Posts by Nigel 11

Re: Prisoner Escort - a question

It's a bus isn't it? One where the passengers are handcuffed to the seats (or something - never seen inside one!). But does that make it any less of a bus?

Re: Human Brain 1000000x more powerful than a computer

it's the power, cooling, and interconnect on the large scale that needs work.

Very well said. When Moore's law finally runs out, the next major breakthrough will have to be in parallel coding.

A (human) brain has ~10^11 processing elements clocked at maybe 10Hz. A CPU has ~10^9 transistors clocked at ~10^9 Hz. By that measure a humble desktop CPU should be ahead of us by a few orders of magnitude. So what gives?

Well OK, a neuron is a much more complex device than a transistor, but a million times more complex? Unless it's in some sense a quantum computational element rather than a classical one (which cannot be ruled out), I don't think there's a difference of complexity of order 10^6. Surely not 10^9 (comparing against a 1000-CPU cluster).

Which leaves the dense-packed 3D interconnect in a brain, and even more so the way it is able to utilize its hardware in parallel for a new problem without any (or much) conscious organisation of how that hardware will be organised, what algorithms it will deploy.

The next huge breakthrough will have to be in problem definition technology. Something that fulfils the same role as a compiler, but working across a much greater range between the statement of the problem and the hardware on which the code will run. There are some scary possibilities. Success on this front may reveal that a decent scientific computing cluster is actually many orders of magnitude superior to ourselves as a general-purpose problem solver, and might also reveal intelligence and consciousness as emergent properties.

Jill (*) or Skynet?

(*) Jill is the most benign first AI I know of in SF. Greg Bear, "Slant".

Re: Front 'trunk'

Mostly trunks aren't completely full with solid stuff. If they are, the car is almost certainly dangerously overloaded (and being used way outside its specification, so any consequences are definitely its user's fault). Usually, baggage is light and squashy stuff (like clothes or desktop PCs).

For reference, a cubic meter of concrete is about 2.5 tons. The maximum permitted load for a typical car, (evenly distributed between both axles, and including the passengers) is in the ballpark of 1.5 tons. Probably quite a bit less for a sports vehicle like a Tesla, and at most half at the front.

Re: English Electric Lightning ????

Going in a different direction, maybe. At top speed and overtaken by, no way!

Re: NO, Windows 9 is make-or-break

Make or Break will be when Microsoft announce an EOL date for Windows 7. As long as businesses can "downgrade" to 7, they'll just ignore Windows 8 while suffering the (just about manageable) pain of migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7. If MS has any sense left it'll announce that Windows 7 has guaranteed support until at least 2020.

If there's no user-compatible upgrade path from Windows 7 when it's EOL announcement arrives, that will be the date that businesses divorce Microsoft. (I mean divorce. Messy, acrimonious, and horribly expensive).

PS the desktop isn't dead, and never will be. It may run a non-MS O/S, or become a thin client for a noisy fat monster in the server room, but it will have a proper keyboard and mouse and a big monitor at the far side of a desk. What you need for real work, as opposed to playing, posing or skiving.

Oddly, the design and engineering deficiencies of the Titanic didn't deter travellers of that age from embarking on the Olympic (Titanic's sister ship)

Sinking-ship icon needed.

Re: Make or Break?

Just as long as you can go into its BIOS, disable secure boot and UEFI, and install Linux and/or Windows 7, I'll be happy with a discount.

We can already see what non-repurposeable Windows Surfaces are worth, can't we?

Tabphone? Ear-iron?

Tabphone or Tabfone might work, in a way that Phablet definitely doesn't.

For gentle mockery of anyone who spends too long talking into one, what about ear-iron? (makes for flat ears).

Re: Very Large Phones

I was thinking megaphone ... except that's already taken. Sigh.

Re: VLP == Vain Losers Poserphone

I doubt that being seen with it is a consideration these days. I'd expect that the typical user of this device wants to use the internet a lot more than he wants to make phone calls. Or is visually impaired, and finds any smaller screen verges on un-usable.

Re: Not in my experience

Really? Did you run software to check the SMART statistics that turned into bricks? Did you try ddrescue after the failure? You must be a very unlucky chap. Based on a sample size of several hundred over a decade, the majority of hard drives (probably 2/3) do show signs of going bad before they fail completely (at which point I pre-emptively replace them), and ddrescue can retrieve a large part of the data from maybe half of the other third.

Anyway, we have backups, don't we?

Re: Detectable

You get bigger earthquakes when a car drives over a speed hump near your residence. A fire engine at full emergency tilt over that hump is Richter 4-plus (Wikipedia: Noticeable shaking of indoor objects and rattling noises. Felt by most people in the affected area. Slightly felt outside. Generally causes none to minimal damage. Moderate to significant damage very unlikely. Some objects may fall off shelves or be knocked over.)

They monitor for tiny quakes because of the theoretical risk that fracking might lubricate and activate an occult fault (one that's present underground but not visible on the surface). AFAIK to date, there has been no significant seismic event capable of threatening life caused by fracking. Pre-drill seismic prospecting will show up most faults before the drilling goes anywhere near them.

Re: Gross stupidity

If corners are cut to the point of failure, what's the worst case? Considerably less bad than it could be with a conventional free-flowing gas or oil well. Pre-frack, nothing comes out. No chance of a blow-out while drilling, which is the greatest risk with conventional gas or oil. Post-frack, a natural gas leak. Tight gas flow rates are quite low compared to conventional wells, which is why lots of them are needed.

Ignoring global warming, is there any energy supply technology that's less likely to cause environmental damage than tight gas accessed by fracking? As for global warming, yes, it's a fossil fuel, but natural gas is the least bad one.

I'd happily have a tight gas well in my back yard. (If literally that close, it would be like living with a building site while it was drilled: I'd expect appropriate compensation for a noise nuisance). BTW with respect to Richter-3 earthquakes, I'm getting one every few minutes in my flat ever since the council installed speed humps on the road outside!

Re: Sounds a bit too complicated for me

The problem with head size is that they can't make it smaller while still passing enough current through a coil that small to generate an adequate magnetic field. Too much power in a very small volume = meltdown (and they still haven't found a room-temperature superconductor).

Which is where HAMR comes is. Shine a laser through the magnetic field created by the head, focussed on one track of the several under the head's "bubble" of magnetic field. That heats up the surface of the platter. Choose the magnetic medium right, and the head's magnetic field will flip only the bits in the heated track while leaving the cold tracks on either side unaffected.

To me HAMR feels like good physics and engineering, SMR feels like a kluge. Bits that can only change state when heated should be MORE stable than those stored conventionally.

Some SMR maths. A conventional disk doing small writes may manage 100-up IOPS (seek time ~8ms which dominates, half a rotation of latency 4ms, a bit of optimisation possible by doing out-of-order writes). If they shingle three tracks, the rotational latency of a write goes up to about six revolutions of the disk (three to read it and three to rewrite it after modification). That's about 50ms for a 7200rpm disk. SLOW except for large writes. (Reading will be no slower).

Re: You don't need a pressure cooker to cook quinoa

You can cook rice in five minutes in a pressure cooker. Not sure who needs to save ten minutes of meal preparation, or why, but I guess it also works with quinoa!

Re: Ex-employer

Maybe easier in Europe for this one? Here in the EU one has an expectation of privacy in a lot of contexts. You employer should not be reading your e-mails without good reason.

In the USA, as far as I can tell you have no expectation of privacy unless you are talking to your priest, your doctor, or your lawyer.

Re: People are like golden retrievers!

911. He's in the USA. Some parts of the USA, he's not joking.

Re: Thank god for the war on Terror

Without knowing the content of the bosses call it's tough to say.

Me, I'm starting to wonder if the Laundry is just fiction?