The end of the motherboard?
Just a PCI5 bus and some IO that you plug cards into?
8318 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
It should be a lot easier these days - in fact IIRC I read a program in a Prolog book that solved a similar problem as it really is just another aspect of resource management and logistics and, while I never quite got round to picking apart GPU code I'd imagine its been done for that so is probably available for C++ already.
I still vividly remember the day I wandered around at BTRL and in the lift well, on pallet with a trolley under it stood a 1024 transputer hypercube. No one around. It was a good 10 minutes before I managed to stop myself trying to work out how to get it into my car and there was still no-one else around!!!!
I ran linux on a 4MB 386 and it functioned quite well on some tasks, the swap disk being a bit slow. I've played with minix and its quite capable though it does lack shit to play with. If this is stable then there's a whole new world of pocket computing that even MPs cant compete with.
I've got a chip that I crowdfunded which I thought was something close to a transputer but 30 years on - relying on fast interprocesser communications to get the real grunt. Unfortunately its in a 16thC intricately carved oak cabinet thingy and a door has jambed so I cant get to it to reveal its true name*. It is interesting to see that people are looking down this path again. We should have enough data/code sets to get an idea it its useful.
*the cabinet might** be worth more than my house so I'm not going to try and break into it.
** I saw something with the same style of carving on it go for £15k and it would fit into the small bit I cant open!!
My Dad uses to have a book on the origin of uk words (auth Partridge?), as a teenager f**k was often referred to. It was an eye opener on a rainy day when you flicked through it bored. Butterfly, originally a Flutterby changed between the two names several times. Words come from other languages and this islands penchant for sarcasm changes the meaning of things regularly and a simple mistake by someone important can change the meaning of a word to something else altogether. Sounds silly but then the Spanish (Castillian) lisp was adopted because the royal line was so inbread their own faces didnt fit.
I had BB and email address with a small ISP that was bought up and they put up prices so I left them and was cut off immediately. The number of sites that insisting on sending email confirmations to my old email address that I had to somehow acknowledge before I could change made The Scream look like a holiday photo.
I'm not sure things graduate from the access front end capabilities. I implemented pivot tables and that seemed to be beyond the limit of most managers understanding. I spent some time isolating the access front end from the DB - as I said all date was read or input via an API of stored procedures so users couldn't randomly lose data in tables of their own creation or delete others. I've long said laziness it the mother of invention Access was the lazy, but fucking useful, way of giving users controlled access to their data - even if the permissions were controlled at the MSql server end. Interestingly no-one complained about not being able to access other peoples data through Access but when I tried to implement a system agreed by management where data (including documents) was restricted to 'owners' and permitted readers the excuses used to access other peoples data when they were on holiday/sick were interesting to say the least even thought there was a clear and easy to implement policy for just these events.
The Access DB was. However once you RTFM and discovered you could connect to 'real' databases Access became a really useful tool. Until the other tools in the dept got the yips at anything Access. I modified about 50 or so Access apps around the company once to use the data from MSQL 4.2 via stored procedures so I could modify the DB structure without having to re-write all the apps. After I moved on someone panicked and got rid of the apps and never managed to replace them before the company did something drastic though I know not what as is been totally subsumed by what was a lot smaller company when I was there.
They didnt go down very low though - below 100hz or so its mainly harmonics and not the actual note. The 63s are a bit better down to 60hz. I've got a pair of each and the originals on the valve amps sound superb but its a bit of a con. But then you need a large room to allow the wave to even get going.
Outside tests on seriously expensive ribbon mike and full freq analysis of output not just normal db graph.
So finding a diagnoses a lot earlier is a big problem? I dont think so. It would be really good to find out what is triggering the diagnosis but not knowing is not really a problem though I am really looking forward to them finding out the answer. It may be however, that ML is actually a lot smarter than humans in certain situations.
The JWST just needs to be colder than the electromagnetic radiation it is trying to receive. Josephson Junctions rely on a superconduction. We've seen that at 203k!!! Quantum Computers might need 4.2k but a Josephson Junction computer can run a lot warmer than that. If its power loss is low enough (and if the whole thing is superconducting then we're talking EM radiation alone) then its quite feasible to run a whole data centre in a very small volume with very little cooling required compared to a 'full size data centre'.
IIRC Josephson's Junctions need superconduction not 4.2k so we could be up to 203k or so. The thing to remember is the bigger you go the less it costs per unit volume to keep it cool. They're up to a million or so junctions on a chip at the moment so around 68020 level of complexity so I'd bet we're close to a point where we could see some useful stuff in the pure digital realm - I think most of the cryogenic goes to quantum computing stuff but there does seem to be a digital option opening up as a result, I cant find any figures on gate switching power but I can imagine it could be very low and it might be possible to replicate a whole datacenter computing power in a small cool room.
Dr Dobbs is probably the main reason some things didnt sell. Not because it dissed them but because it was full of 8080/Z80 machine code for loads of routines and stuff. If you wanted to learn via plagiarisation and you had access to it (as a lot of kids who were at uni or had parents at one) you could just spend a couple of hours copying the code to A4 and then typing it in at home!! ISTR doing that with a pico-basic for my MK14 SC/MP base machine.
The Dragon was certainly a better quality machine but the 6809 lacked the volume of software the z80 had accumulated. I was coding in C in my Speccy while a friend of mine was hacking around in Forth. The games were probably better on the Dragon but for learning stuff that rubber keyboard gave access to a lot more.
I've liked it when I've played with it - the only difference I found with other Linuxes was a lack of pre-built software and the odd library missing for some of the more obscure software I dip into occasionally - though that is becoming more common on big Linux distributions anyway.
I've always thought the main potential advantage of computerised driving would be the potential of co-operative rather than combative driving. When stopped at traffic lights on green (ok amber) the first cars in the queue set off, then the following etc until the ones further back just start in time to stop at the next red lights. A complete block of cars that can make it through the lights starting simultaneously would gain a much higher average speed between lights, the timing of the lights could be much reduced too.
Though to be fair who is going to want to watch TV at all soon let alone on the way to work which can be done at home.
I've taken to switching TV channels when certain adverts come on and frequently I dont go back cos I've found something better. I've even taking to going to bed early to read having set the TV to record what I wanted to watch and the following day I can skip past 20 minutes of adverts. The kids seem to do the same on their various devices, or if the app wont allow they just switch to another app while the ads are on. I get the impression marketing may have just shat in its own bed and we are soon going to lose some really crap channels.