Posts by Dave 126 10664 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010
> If you cannot do without electricity, it's not wise to purchase it that way.
That's rather the point - it's unreasonable to expect every poor soul to be 'wise' or expert in energy markets. A commercial energy customer will have employees whose job it is to buy energy.
Therefore, it is not wise to steer people towards choices - wholesale tariffs - they are not equipped to make.
> Is one correct in assuming that WMD* are a type of innovation which, whilst they can be patented, are largely agreed by more than just an elite chosen few to best be left unpatented?
During WWII a 1917 law was dusted off off, giving the US Patent and Trademark Office the power to prevent an inventor publically disclosing their invention if it was thought it would weaken the US war effort.
Of course I could be in possession of the full blueprints and construction procedures of a hydrogen bomb and be totally harmless - I just can't get the raw materials. It's moot whether I have the plans. Doesn't matter if it's patented.
Conversely, I already have all the materials required to create a biological weapon - I just need to know what order to put the A, C, T and Gs in. It is in this area that serious ethical questions are being by researchers of themselves.
https://www.nber.org/digest/jul19/wwii-policy-kept-patents-secret-slowed-innovation
And discussion from 1939 arguing that payments should be respected in time of war even if the invention is that of an enemy inventor (it saves on the backlog of payment claims come any armistice, apparently). Possibly a tangent, but charming:
https://www.nature.com/articles/144580a0
> Saying that we need something different is a bit like saying "How do we formulate something other than Newton's Laws?" You can do it... ...but it just ends up being the same thing looking at it from a different direction.
It's a question of scale - I'm good with with Newton if the application is playing snooker or landing on the moon. If you want to design microchips or GPS satellites however, you'll find Newton insufficient. The quantumness of things makes itself known, as do relativistic effects if you get really good at measuring things.
I don't know the tasks that tomorrow's computers will be put to.
I don't know where their bottlenecks will be, or the cost / benefit equations used to optimise bang for the buck.
We humans like the concept of files. But for how long will we be the architects?
Do we biological life forms use 'files' in our heads? No, we don't.
Do we expect an iteratively evolved system with selection pressures for efficiency and contingency to be clearly labelled? No, we don't. Biology is messy.
I don't know my emotional reaction to a splodge of paint on canvas until I've splodged it. One can't control splats and drips, clouds of ink in water, or marbellings of oil on water. The physical world is computing an output from physical input. A paint brush held between my toes makes the painting mine. Tying a brush to a tree in a breeze... the work is mine? Tying a brush to a stoat and letting it run across a whitewashed floor... my work or the stoat's?
Physicists, philosophers and artists may be happy with the ambiguity. The IP lawyers (and the stoat) less so.
There's sure to be soon a ML thingy that can create and light a 3D environment such that a player's point of view approximates these images. A never-ending dreamscape. Combined with the flood of 3D data about our real lived-in environments that will soon come from digital twin models and AR sensors. Alice Through The Looking Glass In Basingstoke, Fear And Loathing In Bournemouth. Nightmare fuel.
The surrealist painter H R Geiger often used airbrushes in his work to convey the sheen of shiny objects, a technique common in pre-CGI commercial illustration, especially of shiny cars. Used with skill it can give a near photorealistic appearance to a painting.
He reports once having had difficulty with some country's customs, having to explain to the officials that his "obscene photographs" were actually paintings, which were legal. Geiger's response was "Yeah right, they're photographs - where the hell do you think I took them?"
> I used to like linux but he has just given apple a free plug. So fuck linus
What was that story about a well meaning disruptor, seen as a messiah, finding himself despairing at the zealots that his popular movement enabled? ... Dune maybe, or Life of Brian... possibly Apocalypse Now. Or Lawrence of Arabia... Ah okay, it's an archetype. A cautionary tale, part of our societal immune system.
There is the possibility that the experience of building for a variety of ARM-like chips will be useful down the road. After all, there is nothing to stop RiscV from becoming fragmented as people customise it to their needs.
It might be that some elements of Apple's CPU designs are later adopted by mainstream ARM, and thus lessons learnt from optimising Linux for M* can be reused in future.
> a plan to deprive people of air... After all Bill Gates supports depopulation.
Bill Gates and many others actually support a high human population *over the millennia to come*. Population boom and busts have been observed in ecology, and analogous phenomena have been seen in many other complex systems.
Specs say there's an 8 bit GPIO header.
Full list of inny outty shake it all abouty stuff:
USB – 2x USB 3.2 Gen 2 x2 Type-A ports, 4x USB 2.0 interfaces via header
Serial – 2x RS232/422/485 via header
Expansion
M2 M-Key 2280 socket (PCIe x2, PCIe x4 Gen3 (by FPC))
8-bit GPIO header
optional SMBus/I2C
Storage – SATA III port, M.2 socket for NVMe SSD (See Expansion section)
Display
HDMI 1.4b up to 4Kp30
eDP up to 3840×2160 resolution
Up to 2 independent displays
Networking
2.5GbE RJ45 port via Intel i225LM controller
Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 port via Intel i219LM (Tiger Lake) or Realtek RTL8111H (AMD Ryzen) controller
Have another coffee! According to the article, the TDP for the available i7 is 15W, for the top AMD chip 25W. So, not the hottest CPUs around.
Industrial PCs commonly use their case as a large heatsink (to avoid dust ingress). These boards aren't being pitched at consumers, but at engineers who will integrate them (and their cooling requirements) into a larger system.
Also, from the article:
>And the system will become even thicker if you apply the board's specially designed heatsink and fan assembly, which seems to double the board's depth
Read up on how DARPA works. It employs Program Managers for no more than five years. These Program Managers then seek and fund Performers (which are typically universities or companies) and contracts with them to persue an area of research with the aim of a usable technology.
The actual individuals doing the research usually remain employed by their original organisation.
Try the podcast 'Voices from DARPA' if you're interested.
> People don't want to see "what could be", they want to see exactly what they are plonking coin down on.
That makes no sense. If I'm plonking money down on a house, I'll be wanting a surveyor to tell me that it will be good for many years to come: I'm very interested in 'what could be'. Subsidence, flood risk, sub par mortar, estimated annual maintenance costs...
And if I'm not interested, my mortgage lender will be.
3D scans aren't just useful for showing off a property, they could be used to assess subsidence over time, aid in assessing modifications, be sent to firefighters in event of emergency. The cost of scans would be expected to fall over time (and not linearly), as would the cost of developing applications which use such data.
> The fallacy that all it needs is better graphics and a bigger hype to make the idea catch on has arisen amongst those who ignored this basic lesson in their desperation to be pushing "the new thing
Maybe. But it's also possible that the tech wasn't up to the task before, it isn't just yet, but it's close. See kguttag.com. The advances in AR optics are striking (as you'd expect given the huge funding various display companies are attracting). Other components (low latency computing in a power efficient package, laser scanners, cameras, software, APIs) are close to ready. Apple's first AR is headsets rumoured to be for developers... makes no business sense for Apple to release a product into a new category if it is rubbish. And they've tried the best prototypes that money lets them build today. Unlike me. Or you.
I wouldn't use the case study of Google Glass alone to estimate the success of any future AR product. Windows XP Tablets Edition machines were clunky and didn't catch on- that led many in this very forum to predict that the iPad wouldn't catch on. They know who they are.
'Fortunately' for Cook?
It's been clear that Ive had been bored for some time... I mean, mission successful for helping to save Apple, and redefining the product categories of MP3 player, phone, tablet, and smart watch. And created some of the best received laptop and desktop computers along the way. But these products are mature now, the design choices are now evolutionary, not speculative.
It's popular to throw shade on Ive these days, and for sure, he's been given a lot of adulation in the past - which he couldn't accept. Both positions obscure the real stories, the real processes, the reality of the team work, the conversations, attitudes and ideals that shaped the products and the market.
Sony have, like Apple, traded on design to communicate a level of quality and care in the mind of consumers over decades. They don't need to name an individual designer in order to communicate this. Apple iMacs used to carry Harmon Kardon badges to denotes the speakers were somehow better than average - they've not needed to for years.
Nokia used to have similar ideals, then the middle management came in.
Jobs' argument was this: if the screen picks up scratches in the pocket from keys and change, that looks like poor material choice, Apple's fault. If a glass screen shatters due to a drop, the consumer feels partially responsible. So he insisted on it.
The thing is, the glass manufacture hadn't been completely solved at the time Jobs announced the iPhone to the public. I can only imagine the relief when it worked.
(We've since seen similar with Apple announcing a wireless charger, only this time the challenges evidently proved insurmountable and Apple never released it).
> Ive needed someone like Jobs to hold his worst impulses in check
That's a touch simplistic thus, dare I say it, not as correct as it could be.
This 'worst implulses' theme has been common on forums for a while, usually in comments that betray a naivete about modern product design process in general and Apple's (and Sony's*) design history and structure in particular.
Removal of drives and ports from computers was a Jobs thing - iMac floppy disc drive (and hidden ports), Blue Ray 'a bag of hurt', hidden ports on original MacBook Air... All SJ.
(*Apple's and Sony's stories are interwoven. Esslinger worked at Wega, consulted for Jobs for Apple, Pixar and NeXt. His work inspired Teiyu Goto who designed generations of PlayStation and the VAIO brand and had his design team at Sony use Mac's. Apple's iPod filled a gap that Sony could easily have filled by didn't. Jobs suggested GPS photo tagging to Sony. OSX for Intel was first ported to a VAIO laptop. Etc etc. Bang and Olufsen should get a mention too, for integrated multiroom audio before it was cool, telephone scroll wheel, refinement of class D amllifiers and decades of data about just how much anodised aluminium rich people will have in their living rooms.)
What's interesting is the wider public perception of product design. It was on the ascendant before the blue iMac and then iPod made Ive famous - with names like Phillip Starck and Seymour Powell. Maybe Richard Sapper, though his lamp was in museums but not his Thinkpad for IBM.
It's actually quite hard to casually look at the 1990s in retrospect because many original print sources are hard to find online. There's so little about Teiyo Goto online, my source is Digital Dreams: The Work of the Sony Design Center (first published 1999))
Boardgate: lead free solder implemented incorrectly effecting GPUs on Macbooks Pros. Happended with XBOX 360 consoles too. Not Jony Ive.
Aerialgate: phone losing signal if held in a way that interfered with the aerials. Likely slipped through advanced testing because bulky cases were used to disguise the late-stage prototypes 'in the wild'. Ditto, not Ive.
Batterygate: concept to improve stability by throttling CPU if batteries were older, I.e, slow downs are better than crashes. The problem was with Apple's communication of this, left Apple open to accusations of money gouging. Again, not Ive.
Butterfly keyboard: main issue was poor reliability. The story of exactly why the engineers couldn't achieve the reliability they evidently once thought they could is unknown, and likely nuanced and interesting. After all, how do decision makers assess the claims of engineers about future parts? NB, Steve Jobs did similar, insisted on a glass iPhone screen before the glass technology was quite ready, but Corning pulled through his Jobs' gamble paid off.
Well yes, there is liquid involved. Not exactly liquid cooling though, because it is the vapour that conveys the heat before condensing back to a liquid. Even some phones use these closed loop systems, commonly referred to as 'heat pipes'.
What this article is talking about is water cooling. Instead of using phase change of a fluid to transport 'latent' heat, water coolers use only the heat capacity of a larger volume of water. There no evaporation, no phase change.
Maybe that's why the control consoles on the Starship Enterprise burst into flames at a moment's notice - the computers are cooled with a fluid that, unfortunately, is prone to evaporating and igniting if the lines are ruptured (by a torpedo to a completely different part of the ship, evidently)
>Well there's a concept no-one was asking for.
Laptop stands with fans being sold in supermarkets across the land would suggest that at least some people have asked for cooler laptops. I'm guessing though that many of these stands are sold to cool lower powered laptops with poorer thermal design.
This plug-in water cooler isn't that much more faff to use.
The concept of laptops running faster when at a desk is well established (most laptops only run at max power if plugged into a wall socket, some folk use external GPUs or video encoders).
Just yesterday I saw a friend after work. She'd gone into the office that day because it was too hot for her laptop to work at home.
>P.S. wouldn't it be nice if someone designed a new architecture that was simple and fast without all the crud?
And it would be simple and fast. For ten minutes, by which time someone will have found a flaw that needs patching. Design a better mousetrap and the universe conspires to throw better mice at you.
There are attempts at writing formally verified code - code proven to be as per spec just as 2 plus two equals four can be proved - but it's very hard work.
> As the article says, it's only for machines that aren't connected at all. How much use is one of those?
For sure. Possibly a task that benefits from the user ignoring the outside world, such as writing a novel, illustrating, playing a single player game.
But yeah. Maybe like the above sports car with the headlights removed - legal on a closed track, fun even, but not useful in the sense of nipping to the shops on the public highway network.
This is a technology news site: it will cover things that happen in laboratories as well as boardrooms. If you only care about what is on shop shelves today, look in a shop.
I do agree that some technologies take longer to reach maturity than others. But if I feel that I hear too much of them over the years (okay, decades) it's my fault for reading a technology website.
Thank you for a clear and informative post about the challenges and desirability of photonics.
I wonder if you have any thoughts on using physical objects as computing mediums:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-to-make-the-universe-think-for-us-20220531/
Cheers
So, on the way towards Buck Rogers in the 25th Century then: "Ha, their computers are so primitive they still run on electricity!!". (That was an episode from the 80s, in the 90s pop sci TV programme Tomorrow's World had a bit about photonic computing's promise to radically shorten interconnects. Been a long time coming.)
Whereas computers used on the bridge in Star Trek are evidently so advanced they burst into flames if a photo torpedo hits the far end of the starship - perhaps they run on hydrogen?
Joking aside, good luck to those working in this area.
>There is no 'good', no 'evil'. For corporations, there is only profit.
Yes, that is true. But also more nuanced than first appears.
There is short term profit, maybe made by risk taking or economy drives. There is long term profit, made perhaps by investing in staff and technology, and earning the trust of customers over time. Gross generalisations, to be sure. Investors may have their own values beyond money, as do staff and customers.
Does it? I'm given the impression that organisations often learn more from their failures than they do from their successes. The 'leopard' in your example is an organisation of people, projects, history, procedures - things that change or are replaced over time For the spots on this ever-changing leopard to remain the same would require a conscious decision to keep them the same or else another prevailing pressure.
Andy Weir, author of The Martian, states that the big storm that sets the events of his story in motion is his only deliberate exaggeration in the novel. He just needed a way to have his protagonist left behind on Mars.
(But hey, Ridley Scott is as fond of flying debris, dust and particulate matter as he is of rain, stream and mist - and he films it all beautifully.)
"Literature Review
2.1. Introduction
Henry P. Coats was the first to mention Magnetic Abrasive Finishing (MAF) in his patent in 1938
in the USA. Later MAF was further developed by researchers in the former USSR and Japan [19]. Many
studies have been conducted to investigate the MAF process parameters and performance. Some of the
studies employed permanent magnets as a magnetic field source, while others used electromagnets with
direct current (DC) or alternating current (AC)."
- https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/bitstream/handle/10012/13695/Al-Dulaimi_Thamir.pdf
If science fiction has taught me anything, it's that no harm ever came from black viscous ooze in bodily orifices, no sir. Er...
- The X Files
- Prometheus
- Star Trek TNG
- Westworld television series
- William Gibson's unfilmed Alien 3 script
It's either going to kill you, rewrite your DNA to turn you into an alien hybrid or else eat your brain leaving just your body as a puppet for an AI.
Cool!
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