OK, OK, but it was pretty lame to begin with. The only advantage of this thing is its operability without satellites, and if anything happens that would wipe out all the satellites (hint, it would probably involve lots and lots of uncontrolled nuclear fission and fusion reactions) would probably also wipe out MB propagation too. I think.
OTOH if it didn't wipe out MB comms it would almost certainly have the opposite effect of making them redundant by creating a huge ionospheric mirror so that all VHF comms would propagate. Hard to say, given the test history, which way it would go. It's a bit late and I'm a bit too drunk to look it up.
Either way, this silly system is redundant.
Educationally, less PC is better than more
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Kids and Computers
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· Score: 2
Besides, you can learn programming on a 486... probably better than on a P4. I mean, I started on a TI 99 4/A, and I turned out ok. And you can go grab a P 133 for about $10 these days.
I would like to emphasize this. You do not learn to excel when the machine damn near does everything for you, you learn by overcoming adversity. My first machines were 70's-era 8-bitters with 4K-16K RAM and, if you were lucky and spent a little extra, cassette tapes for mass storage.
I am currently dealing with a factory engineer who graduated college circa 1995 -- we got into this discussion a couple of weeks ago. His first computer experience was an 8086 microprocessor trainer, which he used for one lab before being introduced to a 286 workstation. He is constantly amazed at the tricks I am pulling to get extra performance out of his firmware, and how I can practically tell him over the phone what the source and object code must look like in order to get the results I'm seeing. He simply never had to press the CPU's he was using to get the performance he needed; I did. In doing so I not only learned specific tricks (he went "wow" when I described using a 16-bit integer normalized to units of 1/65536 to use MUL to multiply another integer by a fraction of 1); I learned a whole way of thinking about the machines that you don't get if you start with a GUI and C++.
As many of others have pointed out, what you mostly learn with a really state-of-the-art machine is how to play video games. I would say that some computer usage is useful, especially if it develops strong typing skills (in this modern world, those translate anywhere and are hard to find in the workforce); but a machine that challenges its users to overcome its limitations will teach them more than one that does everything they ever want.
...if you could selectively disable commands, like the fucking NEW WINDOW (make 'em open it in the one you're using) and MUNG URL capabilities. Just what I need, to be looking at all the fucking SOURCE before clicking through to links on/.
Well, I may have clicked on it but at least I'm not the kind of loser who has nothing better do do than think of ways to pull shit like this off.
...specifically, a chord of about 8 inches diameter cut from a sphere of about 2 feet diameter. You could wear it on your chest and look like Tarzan beating your chest as you type -- but I think it would be pretty comfortable to use. The slowpokes could look down and see the keys, too.
You say that you get ANALOG like it's some new god damned technology, it aint.
Actually he said ANALOG like it wasn't some new technology, and if this old crap costs $60 a month then what is the newfangled stuff gonna cost (surely they will want a premium for it to cover their conversion costs)?
I watch very little TV anyway. I'm with the guy who will make his into an aquarium. Mine's just a 19" bought in 1985, watched about as often as that car was driven by the little old lady from Pasadena, and I'll still be able to use it as a monitor for my old Radio Shack Color Computer II when I get the time to port Linux to it.
I have 2 Hotmail accounts, and I have never received a spam to either of them that was not from a website I visited. I suspect your problem has to do either with your personal friends or your slighlty obfuscated version of it here.
Re:how fast were these things?
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PDP-10 Revival
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Not very.
The PDP-10 had magnetic core memory, which means it could not have cycled much faster than 1 MHz. It also did not have modern features like pipeline caches, etc. all of which would have required an astronomical number of the low density silicon chips available at the time.
I used a DEC System 10 at university. It had a massively multiplayer (by those days' standards) Star Trek game called DECwar. If you have ever played the original text-based Star Trek game you know what this looked like, otherwise you cannot IMAGINE how primitive it was; yet the engineering students would spend hours after hours playing this thing. Simple as it was, with a few dozen users on the system the task-switching delays were *very* noticeable.
IIRC the our mainframe had 256K of RAM, then considered an astronomical amount, and the 5-30 Mb "layer cake" cartridge hard drives someone else mentioned.
It was in a glass room so you could ogle it and the observant priesthood of the computer dept who serviced your Hollerith card batch jobs. It was 6 or 7 cabinets, several with rows of incandescent pilot lights displaying the current address and register. You could, with practice, learn to interpret those flickers and tell how fast it was switching jobs and whether one job was hogging the machine. It was that slow.
It would have been much slower if programmed in today's style. But almost all DEC software was written in a macro-assembler style language which resulted in very efficient code. Although the basic core was RISClike most of those old CPU's all supported processor extensions in the form of cards added to a rack, which could actually add microcode and new registers to the CPU. (Not at all like the FPU on an x86, which is more like an outboard processor.) Yep, those were the days; when you signed up for class you were allotted a certain number of seconds of computer time and if you used them up (difficult, but possible) your account shut down automatically. The CPU actually kept track of your real usage as tasks were swapped, and the OS bailed your app if it looked like it had gotten hung in a loop or something.
And then there was the joy that is FORTRAN -- such a great language that I used to prewrite and debug everything in BASIC before converting it over. Yep, definitely memories to savor as I pat the side of my 450MHz pentium.
Doesn't the promo say CGI actors? If one is good enough, why not all? I suspect this project may be overreaching itself. Or may not even be well-formed yet, much less baked, as it seems to consist of some softfocus airbrush work at the moment.
If you would like to experience what rendevous with rama is like and dont feel like going out and buying a book. I suggest you do a search for a commodore 64 emulator and try to find the game on the net.
That would be oooooh so much easier than, say, finding the book at half.com or even gasp your local meatspace used book store or even shudder library.
Actually, like all of Clarke's books (the ones really written by him, I mean, as opposed to the ones ghostwritten for him like all the Rama sequels) Rendezvous is very fast paced, almost clipped, with minimal characterization and each short chapter punctuated with a Clarkeian "twist." If a gamer would enjoy any book of such a length at all, this would be the one.
I don't have a copy of the article. I did run across it a couple years back at my own library; out of curiosity I looked up Elaine Radford in the Literary Review index.
Elaine's problem with Ender wasn't just that he was parallelled with Hitler. There were two objections, both of which I pretty much agreed with though I wasn't P.O.ed enough to write an article about it as she did:
1. While Ender did parallel hitler, he was slyly distorted. Hitler also was a third child of a third child, also had a quasi-incestuous relationship with his sister, also dozens of other things, but Hitler was not a distracted little boy who thought he was playing a video game when he hit the "final solution" button. Hitler thought himself an instrument of destiny and, had he escaped to Brazil, rather than turning into a "speaker for the Jews" I am 100% sure he would have continued pursuing his destiny with more fervor than ever.
This distortion is necessary to make Ender/Hitler palatable to the victim who is beign persuaded to take a more tolerant view of him. There is also the contrast with the brother figure, "Ender without a conscience," who takes the place of a part of Hitler that was not Hitler's brother but a proudly held part of himself. In real life, Hitler's sibs did not share his "gifts," whatever those were. (The ham-handed acceptance of eugenic principles irked me personally, as Ender came out not long after Cyril Burt was discredited and it was shown that every twin study ever done had been faked.)
2. It is very unlikely that Card would have been rewarded with 2 consecutive Nebula and Hugo sweeps (nor anybody expecting a third) had it been known that the series was a big fat shaggy dog story about forgiving Hitler. Radford's theory -- and I'm inclined to agree with her -- is that he planned to pull the rug out from under everybody after sweeping the Nebulas third time running, announcing that the SF community had endorsed his philosophy while in fact his philosophy had been slyly concealed inside something that looked very different from what it was.
I personally also believe it is impossible (given the ignorance of his own work displayed in Card's rebuttal) that Card actually wrote either Ender's Game or Speaker. I suspect it was a committee effort of some group from his church. Whether Card is a writer or not his success in the awards can be attributed to his skill as a politician more than anything else. While it is certainly not illegal to use ghost writers this is hardly the ordinary case.
In the end there is no more damning comment on Card's motives than his own half-decade delay before skulking out with the third book of the series. If he'd been proud of the metaphor he was drawing he would not have called Radford on the phone long-distance and spent an hour trying to browbeat her into withdrawing the article. (I heard her half of that conversation, and she could have used a sampling machine preprogrammed with the phrase "I can only judge what I read, not you personally or your beliefs.")
Oh, and that guy with the "mythos" article that is online that footnotes her -- he dissed everyone that didn't support his pet theory of mythic whatchamacallit. I'm sure he skimmed Elaine's article without understanding what she was so bothered about.
...and Hegemon. As it happens I was there to see it, and it was illuminating.
A friend of mine hated Ender's game; she said it was the worst novel she'd ever read from its sappy tearjerking to its queasy morality to the blatant justification of genocide at the end. She refused to ever read another Card book. I didn't feel as strongly as she did, found the book readable, but I took her point.
At the time she was a SFWA member so she got a free copy of Speaker. Since she didn't want it, she gave it to me. When I read it I got back to her and said, "you're not going to believe this, he escapes to a planet copied from Brazil."
I gave her back the book, and next thing I know she is drawing up a tremendous list of coincidences, at least 75, between Ender's life and upbringing and that of one A. Hitler. This turned into a meticulously researched article -- I saw the doc package, which was an inch and a half thick -- which was published in the final issue of Science Fiction Review,. That article was titled Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman? by Elaine Radford.
SFR is no longer with us but the article and Card's rebuttal were republished by Literary Review, so it's probably there in your meatspace library if you're curious. I don't think the article is online anywhere.
While it was startling to see just how closely Ender parallels Hitler, even more startling was Card's reaction. He seemed to be completely unaware of many of the key passages in the book which Radford cited. This is clear from his rebuttal, which was amazingly lame and ignorant (several times stating bluntly that passages didn't exist which Radford had documented). It was obvious to me that he couldn't have written the book, at least not in anything finer than general outline.
At the time it was expected that Card would sweep the Hugos and Nebulas for a third time in a row with the sequel to Speaker. Instead it took him, what, four or five years to get around to writing it. I am convinced that Superman had a lot to do with it. He pulled a mammoth con job off on the SF community and almost got away with it. For the most part he still has, but he did blink.
As other people have stated before such processor is physically impossible
And as I pointed out they were wrong.
even if it was running at 10Ghz all the components in the mobo would suffer from heavy timing problems due to different wire lengths.
Cray mainframes of the 80's had this problem as they were refrigerator-sized and operating over 100 MHz; the problem was solved by modularizing the system, desynchronizing the components, and recombining data under controlled circumstances. I remember being told by a beaming engineer in 1982 that some busses had three different addresses on them at the same time.
So it can be done. Now, we'll just see it done 100 times faster with equipment 100 times smaller -- a single chip.
The 8088 was never a "screamer" for end users, who saw the chip's increased power more than used up by 16-bit software bloat when compared to some of the really efficient assembly language stuff written for 8-bit CPUs.
I had a 4 MHz Z80 system by Amstrad from the late 80's whose word processor blew away WordPerfect on a 12 MHz 8086 spell-checking documents. (I'd still be using it but it used proprietary disks and you can't get the drives any more.) This was a very powerful, intuitive word cruncher using an extended text mode that could display 512 different characters at a time on its 90x25 screen, and for ease of use it compared favorably with all but the fastest newest Windows-based systems. It also ran CP/M, and sported an interpreted BASIC that made QBasic look like a sick joke.
If we had software written like that for the x86 platform, it would be amazing what these machines could do. Imagine something text based, with pre-emptive multitasking, installable with only the features you need, highly configurable, with optional graphics, and built by people who really care about what they are doing...
Well, I guess we have an operating system like that, but it would be nice to have applications too.
The tricky part is that not only storage and data paths would need ECC - all processing circuitry would need to support error correction with redundant circuits. Even the most basic building blocks would need to be redesigned and replaced with versions that incorporate ECC sanity checking into their internal design to take into account the fact that any intermediate stage may flip a bit. I imagine designing an error correcting adder or multiplier would be a nightmare but it's possible.
It actually isn't hard at all to do this. Individual registers can be verified in real time with parity checks. Multiple parity bits can allow parity errors to automatically be resolved without losing data. A clock cycle might have to be skipped while this is done -- once every few hundred billion clocks. Otherwise, it's transparent and consumes rather little chip real estate.
In some cases it would be easier to duplicate entire modules and compare the outputs. It's not necessary to use three blocks with voting; if a compare fails, you redo the operation. It's a computer; until you write the results you still have your starting state to begin from again. So once again, you miss a clock cycle once in a great while.
Remember also that most of the computer is not the CPU and isn't implemented at this level or running at this speed. You only have to harden the parts that are.
...that doesn't have the antenna right next to your ear. The signal will go further with it on the roof of your car anyway, and bag phones have more power and a lot more range than handhelds while exposing your head to less radiation.
Get a CB. 40 channels of AM, 80 of SSB, and the transceivers are both very portable and dirt cheap. On a good day you can even get propagation to far corners of the world, and if you're so inclined it's not hard to find high-powered linear amplifiers that will work, though it's illegal to use them (who's to know, eh?)
Of course, if you want to see what ham radio would be like without the license requirements, I repeat: Get a CB. Or read Usenet.
The reason it is impossible is due to heating issues
Power dissipation goes down with reduced size. This makes up for the increase with increased speed.
and also that down at 0.01 microns a single bit is represented by only a few hundred electrons.
Only if they make the transistor that small..01 micron is the minimum size of a feature, not the size of all features. While smaller transistors are nice, smaller busses are actually more important. Anyway, to take your assumption at face value anyway...
Quantum Mechanics states that the uncertainty od such a conglomeration is about 1 in 200 Billion - ie, the 'bit' is only certain to that degree. Given that a processor at this soeed will precess many times this amount per second, it is impossible for a processor to run at this architectural scale because one in every 250 Billion bits will be corrupted - which is fatal.
Certainly so -- if you don't design any error correction into the chip. It only requires about a 20% increase in real estate to implement two parity bits which would require two simultaneous bit failures to create a nonresolvable error. This would also slow things down very little as parity checking can be done in parallel with computation -- it's always going on. Thus, instead of crashing once every minute or so as your calculations suggest, it would crash once every several hundred billion minutes or so, which is quite tolerable.
I have estimated that the top speed we are likely to see is about 3GHz at 0.05 microns. To assert otherwise is hogwash.
You know a lot about physics, but not much about CPU architecture. Your pet peeve will be relatively simple to work around when the time comes.
Edmund Scientific sells kits including the magnet and type II superconducting wafer which will let you demonstrate the Meisner Effect with cheap liquid nitrogen as the coolant. They don't sell the liquid nitrogen, you have to scare that up yourself.
If you're going to have to produce and distribute "noise key" records in the first place, why not simply combine the two signals (the voice and the noise) in an analog fashion before transmission, and then do the same process in reverse at the other end? This would have been MUCH simpler (meaning they could have deployed it sooner).
Because the signal that is transmitted will be subjected to additional noise. This has a much greater effect on the encrypted signal, if the encryption is of any reliable level at all, than it does on plaintext sound. The digitization had the same advantage then it does in modern systems, noise can be completely removed which is a necessary first step toward reconstructing the plaintext.
I bought one of the very first HP11C's for the princely sum of $135 back in 1981. Still have it, and only in the last year has it died. Being as this is Louisiana, I probably need to take it apart and clean the keyboard. The batteries may also be dead. But what a convenient little machine -- it actually fits in a shirt pocket. Of course, I could always buy another one -- I think they're down to about $35.
When I bought this cutie the alternative was a TI-35. Had one of those, too. I recall vividly how it failed the "twist test" -- grab each ends, attempt to rotate in different directions. The TI would twist a good 10 or 15 degrees; the 11C not at all, that one could detect visually. And of course the 11C had good ol' RPN, inherently theft- and borrow- proof, as well as faster and more efficient than the () keys on the TI.
Of course, HP did many other things. The very first computer I ever used was a HP2100A minicomputer. This was back in '74 or so when I was just a wee snip of a programmer-to-be and my Dad had to show me how to use the Model 22 teletype machine that was its user interface. Imagine, for only $40,000 you could get a massive 4Kx16bit nonvolatile RAM (hand-threaded magnetic donuts), and an impressive array of pushbuttons with which to set and retrieve memory contents. And nothing else. The high-speed optical tape reader (inch-wide, 8 holes across) came later, as did the optical Hollerith card reader.
I was writing software, pidgin as it was, and I had never heard of Intel. Imagine that.
The CD standard was designed around red and infrared lasers. It is the wavelength of infrared light more than anything else which sets the limit of 650 Mb; the holes have to be a certain size and that's as many of them as you can fit in the area.
Besides better tracking DVD's use shorter wavelength lasers so the holes can be smaller. The substrate in CD-R's was designed to be as reflective as possible -- which isn't very -- in the range of wavelengths used by CD players. CD-R's are marginal even in standard CD players; the DVD player sees an even weaker signal than the CD player does because it uses the wrong color light.
It's no more a matter of piracy prevention than the fact that most regular CD players still won't play CD-RW's, which reflect even less light than CD-R's.
I had a few t-shirts i could send in, but they seem to have been eaten by bugs:-(
So stop programming in that bloated OO language, streamline your code, enable strong typing, and by the way how do errors in your program logic make your t-shirts...
Slashdot Mirror
(DUCK)
OK, OK, but it was pretty lame to begin with. The only advantage of this thing is its operability without satellites, and if anything happens that would wipe out all the satellites (hint, it would probably involve lots and lots of uncontrolled nuclear fission and fusion reactions) would probably also wipe out MB propagation too. I think.
OTOH if it didn't wipe out MB comms it would almost certainly have the opposite effect of making them redundant by creating a huge ionospheric mirror so that all VHF comms would propagate. Hard to say, given the test history, which way it would go. It's a bit late and I'm a bit too drunk to look it up.
Either way, this silly system is redundant.
I would like to emphasize this. You do not learn to excel when the machine damn near does everything for you, you learn by overcoming adversity. My first machines were 70's-era 8-bitters with 4K-16K RAM and, if you were lucky and spent a little extra, cassette tapes for mass storage.
I am currently dealing with a factory engineer who graduated college circa 1995 -- we got into this discussion a couple of weeks ago. His first computer experience was an 8086 microprocessor trainer, which he used for one lab before being introduced to a 286 workstation. He is constantly amazed at the tricks I am pulling to get extra performance out of his firmware, and how I can practically tell him over the phone what the source and object code must look like in order to get the results I'm seeing. He simply never had to press the CPU's he was using to get the performance he needed; I did. In doing so I not only learned specific tricks (he went "wow" when I described using a 16-bit integer normalized to units of 1/65536 to use MUL to multiply another integer by a fraction of 1); I learned a whole way of thinking about the machines that you don't get if you start with a GUI and C++.
As many of others have pointed out, what you mostly learn with a really state-of-the-art machine is how to play video games. I would say that some computer usage is useful, especially if it develops strong typing skills (in this modern world, those translate anywhere and are hard to find in the workforce); but a machine that challenges its users to overcome its limitations will teach them more than one that does everything they ever want.
Well, I may have clicked on it but at least I'm not the kind of loser who has nothing better do do than think of ways to pull shit like this off.
...specifically, a chord of about 8 inches diameter cut from a sphere of about 2 feet diameter. You could wear it on your chest and look like Tarzan beating your chest as you type -- but I think it would be pretty comfortable to use. The slowpokes could look down and see the keys, too.
Actually he said ANALOG like it wasn't some new technology, and if this old crap costs $60 a month then what is the newfangled stuff gonna cost (surely they will want a premium for it to cover their conversion costs)?
I watch very little TV anyway. I'm with the guy who will make his into an aquarium. Mine's just a 19" bought in 1985, watched about as often as that car was driven by the little old lady from Pasadena, and I'll still be able to use it as a monitor for my old Radio Shack Color Computer II when I get the time to port Linux to it.
I have 2 Hotmail accounts, and I have never received a spam to either of them that was not from a website I visited. I suspect your problem has to do either with your personal friends or your slighlty obfuscated version of it here.
Not very. The PDP-10 had magnetic core memory, which means it could not have cycled much faster than 1 MHz. It also did not have modern features like pipeline caches, etc. all of which would have required an astronomical number of the low density silicon chips available at the time. I used a DEC System 10 at university. It had a massively multiplayer (by those days' standards) Star Trek game called DECwar. If you have ever played the original text-based Star Trek game you know what this looked like, otherwise you cannot IMAGINE how primitive it was; yet the engineering students would spend hours after hours playing this thing. Simple as it was, with a few dozen users on the system the task-switching delays were *very* noticeable. IIRC the our mainframe had 256K of RAM, then considered an astronomical amount, and the 5-30 Mb "layer cake" cartridge hard drives someone else mentioned. It was in a glass room so you could ogle it and the observant priesthood of the computer dept who serviced your Hollerith card batch jobs. It was 6 or 7 cabinets, several with rows of incandescent pilot lights displaying the current address and register. You could, with practice, learn to interpret those flickers and tell how fast it was switching jobs and whether one job was hogging the machine. It was that slow. It would have been much slower if programmed in today's style. But almost all DEC software was written in a macro-assembler style language which resulted in very efficient code. Although the basic core was RISClike most of those old CPU's all supported processor extensions in the form of cards added to a rack, which could actually add microcode and new registers to the CPU. (Not at all like the FPU on an x86, which is more like an outboard processor.) Yep, those were the days; when you signed up for class you were allotted a certain number of seconds of computer time and if you used them up (difficult, but possible) your account shut down automatically. The CPU actually kept track of your real usage as tasks were swapped, and the OS bailed your app if it looked like it had gotten hung in a loop or something. And then there was the joy that is FORTRAN -- such a great language that I used to prewrite and debug everything in BASIC before converting it over. Yep, definitely memories to savor as I pat the side of my 450MHz pentium.
Doesn't the promo say CGI actors? If one is good enough, why not all? I suspect this project may be overreaching itself. Or may not even be well-formed yet, much less baked, as it seems to consist of some softfocus airbrush work at the moment.
That would be oooooh so much easier than, say, finding the book at half.com or even gasp your local meatspace used book store or even shudder library.
Actually, like all of Clarke's books (the ones really written by him, I mean, as opposed to the ones ghostwritten for him like all the Rama sequels) Rendezvous is very fast paced, almost clipped, with minimal characterization and each short chapter punctuated with a Clarkeian "twist." If a gamer would enjoy any book of such a length at all, this would be the one.
Elaine's problem with Ender wasn't just that he was parallelled with Hitler. There were two objections, both of which I pretty much agreed with though I wasn't P.O.ed enough to write an article about it as she did:
1. While Ender did parallel hitler, he was slyly distorted. Hitler also was a third child of a third child, also had a quasi-incestuous relationship with his sister, also dozens of other things, but Hitler was not a distracted little boy who thought he was playing a video game when he hit the "final solution" button. Hitler thought himself an instrument of destiny and, had he escaped to Brazil, rather than turning into a "speaker for the Jews" I am 100% sure he would have continued pursuing his destiny with more fervor than ever.
This distortion is necessary to make Ender/Hitler palatable to the victim who is beign persuaded to take a more tolerant view of him. There is also the contrast with the brother figure, "Ender without a conscience," who takes the place of a part of Hitler that was not Hitler's brother but a proudly held part of himself. In real life, Hitler's sibs did not share his "gifts," whatever those were. (The ham-handed acceptance of eugenic principles irked me personally, as Ender came out not long after Cyril Burt was discredited and it was shown that every twin study ever done had been faked.)
2. It is very unlikely that Card would have been rewarded with 2 consecutive Nebula and Hugo sweeps (nor anybody expecting a third) had it been known that the series was a big fat shaggy dog story about forgiving Hitler. Radford's theory -- and I'm inclined to agree with her -- is that he planned to pull the rug out from under everybody after sweeping the Nebulas third time running, announcing that the SF community had endorsed his philosophy while in fact his philosophy had been slyly concealed inside something that looked very different from what it was.
I personally also believe it is impossible (given the ignorance of his own work displayed in Card's rebuttal) that Card actually wrote either Ender's Game or Speaker. I suspect it was a committee effort of some group from his church. Whether Card is a writer or not his success in the awards can be attributed to his skill as a politician more than anything else. While it is certainly not illegal to use ghost writers this is hardly the ordinary case.
In the end there is no more damning comment on Card's motives than his own half-decade delay before skulking out with the third book of the series. If he'd been proud of the metaphor he was drawing he would not have called Radford on the phone long-distance and spent an hour trying to browbeat her into withdrawing the article. (I heard her half of that conversation, and she could have used a sampling machine preprogrammed with the phrase "I can only judge what I read, not you personally or your beliefs.")
Oh, and that guy with the "mythos" article that is online that footnotes her -- he dissed everyone that didn't support his pet theory of mythic whatchamacallit. I'm sure he skimmed Elaine's article without understanding what she was so bothered about.
Anyway. My $0.02 for this episode...
...that it isn't secure. This is a running theme on comp.risks
A friend of mine hated Ender's game; she said it was the worst novel she'd ever read from its sappy tearjerking to its queasy morality to the blatant justification of genocide at the end. She refused to ever read another Card book. I didn't feel as strongly as she did, found the book readable, but I took her point.
At the time she was a SFWA member so she got a free copy of Speaker. Since she didn't want it, she gave it to me. When I read it I got back to her and said, "you're not going to believe this, he escapes to a planet copied from Brazil."
I gave her back the book, and next thing I know she is drawing up a tremendous list of coincidences, at least 75, between Ender's life and upbringing and that of one A. Hitler. This turned into a meticulously researched article -- I saw the doc package, which was an inch and a half thick -- which was published in the final issue of Science Fiction Review,. That article was titled Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman? by Elaine Radford.
SFR is no longer with us but the article and Card's rebuttal were republished by Literary Review, so it's probably there in your meatspace library if you're curious. I don't think the article is online anywhere.
While it was startling to see just how closely Ender parallels Hitler, even more startling was Card's reaction. He seemed to be completely unaware of many of the key passages in the book which Radford cited. This is clear from his rebuttal, which was amazingly lame and ignorant (several times stating bluntly that passages didn't exist which Radford had documented). It was obvious to me that he couldn't have written the book, at least not in anything finer than general outline.
At the time it was expected that Card would sweep the Hugos and Nebulas for a third time in a row with the sequel to Speaker. Instead it took him, what, four or five years to get around to writing it. I am convinced that Superman had a lot to do with it. He pulled a mammoth con job off on the SF community and almost got away with it. For the most part he still has, but he did blink.
Now, back to my copy of The Martians...
And as I pointed out they were wrong.
even if it was running at 10Ghz all the components in the mobo would suffer from heavy timing problems due to different wire lengths.
Cray mainframes of the 80's had this problem as they were refrigerator-sized and operating over 100 MHz; the problem was solved by modularizing the system, desynchronizing the components, and recombining data under controlled circumstances. I remember being told by a beaming engineer in 1982 that some busses had three different addresses on them at the same time.
So it can be done. Now, we'll just see it done 100 times faster with equipment 100 times smaller -- a single chip.
I had a 4 MHz Z80 system by Amstrad from the late 80's whose word processor blew away WordPerfect on a 12 MHz 8086 spell-checking documents. (I'd still be using it but it used proprietary disks and you can't get the drives any more.) This was a very powerful, intuitive word cruncher using an extended text mode that could display 512 different characters at a time on its 90x25 screen, and for ease of use it compared favorably with all but the fastest newest Windows-based systems. It also ran CP/M, and sported an interpreted BASIC that made QBasic look like a sick joke.
If we had software written like that for the x86 platform, it would be amazing what these machines could do. Imagine something text based, with pre-emptive multitasking, installable with only the features you need, highly configurable, with optional graphics, and built by people who really care about what they are doing...
Well, I guess we have an operating system like that, but it would be nice to have applications too.
It actually isn't hard at all to do this. Individual registers can be verified in real time with parity checks. Multiple parity bits can allow parity errors to automatically be resolved without losing data. A clock cycle might have to be skipped while this is done -- once every few hundred billion clocks. Otherwise, it's transparent and consumes rather little chip real estate.
In some cases it would be easier to duplicate entire modules and compare the outputs. It's not necessary to use three blocks with voting; if a compare fails, you redo the operation. It's a computer; until you write the results you still have your starting state to begin from again. So once again, you miss a clock cycle once in a great while.
Remember also that most of the computer is not the CPU and isn't implemented at this level or running at this speed. You only have to harden the parts that are.
...get an old VCR. I'm quite sure neither of mine, both made in the mid-80's, would recognize this silly signal.
The FCC is not a lawmaking or institution, it is a commission.
So? Then who are the guys in the riot gear with FCC appliqueed on their backs who show up and bust pirate radio stations?
...that doesn't have the antenna right next to your ear. The signal will go further with it on the roof of your car anyway, and bag phones have more power and a lot more range than handhelds while exposing your head to less radiation.
Of course, if you want to see what ham radio would be like without the license requirements, I repeat: Get a CB. Or read Usenet.
Power dissipation goes down with reduced size. This makes up for the increase with increased speed.
and also that down at 0.01 microns a single bit is represented by only a few hundred electrons.
Only if they make the transistor that small. .01 micron is the minimum size of a feature, not the size of all features. While smaller transistors are nice, smaller busses are actually more important. Anyway, to take your assumption at face value anyway...
Quantum Mechanics states that the uncertainty od such a conglomeration is about 1 in 200 Billion - ie, the 'bit' is only certain to that degree. Given that a processor at this soeed will precess many times this amount per second, it is impossible for a processor to run at this architectural scale because one in every 250 Billion bits will be corrupted - which is fatal.
Certainly so -- if you don't design any error correction into the chip. It only requires about a 20% increase in real estate to implement two parity bits which would require two simultaneous bit failures to create a nonresolvable error. This would also slow things down very little as parity checking can be done in parallel with computation -- it's always going on. Thus, instead of crashing once every minute or so as your calculations suggest, it would crash once every several hundred billion minutes or so, which is quite tolerable.
I have estimated that the top speed we are likely to see is about 3GHz at 0.05 microns. To assert otherwise is hogwash.
You know a lot about physics, but not much about CPU architecture. Your pet peeve will be relatively simple to work around when the time comes.
Edmund Scientific sells kits including the magnet and type II superconducting wafer which will let you demonstrate the Meisner Effect with cheap liquid nitrogen as the coolant. They don't sell the liquid nitrogen, you have to scare that up yourself.
Because the signal that is transmitted will be subjected to additional noise. This has a much greater effect on the encrypted signal, if the encryption is of any reliable level at all, than it does on plaintext sound. The digitization had the same advantage then it does in modern systems, noise can be completely removed which is a necessary first step toward reconstructing the plaintext.
When I bought this cutie the alternative was a TI-35. Had one of those, too. I recall vividly how it failed the "twist test" -- grab each ends, attempt to rotate in different directions. The TI would twist a good 10 or 15 degrees; the 11C not at all, that one could detect visually. And of course the 11C had good ol' RPN, inherently theft- and borrow- proof, as well as faster and more efficient than the () keys on the TI.
Of course, HP did many other things. The very first computer I ever used was a HP2100A minicomputer. This was back in '74 or so when I was just a wee snip of a programmer-to-be and my Dad had to show me how to use the Model 22 teletype machine that was its user interface. Imagine, for only $40,000 you could get a massive 4Kx16bit nonvolatile RAM (hand-threaded magnetic donuts), and an impressive array of pushbuttons with which to set and retrieve memory contents. And nothing else. The high-speed optical tape reader (inch-wide, 8 holes across) came later, as did the optical Hollerith card reader.
I was writing software, pidgin as it was, and I had never heard of Intel. Imagine that.
Besides better tracking DVD's use shorter wavelength lasers so the holes can be smaller. The substrate in CD-R's was designed to be as reflective as possible -- which isn't very -- in the range of wavelengths used by CD players. CD-R's are marginal even in standard CD players; the DVD player sees an even weaker signal than the CD player does because it uses the wrong color light.
It's no more a matter of piracy prevention than the fact that most regular CD players still won't play CD-RW's, which reflect even less light than CD-R's.
So stop programming in that bloated OO language, streamline your code, enable strong typing, and by the way how do errors in your program logic make your t-shirts...