I read some old books from the 1950's on how they arranged offices, rows and columns of tables of clerks to do the calculating of sub-totals, totals and check-totals just to do the accounting .
Socially, a clerk was one of the safest jobs in the South of England. Live out in the Home Counties, take one of Brunel's trains into London, and work as a clerk from 9 to 5.
Before any kind of automated mechanical technology, a "computer" was a person who did computations, and it was a home-based industry. Papers were sent out to the person, who did the arithmetic and then sent the results back to the sender.
There was a need by the Navy for the automatic calculation of tide tables - resulting in the foundation of signal processing and http://co-ops.nos.noaa.gov/predma2.html">Tide Predicting machines . Astronomers used orrery's starting in the 18th century.
Very true about the IC - it wasn't until those first 8-bit home computers came out, that anyone could do pure programming at home - unless they wanted to assemble an electronics kit.
It almost seems possible that it could have been done much earlier. Automatic sources of rotary motion were known (waterwheel, steam engine) along with gearing mechanisms.
But it wasn't until the Industrial revolution in the 1850's, that the use of punched cards for storing instructions and input data that made mathematical calculating machines possible. That's one important factor. The other one is the use of mathematical notation for expressing algebra that can be converted into instructions.
What if he had got both these engines working by 1849? Would he have moved onto more advanced calculations or extended the use of mechanical computation to commerce like Hollerith punched cards did in 1889? If so, that would have advanced computing by 40 years.
I'd say it would be better for him to get a separate system for the kids. Some time they are going to want to move away from home and move to college/into their own flat.
At that point, they are going to have to buy their own data storage then and transfer everything across.
Fascinating thing was that when they cloned CPU designs, the yields on the silicon wafers weren't that good. So instead of just dumping those broken CPU's, they would write code that worked around the broke instructions, replacing them with alternative implementations.
Funny:) I was thinking of relative positions of multiple monitors of odd sizes relative to each other; above below, left, right, as well as user preferred resolution.
Mobile phones and tablets are "systems-on-a-chip" - all the hardware is in one ASIC chip. This avoids the overhead of multiple ASIC packaging, sockets, multi-layer track, motherboard interconnections, smoothing capacitors, resistors and other glue components, as well as the potential to have multiple hardware combinations. That saves on memory space for drivers.
For a PC 75% of the components on the motherboard are for just for interconnection purposes. Compare the size of the actual silicon for the CPU and GPU, and how much of the packaging is just to connect the silicon to the motherboard socket or PCI Express connector.
You can edit System->Preferences->Sound and select between various themes, but it sounds like he means he wants a custom noise to be playable when the machines boots up, as well as being able to specify custom sounds from a menu.
But how do you define flimsy. If some developing world doctor discovers that a $50 flatbed scanner plus GIMP plugin makes for an accurate diagnostic tool for skin diseases, is that patentable? One university managed to secure a patent for a similar application. It took them less than three month to acquire a sample set of images, and another three years of research to perfect the software.
Playing a startup sound would simply involving editing a login script.
Setting up multiple screens (with Gnome at least), just involves invoking System->Administration->Display. I can't see how easier that could be. Only the user can know the relative orientation of each monitor to its peers, as well as the preferred resolution. I doubt if it would be practical for some GUI software wizard to try and guess what the user wants. Maybe they might want screen at 1024x768 resolution because that's the fixed size of the dialog window of some legacy application.
I guess not, but with the company I interned for, they had an IBM 360 mainframe with a good dozen air conditioning units on the exterior wall of the car park. Whenever one of these overheated, it was due to some poor homeless guy setting up a shelter around these vents.
My laptop (rather vintage now), has the rather quaint design of having the cooling van intake on the underside of the laptop and the exhaust vent/afterburner on the right hand side, along side the hard disk drive. Having the Gnome Sensors Applet lets me see the temperature rise depending on application design.
I always thought originally it was due to the use of the GPU, then I tried some GPU applications that only used integer parameters, and that considerably reduced temperature increase. SDL exclusive applications with software rendering (No OpenGL) had no temperature increase, even though they were blitting an entire framebuffer in full-screen mode. Then tried some experimenting with floating-point vs. fixed point on CPU side. Came to the conclusion that it was the use of floating-point combined with poorly memory-mapped data. Sustained deeply intensive floating-point computations would top the CPU out, but the frequency writing of images to file would slow things down enough for the CPU to cool down.
I've been able to run both CPU and GPU based CFD and 3D visualisation on my laptop without any problems, yet some flash games which are just doing 2D animation will roast a 2.7 GHz CPU to the point that the kernel decides to call it a day and shut down the whole system.
Unbelievably, these flash games aren't doing anything more complex than playing a retro 2D platform game. I'm guessing that this is due to the way in which all the separate texturemaps/pixelmaps are treated as generic webpage images rather than as a single DOOM style WAD file.
Work out their power consumption per core in watts/GigaFlops. Getting the maximum amount of performance out of the highest density of processors with the least amount of space. is the highest priority for suppliers now.
Top-end gaming rig have 1000watt power units to handle SLI/Crossfire GPU's as well as a quad-core CPU. Multiply that by the number of processing nodes, and you'll get an idea of the power consumption. Standard home has a 15 to 20 kilowatt limit to the electricity supply.
So a super-computer is going to be the equivalent of a small subdivision of homes.
I'm imaging that in the style of Jackie Chan movie with a smoky corporate back-office with Wall Street suits on one side and Korean businessmen on the other.
Having repaired a laptop several times, the screen is the most expensive part. A company called Nextronics used to do a "part-exchange" program. Exchange your old WUXGA screen with them and they'd give you a discount of $200 on the $800 - $1200 for a new screen. Looks like they've gone out of business in that market now.
First time was when I had an USB TV stick on a laptop. Lifted up the laptop and was about to sit on the sofa, when the cat decided it wanted that seat:) Laptop slipped backwards, and straight onto the USB TV stick - bent the connector off the circuit board.
Other time was USB headphone adapter stick that has a pair of standard audio connector headphones. Tripped over the cable and stretched the USB connector again.
Simple because the PCMCIA sockets are on the side and not back alleviates thes problems. For audio I now use Bluetooth headphones.
I'd guess it's for upgrading a laptop. PCMCIA would give the board a chunk in memory-map space, as well as being in a robust form-factor. USB dongles tend to end up having damaged connectors to the point they are unusable.
Various European countries have that - they end up being run by "rainbow alliances" which come together over one or two issues. The problem is that they tend to fall apart whenever a simple disagreement on one issue explodes into a major political split. Then either the government is dissolved and new elections are made.
The corporations would always lobby against something like that because (as the lobbyists would say) "the private sector was more informed and better at making such decisions that law-makers" and "it was far better to allow market forces to prevail" than to allow "marxist style central planning dictate economic direction".
Reality, they didn't want anyone who really knew the limitations of the technology to become involved in the scrutiny of public sector contracts. As is typical in the UK, such public sector contracts usually include NDA agreements to "guarantee the public gets value for money".
I was amazed to see the resolutions that HD USB webcams go up to these days (1920x1080 upwards) along with auto-focus, digital zoom, pan and tilt. A high-resolution CCD combined with motorized focus and fisheye lens means that the camera can "look round" without having any other motors apart from the focus. If that can be done for a two-figure sum, Military drone just needs to add satellite-communications, some basic avionics and some IR optics.
Plenty of home videos of people who have stuck wireless webcams into those $25 indoor RC helicopters.
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I read some old books from the 1950's on how they arranged offices, rows and columns of tables of clerks to do the calculating of sub-totals, totals and check-totals just to do the accounting .
Socially, a clerk was one of the safest jobs in the South of England. Live out in the Home Counties, take one of Brunel's trains into London, and work as a clerk from 9 to 5.
Before any kind of automated mechanical technology, a "computer" was a person who did computations, and it was a home-based industry. Papers were sent out to the person, who did the arithmetic and then sent the results back to the sender.
There was a need by the Navy for the automatic calculation of tide tables - resulting in the foundation of signal processing and http://co-ops.nos.noaa.gov/predma2.html">Tide Predicting machines . Astronomers used orrery's starting in the 18th century.
Very true about the IC - it wasn't until those first 8-bit home computers came out, that anyone could do pure programming at home - unless they wanted to assemble an electronics kit.
It almost seems possible that it could have been done much earlier. Automatic sources of rotary motion were known (waterwheel, steam engine) along with gearing mechanisms.
One of the first "programmable toys" was a cart controlled by a winding string
But it wasn't until the Industrial revolution in the 1850's, that the use of punched cards for storing instructions and input data that made mathematical calculating machines possible. That's one important factor. The other one is the use of mathematical notation for expressing algebra that can be converted into instructions.
What if he had got both these engines working by 1849? Would he have moved onto more advanced calculations or extended the use of mechanical computation to commerce like Hollerith punched cards did in 1889? If so, that would have advanced computing by 40 years.
First documented geared calculating mechanism (Antikythera) 150 - 100BC
First documented use of waterwheels - 300BC
First documented Steam Engine - 1AD
First use of punched cards - 1725AD
Apparently Israel also organized the export of 69 Patriot missiles to China as well.
Sounds like someone is just trying to stack everything up for another war.
I'd say it would be better for him to get a separate system for the kids. Some time they are going to want to move away from home and move to college/into their own flat.
At that point, they are going to have to buy their own data storage then and transfer everything across.
Fascinating thing was that when they cloned CPU designs, the yields on the silicon wafers weren't that good. So instead of just dumping those broken CPU's, they would write code that worked around the broke instructions, replacing them with alternative implementations.
People used to point at the moon and say that it was made of cheese. NASA still sent Apollo moon missions anyway.
Funny :) I was thinking of relative positions of multiple monitors of odd sizes relative to each other; above below, left, right, as well as user preferred resolution.
Mobile phones and tablets are "systems-on-a-chip" - all the hardware is in one ASIC chip. This avoids the overhead of multiple ASIC packaging, sockets, multi-layer track, motherboard interconnections, smoothing capacitors, resistors and other glue components, as well as the potential to have multiple hardware combinations. That saves on memory space for drivers.
For a PC 75% of the components on the motherboard are for just for interconnection purposes. Compare the size of the actual silicon for the CPU and GPU, and how much of the packaging is just to connect the silicon to the motherboard socket or PCI Express connector.
You can edit System->Preferences->Sound and select between various themes, but it sounds like he means he wants a custom noise to be playable when the machines boots up, as well as being able to specify custom sounds from a menu.
But how do you define flimsy. If some developing world doctor discovers that a $50 flatbed scanner plus GIMP plugin makes for an accurate diagnostic tool for skin diseases, is that patentable? One university managed to secure a patent for a similar application. It took them less than three month to acquire a sample set of images, and another three years of research to perfect the software.
Playing a startup sound would simply involving editing a login script.
Setting up multiple screens (with Gnome at least), just involves invoking System->Administration->Display. I can't see how easier that could be. Only the user can know the relative orientation of each monitor to its peers, as well as the preferred resolution. I doubt if it would be practical for some GUI software wizard to try and guess what the user wants. Maybe they might want screen at 1024x768 resolution because that's the fixed size of the dialog window of some legacy application.
I guess not, but with the company I interned for, they had an IBM 360 mainframe with a good dozen air conditioning units on the exterior wall of the car park. Whenever one of these overheated, it was due to some poor homeless guy setting up a shelter around these vents.
Just think of all the homeless people that wasted heat to help keep warm this winter.
Some cities and offices, they would use heat exchangers to reuse that heat to keep car-parks or offices warm.ts
My laptop (rather vintage now), has the rather quaint design of having the cooling van intake on the underside of the laptop and the exhaust vent/afterburner on the right hand side, along side the hard disk drive. Having the Gnome Sensors Applet lets me see the temperature rise depending on application design.
I always thought originally it was due to the use of the GPU, then I tried some GPU applications that only used integer parameters, and that considerably reduced temperature increase. SDL exclusive applications with software rendering (No OpenGL) had no temperature increase, even though they were blitting an entire framebuffer in full-screen mode. Then tried some experimenting with floating-point vs. fixed point on CPU side. Came to the conclusion that it was the use of floating-point combined with poorly memory-mapped data. Sustained deeply intensive floating-point computations would top the CPU out, but the frequency writing of images to file would slow things down enough for the CPU to cool down.
I've been able to run both CPU and GPU based CFD and 3D visualisation on my laptop without any problems, yet some flash games which are just doing 2D animation will roast a 2.7 GHz CPU to the point that the kernel decides to call it a day and shut down the whole system.
Unbelievably, these flash games aren't doing anything more complex than playing a retro 2D platform game. I'm guessing that this is due to the way in which all the separate texturemaps/pixelmaps are treated as generic webpage images rather than as a single DOOM style WAD file.
Work out their power consumption per core in watts/GigaFlops. Getting the maximum amount of performance out of the highest density of processors with the least amount of space. is the highest priority for suppliers now.
Top-end gaming rig have 1000watt power units to handle SLI/Crossfire GPU's as well as a quad-core CPU. Multiply that by the number of processing nodes, and you'll get an idea of the power consumption. Standard home has a 15 to 20 kilowatt limit to the electricity supply.
So a super-computer is going to be the equivalent of a small subdivision of homes.
Stupidly, I have one, but kept it it stuffed in the PCMCIA slot rather than using it for such purposes.
I'm imaging that in the style of Jackie Chan movie with a smoky corporate back-office with Wall Street suits on one side and Korean businessmen on the other.
Having repaired a laptop several times, the screen is the most expensive part. A company called Nextronics used to do a "part-exchange" program. Exchange your old WUXGA screen with them and they'd give you a discount of $200 on the $800 - $1200 for a new screen. Looks like they've gone out of business in that market now.
First time was when I had an USB TV stick on a laptop. Lifted up the laptop and was about to sit on the sofa, when the cat decided it wanted that seat :) Laptop slipped backwards, and straight onto the USB TV stick - bent the connector off the circuit board.
Other time was USB headphone adapter stick that has a pair of standard audio connector headphones. Tripped over the cable and stretched the USB connector again.
Simple because the PCMCIA sockets are on the side and not back alleviates thes problems. For audio I now use Bluetooth headphones.
There is the Chandrasekhar limit which defines the maximum size of a White dwarf star .
There is a theoretical maximum limit for a neutron star, which seems to be about 3 - 3.2. This also applies to pulsars, which are spinning neutron stars.
There is also an upper limit to the size that a black hole can become
There is the Schwarzfield radius which defines the escape limit for the speed of light.
Maybe the maximum size of neutron star is the minimum size of a black hole? Or is there something inbetween?
I'd guess it's for upgrading a laptop. PCMCIA would give the board a chunk in memory-map space, as well as being in a robust form-factor. USB dongles tend to end up having damaged connectors to the point they are unusable.
Various European countries have that - they end up being run by "rainbow alliances" which come together over one or two issues. The problem is that they tend to fall apart whenever a simple disagreement on one issue explodes into a major political split. Then either the government is dissolved and new elections are made.
The corporations would always lobby against something like that because (as the lobbyists would say) "the private sector was more informed and better at making such decisions that law-makers" and "it was far better to allow market forces to prevail" than to allow "marxist style central planning dictate economic direction".
Reality, they didn't want anyone who really knew the limitations of the technology to become involved in the scrutiny of public sector contracts. As is typical in the UK, such public sector contracts usually include NDA agreements to "guarantee the public gets value for money".
I was amazed to see the resolutions that HD USB webcams go up to these days (1920x1080 upwards) along with auto-focus, digital zoom, pan and tilt. A high-resolution CCD combined with motorized focus and fisheye lens means that the camera can "look round" without having any other motors apart from the focus. If that can be done for a two-figure sum, Military drone just needs to add satellite-communications, some basic avionics and some IR optics.
Plenty of home videos of people who have stuck wireless webcams into those $25 indoor RC helicopters.