Humans didn't evolve from cockroaches or from any arthropod. The origins of the vertebrates are currently quite obscure; something closer to a lancelet seems the most likely candidate.
Also, it's not clear that cockroaches could evolve immunity to boric acid while still remaining cockroaches. In other words, the biological changes required to make them resistant to the stuff could be so severe that we might not recognize the result as a cockroach.
I was wondering the same thing; I'm a paleontology nut but had never heard this term. I guess I'm a bit behind the times, for Crurotarsi turns out to be just a new term for a major subgroup of the old thecodont group. Although "thecodonts" are no longer accepted as a valid classification group, the term has been around for far longer, and except for the professionals, I'd bet a lot more of those people who are interested in the history of the Triassic have heard of "thecodonts" than "crurotarsans".
The older worker suggested that the young engineer check the core stack to see about a problem, but unfortunately, "he'd never heard of a core stack."
Core stack? What the heck's a core stack? Does that mean get a backtrace out of a core dump?
Hmm, of all the replies here, only the guy who joked about using the Boy Scout compass was on the mark.
A "core stack" has nothing to do with backtraces, call stacks, or stack data structures of any kind. It's a term for a magnetic core memory device. Core memory is constructed from "core planes", each of which is a square array of magnetic cores connected by wires. (See Magnetic core memory for details and a picture of a core plane.) Each core plane functions as a 1-bit-wide memory device, similar to a 1-bit-wide DRAM chip. Just as a DRAM module is built from several DRAM chips acting in parallel, a core memory device is built from a set of core planes literally stacked together to form a compact unit with the appropriate bit width. This is a core stack.
I couldn't find the original reference you were quoting (it didn't seem to be in either article or in any of the previous comments), but I assume the engineer was being asked to check if there was something physically wrong with the core stack; perhaps an access panel had been left open or something, causing it to overheat. Core memory was very sensitive to temperature.
But I always associated the PDP line with rock solid real time stability and versatile I/O. I think the clock ran at about 1Mhz. The backplane was wirewrapped.
The original PDP-10 had a 1-microsecond memory cycle time, which gives a 1 MHz cycle rate. Its logic apparently wasn't synchronous, though. Instruction speed was supposedly around 1 MIPS. Later models had synchronous logic with clock rates ranging from about 10 to 30 MHz.
The machine actually used for TRON was a Foonly F-1, a high-speed implementation of the PDP-10 not made by DEC. Only one F-1 system was ever produced, although Foonly did go on to make slower, less ambitious machines. The F-1 had a 10 MHz clock and used fast ECL logic; it was a pipelined architecture, and common instructions would execute in one cycle. Instruction throughput was supposedly around 6 MIPS.
Check out the F-1's entry (and the links in that entry) in the first table on this page for more details.
(Oh, by the way, one of those links does mention "the Cray at Digital Productions", so I guess I was wrong in saying that Crays weren't used much for rendering work.)
I would never have considered a PDP-10 to be a fast rendering machine. This sounds like a way around paying for time on a cray.
Well, from the article it sounds like they weren't swimming in cash, and they seem to have been desperate for computer time. But remember, the film was made back around 1981. Commercial computer graphics were still in their infancy, and there couldn't have been many specialized rendering machines around. I'm skeptical that Crays were frequently used for that purpose--they were far too expensive for such a task, and they were designed as dedicated high-speed number crunchers anyway, not as graphics machines. You'd be a lot more likely to use a Cray to run the calculations on which a pretty animation would be based than for generating the animation itself; that would likely be rendered by some other machine offline.
At that time PDP-10s had a strong reputation as fast timesharing systems, so it seems plausible to me that one with few users could serve as a pretty powerful rendering box by 1981 standards.
What is the modern equivalent of these idolaters? Why, the biblical inerrantists. They have made themselves a graven image of God, not made of wood or of gold or marble but of words.
My thoughts exactly, which is why these days I refer to people like this as "book-worshipers".
They have defined their god so narrowly and restricted him within the ancient text, and cannot conceive of anything beyond the holy scripture.
I would change "cannot conceive" to "refuse to conceive". People like this don't have broken brains, odd though that may seem. They simply won't allow themselves to accept any alternative. Just as we won't allow ourselves to accept alternatives to our most strongly held beliefs. Such is the nature of belief--it requires an act of will.
However, I wouldn't entirely blame the book-worshipers for their focus on the text as supreme and inerrant, when the text itself encourages such thinking. I believe the focus on Biblical inerrancy is based on certain passages in the Bible which emphasize the importance of the Word, and on the incorruptibility of that Word.
The Qur'an is even worse in this respect--it claims to be God's direct words, which are spoken in the first person, and it demands that the believer accept it as God's final, complete word to His Creation, never to be amended. Much of Islamic belief and practice is driven by this viewpoint. Wikipedia's entry on the Qur'an is a useful introduction.
I don't doubt that there were a large number of species of small flying dinosaurs but the public conception is that most flying dinosaurs were approximately man-sized and National Geographic knows this, I feel the picture was deliberatly taking advantage of this perception and coupled with the godzilla reference attemping to make us think this creature was far larger than it actually was.
Good point, and you may be right about their motives. It certainly seems like they're trying to hype this in order to sell magazines, thus getting "maximum return" from their research sponsorship.
(By the way, calling pterosaurs "flying dinosaurs" is a misnomer. They were only distantly related to dinosaurs, without a great deal of common structure, and probably having a shared ancestor back in the early Triassic. The expression "flying dinosaurs" is much better applied to birds, which have a lot of shared characteristics with dinosaurs and which are apparently descended from predatory dinosaurs of the Jurassic.)
(Yes, I'm a hopeless pedant and a paleontology nut.:)
Yeah, lots of people here are picking up on the overuse of breathless superlatives with this thing. It's kind of ridiculous. Four meters is hardly "huge" even by the standards of modern crocs, much less some of the prehistoric ones. (It does sound rather large for the sort of specialized marine crocodiles this beast was related to.) Quotes like "the most fearsome predator in the sea" (from the Science Daily article) are also silly, considering that this time frame was also the era of the giant pliosaurs, which could easily reach ten meters in length with jaws two meters long.
Still, I wouldn't like to swim in waters inhabited by these brutes.
Sure 4 m may not seem like a giant crocodile but I don't think anyone can deny that the creature in this "photo" is a giant for sure!!
Seriously, that flying dinosaur it's going after would have to be the size of a sparrow for the scales in that picture to work!
respect_for_national_geographic--;
You can leave your respect for National Geographic alone; there's nothing wrong with the scale in that painting as long as you remember that most pterosaurs weren't huge. This croc's skull is about 2.5 feet long, with the jaws being a little over half that length, and there were plenty of pterosaurs with wingspans of a meter or less, especially during the Jurassic and earlier. It was only when the birds started diversifying in the Cretaceous, taking over all the small-flyer niches, that the remaining pterosaurs were forced to become giants.
When a society fails, it comes from the inability to see where policies will lead. If you look at great empires that have crumbled, they fail from the inside out.
Not necessarily. Sometimes they just get overwhelmed.
Easter Island? It failed because no one was smart enough to say "Gee, maybe we should stop cutting trees."
We don't know that there was no one smart enough to say that--in fact, it's likely there was. It's one thing to say such things, quite another to actually turn the society away from a self-destructive path. Easter Island was being overwhelmed by civil war.
Rome? "Gee, maybe we shouldn't over-extend ourselves." Followed by, "Nobody could have expected the Huns to invade."
Uh, this one is completely wrong. Augustus imposed a policy of halting imperial expansion after the annihilation of Varus's three legions in Germania in A.D. 9. There were some further expansions after that, including Claudius' conquest of Britannia in 43 A.D., Trajan's conquest of Dacia (modern Romania) in A.D. 106, and Trajan's temporary eastern conquests during his war with Parthia--of which only Armenia was kept. After that the empire was fairly static for around 200 years; only then did it begin to fragment and shrink.
The empire started to fall apart partly from internal social changes which made it harder to maintain the massive army needed, and partly from an enormous westward barbarian migration which the Romans could not possibly have expected (it began in Central Asia in regions far outside their knowledge), and which they lacked the military strength to hold back. The Huns were only one of the later phases of that migration.
The fact is that humans, even with all our pollution, can't put a dent in our planets ecosystem compared to the power of one rhylothetic (sp?) volcanic eruption
I can't check what you mean because of the spelling:)
(meaning the one in the original article, not the comment.)
It seems the "pterosaur vs. Spitfire" comparison is in many of the articles discussing this, so I suppose it might come from the initial press release, but it's still pointless. It's even more idiotic in the way it's phrased: A Spitfire has a wingspan of 11m and has to be powered by a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. Well, yes, and if it had a smaller wingspan it would need an even more powerful engine. All other things being equal, you need less power to fly with larger wings, not more.
Not to mention the fact that this supposed 60-foot pterosaur (similar claims were made for Quetzalcoatlus when fragments of it were first found, so some caution is warranted) probably weighed no more than 200 pounds, and perhaps a lot less. Pterosaurs were incredibly light for their size.
If you're going to compare pterosaurs with aircraft, do it with the extremely light, long-winged planes used to set records for human-powered flight.
It seems at least a couple of important people there know about the situation, judging from this recent message on the cctalk classic-computing mailing list. (Sellam Ismail is the museum's software curator. I don't know if Al Kossow actually works for the museum, but he's certainly contributed a great deal to preserving computer history.)
Does anyone have any idea what these machines are or whether they can be saved from the scrapper?
As for the data, a lot of people here seem to be really naive about how hard it is to recover old data like this. "Just download it onto a hard disk." Well, yeah, but the trick is getting working 9-track drives (relatively easy) and 7-track drives (much harder) and going through the effort required to ensure you get the data off successfully instead of destroying it. (Remember, these tapes are very old and probably extremely fragile, and you may only get one shot at recovering the data.)
Funny that, but many of the things I've seen seem to indicate that if the ENTIRE polar ice caps melted, we'd see a rise of about 65 meters, not 200 meters. And that's if the ENTIRE cap melted -- I dont think anyone is suggest that possibility.
Here's the point in the article where the previous poster got that 200-meter number:
Sea level has constantly fluctuated in the geological past: its highest recorded level was in the Cretaceous Period, some 80 million years ago, when CO2 levels were considerably higher than at present, and ice-caps were virtually absent from the earth. Then, sea level stood at least 200 metres higher than today, with most of the UK being submerged.
That statement is correct, but incomplete and thus somewhat misleading. During the mid-Cretaceous, a lot of present land (including much of midwestern North America) was covered by shallow seas. Plesiosaurs in Kansas and all that.
However, this huge rise in sea level was not just the result of climate and lack of polar caps, but due to tectonic factors. The rate of sea-floor spreading at the mid-ocean ridges varies over time. As it does so, the ridges grow or shrink in volume, thus changing the volume of the ocean basins. It's generally believed (although there may still be debate on this) that in the mid-Cretaceous, Earth, for whatever reason, was experiencing a greatly increased rate of sea floor spreading, so the ocean basins were less roomy, and some of the ocean water was forced to spread over the continents. (It's been a long time since I studied this stuff, so if I've made any errors, corrections would be appreciated.)
Clearly this is not a factor for our current climate worries.
I'd like to make another point. You mention the possibility of beneficial effects of climate change. While those may be real in the long run, I would argue that our civilization is deeply dependant on climatic and ecological stability and is really unprepared for any major change, regardless of the effects. You can't move human settlements and farms overnight, and it won't be easy to deal with populations of important or damaging lifeforms moving, dying off, or booming. So any major climate change is going to be difficult at the very least, and possibly catastrophic. There may not be that much we can do to prevent the coming changes, and I suspect that our ability to weather them may be severely underestimated, but it's unwise to assume that everything may turn out just fine.
Someone previously mentioned the Wright brothers as an example of historical patent abuse; another couple of examples go back to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.
According to this paper from the website of The Newcomen Society of the United States, Thomas Newcomen, the inventor of the first practical steam engine, was forced to go into partnership with a London syndicate that had bought a royal patent originally issued to the inventor Thomas Savery on engines powered by fire. The patent was for Savery's own "suction engine", which was never practical, but it was so broadly worded that Newcomen's own far superior design was also covered. The syndicate gave Newcomen little credit for his engines.
James Watt, the inventor of the double-acting steam engine (which was the first really efficient steam engine and allowed the Industrial Revolution to take off), and his business partner Matthew Boulton obtained many patents on steam engine designs. These patents were for their own, workable inventions, so they were certainly on stronger ethical ground than the owners of the Savery patent, but by ruthlessly enforcing their patents against any inventors who tried to improve the steam engine further, they held back progress in the field for decades. In particular, the development of portable high-pressure steam engines, which would allow vehicles to be powered by steam, was delayed until Watt's patents expired. Watt opposed such engines, believing that they were unsafe. (See this article from the Technological Innovation and Intellectual Property newsletter, published by Research on Innovation.)
Actually, The Mechanical Universe was based on the first quarter of the Caltech freshman physics course, as taught by David Goodstein, who was the instructor for all the episodes. It was filmed in the Caltech lecture hall used for that course.
I took Caltech freshman physics only a year or two after The Mechanical Universe was filmed, and the first quarter, still taught by Goodstein, followed the series fairly closely, though with a much faster pace. The room was also obviously the same. Many of the "students" in the series were actors, though.
I have little faith in processors from unknown companies that claim to do what Intel, AMD and IBM combined haven't yet been able to achieve.
Well, Intel, AMD, and IBM haven't really tried. This chip isn't a normal microprocessor, it's an "array processor", meaning that it's designed specifically to execute operations on large floating-point arrays. The market for such processors has been rather small in the past. It's hard to write code for them with traditional programming tools, and they're only applicable to a restricted class of problems. Most high-end supercomputing these days uses massively parallel sets of conventional processors. So there hasn't been an opportunity large enough to be worthy of the attention of the big guys.
Once you take a closer look at ClearSpeed's PR, this thing seems interesting, but not worth making a huge fuss about. The ClearSpeed press release shows that 25.6 GFLOPS is the peak performance. That's the absolute maximum the chip can do for the easiest kind of problem, which is why some people call peak performance "guaranteed never to exceed". With 64 processing elements, 25.6 GFLOPS means 400 MFLOPS per element. According to ClearSpeed's Microprocessor Forum presentation (warning: this is a slow download), the chip runs at 200 MHz, so this implies each element can do up to 2 floating-point operations per cycle. In fact, ClearSpeed's press release claims only "more than twice the processing speed of competitive products". So this isn't exactly an earth-shattering advance.
The power usage figure is more eye-opening, of course. Here ClearSpeed's press release claims they are twenty times more efficient than their competitors. But it turns out they're comparing the thing with conventional high-speed processors like the Pentium 4, hardly paragons of power efficiency. And ClearSpeed's presentation says they are using IBM's 0.13-micron process, so IBM should get some credit for providing the semiconductor technology to make this possible. 2-3 watts for modern 200 MHz logic using that kind of process doesn't sound outside the realm of possibility. (Remember, this isn't a conventional superscalar processor which requires huge amounts of logic for instruction issuing and control. This thing is mostly a simple mass of ALUs.)
In any case, ClearCase's presentation says they'll be sampling in the 4th quarter of 2003, so they'll have to demonstrate real hardware soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, it's not clear that cockroaches could evolve immunity to boric acid while still remaining cockroaches. In other words, the biological changes required to make them resistant to the stuff could be so severe that we might not recognize the result as a cockroach.
I was wondering the same thing; I'm a paleontology nut but had never heard this term. I guess I'm a bit behind the times, for Crurotarsi turns out to be just a new term for a major subgroup of the old thecodont group. Although "thecodonts" are no longer accepted as a valid classification group, the term has been around for far longer, and except for the professionals, I'd bet a lot more of those people who are interested in the history of the Triassic have heard of "thecodonts" than "crurotarsans".
Hmm, of all the replies here, only the guy who joked about using the Boy Scout compass was on the mark.
A "core stack" has nothing to do with backtraces, call stacks, or stack data structures of any kind. It's a term for a magnetic core memory device. Core memory is constructed from "core planes", each of which is a square array of magnetic cores connected by wires. (See Magnetic core memory for details and a picture of a core plane.) Each core plane functions as a 1-bit-wide memory device, similar to a 1-bit-wide DRAM chip. Just as a DRAM module is built from several DRAM chips acting in parallel, a core memory device is built from a set of core planes literally stacked together to form a compact unit with the appropriate bit width. This is a core stack.
I couldn't find the original reference you were quoting (it didn't seem to be in either article or in any of the previous comments), but I assume the engineer was being asked to check if there was something physically wrong with the core stack; perhaps an access panel had been left open or something, causing it to overheat. Core memory was very sensitive to temperature.
Yellow. No, blue--AAAAAAAAHHH!
[Too bad the movie has the colors in the opposite order.]
The original PDP-10 had a 1-microsecond memory cycle time, which gives a 1 MHz cycle rate. Its logic apparently wasn't synchronous, though. Instruction speed was supposedly around 1 MIPS. Later models had synchronous logic with clock rates ranging from about 10 to 30 MHz.
The machine actually used for TRON was a Foonly F-1, a high-speed implementation of the PDP-10 not made by DEC. Only one F-1 system was ever produced, although Foonly did go on to make slower, less ambitious machines. The F-1 had a 10 MHz clock and used fast ECL logic; it was a pipelined architecture, and common instructions would execute in one cycle. Instruction throughput was supposedly around 6 MIPS.
Check out the F-1's entry (and the links in that entry) in the first table on this page for more details.
(Oh, by the way, one of those links does mention "the Cray at Digital Productions", so I guess I was wrong in saying that Crays weren't used much for rendering work.)
Well, from the article it sounds like they weren't swimming in cash, and they seem to have been desperate for computer time. But remember, the film was made back around 1981. Commercial computer graphics were still in their infancy, and there couldn't have been many specialized rendering machines around. I'm skeptical that Crays were frequently used for that purpose--they were far too expensive for such a task, and they were designed as dedicated high-speed number crunchers anyway, not as graphics machines. You'd be a lot more likely to use a Cray to run the calculations on which a pretty animation would be based than for generating the animation itself; that would likely be rendered by some other machine offline.
At that time PDP-10s had a strong reputation as fast timesharing systems, so it seems plausible to me that one with few users could serve as a pretty powerful rendering box by 1981 standards.
The description of the impact site should read "the edge of Mare Imbrium (the Sea of Rains)".
My thoughts exactly, which is why these days I refer to people like this as "book-worshipers".
I would change "cannot conceive" to "refuse to conceive". People like this don't have broken brains, odd though that may seem. They simply won't allow themselves to accept any alternative. Just as we won't allow ourselves to accept alternatives to our most strongly held beliefs. Such is the nature of belief--it requires an act of will.
However, I wouldn't entirely blame the book-worshipers for their focus on the text as supreme and inerrant, when the text itself encourages such thinking. I believe the focus on Biblical inerrancy is based on certain passages in the Bible which emphasize the importance of the Word, and on the incorruptibility of that Word.
The Qur'an is even worse in this respect--it claims to be God's direct words, which are spoken in the first person, and it demands that the believer accept it as God's final, complete word to His Creation, never to be amended. Much of Islamic belief and practice is driven by this viewpoint. Wikipedia's entry on the Qur'an is a useful introduction.
(By the way, calling pterosaurs "flying dinosaurs" is a misnomer. They were only distantly related to dinosaurs, without a great deal of common structure, and probably having a shared ancestor back in the early Triassic. The expression "flying dinosaurs" is much better applied to birds, which have a lot of shared characteristics with dinosaurs and which are apparently descended from predatory dinosaurs of the Jurassic.)
(Yes, I'm a hopeless pedant and a paleontology nut. :)
Still, I wouldn't like to swim in waters inhabited by these brutes.
Not necessarily. Sometimes they just get overwhelmed.
Easter Island? It failed because no one was smart enough to say "Gee, maybe we should stop cutting trees."
We don't know that there was no one smart enough to say that--in fact, it's likely there was. It's one thing to say such things, quite another to actually turn the society away from a self-destructive path. Easter Island was being overwhelmed by civil war.
Rome? "Gee, maybe we shouldn't over-extend ourselves." Followed by, "Nobody could have expected the Huns to invade."
Uh, this one is completely wrong. Augustus imposed a policy of halting imperial expansion after the annihilation of Varus's three legions in Germania in A.D. 9. There were some further expansions after that, including Claudius' conquest of Britannia in 43 A.D., Trajan's conquest of Dacia (modern Romania) in A.D. 106, and Trajan's temporary eastern conquests during his war with Parthia--of which only Armenia was kept. After that the empire was fairly static for around 200 years; only then did it begin to fragment and shrink.
The empire started to fall apart partly from internal social changes which made it harder to maintain the massive army needed, and partly from an enormous westward barbarian migration which the Romans could not possibly have expected (it began in Central Asia in regions far outside their knowledge), and which they lacked the military strength to hold back. The Huns were only one of the later phases of that migration.
I think he means rhyolitic.
It seems the "pterosaur vs. Spitfire" comparison is in many of the articles discussing this, so I suppose it might come from the initial press release, but it's still pointless. It's even more idiotic in the way it's phrased: A Spitfire has a wingspan of 11m and has to be powered by a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. Well, yes, and if it had a smaller wingspan it would need an even more powerful engine. All other things being equal, you need less power to fly with larger wings, not more.
Not to mention the fact that this supposed 60-foot pterosaur (similar claims were made for Quetzalcoatlus when fragments of it were first found, so some caution is warranted) probably weighed no more than 200 pounds, and perhaps a lot less. Pterosaurs were incredibly light for their size.
If you're going to compare pterosaurs with aircraft, do it with the extremely light, long-winged planes used to set records for human-powered flight.
Try asking on one of the classiccmp mailing lists. Someone there might be able to help you out.
I would call him an avatar of cuteness. :)
It seems at least a couple of important people there know about the situation, judging from this recent message on the cctalk classic-computing mailing list. (Sellam Ismail is the museum's software curator. I don't know if Al Kossow actually works for the museum, but he's certainly contributed a great deal to preserving computer history.)
As for the data, a lot of people here seem to be really naive about how hard it is to recover old data like this. "Just download it onto a hard disk." Well, yeah, but the trick is getting working 9-track drives (relatively easy) and 7-track drives (much harder) and going through the effort required to ensure you get the data off successfully instead of destroying it. (Remember, these tapes are very old and probably extremely fragile, and you may only get one shot at recovering the data.)
They did miss the opportunity to put in a marker for the Google Copernicus Center, though. :D
Here's the point in the article where the previous poster got that 200-meter number:
Sea level has constantly fluctuated in the geological past: its highest recorded level was in the Cretaceous Period, some 80 million years ago, when CO2 levels were considerably higher than at present, and ice-caps were virtually absent from the earth. Then, sea level stood at least 200 metres higher than today, with most of the UK being submerged.
That statement is correct, but incomplete and thus somewhat misleading. During the mid-Cretaceous, a lot of present land (including much of midwestern North America) was covered by shallow seas. Plesiosaurs in Kansas and all that.
However, this huge rise in sea level was not just the result of climate and lack of polar caps, but due to tectonic factors. The rate of sea-floor spreading at the mid-ocean ridges varies over time. As it does so, the ridges grow or shrink in volume, thus changing the volume of the ocean basins. It's generally believed (although there may still be debate on this) that in the mid-Cretaceous, Earth, for whatever reason, was experiencing a greatly increased rate of sea floor spreading, so the ocean basins were less roomy, and some of the ocean water was forced to spread over the continents. (It's been a long time since I studied this stuff, so if I've made any errors, corrections would be appreciated.)
Clearly this is not a factor for our current climate worries.
I'd like to make another point. You mention the possibility of beneficial effects of climate change. While those may be real in the long run, I would argue that our civilization is deeply dependant on climatic and ecological stability and is really unprepared for any major change, regardless of the effects. You can't move human settlements and farms overnight, and it won't be easy to deal with populations of important or damaging lifeforms moving, dying off, or booming. So any major climate change is going to be difficult at the very least, and possibly catastrophic. There may not be that much we can do to prevent the coming changes, and I suspect that our ability to weather them may be severely underestimated, but it's unwise to assume that everything may turn out just fine.
Now if you'd mentioned the Lusitania, on the other hand...*evil grin*
That one turned out to be wrong; there were a couple of non-Cunard liners with steam turbines before Carmania. Fixed.
According to this paper from the website of The Newcomen Society of the United States, Thomas Newcomen, the inventor of the first practical steam engine, was forced to go into partnership with a London syndicate that had bought a royal patent originally issued to the inventor Thomas Savery on engines powered by fire. The patent was for Savery's own "suction engine", which was never practical, but it was so broadly worded that Newcomen's own far superior design was also covered. The syndicate gave Newcomen little credit for his engines.
James Watt, the inventor of the double-acting steam engine (which was the first really efficient steam engine and allowed the Industrial Revolution to take off), and his business partner Matthew Boulton obtained many patents on steam engine designs. These patents were for their own, workable inventions, so they were certainly on stronger ethical ground than the owners of the Savery patent, but by ruthlessly enforcing their patents against any inventors who tried to improve the steam engine further, they held back progress in the field for decades. In particular, the development of portable high-pressure steam engines, which would allow vehicles to be powered by steam, was delayed until Watt's patents expired. Watt opposed such engines, believing that they were unsafe. (See this article from the Technological Innovation and Intellectual Property newsletter, published by Research on Innovation.)
I took Caltech freshman physics only a year or two after The Mechanical Universe was filmed, and the first quarter, still taught by Goodstein, followed the series fairly closely, though with a much faster pace. The room was also obviously the same. Many of the "students" in the series were actors, though.
Well, Intel, AMD, and IBM haven't really tried. This chip isn't a normal microprocessor, it's an "array processor", meaning that it's designed specifically to execute operations on large floating-point arrays. The market for such processors has been rather small in the past. It's hard to write code for them with traditional programming tools, and they're only applicable to a restricted class of problems. Most high-end supercomputing these days uses massively parallel sets of conventional processors. So there hasn't been an opportunity large enough to be worthy of the attention of the big guys.
Once you take a closer look at ClearSpeed's PR, this thing seems interesting, but not worth making a huge fuss about. The ClearSpeed press release shows that 25.6 GFLOPS is the peak performance. That's the absolute maximum the chip can do for the easiest kind of problem, which is why some people call peak performance "guaranteed never to exceed". With 64 processing elements, 25.6 GFLOPS means 400 MFLOPS per element. According to ClearSpeed's Microprocessor Forum presentation (warning: this is a slow download), the chip runs at 200 MHz, so this implies each element can do up to 2 floating-point operations per cycle. In fact, ClearSpeed's press release claims only "more than twice the processing speed of competitive products". So this isn't exactly an earth-shattering advance.
The power usage figure is more eye-opening, of course. Here ClearSpeed's press release claims they are twenty times more efficient than their competitors. But it turns out they're comparing the thing with conventional high-speed processors like the Pentium 4, hardly paragons of power efficiency. And ClearSpeed's presentation says they are using IBM's 0.13-micron process, so IBM should get some credit for providing the semiconductor technology to make this possible. 2-3 watts for modern 200 MHz logic using that kind of process doesn't sound outside the realm of possibility. (Remember, this isn't a conventional superscalar processor which requires huge amounts of logic for instruction issuing and control. This thing is mostly a simple mass of ALUs.)
In any case, ClearCase's presentation says they'll be sampling in the 4th quarter of 2003, so they'll have to demonstrate real hardware soon.