Very nice. Now please explain how to make a:
R-S flip flop
AND gate
OR gate... all with a fanout of 4 or more.... and how you connect these devices.... and how you interface them to the real world.... and get them to work with the required 99.9999999999% reliability... and do it quicker or cheaper than using silicon.
-----
Once upon a time there was talk of superconducting twistors, and 400,000 MHz tunnel-diode computers, and a dozen other wizz-bang technologies. Most of them were pure rubbish-- for example, most of the devices had no clearly differentiated inputs and outputs, no fan-out or amplification ability, little or no noise margin, impossible clocking schemes, low reliability, poor or expensive or slow interfaces between stages or to the real world, and more foibles beyond recalling.
Magnetic circuits have been studied for at least 80 years. The basic problem is one of size and speed. A dipole magnet (onr with N and S poles) has a certain minimum size, otherwise it depolarizes itself. That sets a minimum size for any magnetic device. Also it's hard to make magnetic amplifiers with more than a small fan-out. It's also really hard to distribute a clock signal-- magnetic pulses fall off at a 1/r^3 rate, and generating a fast magnetic pulse gets blocked by the inductance of the coil.
Now there *are* cigarette-pack to Taj Mahal sized magnetic voltage regulators in use. Your PC power supply may be using one to regulate the 3.3 volt output. But getting them down to IC-size is going to be really hard to impossible.
(1) Jobs where if you goof up, some money goes down the drain, or you're embarrassed or, somebody gets hurt or dies. You know, like being a doctor or lawyer or engineer.
(2) Jobs where it doesnt matter one whit if you're wrong. Jobs like theoretical physicist in a field where there isnt the slightest possibility of carrying out an experiment. Such as dabbling in the theory of gravity.
"very portable X-Ray device"
Um, no. This would make a more portable neutron imaging device. Problem is, neutrons actually split atoms, leaving behind radioactive debris. People are concerned enough about the effects of X-Rays-- imagine trying to convince them to use this "better" device, which has the slight side-effect of leaving you radioactive, all the way through your body.
"cancer treatment"
This is already done, reliably and cheaply, by the insertion of thin radioactive needles into the cancer site. It's very unlikely this neutron gadget could be cheaper. Also very unlikely it could be made safe. I know if I had some terminal cancer, there's a short list of people I'd like to expose to this neutron beam.
Reminds me of many years ago, a certain big computer company (big then), had a pretty good operating system named KRONOS. After a few years the marketing folks decided that wasnt a snazzy enough name. So they changed the name to "NOS" standing for "Network Operating System". Two, er, three main points:
(1) There was darn-little "networky" about this OS. You could dial in to it on 300 baud modems, that's about the networkyness of it. No connections to other computers, or any other public network. Oh, they had an expensive "network front end" box, but it could only support two users at 4800 baud, using their own proprietary protocol, or some days X.21
(2) They announced "NOS" a bit before the manuals were ready. So the first edition of all the NOS manuals were just the old KRONOS 2.1 manuals, with a hand-written slash across the letters "KRO" and another slash over the "2." part, leaving "NOS 1". This went on for over 1200 pages.
(3) They also named one of their barely networking API's "NAM" for Network Access Method. This was at a time when "Nam" in the popular conciousness was assiciated with dying in a rice paddy.
What can you say about folks like that?
Obviously you haven't visited Borland's site in the last decade. The worst navigation setup I've ever seen. Tiny tiny print. Inscrutable menus. Links that haven't gone where the claim, for the last 8 years or so. Patches in some bizarre format that requires some no-name unpacker. Patches arranged in no particular order, with no info about which patches are prerequistes for which others, or fix what. I finally gave up trying to patch their products.
OMG! I just went there to refresh my memory and THEY CHANGED THE FRONT PAGE for the first time in this century. Now a lot more marketing-speak up front. The same bad old menus deeper down. Sigh. They used to be such a *good* company.
Okay, so that may have been an old exaggeration. Bu tin the same fine cecil article, even better and better documented tidbits:
All that having been said, a couple points need to be made. First, Egyptian mummies really were--and are--available by the truckload. Originally reserved for the upper classes, mummification eventually became popular with the proles; by modern times, mummies numbered in the millions. A single burial ground discovered not long ago is thought to contain 10,000. Second, mummies really were used for bizarre purposes. During medieval times they were ground into powder and used as medicine. Later this powder was used as a paint pigment called "mummy brown," a practice that persisted into the early 20th century. (Thanks to Carter Lupton of the Milwaukee Public Museum for this information.) So maybe Twain's comment about a profane engineer should be attributed to a profane painter: "D--n these plebeians--pass out a King. I want to finish this job with one coat."
So I click on the story link, and in the sidebar I get ads like: Negative magnetic energy cures cancer, magnetic unipoles, alien autopsies, levitation techniques, etc, etc, etyechhetera.
If this story is as reputable as the sidebars, it's more than totally bogus.
This modern attitude about mummies is really different. Back a few centuries ago, Egypt was apparently just swarming with mummies all over the place. So many that for a while they were being used as steam locomotive fuel.
I imagine they got pretty blase about tossing mummies into the firebox.:
Aw shucks, this load is mostly skinny servants, we'll be lucky to get one MPM (mile per mummy) from these.
The concept of "average" can be very useful. For instance, you can say the average temperature in HAwaii is 68 degrees F. Or the average tinfoil hat liner size is 6 3/4.
The concept works just swell for data that doesnt vary much, like the two numbers above, and forms a bell-shaped curve.
The concept doesnt work at all,k and in fact is highly misleading, when the data tends to be at one extreme or the other. Such as, oh, number of spyware apps on a compuiter.
IMH experience, computers either have 300+ items of spyware (if they've never been scanned), or they have ZERO (if they have a spyware scan program or three, or have no outside Web access).
So saying the average number is XXXX is a misleading statistic. More than likely, a certain percentage have ZERO, the rest have many hundreds.
From personal and painful experience, one certain shop did a wide-ranging survey and then standardized on using "PowerBuilder" for everything.
Guess they looked for the language with the most checkmarks. In case you don't know, "PowerBuilder" started off as a mainframe language, got grafted to a PC, then had Web client/server glop grafted onto that. Sure, it merits a lot of checkmarks, and now it does most everything, slowly and poorly and with plenty of mainframe-like throwbacks to work around.
>Yeah um im pretty sure thats just you exhaling warm breath/nose air. Nice try though.
This isnt a "try".
Try using a match instead. And hold your breath. You'll sense the heat and if you think about it for a second, you can trace the sensing area to be around your lips. Weird but true.
6th sense: Your "stuffy room" sensor for excess CO2.
7th sense: Infrared sensors around your lips: Close your eyes. Put your hand three inches from your face. Feel the heat around your lips?
8th sense: Your ears can correlate pressure changes to detect that you're between walls.
There's no shortage of chemicals that kill the AIDS virus. Problem is, they also kill good cells.
So just the fact that they've found something that kills AIDS is not particularly interesting.
What's required is to also do tests on cells, then animals, then humans. If they don't immediately keel over, then we can get a tad excited. Until then, it's about as promising a treatment as red fuming nitric acid (a real good AIDS zapper).
>Sadly, the programming language cannot be changed. Did you not read this part?
Yeahbut the reasons he gave were not convincing. Freepascal code can be linked with most anything that doesnt have some really bizarre interface. As an example, I've linked it to al lkinds of hellish Windows C DLLs and system APIs. No sweat.
IMHO you'd be better off writing in a safer, yet still compiled language. A language with fully controllable array-bound checking, data range checking, and overflow checking. A good choice would be Pascal, using "freepascal", which runs on Unix and Windows just fine, and compiles to good code, either 32 or 64 bit.
And the code is linkable with C code and libraries if you must.
I've ported several programs from C and C++ to freepascal. In every case the compiler found a handful of previously undetected range and overflow errors.
Tooth decay has gone waay down since the introduction of Flouride toothpaste and fluoride washes.
That's why dentists have had to expand into the profitable areas of tooth straightening, whitening and laminating.
Now this new thingy may be of benefit, but it might be more economical and more just to put the money into public education about dental health and some into giving the poor more dental checkups.
(Window washer outside the X-Prize conference room window):
Voice 1: Gentlemen, we're in deep doo-doo. We made the first X-Prize waay too easy.
We thought we'd get many years of howls, watching various crazy inventors blow themselves up trying to claim the prize. Instead we've gotten NO laughs and we've actually had to pay out $$$$$$ !!!!
Voice 2: Solution: Simple! Let's advertise some NEW prizes, for things that are basically impossible: either violate basic laws of Physics, or too vague to quantify.
Then we can really howl, and never have to pay out another dime!
You don't like the results. Doesnt matter why, you just dont.
Since you paid for the research, and paid him, do you have the right to bury the results? Or the right to disseminate the information in whatever way YOU decide suits you?
Never mind what is "right", or "better for Gaia". The question is: if you pay for something, do you have the right to control its distribution?
Put that way, I'm siding with the Boss on this one. Not hat I like the answer necessarily.
Yes, they did. But that's only because before that there was near to absolutely NO information about neutrino bursts, and this rare occurrence is just what they needed. Any addition of information to nearly nothing is a big additon.
In this case there's no convenient source of neutrino burts. Just a huge constant flood. It's much harder to draw conclusions when you can't turn off the source!
Slashdot Mirror
Very nice. Now please explain how to make a: R-S flip flop AND gate OR gate ... all with a fanout of 4 or more. ... and how you connect these devices. ... and how you interface them to the real world. ... and get them to work with the required 99.9999999999% reliability ... and do it quicker or cheaper than using silicon.
-----
Once upon a time there was talk of superconducting twistors, and 400,000 MHz tunnel-diode computers, and a dozen other wizz-bang technologies. Most of them were pure rubbish-- for example, most of the devices had no clearly differentiated inputs and outputs, no fan-out or amplification ability, little or no noise margin, impossible clocking schemes, low reliability, poor or expensive or slow interfaces between stages or to the real world, and more foibles beyond recalling.
Magnetic circuits have been studied for at least 80 years. The basic problem is one of size and speed. A dipole magnet (onr with N and S poles) has a certain minimum size, otherwise it depolarizes itself. That sets a minimum size for any magnetic device. Also it's hard to make magnetic amplifiers with more than a small fan-out. It's also really hard to distribute a clock signal-- magnetic pulses fall off at a 1/r^3 rate, and generating a fast magnetic pulse gets blocked by the inductance of the coil.
Now there *are* cigarette-pack to Taj Mahal sized magnetic voltage regulators in use. Your PC power supply may be using one to regulate the 3.3 volt output. But getting them down to IC-size is going to be really hard to impossible.
BTW I suspect "using winelib" is a far cry from running under the full Wine emulator.
(1) Jobs where if you goof up, some money goes down the drain, or you're embarrassed or, somebody gets hurt or dies. You know, like being a doctor or lawyer or engineer.
(2) Jobs where it doesnt matter one whit if you're wrong. Jobs like theoretical physicist in a field where there isnt the slightest possibility of carrying out an experiment. Such as dabbling in the theory of gravity.
Like an idiot, I'm in category #1. What a dope.
"very portable X-Ray device" Um, no. This would make a more portable neutron imaging device. Problem is, neutrons actually split atoms, leaving behind radioactive debris. People are concerned enough about the effects of X-Rays-- imagine trying to convince them to use this "better" device, which has the slight side-effect of leaving you radioactive, all the way through your body. "cancer treatment" This is already done, reliably and cheaply, by the insertion of thin radioactive needles into the cancer site. It's very unlikely this neutron gadget could be cheaper. Also very unlikely it could be made safe. I know if I had some terminal cancer, there's a short list of people I'd like to expose to this neutron beam.
Reminds me of many years ago, a certain big computer company (big then), had a pretty good operating system named KRONOS. After a few years the marketing folks decided that wasnt a snazzy enough name. So they changed the name to "NOS" standing for "Network Operating System". Two, er, three main points: (1) There was darn-little "networky" about this OS. You could dial in to it on 300 baud modems, that's about the networkyness of it. No connections to other computers, or any other public network. Oh, they had an expensive "network front end" box, but it could only support two users at 4800 baud, using their own proprietary protocol, or some days X.21 (2) They announced "NOS" a bit before the manuals were ready. So the first edition of all the NOS manuals were just the old KRONOS 2.1 manuals, with a hand-written slash across the letters "KRO" and another slash over the "2." part, leaving "NOS 1". This went on for over 1200 pages. (3) They also named one of their barely networking API's "NAM" for Network Access Method. This was at a time when "Nam" in the popular conciousness was assiciated with dying in a rice paddy. What can you say about folks like that?
This "change" is more likely a marketing thing. If the marketing folks don't change everything every few years, they start to look idle.
OMG! I just went there to refresh my memory and THEY CHANGED THE FRONT PAGE for the first time in this century. Now a lot more marketing-speak up front. The same bad old menus deeper down. Sigh. They used to be such a *good* company.
Okay, so that may have been an old exaggeration. Bu tin the same fine cecil article, even better and better documented tidbits: All that having been said, a couple points need to be made. First, Egyptian mummies really were--and are--available by the truckload. Originally reserved for the upper classes, mummification eventually became popular with the proles; by modern times, mummies numbered in the millions. A single burial ground discovered not long ago is thought to contain 10,000. Second, mummies really were used for bizarre purposes. During medieval times they were ground into powder and used as medicine. Later this powder was used as a paint pigment called "mummy brown," a practice that persisted into the early 20th century. (Thanks to Carter Lupton of the Milwaukee Public Museum for this information.) So maybe Twain's comment about a profane engineer should be attributed to a profane painter: "D--n these plebeians--pass out a King. I want to finish this job with one coat."
So I click on the story link, and in the sidebar I get ads like: Negative magnetic energy cures cancer, magnetic unipoles, alien autopsies, levitation techniques, etc, etc, etyechhetera. If this story is as reputable as the sidebars, it's more than totally bogus.
I imagine they got pretty blase about tossing mummies into the firebox.:
Aw shucks, this load is mostly skinny servants, we'll be lucky to get one MPM (mile per mummy) from these.
The concept works just swell for data that doesnt vary much, like the two numbers above, and forms a bell-shaped curve.
The concept doesnt work at all,k and in fact is highly misleading, when the data tends to be at one extreme or the other. Such as, oh, number of spyware apps on a compuiter.
IMH experience, computers either have 300+ items of spyware (if they've never been scanned), or they have ZERO (if they have a spyware scan program or three, or have no outside Web access).
So saying the average number is XXXX is a misleading statistic. More than likely, a certain percentage have ZERO, the rest have many hundreds.
In My Humble Experience.
Guess they looked for the language with the most checkmarks. In case you don't know, "PowerBuilder" started off as a mainframe language, got grafted to a PC, then had Web client/server glop grafted onto that. Sure, it merits a lot of checkmarks, and now it does most everything, slowly and poorly and with plenty of mainframe-like throwbacks to work around.
>Yeah um im pretty sure thats just you exhaling warm breath/nose air. Nice try though. This isnt a "try". Try using a match instead. And hold your breath. You'll sense the heat and if you think about it for a second, you can trace the sensing area to be around your lips. Weird but true.
6th sense: Your "stuffy room" sensor for excess CO2. 7th sense: Infrared sensors around your lips: Close your eyes. Put your hand three inches from your face. Feel the heat around your lips? 8th sense: Your ears can correlate pressure changes to detect that you're between walls.
So just the fact that they've found something that kills AIDS is not particularly interesting.
What's required is to also do tests on cells, then animals, then humans. If they don't immediately keel over, then we can get a tad excited. Until then, it's about as promising a treatment as red fuming nitric acid (a real good AIDS zapper).
No problem, they just made the shovels REALLY HEAVY, so they only had to make a few of them.
Software metrics are very slippery things.
Yeahbut the reasons he gave were not convincing. Freepascal code can be linked with most anything that doesnt have some really bizarre interface. As an example, I've linked it to al lkinds of hellish Windows C DLLs and system APIs. No sweat.
And the code is linkable with C code and libraries if you must.
I've ported several programs from C and C++ to freepascal. In every case the compiler found a handful of previously undetected range and overflow errors.
Oh, and stay away from the C-like "extensions"!
Bill is quoted as saying that APL would come out in 1979.
This might set a record for longest delayed software.
Tooth decay has gone waay down since the introduction of Flouride toothpaste and fluoride washes. That's why dentists have had to expand into the profitable areas of tooth straightening, whitening and laminating. Now this new thingy may be of benefit, but it might be more economical and more just to put the money into public education about dental health and some into giving the poor more dental checkups.
Voice 2: Solution: Simple! Let's advertise some NEW prizes, for things that are basically impossible: either violate basic laws of Physics, or too vague to quantify. Then we can really howl, and never have to pay out another dime!
Chorus: Yes! Yes! Yes!
Never mind what is "right", or "better for Gaia". The question is: if you pay for something, do you have the right to control its distribution?
Put that way, I'm siding with the Boss on this one. Not hat I like the answer necessarily.
In this case there's no convenient source of neutrino burts. Just a huge constant flood. It's much harder to draw conclusions when you can't turn off the source!