Posts by John Smith 19

Re: So Amdahl's law alive and well.

"The whole story behind the Transputer is quite interesting... as well as the reasons behind its eventual failure. El Reg has a bit of it here: "

That's actually just part of the story.

As May says in practically the first paragraph Americans are obsessed with bus transfers.

One of the key features of the Transputer architecture was the hardware channels ran independently of the core processor, so the core did not have to keep checking for I/O. It shoved stuff out the door through DMA and got on with the rest of the program (or programs on the hardware scheduler.

IMHO the architecture had 2 major flaws.

1) Word size always equal to address size. So you could never have an 8 bit (smallest unit of code) but 16 bit address option (personally I think they should have gone in with some rock bottom 16 bitters with a serial processing 1b internal CPU to conserve silicon. Very slow but good for cheap development systems or budget array processing.More to the point once people saw how you could develop on 1 processor in Occam and roll out to a massive array for full speed that opens the flood gates.

2) No MMU. You've got a high end (for the time) processor and no dynamic memory management? WTF

Keep in mind the Transputer was basically a stack machine with 16 local registers (which still sounds like a pretty good package to me). Designing an upgraded Transputer with 8/16 and/or proper MMU (given the 30+ years of desktop Unix out there) with minimal impact on the rest of the design sounds like a challenging but doable end of course University project to me.

Re: Rebekah Brooks innocent?

"Really? The boss of news international didn't know how the editor of one of her papers was getting their stories? Well... maybe she really is innocent... i can't believe i actually wrote that :P"

A poor choice of words.

I think the word the jury were looking for was compartmentalised

She knew about the "product," she was able to prove she never asked where it came from.

Re: Global Cooling

"During the days just after 9/11, it was supposedly observed that the lack of commercial air traffic led to surprisingly clear skies. "

What 9/11 did do (on 9/12) was ground all US flights, allowing researchers to find out exactly what the effect of a no contrail sky would be, something they had viewed as impossible to get approval for.

Re: Judging an Experiment as a Commercial Product is Rarely Helpful.

"And then there's the possibility that D-Wave really does have a dog that won't hunt. But this clearly is not the time for that judgement."

I recall a company that put out some of the first Josephson Junction superconductor components. Made in Nb and LHe cooled.

They were commercial.

Were they "Ready for prime time?"

Probably not.

But they cost their early adoptors a shedload of cash to find that out.

Re: Relying on cats to do things...

"It only took the CIA $25m to work that one out..."

I saw that movie.

It's called "The Spy with the Wet Nose" with Lionel Jeffries.

But while I was watching I though "You gotta be bats**t crazy to think anyone's going to do this IRL"

How little did I know.

Re: @Steven Jones

5 down votes?

Just to be clear I don't think batteries are the way to go.

My ideal solution would a fuel cell battery hybrid running on a sugar solution. Readily extractable directly from plants, carbon neutral, high energy density.

However whenever someone tells me "This tech's gotten as good as it gets, there's just no big improvements left to be made" my reaction is to go back to first principles.

A modern battery is maybe 1/1000 of 1% by volume made up of charge carriers.

That' means this tech is a long way from reaching it's limits.

@Peter 2

"Complete incompetent bastards. No decent backups, no disaster recovery plan, no business continuity plan, nothing nada.

inexcusable for an IT business."

They figured Amazon would handle everything.

They were wrong.

S**t happens. Guaranteed. It's not if you will attacked (as a successful business) it's when.

Re: For at least some taxi drivers.....

The answer is simple.

"String em up, that's the only language they understand. I had that Vince Cable in the back of my cab....." etc ad nauseum.

Mines the black leather bomber jacket style jacket with the copy of the Sun in the side pocket.

Oops.

"I upvoted John Smith on the basis that remaining "0.03% weakness" of the protocols has no technological basis, but sociological one. No matter how perfect your technology is, if someone with court order turns at your door, you have no choice but to cooperate. Of course ideally you should have no technological means for this, but in reality more than few protocols are built on trust (which can be subverted). "

Actually what I meant to write was the 0.003% of the UK population (1500 suspects out of a then UK population of 66 000 000 were viewed as potential Islamist terrorists)

Apologies for the missing decimal point.

Re: UK company bosses. "We don't just sell out to anyone"

"Cynical but probably true. However, there is an alternative view: that UK bosses know they'll never get appropriate support and protection from Whitehall and sell to overseas companies who can protect their assets (e.g. IP and patents)."

IIRC the UK has some of the weakest hostile takeover protection in Europe.

PS: "Christopher Clague" ... the offspring of Nick Clegg and William Hague?

That's just an image no one needs in their heads.