williamDafoe

This just shows what a huge joke the Turing Award process is! He should have gotten this award by 2000 or never at all! But the committee was too busy giving out awards for writing sexy sounding papers about stoplight verification and zero knowledge proofs to honor someone who disrupteded the whole field!

Xerox PARC stole everything they could from PLATO after their 1972 tour of PLATO and being PhDs never gave credit where credit was due! Picture language, app generator, multilingual fonts, a system so simple even a kid could learn to program it (I did at age 14, self taught), bitmap graphics, etc. When I went to work at Xerox Office Systems Division - the development arm of PARC - I would say that after 13 years of trying - with computers 10x faster - they were PARTIALLY caught up! Highly inferior communications tools, and no support for inter-terminal games . .

Brand Fortner's Airfight - it inspired Sublogic Inc. who wrote Microsoft flight simulator 2023.

In the seventies "Computer lib / dream machines" by Ted Nelson covered all the hottest computer systems in North America and included among them small talk and Plato and the logo Lab at MIT and graphics at Utah and a few others.

Xerox PARC researchers visited PLATO in 1972 and when they got back to Palo Alto they implemented just about everything they saw! App generator for pictures (SD Mode), paint (charset editor), bitmap /memory graphics display (plasma panel), multiple fonts and character sets, etc!

We have a bubble in SWE hiring in the USA, it peaked in July 2021 at 220% of normal hiring!

https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2023/03/was-there-a-tech-hir...

It makes no sense to keep all the unemployed H1Bs since they usually are laid off as a last resort due to the impact it will have on their lives. Since they often get favoritism in layoffs, why favor them even more?

I know many American Citizens for example a Chinese-born and naturalized guy who said in 2009 he was laid off first in a team of 18 Chinese H1Bs because the rest of the team "would have to go home!" He was not just good he was an authority on OSPF - I hired him for my startup in 2003. In 2011 he went back to Cisco in the same division at an architect (even higher) rank ...

This article about Intel candy canes and unicorns and rainbows looks like simply a large hit of cocaine to keep their bloodied investors hopes' up!

To quote Newt from alien 2, "Ripley, it won't make a difference!" because SRAM is NOT scaling down!

https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/7343/iedm-2022-did-we-just-wi...

I arrived at Google search in 2013 and soon they were complaining about how much Intel was "Slacking" and how badly they needed an alternate supplier for data center chips.

I followed Chromebook and laptop iGPU 3D performance very carefully from 2013-2019. Did you know Intel made ZERO iGPU performance improvements in this time period? The 2013 IRIS Pro 5200 and Haswell (4000 series) were a major highpoint for FIVE years. The 5000 Through 8000 Intel core cpus were highly stagnant and forgettable! Mostly they were slacking off with new designs like the Ynnn "thermal throttlemaker" Such chips ran fast for 3 secs then quit - completely! From 2013-2019 their marketing pinheads sure had a field day making up new names for the same old shit iGPUs year after year after year!

I have seen NO impact from Pat Gelsinger so far! Almost-competitive CPU's using 250% of the power of Ryzen 7000? Are you kidding us, Pat?

Kryzanich laid off a huge number of CPU architects in 2014 so they could have a much bigger and of course - more important marketing department! Who needs these useless digital designers when all they can do is reduce the mips per watt? I mean who cares about that? And while we're at it why not staff the boardroom of the world's greatest physics company with community college marketing people? Because, why not?

I don't see Apple returning to use the Intel i9-thighburner CPUs anytime soon!

I thought 8008 was a 28-pin DIP and 8080 a 40-pin DIP ...

I agree completely! See my answer up above. Only 7 or 8 bits makes sense for a microprocessor, not useful if you cannot store 0-100 in a byte! With ASCII(1963) becoming ubiquitous, the 8008 had to be 8-bits! Otherwise it would have been the 7007 lol ...

I worked on the UIUC PLATO system in the 1970s : CDC-6600, 7600 cpus with 60-bit words. Back then everything used magnetic core memory and that memory was unbelievably expensive! Sewn together by women in southeast Asia, maybe $1 per word!

Having 6-bit bytes on a CDC was a terrific PITA! The byte size was a tradeoffs between saving MONEY (RAM) and the hassle of shift codes (070) used to get uppercase letters and rare symbols! Once semiconductor memory began to be available (2M words of 'ECS' - "extended core storage" - actually semiconductor memory - was added to our 1M byte memory in ~1978) computer architects could afford to burn the extra 2 bits in every word to make programming easier...

At about the same time microprocessors like the 8008 were starting to take off (1975). If the basic instruction could not support a 0-100 value it would be virtually useless! There was only 1 microprocessor that DID NOT use the 8-bit byte and that was the 12-bit intersil 6100 which copied the pdp-8 instruction set!

Also the invention of double precision floating point made 32-bit floating point okay. From the 40s till the 70s the most critical decision in computer architecture was the size of the floating point word: 36, 48, 52, 60 bits ... But 32 is clearly inadequate. But the idea that you could have a second larger floating point fpu that handled 32 AND 64-bit words made 32-bit floating point acceptable..

Also in the early 1970s text processing took off, partly from the invention of ASCII (1963), partly from 8-bit microprocessors, partly from a little known OS whose fundamental idea was that characters should be the only unit of I/O (Unix -father of Linux).

So why do we have 8-bit bytes? Thank you, Gordon Moore!

Had a PC custom rebuilt in 1998 for $1200 just to run a voodoo2 and play Half-Life 1 and Tomb Raider 1. Also Unreal tournament GOTY Edition. Happy days. Only needed a Celeron 400 mhz chip. But 3dfx did not get the best engineers from SGI and they were doomed to fail eventually. The best engineers founded NVidia ... Got a Riva TNT2 in 2000 and forgot about 3dfx ...

Sounds like steam deck is the worst of all worlds. I am told people buy consoles because they just wanna play and not worry about tweaks or game config. Game will still work 5y later on a console, but not on a PC. Looks like steam deck implements NONE OF THET!

I think this story would make a great basis for a STAR TREK episode. Something about a civilian starship whose secret purpose was to be converted into a troop carrier in times of high emergency, perhaps named, 'The Federation'.

Check out LILYGO TTGO. ESP32 (orig, 2016, LX6) WITH 240x135 IPS display, 16MB flash, < $10 !!! Lots of "volos projects" videos on YouTube with videogame downloads for that platform (breakout, centipede etc.)

Score: 2358. In general I was within 5 years except for the first one where I was off by 12.

"We now pause all CPU activity as we refresh the DRAM for all the registers.. " - sheesh!

That's not going to happen because the process tech for dram is tuned for capacitance and the process tech for SRAM and CPUs is tuned for speed...

How about, "this CPU is using 3D nandram and is rated only for one quadrillion instructions or one year whichever one comes first!" Imagine a compiler that has to do wear-leveling on the registers!

He did not pay $44B for Twitter. He paid $31B and dumped $13B of interest rate payments on top of the heads of twitter engineers. The interest on those loans amount to $2.74m PER DAY out of the supposed $4m PER DAY that twitter is losing

Imagine you are working at a company and 30% of its capital evaporates overnight. If you are holding onto that capital, or warrants (such as stock options) for that capital, now would be an awesome time to quit, because you were just given a 30% pay cut in your capital compensation (for mid-level engineers this translates to 15% gross pay cut on entire salary package). And your pay cut happened because the founder is super-greedy, stupid, and caustic.

The original PDP-11/70 was 0.7 vax mips. So it was 70% as fast as a Vax 11/780. I believe (from memory) the Vax 11/780 could do ~1757 dhrystone 2.1 mips so a PDP-11/70 would be about 1230 dhrystone mips. https://wiki.cdot.senecacollege.ca/wiki/Dhrystone_howto

Looks like some of the employees in the printer cartridge division have moved into management roles in the enterprise SSD division ....

I tried this once, and failed. By the time a major seam of a well-made backpack fails, they are all, about to fail. My backpack was 5Y old and was in the "wearout" phase of life, where everything fails at once. Replacing an important zipper completely (seams had failed, not zipper itself) only gave my pack another 6 months of life. Yes, a shoe repair shop is the right place to go, but $90/yr is an expensive backpack indeed!

I currently have a Yellow Columbia half-track and the quality is unreal, I've used it every day for 6Y, with laptop+clothes+gear, no damage yet!

Why doesn't Google have a visualization system for temperature of the racks, with monitoring and alarms? It seems the problem went undetected because SREs did a poor job to begin with .... No DC has more than a few tens of thousands of machines which is easily handle by 3 borgmon or 100 monarch machines LOL ...

Workers fluent in English and who didn't gamble or drink were much lower risk (in terms of theft and punctuality) and higher value to ANY employer. Ford wanted to verify that his higher wages were being spent wisely on a higher quality workforce . .

Not completely true. It can apparently spread to a lower respiratory problem in ANYONE (where it is VERY deadly, 50% mortality rate) it just tends not to do it very often in persons 10-30 yrs old.

I have worked on a system that spins up 50k threads on a CPU with 72 threads and it works just fine, it's the google web page fetching system. If that didn't work then Google wouldn't fetch web pages. At all.

That a horrific mistake that MIT nitwhits used to teach students at the end of 6.001 - how to write opaque, horrible lisp programs in languages such as "C".

It may be spelled Alphabet but it's pronounced Awfulbet.

He will be remembered as one of the greatest banksters of all time. He converted Thomas Edison's company of genius inventors into a factory of paper-pushing lending trolls.

Pilot would crash with probability 0.9^p, where p is the number of things you did at once, p=4 was a limit I never surpassed. With UNIX p=30 was commonplace.

Once upon a time I was wandering through PARC and I wandered into a closet where a giant Ceder machine (Dorado) was running. It has an un flipping believable 512x512 COLOR display! It was an entire eight foot tall rack and its fans for the ECL logic roared like a hurricane. This deluxe personal computer from Xerox ran as fast as a Decsystem 20 massive time sharing machine that normally hosted 20-40 users.

Unfortunately everybody at PARC believed Butler lampson when he said you could write a personal computer program and if it crashed once per day that's okay you just pressed a button and rebooted it! Everybody took that to heart and wrote buggy unstable software and all the D-machines (wildflower architecture) including Dorado Dolphin Dandelion and Dandetiger crashed once per hour! it seems Butler lampson didn't consider joint probability distributions...

Xerox made okay programming environments but Pilot and Smalltalk and Interlisp were horrible operating systems compared to UNIX v7.

It's really hard to decline so consistently with the same rotten management at the helm year after year. Did they hire management from Qualcomm to achieve this?