The tribe of x86 architectures didn't originate as an Intel design. The
8008 ISA originated at Datapoint, and grew through the 8080 and 8085.
Intel recognised their limitations, and decided to make something better,
but the iAPX 432 took time to mature and the 8086 was designed as an
extended 8080 to keep the company going until the 432 succeeded.

The 432 was a total failure, but the x86 line kept the company going and growing. Then they came up with the i960, which had some success as a
high0end embedded processor, but was cancelled when Intel acquired rights
to DEC's StrongARM cores. They produced XScale as an improved StrongARM,
then sold the line.

The i860 was a pretty comprehensive failure, but the x86 line made them
into a behemoth. Then they decided to phase that out and do Itanium. It
was less of a failure than 432 or i860, but they had to adopt AMD's
x86-64 ISA to avoid shrinking themselves into a subsidiary of HP.

Not many computer companies survive three failed architectures: has that
record been beaten?

John

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You forgot the dismal financial drain IA64 placed on Intel.

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jgd@cix.co.uk (John Dallman) writes:

The tribe of x86 architectures didn't originate as an Intel design. The
8008 ISA originated at Datapoint, and grew through the 8080 and 8085.
Intel recognised their limitations, and decided to make something better,
but the iAPX 432 took time to mature and the 8086 was designed as an
extended 8080 to keep the company going until the 432 succeeded.

The 432 was a total failure, but the x86 line kept the company going and >growing. Then they came up with the i960, which had some success as a >high0end embedded processor, but was cancelled when Intel acquired rights
to DEC's StrongARM cores.

The i960 was the outcome of salvaging another project, BiiN, which had
similar goals (from reading the Wikipedia article) as the 432 and had
many 432 veterans. But apparently they learned from their mistakes,
and the base architecture is a RISC, and was competetive for a while.

Reading the 386 oral history, Intel's idea at the start of the 386
project was that BiiN was going to be the big thing, and 386 just a
stopgap for those who had already invested in the 80286 (similar to
432 and 8086). At that point the IBM PC existed, but there was no big
PC market yet. Some time during the project, the PC market grew far
beyond expectations, and the 386 became the main project of Intel.
And they then rode with 386 followons until they produced the same
situation again with IA-64 against Pentium Pro and its followons.

Anyway, the kind of market that BiiN was developed for did not appear
for BiiN. Tandem and Stratus owned this market; my impression was
that BiiN was intended to be an alternative to those instead of
marketing the BiiN hardware to them. Tandem went with MIPS
processors, and Stratus with the 68000, then, strangely, i860, then HP
PA, and finally Intel Xeon.

So when BiiN stopped as a project and company in 1989, the base
architecture, the i960 was salvaged and marketed as an embedded
processor (Intel management at the time did not want to market it for
Unix systems, probably because they were already marketing the 486 for
PCs and the i860 as super-chip).

According to Wikipedia, the first i960 taped out in the same month as
the 386, but that apparently was only for internal BiiN usage at the
time, and it only made commercial appearance in 1989 as embedded
processor with all the more advanced features disabled.

One interesting i960 is the i960CA (announced in July 1989), which is
the first single-chip superscalar: dual issue, one integer, one
memory, and one branch instruction can be performed at the same time,
at 33MHz (the R3000 came out in 1989 with single-issue and similar
clock).

Intel reassigned the development teams in 1990, with the now-former
i960 team working on the Pentium Pro and a smaller team working on the
i960, so the i960 fell back relative to the competition. Given the
decision to market it only for embedded systems, that's probably understandable. The decision to replace it with StrongARM is in the
same vein.

If they had designed and marketed the i960 for the Unix market and if
they had done that from the start, they probably would have been among
the first commercial RISCs, maybe the first. My guess is that an MMU
for Unix takes less development effort and less silicon than all the
features they designed in for BiiN, and they would have taped out and
released earlier. It's not clear how that would have turned out in
the long run: Would IA-32/AMD64 still have taken over the Unix market?
Would they have started IA-64?

The i860 was a pretty comprehensive failure, but the x86 line made them
into a behemoth.

According to <https://web.archive.org/web/20220705003416/https://spectrum.ieee.org/intel-i860>,
this was started around the same time as the 486. Unlike the i960,
this was marketed as high-performance general-purpose CPU, probably to
address the widespread belief at the time that RISCs are the future
and IA-32 was doomed. But apparently the i860 was designed for very
good performance from perfectly scheduled code, but was not so great
at usual compiler output (a mistake repeated in IA-64; so they did not
learn from their mistakes in this case). I remember the explicitly
pipelined FPU, but don't remember anything where the i860 would
perform worse than other RISCs of its time. Anyway, the i860 did not
see mainstream general-purpose use.

Then they decided to phase that out and do Itanium.

There was never a successor to the i860, so IA-64 (which was not
started at Intel until 1994) is unlikely to have anything to do with
it. Given that they wanted to market the i860 as high-end CPU, I
expect that there was a followup project worked on when the i860 was
released, but either that project failed (which would not surprise me,
as i860 features look like being bad ideas like branch-delay slots,
only more of them), or Intel decided that the market for the i860 was
too small, and they canceled the project (or both).

It
was less of a failure than 432 or i860, but they had to adopt AMD's
x86-64 ISA to avoid shrinking themselves into a subsidiary of HP.

It seems to me that IA-64 was a bigger failure: More money invested,
and more money lost (probably even relative to the size of the company
at the time).

- anton
--
'Anyone trying for "industrial quality" ISA should avoid undefined behavior.'
Mitch Alsup, <c17fcd89-f024-40e7-a594-88a85ac10d20o@googlegroups.com>

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Brett <ggtgp@yahoo.com> writes:

Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> wrote:

Brett <ggtgp@yahoo.com> schrieb:

Quantum mechanics is high IQ bullshit to make professors look important.

You need quantum mechanics to describe solid-state electronics
(or all atoms, for that matter).

Type “quantum mechanics criticism” and variants into Google and have at it.

Why should one do that? Google indexes all kinds of cranks.

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But we know the earth is flat.

Don't be ridiculous. Just look at the shape of any old shoe's sole.
It shows that the earth is evidently not flat, it's curved "upward".
The only sensible explanation is that the earth is a sphere and we live *inside* of it.


Stefan

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David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 20/09/2024 07:46, Thomas Koenig wrote:

Brett <ggtgp@yahoo.com> schrieb:

Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> wrote:

Brett <ggtgp@yahoo.com> schrieb:

Quantum mechanics is high IQ bullshit to make professors look important. >>>>

You need quantum mechanics to describe solid-state electronics
(or all atoms, for that matter).

Type “quantum mechanics criticism” and variants into Google and have at it.

I've read enough crackpot theories already, thank you, I don't need
any more.

Quantum mechanics describes the rules that give structure to atoms and molecules. On a larger scale, those structures build up to explain
spherical planets. But we know the earth is flat. Therefore, quantum mechanics is bullshit. What more evidence could you want?

Yup, you just explained the Einstein argument, just like I said.

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The basic issue is:
* CPU+motherboard RAM -- usually upgradeable
* Addon coprocessor RAM -- usually not upgradeable

Maybe the RAM of the "addon coprocessor" is not upgradeable, but the
addon board itself can be replaced with another one (one with more RAM).

I love being able to upgrade/replace different components separately.
But AFAICT, this is a minority concern. Most people treat computer
systems as "atomic black boxes".


Stefan

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On 20/09/2024 17:21, Brett wrote:

David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 20/09/2024 07:46, Thomas Koenig wrote:

Brett <ggtgp@yahoo.com> schrieb:

Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> wrote:

Brett <ggtgp@yahoo.com> schrieb:

Quantum mechanics is high IQ bullshit to make professors look important. >>>>>

You need quantum mechanics to describe solid-state electronics
(or all atoms, for that matter).

Type “quantum mechanics criticism” and variants into Google and have at it.

I've read enough crackpot theories already, thank you, I don't need
any more.

Quantum mechanics describes the rules that give structure to atoms and
molecules. On a larger scale, those structures build up to explain
spherical planets. But we know the earth is flat. Therefore, quantum
mechanics is bullshit. What more evidence could you want?

Yup, you just explained the Einstein argument, just like I said.

I think you are somewhat confused.

I can't claim to understand every argument Einstein made, but I am quite certain he was not a flat-earther. Nor did he think quantum mechanics
was "bullshit" - his Nobel prize on the photoelectric effect was a stepping-stone in the development of the theory of quantum mechanics.

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In article <vcgpqt$gndp$1@dont-email.me>, david.brown@hesbynett.no (David Brown) wrote:

Even a complete amateur can notice time mismatches of 10 ms in a
musical context, so for a professional this does not surprise me.
I don't know of any human endeavour that requires lower latency or
more precise timing than music.

A friend used to work on set-top boxes, with fairly slow hardware. They
had demonstrations of two different ways of handling inability to keep up
with the data stream:

- Keeping the picture on schedule, and dropping a few milliseconds
of sound.
- Dropping a frame of the picture, and keeping the sound on-track.

Potential customers always thought they wanted the first approach, until
they watched the demos. Human vision fakes a lot of what we "see" at the
best of times, bit hearing is more sensitive to glitches.

John

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In article <vcisaf$ulcv$1@dont-email.me>, ldo@nz.invalid (Lawrence
D'Oliveiro) wrote:

On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 00:58:44 +0000, MitchAlsup1 wrote:

Hint:: They can context switch every instruction.

How does that help?

All the threads are executing exactly the same instructions,on the same
code path. If any of them start taking different branches, performance
goes way down, because then they can't amortise the time for the
instruction fetch across all the threads.

The context switches don't involve any memory accesses. The GPU processor
has a set of registers for each thread, and a context switch is just a
change of which registers it's looking at. It's the same trick as the old
TI 990 architecture. I was quite amused when I figured that out in the
middle of the first presentation from Nvidia I ever sat through.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-990>

John

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On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 20:06:00 +0000, John Dallman wrote:

In article <vcgpqt$gndp$1@dont-email.me>, david.brown@hesbynett.no
(David
Brown) wrote:

Even a complete amateur can notice time mismatches of 10 ms in a
musical context, so for a professional this does not surprise me.
I don't know of any human endeavour that requires lower latency or
more precise timing than music.

A friend used to work on set-top boxes, with fairly slow hardware. They
had demonstrations of two different ways of handling inability to keep
up
with the data stream:

- Keeping the picture on schedule, and dropping a few milliseconds
of sound.
- Dropping a frame of the picture, and keeping the sound on-track.

Potential customers always thought they wanted the first approach, until
they watched the demos. Human vision fakes a lot of what we "see" at the
best of times, bit hearing is more sensitive to glitches.

Having the ears being able to hear millisecond differences in sound
arrival times is key to our ability to hunt and evade predator's.

While our eyes have a time constant closer to 0.1 seconds.

That is, I blame natural selection on the above.

John

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On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 11:21:52 -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote:

The basic issue is:
* CPU+motherboard RAM -- usually upgradeable
* Addon coprocessor RAM -- usually not upgradeable

Maybe the RAM of the "addon coprocessor" is not upgradeable, but the
addon board itself can be replaced with another one (one with more RAM).

Yes, but that’s a lot more expensive.

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On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 09:55:53 +0200, Terje Mathisen wrote:

Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

The way I understood to do flicker-free drawing was with just two
buffers -- “double buffering”. And rather than swap the buffer
contents, you just swapped the pointers to them.

If you cannot swap the buffers with pointer updates ...

Surely all the good hardware is/was designed that way, with special
registers pointing to “current buffer” and “back buffer”, with the display
coming from “current buffer” while writes typically go to “back buffer”.
Why would you do it otherwise?

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On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 20:17:20 +0000, MitchAlsup1 wrote:

Having the ears being able to hear millisecond differences in sound
arrival times is key to our ability to hunt and evade predator's.

We tell the direction of sound at frequencies above about 700Hz, I think
it was, by the change in timbre as the sound has to negotiate the shape of
our ears and heads. This works better for complex sounds than for pure
tones.

This also works less well for lower frequencies, since the wavelength
becomes long enough to diffract around our heads much more easily. We may
be able to tell direction at these frequencies based on phase differences,
or we may not. Certainly home-cinema designers don’t seem to consider this important, which is why we only have one subwoofer in a typical surround
setup, instead of a stereo pair.

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On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 01:08:23 +0300, Niklas Holsti wrote:

If you can back up that claim (that noise in quantum computing comes
from "many worlds") ...

No, I’m saying the opposite: the noise comes from the fact that “many worlds” is nonsense.

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On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 21:40:33 +0000, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 01:08:23 +0300, Niklas Holsti wrote:

If you can back up that claim (that noise in quantum computing comes
from "many worlds") ...

No, I’m saying the opposite: the noise comes from the fact that “many worlds” is nonsense.

There are many kinds of noise and the presence of noise is part of
our world with very little needing quantum mechanics to be visible.

The Casimir effect measures quantum noise in a <hard> vacuum
caused by virtual particles.

Then there is a noise of amplification, a noise of sampling, a noise
related to the movement of atoms (heat), Brownian motion, and on and on.

All of these noise sources will remain even if the many-world
theory collapses and dies (low probability).

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On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 21:54:36 +0000, Chris M. Thomasson wrote:

On 9/20/2024 2:32 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 11:21:52 -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote:

The basic issue is:
* CPU+motherboard RAM -- usually upgradeable
* Addon coprocessor RAM -- usually not upgradeable

Maybe the RAM of the "addon coprocessor" is not upgradeable, but the
addon board itself can be replaced with another one (one with more RAM).

Yes, but that’s a lot more expensive.

I had this crazy idea of putting cpus right on the ram. So, if you add
more memory to your system you automatically get more cpu's... Think
NUMA for a moment... ;^)

Can software use the extra CPUs ?

Also note: DRAMs are made on P-Channel process (leakage) with only a few
layer of metal while CPUs are based on a N-Channel process (speed) with
many layers of metal.

Bus interconnects are not setup to take a CPU cache miss from one
DRAM to a different DRAM on behalf of its contained CPU(s).
{Chicken and egg problem}

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Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 01:08:23 +0300, Niklas Holsti wrote:

If you can back up that claim (that noise in quantum computing comes
from "many worlds") ...

No, I’m saying the opposite: the noise comes from the fact that “many worlds” is nonsense.

I've never been a fan of many worlds but this kind of blew my mind when
it revealed how many worlds is like pilot wave theory without the
corpuscles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUHW1zlstVk

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MitchAlsup1 <mitchalsup@aol.com> wrote:

On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 21:54:36 +0000, Chris M. Thomasson wrote:

On 9/20/2024 2:32 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 11:21:52 -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote:

The basic issue is:
* CPU+motherboard RAM -- usually upgradeable
* Addon coprocessor RAM -- usually not upgradeable

Maybe the RAM of the "addon coprocessor" is not upgradeable, but the
addon board itself can be replaced with another one (one with more RAM). >>>

Yes, but that’s a lot more expensive.

I had this crazy idea of putting cpus right on the ram. So, if you add
more memory to your system you automatically get more cpu's... Think
NUMA for a moment... ;^)

Can software use the extra CPUs ?

Also note: DRAMs are made on P-Channel process (leakage) with only a few layer of metal while CPUs are based on a N-Channel process (speed) with
many layers of metal.

Didn’t you work on the MC68000 which had one layer of metal?

This could be fine if you are going for the AI market of slow AI cpu with
huge memory and bandwidth.

The AI market is bigger than the general server market as seen in NVidea’s sales.

Bus interconnects are not setup to take a CPU cache miss from one
DRAM to a different DRAM on behalf of its contained CPU(s).
{Chicken and egg problem}

Such a dram would be on the PCIE busses, and the main CPU’s would barely touch that ram, and the AI only searches locally.

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On Sat, 21 Sep 2024 1:12:38 +0000, Brett wrote:

MitchAlsup1 <mitchalsup@aol.com> wrote:

On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 21:54:36 +0000, Chris M. Thomasson wrote:

On 9/20/2024 2:32 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 11:21:52 -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote:

The basic issue is:
* CPU+motherboard RAM -- usually upgradeable
* Addon coprocessor RAM -- usually not upgradeable

Maybe the RAM of the "addon coprocessor" is not upgradeable, but the >>>>> addon board itself can be replaced with another one (one with more RAM). >>>>

Yes, but that’s a lot more expensive.

I had this crazy idea of putting cpus right on the ram. So, if you add
more memory to your system you automatically get more cpu's... Think
NUMA for a moment... ;^)

Can software use the extra CPUs ?

Also note: DRAMs are made on P-Channel process (leakage) with only a few
layer of metal while CPUs are based on a N-Channel process (speed) with
many layers of metal.

Didn’t you work on the MC68000 which had one layer of metal?

Yes, but it was the 68020 and had polysilicide which we used as
a second layer of metal.

Mc88100 had 2 layers of metal and silicide.

The number of metal layers went about::
1978: 1
1980: 1+silicide
1982: 2+silicide
1988: 3+silicide
1990: 4+silicide
1995: 6
..

This could be fine if you are going for the AI market of slow AI cpu
with huge memory and bandwidth.

The AI market is bigger than the general server market as seen in
NVidea’s sales.

Bus interconnects are not setup to take a CPU cache miss from one
DRAM to a different DRAM on behalf of its contained CPU(s).
{Chicken and egg problem}

Thus a problem with the CPU on DRAM approach.

Such a dram would be on the PCIE busses, and the main CPU’s would barely touch that ram, and the AI only searches locally.

Better make it PCIe+CXL so the downstream CPU is cache coherent.

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On 2024-09-21 0:40, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 01:08:23 +0300, Niklas Holsti wrote:

If you can back up that claim (that noise in quantum computing comes
from "many worlds") ...

No, I’m saying the opposite: the noise comes from the fact that “many worlds” is nonsense.

Strange view of the world, that. Noise in quantum computing is a fact,
but your opinion about "many worlds" is just that: an opinion, not a fact.

A view of the world in which opinions cause physical facts... no point
in continuing the discussion. Bye.

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On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 22:07:42 +0000, MitchAlsup1 wrote:

All of these noise sources will remain even if the many-world theory collapses and dies (low probability).

Many-worlds is not a “theory” in any scientific sense: it is merely an (attempt at) “interpretation” of quantum theory. It tries to make things clearer, but in the process just replaces one set of mysterious terms with another.

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On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 15:33:23 -0700, Chris M. Thomasson wrote:

Is there any activity going on at absolute zero?

No, because the Third Law of Thermodynamics says you can’t get there
anyway.

Fun fact: there are actual physical systems with negative absolute
temperatures (I studied a bit of this in undergrad physics), but whether starting from positive or negative, you can’t get to absolute zero from either side.

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On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 22:11:05 +0000, MitchAlsup1 wrote:

Can software use the extra CPUs ?

There were these attempts at massively parallel processing called
“systolic arrays” ... were they ever useful?

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On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 14:54:36 -0700, Chris M. Thomasson wrote:

I had this crazy idea of putting cpus right on the ram.

Not so crazy. I can remember things like this being discussed back in the 1980s. I think the Transputer had a similar idea.

What seems to have happened since is that individual CPUs are being
matched up with more and more RAM.

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On Thu, 19 Sep 2024 19:29:31 -0000 (UTC), Brett wrote:

Quantum mechanics is high IQ bullshit to make professors look important.

Quantum mechanics is real. Quantum effects are real. Transistors only work because electrons can “tunnel” through a barrier with higher energy than they have, which should be classically impossible.

Matter only hangs together because electrons don’t actually orbit nuclei
like planets in a miniature solar system: if they did, they would emit radiation (“bremsstrahlung radiation”), thereby losing energy and spiralling into the nucleus until the atom collapses. And that would
happen to every atom in the Universe. Clearly that is not the case.

Even an old-style incandescent light bulb only works because of quantum effects: the shape of the radiation curve depends only on the temperature
of the radiating body, once it gets sufficiently hot, with little or no dependence on what material the body is made of. This applies to your
light bulb and also to our Sun and the other stars.

It is true that quantum theory sounds completely crazy when you try to
explain it. But it works, and gives the right answers, that have been
verified repeatedly in countless tests. And in science, that counts for
more than anything.

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On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 19:28:51 -0700, Chris M. Thomasson wrote:

Shit man, remember all of the slots in the old Apple IIgs's?

In those days, RAM was slow enough that you could put RAM expansion on bus cards.

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On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 00:15:19 -0000 (UTC), Brett wrote:

Type “quantum mechanics criticism” and variants into Google and have at it.

Do any of those “criticisms” offer a coherent alternative theory with some actual experimental evidence to show it works?

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

(crickets)

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Michael S <already5chosen@yahoo.com> wrote:

On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 23:55:50 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 20:21:53 -0000 (UTC), Brett wrote:

You hear physicists talk of microscopic black holes, but the force
that keeps atoms apart is so much more powerful than gravity that
such talk is just fools playing with math they don’t understand.

That would mean that neutron stars (all the atoms crushed so tightly
together that individual subatomic particles lose their identity)
couldn’t exist either. But they do.

Radio pulsars exist.
The theory is that they are neutron stars. But theory can be wrong.

Some of the pulsars are spinning at such a rate that they would fly apart,
so we know the theory is wrong.

“A pulsar (from pulsating radio source)[1][2] is a highly magnetized
rotating neutron star that emits beams of electromagnetic radiation out of
its magnetic poles.[3] This radiation can be observed only when a beam of emission is pointing toward Earth (similar to the way a lighthouse can be
seen only when the light is pointed in the direction of an observer), and
is responsible for the pulsed appearance of emission. “

This sounds like an electric motor, and if you think a galactic
civilization would not turn such into a gas station, I have news for you.
You can take advantage of the huge gravity to feed it oil barrel
projectiles full of liquid hydrogen to feed off of the explosions for more power generation and keep the generator alive. The resulting spectrum would
be artificial, but we lack the theory to understand that.

A Dyson sphere compared to a pulsar looks like a comparison of a desk fan
to a modern wind mill.

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On 2024-09-27 21:43, Brett wrote:

Michael S <already5chosen@yahoo.com> wrote:

On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 23:55:50 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 20:21:53 -0000 (UTC), Brett wrote:

You hear physicists talk of microscopic black holes, but the force
that keeps atoms apart is so much more powerful than gravity that
such talk is just fools playing with math they don’t understand.

That would mean that neutron stars (all the atoms crushed so tightly
together that individual subatomic particles lose their identity)
couldn’t exist either. But they do.

Radio pulsars exist.
The theory is that they are neutron stars. But theory can be wrong.

Some of the pulsars are spinning at such a rate that they would fly apart,
so we know the theory is wrong.

Which pulsars are spinning too fast? Reference please!

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On Sun, 22 Sep 2024 16:42:58 -0000 (UTC), Brett wrote:

Now go find the other missing billion rings Einstein predicted.

Where did he predict that?

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Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Sun, 22 Sep 2024 16:42:58 -0000 (UTC), Brett wrote:

Now go find the other missing billion rings Einstein predicted.

Where did he predict that?

All galaxies that have another galaxy behind at a reasonable range should
show Einstein rings.

Billions.

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Niklas Holsti <niklas.holsti@tidorum.invalid> wrote:

On 2024-09-27 21:43, Brett wrote:

Michael S <already5chosen@yahoo.com> wrote:

On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 23:55:50 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 20:21:53 -0000 (UTC), Brett wrote:

You hear physicists talk of microscopic black holes, but the force
that keeps atoms apart is so much more powerful than gravity that
such talk is just fools playing with math they don’t understand.

That would mean that neutron stars (all the atoms crushed so tightly
together that individual subatomic particles lose their identity)
couldn’t exist either. But they do.

Radio pulsars exist.
The theory is that they are neutron stars. But theory can be wrong.

Some of the pulsars are spinning at such a rate that they would fly apart, >> so we know the theory is wrong.

Which pulsars are spinning too fast? Reference please!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSR_J1748%E2%88%922446ad#:~:text=PSR%20J1748%E2%88%922446ad%20is%20the,was%20discovered%20by%20Jason%20W.%20T.


Spinning at 42,960 revolutions per minute.

Took seconds for google to answer.

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On 2024-09-28 5:47, Brett wrote:

Niklas Holsti <niklas.holsti@tidorum.invalid> wrote:

On 2024-09-27 21:43, Brett wrote:

Michael S <already5chosen@yahoo.com> wrote:

On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 23:55:50 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 20:21:53 -0000 (UTC), Brett wrote:

You hear physicists talk of microscopic black holes, but the force >>>>>> that keeps atoms apart is so much more powerful than gravity that
such talk is just fools playing with math they don’t understand.

That would mean that neutron stars (all the atoms crushed so tightly >>>>> together that individual subatomic particles lose their identity)
couldn’t exist either. But they do.

Radio pulsars exist.
The theory is that they are neutron stars. But theory can be wrong.

Some of the pulsars are spinning at such a rate that they would fly apart, >>> so we know the theory is wrong.

Which pulsars are spinning too fast? Reference please!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSR_J1748%E2%88%922446ad#:~:text=PSR%20J1748%E2%88%922446ad%20is%20the,was%20discovered%20by%20Jason%20W.%20T.

Spinning at 42,960 revolutions per minute.

The article says it is "the fastest-spinning pulsar known", but does not
say that it is spinning faster than neutron-star theories allow, so it
does not support your claim.

Took seconds for google to answer.

It is the wrong answer, at least for your claim.

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Niklas Holsti <niklas.holsti@tidorum.invalid> schrieb:

(Yes, I have seen a Youtube video from a Flat Earth fanatic making that argument :-( )

The Flat Earth Society has members all around the globe.

(Yes, this was on their web site once :-)

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On 2024-09-28 5:44, Brett wrote:

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Sun, 22 Sep 2024 16:42:58 -0000 (UTC), Brett wrote:

Now go find the other missing billion rings Einstein predicted.

Where did he predict that?

All galaxies that have another galaxy behind at a reasonable range should show Einstein rings.

Billions.

Whether such a ring is detected by our telescopes depends on the
closeness of the alignment of the galaxies with the line of sight from
us and on their brightness, size, and structure. It also depends on the properties of the telescopes that have looked at these galaxies and on
how astronomers have analysed the images from those telescopes.

Can you show a calculation of how many rings, of some defined quality (completeness, shape, signal-to-noise level) should have been seen and
detected in all astronomical observations to date?

Your arguments are like those of a Flat Earth fanatic who observes that
the horizon looks like a straight line, even when compared to a
meter-long ruler, and who then thinks this proves that the Earth is
flat, but who does not calculate whether that "looks straight" test can
detect the small curvature of the horizon as seen from eye height above
a globe with a radius of over 6300 kilometers.

(Yes, I have seen a Youtube video from a Flat Earth fanatic making that argument :-( )

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David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 03/10/2024 21:10, Brett wrote:

David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 03/10/2024 05:58, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Thu, 3 Oct 2024 01:45:36 -0000 (UTC), Brett wrote:

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Tue, 1 Oct 2024 23:33:57 -0000 (UTC), Brett wrote:

Sky Scholar just posted his latest mockery of modern physics:

Is this a particularly believable and/or coherent mockery?

He invented the MRI machine and the Liquid Metallic model of the sun ... >>>>

And Linus Pauling got the Nobel Prize and went nuts over Vitamin C.

In science, we don’t go by “this guy has a legendary reputation and/or >>>> sounds like a credible witness, let’s believe him”, we go by evidence. >>>

Indeed.

Also note that the two guys who won the Nobel Prize for the development
of MRI - the /real/ inventors of the MRI machine - are both long dead.

But this particular crank is mad enough and influential enough to have a >>> page on Rational Wiki, which is never a good sign. (It seems he did
work on improving MRI technology before he went bananas.)

<https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Pierre-Marie_Robitaille>

One day I will be on rational wiki. ;)

Watch his videos and try to debunk what he says.

Good luck with that. ;)

There are more productive uses of my time which won't rot my brain as quickly, such as watching the grass grow.

A bit challenge with the kind of shite that people like this produce is
that it is often unfalsifiable. They invoke magic, much like religions
do, and then any kind of disproof or debunking is washed away by magic.
When you make up some nonsense that has no basis in reality or no
evidence, you can just keep adding more nonsense no matter what anyone
else says.

So when nutjobs like that guy tell you the sun is powered by pixies
riding tricycles really fast, he can easily invent more rubbish to
explain away any evidence.

There's a term for this - what these cranks churn out is "not even
wrong". (You can look that up on Rational Wiki too.)

And while the claims of this kind of conspiracy theory cannot be
falsified, there is also no evidence for them. Claims made without
evidence can be dismissed without evidence - there is no need to debunk
them. The correct reaction is to laugh if they are funny, then move on
and forget them.

We are all human, and sometimes we get fooled by an idea that sounds
right. But you should be embarrassed at believing such a wide range of idiocy and then promoting it.

A gas cannot emit the spectrum we see from the sun, liquid metallic
hydrogen can.

Gases do not show the pond ripples from impacts that we see from the sun surface.

And a long list of other basic facts Pierre-Marie_Robitaille goes over in
his Sky Scholar videos.

Stellar science is a bad joke, such basic mistakes should have been
corrected 100 years ago.

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On 04/10/2024 19:59, Brett wrote:

David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 03/10/2024 21:10, Brett wrote:

David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 03/10/2024 05:58, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Thu, 3 Oct 2024 01:45:36 -0000 (UTC), Brett wrote:

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Tue, 1 Oct 2024 23:33:57 -0000 (UTC), Brett wrote:

Sky Scholar just posted his latest mockery of modern physics:

Is this a particularly believable and/or coherent mockery?

He invented the MRI machine and the Liquid Metallic model of the sun ... >>>>>

And Linus Pauling got the Nobel Prize and went nuts over Vitamin C.

In science, we don’t go by “this guy has a legendary reputation and/or
sounds like a credible witness, let’s believe him”, we go by evidence.

Indeed.

Also note that the two guys who won the Nobel Prize for the development >>>> of MRI - the /real/ inventors of the MRI machine - are both long dead. >>>>
But this particular crank is mad enough and influential enough to have a >>>> page on Rational Wiki, which is never a good sign. (It seems he did
work on improving MRI technology before he went bananas.)

<https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Pierre-Marie_Robitaille>

One day I will be on rational wiki. ;)

Watch his videos and try to debunk what he says.

Good luck with that. ;)

There are more productive uses of my time which won't rot my brain as
quickly, such as watching the grass grow.

A bit challenge with the kind of shite that people like this produce is
that it is often unfalsifiable. They invoke magic, much like religions
do, and then any kind of disproof or debunking is washed away by magic.
When you make up some nonsense that has no basis in reality or no
evidence, you can just keep adding more nonsense no matter what anyone
else says.

So when nutjobs like that guy tell you the sun is powered by pixies
riding tricycles really fast, he can easily invent more rubbish to
explain away any evidence.

There's a term for this - what these cranks churn out is "not even
wrong". (You can look that up on Rational Wiki too.)

And while the claims of this kind of conspiracy theory cannot be
falsified, there is also no evidence for them. Claims made without
evidence can be dismissed without evidence - there is no need to debunk
them. The correct reaction is to laugh if they are funny, then move on
and forget them.

We are all human, and sometimes we get fooled by an idea that sounds
right. But you should be embarrassed at believing such a wide range of
idiocy and then promoting it.

A gas cannot emit the spectrum we see from the sun, liquid metallic
hydrogen can.

You do realise that the sun is primarily plasma, rather than gas? And
that scientists - /real/ scientists - can heat up gases until they are
plasma and look at the spectrum, in actual experiments in labs? Has
your hero tested a ball of liquid metallic hydrogen in his lab?

Gases do not show the pond ripples from impacts that we see from the sun surface.

And a long list of other basic facts Pierre-Marie_Robitaille goes over in
his Sky Scholar videos.

Stellar science is a bad joke, such basic mistakes should have been
corrected 100 years ago.

You think one crackpot with no relevant education and no resources can
figure all this out in a couple of years, where tens of thousands of
scientists have failed over a hundred years? Do you /really/ think that
is more likely than supposing that he doesn't understand what he is
talking about?

In real science, lab experiments, observation of reality (such as the
sun in this case), simulations, models, and hypotheses all go hand in
hand in collaboration between many scientists and experts in different
fields in order to push scientific knowledge further.

"Maverick" genius scientists who figure out the "real" answer on their
own don't exist outside the entertainment industry.

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On Mon, 07 Oct 2024 12:59:11 -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote:

"Proof by computer" can mean many different things. The 1976 proof by Appel&Haken failed to convince a number of mathematicians both because
of the use of a computer and because of the "inelegant", "brute force" approach.

It does rather change the notion of mathematical proof to something more
akin to a laboratory experiment, except the laboratory only exists inside
a computer, don’t you think?

In other words, mathematics looks like it is turning into an actual
science.

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Michael S <already5chosen@yahoo.com> writes:

Even if 99% is correct, there were still 6-7 figures worth of
dual-processor x86 systems sold each year and starting from 1997 at
least tens of thousands of quads.
Absence of ordering definitions should have been a problem for a lot of >people. But somehow, it was not.

I remember Andy Glew posting here about the strong ordering that Intel
had at the time, and that it leads to superior performance compared to
weak ordering.

mitchalsup@aol.com (MitchAlsup1) wrote:

Also note: this was just after the execution pipeline went
Great Big Our of Order, and thus made the lack of order
problems much more visible to applications. {Pentium Pro}

Nonsense. Stores are published in architectural order, and loads have
to be architecturally ordered wrt local stores already in a
single-core system. And once you have that, why should the ordering
wrt. remote stores be any worse than on an in-order machine?

Note that the weak ordering advocacy (such as [adve&gharachorloo95)
arose in companies with (at the time) only in-order CPUs.

Actually OoO technology offers a way to make the ordering strong
without having to pay for barriers and somesuch; we may not yet have
enough buffers for implementing sequential consistency efficiently,
though, but maybe if we ask for sequential consistency, hardware
designers will find a way to provide enough buffers for that.

@TechReport{adve&gharachorloo95,
author = {Sarita V. Adve and Kourosh Gharachorloo},
title = {Shared Memory Consistency Models: A Tutorial},
institution = {Digital Western Research Lab},
year = {1995},
type = {WRL Research Report},
number = {95/7},
annote = {Gives an overview of architectural features of
shared-memory computers such as independent memory
banks and per-CPU caches, and how they make the (for
programmers) most natural consistency model hard to
implement, giving examples of programs that can fail
with weaker consistency models. It then discusses
several categories of weaker consistency models and
actual consistency models in these categories, and
which ``safety net'' (e.g., memory barrier
instructions) programmers need to use to work around
the deficiencies of these models. While the authors
recognize that programmers find it difficult to use
these safety nets correctly and efficiently, it
still advocates weaker consistency models, claiming
that sequential consistency is too inefficient, by
outlining an inefficient implementation (which is of
course no proof that no efficient implementation
exists). Still the paper is a good introduction to
the issues involved.}
}

- anton
--
'Anyone trying for "industrial quality" ISA should avoid undefined behavior.'
Mitch Alsup, <c17fcd89-f024-40e7-a594-88a85ac10d20o@googlegroups.com>

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