Recent content by DonPMitchell

The big issue at Microsoft with Windows XP was applications compatability. Up until Win2K, they were supporting two completely different operating systems, written by two teams: the NT kernel developed by Dave Cutler, and the "Win 9x" team. NT was the first major operating system developed...

Half life of tritium is 12 years, uranium 238 is over 4 billion years. But that means Tritium is enormously more radioactive. And because its an isotope of hydrogen, a gas, and it gets absorbed into plants and animals and the ground water. The best thing to do with tritium is pump it back...

Win2000 was the last of the pure Windows NT systems, with Windows 9x separately solving the Applications Compatability problem. From the perspective of inside Microsoft, that was the big issue of XP, merging the functionality of the two systems into one. XP is supposed to run all the crazy...

And by the way, fusion is pretty dirty. Deuterium + deuterium fusion can go one of two ways: Helium3 + a neutron, or Tritium + Protium. The intense neutron flux in a fusion reactor is a problem, it tends to make the whole device radioactive and causes weird materials failures (metals crumble...

Tesla proposed a wireless power scheme using a giant high-frequency transformer (a Tesla coil) tuned to resonate with the Earth. That is, tuned to create a standing-wave electrical oscillation on the Earth. Then similarly tuned coils could extract power. He claimed to have demonstrated this...

It is not possible to do this. A display of 1000 pixels across can only represent a signal with a maximum frequency of 500 cycles (0.5 cycles/pixel) across. When a model is rendered, it is equivalent to sampling it, and it may have features that go beyond 500 cycles. That high frequency...

Nikola Tesla claimed that he could transmit power wirelessly (in 1899), by building a giant coil that would resonate and create a standing-wave pattern on the Earth. He claimed to have succeeded, but offered no real proof and never was able to demonstrate the effect for anyone. He gathered a...

There was something called Project Stormfury that tried to modify hurricanes with cloud seeding in the core. And another project for military use, like turning hurricanes towards Cuba, with cloud seeding and oil slicks and stuff. I don't think it worked. From what I've found on the power...

Forth requires a very tiny interpreter. We used Forth on satellite control systems in the late 1970s, because an interpreter + forth code was denser than assembly language. Forth lives today mostly at "postscript", which is froth plus printer specific functions.

High frequency skin effect is why tesla coils don't really give deep shocks. But radio frequency power is very inefficient for lots of reasons, energy gets absorbed more in transformers, is lost by radiation and reactance in power lines, etc. The increase lethality of AC power was used in...

In the original FFT paper, they state that base 3 is more efficient than base 2. I've also heard the same said about the complexity of logic ciruits in general. Soviet scientists (Ukranian to be specific) actually built some base-3 computers, but they weren't really used much. I mentioned...

Also besides the pipeline length issue I mentioned above, scary things happen in circuits at high clock speeds. GPUs are slapped together fairly cheaply with ASIC technology and software generated logic. A CPU more customized and operates in a regime where wires act like transmissions lines...

Integrating GPU and CPU is an interesting question, basically an asymmetric dual core. I know that Intel and nVidia eye each other as rivals (a friend at nVidia jokingly calls Pentiums the "host co-processor"). There are probably good economic reasons to not bundle these two types of devices...

Maybe everyone but me knew this, but web pages selling processors didn't explain it. Here's what I found: BX80546KG3600EA - 3.6 GHz, Active Heatsink BX80546KG3600EP - 3.6 GHz, Passive Heatsink BX80546KG3600EU - 3.6 GHz, 1U RK80546KG1041M - 3.6 GHz, OEM So for a workstation, you want the EA...

Most of the tricks you see in modern CPUs go way back to Seymour Cray - pipelining and multiple functional units. The CDC machines did this stuff in the 1960s. The analogy to waiting in line for a cash register is not accurate. You are actually doing a little part of the cash transaction...