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> one thing desperately missing is a free GPU.

I wonder if the Larrabee approach would work here: many simple RISC-V cores running in parallel, with wide vector units and a little specialized hardware (eg texture sampling).

Zaakon Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco

It's a country where only top level officials have access to the internet, most places don't have working electricity, and there's virtually no interaction with the rest of the world.

Zaakon Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco

North Korea doesn't exactly have a large pool of technically skilled people available.

Zaakon A look at my BBS Software from '93

Is that a privacy issue or some other factor?

Zaakon Developer publishes patch to enable Windows 7 and 8.1 updates on new hardware

Do you have a link to info about that kernel/userspace incompatibility? I thought Linus' mantra was "we don't break userspace".

Zaakon A look at my BBS Software from '93

The restriction is because commercial activities are prohibited over amateur radio, and encrypted traffic would prevent that rule from being enforced.

I believe there's an exception for controlling remote devices when you need to make sure some rando doesn't brick your pricy gear.

Zaakon Building a Completely Reversible Computer

Yes, there are large difficulties to creating reversible computers in practice. However, it's the theoretical benefits (such as no minimum power dissipation) that motivate people to work on them.

Zaakon Building a Completely Reversible Computer

Reversible computers are turing-complete. The only requirement is you either have to store all intermediate results (no erasing), or you have to periodically "uncompute" them. I don't remember what the minimum bound on the overhead is, but it's manageable.

Zaakon Building a Completely Reversible Computer

2. Reversible operations have no minimum amount of energy that must be dissipated as heat, unlike irreversible operations which must dissipate every time bits are erased. So each computer individually could be consuming no energy, so both together would consume the sum (zero) of the two.

Zaakon Building a Completely Reversible Computer

The benefit of a reversible computer is that there is no minimum amount of energy it must dissipate as heat in order to perform its computations.

Every time a bit of information is erased, a certain amount of energy must be dissipated as heat. A reversible computer doesn't (have to) erase information.

Reversible computing is energy-aware computing taken to its logical extreme.

Zaakon Ask HN: Which is the most powerful satellite camera directed towards earth?

https://what-if.xkcd.com/32/

Zaakon Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

If you had a "sufficiently smart compiler" you wouldn't need register renaming and instruction reordering, but such a compiler has consistently failed to appear. That's a big part of the whole Itanium fiasco.

If you want your CPU to run fast, you have to pipeline instructions and you need caches that can run at full CPU speed. It's easy to design a CPU without all the complexity, but it will be slow. No one knows how to do both simple and fast. It's probably impossible.

Zaakon Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

Back in the 80s, instruction decode was a large part of the logic in a CPU (thus the motivation for RISC). Currently, it's a tiny fraction. It's been many years since a simpler instruction set was useful for reducing the complexity of the CPU.

Zaakon How to write a simple operating system

How is bare-metal coding on something like the beagleboard black? Does it have the same issues, or is it a more open platform?

Zaakon The 640 K Barrier

I would attribute that more to Intel's revenue than anything special about the company though.

Zaakon An off-grid social network

Where does that number come from?

One data center * 24 backup generators * 3 MW each = 72 MW per data center. Four of those = 288 MW > 1/4GW.

Google has more than three data centers.

Zaakon SpaceX makes aerospace history with successful landing of a used rocket

Space Australia is best Australia

Zaakon The Elephant in the Smartwatch Room

That really stinks. I don't like Apple's idea of what a smart watch should be. :(

Zaakon Chemists Discover Why the Nose Is Hypersensitive to Sulfur Odors

I like the expression "evolution isn't toward, it's away".

Zaakon Disseminating the New Kilogram: An International ‘Dry Run’

The prototype kilogram was made of platinum-iridium because they are very nonreactive and fairly hard, so once the prototype was made it would be unlikely to be accidentally modified.

If you tried to use water ice as a standard, you'd find that its mass was changing all the time as the ice sublimated away, or humidity condensed onto its surface. It would be impossible to make precise measurements.

Zaakon Zeolite retains heat indefinitely, absorbs 4x more heat than water

I wonder if you could incorporate a wire mesh into the zeolite to improve the heat distribution.

Zaakon HN create account removed from login page

I'm glad I saw this, because I didn't have an email or password set up.

In the future, when a major feature like this is removed, it would be nice to see a banner across the top for people who will be affected.

Zaakon Tim Berners-Lee: If I can't give power to web apps, they can't compete

Good point, but you could have as many swear words as you want in your page content.

Zaakon Tim Berners-Lee: If I can't give power to web apps, they can't compete

As far as I know, there was never any registrar who insisted on approving your site's content before they would give you a DNS entry. Even if there was, there were many other places you could register that didn't.

Zaakon The DOD had two "better-than-Hubble" space telescopes just sitting around.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mentor_(satellite)

100+ meter diameter radio telescopes pointed at the earth. That's the same size as the largest steerable ground-based radio telescopes. Makes you wonder what they can hear.

Zaakon Every Black Hole Contains a New Universe

"What Continues... and What Fails..." by David Brin, perhaps?

Zaakon Backdoor found in a China-made US military chip

Does the NSA have its own fabs to keep back doors out or to keep secrets in?

Zaakon The only way to get hold of a human at Google

I would like to see Google create a marketplace for support. They allow people to buy some access to their internal systems, who then sell support service. There would need to be careful vetting and monitoring of the people who buy the access, but if that could be made to work, end users get access to support, and Google wouldn't have to staff it.

Of course, they would have to provide support to the support providers, but that would be a much smaller, more knowledgeable population.

Zaakon SpaceX headed to the ISS tomorrow

This is a question I have about SpaceX. How much of their low development and launch costs depend on having large numbers of people willing to sacrifice compensation to work for such a transformative company?

I don't know anything solid about this, but I would very much like to know.