91–100 of 356 posts
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Celeron 300A, the relative poorer man's Pentium
Weren't they also supported by the Abit BP6 motherboard, letting you use two of them as poorer man's Xeons?
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The duron had a pencil trick which unlocked it somehow. I don't remember the details.
The pencil trick: "Unlocking the Duron and Athlon Using [a] Pencil Hold your CPU in your left hand and look very closely at the CPU, so as to clearly see the L1 bridges. Use a business card to separate the bridges so that you do not connect the L1 bridges to each other. Work your way across the bridges from left to right (using a business card as a separation tool) and connect the bridges by rubbing the pencil back a…
Of course there was the AMD multi-core CPUs that had some of the cores disabled via software and sold at cheaper prices. Of course there were software hacks available to re-enable those cores.
Not to sound like a broken record (I and others have said this or similar on these kinds of threads) but... I, personally, have become convinced that looking for signals this way is actually pointless. The argument is basically this: 1. Within 1000 years (and maybe a lot less) we will have the engineering capability to build space habitats, powered by solar power. This last part is important because this thought expe…
I personally suspect the engineering challenges might pale next to the challenges of political organization.
Quite simply, the continued human expertise and organization necessary to manage and sustain such a system is far, far beyond anything we have today.
We can't even manage to globally reduce CO2, and the recent government responses to coronavirus have led a lot to be desired, to say the least.
Just because you put people up in space habitats doesn't mean they become any less power-hungry, any more cooperative, or any more peaceful.
You say we'll have the engineering in 1,000 years, and I could buy that. But read Aristotle's Politics from 2,400 years ago, which is concerned mainly with political stability and revolution, and he might as well be describing people today.
I'd like to see us manage "spaceship earth" a helluva lot better before I have even the remotest faith we could manage space habitats politically. Heck, we couldn't even manage Biosphere 2, remember?
Even at the time, the prize seemed a little unearned, since all you had to do was click through an installer. But it was still an incentive. Probably the greatest lottery prize that's ever been offered.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The duron had a pencil trick which unlocked it somehow. I don't remember the details.
The pencil trick: "Unlocking the Duron and Athlon Using [a] Pencil Hold your CPU in your left hand and look very closely at the CPU, so as to clearly see the L1 bridges. Use a business card to separate the bridges so that you do not connect the L1 bridges to each other. Work your way across the bridges from left to right (using a business card as a separation tool) and connect the bridges by rubbing the pencil back a…
Not to sound like a broken record (I and others have said this or similar on these kinds of threads) but... I, personally, have become convinced that looking for signals this way is actually pointless. The argument is basically this: 1. Within 1000 years (and maybe a lot less) we will have the engineering capability to build space habitats, powered by solar power. This last part is important because this thought expe…
I have always thought that this would be a much more efficient way of living off Earth. Sci-fi wants us to believe that we can teraform planets. All they ever talk about are the atmosphere generators. However, they never address the reason the planet didn't have an atmosphere to begin with. To me, the research into generating artificial magnetic shields is the place to be. Generating those fields the size of a planet will be orders of magnitude more difficult than for smaller sized ships.
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Isn't Folding@Home trying to run an asymmetrical computation, though? The broad strokes as I understand them are that you have a sequence of amines, you arrange them into a three-dimensional protein (the hard part) by whatever method, and then you evaluate the energy bound within your structure (the easier part?). Lower energy is better. The obvious problem is that there's no judgment of "correct" or "incorrect". Ana…
Protein folding might work as a proof-of-work algorithm. One big problem is of course that it's useful work that could conceivably be monetized. Proof-of-work works because a theoretical attacker would have to invest huge resources into an attack. For bitcoin it's trivial to say "for attack scenario X an attack has to spend at least Y", and as long as the expected reward is lower than Y the network is safe (that's fo…
Protein folding, where the value is speculative, cumulative, and difficult to cash out, is an excellent candidate. Especially since the ability to realize the value of a given fold is diminished by openly publishing it, which is a requirement of proof of work; the folding computation thus becomes a positive externality of the cryptocurrency, since everyone can use that knowledge as an economic stimulus.
I'd like to see someone try it.
There was a promise at the time (still active, I'm sure) that if your computer discovered a signal from ET, you would be listed as co-discoverer of alien life. I still remember watching the screensaver crunch through work units with the tiny but real hope that the data on my computer had that signal. Even at the time, the prize seemed a little unearned, since all you had to do was click through an installer. But it w…
Not to sound like a broken record (I and others have said this or similar on these kinds of threads) but... I, personally, have become convinced that looking for signals this way is actually pointless. The argument is basically this: 1. Within 1000 years (and maybe a lot less) we will have the engineering capability to build space habitats, powered by solar power. This last part is important because this thought expe…
Because I'm an eternal optimist I tend to think of these filters as very positive, things like finding alternative sources of energy to stars, or reclusing themselves in some VR utopia.