adrian_b

14 ms·

181.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
No other sampling rate was used, but before sampling the audio signal had to pass through anti-aliasing low-pass filters. In the beginning, it was extremely expensive to make analog low-pass filters that were steep enough to block frequenci
182.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
According to your link, DDR5 today has the same price in real US $ as DDR3 was in 2014, during a brief spike towards high prices. Since that peak in 2014 until today, the prices were lower than now. The peak in 2017 was more than 10% lower
183.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
Firefox and Vivaldi browsers on Gentoo, NVIDIA GPU, both work normally with that link. So it must be something very specific to what software you have installed, unless it is an AMD GPU problem, but neither of the 2 links (x and xcancel) ha
184.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
No. AMD K5 did not have successors. AMD bought the company NexGen and K6, K6-2 and K6-III were based on the NexGen design. I had been the happy owner of a K6-2, which did not have the integrated L2 cache of K6-III, but I had a friend who ha
185.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
The cheaper alternative to having 2 spacecrafts connected by a cable is to replace one spacecraft with a counterweight. However, having 2 identical spacecrafts would be more reliable, as there would be more chances for at least one of them
186.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
The experiments recently done on mice on the ISS have concluded that, at least for them, around 1/3 of Earth gravity is the minimum required to preserve health. So providing only 1/5 g for artificial gravity is likely to be insuff
187.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
That voting has obviously been done by people who have never read the original texts of the people for whom they have voted. Einstein is indeed one of the most important physicists of the 20th century, but it is really meaningless to try to
188.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
Have you even read what I have written? What I have written is not a dismissal of Einstein. On the contrary, I have said that Einstein is the source of a few extremely important discoveries, but those are not the theories cited by most peop
189.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
The contemporaneous IBM POWER ISA was implemented in superscalar CPU cores with out-of-order execution and with SMT and it would provide superior performance in any equivalent fabrication technology. The Itanium ISA actually had a few nice
190.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
In the history of the SPEC benchmarks, the compiler benchmarks, like gcc, have been the best predictor of CPU performance for the applications that cannot benefit from array operations, so they cannot use the vector or matrix instruction se
191.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
Those mentioned by you are very specific kinds of meat, and there were doubts about how healthy they are long before the last century. There is absolutely no evidence that any data about red meat or sausages also applies to other kinds of m
192.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
This is how they looked after removing the top of their package, not how they looked inside the computer. This is how the silicon die looked like, with the ten bonded gold wires that went to the pins of the package.
193.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
Pentium was the first CPU with a branch predictor that many people could afford to buy. Before dynamic branch prediction, where the prediction for every branch is updated after each branch execution, depending on its history, static branch
194.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
Branchless coding is superior to branched coding whenever the branches are more or less random, which happens frequently when checking some properties of input numbers, like their sign or whether they fall inside certain intervals, or when
195.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
RC4 was fast in software for computers with weak CPUs (like 80286 or even 8086, which were still in use during the nineties) and no hardware assistance for cryptography. DES had been designed for computers that had a special DES hardware ac
196.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
For any kind of symmetric encryption method, if you are in the context of a "known-plaintext attack", i.e. where besides the cipher that was used you know both the non-encrypted text and its corresponding encrypted text, if you kn
197.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
Which is why flash remains much more expensive than HDDs. Flash is also much faster than a bubble memory, because it provides random access to blocks, even if a block is read sequentially. Thus flash was positioned in a good spot in a hiera
198.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
I want to add an explanation of the word "trigger" because nowadays few people are aware of its correct meaning. The early authors made a clear distinction between "trigger" and "latch", but the reasons for thi
199.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
Yes. During the time of the Apollo project, from 1964 to 1969, the fastest computer of the world was CDC 6600, which was made with discrete transistors (and which greatly annoyed IBM, because a much smaller company had been able to make com
200.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
Yes, that's true. Despite the fact that I happen to eat mostly vegan food myself, I am extremely skeptical about the claims of most such studies that claim positive results for vegan diets, because, as you say, they lack adequate dieta
201.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
While I upvoted this, as being true for the general population, for me Linux has made it on the desktop (and laptop) much more than 2 decades ago, around 2003, when the remaining problems that had forced me to use dual-booting with Windows
202.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
Not at all. The size of an atom was computed for the first time 40 years earlier, in 1865, by Johann Josef Loschmidt, who was an Austrian scientist. Loschmidt had determined the value of what today is called "Avogadro's number&quo
203.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
Thanks for another interesting article. Because you have skipped quickly over the decade before WWII when there were great advances in designing digital circuits with vacuum tubes, mostly in the UK, which have lead directly to the electroni
204.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
Indeed. The bubble memory was doomed by the fact that it had to be made from material that was patterned, by using photolithography or similar means. Because of this, even if its structure was simpler than that of semiconductor memories, it
205.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
Nonvolatile memory has advantages, but also disadvantages. In a computer that would have only non-volatile memory it would be difficult to ensure that things that must be secret remain secret. Various events like power failures or software
206.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
"Glyph" comes indeed from sculpting, so it was originally applied only to inscriptions carved in some durable material, like stone, wood or metal. Nonetheless, nowadays it is a word commonly used when discussing typefaces (i.e. fo
207.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
Whatever is your writeWaitFree, nothing can stop another thread to do plain writes. In that case no other thread can make progress. I agree that this is a very unlikely case, but the case when a thread is halted inside the critical region c
208.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
Not true. If a writer writes continuously the shared data, it is impossible for the other thread to make the copy that must be edited. If the copy succeeds, then you are right that an updated version could be substituted to the original usi
209.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
The problem is that a reader should not do anything with the data that is read, which depends on its value, before validating the copy, by counter comparison. As another poster has said, the high-level languages leave undefined what happens
210.
by adrian_b 2mo ago
No, you missed my point. I agree that there is the risk for a writer to be halted in the middle of its critical section, which would stop all the other writers and readers. My point is that there exists no solution that is risk free, becaus

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