kens

15 ms·

331.
by kens 2y ago
Thanks! Not to complain, but you spelled my name wrong :-)
332.
by kens 2y ago
That's weird that I'm excluded. Thanks for watching out for me :-) Hypotheses: 1. it's an error. 2. I have powerful enemies. 3. Someone from the future is trying to stop me. 4. My blog triggered the FDIV bug and needed to be
333.
by kens 2y ago
Christina Engelbart is working to preserve the history at the Doug Engelbart Institute: https://www.dougengelbart.org/
334.
by kens 2y ago
As far as I can tell, TREE-META and META II were unrelated compiler compilers.
335.
by kens 2y ago
Output was displayed on 5" CRTs. High-resolution TV cameras (875-line) transmitted the CRT output to 17" monitors at each work station. By flipping a switch, the video could be inverted, so you could get either black lines on a li
336.
by kens 2y ago
Author here if there are any questions...
337.
by kens 2y ago
Yes, I find math problems that depend on base 10 to be unsatisfying because they rely on arbitrary cultural factors of how we represent numbers. "Real" mathematics should be universal, rather than just solving a puzzle. Of course,
338.
by kens 2y ago
Why would you confidently state something that is contradicted by the link you provide?
339.
by kens 2y ago
In original Morse code, S was "dot dot dot", E was "dot", and Z was "dot dot dot space dot". So if you were transcribing Morse code back then, it was ambiguous if you received a "Z" or "SE".
340.
by kens 2y ago
To clarify some of the confusion in this thread, a REAL ID driver's license is completely different from an enhanced driver's license. A REAL ID meets federal security standards and is available in all states. An enhanced driver&#
341.
by kens 2y ago
I found a video with an identical National Plant Services sewer inspection van, inspecting a large-diameter sewer line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVXceJ3Yxnw (The photo shows van TV-230 while the video shows van TV-21
342.
by kens 2y ago
Does anyone else still worry about cyanide when finding a grape with a puncture? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Chilean_grape_scare
343.
by kens 2y ago
The article has a pull quote: “Bulldozers were as important to the Allied victory as the jet engine, the radar or the atomic bomb.” That's a strange statement since the jet engine had approximately zero impact on the Allied victory; th
344.
by kens 2y ago
The title is "Bispecific antibodies targeting the N-terminal and receptor binding domains potently neutralize SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern". Note that although the antibodies were only helpful before infection, "its therape
345.
by kens 2y ago
Interestingly, Bob Colwell, one of the authors of that paper, ended up being hired by Intel and he designed the Pentium Pro. The other classic paper on the iAPX 432 is "A performance evaluation of the Intel iAPX 432". Coincidental
346.
by kens 2y ago
Yes, this is for floating point multiplies. But internally, the FPU uses x86 extended-precision numbers, 80-bit floats, with 64 bits of significand and 15 exponent bits. So the multiplier is dealing with 64-bit numbers, plus a few more bits
347.
by kens 2y ago
I think that the +1 is accomplished simply by setting carry-in on the adder for that term, so you don't need a separate adder. (Disclaimer: I haven't looked at that part of the circuit yet.) Another interesting question is how sig
348.
by kens 2y ago
The trick is that Booth's algorithm gives you the ×8 term for free; you multiply by one more in the next base-8 digit. You can put either ×4 or -×1 into a term, but you can't put both of them into one term. So you can do ×8 - ×1 b
349.
by kens 2y ago
A bit surprisingly, the Z80's datapath is 4 bits wide. The Pentium's FPU is more than 64 bits wide (extra bits for rounding and stuff). So, yes, there is a big difference in the datapath widths.
350.
by kens 2y ago
Yes, it's a tradeoff. Many other FPUs at the time used radix-4 instead because it avoids the extra ×3 circuit. Pipelining is tricky because there isn't a nice place to break the multiplication array into two pieces.
351.
by kens 2y ago
For the 64-bit multiplication, you're adding 22 terms, one for each base-8 digit. (Think of grade-school multiplication.) Each term needs to be trivial to compute, so you can do a shift and/or a negation to get the term, but you c
352.
by kens 2y ago
That would require me to focus on one subject :-)
353.
by kens 2y ago
There were a lot of different algorithms in use back then. I don't know if there is a winner used in modern chips.
354.
by kens 2y ago
Author here if anyone has questions...
355.
Evaluating Animal Consciousness(science.org)
3 points by kens 2y ago|0 comments
356.
by kens 2y ago
See, for example, a paper mill that churned out 400 papers with potentially fabricated images: https://www.science.org/content/article/single-paper-mill-ap... Influential microbiologist Didier Raoult had 7 papers
357.
by kens 2y ago
The higher-level problem is that there are tons of scientific papers with falsified data and very few people who care about this. When falsified data is discovered, journals are very reluctant to retract the papers. A small number of poorly
358.
by kens 2y ago
You've done a lot of interesting historical research there! I wanted to get into a discussion of "central processing unit", but decided my article was long enough already :-) The term "central processing unit" is un
359.
by kens 2y ago
Yes; I watched the movie "Gaslight" recently, and the meaning that everyone uses has drifted pretty far from the movie's meaning. But it's probably hopeless to resist a meaning when it becomes trendy.
360.
by kens 2y ago
Although the title says "just discovered", obelisks were discovered a year ago. Obelisks are RNA elements inside bacteria inside humans. Here are some links for more information: The publication in Cell: https://www.cel

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