Monthly Archives: August 2015

Chaos Manor View, Thursday, August 06, 2015

I am very much in fiction writing mode, and most of my thinking is about worlds other than this one.

Everyone must understand that the American Era is over: the United States domination of the world is ended, just as the British domination of the world (pink all over the globe) I learned in grade school ended after World War II. For some this was an objective to achieve. For others it is a disaster. For all it is a coming fact. The nuclear weapon, like the .45 Colt, is an equalizer, and it is now inevitable that Iran will acquire nuclear weapons whenever they decide to do so, given that the deal essentially gives up on inspections, and Iran has announced that under no circumstance will there be any inspection of their military installations even if there is inspection – after 24 day’s notice – of their peaceful installations. Intelligence experts say Iran is about a year from their decision to have them. My guess is that there will be a demonstration in Summer, 2017.

Meanwhile the other nations of the Middle East will rush to acquire their own; they can read the newspapers as well as I can.

The good news is that I can actually type two finger with this Logitech K360 keyboard. I have ordered another so I don’t have to carry it back and forth. So far I have made no corrections in this, and look how far I have come.

The keys are not larger than keys on the comfort curve keyboard, but they are separated from each other by about 5 mm space, so that they remind me of the chicklet keys of the old unlamented IBM PC Junior. I would not recommend the K 360 to a touch typist, but it is pretty good for two fingers, which I seem condemned to after the stroke. But my accuracy is greatly improved by this; I’ve made only one correctable error so far (I managed to get an extra character in ‘chicklet’). I still have to look at the keyboard which means I am dependent on the Word spell checker, and I note that a couple of times I misspelled a word but when I looked up to be sure and hit space, autocorrect fixed it; I’d not have known I made an error. Obviously I must read everything over after I type it, but I always do anyway; but I can get a lot more done before I have to fix stuff. I’d say this keyboard has more than doubled my output. I can’t type as fast as I can think, but I’m a lot faster than I was on the comfort curve.

I worked on Mamelukes last night. I have been able to get communications between my three machines pretty well, now I need to come up with a filing scheme that makes sense because I really don’t understand the default. But I got real work done last night. I am not as fast as I used to be, but it is not intolerably slow either. Now to work on the colonization novel I am doing with Niven and Barnes.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-triumph-of-robert-conquest-1438814435

I should have mentioned the death of my long time friend Robert Conquest, but it was depressing and I avoided it.  I hate writing obituaries. Conquest and I were not close, but we were good friends. He was Possony’s age or thereabouts and Possony and he were close.  I met Conquest at the Hoover long ago.  We met in Moscow in 1989; they finally let us in as the regime was collapsing; the notion of a visa for Robert Conquest was absurd.  We drank a toast to Stefan Possony.  There few like them in this world today. The Wall Street Journal editorial above is a good obituary.

ISIS Sex Slave Prices

I don’t know what to say about this; I’m beside myself with shock and disgust. The United Nations investigated ISIS sex slavery and found an authentic document describing the prices of sex slaves:

<.>

We have received news that the demand in Women and Cattle market has sharply decreased and that will affect Islamic State revenues as well as the funding of mujahedeen in the battlefield, therefore we have made some changes. Below are the prices for Yazidi and Christian women.

The price for Yazidi or Christian women between the age of 40 – 50 is $43 (£27)

$75 (48) for 30 to 40-year-olds

$86 (£55) for 20 to 30-year-olds

$130 (£83) for ten to 20-year-olds

$172 (£110) for one to nine-year-olds

Customers are allowed to purchase only three items with the exception of customers from Turkey, Syria and Gulf countries.

Dated and sealed by ISIS in Iraq October 16, 2014.

</>

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3186229/ISIS-executes-19-girls-refusing-sex-fighters-envoy-reveals-sex-slaves-peddled-like-barrels-petrol.html

Customers from Turkey? And Turkey would rather bomb Kurds than bomb ISIS right now? And Turkey isn’t controlling its border effectively, allowing ISIS to operate with impunity?

I wonder how close the regime in Turkey is with ISIS….

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,
Joshua Jordan, KSC
Percussa Resurgo

This is what I was talking about

Jerry, earlier this year I wrote you a letter about how the Air Force could make better use of air supremacy. (Another of your readers responded, accusing me of “victory through air power.) Here’s an article you may not have seen showing us doing exactly the type of thing I was advocating: http://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/08/02/us-led-raids-destroy-isis-bridges-on-iraq-syria-border.html?ESRC=navy.nl 

You drop the bridges and it makes it harder and slower for ISIS to get troops, supplies and equipment to the front where they’re needed and that makes it easier for our “boots on the ground” to do their job. I do have to ask, though, what took them so long?

Joe

The classic air support doctrine, devised when it was still the Army Air Force, included isolating the battle area, also known as interdiction. The problem as the Air officers saw it, was that it required air supremacy; the kind of airplane that could perform the interdiction mission was not optimum for gaining air supremacy. There was strategic debate on principles of air supremacy, but it was agreed that it included operations against enemy air bases, and until you can fly and he can’t the air is dangerous to close support operations.

The usual reply of a ground officer was that his men were getting pounded while you fly boys go to the officers club between missions and my troops sleep in foxholes.  Now get out there and isolate the GD battle area so we can win this bleeping campaign.  The Army Air Force won politically and got Hap Arnold’s Independent Air Force, partly by convincing key Congresscritters that these ground ponders didn’t understand air strategy.

In those days, gaining air supremacy also included operations against ground based anti-air systems, which in those times was mostly flak towers and dual purpose weapons like 88’s, some of which needed joint heavy bomber/ ground support aircraft; now air supremacy requires destruction of SAM bases, which need not all be in the battle area at all.

A lot of this analysis came about after McNamara had the genius stroke of combining all combat missions in a single airplane. The result was the TFX which was pretty good at most missions, but there ain’t no prizes for second place in a dogfight. The TFX was great at the interdiction mission but not so much so in trying to gain air supremacy, and had to be escorted when close to the North. Long story.

I spent most of my aerospace career working for the Air Force, often in mission analysis and planning, and the Air Force definitely treats support of the ground army as a non-priority mission, important really only after air supremacy is achieved, because otherwise it’s just too damned dangerous. The P-47 Thunderbolt was a bit of an exception; it could drop its wing tanks and engage in air to air combat successfully; but that came late in the war after the Luftwaffe was fighting for its life and losing. Train busting was a decisive mission – a combination of recce/strike and interdiction.  But by then air superiority was achieved and air supremacy (we can fly; they can’t) very nearly so.

The Middle East situation is complicated with SAMs. Warthogs really can’t operate in a high SAM environment, and have to be protected by a different airplane, which isn’t as good at the ground support mission as a plane meant for that purpose.  It’s complicated by the fact that there’s no one other than the Marine Corps which sees both missions as important. 

Which is why I have my doubts about the Independent Air Force.  Wars are won when you stand an 18 year old kid with a rifle outside the enemy’s headquarters. Winning the air war is one way to do that, but not the only way.

Telling it like it really is

This is a very interesting couple of minutes.
http://www.liveleak.com/ll_embed?f=51fe948515b4

“It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.” – Voltaire

*sigh*

<.>

NASA informed lawmakers on Wednesday that because Congress has failed to fully fund its Commercial Crew Program for the last five years, it is signing a $490 million contract extension with Russia to send Americans to space.

The new contract, running through 2019, means that NASA will continue to depend on Russia to get its astronauts to space even as tensions between Washington and Moscow escalate.

It will put money in Russia’s pockets even as U.S. economic sanctions seek to put pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government over the conflict in Ukraine.

It will also make the U.S. susceptible to threats from Russia, which in the past has suggested it could stop taking U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station. The U.S. has relied on Russia since retiring its space shuttle program.

</>

http://thehill.com/policy/finance/250322-nasa-signing-490m-contract-with-russia

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Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

Chaos Manor View, Wednesday, August 05, 2015

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded—here and there, now and then—are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

“This is known as ‘bad luck’.”

– Robert A. Heinlein

http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/climatechange2/01_1.shtml

After this great glaciation, a succession of smaller glaciations has followed, each separated by about 100,000 years from its predecessor, according to changes in the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit (a fact first discovered by the astronomer Johannes Kepler, 1571-1630). These periods of time when large areas of the Earth are covered by ice sheets are called “ice ages.” The last of the ice ages in human experience (often referred to as the Ice Age) reached its maximum roughly 20,000 years ago, and then gave way to warming. Sea level rose in two major steps, one centered near 14,000 years and the other near 11,500 years. However, between these two periods of rapid melting there was a pause in melting and sea level rise, known as the “Younger Dryas” period. During the Younger Dryas the climate system went back into almost fully glacial conditions, after having offered balmy conditions for more than 1000 years. The reasons for these large swings in climate change are not yet well understood.

I seem to have recovered from the bug – probably stomach flu. It is Wednesday, and we have had our usual conference and lunch; I have more fiction work to do, and this is a part I have to do. Unfortunately something is wrong with communications, and I don’t know what it is.

I have the Logitech K360 keyboard; it has separated keys, and thus makes it easier to avoid hitting two keys at once. I think I am typing faster already, but it is apparently not as convenient as the Surface Pro 3 keyboard. The Logitech has smaller keys, and reminds me of the chicklet keyboard of the late and unlamented PC Junior, but now that I am become a two finger typist I can’t complain; I am already making fewer errors on this than I was yesterday on the Comfort Curve keyboard I used before the stroke. The Logitech may not be the best “large key” keyboard – indeed it is not a large key keyboard at all; the keys are smaller than the comfort curve keys, but they are separated so that it is easier to avoid striking two at once.

I think I will use it a week and see if it improves anything; but it seems to be doing so already. It is not perfect, but it may be the best available – or maybe I will end up doing all my work on the Surface Pro 3.

{There is more on my experience with the Logitech K360 below; I am beginning to like it.}

    Per our recent discussion, the first of the new Intel generation is now officially launched.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/08/intel-skylake-core-i7-6700k-reviewed/

Eric

It is not time to build a new machine until some other way to exploit its ability appear, but I expect to build a new PC for Chaos Manor sometime after Thanksgiving; until then the main systems are only a couple of years old, and we’d never notice the improvements. Those who have not upgraded to booting from Solid State drives should stay away from places that have this; the experience of near instant booting is hard to forget. The main wait in reboot now is as the CPU checks devices – yep, that’s a device, yep, that’s another – since the loading of the OS and programs is so fast. The new CPU’s will do the same for bringing up the operating system, and while the old will still work, you’ll wonder how you stood the slowness; but that won’t be just yet. I think by Thanksgiving it may be time to upgrade. Probably I’ll use Thermaltake cases. Mine have been quiet, powerful, reliable, run cool, and easy to service. They are also elegant and don’t needlessly flash lights at me. Of course the elegance is a luxury, but amortized over a five year life they don’t cost that much more, and at my age I hope I deserve some luxury…

I will also look into keyboards; there are probably better keyboards than this Logitech K360, but I have been typing rapidly with it and it hasn’t been the painful experience I’ve been having since the stroke: there may be better than this; I think the Surface Pro 3 keyboard may be better; but this may be Good Enough. If your problem is sloppy typing hitting multiple keys, do try the Logitech K360.

Upgrading Tablets

The biggest problem with tablet computers (such as Jerry’s Surface Pro and

my Dell Venue Pro) is that they come with extremely limited “hard drive”

space. Apparently, the Transcend 512 GB SATA III MTS600 60 mm M.2 SSD

(TS512GMTS600) (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KLTPWJE/) is a drop in

replacement for the 128GB SSD in my tablet. It might work for the Surface

Pro, too. If so, it seems like a reasonable upgrade for you to undertake.

Pity that the RAM is soldered onto the mother board. 4 Meg of RAM also

cries out for an increase.

Fredrik Coulter

Eric replies:

I’ve read accounts of successful Win8.x upgrades to Win10 on devices with as little as 32 GB of storage. Offload all your data files and temporarily uninstall the bulkiest apps if necessary. It’s minor hassle compared to the price still demanded by tablets with storage in the hundreds of GB.

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Microsoft+Surface+Pro+3+Teardown/26595

According to this, the SSD inside the Surface Pro 3 is an mSATA device, like the one in Roberta’s PC. The Dell Venue Pro is using the newer M.2 form factor but it is still a SATA-III drive rather than the much faster PCIe-connected interface also supported in that standard.

So yes, the tablets are upgradable but the process is not for the faint of heart. It would take only a minor mistake to completely trash your device, and even if you get it right, reassembly so everything fits together to factory spec is not trivial. You really want this done by someone with as much experience as possible in dealing with these kinds of devices.

Peter is more emphatic

Microsoft’s Surface tablets simply must not be opened by end users. They are literally glued together inside. They are designed to be serviced by the company, but the adhesive films must be replaced each time, and I don’t think Microsoft will provide that material to end users. Someone might be able to find some similar adhesive to hold the machine together again, but that just seems like a really bad idea to me.

If a tablet will be a person’s only personal computer, sure, go for the biggest RAM and SSD configuration offered, which is 8 GB of RAM and 512GB for the Surface Pro 3.

But for people who will be using the tablet as an adjunct to another machine (a desktop, a full-size laptop, etc.), I think it’s wiser to save money on the tablet by taking the smaller SSD. This choice will also save small amounts of weight and power consumption.

Whether to get the 4 GB or 8 GB option for RAM depends mostly on the user’s workload. If the machine will be used primarily for a single application at a time (like OneNote), the larger RAM configuration may also be a waste of money and power.

. png

My minor dilemma is that I find it easier to write on the Surface, because of the keyboard; but fortunately the Logitech k360 may have solved that. But that’s my problem and unlikely to be yours. As to backup on the Surface, I’m getting a Terabyte external drive to attach to the docking station; that ought to do it. I’ve no desire for any other upgrades to my Precious… I’m beginning to use it for fiction now. I do need a cable to attach the docking station to a BIG monitor.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

Chaos Manor View, Monday, August 03, 2015

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded—here and there, now and then—are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

“This is known as ‘bad luck’.”

– Robert A. Heinlein

http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/climatechange2/01_1.shtml

After this great glaciation, a succession of smaller glaciations has followed, each separated by about 100,000 years from its predecessor, according to changes in the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit (a fact first discovered by the astronomer Johannes Kepler, 1571-1630). These periods of time when large areas of the Earth are covered by ice sheets are called “ice ages.” The last of the ice ages in human experience (often referred to as the Ice Age) reached its maximum roughly 20,000 years ago, and then gave way to warming. Sea level rose in two major steps, one centered near 14,000 years and the other near 11,500 years. However, between these two periods of rapid melting there was a pause in melting and sea level rise, known as the “Younger Dryas” period. During the Younger Dryas the climate system went back into almost fully glacial conditions, after having offered balmy conditions for more than 1000 years. The reasons for these large swings in climate change are not yet well understood.

Generally on Sundays Larry and Marilyn Niven join us for brunch, but yesterday he called to say he wouldn’t make it: stomach flu. Then I got:

nothing important

Jerry,

My sympathy over the bug – I’m getting over what looks like the same thing – a couple days of mild fever, gut issues, and pervasive mental fog. I just now finished reconstructing the current SAS email list from the last backup, after accidentally deleting the whole list instead of just one entry in it the other day. Whatever this bug was, apparently working with critical data under its influence is contraindicated.

Anyway, I thought you might want to hear it’s not just you.

best

Henry

And began to realize that I didn’t have food poisoning, it was stomach flu, and my gut problems weren’t the only thing. My head wasn’t working either. I replied “Larry has it too, so it’s something recoverable; glad to hear it’s not just senility.” But this morning I have the same gut problems, and I now know my head isn’t working. This week is my birthday; I can hope this will all be gone by then, but fair warning, this is likely to be a fairly sparse week.

We have installed Swan, a relatively modern system, with Windows 10 in the back room I use as TV room and back bedroom. I’m learning and it isn’t easy, and my judgments are impaired enough that I suspect my opinions are worthless. Things that ought to be easy turn out to be impossible: such as installing Live Writer, which I haven’t been able to do, and won’t try again until my head’s working. I have no idea what’s wrong.

A report from Eric Pobirs:

What we did today 8-1-2015

    Nothing major but some notable items came up along the way.

    I brought with me a plastic mounting device that lets the Xbox One’s Kinect sensor live on top of the TV. It comes with a sleeve that can be slid over the Kinect’s camera for those who are actively paranoid about such things but I didn’t bother. The mount works pretty well but the angle of the Kinect is borderline for seeing the user due to the limited space in front of the bed. This was an issue for the first generation Kinect, which had a motor for adjusting it’s position but expected a fair amount of room depth. Several third party companies offered add-on lenses to go over the old Kinect’s camera to let it work in smaller spaces. The version Microsoft produced for use on Windows systems was also slightly different from the console version in a similar way, making it more suitable for a desktop system.

    I also brought a copy of Fantasia: Music Evolved (A bit of an Xbox in-joke: the first Halo game was subtitled Combat Evolved.) Best Buy had a nice blowout and it was something that might be more interesting than the typical console gaming fare.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVRoffaTkNQ

    I then set out to find out why Bette had fallen off the network and to bring Swan downstairs for use in the back room. I went through some frustration as everything seemed to be working but it kept insisting there was no cable plugged into the port. The cable lead to the same Netgear 16-port gigabit switch Swan was using with no problems. I noticed the USB to Ethernet adapter from the swollen corpse of the Mac Book Air and tried to use it as a secondary NIC. Windows 7 didn’t have a driver and of course couldn’t connect to Windows Update’s larger library. I found hacked driver after a bit of searching and used Swan and a USB drive to bring it to Bette. The device installed fine but gave the exact same ‘cable is disconnected’ error message.

    Noticing a 5-port gigabit switch that wasn’t in use, I connected it to a known good port on the bigger switch and used that to get both Bette and Swan connected. It worked. Apparent;y ports have started dying on the Netgear in no particular order. Due to time constraints and a general inclination to move on,  I didn’t test to see if giving the Netgear some time off would fix the problem. Perhaps tomorrow. Bette was back on the network and accessible. My next task was to put the D-Link NAS box to rights.

    On my last visit we found the D-Link had lapsed into a coma and needed a full reset before it could be recovered. Fortunately, this left the content of the drives intact and it was back on the network but for its DLNA server function, which was needed if the Xbox was going to treat it as a video library. Because DLNA clients can terribly simple devices that need directories spoon fed to them, the D-Link needed to scan itself for all the files it contained. This was glacially slow and hadn’t concluded when we called it a day last week. Upon checking today it had finished and was still waiting for acknowledgement of that. I save the settings, which triggered another refresh but this one only took a couple of minutes. At least, I thought I save the settings.

    When I went back downstairs and tried the Xbox One’s Media Player it saw the D-Link and the video files in the Media directory. This required an annoying amount of drilling down from the root directory but it worked. Videos played perfectly. Huzzah! Then I summoned Jerry to the back room to bask in the glory of his new toy and… it didn’t work. The media player app no longer saw the D-Link, just three PCs with active UPnP. I went back upstairs to view the D-Link’s configuration menu via Swan. After some UI confusion I got it to use the Media directory as the portion presented to DLNA clients. After some fiddling and yet more refreshes of the directory cache it appeared to do a more definite save of the settings. So now back downstairs to see what the Xbox thought. It now saw the D-Link again and required less drilling down to get to the videos, although still more than a newer NAS would require as they provide more of what common DLNA clients expect.

    Hopefully, it was a learning curve and not an ongoing fault of the D-Link, and the videos will be available to Jerry when he gets around to trying on his own. But wait, what do we watch with videos? MORE VIDEOS! Another item we hadn’t gotten done last time was access to streaming services. I noticed from a package on his desk that Jerry was an Amazon Prime subscriber. This meant he was also entitled to access the Amazon Prime video service. (Amazon Prime also offers free Kindle books starting this month.)

http://www.amazon.com/Prime-Instant-Video/b?node=2676882011

    The library is quite extensive, including a good amount of content exclusive to Amazon. My first choice to try it out was the first episode of ‘Orphan Black’ and I was soon dismayed. Not at the show but at the video quality. It was horrible. Like watching a postage stamp video from the dial-up era blown up to full screen. This couldn’t be right. The same machine had downloaded the 22 GB of ‘Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag’ over the same connection just a week ago and had made good time on that. I switched to an episode of ‘Under The Dome’ and it was perfect. Perhaps not Blu-ray quality but at least on par with the HD broadcast. ‘True Blood,’ also perfect. Well, not entirely perfect. I noted some decompression artifacts here and there but only because I was intently looking for them. There wasn’t anything I’d consider unacceptable for the nature and cost of the service.

    I called Jerry over to bask in yet another glory of his new toy. I brought up the HBO ‘John Adams’ as a demo. The animated montage of flags over the credits looked great but was going on interminably. I fast forwarded a bit and found that the image quality dropped substantially and never recovered in the two or three minutes we continued to watch. I also tried ‘Orphan Black’ again. It was better this time, making it almost two minute in before the quality dropped unacceptably. Perhaps Tatiana Maslany just doesn’t compress well.

    At some point I hope to do some more testing on that fast forwarding problem but for the most part having a client device like the Xbox One hugely ups the ante when it comes to weighing the value of buying Amazon Prime.

I’m looking forward to playing with the new Xbox One. It is certainly the best way to Skype if you have a group; the camera adjusts field size to accommodate all the human faces it can see, widening the view when there are several and focusing down when there’s only one. I’ve used a few other features. I’m finding more. This is a lot of computing power as well as a Blu Ray disk player. Ain’t Moore’s Law wonderful?

EmDrive peer reviewed article—

Hi, Jerry – finally, the EmDrive has been presented in a peer reviewed paper.  You can read the synopsis here:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576515002726?np=y

There’s also a short slide presentation (3 minutes) which describes the high points of the article.  In it, Shawyer describes a much more powerful 2nd generation design, and the applications for such a design. 
One such application is the delivery of a 1 ton payload to LEO, using a pure electric thrust design; the other is the delivery of a 1 ton scientific payload to a target 4 light years distant.  Such a mission would take about 10 years, similar in length to the recent Pluto mission.  No mention is made of slowing down or achieving orbit around the target destination; it appears that the mission suggested would blow through another solar system at around 2/3rds light speed.  Achieving this would require an on board 200 Kilowatt nuclear power source.

The paper is significant in that it is the first peer reviewed paper on the topic.  The lack of a peer reviewed article is often used by critics to denounce the validity of the EmDrive concept.

So, progress is being made.  We appear to be moving past the ‘offhand condemnation’ of the technology, and entering into the more rigorous actual examination and experimental testing of the concept.

I’ve been ‘banging the drum’ on the EmDrive since perhaps 2006, and it gives me great gratification that actual experiments are being conducted.  These experiments should have been conducted 10 years ago, and that failure of the scientific community to do so reflects very poorly on the open minded, data driven approach that is consistent with modern science.

Even if the experiments reveal a subtle flaw which invalidates the concept, I will feel relieved.  Science will have done its job.  I just feel that it ought to have been done much more quickly.

However, we’re getting there now.  And it appears that the keys to the solar system, and the exploration of the nearest stars, may soon be within our grasp.  As you have said, we can hope.

Regards, Charlie

I can only repeat, if thrust without loss of mass is demonstrable and repeatable, the world is a different place; but so far that does not seem to be certain. I’d love to be part of a testing group. It’s the data, not the theory, that matters. Aether or no aether.

I’ve followed it since 2006 or so myself, and I haven’t seen a crucial experiment; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But it seems to be getting closer. I’d love that.

And yet another game changer as Moore’s Law shifts from chip size to power

http://www.wired.com/2015/07/3d-xpoint/

Intel’s New Memory Chips Are Faster, Store Way More Data

Intel and Micron say they have designed a new class of memory chip that could radically improve the performance of smartphones, desktops, laptops, and other computing devices.

Revealed during a press event in San Francisco on Tuesday morning, the technology is called 3D XPoint. According to Intel and Micron, these chips are “non-volatile,” meaning they can store data even without power; they’re up to 1,000 faster than NAND flash memory chips used in most mobile devices; and they can store 10 times more data than the DRAM (dynamic random access memory) chips used in PCs.

Traditional computers—including PCs and laptops as well as the data center servers that drive the world’s Internet services—are built around a processor, some DRAM, and a hard drive. The DRAM holds the short-term data that the processor needs to drive the machine at any given moment, while the hard drive holds applications and long-term data.

However, many machines now use faster flash drives in lieu of hard drives. Smartphones and tablets did away with hard drives and use flash for storage. Intel and Micron’s new technology, 3D XPoint, is a potential alternative to flash as well as DRAM.

3D XPoint doesn’t match the speed of DRAM chips. But since it is non-volatile, the new chips will have the ability, like NAND flash, to preserve data even when a device is powered down.

“One of the most significant hurdles in modern computing is the time it takes the processor to reach data on long-term storage,” Mark Adams, president of Micron, said in a statement. “This new class of non-volatile memory is a revolutionary technology that allows for quick access to enormous data sets and enables entirely new applications.”

Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy, says the technology could prove important—if it works as advertised. “This technology could enable a rethinking where and how analytics can be done. Analytics and Big Data today are done in either large monolithic data centers or scale-out data centers,” he says. “This technology enables ‘edge analytics,’ meaning Big Data could be done outside of these kinds of data centers, closer to the data. So instead of doing your processing at an Amazon or Google, you do it in the field.”

Intel and Micron declined to describe the materials they used in creating 3D XPoint, saying that for the moment, those details are proprietary. The two companies didn’t reveal the pricing of their initial chips, either. But they said they expect to start production at a jointly owned factory in Utah this year.

The two companies call this the first new mainstream memory chip to come to market in 25 years. But it follows other recent advances in memory technology. Companies such as Crossbar and Everspin Technologies say that have built technology similar to 3D XPoint, and a few years ago, HP revealed hardware that used memristors, a new fundamental component of computing that could be used to build both processors and long-term storage. HP is now building a system using this technology, called The Machine, which it says it will ship by the end of the decade.

3D XPoint technology may still be a long way from market. But Intel and Micron are among the few companies in a position to widely manufacture such chips. And the stakes could be big. According to research outfit IDC, the memory chips market is worth about $78.5 billion.

These little beasts keep getting better and better; now if the user interface could keep pace.

“Frederick R. Ewing? It’s about time people began noticing his work.

I’ve long felt he hasn’t received the recognition he deserves.”

<http://www.jmarkpowell.com/the-bestseller-book-that-didnt-exist-how-the-author-of-a-beloved-christmas-classic-pulled-off-the-hoax-of-the-century/>

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Roland Dobbins

Regarding Cecil the Lion

The dentist’s mistake was that he killed the wrong cat. You should never shoot a lion with a tracking collar, a name, two prides of his own, and lots of human friends. You should only shoot lions that are mateless, nameless and friendless. That’s just common sense.

No luring out of sanctuary, no spotlighting, and no slow kills; that’s cheating, punishable by doxing. And dammit, eat what you kill!
So it turns out that hunting, despite its glamorous aura of lawless freedom, is as hide-bound by tiresome custom as is civilization. It’s human nature to both make limits, and chafe at them.

Paradoctor

I don’t hunt, although at one time I was a contributor to Ducks Unlimited. We had Game Wardens in Tennessee when I was growing up, and I was brought up to respect them. It was not a big bureaucracy, and the Iron Law was not at work – at least as far as I noticed at the time. I suspect Cecil would have been a lot safer under the protection of guards with a financial interest in keeping him alive; I doubt he was lured without some cooperation. But my head’s not working.

It certainly seems a less than intelligent thing to do: to shoot a lion with a collar.

“Why are the Americans more concerned than us? We never hear them speak out when villagers are killed by lions and elephants in Hwange.”

<http://news.yahoo.com/lion-zimbabweans-ask-amid-global-cecil-circus-140822692.html>

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Roland Dobbins

http://www.amazon.com/Lord-Janissaries-BAEN-Jerry-Pournelle/dp/147678079X 

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/23/moscow-could-be-prepping-for-space-war-with-spooky-new-satellites.html

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

Chaos Manor View, Saturday, August 01, 2015

Thursday I came back from medical appointments exhausted, and Thursday night I came home from my LASFS meeting early, with a stomach ache and other internal problems, and feeling worse than I have in weeks.

Bad night Thursday night. But woke up Friday morning after finally going to sleep feeling a lot better, but harried; I hadn’t got much meaningful work done Thursday, had another medical appointment at one o’clock meaning I was rushed, and I began to feel indigestion and nausea again.

And things went crazy; in particular, Firefox acted strangely, and when I restarted it the session manager never appeared, and I couldn’t find it. Part of my memory system is opening links readers send to me so I am reminded of them.

And it was still acting strangely. And I had to go. Came back with stomach ache and Zantac didn’t help a lot; I can only conclude mild stomach flu or food poisoning. And at my age I notice that piling on minor annoyances can quickly result in my bringing on a real disaster.

Restarting the Windows 7 system cured several of the problems; I think Firefox has a real problem with garbage collection. There is also ambiguity in how Firefox treats the “maximize” button, and their new way of accessing Options is perhaps an improvement but also unfamiliar.

In any event All is more or less back to normal; I feel as if I am recovering from either mild stomach flu or mild food poisoning – the symptoms are pretty well the same – and I am improving, so between Zantac, milk of magnesia, and Alka-Seltzer I ought to be fully recovered by Monday. Eric is bringing down Swan, a computer I can use at night in the back room; now that we have wired fast Ethernet back there Things may go better.

Baen and Simon and Schuster announce Lord of Janissaries, http://www.amazon.com/Lord-Janissaries-BAEN-Jerry-Pournelle/dp/147678079X or http://books.simonandschuster.com/Lord-of-Janissaries/Jerry-Pournelle/BAEN/9781476780795

This is not. Alas, the new Janissaries 4 Mamelukes, which, I swear, I am working on and now that my two finger typing is improved – I type that and take longer to correct all the typos than it did to type the sentence. I keep hitting two keys at once. But slowly I improve. Anyway I have not forgotten the book. But Lord of Janissaries, the new title, is not new: it’s all three of the original books in one enormous volume. More than 850 pages, with the maps in back as an appendage. Type big enough that I can read it, which is as well because I opened it at random and came on a scene that affects what I’m doing now, and I better go read it all again. Fortunately it still holds up, so if you need some good bed time reading this may be your answer.

And I just thought of a new Mamelukes scene, so maybe it’ll get worked on faster than I thought.

Eric is hard at work getting the up[stairs straightened out; our Ethernet switches up there are really old and it gets hot, and it’s probably time to replace them, oh my… Meanwhile I think I can type in the Surface Pro 3 faster than on this comfort curve keyboard: bigger keys. So I can take it back there with the docking station and a large screen monitor.

The election is early days; Mr. Obama is not popular, Mrs. Clinton not a great deal more so, and opportunists are throwing themselves into the Republication nomination scene. What the Republicans need is good lower level party work; get the ground game up to speed, Forget the nuances, it’s time to win. There are plenty good candidates who won’t stand out in this early melee. It’s time to take Congress and the Presidency and get out of this Depression. And make no mistake; it is a depression, mostly brought on by regulations. It’s now easier to open a neighborhood bank in most European countries than in the United States, and growing government won’t fix that. Whole agencies need to be abolished.

People have had it with Hope and Change; can we just get back to normal economic growth and take advantage of the enormous upswings in technology? But we won’t do that by growing government. Increasing regulations, and all the rest that Hope and Change always equates to.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.