They should have called it Picasso.
Posted on 01/29/2017 12:45:19 PM PST by oblomov
n 1971, Intel, then an obscure firm in what would only later come to be known as Silicon Valley, released a chip called the 4004. It was the world’s first commercially available microprocessor, which meant it sported all the electronic circuits necessary for advanced number-crunching in a single, tiny package. It was a marvel of its time, built from 2,300 tiny transistors, each around 10,000 nanometres (or billionths of a metre) across – about the size of a red blood cell. A transistor is an electronic switch that, by flipping between “on” and “off”, provides a physical representation of the 1s and 0s that are the fundamental particles of information.
In 2015 Intel, by then the world’s leading chipmaker, with revenues of more than $55bn that year, released its Skylake chips. The firm no longer publishes exact numbers, but the best guess is that they have about 1.5bn–2 bn transistors apiece. Spaced 14 nanometres apart, each is so tiny as to be literally invisible, for they are more than an order of magnitude smaller than the wavelengths of light that humans use to see.
Everyone knows that modern computers are better than old ones. But it is hard to convey just how much better, for no other consumer technology has improved at anything approaching a similar pace. The standard analogy is with cars: if the car from 1971 had improved at the same rate as computer chips, then by 2015 new models would have had top speeds of about 420 million miles per hour. That is roughly two-thirds the speed of light, or fast enough to drive round the world in less than a fifth of a second. If that is still too slow, then before the end of 2017 models that can go twice as fast again...
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Computer safty calls for malware and virus potection.
The cellphone that most people use is, in reality, a mini-computer
yet most cellphones don't have antivirus protection
Add to that compulsory applications required by 'Googglie' on your android cellphone,
many of which are insecure, and cross to other applications, even without the user/owners permission,
making the cellphone only as secure as your computer without virus protection.
The problems magnify as more and more application companies are bought up by larger application corporations.
They didn’t build that! Al Gore had a dream and Lo, when he awoke, it was there on his pillow. Gore then gave it to Intel to reverse engineer and copy. /s
We can get our porn even faster now.
The IBM 370 was introduced in 1970, the year before Intel produced the 4004 chip mentioned in the article. The 370 could address a maximum of 16 megabytes of RAM (addresses were 24-bit), however, the machines initially offered maxed out at three megabytes of installed RAM.
In 1983, IBM expanded the 370's address space from 24 bits to 31 bits, making two gigabytes addressable. Why not 32 bits, you might ask? Two reasons:
They should have called it Picasso.
I don’t understand your post, is it new on AMC or not”? Did I miss a season?
The government (with the possible exception of one particular agency) tends to run behind the state of the art in IT. The state of the art is determined by international competition between private entities.
An amusing article popped up recently which claimed the government actually had an IBM 7074 still in use. Supposedly, it was running a legacy app that was being screen-scraped by a Java application running on more modern hardware.
However, the story lacks credibility. How would you ever keep the beast running? Where are the spare parts? Where are the customer engineers? And how to justify the electric bill?
Turns out, it was more than likely a 7070 emulator running in software on a modern z/Architecture mainframe. That's bizarre enough.
Bipedal robot walking around, doing stuff:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY
Quadrupeds:
Already starting to happen.
The first season is on FireTV thru Amazon Prime (at no charge). I’d seen commercials for it thru last year but the commercials didn’t make it sound appealing. I wound up trying it on FireTV, and watched the entire season in two days.
I do believe the second season is coming up on regular TV. I’ll be watching it. We aren’t THAT far from that kind of life.
Webmaster lists two seasons.
Not sure if season two is complete, though.
In other words, you don’t know if the debut of Humans on AMC beginning 2/13 is the first season or not........Correct?
LOL! You posted that link in jest right? You got me on that one..........LOL!
No, I know that there is a season one and a season two already out. I just don’t know if season two is complete yet or not.
Ah! Just had a moment of clarity. This one is British.
Eric?
Just found another series called “Real Humans.” Not sure if it’s any good.
Evidently "Humans" is based on the Swedish series you posted..........
From what I could find, the Feb. 13 premier is actually the beginning of Season 2.......I didn't know there was a Season 1.
Interesting enough, my Comcast On Demand requires that I purchase the individual episodes of Season 1..........
I never experienced that before. Usually the TV series were free to watch.......
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.