SoSoRoCoCo

Wow. An entire country can accidentally be hosed if their domain name used by their NS expires? Is it that perilous?

I hope we never find out what happens if the US internet goes down. But with 2020's track record and what 2021 is starting to look like, we might find out!

Same here!

Last night a friend from India popped up on signal. I told him "Welcome!" and he said "You finally wore me down, I've left WhatsApp and I'm trying to move my family off of it..."

> Everything is a Command Line

This is a really controversial pattern for GUIs. In one camp, the GUI is really a skin over the CLI that acts like a virtual user, translating GUI inputs into underlying CLI. In the other camp, the GUI is all there is (e.g., Windows) and there is no underlying OS that can be accessed via CLI: in fact, the CLI is a "fake GUI" (win32 apps written without a Window). I can't say which is better, but it is fascinating to see that this was an "original pattern".

BYTE ftw! Typing in Apple //e ASM code for hours and hours... ... and hours ... and then later, 2600 magazine.

I'm glad to have this to read. It brings back memories of hanging out at the local RC shop that sold D&D stuff, back in the 80's.

What I've always wanted to read area transcripts of the early players (like Gygax), perhaps at GenCon, working out very difficult encounters. For example: how did the early DMs approach role-playing a supergenius demigod with high-level cleric/MU spells? That's got to be very hard character to inhabit. I mean the Lolth module, Q1? come on, there are so many high level intelligent creatures in that endgame...

Oh. I see what you mean. Yeah, I guess by definition backwards propagation is trial-end-error. Huh, I never thought of it that way. Thanks for clarifying, I thought you were being saucy: my apologies for being snarky.

Well, if your only experience is reading python opencv stack overflow posts, then of course...

This question has raged since the 90's. I worked on the Itanium (Madison and McKinley), and the VLIW architecture was brilliant. This was during the time of the Power4 and the DEC ALPHA, two non-x86 competing architectures that were dominating the "Workstation" market (remember that term?). It looked like the server world was going to have three architectural options (Sun was dying, and Motorola's 68000 line wasn't up to the task.)

Microsoft even had a version of NT3.5 for The Itanic. It seemed we were just about to achieve critical mass in the server world to switch to a new architecture with huge address space, ECC up the wazoo and massive integer performance.

Then the PC revolution took off with Win95, and the second war with AMD happened (and NexGen sorta). This couldn't be solved with legal battles. This put all hands on deck because there was SO much money to be made with x86 compatibility. The presence of x86 "up and down" AMD & Intel's roadmap took over the server market as well: it was x86 all over the place.

And that, chil'ren, is why x86 was reborn in the 90's just as it was close to being wiped out.

Now Apple has proven you can you seamless sneak in a brand-new architecture, get hyooj gainz, and we are none the wiser. This is fantastic news. I think we are truly on the cusp of x86 losing its dominance in the consumer space after almost 35 years of dominance.

Ah, good info. Thanks.

That only lists the number, not what the # actually means in terms of actual lithography or more importantly, transitor performance. It used to be minimum feature size, or just L of the gate, but with finfet it can be an overloaded term. Scaling in x of .75 and y of .7 lead to 10% performance improvement per node at Intel. TSMC hasn't been that clear. And that doesn't even account for increase in metal layers, pitch of layers (or if they use poly lower layers to get even faster gains), or average track density due to above/below electromigration minimums.

EDIT: All of this stuff is usually stated at ISSCC every time a new process is announced, so it isn't NDA. I haven't followed this in years which is why I was asking for a process person to step in.

Yeah, agreed. The designers / integration will probably get the newest nodes--and the headaches with getting their yields up! I suspect the older high-yield nodes will be filled with tenants pretty quickly. I don't have much knowledge of how this is going, at least from the inside.