adrian_b

Whatever happened, it was temporary, because radio contact was established again after a 2-day pause.

A big unknown planet has crossed the path between Voyager 1 and the Earth, blocking the radio signals for 2 days !

(This is not impossible, because a planet so far away would have an extremely low angular velocity, so an occultation could take so long even for a not very big planet.)

While the conclusion that frequent ejaculation reduces the risk of prostate cancer was a rather obvious and expected result, what is quite surprising is that the frequency of ejaculations when young had a greater weight than the frequency of ejaculations in old age, despite the fact that what happened when young was separated by decades from the diagnostics of prostate cancer when old.

> it's not the dangerous, long-term kind

For now this is only a desire, not a fact.

The neutron radiation around a fusion reactor is far more intense than in any fission reactor, because in fusion reactors most of the produced energy is carried by neutrons.

Any material exposed to neutron radiation will become radioactive. Of course the designers of fusion reactors will attempt to choose only materials that are converted into radioactive isotopes with a short halflife, but until someone demonstrates a working fusion reactor we will not know whether this is possible or the production of some amount of long-life radioactive waste must be accepted.

In my opinion, during the next few decades there are far less chances for fusion reactors to be used as a significant energy source on Earth than for some improved kinds of fission reactors.

In any case neither fission reactors nor fusion reactors are strictly necessary on Earth, but nuclear reactors are the only way to achieve interplanetary travel through the Solar System in decent times, so I believe that the future of nuclear reactors is for spaceships, not for terrestrial use.

I am not sure if you mean what you have written, or you mean the opposite, but reading a big file when there are no available free memory pages will flush memory pages from the disk cache, which previously were caching data from files accessed by your user, or by other users.

In high performance applications, you must not let the kernel choose randomly what pages should be invalidated, but you must use madvise for memory_mapped files or posix_fadvise for files accessed with read/write, with appropriate arguments so that cache memory pages that are not needed any more will be freed with enough time in advance before reading more data.

> Anthropic confirmed in a statement that Cathedral researchers had gained access to “a limited set” of its sales, human resources, and IT systems.

The end result is the same.

It matters less who was hacked than whose data was obtained.

Yes, but that means that any company which previously provided free downloads would have to provide them only against payments, otherwise they would lose a lot of money.

Such a tax would be the end of any kind of free downloads and of any kind of non-profit content providers.

The tax is huge.

Fortunately, I do not live in France.

Otherwise, this tax would cost me at least 50% of what I pay for all my food, daily.

50 GB of daily traffic is normal for me, sometimes even much more, e.g. one day ago I had a traffic of 1 TB per day, because I downloaded the Mistral Large LLM weights. So to download Mistral, I would have had to pay EUR 55, much more than I pay for a month of Internet access.

That's right.

A lot of features of VAX and VMS are clearly inherited directly from PDP-11 and RSX-11M.

The main resemblances between VAX and PDP-10 are just that VAX is bigger and more powerful than PDP-11 and it is big enough and fast enough to be an upgrade even for PDP-10 not only from PDP-11.

Nonetheless there is something that VAX has inherited from PDP-10, but not really from the base DEC PDP-10 but from the enhancements that the users of PDP-10 had done to it.

The company BBN (Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc.) had made since 1970 a so-called "BBN Pager" for PDP-10, which was a hardware extension that added a paged memory management unit to PDP-10. They also designed the TENEX operating system for the PDP-10 extended with the BBN Pager.

The TENEX operating system is the origin of several very important innovations, like the memory-mapped files, which were later brought to UNIX by 4.2BSD, through SunOS 4.0 and 4.3BSD-Reno. Several of the earliest implementations of some Internet protocols, like Telnet and FTP, were done on computers running TENEX (i.e. extended PDP-10s). Implementing Telnet required the concept of pseudo-terminal, which was also imported in 4.2BSD and later the use of pseudo-terminals was expanded in various UNIX variants, to applications like terminal emulators in GUI desktops.

The paged memory management from which VAX got its name (Virtual Address Extension) comes directly from the BBN Pager extension of PDP-10.

The term "minicomputer" was first used in the marketing of PDP-8, but not immediately after its launch from 1965.

The use of "minicomputer" became widespread only in 1969, when it was explicitly derived from the word "miniskirt", which had become fashionable not long before that.

Quotation from "Electronic Design News", in July 1969:

“Design isn’t what it used to be. Today’s designer has available a ready-made solution to major problems — a minicomputer. Like the miniskirt, the small general-purpose computer presents the same basic commodity in a more appealing way.”

During the seventies, there was a classification of computers into mainframes like IBM System/370, supercomputers like Cray-1 and minicomputers like PDP-11.

Then in the second half of the seventies, "microcomputers" were added as the lowest tier.

The first few versions of Windows NT had a very strong API resemblance with VMS, which is why Microsoft settled to pay to DEC a 9-digit $ amount, to avoid a legal battle. Though eventually that deal was less advantageous for DEC than it appeared from the amount of money, because it included the support of Windows NT for DEC computers.

The parts of the initial Windows NT API that did not resemble VMS looked liked cleaned-up versions of the UNIX API, e.g. the functions for handling file and device I/O.

The central role of asynchronous I/O in Windows NT was inherited from VMS, which in turn had inherited it from the RSX-11M operating system for PDP-11 computers (Dave Cutler had a major role in the development of all these 3 operating systems).

Whether VMS => WNT is a joke like IBM => HAL, is anyone's guess. A more certain thing is that IBM was named such as to be a hyperbolic substitute of the name of its main competitor, NCR (National => International, Cash Register => Business Machines)

That is true.

I use yt-dlp to download sporadically some YouTube clips and it works fine.

However, once I attempted to download a complete YouTube list of clips, with a total size of several tens of GB. Towards the end of the list, after a couple of hours or so, the download was interrupted.

Then my IP address was completely banned for YouTube, regardless of the browser used. The ban lasted for a couple of weeks.

Now, used only for infrequently downloading single clips, yt-dlp works again fine.

Yes, it was used in many circumstances when today people would wash themselves, like after hard work or physical exercises.

Some GPUs may easily last more than 10 years of light use, but I am not aware of public data about the reliability of datacenter GPus, which would give the percentage of A100s that die during the first 3 years of 24/7 use and during the first 6 years of 24/7 use.

I doubt that many of the 6-year old A100s have been in use 24/7.