Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: computing – Page 496

“We will constantly be ‘within’ the internet, rather than have access to it, and within the billions of interconnected computers around us,” Ball wrote in his Metaverse Primer. Mark Zuckerberg described the metaverse similarly, calling it “an even more immersive and embodied internet.” Picture this: you strap on a headset or pair of goggles, flick a switch, and boom—you’re still standing in your living room, but you’re also walking through a 3D world as an avatar of yourself, and you can interact with other people who are doing the same thing from their living rooms.

Being constantly within the internet doesn’t sound all that appealing to me personally—in fact, it sounds pretty terrible—but the good news for those with a similar sentiment is that the “full vision” of the metaverse, according to Ball, is still decades away, primarily because of the advances in computing power, networking, and hardware necessary to enable and support it.

In fact, according to Raja Koduri, VP of Intel’s accelerated computing systems and graphics group, powering the metaverse will require a 1,000-fold improvement on the computational infrastructure we have today. “You need to access to petaflops [one thousand teraflops] of computing in less than a millisecond, less than ten milliseconds for real-time uses,” Koduri told Quartz. “Your PCs, your phones, your edge networks, your cell stations that have some compute, and your cloud computing need to be kind of working in conjunction like an orchestra.”

Read more | >

Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking – the most famous physicists of the twentieth century — both spent decades trying to find a single law that could explain how the world works on the scale of the atom and on the scale of galaxies. In short, the Standard Model describes the physics of the very small. General relativity describes the physics of the very large. The problem? The two theories tell different stories about the fundamental nature of reality. Einstein described the problem nearly a century ago in his 1923 Nobel lecture 0, telling the audience that a physicist who searches for, “an integrated theory cannot rest content with the assumption that there exist two distinct fields totally independent of each other by their nature.” Even while on his deathbed, Einstein worked on a way to unite all the laws of physics under one unifying theory.

Read more | >

Yet despite the chip giant’s manufacturing struggles, it still maintains nearly 90% market share in data-center chips, compared with AMD’s 10%, according to data from Mercury Research. Intel has lost more ground in desktop and laptop computers, holding onto 83% market share and 78% share respectively, with the remainder going mostly to AMD, according to Mercury data.

After years of hearing about these problems, Wall Street had largely written off the company’s manufacturing prowess. Investors expected the company to move to a hybrid approach to chip making, contracting more of its chip manufacturing to TSMC and potentially to Samsung. Some analysts suggested the company go as far as spinning out the manufacturing business, as AMD did with what is now known as GlobalFoundries years ago.

But weeks after Gelsinger took over, he announced that the company planned to double down on its manufacturing business in an effort to return Intel to its roots, including a bid to compete with TSMC as a contract manufacturer. Since his return to Intel after nearly nine years as chief executive of VMware, he has shaken up the company’s executive team. That includes re-hiring several notable Intel staffers, including Natarajan.

Read more | >

The mathematician Ben Green of the University of Oxford has made a major stride toward understanding a nearly 100-year-old combinatorics problem, showing that a well-known recent conjecture is “not only wrong but spectacularly wrong,” as Andrew Granville of the University of Montreal put it. The new paper shows how to create much longer disordered strings of colored beads than mathematicians had thought possible, extending a line of work from the 1940s that has found applications in many areas of computer science.

The conjecture, formulated about 17 years ago by Ron Graham, one of the leading discrete mathematicians of the past half-century, concerns how many red and blue beads you can string together without creating any long sequences of evenly spaced beads of a single color. (You get to decide what “long” means for each color.)

This problem is one of the oldest in Ramsey theory, which asks how large various mathematical objects can grow before pockets of order must emerge. The bead-stringing question is easy to state but deceptively difficult: For long strings there are just too many bead arrangements to try one by one.

Read more | >

When Patch Tuesday rolls around, we can usually expect a series of Windows problems to be fixed (and perhaps to see some new ones introduced), as well as new features added. But Microsoft also uses such updates to take things away — and this is precisely what has happened with the latest updates for Windows 10 and 11.

Microsoft, quite understandably, would like everyone to use its Edge browser, and has taken endless steps to ensure that it stays the default browser on as many computers as possible. With the latest operating system updates — specifically the KB5008212 and KB5008215 updates — the company has implemented a block on workarounds used by the likes of EdgeDeflector and Firefox to force links to open in a browser other than Edge.

Read more | >

And he’s been searching for it for a decade.

It’s a nightmare scenario that might become increasingly common in a world of digital currency. A man threw away an old PC hard drive while doing a quick spring clean of his home in Newport Wales, U.K., in 2013. Fast-forward almost a decade and he’s still desperately petitioning to be allowed to go through his local landfill.

The reason the man, 35-year-old IT engineer James Howells, wants to trawl through his local trash site is that the hard drive he threw out included a wallet with 7,500 Bitcoin.

At the time he threw out the hard drive, that amount of Bitcoin would have been worth 665 thousand dollars (500 thousand pounds). Today, it would have made him a millionaire, as it would be worth a total of 357 million dollars.

In an interview with The Guardian in 2013, Howells explained how he had been looking through the landfill, which is roughly the size of a football field. “I had a word with one of the guys down there, explained the situation. And he actually took me out in his truck to where the landfill site is, the current ditch they’re working on. It’s about the size of a football field, and he said something from three or four months ago would be about three or four feet down,” Howells explained.

Roughly $140 billion in ‘lost’ Bitcoin worldwide Following initial scavenging efforts for the lost hard drive, Howells seemed resigned to losing the digital fortune. More recently, however, he has recruited local residents in Newport to help him search for the device. Anyone who helps him find it, he says, is promised to be rewarded millions — if the hard drive is still readable, that is. The 35-year-old also offered to donate 25 percent of the potential findings — roughly 70 million dollars– to a “Covid Relief Fund” for his home city.

Full Story:

Continue reading “A Man Accidentally Threw Out a Hard Drive Worth 7 Million in Bitcoin” | >

One promising solution to plastic pollution is mycelium or mushroom packaging. It is made of 2 ingredients: mushrooms and hemp. Mycelium is the underground network of very durable, thread-like filaments called hyphae. It is mixed with agricultural waste like wood chips, oat hulls, cotton burrs or hemp hurds.

Link to my Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/Belinda_Carr.

Chapters.
0:00 Introduction.
1:00 How its made.
2:43 Products.
4:32 Advantages.
5:30 Disadvantages.
6:19 Myths.
7:12 Conclusion.

One of the largest mushroom packaging manufacturers in the world is Ecovative Design, a New York based biotech company founded in 2006. They sent me these samples of their product. Their manufacturing process is pretty straight forward.

Their designers create a 3D CAD model of custom packaging.
A CNC machine routes the design into MDF.
Plastic trays are thermoformed around the MDF pieces.
The tray is filled with their proprietary hemp hurd and mycelium blend.
It is allowed to grow for 4 days in a controlled environment with regulated temperatures, airflow, CO2 and humidity levels.
It is popped out of tray and allowed to continue growing for 2 more days to create a velvety layer of overgrowth.
The packaging is then heat treated to dry out, kill spores and stop the growth process.

This material can last for 30 years in dry, temperature controlled indoor environments. It is also 100% biodegradable and a nutrient for soils and plants. When broken down into 1 cubic centimeter pieces, it will compost in just 45 days. In the ocean, it will compost in 180 days.

Continue reading “Can Mushrooms replace EVERYTHING? | Concrete, Plastic, Meat, Leather” | >

Officials from IBM and Samsung announced at this year’s IEDM conference in San Francisco a collaboration on a new chip design that adds transistors vertically on a chip. As part of their announcement, they suggested that their vertical transport field effect transistors (VTFET) could double the speed of processor chips, or alternatively, reduce the power they use by up to 85 percent.

Since the beginning of digital technology, processing chips have been made by placing tiny transistors on a chip and connecting them. Over time, engineers have placed increasingly more transistors on chips that have remained roughly the same size—adhering, generally, to Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors on a should double every year. Engineers have known for a long time that there are limits to Moore’s Law—eventually, it would become impossible to add even one more transistor, much less double the number that are there.

So researchers are looking for other ways to make chips. But in the meantime, engineers continue to look for ways to add more transistors to conventional chips. In their announcement, IBM and Samsung have explained that they are taking steps to begin designing chips that can expand vertically. In a practical sense, the move was inevitable. As an analogy, when towns grew too big to be efficient, engineers began making buildings taller, essentially turning 2D towns into 3D cities. Officials and engineers at IBM and Samsung (and doubtless other corporations, such as Intel) suggest that now is the time to begin doing the same with microprocessors.

Read more | >

The months-long project demonstrates the physics behind the CPUs we take for granted.

Computer chips have become so tiny and complex that it’s sometimes hard to remember that there are real physical principles behind them. They aren’t just a bunch of ever-increasing numbers. For a practical (well, virtual) example, check out the latest version of a computer processor built exclusively inside the Minecraft game engine.

Minecraft builder “Sammyuri” spent seven months building what they call the Chungus 2, an enormously complex computer processor that exists virtually inside the Minecraft game engine. This project isn’t the first time a computer processor has been virtually rebuilt inside Minecraft, but the Chungus 2 (Computation Humongous Unconventional Number and Graphics Unit) might very well be the largest and most complex, simulating an 8-bit processor with a one hertz clock speed and 256 bytes of RAM.

Minecraft processors use the physics engine of the game to recreate the structure of real processors on a macro scale, with materials including redstone dust, torches, repeaters, pistons, levers, and other simple machines. For a little perspective, each “block” inside the game is one virtual meter on each side, so recreating this build in the real world would make it approximately the size of a skyscraper or cruise ship.

Read more | >

Stacking transistors could be the next big thing in chips.

IBM and Samsung have announced their latest advance in semiconductor design: a new way to stack transistors vertically on a chip (instead of lying flat on the surface of the semiconductor).

The new Vertical Transport Field Effect Transistors (VTFET) design is meant to succeed the current FinFET technology that’s used for some of today’s most advanced chips and could allow for chips that are even more densely packed with transistors than today. In essence, the new design would stack transistors vertically, allowing for current to flow up and down the stack of transistors instead of the side-to-side horizontal layout that’s currently used on most chips.

Vertical designs for semiconductors have been a trend for a while (FinFET already offers some of those benefits); Intel’s future roadmap also looks to move in that direction, too, although its initial work focused on stacking chip components rather than individual transistors. It makes sense, after all: when you’ve run out of ways to add more chips in one plane, the only real direction (other than physically shrinking transistor technology) is to go up.

Read more | >