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This guy implemented a Cray‐1A in a FPGA. FPGAs are prototyping tools, so it’s a bit like taking a cutting‐edge mechanical device from years past and making a functional copy in Meccano (Erector Set) parts.
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May 2, 2016 22:02
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Imagined posted:In practice, though, could something with an error factor of 1,200 feet really be described as "more accurate" than anything else? It's like trying to bomb Times Square Studios and hitting the Herald Square Macy's instead. I love how New Yorkers think that everyone else on the entire planet automatically has intimate, exhaustive knowledge of NYC landmarks
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May 2, 2016 22:11
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Buttcoin purse posted:I hope that color is obsolete. It is obsolete! As you may have noticed, modern cars only come in white, black, silver, and (for sports cars only) dull red.
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May 2, 2016 22:11
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GOTTA STAY FAI posted:I love how New Yorkers think that everyone else on the entire planet automatically has intimate, exhaustive knowledge of NYC landmarks I'm not from New York, and I came up with that comparison via Google. Suffice to say, "Well, we probably hit the right city." is hardly what I'd call pinpoint accuracy.
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May 2, 2016 22:16
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Imagined posted:Suffice to say, "Well, we probably hit the right city." is hardly what I'd call pinpoint accuracy. Hi and welcome to WW2 precision bombing campaigns dreamed up by Curtis Lemay.
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May 2, 2016 22:23
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TotalLossBrain posted:Hi and welcome to WW2 precision bombing campaigns dreamed up by Curtis Lemay. Him and good old "Butcher" Harris. "I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities [and civilians therein] of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier."
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May 2, 2016 22:28
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Imagined posted:Him and good old "Butcher" Harris. "I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities [and civilians therein] of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier." Beautiful simplicity in planning: a bunch of residential areas surrounding that factory? It's worker housing and therefore a legitimate target. All of post-war strategic air command is one big obsolete tech and concept.
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May 2, 2016 22:38
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Imagined posted:In practice, though, could something with an error factor of 1,200 feet really be described as "more accurate" than anything else? It's like trying to bomb Times Square Studios and hitting the Herald Square Macy's instead. Which has definitely never happened before....
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May 2, 2016 22:48
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I kind of feel like you're rebutting a point I never made, but at any rate *if* the official story can be believed, that was less a case of inaccuracy in the sense of meaning to hit one thing and hitting another, but more like trying to hit one thing, hitting it successfully, and then finding out it was the wrong thing. Poor intelligence or programming, not inaccuracy.
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May 3, 2016 00:22
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That training video reminded me of something old timers like me remember from school, film strips. I don't mean movies that are shown via projectors, but they were similar to slides, single frames that would have to be read aloud, or if you're lucky, an accompanying tape. If you had the tape, when the filmstrip needed to be turned to the next one, it would make this BOOP noise that anyone who went to school in the 80s or earlier knows so well. If you didn't have the tape, it would just be turned when the teacher asked if everyone was ready. This charismatic fellow gives an example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX0tE5LPPaA
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May 3, 2016 00:45
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evobatman posted:Something I've wondered about are the Cray supercomputers of the 70s and 80s. How do they compare to todays computers? A typical PC today has 4 cores, 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. Do concepts such as RAM and CPU power even relate to a Cray?
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May 3, 2016 01:31
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GWBBQ posted:To go more modern, we have a rack from the Pixar render farm that did Toy Story 3 (one of these http://d2rormqr1qwzpz.cloudfront.net/photos/2012/11/30/41924-pixar_servers.jpg) and it's neat, but pales in comparison to the 4 modern video cards zip tied to a dish rack in the corner of the closet that someone was using to mine Bitcoins until I unplugged it. One of my current "long-term-never-going-to-get-finished" projects is to make a nice personal renderfarm. It might bring me back to a previous love for 3D modelling and animation before I burned out a few years ago.
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May 3, 2016 10:29
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GOTTA STAY FAI posted:I love how New Yorkers think that everyone else on the entire planet automatically has intimate, exhaustive knowledge of NYC landmarks 
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May 3, 2016 11:35
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atomicthumbs posted:It is obsolete! As you may have noticed, modern cars only come in white, black, silver, and (for sports cars only) dull red. Come to europe! Here you can buy compact cars in a lot of bright colors! Sometimes even bigger cars get interesting colors, but only the "sport" version of course!
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May 3, 2016 12:22
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atomicthumbs posted:It is obsolete! As you may have noticed, modern cars only come in white, black, silver, and (for sports cars only) dull red. When my wife went car shopping last year, she managed to frustrate the sales drones by saying that she was interested in "any color other than white, grey, black, or silver".
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May 3, 2016 13:27
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Powerlurker posted:When my wife went car shopping last year, she managed to frustrate the sales drones by saying that she was interested in "any color other than white, grey, black, or silver". "Well, we do have one in champagne gold..."
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May 3, 2016 13:42
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Imagined posted:Him and good old "Butcher" Harris. "I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities [and civilians therein] of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier." 
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May 4, 2016 06:52
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“The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.” —Arthur Travers Harris, 1942. e: Oh poo poo this isn’t the Historical Fun Fact thread. How about this for obsolete and failed: the Knickebein system the Nazis used to guide their bombers to targets in England:  The British spoofed the signal to fool the Nazis into bombing empty fields. quote:Some Luftwaffe bombers even landed at RAF bases, believing they were back in the Reich. The entire Battle of the Beams makes for good reading. Check out the references for books written by some of the people involved in the countermeasures. quote:British monitors soon started receiving intelligence from Enigma decrypts referring to a new device known as Y-Gerät, which was also sometimes referred to as Wotan. Jones had already concluded the Germans used code names which were too descriptive, so he asked a specialist in the German language and literature at Bletchley Park about the word Wotan. The specialist realised Wotan referred to Wōden, a one-eyed god, and might therefore be a single beam navigation system. Jones agreed, and knew that a system with one beam would have to include a distance-measurement system. He concluded that it might work on the basis described by an anti-Nazi German mathematician and physicist Hans Mayer, who while visiting Norway, had passed a large amount of information in what is now known as the Oslo Report. Platystemon has a new favorite as of 11:28 on May 4, 2016 |
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May 4, 2016 07:19
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May 4, 2016 07:28
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It's a minor miracle we didn't carpet-bomb Germany with nerve gas.
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May 4, 2016 07:45
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hackbunny posted:I'm old enough to remember arcade cabinets with ashtrays Every modern barcade has retro cabinets retrofitted with drink holders, although sometimes they're just a shelf.
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May 4, 2016 10:52
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Platystemon posted:“The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.” Pro-click/read. Very interesting stuff!
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May 4, 2016 10:54
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quote:Some Luftwaffe bombers even landed at RAF bases, believing they were back in the Reich. "As the reality of his situation dawned on him, Wilhelm knew, with a sudden and chilling certainty, that he'd just become an international laughingstock."
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May 4, 2016 12:49
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evobatman posted:Something I've wondered about are the Cray supercomputers of the 70s and 80s. How do they compare to todays computers? A typical PC today has 4 cores, 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. Do concepts such as RAM and CPU power even relate to a Cray? Yes and no, the point of Crays and other vector machines was to execute lots of calculations in parallel, with several processors that could perform hundreds or thousands operations in parallel - or rather, perform the same arithmetic/logic operation in parallel on thousands of different values (a vector of values, hence "vector machines"). Since memory was slow, a lot of the memory wasn't shared between processors, so you can't even do straight comparisons with RAM. They were pretty exotic architectures, painstakingly designed on paper and hand-built (Crays famously had all signal wires in the same length, so that signals would be synchronized at the hardware level - a feat that required weird twisty wiring), very different from a PC (although PCs took some concepts from them, see SIMD instructions). They are, in fact, more closely related to GPUs: it wouldn't be wrong to say that your computer's video card is an embedded supercomputer. I don't know exactly how modern CPUs compare to the old supercomputers, but modern GPUs outperform them several orders of magnitude hackbunny has a new favorite as of 13:04 on May 4, 2016 |
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May 4, 2016 12:58
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SatansOnion posted:"As the reality of his situation dawned on him, Wilhelm knew, with a sudden and chilling certainty, that he'd just become an international laughingstock." Catch Luftwaffe with this one weird trick. Nazi's hate it!
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May 4, 2016 16:39
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Especially grammar nazis.
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May 4, 2016 17:52
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The Secret War BBC series has the Battle of the Beams as the first episode. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uf5caj9ZhpQ
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May 4, 2016 18:12
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moller posted:Every modern barcade has retro cabinets retrofitted with drink holders, although sometimes they're just a shelf. The one that just opened by me didn't have a single place to put a drink other than on the floor or atop the cabinet itself. They claimed it was an oversight - even though it's literally the first thing that occurs to you when you have a drink in your hand and go to play an arcade game. C'mon, guys.
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May 4, 2016 18:42
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raverrn posted:It's a minor miracle we didn't carpet-bomb Germany with nerve gas. Operation vegetarian.
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May 4, 2016 23:42
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sleep tight bomber
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May 5, 2016 00:31
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Vintage shaving technology:   
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May 5, 2016 13:08
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Platystemon posted:Vintage shaving technology: I don't think that you can use those beans as fuel until they've been digested.
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May 5, 2016 13:11
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Iron Crowned posted:I don't think that you can use those beans as fuel until they've been digested. Maybe that is the joke. It is a joke item right?
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May 5, 2016 13:51
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Post the very best in overthinking fart jokes. Good job, PYF! 
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May 5, 2016 13:57
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Luisfe posted:Maybe that is the joke. It's basically "a nigga who fart in he own beard"-in-a-box.
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May 5, 2016 13:57
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I'm sure you could sell it to the wet shaving crowd as a genuine article.
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May 5, 2016 13:57
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A bar full of horrible 23 year olds today has more computing power than the NASA control center during the Moon landings. Like, a lot more.
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May 5, 2016 14:03
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cheerfullydrab posted:A bar full of horrible 23 year olds today has more computing power than the NASA control center during the Moon landings. Like, a lot more. Any recent TV has more computing power than NASA or anyone at that point had.
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May 5, 2016 14:21
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Der Kyhe posted:Any recent TV has more computing power than NASA or anyone at that point had. Every once in a while my TV’s software locks up and I have to go to the basement and throw the circuit breaker (easier than unplugging it because of how it’s situated). Sometimes new techs sucks. Friends don’t let friends buy SONY.
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May 5, 2016 14:23
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Platystemon posted:Every once in a while my TV’s software locks up and I have to go to the basement and throw the circuit breaker (easier than unplugging it because of how it’s situated). That can't be a good thing to do. Why not at least take some time to put a power strip or something that's more accessible?
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May 5, 2016 14:38
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