> Because the alarm wire carried current only during a fault, an open 25-inch strap produced the same electrical state at the receiving end as a healthy power plant.
I’m a building automation and controls tech in Manhattan, and for this exact reason digital feedback points and alarms are always normally-closed, and analog points are 4-20mA. This allows differentiation between nominal zero values and a fault in the loop.
Disasters like this are what our best practices are borne from.
> I’m a building automation and controls tech in Manhattan
Hi - sorry if this is not your expertise, but I thought I might as well try asking. I live in ~central Manhattan, in a ~40th floor apartment with a corner view with large windows meanings lots of glass through which sound will travel.
For around a year now there's been an annoying high tone coming from somewhere nearby, I would suspect perhaps some large AC fans, or maybe generator coil whine? It's persistent, around both ~2587Hz and ~2475Hz peaks, so a quite high pitched tone that's been driving me insane. The moment I open a window it's just excruciatingly "there", and even with windows shut it's still faintly there in background.
I don't know how somehow no one else has complained/gotten it fixed in this long. I'm overall use by now to manhattan noise, but this kind of persistent high pitched tone is another level of noise annoyance. I know the general direction it's coming from, and have few ideas for which buildings/devices it might be based on just seeing from my window, but pinpointing this kind of tone is difficult.
Again, might not be your expertise at all, but if you know of how I could proceed with it, to either find the source, and/or report this somehow for an investigation (311 ? some other agency? ) ? Thanks upfront!
I have been dealing with something very similar -
I am not certain if the frequencies are in the range of what you are experiencing but I have found a device called a "Bat Detector" which is a simple circuit board that uses a directional mic array to help locate bats in dark environments. It plugs into a pair of headphones and has a frequency control knob so you can try to dial in the sound you are looking for.
I don't live in an area as dense as yours but I would try mounting the detector to a tripod with some kind of sighting scope to be able to aim it with some precision.
>We’re establishing the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund as a wholly-owned LLC—rather than a 501(c)(3) or other format—to give adjustability between different forms of giving.
Same thing that happened to Starbucks. Online and drive-through orders make more money with less work, so they concentrated on optimizing those while killing the brand.
Reasonable minds can disagree on a citizen’s right to speak freely versus his neighbor’s right to not have their feelings hurt by words, but I can’t fathom a reasonable argument why such a protection should only apply to government workers and the police.
It’s misleading to post model output on a blog, especially when the about says
> This blog is where I write about what I find.
Why not simply include a disclaimer that it was AI model output not his own writing? Because humans don’t like AI writing and the article wouldn’t be featured on as many tech news sites. Hence the sin of omission, the choice to mislead.
For starters, IBM did also do the CPU for the GameCube, and that was likely a part of the Wii using an upgraded PPC arch for that.
On the flipside, there is the theory (I think even Copetti brings it up in their XBox 360 Architecture breakdown [0]) that IBM using the Cell PPE for the 360's tri-cores left a sour taste in Toshiba, but more-so Sony's mouths.
I think the big 'X factor' though, was that, for as much pain as it caused AMD in the short term, (it's so easy to forget their 'malaise' era, i.e. Early Bulldozer and the GloFo split pains to their margins[1]), AMD made all the 'right' choices to let the console vendors have their cake and eat it too.
Namely, AMD was more than happy to do a custom core if there was a volume contract (similar to what IBM was willing to for the 360/GC/Wii) but also now had a capable, in-house GPU. (And thankfully had Bobcat as a stepping point towards Jaguar[2])
There's part of me that asks, if AMD had an ARM core, if we would have all Consoles powered by AMD chips now. Nintendo likely bought into Tegra because it was an ARM core, and for better or worse their mobile stuff by the time of making that choice had 15+ years of proven ARM success (GBA, DS, 3DS) behind it.
(See also, Intel in the 2010s scrambling with half-assed promises of integrating custom functionality or FPGAs with x86 cores.)
[1] - From what I recollect, the GloFo split and how the contracts were drawn up as far as their production, had a huge impact on their ability to produce due to yields and thermals, as well as the contracts for how GloFo got paid; it was at least part of them diversifying with TSMC as soon as they reasonably could.
[2] - As a Rant, I am pretty sure, if Jaguar had Desktop/Mobile versions that included a Dual channel DDR controller, they would have cleaned up on the low cost laptop market. I had one with, I think it was an A5000 or A5200, and for how tiny the battery was it could last wayyyy longer than any of the intel laptops I had for the time, but churned if you were doing memory heavy stuff.
> On the flipside, there is the theory (I think even Copetti brings it up in their XBox 360 Architecture breakdown [0]) that IBM using the Cell PPE for the 360's tri-cores left a sour taste in Toshiba, but more-so Sony's mouths.
It's more than a theory. It's pretty much spelled out explicitly in The Race For A New Game Machine how salty not just Sony and Toshiba were in the broad sense, but also the Sony and Toshiba engineers that the IBM team worked with felt pretty betrayed.
Intel did release a few generations of their Xeons with an Arria built in but it's been a couple years since the last release. It's a cool idea but I think all the money dried up quick once the AI boom started. Plus they spun off Altera so I doubt they'll be doing it again.
>There's part of me that asks, if AMD had an ARM core, if we would have all Consoles powered by AMD chips now. Nintendo likely bought into Tegra because it was an ARM core, and for better or worse their mobile stuff by the time of making that choice had 15+ years of proven ARM success (GBA, DS, 3DS) behind it.
AMD worked on a ARM core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_K12 but I'm not sure it would had work, they were never the best on the power consumption, so I'm not sure it would have been a good choice for the Switch.
The story about that AMD ARM core is that they were making it for Amazon. Performance was not good enough so it was canned. Amazon then went on to make their own chips called Graviton.
I think Nintendo used Tegra because it was super cheap. AMD has access to the same ARM cores as everyone else (see Seattle and Sound Waves) but a semi-custom chip would have been more expensive than an overstocked Tegra.
To your point... yeah, Switch was the only 'real' big volume hit for Tegra that I remember (Although I did like my 2012 Nexus 7) with any staying power.
Hell Nvidia was so desperate they did the whole Shield thing...
PS3 used the Cell processor but it’s debatable how much that was an asset vs handicap. Total PlayStation sales dropped for that generation vs both PS2 and PS4. The manufacturing costs didn’t fall nearly as fast as expected and it was a poor fit in terms of cross platform development etc.
I'm guessing that they were safe in that it was more or less a 'codename' for a specific product's CPU that nobody else could buy, versus a product out on the market, left enough clear separation to avoid Trademark complaints.
The combined might of IBM and Microsoft's legal teams, even (possibly even moreso?) then, was better than Intel's to be sure.
Because simple similarity doesn’t usually result in a lawsuit? Especially if one of the words isn’t a public product name and also happens to be an existing word with no existing specific use in the industry.
Pre-existing word like “Word” “Excel” “Apple” etc.
We know about “Xenon” because they used the internal name outside the company. There’s zero difference between an unofficial and official branding when you’re using it in press releases.
That being said I think it's a natural consequence of the difference between a mainframe and commodity servers. A mainframe is going to be running pretty disparate workloads simultaneously, so it makes sense to steal from your neighbor if they aren't using their cache. Whereas it's more likely that a commodity server is just running the same server on each core, and if you have a different workload, you pick a different shape of server to run it on. There are pros and cons to both.
I do wonder about the spectre consequences of borrowing cache lines from other cores though.
Even though their CPUs are insanely fast, the real power of mainframes is in their IO. The amount of data you can push through those machines is absolutely mind blowing.
Historically this was because each I/O "channel" was a separate computer that handled the actual communication with the device, be it a terminal, disk, tape drive, card reader, printer, etc. and exchange data with the CPU via DMA. This allowed mainframe CPUs, which in the past weren't particularly fast, to handle huge workloads involving hundreds or thousands of users. These days, even commodity computers get blazing fast I/O to bus mastering devices. Where the mainframes win today is on reliability, built-in redundancy, hot-pluggability and expandability of components (you can just plug in CPUs, memory, disks, and network interfaces as long as you can afford them with the machine still running), and service and support. (Mainframes phone home immediately if they detect problems and an IBM service person will be on site the same day to fix it.)
A 4-rack system is about 1.5 racks of CPUs and 2.5 racks of IO. That's a lot of IO for a single computer, all accessible at bus speeds.
Mere mortals such as me, have to make do with cloud-based clusters where the IO is distributed across multiple machines connected by very fast interconnects, but they don't behave as a single machine, nor have the IO always accessible at local bus speeds.
> Mainframes phone home immediately if they detect problems and an IBM service person will be on site the same day to fix it.
The joke usually went like this: technician shows up to fix the machine, operator says "We didn't call you", to what the technician answers "You didn't. Your computer did"
Basically for Telum II, (I don't know what changed here from Telum III, the core under discussion with the ARM decoders) each CPU core has a giant 36MB L2 cache. Then, rather than a discrete L3 cache, the cores keep track of L2 residency needed for that core's working set, and allocate the rest of their L2 to a shared pool that is the L3 cache. Then the same thing with L4 being the same pools in all of the other chips on the same drawer (which you can kind of think of as close to a single server).
I was one of them, but I don't think IBM hasn't innovated, my contention is more that they have de-emphasised software and hardware in favour of services, and they've moved away from consumer-facing activity to be entirely B2B, and that there is an overall feeling of slow decline.
Their hardware advances are real, Power chips are still excellent and IBM's mainframes are pretty unique, but the niche for both of those seems less relevant over time and some of this stuff looks to me like hype-work to keep the name relevant while the leadership place ever more emphasis on enterprise services and consultancy.
Maybe I'm wrong, but they aren't a company that get mentioned in the same breath as Microsoft, Google, Nvidia or Apple, not any more.
Yeah, a huge chunk of IBM's service revenue has always been effectively mainframe services, with wall street accounting spin.
I suspect that almost zero companies adopted mainframes after 1980 or so, so it's ALL legacy market. However, IBM always invests a lot of money in hardware to keep the mainframe perceptually leading edge and "sexy", so they can hold-on to those customers. So you gotta give them credit for that.
(IBM and Microsoft were always 'in the same breath' for years, Microsoft totally out-smarted them, and IBM gave up on that.)
To my understanding, the RP2350 has two ARM cores and two RISC-V cores, the two pairs are separate, and only one architecture can be used at a time on the chip.
nope. two "slots", each selectable from {ARM, RISCV}. In each, you pick one. so you can configure it at two arm cores, arm + riscv, or two riscv cores. dual-arch is possible, if you desire it
Thanks, and yea, you're right. Their top-level copy muddies the waters on this and makes it sound like what I wrote, but indeed, from their datasheet:
> The ARCHSEL register has one bit for each processor socket, so it is possible to request mixed combinations of Arm and RISC-V processors: either Arm core 0 and RISC-V core 1, or RISC-V core 0 and Arm core 1.
> Practical applications for this are limited, since this requires two separate program images. The two cores interoperate normally, including shared exclusives via the global monitor: a shared variable can be safely, concurrently accessed by an Arm processor performing ldrex, strex instructions and a RISC-V processor performing amoadd.w instructions, for example.
> Hardware supports debugging for a mixture of Arm and RISC-V processors, though this may prove challenging on the host software side. Debug resources for unused processors are dynamically marked as non-PRESENT in the top-level CoreSight ROM table.
What does IBM actually do? I just can never understand their business and operating model. It seems like they just do a bunch of random stuff and sell to the most enterprisey of enterprises.
You should dive into the topic of Mainframe. There are a lot of financial transaction to other critical infrastructure are dependent on it. And not just because of backward compatibility but technical superiority.
Yah it’s a bit wild. I had an internship there 10 years ago. The tech was fine (same shit you see at any tech company). The vibe however was just like — wow this place was probably cool 50 years ago
The z mainframe team does good technical work but then the high price cancels out all the value of that work. I'm not sure if that counts as innovation or not.
At this point no one is buying into mainframes are they?
So they are just selling to the existing pool of users for which the price just has to come in under the cost/risk of rewriting all their ancient stuff.
> At this point no one is buying into mainframes are they?
If you want to be a high-volume consumer bank (insurance is similar - it's about processing a high volume of transactions), you have few alternatives. You can get a couple mainframes (you should place them in different datacenters), with their extreme reliability and stability, or you can build your infrastructure with commodity distributed systems, but then you'll need to build the same level of reliability out of your unreliable components. Current solutions are getting really good at that, but it's your job to integrate them. In the end, it's not really a matter of how much money you spend, but how you spend it - the numbers will closely match.
Regulators don't really care how you do it, as long as you don't fail to provide adequate guarantees to your customers (banking is extremely regulated, and customers are well protected).
There are many "new banks" that have been using cloud. It remains to be seen if they'll opt to migrate their stacks to mainframes, in which case, the ARM support might come in handy, as more packages are better optimized (as in using platform-specific functionality) for ARM than for s390x (where I don't think many people spend much time).
A single mainframe can handle workloads that would take dozens of x86 cloud servers, with nine nines of uptime. If you can afford it it pays for itself in terms of reliability and scalability.
Not totally - it's really nice when you don't have to worry about complex cluster scaling and it's all nice and vertical. Everything in those machines is also hot swappable so really the only downtime will be from an application defect or a catastrophic event (fire in the datacenter).
Sometimes quality of service matters more than cost.
If the consumer segment started to develop a sense that their payment cards were glitchy or unreliable, our economy could suffer real consequences. Error free, secure, instant payment experiences are essential. Go visit a local grocery store and measure how long it takes to authorize a transaction each time a card is presented to the terminal. Pay special attention to how fast the Visa and American Express networks are. At my local Kroger the terminal and network setup is so fast that you can use the chip reader almost like a mag stripe reader.
Fingering was huge at my university in the late 90s and seemed very focused on relationships. Passive aggressive and extremely emo .plans was very much a thing when some people’s feelings were hurt. If you were interested in someone you were definitely fingering them to see from where they were last logged in (we used to call this finger stalking).
Come to think of it I setup my first “date” (more like a hookup) over unix talk.
We had a legit proto social network going, all over telnet!
Haha that was the case at my uni too. I met my (ex) girlfriend on the unix system at uni through `talk` and `to` [1]. A lot of the CS students (me included) had .plans that we would update regularly as sort of proto-blogs. Definitely a lot of finger stalking (and `flon` [1] stalking as well).
No, that I think would be Match.com or something along those lines. This is like the grandfather or grand-grandfather of Tinder, but not even intentionally.
What I find funny is how an Estonian proverb/saying would fit here quite nicely: “don’t try to teach your grandfather how to have sex.” In this case, the grandfather didn’t need teaching - it was molded by the era into what was necessary.
match.com is a company that literally owns Tinder and nearly every "dating site" btw (even the one you're thinking of, it doesn't matter, it owns all of them including the ones that used to pride themselves on not being owned by match.com).
It was awesome to see which lab and xterm someone was on in college so you could pop by. Plus, when you used the xterms, you never had to wait for an open computer!
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