Posts

The Paradox Machine

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Twenty years ago I made a discovery that was too far ahead of its time. I called the invention the paradox machine, in line with other epistemically impossible devices like the perpetuum mobile and the time machine. At the time I thought that it would take at least 20 years until technology had evolved to the state that it would be feasible to implement a paradox machine. Recent advances in physics and quantum computing lead me to believe that building one would be possible with today’s technology. A time machine as seen in the 1960 film The Time Machine , based on the novella by H. G. Wells. The paradox machine is a computer and solves impossible or untraceable problems. It however uses a model of computation totally different from traditional computers or even most other quantum computers. Instead of causality it is driven by paradox. Results are implied from the precondition. In one possible implementation a pseudo time machine is used. The paradox machine avoids a time paradox by

How to Atiflash on a Mac Pro without Windows or boot screen

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Things you need: Mac Pro with PC graphics card installed Live Linux installation DVD USB dongle with  Atiflash for Linux There is a version of Atiflash available for Linux (now renamed amdvbflash). The flash tool will not see the PCIe graphics cards if it is run on Linux in EFI mode. To force Linux on a Mac Pro to boot in legacy BIOS mode, start it from a live DVD. Before you start, make sure your Mac Pro reliably boots to your macOS partition without a need to use the boot screen. You can then install your new PC graphics card in the Mac Pro. There is no need to remove it at any point.   Download  and c opy the amdvbflash file to a folder on a USB flash drive or other removable media. Connect it to your Mac Pro. Boot to live Linux by pressing  "C"  at startup. Copy  amdvbflash  to the RAM disc by dragging your working folder to the  Downloads  folder. Open terminal and  cd  to ./Downloads/<your_folder>/ Make  amdvbflash  executable using the graphic interface or with t

Rosetta 2 explained

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(This is my assumption on how Apple's new Rosetta 2 works.) Rosetta 2 is not an emulator. It is a compiler that translates from one instruction set to another. This translation is part of the process where code and libraries are loaded into caches. Most likely Rosetta 2 is integrated into the dynamic linker dyld. The compiled code should execute at nearly native speed. Microsoft has a similar system for its Windows 10 ARM version. It works both ways; ARM apps can be executed on Intel PCs. The translation maps instructions and registers from one instruction set architecture to another. It is easy to compile from a limited instruction set to a more advanced instruction set. The Windows 10 implementation is good at translation 32-bit x86 and ARM core to 64-bit processors. It may not be able to translate 64-bit code. Apple has depreciated 32-bit apps, so I believe Rosetta 2 should be able to handle 64-bit code. One way of making this possible might be to limit compiler output to a comm

Is the Southbridge Dead?

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The main component on the logic board of the new 2019 Mac Pro is the massive PCIe switch that directs the pool of 64 PCIe lanes to the eight PCIe slots. At the same time, the role of the southbridge has all but vanished. None of the functions of the 33 different ports provided by the Intel® C621 southbridge are in use in a default configuration or the Mac Pro. Here Apple is setting a trend. Future PCs are likely to completely abolish the southbridge . The Mac Pro 7,1 logic board by iFixit . The yellow rectangle marks the Intel C621 southbridge. What is a the southebridge? Early PCs were built around a parallel bus. 8-bit computers from the 1970s would have a case with a passive backplane. Identical connectors would sit next each other, with the corresponding pins tied to each other in the backplane to form a bus. One connector would house a processor card while others would hold memory and input/output cards. In early PCs like the IBM PC and the Apple II the processor and part of the r

Why faster computers only waste more energy...

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The Internet is full of content that does nothing but sucks an unlimited amount of computer resources and energy, producing greater and greater amounts of heat and noise.  One of the worst offenders is Flash Player, with energy-sucking ads all over the web. Even if you disable Flash Player, it no longer helps, HTLM4 and HTLM5 enabled browsers are able to play the distractions, possibly with even more energy wasted. I recently upgraded my dual core Pentium E2160 to a faster Core i3 thinking that my web surfing would be less frustrating. All I seem to have done is made more noise and increased my already huge electricity bill.  I opened four pages on the Finnish IKEA site. Made some tea, and by the time I returned to my desk I had all four cores running at 100% with processor temperatures rising to 91 degrees Celsius. I quickly realized that each one of the pages was stuck in an unthrottled endless loop sucking up all the computing resources it could access. Four pages equals four cores.