Excellent - I do subscribe to the channel but I missed that one. Love the whine - now that's what I am talking about.

What would really help the adoption of EV is if the motors made the sound that the Jubilee Line trains make in London. They use AC motors fed from the same DC source that other underground trains use, but the switching of the thyristors (it was a moment in time when it was the technology of choice) makes this wonderful whooping sound as the train accelerates. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Waaaaay, way back when CPUs were much slower, we designed things called associative memory, and content-addressable memory (which we still use in network switches) all about distributing the logic functions within the memory, so we could avoid the fetch/process/store cycle. Did we forget all of that technology and research only to reinvent it now ?

Imagine that. People abusing AI to continue to prove that Rule 34 is indeed true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

But this is exactly what companies like IBM did in the 60s and 70s to earn a right to sell into government contracts around the world. UK? Build two manufacturing plants and a lab, we will take you seriously. Semiconductor manufacturing in Essonnes in France, along with Montpelier; plants in Sindelfingen in Germany and Vimercate in Italy. It was part of the cost of doing business - invest in our country, and we will consider your for our driver licencing agencies and tax offices, our military and security services; we will let you fairly compete against our own indigenous suppliers like Bull, Siemens, Olivetti, ICL ..

If GB is to survive a post-Brexit world, putting a semi fab here is not my favourite kind of industry. The idea of semi fab location is to put it in relatively low cost locations, where people care less about huge amounts of water and energy required, or toxic waste to be disposed of, and it can be run in a relatively automatied fashion, with no skills transfer from an IP or design point of view, and all of the profits go out of the back door back to the US. Personally, I don't think that is the kind of branding we want attached to GB in the future. You'd find GB just creating a freezone in which these factories operate outside of the virtual borders of the United Kingdom just for a few thousand jobs.

I think we have some real skills to exploit in GB for technologies that can be exported; for addressing the challenges of global heating; developing circular economies. I would look to Europe and see what they need from a third country that would really, really benefit them. How about being the recycling masters of Europe? Don't ship your plastics and all that around the world to be deposited in a stream in Myanmar. Send them to the GB where we will develop advanced recycling technologies; where we will work with the EU on developing packaging for consumables that can be better recycled; on enzyme technologies to create usable source material from plastics.; using advanced AI techniques for sorting and separating; embracing the need for recycling and re-use for materials for batteries and electric vehicles that will be consumed in the sudden rush to electrification - where there's muck, there's brass; building yet more off- and on-shore wind energy that we can sell to Europe via the connectors, to compete with the production of electricity via gas. Grow the recycling and long term storage of nuclear waste from the French and other big users of nuclear energy in Europe. Work with the US on the development and production of new nuclear energy sources like Thorium in container sized delivery for commuity power projects and sell the products to Europe - hey, we can work with the US on nuclear power plants for submarines, why not work on making small community nukes in a collaboration?.

Hey Europe, we can be your recycling friend next door, and you don't have to worry about pesky EU regulations.

Strangely enough in the original Brainiacs vs Speed Demons articles in Microprocessor Report, they put IBM Power in the Brainiac camp, so they didn't think of it as a RISC engine. Reduced Instruction Set Complexity, at most.

Still wins my Favourite Mnemonic award for an instruction - Enforce In Order Execution of I/O Operations, or somesuch. EIEIO.

I disagree. Vendor logic, in general went through a Corporate component qualification process. Most divisions in IBM went to CCP in Burlington for its parts - so once available to one development group in IBM, they were available to all. Even TTL components - 7400 series - were qualified, and then supplied to IBM with IBM part numbers. What Boca did, to avoid the costs of the central procurement and qualification process (which wasn't cheap or easy - I did it once upon a time for TIL311 LED displays) was to step completely outside the normal IBM procurement, development and manufacturing processes. That's why the product was as cheap to manufacture as it was, which by the time IBM had its traditional markup only made it expensive, and not extortionate.

There was a lovely combination of factors, none of which would have compelled by itself. As well as all of the other factors, I think the physical packaging was a big part. 8088 / 86 was in a 40-pin plastic package with tinned pins. 68000 was in a 64-pin ceramic package, with gold pins. So, a socketed version was going to have to be a 64-pin gold socket, not a 40-pin tinned socket (and IBM would not countenance putting dissimilar metals on pin and socket for reliability reasons). You couldn't solder the 64-pin part reliably, since the wave soldering used at the time would heat the part from one end to the other, causing the ceramic to crack. IBM would therefore not use 68000 in the PC until, and unless it arrived in the 68008 variant.

IBM had its own processors that it could have called on as well - UC.5, UC1, Thebes - but that would have effectively prevented the cloning business, and that I am sure was the key component part of the success of the IBM PC "architecture" for want of a better word.

The Lancet have recommended a UK Public Inquiry .... https://www.thelancet.com/jour...

You forgot Lattice. That's a third.

Way, way back, 40 years ago when we had terminal rooms rather than one per desk, I wrote an IOS3270 application that put up a dummy login prompt for the local VM system. It presented such a faithful reproduction of VM that I only left it running for a morning before having passwords for half of my colleagues. They'd wander in to the terminal room, see the VM screen, hit enter, log in and off it went. The only tricky bit for me was to snag the userid and password, stuffing it into a file and then passing the creds on to a real VM session without anything appearing on the screen. Actually, my code was imperfect, and anyone really thinking about what they saw on the screen should have raised an alert or told someone, but nobody did. After that I have never been surprised about people being taken in by even a modest hack.

about the new Honda EV to be made available real soon now .... https://www.honda.co.uk/cars/n...

My oldest pair of speakers still in daily use are a pair of Kef Concertos that are approaching 50 years old. Love them to bits. They are driven by a Cambridge P60 amp from a similar vintage. These things do need a bit of TLC to keep them going, but these principles of keeping things going for as long as possible, without buying new and trashing the old ones are something we all need to re-learn, for the planet's sake. Companies are just going to have to learn how to make money and survive as an enterprise without turning everything in our homes into consumables.