asciilifeform: '... and with strange eons even death may die.'
asciilifeform: dub: let me guess. mandatory u.s. army 'anti-terrorist training' ?
asciilifeform: incidentally, we know that gate delay is thermally ticklish. how? easy - asynchronous circuits will speed up or slow down depending on temperature.
asciilifeform often wonders about thermal behaviour of the semiconductor widgetry connected to such clocks, and whether anyone even gives a fuck
asciilifeform laughs, reading log, seeing people thinking that microwave clock is for knowing the time.
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: American Government Edits Wikipedia On Nobody Ever - USGDot
asciilifeform digs for ancient paper regarding maliciously estimating a remote machine's temperature using userspace-observable clock drifts
asciilifeform: also must recall that machine contains other components with quartz oscillators - and some of these components sit on the bus and can toss interrupts.
asciilifeform: likewise - perhaps there is no need to point this out, but the linux/bsd kernel is also not a scientific instrument.☟︎
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: handily inside thermal drift range then.
asciilifeform: incidentally, quartz oscillators generally don't come in the GHz range. there's a fairly modest (<100MHz) crystal and a PLL multiplier. which compounds any error...
asciilifeform: unless the magnitude of the skew is more than 10 msec or so
asciilifeform: japan taught sr to engineers. america - no.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: actually i first learned of this when studying the demise of american tv makers.
asciilifeform: nubbins`: try example 'closer to home,' even. last generation of CRT displays had to include sr correction (short tube, less glass, but higher gun voltage - fast electrons.)
asciilifeform: 'gps' and similar navigation systems, for example, live and die on atomic clock (and correct for SR!)
asciilifeform: if you need serious (accurate and precise) timing, must use an instrument built for that purpose.
asciilifeform: back to clocks: it is grave mistake to regard a pc clock as a scientific instrument. you can get pretty good thermal stability out of a quartz resonator, using an 'oven' (more or less just like kitchen oven, in miniature - maintain controlled temperature.) but this is never found in a consumer appliance.
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: there is an entire 'culture' of audio voodoo.
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: the inescapable question, is, as before, what one must smoke.
asciilifeform: and here i thought the magic green marker was state of the art.
asciilifeform: 'put the rubidium oscillator's sine output into the cd player... it will enhance the sound quality greatly.'
asciilifeform: unlike cesium clocks, these are inexpensive - radio stations in the civilized works are required to use them.
asciilifeform waits for announcement of mpex plant purchasing rhubidium frequency standard
asciilifeform: a traditional pc comes with at least 2 measurable oscillators (cpu crystal and 18hz real time clock)
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: this is actually a traditional means of generating 'hardware entropy' on a pc. i rediscovered it as a kid, thought i 'had something nice'
asciilifeform: they have some - limited - thermal compensation.
asciilifeform: typical quartz oscillators are rated to 2%
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: most obvious explanation is clocks.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: describe briefly the geometry of the wire.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: sure. symbionts. now engineer some...
asciilifeform: the problem, in case anyone doesn't know, is presently dealt with through luck and brute force.
asciilifeform: short version - bacterium isn't a sled dog. he won't work if he doesn't 'want' to. (expressed in actual flesh as the formulation: the ones without the 'work' trait - e.g. secreting dope - tend to outperform their 'useful' peers in reproduction)
asciilifeform: the point about 'liveware generally doesn't wanna be used' can only be appreciated by folks who tried to breed industrially useful bacteria (e.g. e. coli secreting a saleable substance) - and the problems in that business
asciilifeform: motorcycle is considerably less efficient, thermodynamically, than horse - but more popular for, imho, good reason...
asciilifeform: used. Machines aren't supposed to be like that. Machines are supposed to do what you want. Which means that both the designer and the user need to control them.' (one mr. kreinin, with whom i have a number of disagreements, some public, but good point about meatware. -- http://yosefk.com/blog/high-level-cpu-follow-up.html)
asciilifeform: 'I want to build machines to do stuff that someone "like us" wouldn't want to do, for any of the several reasons (the job is hard/boring/stinky/whatever). And once I've built them, I want people to be able to use them. Please note this last point. People and other "nature's computers", like animals and fungi, aren't supposed to be "used". In fact, all those systems spend a huge amount of resources to avoid being
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: nsa-sponsored attempt to survive << they won't really worry until wintel stops being a thing.
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: lol at trying to rationally monitor or quota resources on x86 box.
asciilifeform: who expects people to jump into the biodiesel fermenter on their own will.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: nsa 'expellas furca, tamen usque recurret.'
asciilifeform: decimation: the real lesson (which always seemed rather obvious to me, but what the hell) is that the numbers are uninteresting except in so far as they shed light on the mechanics of the source
asciilifeform: decimation: if you had an infinitely large pot, you could tip it over and drown the enemy.
asciilifeform: for one thing, in most cases a plaintext exists, and who can know where and in how many copies.
asciilifeform: but there is virtually never any good reason to attempt it.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: there are published recipes for this. see 'multi-party computation' literature.
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: if you know ~1 in 4 bits, you can trivially break.
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: this isn't how it works.
asciilifeform: it's a good job that f-students can't actually break mathematics.
asciilifeform: later found that in the original fortran, one could assign... to a constant.
asciilifeform: (setq #f #t) << actually evaluated this in a 'lisp' i wrote as a schoolboy. mega-lol.
asciilifeform: i sorta get the flavour here. perpetuum mobile, were it build, could perhaps also cure baldness.
asciilifeform: let's put it slightly differently. if it's also a chronoscope, this cannot be readily inferred from feynman's hypothetical.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: to be fair, the machine (as described originally by r. feynman) doesn't divine history a la asimov's 'chronoscope', but merely computes certain classes of function unusually cheaply.
asciilifeform: kakobrekla: why they stopped making them << ft meade's shipments of diddled ARM micros held up. budget blown on coke.
asciilifeform: kakobrekla: i suppose they keep the site up, for old time's sake
