A lot of people talk about how Columbus was genocidal and various other kinds of awful, but there isn't enough coverage of how much of an idiot he was.'nThere's a myth that he was trying to sail around the world to prove that the Earth was round.
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A lot of people talk about how Columbus was genocidal and various other kinds of awful, but there isn't enough coverage of how much of an idiot he was.
There's a myth that he was trying to sail around the world to prove that the Earth was round. This wasn't a thing that needed proving. The ancient Greeks not only knew that the Earth was round, they fairly accurately measured the diameter. By the time of Columbus this had been refined with even more accurate results.
Columbus wanted to open up a trade route to India via the ocean. He struggled to get funding because ships of that time couldn't carry enough supplies to feed the crew for the time it would take to sail all of the way from Portugal to India in a great circle arc. They would all starve before they got half way.
He was lucky that there was an unexpected continent in the middle (which he thought was India, because he had zero clue about the size of the Earth) and that the people he met were Indians (because he was racist).
He was a lucky idiot. I'm sure you can think of modern analogues.
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Oggi le persone chiedono ai propri rappresentanti politici, ai propri leader, la rimozione
Non la fiducia, lo sforzo caparbio, la lotta per migliorare, ma la rimozione
La rimozione dei propri problemi, dalle difficoltà, dai fastidi della vitaÈ questo il vero problema
È questo che vuol dire vivere, in modo del tutto errato e totalmente sbiellato, la vita
Vivere una fantasia dorata e rosa da film
Essere nel paradigma allucinato del consumismo
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Reverse-Engineering the Intel 8087 Stack Circuitry
Although something that’s taken for granted these days, the ability to perform floating-point operations in hardware was, for the longest time, something reserved for people with big wallets. This began to change around the time that Intel released the 8087 FPU coprocessor in 1980, featuring hardware support for floating-point arithmetic at a blistering 50 KFLOPS. Notably, the 8087 uses a stack-based architecture, a major departure from existing FPUs. Recently [Ken Shirriff] took a literal closer look at this stack circuitry to see what it looks like and how it works.
Nearly half of the 8087’s die is taken up by the microcode frontend and bus controller, with a block containing constants like π alongside the FP calculation-processing datapath section taking up much of the rest. Nestled along the side are the eight registers and the stack controller. At 80 bits per FP number, the required registers and related were pretty sizeable for the era, especially when you consider that the roughly 60,000 transistors in the 8087 were paired alongside the 29,000 transistors in the 16-bit 8086.
Each of the 8087’s registers is selected by the decoded instructions via a lot of wiring that can still be fairly easily traced despite the FPU’s die being larger than the CPU it accompanied. As for the unique stack-based register approach, this turned out to be mostly a hindrance, and the reason why the x87 FP instructions in the x86 ISA are still quite maligned today. Yet with careful use, providing a big boost over traditional code, this made it a success by that benchmark, even if MMX, SSE, and others reverted to a stackless design.
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Finger counting. computus compilation, Lorsch 9th century. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. lat. 1449, fol. 118v.
#medieval #MedievalArt
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@anubiarts at the other end:
Proprietary: let's call the web browser some colonial name like Explorer, Safari
FLOSS: the menu entry for the web browser must read Web Browser because otherwise the user will be confused about what it does.
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@Gina hi Gina, I’m a Canberra based Red Hatter and also on the Linux Australia council (for at least the next month or so).
Happy to help if I can.
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Sophistry as a Service
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