bjn

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• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  You haven’t really written a post apocalypse novel, though you’ve touched on apocalypses either in the distance past or alternate timelines....
• Commented on Facts of Life and Death
  I'm part way through switching 12V spots to 240V LEDs through the house, which involves an occasionally difficult rewiring of hard to reach transforms. I'm also swapping the spotlight dimmer to an LED friendly dimmer, and the things do flicker...
• Commented on Facts of Life and Death
  One result of Brexit will likely be even more deregulation, possibly radical deregulation. As the UK becomes un-attractive to invest in because of Brexit (lack of access to markets, increased costs of doing business, smaller talent pool to draw on,...
• Commented on Sad Trombone Exoplanet Reality Check
  Dead file formats are why open standards are hugely important. We've mostly transitioned to a worlds of "it's just a collection of bits" and underlying physical formats are starting to become less significant. How those bits are organised is still...
• Commented on Sad Trombone Exoplanet Reality Check
  Yuri Milner's thing is not driven by a continuous laser, it's meant to be a ground based laser array that pulses once per day driving the fleet of nano-ships. They don't seem to have a plan as to how to...
• Commented on Reality is broken
  Yep!...
• Commented on A game of consequences
  Found Iain's take on it....
• Commented on A game of consequences
  Can't remember where I read it, but the genesis of Iain Banks's Culture were fragile space colonies who fell out with the societies that created them and whose inhabitants banded together into highly egalitarian societies. The reasoning being that all...
• Commented on Fantasy shibboleths
  Given that states prioritise military spending over many other things, I can see why they'd go for magic swords over magic plowshares, especially if magic is expensive and hard to commodify....
• Commented on Fantasy shibboleths
  I wouldn't have dropped lunged at Rob Roy when he comes in with those big cuts, you might skewer him, but there's a good chance he will still connect with you. Its not a points fight and thrust aren't instant...
• Commented on Fantasy shibboleths
  Half swording from 1410. A real joy to do. Turns the sword into a combination short spear/crowbar. Attack the gaps in their armour, if that doesn't work batter them, if that doesn't work, put them in a lock and/or throw...
• Commented on Fantasy shibboleths
  I accept that a poleax is going to do some damage to plate, as will a couched lance. My original point was raised with respect to bad fantasy/histfic where they have hand weapons going through various armours as if they...
• Commented on Fantasy shibboleths
  My bunch have played with doing things to modern riveted mail sitting in a free swinging pig carcass (which was turned into sausages afterwards). No sword could cut through it, but we could penetrate it fairly easily with a strong...
• Commented on Fantasy shibboleths
  This whole armour discussion was kicked off by my objection to the ease of which armour is penetrated in much fiction, especially TV/Films. In no way am I denying that archery was effective militarily, completely agree with the points you...
• Commented on Fantasy shibboleths
  I typed a big reply and lots it due to an expired session. Gah. Display armours, do you mean fancy armours for show as opposed to use? Then those are designed to look good and be easy to wear and...
• Commented on Fantasy shibboleths
  Firstly the period is too late for me, highland broadsword I've only done one class on, rapier a but more. I'm Mr Italian Late Mediaeval. I could bore folks here on what's wrong with it, and as these things got...
• Commented on Fantasy shibboleths
  You're right-ish about the weights. My late own late full plate over mail C14th harness is around 35kg. I was being a bit melodramatic. Shouldn't have been. That said, you can't pierce medieval plate with a sword point, not going...
• Commented on Fantasy shibboleths
  Two of my shibboleths is non-functional and poorly designed armour. Usually at it's worst in the visual mediums as opposed to literature. Why are people lumping around 50kg+ of steel if the damn thing doesn't have the slightest effect against...
• Commented on Fantasy shibboleths
  Thanks for clearing that up. Basically solo drills with a purpose....
• Commented on Fantasy shibboleths
  I was only clarifying the cost of swords, spears are definitely going to be cheaper, just a knife on a stick. I'm not disputing the fact that you'd also want to arm an army mainly with pole weapons, it's also...
• Commented on Fantasy shibboleths
  I'm a huge historical european martial arts geek and love swords in a way that is probably slightly creepy. I've been waving swords about for years and I even teach a small HEMA class. I've read quite a few ancient...
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  I thought their 16nm was still at the 'small batch stage'. Still somewhat surprised AMD hasn't shifted to 20nm for their GPUs....
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  Applauds!...
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  I've actually given talks on exactly that point. That price was achieved by packaging two massively parallel AMD chips built on a 28nm process, each with 6B+ transistors. However AMD has been stuck at a 28nm process since 2012 and...
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  "Also, most of the power in a PC is in the graphics, not the CPU silicon. Anything video, for example, lends itself to easy parallel programming." True-ish for around 50% of non trivial image processing algorithms, but you still need...
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  Flat our serial compute speed still matters for many things. There is a lot of software isn't really capable of being parallelised much at all. Word processors for example can't take advantage of all the massive parallelism available on a...
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  "No, it's really about processing power for a given cost. " (386ing!) If the 'it' you are refering to is Moore's Law, you are dead wrong. The key phrase from his paper is... The complexity for minimum component costs has...
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  Welcome! Thank you. I've been lurking for a bit....
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  "No, it's really about processing power for a given cost. And, almost all of the interesting future applications are parallel processing oriented." Linking density to individual transistor costs are what Moore's law is about. General purpose processors, DSPs, memory, I/O...
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  One of my non-SF Shibboleth's, Moore's law is about the number of transistors you can cram into a given area, rather than the "performance" of a device. In general, these do not scale linearly with each other. We may get...