New top-end Intel i9's have 18 cores/36 threads!

In 2013 when I built my current rig, I thought my i7 4930K was impressive with 6 cores/12 threads but Intel has blown past that with 12 core/14/16 & the big daddy at 18 cores!  More importantly these CPU's are in the Tera Flop range now finally...GPU's have been there for awhile ;-)

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3198430/components/intels-core-i9-starts-a-bloody-battle-for-enthusiast-pcs.html

If anyone's thinking of getting it...careful as aside from price, it requires a brand new chipset of course (this is why I build new comps every 5y or so instead of trying to upgrade parts ad hoc).

Meanwhile, checking the latest Top Supercomputers list

https://www.top500.org/lists/2016/11/

we see that China has the top 2, no way US closes that gap with Trump in charge ;-)  Seems the peak speed of which is 125K Tera Flops or 125 Peta Flops!  That's now in the ballpark of Exa Flops = 1000 Peta Flops...that's key because the best computational neuroscience estimates are that the Human brain computes at the Exa scale level!

You may be wondering, this new Intel chip with it's 18/36 cores can only do 1 or 2 Tera Flops while the supercomputer can do 125,000 Tera Flops???  Did I forget to mention that supercomp has >10 million cores!!! haha

Star Trek: Discovery

Finally, a real actual Trailer is out for the new installment of Star Trek!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8mesUEFjas

It "looks" very good, we'll have to see how the stories, characters and most important for me, the science of the show is!  ST has always been one to focus more on the Sci part of SciFi (and of course the human element, reflecting current issues etc) except maybe with the previous subpar installment ST: Enterprise (barely watchable!).

It's tentatively scheduled for Fall release...fingers crossed!  Can't wait!!

Good time to Image your OS Drive

I'm sure you all saw the news on Wanna Cry, the virulent Ransomware making the global rounds. Seems it does require some form of click to install itself and most of the time it's thru phishing scams which I never fall for (though I've seen some decent ones, most are obvious) and I've helped Carol become more adept at avoiding them as well.

Still you never know, so I figured it's as good a time as any to use my OS' (win 8.1) built in ability to create an Image of everything installed on my OS Drive (C:/Drive for most of us) and save that on my D:/Drive (4TB backup drive).  My image is almost 200 gigs but I got ~1.4TB left so I'm fine :-)

I recommend doing the same, in case you don't know, what the Image would do is say you got this Ransomware or some other bad virus or corruption, you could just do a clean reinstall of windows then once you've done that...can get everything back to the way it was from the untouched Storage drive where you stored your clean OS image!  Actually, I think you can skip the clean reinstall and directly load from the Image (this may be version dependent).

Here's a link that explains how to do this...quite easy!

https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/4241/how-to-create-a-system-image-in-windows-7/

Elon's Solar Tiles Debut

I first heard of this brilliant idea a few years ago, glad to see it come to fruition

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/05/10/2010211/teslas-highly-anticipated-solar-roofs-go-up-for-pre-order-today

Musk says the cost is comparable to traditional asphalt roofs (once you include energy savings, govt subsidies,...etc) but we'll have to see.  Our house is still <10 years old so I hope by the time I need a new roof this will be priced reasonably and all the kinks worked out.  Then we'd have to buy 1 or 2 of their PowerWall's as well so they can work in tandem.

https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/powerwall

Saving Space on an SSD!

If you bought an SSD for your OS a few years ago at least, then likely space is a precious commodity!  I built my last rig in 2013, SSD's were about $1/Gig back then so I got a great Samsung 840 Pro 256GB.  Love this SSD but with 256GB after 3-4 years you start to run out of space, I only have 1 giant game installed GTA V, takes nearly 80GB!!  A few smaller games and then some appz. I've been fighting with 10-20GB left for awhile now...I knew there must be some software out there that can help me but I wasn't even sure how to Google it.

Long story short and to save anyone else in this situation the trouble, I found this excellent free program called WinDirStat.

Using this program I found out NVIDIA, GARMIN and RAZER etc. don't clean up after themselves after each update so you could have 10 gigs in their download folder!  I found other install files that take up 40 gigs or so but these require a bit of extra work to figure out what can be deleted etc.  So I skipped that for now.

The big payoff came when I looked under the heading <Files>, it was taking about 40 gigs...with Hiberfil.sys accounting for 26 of that!  I figured that was to do with putting a system into Hibernation which I don't do, some quick research showed how to get rid of it safely.  Finally, the Pagefile.sys was also 10 gigs, I had set that thinking I have plenty of room (when I setup my system in 2013) but upon further reflection since I have 32GB of RAM, I don't even really need a Pagefile at all since I think the most use I ever saw was 15-16GB (I did leave a minimal one)!

So mission accomplished, I now nearly have 60GB of free space, won't be going into the red zone anytime soon!

UPDATE:  I now went back to that step of safely removing the Installer Files, can't remove them all as some are in use...this great little program can do the checks for you!  I now removed an extra 34gigs in orphaned installer files!!

https://www.ghacks.net/2015/12/13/patchcleaner-remove-orphan-windows-installer-files-to-free-up-disk-space/

Nuclear Fusion - We really are getting very close to viability!

One of the energy sources that will hopefully become viable for humanity in the near future is Nuclear Fusion (not Nuclear Fission which has been around for nearly 100 years!).  However, it's been just around the corner for 50 years or so.  The Engineering challenges are vast but there have been many instances of sustained Fusion reaction now (even a few where the energy output nearly matched the input - a level called Breakeven - one of the closest to this is the LNL National Ignition Laser based experiment - but I feel this approach may not be sustainable or commercially viable) so I don't think it's a stretch to say we're getting close now as opposed to back then.  Likely it was the media's usual hyperbole that lead to this cynicism!

Here's a short summary of those Engineering challenges, actually a very good introduction to NF in general!

http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/challenges/fusion.aspx

Since the article above didn't mention one of the coolest (and perhaps my personal fave approach)...The Stellarator, I'll link to details myself below.  I think this approach is very promising and some initial tests on plasma control went well, I believe a >30 minute test will take place in 2021 if that is passed then we can most definitely say we are very close indeed!

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/10/bizarre-reactor-might-save-nuclear-fusion

Looks like China & Australia see the potential of The Stellarator approach as they recently entered a partnership!

https://www.asianscientist.com/2017/04/academia/australia-china-fusion-energy/

Some of the latest news (few days ago) is a UK company called Tokamak Energy (Tokamak is a Russian term - most likely for Torus aka Donut - which is the shape of the most popular Reactor design) just went online and produced First Plasma (at around 100 million Celsius - about 10x hotter then core of the Sun, this is necessary since we cannot produce the immense pressures required which are provided by Gravity in the Sun's core!).

http://interestingengineering.com/uks-fusion-reactor-just-generated-first-plasma/

Universal Basic Income

It seems Ontario has now begun a Basic Income program in Hamilton, Lindsay & Thunder Bay.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/wynne-announcement-hamilton-1.4082476

The program will pay $17K for singles, $24K for families.  That's definitely a modest amount but probably reasonable for a pilot program.  Seems it will last 3 years of data gathering, then I suppose they will use that to either scrap it all together or I what I hope is to make it better.

Here's a good write up of this fascinating and ever more relevant topic...at the end of my "lecture" I point out some highlights from the link below, it's a bit long so you may prefer just to check that

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

One of the most common complaints critics have is that UBI will create a disincentive to work, to some degree this is true (and there is data on this -- check the Wiki) what most people who are not in High Tech or at least very plugged into the scene (such as your humble correspondent ;-) don't realize is that this question will be moot in as little as 10 years!  Sometime in the 2020's we will reach a true AI (as I've discussed in numerous posts!) at that point pretty much any job could be replaced by said AI.  Now, this is a complex subject which I don't want to go off on too big a tangent but these AI should have rights and hence they may not want to do all those jobs etc.  So how that will all shake out is hard to say.  But don't get too hopeful, Nanotech and 3D printing are also on the rise, so between these 3 amazing technologies the future of most jobs, not just manufacturing jobs but also most types of Lawyers, Doctors and Quants (such as myself)...etc will all be taken!

The point I'm trying to make is that  disincentive for work is irrelevant when there's no work!  So it's really with good foresight that many countries are seriously testing out what form of this program (likely will require a multi-variable approach in the sense that we change/adapt the form every 5 years or so to adapt to the changes technology is making to society) works best now!

Also, related to this are the people who don't believe in UBI, they usually advocate "jobs for everyone"...I find this to be a very antiquated mode of thinking!  It's like going back to the 1800's and outlawing textile looms because it put seamstresses out of a job (which incidentally what began the group called Luddites!).  For people who understand where technology is going they can see this is not the answer, there's been a long trend of automation, going back to the very first types of work, agrarian in nature...look how many people it now takes to run a farm, just a few!  As everything becomes more automated, we all have more free time (though parents to young children such as myself have trouble seeing that sometimes!) and will continue to do so as tech progresses.  Simple example would be a Nanotech based Replicator, like in Star Trek, this actually isn't that hard compared to many of the other future tech on that show.  No more shopping, no more cooking, cleaning up dishes etc.  Think how much more free-time we'd have!  My point is, if we force companies to keep human labor we will stifle this tech evolution, for instance we may not get to the stage where we have Replicators :-(  If you think about it, do you really want to work or is the more basic thing you want...money?  I know it's the latter for me so I certainly do not want to halt technology by handcuffing companies...UBI is the answer (what form is best?...that requires much research and experimentation!).  I do want to point out that companies will pay a significant portion of UBI, not sure how the optimal details will work out but take for instance a company akin to Microsoft that may gain a monopoly on AI labor, and another on Nanotech...these 2 companies would make Apple look like a Ma N Pa operation!  They would be ridiculously rich and so should pay their fair share to UBI!  If they don't...they lose anyway as nobody would have any money to buy their products!

Some people also question...what would you even do if you didn't work?  I think this is the ultimate 1st world problem! haha  I personally could list dozens of things!  But for those who lack imagination I'm sure we could run a variety of suggestions by you and at least a few of those would interest you!  Also the size of the UBI would limit what you could do but that's just a transitional phase, as Nanotech leads to buildings for example being created for a few $, money will go the way of the DoDo haha.  Even today with a modest UBI, you could study free online courses at great institutions like MIT on say M-Theory (potentially a Grand Unified Theory of Physics) or the collected works of Shakespeare or Mandarin...etc!  You could take up painting, carpentry...any number of activities!

Finally, there's many more interesting tangents to explore in this topic, but I have to do more research myself so let's save it for a future post!  I'll finish with a few highlights from the Wiki on UBI:

• Administrative Efficiency - The lack of means test or similar administration would allow for some saving on social welfare, which could be put towards the grant. The Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) describes one of the benefits of a basic income as having a lower overall cost than that of the current means-tested social welfare benefits,[9] and they have put forth proposals for implementation that they claim to be financially viable.[10]
• First, although most basic income supporters tend to be politically left, right-leaning supporters, at least since the 1970s, have argued that policies like basic income free welfare recipients from the paternalistic oversight of conditional welfare-state policies. Second, Philippe Van Parijs has argued that basic income at the highest sustainable level is needed to support real freedom, or the freedom to do whatever one "might want to do."
• Fox Piven holds the view that an income guarantee would benefit all workers by liberating them from the anxiety that results from the "tyranny of wage slavery" and provide opportunities for people to pursue different occupations and develop untapped potentials for creativity

Update:  A story about San Fran mulling a proposal to tax robots that take people's jobs...the money can be used to retrain those workers etc.

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/05/02/1958221/san-francisco-politician-jane-kim-is-exploring-a-tax-on-robots