User talk:JohnMashey

Welcome!

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Hello
Sorry to see you sucked in too :-) William M. Connolley (talk) 09:48, 2 February 2009 (UTC)

Well, not really sucked in... my wife's from Yorkshire, did her PhD at Imperial, got me copy of Selley's First Edition, and I've corresponded with him occasionally. We're up in British Columbia to ski a few times/year, and the wines around Lake Okanagan are actually getting interesting, even for a Californian who would not have thought "good Canadian wine" was a real phrase.

This particular discussion was incited by recently sipping some wine in Brit friends' new Mediterranean villa in the middle of 10 acres of recently-planted grapes in the Okanagan, and "Northward march of the grapes" was a lunch topic. Then I noticed WMC & Wikipedia getting whacked on this by Glen Raphael in comments at http://backseatdriving.blogspot.com/2009/01/10-of-earth-scientists-dont-think-temps.html ... so I figured I'd at least record what I knew while watching the SuperBowl.

JohnMashey (talk) 21:43, 2 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Ah well, sounds like a grim life compared to sunny Cambridge. But welcome anyway William M. Connolley (talk) 22:22, 2 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks
Thanks for stepping in with facts. Too much discussion seems to be based on "appears to me"-type comments based on pretty much no research. Just stepping in from time to time and pointing to what you've documented is very valuable. Guettarda (talk) 17:49, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

Request for a refactor
John, in a comment here, you implied that Heartland is guilty of money-laundering. I don't know much about the organization, but I know that serious charges shouldn't be bandied about. I'm not exactly sure what our policies regarding this are, but I'm sure such a comment could not be made without solid support from a reliable source if in an article. The standards may be looser for talk page comments, but I doubt this is acceptable. Would you consider refactoring your comment to avoid the implication? Note carefully, I'm not saying it isn't true - I have no particular knowledge of the situation, I'm merely noting it is simply asserted without proof. (You are free to respond here)-- SPhilbrick  T  17:20, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

possible conflict of interest relating to Wegman controversy
Hi John Mashey, I would like to draw your attention to the Conflict of Interest policy at WP:COI. If you are the same John Mashey who has brought plagiarism charges against Edward Wegman you would most probably be deemed as having a conflict of interest in discussions and articles on the same matter of your plagiarism charges against Edward Wegman. You should also be aware of the policy of WP:BLP which is taken very seriously. Otherwise, welcome to Wikipedia! Best wishes, Alex Harvey (talk) 13:14, 12 June 2011 (UTC)

Photo for your Wikibio?
John: I hadn't realized you had a wikibio -- I made a couple of small edits there, including a link to a nice external photo. Do you have a photo of yourself that you would like to donate to illustrate your bio? You handsome devil, you.... --Pete Tillman (talk) 20:04, 6 March 2012 (UTC)

MIS Stage 11
Since, uniquely, Marine Isotopic Stage 11 has its own article, that is the best initial place for that. I'll copy this section there. I think that "somebody" is you. Johnbod (talk) 01:31, 14 January 2014 (UTC)


 * OK, I'll work on it next week, suspecting I'd be the one to do it, but when thinking of editing a page I'd never examined, especially to reverse or cast doubt on conclusions, I always like to Talk first, in case somebody else was already working on it. MIS was definitely weird, as deglaciation took 2X longer than MIS 1,5,7,9,19, with 17 and 15 being intermediate.JohnMashey (talk) 21:48, 14 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I've no issue with changing or removing the comment on it at MIS, but it should stay very brief - a line at most I think. Also the rest of the article - does it seem ok? It took me to the edge of my limited scientific comfort zone. Johnbod (talk) 23:27, 14 January 2014 (UTC)

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Some MIPS history
I sent an email, but thought I should post here as well. I'm trying to track down some MIPS/DEC history, and if anyone knows it's you! Maury Markowitz (talk) 17:20, 27 June 2022 (UTC)


 * Sure, what's the question?
 * "Also, you posted some stuff on the PRISM talk page that looks like it was from another document, but it's not the one you linked to at the bottom. Was this posted anywhere?"
 * that's not from any other dpocument, although I may have posted a few snippets on comp.arch long ago, and a few are in one section of
 * Interactions, Impacts, and Coincidences of the First Golden Age of Computer Architecture
 * https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9623447 JohnMashey (talk) 20:28, 27 June 2022 (UTC)
 * The question is a bit of a shot in the dark. You were on the MIPS side at the time so you'll have a different perspective on this, but that is what I am looking for. Sometime around 2000, there was a lengthy post to one of the DEC-related usenet groups about the development of the DECStations. The post suggested that the performance of the initial systems was far below expectation because the compilers were at a low level of development. It basically suggested that DEC had been misled by MIPS as to the state of the development platform as a whole and it was not really ready for production. This led to infighting within DEC as the VAX-heads took it as evidence that RISC was just hot air. The overall thrust of the post was that DEC had bet the farm on going with MIPS and felt they had been burned, and this was one of the reasons they believed it was important to do Alpha so they would be in control of their own destiny, for better or worse. Does any of this sound plausible from what you know of the history? I've tried looking for the post several times without success. Maury Markowitz (talk) 11:52, 28 June 2022 (UTC)
 * Any chance you have a PDF of that article? I tried the Wiki Library but no luck there. Maury Markowitz (talk) 12:01, 28 June 2022 (UTC)


 * The unnamed poster was 100% wrong, sounds like a "vax uber alles" person. Review the PRISM talk page comments from me. Multiple groups inside DEC had done/wanted to do RISCs... Forest Baskett had worked on Stanford MIPS, then went to DEC Western Research Lab in Palo Alto (which did Titan, led by Forest, who then left for SGI. As I noted on PRISM page, DEC designers wanted to do RISC, but plans kept changing and they kept getting grabbed to work on VAXen. Next, DEC folks usually had copies of MIPS Performance Briefs, as we often traded public performance documents, and as I noted, the DEC deal started with me giving Bob Rodriquez the version as of January 1988. After the legal folderol, a couple people did a complete Ultrix port in 2-3 weeks, which doesn't happen if compilers are broken ... and of course had moved over their internal benchmark programs, so they had comprehensive benchmark data *months* before finalizing the deal. The MIPS compilers were evolutions of years of work at Stanford, and were relatively rare at the time on UNIX for having serious global optimization. They also had the de facto standard features from DEC and IBM. When Olsen sent out the Fellows group to do due diligence, I think there might have been one compiler person, but in an all-day session, I don't think we spent more than a few minutes on that. They already knew the compilers were solid, and of course Ultrix was already running. Most of the time was spent digging into details of the chips and their usability in different sorts of system designs, as their systems designers were champing at the bit to build all sorts of things. They also wanted to know about 64-bit (and we of course were already starting to plan for that). Finally, see "Performance from Architecture: Comparing a RISC and a CISC with Similar Hardware Organization", by 2 of DEC's top performance experts. Conclusion: "But while our quantitative results may change somewhat as compilers evolve, as more programs are measured, and as operating-system effects are included, we believe that the fundamental finding will stand up: from the architectural point of view (that is, neglecting cycle time), RISC as exemplified by MIPS offers a significant processor performance advantage over a VAX of comparable hardware organization." Anyway, certainly they wanted to be in control of their own destiny ... but the MIPS deal included rights to all the logic & ability to make variants if they wanted (like to add stuff to make VAX transition easier.) So, anyway, while DEC's internal motivations/plans were very complicated, MIPS compilers were fine, were in production at SGI and other vendors ... including DEC's ~$2B MIPS-based product line.

PDF oops, forgot, here's one: Interactions, Impacts and Coincidences of the First Golden Age of Computer Architecture JohnMashey (talk) 02:02, 29 June 2022 (UTC)