Posts by Eddie Edwards 970 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Oct 2007
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/infer:
"3. To lead to as a consequence or conclusion: "Socrates argued that a statue inferred the existence of a sculptor"
Sarah Bee and El Reg 2. Jacob and Luther 0.
On to injury time ... Sarah gets another 5 minutes because of the crack about strap-ons.
Pedantry fails are the best fails of all.
Suitability of multiple cores depends on the application. This here 8800 GTX has way more than four cores and goes like shit off a shovel - provided I ask it to render stuff. If I ask it to lex a C file it's not so hot.
I find it hard to believe that Sandia are only just now modelling the performance of their core computations versus number of processors per die and memory bandwidth.
There is no solution if all you want to do is scale your single-instance computation up to larger N. That's Amdahl's Law. We've know that for more than 20 years.
But I have plenty of workloads that need almost no memory bandwidth but do a lot of computation. Run these in parallel with workloads that have reasonable bandwidth requirements and you're golden.
I wish I worked in some kind of recognized national lab, then I could issue iconoclastic press releases which state the bleeding obvious and pass them off as original research.
Liked the last joke but what a missed opportunity to thoroughly take the piss! Was this a paid review or something?
Wave a brolly over a pad to find the weather? Why the fuck would I want to go and find my umbrella before checking the weather? Why not just minimize everything and look at my Vista weather widget? Or even - hell - look out the window!
As for taking my Oyster card out of my jacket so I can avoid clicking on a "favourites" link for TFL's website ... yeah, nice feature. I always wanted new ways of forgetting to take it with me when I go out.
The bunnies are great though. Everyone naturally maps tasks to different coloured bunnies in their head, so remembering which was which should be no problem, and much more efficient than the "favourites" menu with it's non-intuitive textual labelling.
But how much do these 25p RFID tags in cloth pouches cost? No mention of price?
To misquote sideshow Bob, "Yes, I am aware of the irony of appearing on television in order to decry it."
Or the irony of posting on a web forum about the irresponsibility of wasting your time on texts.
A 13yo girl has what? 20 friends? And every text is sent to all of them? So even if she sent all 14,000 texts, that's still only 700 in a month, or about 20 per day. That's slightly over one an hour. Texts are only 160B too so she's writing about 400 words per day. Hardly an excessive amount of communication. In my day girls spent hours per day on the phone. The average girl speaks over 10,000 words per day. These girls are communicating less than normal, it seems. Maybe because they have unlimited texts and not unlimited minutes? Hmm, it's almost like they're acting like classical rational consumers, reducing the amount of purchases based on monetary and opportunity cost. And it's almost like their dad is in on the deal, getting them an unlimited texting plan. He's acting like a rational consumer too! The idiot!
The over-reaction on this forum shows that most people lack basic analytic intelligence. Massive props to the AC who said the girl had an "illness". That was the best one.
Hikaricore, the reason we don't riot over stuff like this is that these issues are not worth rioting over.
In fact, I'm not aware of any physical country where riots occur over minor transient DRM issues. Where do you live? WoW?
Last riot in the UK was Saturday, over Israel's bombing of Gaza.
"And there's profits to be had by owning the number two - hell, the twenty-second-best selling MMO out there."
No, experience has consistently shown that the market can only support a small number of MMOs, where "small number" is clearly considerably less than 22. This is because of a need for critical mass.
The games industry has known this for three years. Did the author actually consult anyone in said industry? Looks to me like he just looked up some annual reports and then pontificated.
Your anti-Windows bias is clouding your imagination.
A phone client could be used by tons of people for non-emergency tasks.
Just last night my wife needed to scan something on my PC (she's a Mac person). I had to talk her through it on my mobe. If I had an iPhone + RDP I could have just done it for her.
Not sure how to operate my scanner over SSH if I'm honest.
x86 Native Client works how well on a PPC-based PS3 browser or X360 browser? How well on an ARM-based palmtop?
The correct solution is JIT compiling, but Silverlight already does that and so, I understand, does Chrome's Javascript. So ... why?
The only explanation is that Googlebots get to work on whatever they think is cool and then they throw it and see what sticks.
If only I had those kinds of resources :(
Child Pornography laws exist in order to protect children from child abuse (making child pornography using real children implies child abuse).
They are being used in an attempt to eradicate all images that certain people deem offensive. Cartoons of Simpson sex; ancient album covers posed by models who were presumably of legal age at the time; the list goes on, and will go on.
None of those have anything to do with child abuse. These acts cheapen the serious intent of these laws and will ultimately desensitize us to occurences of real child pornography. We're going to read that someone was arrested for "having child porn" and deduce that they were a Scorpions fan with the sense of humour required to enjoy Simpsons sex cartoons.
Never mind the hideous "vetting" process that now goes on for anyone wishing to work with other peoples' children, the blacklisting of those deemed unsuitable, and the subtle demonization of men in general.
I think the moral majority really need to get a grip on this one.
Won't someone think of the adults?
Interesting case. Perhaps Google are guilty of extortion. In order to make sure that Interflora comes up in the Sponsored Links before any people riding on their brand's coat-tails Interflora would have to pay Google an unspecified amount of brand "protection money". Google needs to sort this out ethically. "Do no evil" my ass.
I hope Interflora win, TBH. This is clearly an abuse of their brand name. I only wish they were suing Google, and not M&S.
I thought the word "architect" came from the word "arch", not "chief". As in, someone who understands the once arcane and guild-restricted knowledge of the arch. The arch allows us to build vast buildings using a fraction of the amount of stone required without arches. It was held a secret within societies of masons for centuries.
The idea from this is that architects must know all about "best practices" and have the widest range of techniques available. You will rarely make a graduate programmer be the system architect.
Architects sit logically above everyone else, and they direct their work, but not in a management way - in a regulatory way. The *plans* they produce direct the work, but the architect need not spend much time on the building site, micromanaging people. Architects are policy setters.
Policy *must* be set in IT because it is embodied in the infrastructure (networks and machines, or classes and libraries). Every time a programmer chooses STL or a network manager chooses 1000BaseT, an architecture decision has been made, and cannot easily be reversed. If we are indeed in the middle of a technological revolution then mitigating factors can be introduced. That's still architecture. You don't stop making decisions now just because things might change in 5 years.
So of course we need people to make these decisions, and they must be made well. What is not clear is whether or not that is a full role requiring a whole person, or whether it is done by the "workers" wearing different hats on occasion. This is the political aspect to architecture, the part that means people may walk the other way when they see "the architect" approaching.
So "do we need architecture?" is a stupid question. Yes we do. And the people responsible should *know* they are doing architecture when they are doing it.
"Do we need architects?" is a political question, similar in kind to "do we need mailboys?". There is no single right answer for every situation. It depends how much mail there is to deliver.
With unlimited energy, there is no effective limit to how hot this planet can get. Getting rid of planetary homeostatis is just an energy problem.
With unlimited energy, growth capitalism will never need adjusting. Maintaining an unsustainable system is just an energy problem.
With unlimited energy we can have eternal war. Peace is just an energy problem.
It all depends on what you do with the energy. Technology will not make this planet a utopia. Only people can do that.
Yes I have been guilty of using these terms at home.
e.g. "How much of that can you eat?" "All of it."
or "Can you assemble this straight away?" "No I need to take it out of the box first."
or "When are you going to bed?" "At the end of the day."
or "Are you considering the new XBox at all?" "No, I wasn't going to engage in any 360 thinking."
I mean I could go on ...
Was the new Survivors script written by Dan Brown?
It has the same quality of "Oh God this is shit but I just want to find out what happens next."
Definitely way more than 90% fatalities, as Ged points out.
Also, let's not be so credulous about how all this infrastructure will *actually* cope. It may be specced to do something but that doesn't mean it will actually do it.
The bit about phones being powered from the line made me laugh too. It's been 10 years since I had a phone that didn't require a wallwart. And if you think BT's customer service is bad now, wait until they're all dead.
I was going to recommend some but reading through the comments I'm starting to think this is all just an excuse for old people to complain.
What's wrong with having a bit of fun with language?
I object to stupid meaningless words used seriously by people in suits during meetings (HR, yes; leverage, yes; monetize, yes; reimagining, oh for God's sake) but I don't see anything wrong with FAIL, LOL, teh, pwnage, automagically, fucktard, or any of the other ones that are *jokes*.
Surely this is El Reg's shining glory? The use of terms like "commentard" and "webinar" with tongue placed firmly in cheek? I guess that's what attracts me here every day; it certainly isn't the journalism :p
I'm not defending Lori Drew's behaviour. I just think the media should get off their lazy arses and report it accurately.
The sad fact is that the final evil act *has* gone unpunished. I believe Grills made an early plea bargain and got off scott free. Drew has been made a scapegoat for the girl's suicide by a lazy media and a corrupt system of justice which uses such mechanisms as "plea bargains" which guarantee indemnity to people if they agree to make the lawyers' and judges' workloads lighter. The result is that the only person who they can indict over this sorry incident is someone who's involvement in the whole thing appears to be rather minor. Drew went down for a misdemeanour, because after all they couldn't actually get her for any of the trumped up felony charges they fired her way.
@ Other AC
Why don't you read the article all the way to the end? Or if you're too lazy and incompetent here's the relevant quote: "Grills also said she wrote the message to Megan about the world being a better place without her. " Pretty specific in my opinion, but you do have to actually work your way through several hundred other words first.
Lori Drew did *not* send the final message encouraging the poor girl to commit suicide. This was sent by Ashley Grills who has admitted as such.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/05/15/internet.suicide.ap/index.html
The UK media's reporting of this incident has been utterly lazy and incompetent.
@ Nick
"it's a wonder that anybody programming the x86 chipset has any sanity left."
I retained my sanity by switching, first to C, then to C++.
BTW the 80s called. They want to hire you.
@ Tom
Precisely the bullshit I was talking about. I forgot the word "singularity" though. There's nothing well-informed about someone who extrapolates an exponential curve to infinity. (Sorry, you were talking about sci-fi. Did you know that some people take this stuff seriously?)
@ Red
It absolutely is a hardware constraint. Game designers have wanted destructibles for years but the power isn't there to do it. Current next-gen physics engines can stack about 3,000 blocks by using the entire Cell, and the FPS will vary wildly as the simulation progresses. To just make a house out of bricks that you can knock down would take well over 10,000 blocks. To run that at a constant 60Hz ... and to have a village or town of such houses ... no, we need more processing power.
@ Ged
"A more reasonable explanation would be that the increase in processing power is an exponential curve and although Moore’s law can be observed over a number of years, this is only a small part of the picture."
In fact Moore's Law predicts an exponential curve. The correct explanation is almost certainly that the curve is ogive in shape - that is, S shaped. Every other growth curve is. (This is why all the predictions of "the spike" or "transcendental human experience in our lifetimes" are such utter bollocks.)
Also, Moore's Law is related to feature density, not processing power, performance, or anything else. There are fixed limits to feature density (for instance, the diameter of a silicon nucleus). It obviously won't last forever.
@ You ain't gonna need it
I'm running radiosity precomputes, massive builds, raytracing, pathtracing, etc. just to make a single game level look nice. Others do this stuff just to generate a single image. Iteration time is king in the creative industries. We need to do stuff faster. Computers aren't only for running Word. If that's all you care about, the £300 computer will always suffice. As would a piece of paper and a pencil.
Problems grow to fill the available processing power. Just look at Vista :p
Good summary of what we've known in the games industry for about five years (you wouldn't know it to listen to our "luminaries" like Carmack and Sweeney, though; they're still praying for salvation based on their old faith - which is hardly surprising given their legacy codebases, but still).
Effective large-scale parallel programs (e.g. games) seem to split in a recursive way. The top layer may be serial, then there may be a parallel layer underneath, then each part of the parallel layer may be serial again, with each serial part implemented by a parallel algorithm. Thus can we divvy up hundreds of cores within a single program. An example might be:
Serial: Calculate each output frame of the game in turn
Parallel frame: Run simulation and rendering in parallel
Serial simulation: First calculate physics, then run AI
Parallel physics: Break the sparse matrix into chunks across many processors
Serial chunks: Run a standard single-threaded algorithm to evaluate a chunk
Unfortunately, the "productivity programmers" don't have a clear layer that belongs to them. Domain-specific knowledge is inserted at all levels.
We want to avoid having the domain guys think too hard. Much customization (insertion of domain-specific knowledge) can be to do with data structures and "shaders" - small pieces of functional code which do raw data processing. But they will sometimes need to understand the parallel context this stuff runs in. The aim is to make this "sometimes" be as infrequent as possible, but this in itself requires the domain people to change their paradigm e.g. they can no longer just call out to other objects at will, because that doesn't scale. Their job still gets harder. I don't see how to avoid this.
Ironically, the lowest-level performance programmers still need to write the best single-threaded code for a given task. They are the only ones to escape the paradigm shift, despite being the best people to take it on board.
"As consumers realise coverage is much of a muchness"
We're not even there yet. Rural users in North Shropshire know that Orange coverage sucks and Vodafone rules, with O2 coming in between. It's not geographical limitations, it's simply that one has more masts.
We also note that Vodafone charge more than Orange.
So I'm seeing "pay more, get better coverage". YMMV.
"Like the BBC's own streams, TVCatchup's services is restricted to UK IP addresses ("at great expense", says Parsons), to avoid violating copyright licensing deals between broadcasters and producers."
AIUI, a basic rule of tort is that 3rd parties can't be bound by contracts which they aren't party to.
They don't care about the deals between broadcasters and producers. What they care about is that their service would (presumably) be illegal if it retransmitted UK TV outside the UK.
The "great expense" is surely a necessary component of their legality, not an extra they add on to keep the broadcasters happy.
Weasel words strike again.
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