* Posts by Frumious Bandersnatch

2662 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Nov 2007

Prof Stephen Hawking's ashes will be interred alongside Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin

Frumious Bandersnatch

sidereal life is rubbish

... though with the late professor's cremation, I welcome his more speedy becoming of part of us all.

No, Stephen Hawking's last paper didn't prove the existence of a multiverse

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: Don't be silly, it's Turtles all the way down!

No, it's apparently something an old woman told Mark Twain. IIRC. YMMV.

Russia stares admiringly at itself, flexes internet muscles

Frumious Bandersnatch
Facepalm

But when Internet terminates you ...

... there be no more horrorshow groodies! Who you gonna tolchock in the yarbles if you can't get yer glazzfilly? Glasnost! Perestroika!

UK digi minister Hancock suggests Facebook and pals give your kids a time-out

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: The black leather jacket with "HIGHWAY TO HELL" on the back, please

This ain't no technological breakthrough. This is the road ... TO HELL.

Broadcom's buyout of Qualcomm bogs down as DC blocks merger

Frumious Bandersnatch

DC blocks merger

Maybe they should get Marvel in the mix? (or did I mean to write "Marvell"?)

With IoT you too can turn your home into a giant flashing 'HORSE BIRTH NOW' klaxon

Frumious Bandersnatch

is it open source?

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/06/sourcenext_horse/

Vatican sets up dedicated exorcism training course

Frumious Bandersnatch

Best ... exorcism ... putdown ... Ever!

You've been Vati-CANNED!!!

NRA gives FCC boss Ajit Pai a gun as reward for killing net neutrality. Yeah, an actual gun

Frumious Bandersnatch

You fool!

It was our planet!!!

Japan's Robo-Bartenders point to a golden future

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: Head keepers

> It's that little etched pattern you see at the bottom of the glass.

Encourages "nucleation", if you want to get technical.

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: I hope that was an oversized glass

I actually learned the Japanese word for "oral" today. It's 口頭, which uses the symbols for "mouth" and "head". Suffice to say, I didn't have a problem memorising it for some reason...

Data scientist wanted: Must have Python, spontaneity not required

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: is there really a skills shortage?

> Love the Numpy/numpty

Oo-er, missus

Can't wait to get to Mars on a SpaceX ship? It's a cold, dead rock – boffins

Frumious Bandersnatch

and just killed a thousand dreams

Maybe you're looking for a more Arthur C Clark (as hinted at in the article) than a H. G. Wells-based psycho-cosmology?

A Hughes failure: Flat Earther rocketeer can't get it up yet again

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: A rocketeer that cannot comprehend Gravity?

Obviously, circles have gravity. He's part of one and he gravitates towards its centre. The fact that there's "no there there" is immaterial (except for the gravity part, natch, because mc2 or something).

Thar she blows: Strava heat map shows folk on shipwreck packed with 1,500 tonnes of bombs

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: Please, please, please...

Is there any way we can talk him into this?

The promise of a smoked kipper breakfast on his heroic return, perhaps?

You may not be a software company, but that isn't an excuse to lame-out at computering

Frumious Bandersnatch

They continually throw it at the wall to see what sticks

<drools>Mmmm. Wall Spaghetti</drools>

Why did top Home Office civil servant lobby Ofcom for obscure kit ban?

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: Interesting Cover Story

I think you mean "double entendry"...

Irony's lost on old Pope Francis: Pontiff decrees fake news a 'serious sin'

Frumious Bandersnatch

Consider, for a moment, the impasse of the one-god Universe

He is all-knowing and all-powerful.

He can't go anywhere since He is already everywhere.

He can't do anything since the act of doing presupposes

opposition.

His universe is irrevocably thermodynamic having no

friction by definition. So, He has to create friction:

War, Fear, Sickness, Death,

To keep his dying show on the road.

Sooner or later, "Look boss we don't have enough energy

left to fry an elderly woman in a flea bag hotel bar."

"Well, we'll have to start faking it."

Joe looks after him sourly and mixes a bicarbonated

soda. "Sure, start faking it. Sure, and leave the

details to Joe."

... link

Engineer named Jason told to re-write the calendar

Frumious Bandersnatch

Hmmm

I guessed this was going to be a story about data serialisation formats. I was going to suggest my mate Yamal to do the necessary rewrites...

Total recog: British AI makes universal speech breakthrough

Frumious Bandersnatch

So how does it work?

Viterbi decoders?

Microsoft to rebuild Redmond campus, including cricket pitch

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: How about "flat latte"

See "placébook" video, obviously.

Frumious Bandersnatch

I know this ...

It's Unix! (done badly)

Frumious Bandersnatch

TWATIHKAL

The Windows Aero Trademark I Have Known And Loved.

(best not mention TIFKAM)

Frumious Bandersnatch

How about "flat latte"

in honour of modern monochrome iconography and fashionistically re-inventing "late"?

Frumious Bandersnatch

Gatesland?

Should that be "Gatesgatesland"? I mean, in keeping with Watergategate and all that...

Scotland, now is your time… to launch Brexit Britain into SPAAAACE!

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: They're going to move it.

> Highlanders wore plaids not kilts.

And that's why they're not dead men?

(Too cryptic? Blame the subversive revolt against the Motion Picture Production Code...)

Hey girl, what's that behind your Windows task bar? Looks like a hidden crypto-miner...

Frumious Bandersnatch

continuations...

Hello, lambda calculus ...

(I wonder will this curry favour with the readers?)

KFC turns Japanese bath tubs into party buckets

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: Yum

> Cole's Law

Huh? You mean the one mandating thinly-sliced cabbage?

(ISBN 0843106743, IIRC)

Official: Perl the most hated programming language, say devs

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: common::sense

I will check that out. Thanks.

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: common::sense

Thanks, but I did mention needing to use binmode (the use utf8 was only there so I could use a bareword 私 as a hash key)... and yes, I have come across times when I've had to turn UTF8 upgrading off locally on stderr/stdout after turning it on globally. Mainly because some libs or functions don't properly set the utf8 flag on returned data, so going back to raw output is often quicker/easier than messing around with utf8 internals that correctly set the utf8 flag on variables that have been affected. Especially if all you want to do is just add a quick print/warn for debugging a section of code.

Anyway, thanks for the clarification, but I've been there, believe me :)

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: Perl.... Arrggh

> I started to learn perl - from books - and it was the worst experience ever.

I started learning it as a substitute for awk and various horrible shell variants. It was a great replacement for awk because it did everything that did, but with more power. It was better than shells because it had all the features a proper programming language has (eg, associative arrays) and had a single, fairly logical way of doing string interpolation (the worst part of all shells, which all decided on slightly different ways to handle the problem). Oh, and it's obviously much quicker to write in Perl than something like C.

For people who come at Perl from the same direction I did, it was a brilliant language. I guess that people who came to it later, and who aren't building on previous awk/sed/*sh experience, it can be kind of hard to understand the power (and even simplicity) that Perl delivered.

Frumious Bandersnatch

common::sense

First I've heard of it. I write a lot of code that uses utf8 and then has to binmode stderr and stdout to avoid "wide character" warnings when printing utf8 strings. It seems that common::sense solves the latter problem

$ perl -le 'use common::sense; my $a = { 私 => "あなた"}; print $a->{"私"};'

あなた

$ perl -le 'use utf8; my $a = { 私 => "あな た"}; print $a->{"私"};'

Wide character in print at -e line 1.

あなた

Now if only I didn't have to open files with 'open FILE, "<:encoding(UTF-8)", $fn' every time ...

BOFH: Do I smell burning toes, I mean burning toast?

Frumious Bandersnatch
Pint

not a drill?

In memory of Fats Domino"

Combinations? Permutations? Those words don't mean what you think they mean

Frumious Bandersnatch

you missed an opportunity in the article

to talk about how programmers actually code up the selection of a random combination or permutation. You need something like a Fisher-Yates shuffle (using lists) or Floyd's algorithm (using sets) to ensure that the results aren't biased in some way.

It's all to easy to come up with a naive algorithm for, eg, dealing a hand from a deck of cards that seems to work but favours picking certain hands over others.

Raspberry Pi burning up? Microsoft's recipe can save it and AI

Frumious Bandersnatch

Yup. Well, C1 and XU4. The C1/C2 have gbit Ethernet and are faster than the Pi boards. You can also fit emmc (from the same supplier) for faster onboard storage. USB2, like Pi.

XU4 with "cloudshell" case is very nice. Uses one of the USB3 ports for a SATA bridge so you can put in a laptop drive. The other USB3 is accessible for other uses. The whole thing makes a nice small-form NAS. It's also got a small LCD screen (CGA res) integrated in the case so it can be used as a (tiny) terminal in a pinch, or most likely you'll want to use it for status messages. It has an IR sensor, so you could use remote to turn on the screen and control the box without a keyboard. Also has Gbit Ethernet.

Horses for courses, I reckon. Pi is cheap and cheerful, but C2 gets you more bang per buck, benchmark-wise. The more expensive Odroid boards are just more grown up with more RAM and faster I/O interconnects. Better for more serious projects/roles.

Footie ballsup: Petition kicks off to fix 'geometrically impossible' street signs

Frumious Bandersnatch

Actually, you can make a soccer ball out of all hexagons...

Bear with me on this...

http://gwydir.demon.co.uk/jo/solid/buckynet.gif

Remove those pentagons from the template and sew it up around a spherical ball. Granted, the holes will be pentagonal and the ball itself prone to bursting due to the inner bladder being exposed, but still...

Frumious Bandersnatch

Advanced Bistromatics!

Calm down, Elon. Deep learning won't make AI generally intelligent

Frumious Bandersnatch
Terminator

How about a little balance?

The article quotes Professor Mark Bishop saying "nothing to worry about." How hard would have been to find a Bishop Mark Professor to warn about the ROTM and tell us all that the end is nigh?

FCC commish cites infamous porn ruling to slam shady US mobile competition report

Frumious Bandersnatch

nicely slow-rolled tension in the headline

I had to read to the middle of the article before I read "I know it when I see it."

Unfortunately, the Pai approach is "I'll see [to] it when I believe it", with cash and political capital being a powerful reason to believe almost anything, even before breakfast.

Twitter to upgrade from micro-blogging to milli-blogging with 280 chars

Frumious Bandersnatch

not about utf

SMS did (still does?) have a 140-byte limit because it was piggy-backing on an existing control channel. The standard didn't include UTF-8 support so what happened was that if you used any Unicode char, a flag was set and all the message was sent as UTF-16, thus losing half the space or being twice as expensive.

Twitter has always, AFAIK, supported UTF (I guess UTF-8). The 140-char thing counts actual characters, not bytes.

Frumious Bandersnatch

I think you just have to be a bit more flexible in understanding what was intended by "double the amount of information in one character". In fact, as you point out, the shortest translation of あほ would be "fool", which has twice as many characters in English. That's the sense that's intended.

The CJK languages don't use spaces and many words are only 1 or 2 characters long.

(382 characters)

文字に就き情報の二倍と言う事を掴むため、余裕がもっと必要だと思うけど。実は、君の言う通り「あほ」の一番短い英訳が「fool」に成って、長さは日本語より二倍です。そんな解釈が出る。

日中韓は、間隔も無いし、単語の長さとして、1~2字も多いです。

(122字)

Not quite 2:1, but you can see the point.

NASA Earthonauts emerge from eight-month isolation in simulated Mars visit

Frumious Bandersnatch

Hmmm

I'm reminded of the plot of the film "Moon". Did those guys really get to come home at the end or spoilers

Cops' use of biometric images 'gone far beyond custody purposes'

Frumious Bandersnatch

There Might Be Grounds?

Everybody wants to wear prosthetic foreheads on their real heads...

'Don't Google Google, Googling Google is wrong', says Google

Frumious Bandersnatch

confusing "setup" and "set up" one of my personal bugbears

The first is a noun (or adjective) while the second is the only proper way to use it as a (phrasal) verb.

Boffins fear we might be running out of ideas

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: there's always

Plenty to be getting on with.

Frumious Bandersnatch

there's always

computational chemistry

space exploration

biosphere maintenance

fusion/Thorium power generation

world peace

Red panic: Best Buy yanks Kaspersky antivirus from shelves

Frumious Bandersnatch

Hmmm

As regards looking for Russian interference, isn't this a case of deliberately ignoring the Dave the Orang-utan in the room?

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: What the FEEL?

The scoops are on their way, bob.

(IT'S MADE OF PEOPLE, PEOPLE!)

Oracle 'systematically denies' its sales reps their commissions, forces them to work to pay off 'debts', court told

Frumious Bandersnatch

Well they're putting up resistance

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olkS6KdF0Mw

(chosen for the "sitting here in limbo" line, but Lord, they deserve to win)