Posts by Michael H.F. Wilkinson
1887 posts • joined Tuesday 24th April 2007 14:31 GMT
Page:
Re: "Ritual significance"
"I actually used that argument in an archaeology essay - got good marks for it too :-)"
Shows there are good teachers around (and with a sense of humour too, one would wager)
"Ritual significance"
It is a catch phrase (probably often correct, maybe wrong as often).
I once had a tour of the "Cave of the Shaman" in southern France. It is named after a VERY male figure scratched in the rock, complete with a huge erection. There were also scratched drawings of women with exaggerated "features". There was a lengthy explanation of fertility rites etc. My suggestion these might simply be stone-age variants of scribbles found on doors of modern day toilets frequented by adolescent males of all ages did not go down well.
Re: Sir
No it was a bring your own rock party
Would dearly like one of those displays
Both for general use and better 3D display of visualization of MRI/CT scans and the like. OK, so chugging out more pixels requires more processor grunt, and that does affect battery life, but I want a powerful nVidia card anyway to chug through the CUDA stuff we do, so I am used to having to charge the laptop more often.
Re: Not sure if they're doing this right.
Who are investors going to back:
Start-up A says: We will put existing technology in a shiny box, and add a huge markup.
Start-up A does: Put existing technology in a shiny box, and add a huge markup
or
Start-up B says: We are going to REVOLUTIONIZE storage
Start-up B does: Put existing technology in a shiny box, and add a huge markup
The first gets full marks for honesty, the second gets the investment, I would bet.
Me, cynical?
Ditching him in his hour of need?
There might be a few (non-mutually exclusive) reasons for this:
a) Oz do not want to tick off the USA
b) Oz find him tiresome
Whining does not win many people over I am afraid.
Mine is the one with the Barmah hat (not an ozzie myself, though)
Re: So do you think...
Praise Be!!
OK, so I need more memory
We are processing up to 4Gpixel images now, so I'd better polish up my act
Re: Dear Senator, Kettle meet Pot
Precisely! Don't spy on people, THAT"S OUR JOB!!
For long haul flights I tend first to check which airline is cheapest through budgetair/cheaptickets/any other comparison site. Once found I check out the websites of the two cheapest airlines found, often to find they have an even cheaper offer if you order directly from them.
Cheapskate, perhaps, but hey, it works.
WANT ONE!
Seeing how our shiny new 64-core machine is chugging through HUGE image data, a 4096 core shared memory device would be a dream come true!
Don't be silly
Crysis is not available on BlueGene
Re: Cool space toy.
but it does get higher than LOHAN, which is an achievement in itself
Posted in PFY vs Bearded 80s Netscape Bore: BOFH
And there I was waiting for the cattle prod
Nice one
A 13" notebook with retina display would be great
I do not care who makes it, but if I can get my hands on a good 13" notebook with hi-res display, and nVidia GPU (recent one (for CUDA)) I will be very happy indeed (especially as the boss should pay). A machine like that is really great as a portable workstation and demo machine for hi-res image processing. I know our code runs on OS-X, so I am completely agnostic about the manufacturer. I do suspect that the usual suspects (ASUS, please make one) will follow suit, and produce competitors. Then it will be all about price/performance and build quality.
Re: This is part of the Unicode standard
1F52F seems to stand for a Kosher atom ;)
Re: Not At All
Mileage varies, as ever. Don't forget, even if all the men treat the women with the respect they deserve, women may still be put off by a very much "male" atmosphere if you are one of very few women in an otherwise all male organization.
We have some outstanding female students (but far too few), and the general attitude of our male students is one of respect (though quite a percentage shows signs of the usual nerdy awkward behaviour towards the opposite sex, but that is par for the course). Strikingly, most of our female students are from abroad. This shows that not all women (by quite a long way) aren't interested in IT. In international conferences in image processing I would guess that about 25-30% of delegates are female (mainly Asian). It seems to be a thing in western culture to keep women out of technology (a long-standing tradition, as women were banned from most guilds in the distant past). I do see a gentle upward trend in the number of Dutch girls enrolling in our course, but we have a long way to go.
I call it the snobbery of indifference: it's cool to be cool in the sense of not really caring about anything, and certainly not about learning. I am not sure it is a world-wide thing, I see many more people in the east doing computer science (or indeed any science or engineering course), and that includes a lot of women. I have seen a similar pattern in Uganda, where many girls do Computer Science. I think people in many non-western countries have way more respect of science and engineering, because they are all too aware of the huge benefits they bring. Many westerners are all too complacent in that respect. Many kids just want to get rich quick or be famous (often willing to debase themselves on TV for such purposes).
Teach them the fun and excitement of science and technology early on (before puberty) and you stand a much better chance of winning them over.
Posted in Asus Transformer Pad TF300
Sounds like an interesting device to me
I like the hybrid concept much more than a pure tablet, and yes, I do see uses next to my laptop.
Now listen carefully!
It has a Pi-brain, not a pea-brain!
Posted in Volkswagen Up!
Re: Very tempted
"He said he was 5'11" (aka 1.83m - or more correctly 13.1 linguine)."
More precisely 180.3338 cm (1.8033m) or 12.881 linguine courtesy of the Reg Online Standards Converter
Posted in World smart TV sales surge
TVs get smarter as programmes get dumber?
There seems to be a correlation
Re: Windows is the OS of the Cloud
Windows is the OS of the Cloud in Cloud-Cuckoo Land
There, corrected that for them.
Rotten thing to happen.
I have not been to Buenos Aires, but I have been to other places so riddled with pickpockets that I was tempted to put a live mousetrap in my coat pockets or bag. In one place whenever some little kid asked me the time, I told them whilst swiping my hand over my back pocket rapidly. I always connected.
They didn't get anything (except a slap on the wrist).
"Curiosity is not as life-limited as the approximate 90-day missions ..."
I bet they feel smug at NASA (and with good reason!) whenever they mention the 90 expected survival of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on Mars, especially with Opportunity rolling again after 8 years on Mars.
I'll keep my fingers crossed for Curiosity.
Ha ha, Hack Has Hilarious Headline!
couldn't resist
Re: Well, you know what they say...
You lot still using a three wheel system?
thrwt wyndr plctb fvwhl
Cool!
Who will be the first to build a cute little cluster of these (just because we can). Could fit quite a number in a cupboard.
Re: Well, you know what they say...
Don't be silly! It is never that small
Re: "The Enigma code was developed by the Germans just after the WWI"
WWI is in the Concise Oxford Dictionary. Until 1939 it was referred to as the Great War or the World War. Only after WWII did the phrase WWI become commonplace.
No spam other than the usual rate (like from BILL GATES FONDATION, or the widow of the late UJUMBU N'TUITIF, or warnings that bank accounts are blocked until I update my personal information, usually from banks where I have no account). Internet business as usual, in other words. No offers for cheap Viagra today, or cheap PhDs (maybe they did find out I have a proper PhD through linkedin.
My password does not seemed to have leaked, no important stuff is on there, and I have changed my password to be on the safe side.
Are there two teams out there who refuse to talk to each other?
baffling "design decision." I will stick with Win 7 at home, unless I seriously want to tick off the missus (I really only boot to Linux).
Posted in AMD and Nvidia extreme GPUs workout
Nice
I must convince the people at work that the GTX 680 would sit very nicely in my desktop, if only to test some neat CUDA fluid dynamics code a student has just made (which works nicely on a dual GTX 590 machine in the lab). It is so nice we are getting humongous compute clout for such modest prices, compared to the old Cray J932 and SV1e we used to have.
Re: Historical record
Good point about the southern hemisphere.
"We will plug Lightning into your Thunderbolt"
They almost make it sound dirty.
Nudge, nudge, wink, wink!
Your thunderbolt, does it go, hey, does it go?
I bet it likes lightnin', know what I mean? Say no more, say no more!
I prefer more cores to faster cores
because it runs my code faster. On 8 or 16 cores I also tend to get a slightly better load balance than on 6 and 12, because the binary tree structure used in the gather phase of many algorithms is nicely balanced. Furthermore, hyperthreading is great mainly if the different threads share a lot of the data they work on, so the you do not get cache contention issues. In my code I find it does not contribute anything, and can actually harm performance.
The same does not hold for a lot of code out there. Horses for courses. For my desktop, the AMD chip is best (but not with a AMD/Radeon graphics board, because we also use CUDA), others may be served better with Intel chips.
Re: hitsorical record
"NGC 6537 looks very like a cross - and many other planetary nebula exhibit the hourglass appearance that could be interpreted as a cross. The helix nebula is the size of the full moon and 2.5 light years across and may be a candidate - not sure how fast its expanding!
A nearby one may have dispersed by now, or possibly have blown itself away with a greater explosion later on - maybe the crab nebula was planetary before it went supernova?"
The Red Spider (NGC 6537) is pretty unique in shape, and at 1.5 arcminutes is not very big (and would have been smaller in the past). The hourglass-type side-on nebulae like the Dumbbell are not that cruciform, and though the Helix is the size of the full moon, it is very difficult to spot, even through my 8" scope, as its surface brightness is very low. This is a key problem: high surface brightness planetaries are small, one big enough to resolve by eye have very low surface brightness.
If the white dwarf at the centre of a planetary is part of a binary (spotted one such system last year), it could go supernova (Type Ia), otherwise this is unlikely (not enough mass). There is no indication that the Crab pulsar is part of a binary, I think. There may be a supernova remnant as yet undiscovered, of course. Supernovae embedded in a star forming region could generate strange light echoes on the surrounding dust and gas.
Finally, the "red crucifix" in the sky may have been atmospheric, rather than deep sky. A curious illumination of clouds after sunset, noctilucent clouds in a strange formation, auroras, or a bright meteor which exploded (and form cruciform patterns). And finally, if your king or local lord had stated he saw a red cross in the sky (after imbibing some bad mead, maybe) stating you could not see it might be a terminal career move ;-)
And there I was thinking June 6th is
I cannot see the transit of Venus due to bleedin' clouds day
sigh
Re: hitsorical record
"A planetary nebula could easily be mistaken for a crucifix so I guess a nearby one would easily cover all the requirements. We just need to find the culprit."
Not the planetary nebulae I know. Besides, they are not large enough to be resolved by the naked eye. Planetary nebulae are not supernova remnants, but form when a star roughly the size of the sun blasts off its outer layers. However, let us not forget that the 1054 supernova was seen in the east, but not by western observers (too busy bashing each other's brains in ?). I do not know of a nearby SN-remnant which could be a candidate. A gamma-ray burst may be the culprit, as others have noted.
As this event is not so much impossible, but very, very improbable, I suggest the Heart of Gold is to blame
Posted in How to get a job in Australia
Re: I've heard...
Been there, loved it. Spent some time in Sydney, and really liked the place (people, climate, food, surroundings).
If you find Oz boring, can I have your helping?
Lovely extrapolation!
Of course we must assume any trend in the past goes unchecked. Double brain size in 3000 AD? make that 4x bigger in 4000 AD, a massive 10kg brain size in 5000 AD etc. How long before our brains are visible from space?
Size doesn't matter, it's what you do with it
had to be said
Of course they keep shtumm
They would not communicate with cricket-playing nations, would they
Held in very bad taste out there in the galaxy.
Posted in Bot imitates bat for better flight
Holy Shmoly Batmat!
Calm down, Robin, it's just the batbot
It can't be that time already?
We just have to know now
What is the speed of a kangaroo in vacuum?
Mine is the one with the roo-leather Barmah hat
So can we do sheep in vacuum tests now?
Hat, coat, outahere!
Users were not so much won over to new versions
They simply had to put up with whatever was preinstalled, or foisted upon them in the workplace. People are adaptable, and can learn new ways of working, but some "improvements" weren't.
NICE
I love the 13" form factor, but dislike the terrible resolution.
ME WANT!!
