Posts by Michael H.F. Wilkinson
1891 posts • joined Tuesday 24th April 2007 14:31 GMT
Page:
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!!
Re: @ Echowitch
Unless the user let the browser remember the password. There should perhaps be stronger security than password/username, e.g. verification by response to mobile phone, or pin/bankcard validation used for online banking.
Recursion
See "recursion"
Posted in Acorn Archimedes is 25
Seriously thought about gettig an A440
Neat machine, but ultimately beyond my means. A year later I was coding image processing software for a living on an 8 MHz 80286 with 640 MB RAM, and a Matrox PIP1024 image capture and processing board, which had a whole 1MB of RAM. I yearned for the vast 4MB RAM of the A440.
Re: Big event, mundane response from SpaceX mission control
Elon Musk is quite aware of the similarities. When interviewed by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, he acknowledged he should get a white Persian cat.
Great guy, great achievement by the whole SpaceX team!
Re: Cock-up indeed, even with disclaimer, but don't blame the teacher
"As a (senior) lecturer, you probably have no concept of how unabidably crap the average corporate trainer is. It's a certificate culture out there, and the delegates (I won't demean the term "student" by using it here) are expected to sit, listen, maybe "brainstorm" a bit, then walk away with a piece of paper."
Actually, a colleague had to follow an "Academic Leadership" training given by a corporate trainer. His description was telling. Unabidable crap is a fitting designation. The trainer asked questions like: "what would you do if a PhD student turns up at 9:30 each morning?"
Answer by (experienced) trainees varied from: "Nothing, as long as he gets his work done," to "Commend him for consistently arriving before the head of the department."
These were not the right answers according to the trainer (who clearly had no concept of an academic working environment). He honestly expected people to work regular 9-5 shifts. When criticised that this was not how we work, and that many PhD students work say 10 am to 8 pm shifts r longer, he stated this was no way to run a lab. He was questioned whether he had ever run a research department, he had to admit this was not the case, but he stuck to his guns that he knew how it should be run.
My colleague and all other trainees considered the course a complete waste of time, but you had to get the certificate for the new tenure track system. I gather they have now got rid of this course.
Posted in 450-year-old football was hard to kick
Comment from the Goalie of the Unseen Academicals:
OOK
The 16th century ball tested looks more like mr. Nutt's design than the lumps of wood with rags used before it
Cock-up indeed, even with disclaimer, but don't blame the teacher
"Either the team responsible for this cock-up didn't attend - or those teaching the courses need to be fired."
As a (senior) lecturer, I cannot accept responsibility for all cock-ups my students make after following or even passing my course. The people teaching the course in source attribution may have been sterling, but let us not forget a student's ability to forget, misconstrue, or otherwise garble any information or skills imparted to them. I have seen all too often that students learn things only to the level to pass the exam, and then get totally plastered to ensure they erase that section of memory as effectively as possible. Fortunately, there are also many students who really want to learn and work hard at it. I have long ago decided to focus my efforts on the latter class, and lose no sleep over the former. After all, they are grown ups, they are responsible.
Many image search tools exist, they should have been able to find the source. If anyone is to be fired, fire those responsible.
Re: Collusion
You are assuming the lawyer gets paid to help you, which is not how many lawyers see it. They get paid so they get richer. As the lawsuit is delayed, they charge more. The same holds for the lawyers of UPS. What incentive do they have to get things over with quickly if they get paid by the hour?
Me, cynical?
Re: "of merchantable quality"
Agreed, they employ many salesmen of the caliber of C.M.O.T. Dibbler. To sell a bad product as successfully as Microsoft clearly can, you must be a hell of a salesman. Window 7 is mostly OK, however.
Re: Well, I for one support this move.
Quality comedy , that is, or quality trolling, maybe.
Quality nonetheless
Poor people
Now they have to worry about IE as well as IEDs
Sorry, couldn't resist, given all the trouble IE6 (aargh!) and 7 (less so) gave with our conference web site, which worked fine with Opera, Safari, Firefox, and passed W3C compliance tests.
Re: Worried
On the other hand, I would not expect computer to drive more dangerously than a large percentage of drivers (word used without prejudice) in Crete or Cyprus. Driving there was, let us say, an interesting experience, after which a quick bout of dodging charging bulls seems like a pick-nick.
Posted in And the worst film NEVER made is...
Re: And now something completely different
In relation to the earlier Streisand remark, I just read that as
The Barbrarians
and of course I had to think of Cohen the Barbarian (a.k.a. Ghenghiz Cohen)
Mine is the one with "Interesting Times" in the pocket/
Posted in Passwords are for AES-holes
Correct Horse Battery Staple = Insecure
That is correct because too many lusers are now using it because they heard it is secure
Fortunately one login for all except the HPC systems suffices here.
Posted in LOHAN sucks 27 inches
Units!
Those who love metric don't like mm Hg, they like Pascal.
El Reg readers like
millilinguine Hg
or Jubs/nanoWales
or Norris/nanoWales
SpaceX may be a health hazard
All this drinking to their success may start to stress livers (and brain cells) in many places
Brilliant stuff. Takes me right back to my childhood memories of the Apollo program.
Posted in Special Projects Burro pops his hooves
Sad news
He has joined the choir invisible
He has gone to meet his maker
It is an ex-donkey
RIP Aladdin
Going Postal
was my immediate thought.
Terry Pratchett, you are a wise man, and clearly we all live on the discworld/
Speed might be OK, but the latency is killing
most likely
So maybe when a you see a meteor streak across the sky this time next year
you will imagine to hear it say
"More powerrr, we need more powerrrr!"
I will wait to see the scientific paper on this. A problem with these tests is that it mixes hardware and software performance measurement. Gaining speed by increasing communication bandwidth (and decreasing latency, for preference) just get the "duh" response it deserves.
The only ways to see if two algorithms differ is to (i) do a proper complexity analysis (computing time and memory/bandwidth use) to see how it should scale theoretically (both in terms of data size and number of processors), and (ii) time optimized versions on the same hardware (or different sets of hardware), using a variable number of processors or nodes.
"The visual effects are spectacular"
Oh really. I do not need spectacular visual effects on my desktop, unless I am playing a computer game, or running scientific visualization software. My OS should not try to dazzle me, I need to get work done. The best OS is the one you hardly notice. This may involve smart use of visual effects. Some visual effects I find useful (compiz-fusion has some things I find very handy, in particular in the area of switching desktops and looking for the right open app), but most are just battery-draining eye candy. It is telling that the spectacular visual effects are mentioned before the streamlined navigation (which is useful). I want substance, not bling.
I will raise a dram to Scotty
Not the frothy kind! Distill the stuff I say. A glass of single malt to my fond memories of Scotty saying
Ye cannae break the laws of physics capt'n!
Re: New languages
I agree up to a point. Languages do need to change, and they are in fact changing. OpemMP is a sort of "bolt-on" solution for C(++) which allows the compiler to treat for loops as for-all statements, and provides various other mechanisms for syncing. A functional approach such as in Erlang is often proposed. I do have some doubts that we can solve all sorts of problems merely with new languages. We need to learn new ways of thinking about these problems. A good language can inspire new ways of thinking, of course.
@Pperson
I have to disagree a bit here. Parallel computing is great, but at the same time it is hard work, and it is only useful in particular, data and compute intensive tasks. Memory access bottlenecks have been reduced greatly by getting rid of the front-side bus (guess why Opterons are so popular in HPC), but they are still very much present in GPUs, in particular in communication between GPU and main memory. There are improvements in tooling, but they are too often over-hyped. Besides, as with all optimization, you need understanding of the hardware.
Parallel computing is at the forefront of computer science research, and new (wait-free) algorithms are being published in scientific journals, as are improvements in compilers, languages and other tools.
Throughout its early history, physics simulation with its emphasis on matrix-vector work dominated the HPC field. Now a much larger variety of code is being parallelized. People are finding out the hard way that parallel algorithm design is a lot harder than sequential programming.
As I like to tell my students: parallel computing provides much faster ways of making your program crash.
Re: Pulled a rabbit out of the hat
I thought the Unseen University had prior art on that. Go ahead Apple, sue UU, they have a pond full of people who tried to sue them.
Doffs hat to TP
Re: "Use, Reuse, Overuse, Abuse"
Wasn't stage five "Light fuse"
see icon
Re: Android
Not sure about that. quite a few people (myself included) drop the default browser in Android for something with more functionality. My HTC Desire's default browser had no tabs, I tried firefox on Android briefly but was not impressed, and run Dolphin now. There may be better browsers out there for Android, but I rather like Dolphin, so won't change now.
Re: Why not ask
or for a more emotional (i.e., high blood-pressure) pitch, Steve Balmer
42?
They just made a few extra to hit this number
Parallel code easily transfered to very different architecture?
Let me guess, they can easily parallelize adding two arrays together, or doing matrix vector stuff optimally. This covers some very important bases, but some parallel code needs to be rethought rather than just recompiled when porting to a very different architecture.
We have code which does not use matrix-vector stuff, and works best (40x speed up on 64 cores) on fairly coarse grained, shared memory, parallel architectures. We still have not managed to make a distributed memory version (working on it), and are struggling with an OpenCL version for GPUs (working on it with GPU gurus).
Every time I have heard people claim to have tools that take all the hard work out of parallel programming, they show me examples like "add these 10^9 numbers to another bunch of 10^9 numbers". These tools can indeed take a lot of the hard work out of parallel computing, but not all, by quite a long way.
Posted in Brit knits jumper for NASA space chicken
Brilliant, just brilliant!
Few people can say their knitwear was used by NASA, someone give her medal!
Interesting spec
I can essentially live with the so-so resolution, I cannot do without an nVidia GPU to run many of our CUDA programs. A fairly portable 14" with a pretty nifty CUDA punch goes a long way to ticking all the boxes for my work.
100 "stunned" peopled attended the nuptials
Did he have to stun them in order to get them to attend?
Sorry, couldn't resist
Posted in Windows Phone beats iOS sales in China
"Apple will also take heart from the fact that, as of yet, there are no reports of Windows Phone fanatics in China offering to exchange organs, or even their virginity, for a handset."
This could mean people are less enthusiastic for Windows Phone, it could mean the Windows phones are sufficiently cheap to be affordable without such extreme measures, or it could mean a certain proportion of the populace needs their brain seen to (or a combination of the three).
For those in need of having their brain seen to, I hear prof Gumby is a very well-known brain specialist (or was that bwain specialist?)
Posted in SpaceX Dragon chokes at the last second
"I can't let you do that, Dave"
Wasn't that what the computer really said?
Cue Q
"Please be careful with it Bond!"
I bet Simon Travaglia would like these. Paint the green button red and vice versa.
Deep-fried pizza, anyone?
I have heard of this mythical beast, apparently hailing from Bonnie Scotland as well, but, much the cardiologist's delight, never encountered it in the wild. Should this not be researched?
Posted in Inside Nvidia's GK110 monster GPU
Fermi, Tesla, and Maxwell would all want one
Just one?
Physicists (and not just physicists) always want more compute power than currently available.
Are the honourable members of the senate just jealous?
Being rich guys who cannot renounce citizenship without losing their jobs.
Posted in What is SpaceX Dragon's secret cargo?
Re: Think sideways
Tribute to the Goodies? Like a trandem (three-seater bike) as replacement for the three-man Soyuz capsule
"Steve Austin, a man barely alive"
You could go further back.
Posted in What is SpaceX Dragon's secret cargo?
A few bottles of Château de Chasselas from the four Yorkshiremen? To wash down the spam?
So if I a bunch of them
could I build a Kim cluster? Might even catch up with a 80486 if you put together a few hundred.
Interesting developments, in particular the having multiple MPI tasks able to run simultaneously on a single Kepler chip. Great added flexibility.
Posted in HP Envy 14 Spectre Ultrabook
Re: Intel Graphics == No use to me
I understand the why, it is just of no use to me. Others will probably be very happy with the machines
