Posts by Michael H.F. Wilkinson
1891 posts • joined Tuesday 24th April 2007 14:31 GMT
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Is LOHAN going to make a playmobil re-enactment of this?
Just asking.
It is exciting when people go after such a long-standing record.
I am surprised.
Worst film nominations and nobody mentioned U571?
Most bad film I can ignore, and they will go away again. U571 is such an insult to what really happened in cracking enigma that it just gets my blood pressure up (and many others).
Posted in Lawyers of Mordor menace Hobbit boozer
Are they also suing scientific journals?
The word "Hobbit" is used to describe small, smart hominids found on the island of Flores in Indonesia in the scientific literature. See e.g. this pdf. Do they want to sue Nature, or Elsevier?
Thought not.
And if they do not pay, they will be clamped?
Look out for big yellow triangular thingies (technical term) in space.
If iPads had been available when "Yes, minister" was produced
I wonder how sir Humphrey would have managed to subvert it. Could have made for some interesting episodes.
Posted in Galaxies to get the Pluto treatment?
The situation is a bit different from that of planets, as the notion of dwarf planet was introduced to cover cases like Pluto and the larger Kuiper-belt objects. The notion of a dwarf galaxy has been around much longer. Proper definitions help to avoid confusion.
Great, could be used to develop nan-playmobil!
for nano re-enactments.
Would find use on El Reg, I suppose
Posted in The seven types of commentard
Re: This is not a type N post
Yes, but do use El Reg approved units
Posted in The seven types of commentard
Re: How do you count Type N?
More importantly, how do you submit a type N post?
I really want to, but on second thoughts, I cannot be bothered
Re: "Study shows soap operas trigger aggression in women"
" personally think that watching that shit would wind anybody up, male or female. I only have to hear the theme tune from A Certain Famous Soap to feel my blood pressure rising."
Absolutely! My wife frequently wonders why I leave the room when certain shows are on TV (not just soaps, "talent" (word used without prejudice) shows have an even more pronounced effect). I tend not to say I am looking for more fun things to do, like stapling my ears to a wall, or putting my hand in a meat grinder. Somehow, remarks like that do not go down well.
By improvements in (time) management?
Re: "Region 1429"
Active regions on the sun (groups of sun spots) are numbered. This one happens to be 1429.
Posted in Solar storm arrives, nobody notices
I had a look north of the city
No aurora to see. Moonlight may have been the culprit, or maybe there was just nothing to see (apart from the Moon, Venus, Jupiter, and Mars)
Pity I did not hear this yesterday.
I was accosted by evangelical Christians yesterday evening and was asked what I believed in. I pointed to Venus, Jupiter, and Mars in the sky stating that my Goddess of Love, Father of Gods, and God of war were all now visible in the sky, so who was I to doubt. They were genuinely shocked.
On the other hand, if I started out about the FSM they would probably know immediately I was pulling their leg (which I was of course), so suggesting belief in ancient gods is probably the better ploy.
Cool!
I will test the 64 core 512GB single box (4U rack server) we are getting shortly (for processing large astronomical and remote sensing images rapidly). I will compare the cents per MFLOP/s to the figures here. We already know it will kick the backside of the 32 processor Cray SV1e we used to have performance wise, at less that 1% of the cost. I am really curious what the figures will be. Linpack has its limits of course, but it is still nice to know where you stand, even roughly.
Is it just me?
But whenever I hear the name of these orbiters, I have an image of John Cleese as "Tim the Enchanter" from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The way he bawled "GRRRAIL!!" in a Scottish accent at Graham Chapman as King Arthur is forever etched in my memory.
Posted in Sun belches wonking solar flare
I just hope we get some clear skies
Maybe there will be some aurora activity.
Re: Mexico again
Maybe they like enchiladas?
Mine is the one with the sombrero
Nano diamonds
The perfect gift for fashionable protozoans?
Re: if this is what you have for the 7th of march
Isn't that when they release the iFool?
Sorry, couldn't resist
"The Jobsian legacy calls for a new product thrust into every niche in your life."
Sounds painful
Re: or maybe laying on the chaise longue
Eggs?
Re: Foreign lorries @Matthew 3
1.80m
But then I do not live in Blighty
Posted in AOL pulls the plug on Brizzly
Re: picture sizes?
I just got me a 2 Terabyte disk for picture backup, which should keep me in business for a while. I might put some stuff in cloud storage for cloud processing, or access when not at home, but I will certainly keep local backups.
Given the price of a NAS, you can store shed-loads at home for very little.
Men were real men in those days
This is proven by the fact that the Delilah speech scrambler shown in the picture was called "portable".
By implication, we assume women were real women, and small furry creatures from alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from alpha Centauri.
How many of us want that app?
Could get messy if everyone could fire a minister, but I know we have all wanted to at times.
Posted in Giant stick insect saved from extinction
Perhaps we should equip them
with FRICKIN' LASERS.
That'll show the rats!
Re: Somethings wrong here...
Glare can cause a non-circular object to appear round quite easily.
Re: Spectral Analysis
Usually the brightest fireballs show up red and green N2 and O2 lines. A very bright one may show other traces, but it might have been difficult to get spectral readings on such a fast moving object.
Kudos to these guys!
The lot of them. Really interesting stuff is being made out there.
One caveat: Igors disapprove of near threshold computing:
"Tethting the printhiple? Thtick a bolt of lighting through it! Igorth alwayth make thythtemth that need more power!"
Re: Re: Perfectly plausible
Ah, now you are talking. Proper Bond movie with no fewer than 7 James Bonds (well, 6 and one Jimmy Bond).
"Who is this le Chifre?"
"Nobody knows. Not even le Chifre."
UNIX has a card in its hand:
I ATEN'T DEAD!!
Spinners?
Where they using procrastinators to get the filming done quickly?
Mine is the one with "Thief of Time" in the pocket
5 digit PINs are being introduced here
I would have no problems remembering 5 digit or longer ones.
Regarding blacklisting, given that your bank knows your date of birth, surely they could forbid you to use a number derived from that date? That would not prevent you from using your wife's, or kids birthday, but those are not printed on your ID, as a rule, so at least some security is added.
Posted in CRACK made by quakes FOUND ON MOON
Cool!
or actually, not that cool (the moon, that is, not the science).
Posted in Exascale by 2018: Crazy ...or possible?
Re: Re: I could use such power
Many image processing tools are easily broken up into small loads. The tools we develop are so-called connected filters in which data from all parts of the image may influence all other parts. Often you want to avoid this, but e.g. for analysis of complete road networks, you cannot predict which parts need to communicate with which other parts. To cut communication overhead down you need comparatively coarse grained parallellism.
We have been able to device a scheme (which we are now implementing) which cuts down local memory requirements from O(N) to O(N/Np + sqrt(N)), with N the number of pixels and Np the number of processor nodes. Normally you just require O(N/Np) per node. Communication overhead can be dropped from O(N) to O(sqrt(N) log(N)). This has moved the problem from the impossible to the "possible, but you need a coarse-grained cluster."
Of course, the first (shared memory) parallel algorithm for this filters dates from 2008, so we still have much to learn. Other problems in science can also require global interaction between particles (gravity has infinite reach). A lot of work is done cutting communication down, but this is often at the expense of accuracy.
Posted in Exascale by 2018: Crazy ...or possible?
I could use such power
We are looking at terapixel scale image processing. One aim is compute the entire aerial photography data set of the Haiti earthquake for damage assessment. We aim to do this in a few hours. This can still be done at the multi gigaflop rates provided by decent size clusters. For the 2004 tsunami, we would need orders of magnitude more compute power to handle all measurements required (we are talking petapixel range). These are computations that cannot possibly wait. Though exaflop processing might not be needed yet, as image resolution increases, so do the data rates. Compute power will have to keep up. Real-time emergency response requires real-time processing of vast amounts of data. The size of each compute node of the EC2 and similar cloud systems is far too small for our purposes (we need to have at least 32 cores (preferably 64) cores per node and between 128 GB and 1 TB of RAM per node).
So, yes, I can see real-world, life and death applications for these kinds of compute powers. Other applications include large scale scientific simulations (think evolution of galaxies, or the cosmic web, but also earthquakes, ocean currents, or even the blood flow through a sizeable chunk of the vascular system).
Posted in Tiny transistor stays where it's put
-196 C is cold, but
it is "merely" liquid nitrogen (LiN) level. Not everyday, but not nearly as impractical as previous devices requiring liquid helium (LiHe) temperatures. Think of the Josephson switch, which was hailed as a breakthrough in high performance computing once. LiHe cooling requirements.
If we can build qubit devices based on this, the potential gains might outstrip the cost of LiN cooling.
Posted in Dick estate gets stiffed
One thing is odd
They (the studio, producer, whatever) enter into an agreement with the estate, and now in retrospect they don't want to pay? Can a written agreement be ignored so easily?
Posted in LOHAN flashes fantastical flying truss
Despite the reservation about stability
Two balloons seems more fitting for LOHAN
I know, I know, I'll get me coat
All ProView has is their iP
sorry, I'll get me coat
Posted in Europeans turn backs on Ultrabooks
Re: Re: HP DM1
There is a very positive review right here on the reg
Posted in Cloudy bigshots eclipse open source
Users might not care, but what do they know?
If all OSS products were withdrawn or crippled in one fell swoop, how much of the internet would be left standing? Users do not care about the fact that Apache is OSS, or that their home wifi router runs Linux, but unplug all OSS products from the net, and the wails of anguish would be deafening. Much of open OSS (or software in general) is not sexy. It just sits in the background doing some vital job. That means people only begin to care when something fails.
Good point!
Small runs become much more interesting this way. Ultimately, one might envisage chip making to be commoditized like 3D printing is becoming a commodity. One off parts are becoming affordable (see LOHAN). Imagine designing your own ASIC chip from scratch rather than going the FPGA route. Design a schematic, send it off, have a wafer-full made, mounted and sent to you.
Far fetched now, but maybe some day.
What do you mean "a man can dream"? A man should dream!
Posted in OCZ out-flashes EMC's Lightning
OMG I want one!!!
or two, or three!
Devices like these could SERIOUSLy boost the performance of some seriously big image processing chores (multi terapixel stuff). We require both massive storage and rapid access to LOTS of data.
Aren't we living in wonderful times, technology wise.
"The steady stream of embarrassments are being seen as evidence of a power struggle within the church as one group of elderly men pits itself against another group of elderly men to replace an even more elderly man. Possibly with an elderly Italian."
Loved that bit to bits! It almost sounds like the bad old days at the Unseen University (dead men's shoes and all that).
On the plus side, if we wait just e bit longer, maybe nature will take its course and all these elderly men will start falling over from old age. Whether or not they will meet the maker they would expect (or would have us believe to expect) is another matter entirely
It may have been the 11.x version that would not boot on various NVidia powered laptops (specifically), not just mine. I then got the older Kubuntu (maybe Gnome versions worked better) which on occasion froze, until that fateful evening when it froze 4 times in quite quick succession (whilst writing some LaTeX in emacs, not a graphics or CPU intensive load). Later a patch was made available for 11.X, but by then I had switched back. New version might be fine, and we work with some Kubuntu derivative at work on my desktop machine, which seems happy enough with the NVidia support. It just did not get along with my old Vaio SZ.
Posted in HP gives sysadmins a little mobility
Simon will want one
You just know it. Better still, rig the Boss/head of IT's smartphone/fondleslab to remotely mess things up, with an easy trail leading to said Boss/head of IT. Just one more way of getting rid of a boss.
