Posts by Michael H.F. Wilkinson
1891 posts • joined Tuesday 24th April 2007 14:31 GMT
Page:
Posted in The Osborne 1: 30 years old this month
Ah, the old sewing machine portables
or "luggables", more likely. Brings back memories of hernias past (not mine BTW) ;-)
;-) + letters or d1g1ts
1/4/2011
Nice one
There is still the problem of 600 million years of evolution.
Your eyes have to focus on the screen, but this differs from the apparent distance to the object as apparent from stereo information. This is a new situation, in the sense that in 600 million years of evolution our eyes have not had to deal with it until now.
Alternatively, if you do not believe in evolution, GOD DID NOT MAKE US THAT WAY. 3D FILMS ARE THE WORK OF THE DEVIL!!
Re; No Wheels -> Please do the math:
A wheeled undercarriage means you "spread" the force of impact of the couple of square metres of tyres actually touching the ground. Landing on an air cushion you spread the load over the entire air-cushion area, which is many times more than the area of the tyres. This means the impact is much less, as much less pressure needs to be developed to generate the same force to negate the downward motion (i.e. to decelerate).
Is it just me?
Or is this joke not in the best of taste?
People died in the Hindeburg disaster.
But you can see them
"There was once a whole biosphere of anaerobes for whom oxygen was a dangerous corrosive metabolic poison... you don't see them about quite so much these days."
In your gut there are plenty: about 1/3rd of the volume of your faeces consists of anaerobes. This means you are probably carrying around one or two pounds of them.
Or sharks
WITH FRIKKIN LASERS!!!!!
obviously
Interesting article (in Deep Sea Research)
They may be onto an explanation of the unknown carbon sinks in the climate system. The existence of these sinks has been postulated previously, based on discrepancies between CO2 emissions and actual CO2 rise. This could in part fill the gap.
Posted in HMS Ark Royal goes under the hammer
I WANT TO BUY IT
BECAUSE IMPERIALIST FORCES HAVE BOMBED MY AIRFORCE TO BITS!
WILL PAY IN OIL
PLEASE DELIVER TO TRIPOLI HARBOUR, COMPLETE WITH HARRIERS IF POSSIBLE!! HASTE NEEDED
M.K, Col. (retd., really I cannot resign because I have no official title)
Posted in iPad 2 tougher than iPad 1. True
Are you suggesting
iPad users get so frustrated with their device that they take a hammer to it.
We live and learn
Posted in Windows Server pushed to the super limit
There are plenty of workloads for which the Altix UV is fine
see title
Posted in Windows Server pushed to the super limit
We are talking HPC use, not general commercial use
HPC works on a few BIG problems per box. Business software usually has a myriad of computationally small problems. Horses for courses.
Posted in Windows Server pushed to the super limit
Meaning nothing
If you run truly parallel, shared-memory code (as we do on gigapixel-range satellite image analysis), an SMP box which is just a set of 4-core or 8-core blades held together by fast switches to appear as a single shared memory box, is pathetically slow, and scales horribly, compared to a 12 core or 24 core box sitting beside it. On the latter I get a speed up of 17.5 on 24 cores, which is kind of neat. On the 64 core SMP I get a speed-up of 1 to 3 on 8 cores, and just dismal results (0.2x "speed up" on 32 cores).
Posted in Nokia talks Pure typographic cobblers
deary me
what a load of excitement over a fairly boring looking font. Maybe it will look better or be easy to read on a small screen. If so, very nice.
what I really do not get is why this is supposed to be about fluid seamless motion given that the font is very angular. what was the guy smoking?
Excellent sub-title
FACEPALM says it all
Good news indeed
As I said before. I will raise my glass to her full recovery.
Excllent!!
Should PARIS not be honoured with an Ig-Nobel prize for engineering? I will check out if it is possible under Ig-Nobel rize rules
Posted in iPhone 4 SURVIVES plunge from plane
Neat
But does it not come with an iParachute (tm)
I suddenly have a vision of people selling little backpacks with parachutes for phones.
LET'S PATENT THAT!!!!!
Posted in Brian May stands up for Welsh badgers
This is interesting information
Could you give a link to articles or reports on that?
As a scientist I would be most willing to change my opinion (based on other reports, not gut feeling) given good evidence. What your arguments do suggest is that the culling would be directed to those sets clearly suspected as being infected, not just blanket killing of all badgers, which is not always made clear.
Posted in Brian May stands up for Welsh badgers
Indeed, and if farmers new more about epidemiology
there would be fewer epidemics, better controls on transportation, fewer animals kept packed too close together, and fewer knee-jerk reactions to any wild animal that happens to share their land.
Posted in 'R' is for Revolution Analytics
R is great
It's like MatLab but for statisticians. SPSS, Systat (I am that old) and SAS are a straitjacket compared to the freedom of R. I used to do statistics in C (just wrote my own code for any methods needed), since R is around, I do not do this anymore.
Maybe Bletchley Park
should sell them an app that simulates the Enigma machine. Then we can put a remade Colossus or Turing bomb to good use again. ;-)
You really have to laugh at their stupidity. I new how to decrypt single letter replacement schemes as a kid (10 or 12 y/o).
If you REALLY want to be secure, use a (sufficiently random) one time pad. This is provably uncrackable. Truly random bits can be obtained can be obtained in many ways (including the use of various quantum devices, and radioactivity (no bad Fukushima jokes please)).
Posted in Apple sues Amazon over 'App Store' name
Calling the Lisa affordable
is stretching credulity to breaking point. The Lisa flopped not because of the features and performance, but because of the price (USD 9,995 in 1983!!). The Mac was much more affordable.
Posted in Apple sues Amazon over 'App Store' name
Or, even better
use the first five:
Appl-iStore
oops, did I get my hyphenation wrong?
Is it just me?
Or does "Limited Extended Edition" sound ridiculous? I get annoyed by any "limited editions" anyway, as a production run of 15,000,000,000 is also limited, albeit to 2.5 per person on Earth (give or take 0.1).
Will they have an "Extended Extended Edition" later (and get into trademark trouble with Asus (Eee-PC))?
Will this EEE be on the future Ultra-Violet-Ray disc? Will an EVEN MORE EXTENDED EXTENDED EDITION be available on the even more future Xray-Disc format (sounds better dunnit?)?
Mines the one with the battered 3 volume LotR BOOK in the pocket.
Posted in Texas bank robber asked for ID
Brilliant!!
That clerk deserves a reward for sheer brilliance.
Que?
I have been using OpenSuSE for years without issues.I have had issues with Ubuntu, but to date everything under OpenSuSE has been solid for me. I also fail to see how an OS can brick a motherboard.
Posted in Honey I shrunk the chip ... now what?
@ Captain TickTock
Quite right, but as a parallel programming guy (C++ with libpthread and some MPI and OpenMP), I find there are often problems when processing order is data driven. Functional programming is not necessarily a boon then. One might argue that you are trying to shift the burden to the compiler designers. In effect we have the same problems when coding for GPUs. Having said that, even if we improve our parallel programming skills, memory-bandwidth bottlenecks are a key problem to be solved.
Posted in Honey I shrunk the chip ... now what?
@ BristolBachelor: Wirth's law
"Software is getting slower faster than hardware is getting faster"
The fact that the minimum specs for Office 2007 equaled those of a Cray Y-MP performance and memory wise is telling
Posted in Honey I shrunk the chip ... now what?
One problem with light is the wavelength
Even blue light is at 450 nm (in vacuum, about 300 in glass), MUCH larger than the components used today. Therefore, within a chip, you have to use near-field calculations, and interference is more complicated. This gets messy quite quickly. Besides, if both transmitter and receiver have dimensions much smaller than the wavelength, it is difficult to impossible to get any directional sensitivity. Optical interconnects between chips seem more feasible.
Frankenstein or Euler Fractur
are also nice
I still opt for nVidia
due to CUDA, and Linux support. We have a lot of code for 3D visualization that I also run at home.
I thought someone had
i) spilled coffee
or
ii) fallen asleep
on the keyboard
Tag?
I could not resists following the tag
Jorge_MirapÃÂÂÂÔ
However, unsurprisingly the response was
"
Jorge_MirapÃÂÂÂÔ
Sorry, there are no articles for this tag.
Try searching for all relevant articles.
"
It still leaves me wondering, what does
Jorge_MirapÃÂÂÂÔ
mean?
Amanfrommars, where are you?
Well put!
The patent system in Europe works much better, because there is a proper evaluation of novelty BEFORE granting a patent. Only (comparatively) rarely are court battles needed. By penalizing the USPTO for granting idiotic patents (a method to LOSSLESSLY compress ANY bit string (including its own output) is probably my favourite) we may get rid of a lot of junk. In this instance the US should take a close look at the European system of patents.
Mycoxaflopin
new keyboard please!!
No mathematical equation can be patented
This is an exception written down in most if not all patent laws. As any algorithm can be expressed as a (sufficiently complex) lambda-calculus expression, no algorithm should be patentable, by this logic.
This is not my argument, by the way, but one put forward in an editorial in IEEE Computer Magazine. It does have logical merit, but I do see the point tat some algorithms might be patentable, because they are sufficiently innovative. The problem is that far too many obvious ones slip through (making a cursor blink by performing repeated XORs with the content of video memory is one). I also found that when implementing LZW efficiently, several optimizations I cooked up in a single afternoon violated patents (7 in all). Now I might be a brilliant programmer, if I can think of 7 patentable things in a single afternoon, but it may also be that some of these patents are indeed obvious.
But that's not as bad
as the Azgoths of Kria, or Paul Neil Milne Johnstone from Earth.
Seconded!!
letters and digits
But he lied.
He lied about the fact that it was not his work when handing it in, he then lied that there were only one or two "accidental copies". What he did was very serious, in terms of scientific behaviour, simple ethics, and certainly leadership.
Posted in Sinclair ZX81: 30 years old
If so many ZX81s are still around
why not make a cluster of them. It should only take about a million Z80 cores to compete with a netbook
Fetid dingo's kidneys
is another
Equallity?
"Endangering or getting operatives killed is a very serious crime and Manning is being held accountable for his actions."
So why did some members of a previous US administration not face similar charges? A Pfc is easier to bully than a member of the administration?
In the case I refer to the name of an operative was maliciously leaked. The "revelations" so far in Wikileaks seem humdrum (though they may do damage).
don't be too harsh
Just the word "Sometimes" in the quote is superfluous
;-)
