Posts by Michael H.F. Wilkinson
1927 posts • joined Tuesday 24th April 2007 14:31 GMT
Page:
Wasn't it rancid
when it was first released?
I remember teaching web design at that time, and reading up on all the vitriol spewed over the product by web designers right then (and on IE5 as I recall). Some students wanting to create really fancy designs had a seriously hard time getting it to render reasonably on a wide range of browsers.
At least MS-Oz is being candid about the product's quality, albeit rather late.
Didn't irony
have something to do with iron?
Typical behaviour for adolescents then?
destructive through and through! stars, kids, they are all the same
Patent != innovation
I found one patent on making a blinking cursor by repeatedly XORing the cursor content with current screen content (DUH). In the US this is more than innovative enough to get a patent. The USPTO does a disastrously bad job of checking for prior art, leaving it to courts to find out which patents are innovative, and which not.
Posted in McAfee offers cash for clunkers
Let me be the first to point out
"An update of active viruses issued by McAfee last week falsely labelled part of the Windows operating system as a virus."
Easy mistake to make
Posted in Marmite sends in the lawyers against BNP
Say what you like about Griffin
......................
Finished yet?
Thank you
(tips hat to Tom Holt)
Pedant alert
The REST mass of the protons was way smaller than the B+ (disappointing grade to some ;-) )
The sum of the masses they had in the lab frame of reference was as high or higher than the B+.
Great fun nonetheless
Posted in BOFH: Forgive and forget
Back in charge
KZEEEEERT!
we need a cattle-prod icon
Ah, it's Friday
Posted in Nokia: digital SLRs are doomed
Ye cannae break the laws of physics capt'n II
No Nokia, you cannot take deep-space photos with your camera phone, and you cannot replace a 400 mm F5.6 APO telephoto with a lens that fits into a thimble.
The guy probably believes the image enhancement effects in CSI.
I get so tired of this sort of idiots (highly paid at that). For those still doubting:
The first issue is all about photon counts. The noise in an image is determined (apart from detector noise) most fundamentally by photon noise. Because emission and detection of photons is a random process, the noise is equal to the square root of the number of photons detected. So if a pixel captures 100 photons, the expected noise is 10. If you capture 10000 photons the noise is 100, but the signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) is 10 in the first case and 100 in the latter. S/N is very important in image quality. This is why astronomers want BIG scopes, because doubling the diameter quadruples the amount of light, and doubles S/N.
No matter of post-processing can alter these facts. I teach computer vision and image processing at the University of Groningen, and have worked quite a bit on developing ways to counter the effects of noise.
The second issue is resolution: the limit of resolution is determined by the ratio of wavelength to aperture. This is why we are building a synthetic aperture telescope HUNDREDS OF MILES ACROSS for long radio wavelength. There used to be al sorts of wild claims on what deconvolution methods could do, but in the field it is now accepted that whilst you can enhance details that are faint (at the risk of increasing noise) you cannot reconstruct information that has simply been lost at the aperture of the lens.
Posted in Nokia: digital SLRs are doomed
Yes the do have to be large
Diffraction only quits being a problem in the near field (as in NSOM (Near-field Scanning Optical Microscopes)). Otherwise -> big surface area = better S/N + better resolution (if properly corrected by whatever means). Improvements can be made in weight/bulk, but aperture is irreplaceable.
Posted in Nokia: digital SLRs are doomed
For clubbing
nothing beats the heft and swing you get out of a long telephoto, preferably with a hefty SLR attached
Posted in Nokia: digital SLRs are doomed
Ye cannae break the laws of physics capt'n
A phased array design you seem to be proposing works fine in radio for three reasons: (i) wavelengths are long so mechanical tolerances are fairly relaxed, (ii) photon counts are HIGH, due to low energy per photon, and (iii) phase can be measured. This allows digital correlation of the signals. All three properties are lost in visual range. Optical heterodyning is very difficult and requires very bulky equipment. Getting solid optics down to the tolerances need is hard, fluid is worse. If the ESO Very Large Telescope in finds it hard to do, I do not think a portable version will be around soon
Ig Nobel prize!!
worthy at least
Actually
I much prefer the wireless mouse I got for my laptop. The added weight makes the mouse more responsive. The batteries rarely run out, and then I have the track pad (or a spare set of AAs)
Under Dutch law
If they advertise it as free, they MUST deliver it free. Sounds fair enough.
Does Oracle want to kill ODF?
Actually
C++ initially was cross compiled.
Methinks there is a bit of a contradiction in your argument (word used without prejudice)
Posted in Why doesn't Nokia buy Palm?
As a Yurpean
and a developer, I would love to see WebOS take off. I am probably not going to get my hands on a WebOS phone any time soon, more's the pity. If WebOS fails, it is due to business decisions and not technical merit (remember Betamax?), Nokia buying Palm could prevent that happening.
Please do not speak for all Europeans, and if you feel an irresistible urge to do so, please try to sound more sensible
Posted in King of the geeks leaves Oracle
VMs and garbage collection get in the way
of speed, but then speed is not always needed. Very often programs spend most time waiting for user responses. Java is OK then. Just do not start teaching in Java, as the kids never learn how to TIDY UP THEIR MESS!!! Once they can program properly in C (or even Pascal), and know how linked list work from the inside out, they can be allowed to use prefab code available in Java.
When processing gigapixel and terapixel images, I really need to go to C(++) or similar. Java actually is not the worst: scripting languages are the real killers. I have seen some dismal attempts at processing SERIOUS amounts of text in python. What python does in days C does in minutes. Result: a 16 core machine is constantly chugging away with 16 python jobs which could have been finished WEEKS ago, meaning I cannot test my efficient parallel C-code on this machine (BLEH).
Python and the like are great for prototyping and stringing together bits of compiled C code in a flexible way, just do not process ARRAYs of real data.
Absolutely
no contest
Posted in Intel: 'We won't wait for software'
or run
64-bit Linux, runs great for some HPC stuff I try out in smaller (4-6GB) scales on my quad core at home.
OK so few games, but serious computers are for serious use ;-)
But I rather like
chocolate pudding
There have been some remarks about the use of it all
We could equally say: Why should anyone pay millions for a Picasso, Rembrandt or Van Gogh? Why should anyone pay a composer, or musician, or a fiction writer?
Answers: because we are human beings. We just like doing certain things because of curiosity or because we want to move our fellow humans emotionally. Most of all we make music, paintings sculptures and do science because it is fun, or because we could not imagine us being us WITHOUT doing it.
In the very long run, if we are to survive, we will need to travel vast distances in space. Better understanding of physics is essential to this venture. However, in my opinion, we will only be worth saving in the long run if we do not lose our ability to do things out of curiosity, creativity and compassion, and without looking at the bottom line all the time.
No beancounter can ever put a value on the joy of doing science
when will they start
colliding aircraft carriers?
Posted in Erotic trojan keelhauls Japanese pirates
Lends a whole new meaning to
having them by the short and curlies
Posted in Teen's mobe loaded with X-rated smut
excuse me
but I would be shocked if someone put stuff like this on my phone. Not because I would be shocked by the pics themselves (necessarily), but by the fact that someone put unwanted stuff on my phone AT ALL. By the same token, they might have enlisted you for all sorts of nasty (costly) subscriptions to unwanted services, or all sorts of spyware.
I am afraid I must resort to the use of the FAIL icon for the first time
do you work as an editor for
the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?
No worries
The moons of Jupiter spend only a short amount of time in the shadow of the planet. The more distant the orbit, the smaller the fraction of time in the shadow. It would have some effect on th etemperature, but not life-threateningly so
precisely
I am removing Ubuntu from my laptop. The last straw was that it froze four times in one evening, only "responding" to me yanking both the power cord and the battery from the machine. It has proven an unstable piece of fetid dingo's kidneys. OpenSUSE 11.2 works fine on my desktop, will now retake my laptop.
Integrating Twitter and facebook with an OS? NO THANK YOU. Never use these things, unlikely to change in the short term. This is application-level stuff, and I assume Canonical will actually integrate between applications rather than at the OS level.
Three, at least actually
It was a three-judge panel after all. The parents too exhibited intelligence in fighting this.
GPL gives you the right to use stuff FREE
provided you return the favour. Your get it FREE, so logically you are not entitled to any refund. You can distribute anything anywhere, provided you release your source code.
With Apple you pay, you invest hundreds of hours of work, you might end up not being able to sell or even distribute ANYTHING at a whim, with no chance of recompense. I would not waste ANY time on that.
Posted in Mars Express skims past Phobos
Because it's very different from Deimos
Most moons are solid, this one is not. People used to think this tiny moon was a captured asteroid, they were apparently wrong.
Not perhaps the greatest excitement, but still interesting
Or simply
run Crysis?
Or try processing
100 Mpixel to 1Gpixel images on a smartphone. Do that quite regularly now on my desktop
It is simple
They do not visit us because we play cricket!
Posted in Woman called Window joins Apple
There are quite some
Odd Persons in Norway for that matter (actual name, no joke)
Not if the compile time
outstrips the run time. Tracing can give benefits over full compilation in specific situations.
absolutely
..... (nuf said)
After all, they allow cross-breeding
of vulcans, humans, klingons, you name it. Even if extraterrestrial life is based on exactly the same DNA, bases and amino acids, the likelyhood that they use the same genetic code is of the order of 1/20^64 (each of 64 triplets encoding for 1 out of 20 amino acids)
that is a probability of 5.42101086242752217 10^ -84, or 83 zeros after the decimal point followed by 5 and a bit. Never mind the probability of having a sufficiently similar genome (how many base-pairs?).
By comparison, even their sound in vacuum technology is quite plausible.
Actually, quite a large percentage is heat
Some 50% or more. Getting rid of heat is one of the real thermodynamical nightmares. As Eddington (I think it was) once said: "If you want to break the second law of thermodynamics, there is no hope."
One might still
coat a missile with an ablation-type heat shield (think Apollo era). If it is also reflective (in the correct wavelength band) it will reflect part of the heat, but that by itself is apparently not enough. However, if you allow a thick shield to evaporate this has two effects: It carries the heat away from the missile effectively, and could create a cloud of droplets or particles which could scatter part of the laser energy. The vapour absorbing energy is not a problem as it will not conduct energy to the missile effectively.
Launching missiles in thick fog could help, but IR travels quite far through fog (would reduce range further though).
It would be a hell of a way
to light a barbeque
I found (e)mail merge in OO
easier and more robust than MS-Office. There are some weirdnesses to get round at the start, but at least it will talk to a (standard compliant, authenticated SMTP) mail-server, which MS-Office refused to do.
Posted in BOFH: The PFY Chronicles
Hmmm, PFY in charge?
but then Simon has returned from the dead before.
Ig Nobel prize!!
Surely
