Posts by Michael H.F. Wilkinson
1883 posts • joined Tuesday 24th April 2007 14:31 GMT
Page:
Fortunately
Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged is not in control of Curiosity. Otherwise he would use that punch to write a very rude word indeed (like Belgium)
Who guards the guardians?
Nobody, it seems
Re: Well I never...
but, but, but.....
WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE LAWYERS!!
Anybody?
...
Anybody?
...
Apparently not
Re: We should ignore it ---- Why?
Door handle? Also looks like the flushing handle in our toilet. If Curiosity pulls it, it might find the resulting evidence of water overwhelming
Posted in El Reg contemplates the ultimate cuppa
Re: Has nobody mentioned water?
It is important! I am very fortunate to have just about the best water possible coming out of the tap.
Posted in El Reg contemplates the ultimate cuppa
Re: The ramsay way
Should that last line not be
F***IN ENJOY!!!
Posted in El Reg contemplates the ultimate cuppa
My versions
Basic work version:
1. Take one wire-mesh tea-strainer spoon, and insert one good teaspoon of Keemun Black tea (Twinings Prince of Wales at a pinch).
2. Nuke water in big mug in industrial-strength microwave oven until it really boils
3. Add tea-strainer spoon.
4. Infuse as long as desired, or alternatively forget about it whilst coding and drink arbitrarily strong
4b) add milk and sugar if you must
Keemun black tea is very dark by nature, and never turns bitter, so forgetting to remove the tea only makes it stronger, but never renders it undrinkable.
On the road version:
replace tea strainer egg by Twinings Prince of Wales tea bags
Working in region with hard water:
Replace Keemun Black by good quality Assam and keep infusion time down. Assam takes hard water better than most
The horror, the horror
of not being able to use twitter, facebook, ......
Oh, wait. I don't have accounts there.
but wait. No REG!!!!
AAAARGH, WE ARE DOOMED!!!!
Re: If there is life out there, they're keeping quiet
Cricket, they do not like cricket at all. They find it very offensive, and are ignoring us for the barbarians we are
Re: Dear God
And they have added frickin' lasers to the sharks
Re: I love programmer snobbery.
I have written well-structured programmes in assembler.
Likewise, it is possible to write good code in Javascript (no doubt, I have not written any)
Whether either of the above is what I would want to do is another matter entirely. This is not a matter of snobbery, it is a matter of practicality. Scripting-based languages are very valuable for quick prototyping, or for portability, when top performance is not required (and JIT compilers go quite a long way to address performance issues). However, C and C++ are still my preferred tools, for development of high-performance code and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
or a chartered accountant
isn't the official phrase "sexecution" ?
Re: Ah UEFI.
Remind me, does UEFI stand for Users Expect a Fuck-up Instantly?
Re: If your names not down your not coming in..
"I'd much rather we had green energy from nuclear powerplants"
Precisely, you cannot beat nuclear for that nice green glow
Sounds a bit too much like model data being presented as facts, not that I doubt that (feral and domestic) cats cause a lot of damage.
In my own modelling of (microbial) ecosystems I always was suspicious if my algorithm gave surprising results. Almost always I had found something new. In most cases it was a new bug in the code. In rare cases there was something interesting to report. In all those cases I went and checked the literature to corroborate my findings with observational data (or failing that, suggest how biologists could falsify my findings)
Re: Amazing to think ...
"that each pixel in the picture is a sun!"
M31 contains some 1,000,000,000,000 stars. You would need terapixel images to make the above be true.
The universe never ceases to amaze.
Re: Maybe, maybe not
The towel tricks works by calming the wifi chip by protecting it from the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.
Mine is the one with the towel
Re: Answer me these questions three, before your passport you will see!
I don't know that
AAAAAAAAAAAARRRGGGHHH!!!
Answer me these questions three, before your passport you will see!
1. What is your name?
2. What is your quest?
3. What is your favourite colour?
OR
3. What is the capitol of Assyria
OR
3. What is the average airspeed of an unladen swallow?
I know, I know! The one with Monty's Encylopythonia in the pocket, please
Re: Quite impressive in term of size but am I alone in wondering.
Dead right. Getting a million cores running effectively is very hard!! It is not just Amdahl's law that can get in the way (i.e. the max speed-up is limited by a section of the code that is sequential), it is communication overhead. We are working on a problem that, if implemented naively, would required O(N log N) communication, with N the number of pixels, which in practice means that the largest data set we have to work on (1.5 Tpixel) requires in the order of 120TB of data traffic. We are trying to get that down to O(G √N log N), with G the number of grey levels, which boils down to in the order of 240 GB of traffic in our case. Still a lot, but it should bring the algorithm into the realms of the possible.
I do not see compilers take over this sort of redesign of the code automatically any time soon
Shirley not?
And stop calling me Shirley!
Mine is the one with the Naked Gun DVD in the pocket
Re: Yeah...
More likely it will crush the blender!
But I thought it was OK as long as there are urns, or cherubs in the picture?
Shows it must be art, dunnit?
That's what Sgt Colon told me
Re: Priorities
"Guns are granted by the constitution, tits - no so much.
The sheer truth is that porn lobby is just too weak."
Should the porn lobby give stiffer opposition?
Sorry couldn't resist
Nice to hear about a company that tries to do good and not just "not do evil". If you can pull it off, not taking venture capital and going public is a very good way to keep control of a company, and staying true to your goals. It is not easy of course.
Well done to Liferay
Re: I had almost expected
I see the Firefox headline flaw has fortuitously been fixed
I think it is called unobtanium (or was it narrativium?)
Posted in BEST reiterates ‘no solar forcing’ claim
Exactly!
I mean, I haven't seen the sun for MONTHS and it is still not that cold! How could a ball of hot plasma 110 times the diameter of the earth affect us at a distance of 149 MILLION kilometres?
Regarding the "liquid output"
doesn't that depend heavily on the liquid input?
How many rings to rule them all?
One for each board member
So, that is the LOTR joke settled
Sorry, couldn't resist
Mine is the one with the three volume edition
I had almost expected
Firefox to feature in the fantastically fanciful headline
Re: Am I bothered?
That or the "Scientists Now Know" section of Annals of Improbable Research
I should send them my paper on Creativity - Bureaucracy Decay Studied by Pasta - Antipasta Collision Experiments, but I haven't yet got round to making up some data to put in the plots
Re: *facepalms*
It is equally typical for non-engineers not to get these jokes
Engineers and non-engineers are simply two nations separated by a common language
Re: *facepalms*
"Please express the force of your facepalm in kilopascals."
I think Norrises per nanoWales is the accepted unit here
Not that I care
The NRA clearly need no lessons in shooting themselves in the foot
Next they will complain about restrictions on weapons like those on the left
Nice article!
"I know a troll when they sue us."
That almost cost me a keyboard
Posted in Google denies smacking Botswanan ass
Just taking a dust bath to remove ticks
Did the presence of the google operatives give the creature the impression of being infested with bloodsucking parasites?
Intelligent creature, in that case
Whatever the product, this will not entice me
either to buy Facebook stocks, or to join Facebook
Re: Death by X-Ray?
That, or you just reverse the polarity of the neutron flow (seems to work for Scotty and Geordi La Forge, and Dr. Who (or was that the flux))
@S4qFBxkFFg
Agreed, but some people do get it aesthetically right and functional, like this telescope, which I think you might appreciate.
Re: not just the old..
I have this image of these two confused (and for some reason blond) women asking directions from a bemused Billy Connolly or Rab C. Nesbit lookalike.
"Ach nea! Ye've come a wee bit too far north, ya stupid cows!"
Re: Non-information
Simply typing in the wrong name of the city will not cause this in general. On all satnavs I have used (Garmin and (long ago) ViaMichelin) you must first actively select another country. Otherwise Frenchmen would be sent to Paris, Texas by accident. ;-)
Remaining question: Is there a Brussels, Croatia? ;-)
Re: Lasers in space
Yes, indeed, once you see the light of a weapon-class laser, you can't any more (ever again!)
Re: Lol.
Software re-use often has these side effects.
Re: installation disc?
So he did not make the "recovery discs" most laptops ask you to make? That is much safer than a recovery partition (in case the hard drive goes titsup). Machines with windows pre-installed often come with a product code on the underside of the machine. Could this be used to get a reinstallation disk from MS (not likely I guess, but perhaps worth a shot)?
And people wonder why the Dutch make jokes about Belgians
Quite besides being distracted, having to refuel a few times on an 80km trip should be a give-away that something is rotten in the state of Belgium.
Re: Unfortunately,
And the problem with kids today is that if you tell em they don't believe a word you are saying!
