* Posts by Michael H.F. Wilkinson

4245 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2007

Sticky Tahr-fy pudding: Ubuntu 14.04 slickest Linux desktop ever

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Re: Head to head

"A lot less than Windows to Linux as you're not going to have to change all your applications."

My main applications are IDEs, compilers, text editors (code plus LaTeX), MatLab and Mathematica (apart from the browser). All of them available in Linux. The odd MS-Office document I get opens well enough in LibreOffice. In our department people use Windows (7), Mac OS-X and Linux (Ubuntu) roughly equally. I myself have used all three. Despite my earlier struggles with windows versions, I quite like Win 7. For most of my work I prefer Linux.

Just goes to show: OS wars are SO last century

VDI a 'delightful' experience... Really?

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Inetersting points raised

One thing I did not see is how to deal with a highly diverse user base. What is suitable for our secretarial staff is totally unsuitable for researchers and developers, and what is suitable for a researcher in software engineering is not suitable for somebody doing image processing or CUDA development. There is a tendency towards "one architecture to rule them all" in many IT departments, which would either deliver a complete overkill system for the low end users (leading to cost overruns for which IT is famous), or frustrate the hell out of power users. All to often, the latter is chosen.

There is of course a tension between keeping things simple for the IT staff and at the same time keeping a highly diverse and constantly changing customer base happy.

First pics: Comet-chaser Rosetta hurtles towards icy prey, camera in hand

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Happy

Re: Science is amazing

Somebody gave me a very strange look when I said I was organising a star party. She wondered who I had invited, and when I answered that at least 4 people with scopes would be coming puzzlement was replaced by bafflement. Apparently she was expecting some celeb names.

FINALLY Microsoft releases Office for iPad – but wait there's a CATCH

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Re: 5 people editing one document simultaneously

I can readily see that happening. Working with documents in some repository is commonplace. Having your docs in the cloud has problems however. My problem is that when I am in Uganda, Indonesia, South Africa or even Australia, I must have access to the full editing suite off-line. Never mind the annual subscription, connectivity problems and roaming charges would be my main concern. Even if the hotel or institute I visit does have good WIFI, I have had issues with connecting to data on servers here in Europe, and the moment you step out of the hotel or institute (e.g. working during a train journey) your only option is by mobile internet. That bill is going to hurt. In a plane even mobile internet is an issue.

This is not a Microsoft issue alone. I have tried one or two LaTeX editing suites for Android, and the ones I tested required access to internet to give full functionality. This is far from ideal.

Bitcoin bloodbath as China shutters all trading sites

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

As Terry Pratchett said

"Rumour is information distilled so finely that it can filter through anything"

No currency or stock is totally immune to it. The value we assign to stocks, bonds or currencies is very much based on trust (or confidence, if you like). Rumour can shatter that confidence, or at least shake it sufficiently to wipe out a large amount of the assigned value. If I held any bitcoins I would be seriously worried.

I would go for Flainian Pobble Beads any time, and I have almost got one ningi (quite a way to go before I can deposit my first Triganic Pu)

Nvidia unveils Pascal, its next-gen GPU with hella-fast interconnects and 3D packaging

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Interesting news

Memory bandwidth (also between CPU and GPU) is a major bottleneck, and designing algorithms to minimize data traffic over these buses is sometimes very difficult. Higher bandwidth should make designing algorithms for these machines less of a hassle.

WOW! Google invents the DIGITAL WATCH: What a time to be alive

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Joke

The arrival of the Vogons is nigh!!!!

As some ape-descended life forms apparently STILL think digital watches are a good idea.

Nvidia unveils Titan Z: An 8TFLOPS off-the-shelf supercomputer disguised as a gfx card

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Would love to have one for certain HPC loads, not for others

It is amazing what can be done with "cheap" HPC systems. I do note that this kind of architecture is not that good at the type of compute load I tend to work on: heavily data-driven processing order. GPUs still prefer SIMD-like problems of "lots of the same" type seen in many physics problem. Alternatively, I need to rethink my algorithms, but at the moment the fastest kit we use for our problems is a 2U rack server with 64 AMD cores and 512 GB RAM.

As you might guess from the above, 12GB is also too small for most of my data sets, and we still haven't quite worked out how to do our work in distributed-memory machines. It would be great if we could find a way to harness these beasts for our kind of work, however

Stop fondling that slab and shag, says Durex

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Joke

I thought that it was mandatory that every item used during Earth Hour must be reusable.

hmm, condoms? Reuse?

Yech!!

NASA: Vote now to put flashy lights on future spacesuits

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Coat

Any votes for Cylon style sweeping red leds?

Sorry, couldn't resist

As WinXP death looms, Microsoft releases its operating system SOURCE CODE for free

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Anybody else ever used brown-bag word processor?

I got the disk for HFL 4,- (less than 2 euro) and my wife wrote her MSc thesis on it. Simple, but it worked. I was more of a Wordstar user, as my documents (text data files from our image processing system) exceeded 64kB frequently. The column-mode editing in Wordstar was ideal for certain tricky manipulations with columns of data. I did like the first Word for Windows editions, but have switched to LaTeX since. I only ever use Word or Open/LibreOffice if I get documents from our management.

Improbable: YOU gave model Lily Cole £200k for her Impossible.com whimsy-site

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Joke

The words of Trillian ring true

"I don't know about impossible but it's very, very improbable."

In fact, it is so improbable I think they must have hooked up the logic circuitry of a Bambleweeny 57 sub-meson brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian motion generator to get this far.

I'm of to get a really hot cup of tea

Ray-Ban to produce Google Glass data-goggs: Cool - or Tool?

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Happy

Re: Like the Blues Brothers reference

Or the more extravagant ones of Elton John or Dame Edna

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Thumb Up

Like the Blues Brothers reference

I now have this mental image of Jake's jilted fiance in the film aiming her rocket launcher using a google glass

It's 2014 and you can pwn a PC by opening a .RTF in Word, Outlook

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

And people wonder why I use LaTeX. Not for everybody, I know, but it works for me.

IBM Boffins KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE, thanks to Twitter

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Joke

Paris?

Paris Texas, Paris Utah, or the real deal?

OK, geo-tagging and time zone info can help, but an effin' big Eiffel Tower in the picture should give us a hint.

Garçon, l'addition s'il vous plait!

Stop skiving: Computers can SEE THROUGH your FAKE PAIN

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Alien

But it still cannot see

the terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side

We need a Marvin icon

Bletchley boffins go to battle again: You said WHAT about Colossus?

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Mushroom

Can anybody rid us of these turbulent managers?!

For goodness sake, get on with providing service and stop this pointless bickering! If they prove incapable of sorting out their differences, could somebody get the lot of them fired, and replaced by people with more IQ than ego.

What does people-centric IT mean, anyway?

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Joke

People-centric IT?

And there I was thinking IT solutions were designed for semi-evolved simians.

Or nematode worms.

Darn, need to redesign my UI

Apple to switch HUMAN iPhone-juicer-fiddlers with ROBOTS – report

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Coat

Here I am brain the size of a planet and they ask me to make batteries!

call that job satisfaction, 'cause I don't!

Sorry, couldn't resist. Mine's the one with the radio plays in the pocket

Middle England's allotments become metric battlefield

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

So what is the correct unit in the Register's System

It's area should be in nanoWales, but the linear size might be in double-decker buses. Or will the humble linguine (unboiled, sea level) suffice?

Tornado-chasing stealth Batmobile set to invade killer vortices

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Re: Are there any test results?

I assume the construction is mainly metal, creating a good Faraday cage. That should withstand being zapped. Any sensors outside the cage would be in serious trouble, however.

This changes everything: Microsoft slips WinXP holdouts $100 to buy new Windows 8 PCs

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Re: Windows 8.1?

I moved to XP from 2000 after at least SP1 (and dual booted it with SUSE Linux). I manually tweaked security settings (and was fairly paranoid in setting router firewall settings). I found XP useful, but actually prefer Windows 7. For me, Windows 7 is the best version I have used, but then I have little or no experience with the 98, ME, and Vista incarnations (my loss, I know ;-) ).

Win 8 on a new laptop is much less to my liking and I must still get round to setting up the machine to dual boot with Linux. A single try getting round the effing EFI boot loader failed.

I will try upgrading one ancient laptop from XP to Win 7 and failing that make it a full Linux machine.

5 Eyes in the Sky: The TRUTH about Flight MH370 and SPOOKSATS

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Re: Re; LeeE Of course it's military...

Regarding the "unclassified" classification, all satellite images gathered by DigitalGlobe and the like must be screened by a government agency before release to the public (by law). Nothing surprising there. I have processed many satellite images (all previously cleared) and in terms of resolution this looks like many commercial images I have seen. I have no clearance (nor feel an urgent need to get one) for military work.

The only higher-resolution remote sensing images I have seen were aerial (not satellite) images taken after the Haiti earthquake. These were 15cm in resolution. More is probably possible, but not needed in most applications, as it only leads to an explosion in data size. For commercial images, this is an important consideration. Many, if not most applications only really need a resolution in the order of 1m which already leads to roughly 150 terapixels of data to cover just the earth's land mass. Moving to 0.25cm you have a 16-fold increase in data size (and processing time if your processing algorithms are O(N), otherwise it is worse). You need a very good business case to justify that.

BOFH: On the PFY's Scottish estate, no one can hear you scream...

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Happy

Nice!

"Sending money to Uganda" has a nice ring to it

As a veiled threat for those in the know

Proof Apple is GOING BACKWARDS: It's trying to patent a Newton-ish touchscreen stylus

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Childcatcher

Maybe the cost of filing a patent could be made variable

A fixed component + a DON'T WASTE OUR TIME fine (DWOT-fine) if prior art is found

The latter could be expressed as

DWOT_fine = base_fine * num_hits * age_oldest / rank_first_hit;

with

num_hits = number of hits on prior art in relevant search engines;

rank_first_hit = the rank of the first hit on prior art in a relevant query

age_oldest = age (in years) of first mention of prior art

base_fine = a figure in the order of 1,000,000 $

Alternatively, crowd-source this: publish the application, and have a contest who can find the oldest prior art. The DWOT-fine (computed based on age of oldest prior art, number of valid responses, and speed of first response) is split between the person finding the oldest prior art, and the person giving the first valid response.

THAT would cut back frivolous patent applications

A sysadmin always comes prepared: Grasp those essential tools

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Joke

What? No cattleprod!!

Indispensable, I would say

Planes fail to find 'credible' candidate for flight MH370 wreckage

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

To summarise

We still do not know.

Frustrating for us commentards, but agonizing for the relatives of those on board. Fingers crossed for more information. The sooner the better.

Bing accused of out-censoring the Great Firewall

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Re: I just hope...

Nothing specific to Microsoft. Many if not most businesses when faced with the choice of conforming to local laws or not doing business don't chose the "not doing business" option.

Nothing personal, it's just business, they say.

Sad, perhaps, but true.

Monkey steals iPod touch, loses interest in minutes

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

OOK!

I think the monkey in question would as easily lose interest in "War and Peace", which to many humans is absolutely riveting.

I asked, the only simian I know who appreciates books, and he said "OOK" so there!

Keep your quinoa, hipsters: Boffins back healthy slabs of choc

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Pint

Great news

I'll break open those bars off extra-dark chocolate my kids gave me for my birthday to celebrate in style

So. Farewell then Steelie Neelie: You were WORSE than USELESS

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Once upon a time

Neelie deserved the "Steelie". Maybe she should have clung on to the competition portfolio. I always felt the "digital agenda" portfolio had "FAD" printed over it in large friendly letters

Blighty goes retro with 12-sided pound coin

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Happy

Brings back memories

I must have an old threepence lying around somewhere, along with a few ha'pence.

Surf's up near Saturn as boffins spot waves on Titan

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Happy

Interesting news, but

It's a bit nippy for surfing, I would say, at −179.2 °C.

Imagination brings real-time hyper-realistic ray tracing to mobile kit

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Interesting, but...

What about the power draw? Important constraint for a mobile device

Grav waves: Moment when 'father of Big Bang inflation' learns he was RIGHT ALL ALONG

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Thumb Up

I suppose he didn't say

"I love it when a plan comes together!"

Great work, and well-deserved bottle of bubbly

Byzantine Generals co-boffin Lamport bags CompSci's 'Nobel prize'

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Pint

Well deserved!!

I'll raise a glass to him tonight, most likely a more distilled versio

WTF is … the multiverse?

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Happy

And somewhere in the multiverse

there is a giant star turtle, with four elephants on its back, ....

Shuttleworth: Firmware is the universal Trojan

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

It's not just the "regular" firmware

What about all the microcode in most, if not all CISC processors (not sure about modern RISC machines)? In principle it could be doing all sorts of things beyond performing the instruction requested by the given op-code.

Opening up the code for inspection might work, but then you would still need to check the actual product shipped to ensure it adheres to the open specifications.

The problem with paranoia is choosing an appropriate point to stop suspicions, and start trusting. I have no easy answer for that.

This record-smashing robot solves a Rubik's Cube in 3.253 seconds

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Thumb Up

Nice project

This kind of project is great to get kids enthusiastic for computer science at an early age.

Think drone delivery is hot air? A BREWERY just proved you wrong

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Re: Nice advert. However, ...

Light beer indeed, maybe with Helium as replacement for CO2

GRAV WAVE TSUNAMI boffinry BONANZA – the aftershock of the universe's Big Bang

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Happy

Nah, it read: "We apologise for the inconvenience"

French novel falls foul of Apple's breast inspectors

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

19th-century attitude

They still have not read "Pornography and Obscenity" by D.H. Lawrence, which he wrote as a response to the outrage he had caused with Lady Chatterley's Lover. Lawrence would never classify the "offending" (to Apple) image as pornography. In his words

"Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it",

which this image, curiously juxtaposing the female body with a knife blade clearly does not do.

The USA apparently have some catching up to do on these issues.

iOS 7's weak random number generator stuns kernel security – claim

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Re: SIlly question but...

I would use the Mersenne Twister now, in particular because loads of implementations exist (R, matlab, PHP, Python, GNU Scientific Library, etc). When I implemented the additive (or subtractive) generator (1989) it did not exist, and most if not all languages used the LCG. Knuth's one is a variant of the Lagged Fibonacci generator. Apart from being a better generator than the LCG, if initialized properly, it is much faster, because I only have to do one subtraction, and a conditional addition (if the result of the subtraction is negative, which is a cheap test), as opposed to a multiplication, modulus, and addition for the LCG. Numerical Recipes in C has an implementation (ugly code, but it works). The speed difference on an 8 MHz 80286 (used for image processing) was massive.

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Re: SIlly question but...

That's one solution. I also like the least significant bits of the output of a covered webcam with gain at maximum. Really random bits are easily obtained from noise in the outside world if your device has inputs like cameras and microphones.

For quick and dirty work NOT involving security (but e.g. for Monte-Carlo simulations) I used to use the additive PRNG from Knuth (with 2^55-1 period). This needs 55 seeds in my case, and webcam noise or similar is fine for that. With the development of the Mersenne Twister this subtractive generator is a bit out of date. I gather it is faster (and also faster than the LCG), however.

Daring danger-drone dives into VOLCANIC eruption – what happens next has to be seen

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Best use of a drone I have seen for a long time

Well done!

Don't stare: SHRUNKEN Mercury lost 7km, but only 'cos it's COOLING

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Coat

I thought it looked a bit small through my scope

Sorry, time to go home, it appears. Mine is the one with "Turn Left at Orion" in the pocket

Malaysia Airlines mystery: Click here for the TRUTH

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Joke

Re: The Most Bonkers Explanation award goes to...

Or was it really a Boeing 666

Wackadoo DIYers scissor-kick beatboxer

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Re: Won't someone think of the children!

The horror, the horror,....

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Childcatcher

Won't someone think of the children!

</offended mode>

If "death spiral" had been present in the Middle English, I shudder to think what sort of instrument of torture it might have been