* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

3-2-1... BOOM: Russian rocket launches, explodes into TOXIC FIREBALL

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Coat

Re: Russian engineers

It doesn't kill germans, so it's a bit boring and mundane...

Crimelords: Stolen credit cards... keep 'em. It's all about banking logins now

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Big Brother

Re: Over drought

Then fill it with a governmental credit card!

D-Wave IS QUANTUM, insist USC scientists

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Re: @ Michael H.F. Wilkinson - Uncertainty about quantum computing?

Your Ket is showing!

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Trollface

Sounds like there are homeopathic amounts of quantum involved.

Where's Professeur Jacques Benveniste?

'The Apprentice' is a load of old codswallop, says biz prof

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Meh

Can we now discuss the arming of wahabbi jihadis in Syria with seriously serious gear including AA missiles?

Snowden speaks from Moscow: 'Obama lies'

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Alien

> Obama a liar

Pope catholic, bears shit in woods etc.

Really, does anyone except blue-state fascists still have any confidence in Hopey Changey?

Closed Guantanamo, most transparent administration evar, saved the economy, left Iraq as promised, does not do surveillance, not into exporting duhmocracy by force of arms into foreign lands and other utter bullshit for years and years and years.

Did I mention not gonna kill women and children every Wednesday and won't intervene in Syria? Ok, he didn't say that but he does have a "Nobel Peace Prize", like Kissinger.

Facebook reveals TAO - the data store for its social graph

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Holmes

Nah. "Tao" is about as generic as "Windows". There are about 394 search results at the Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS)...

Unix luminary among seven missing at sea

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Trollface

Re: Cruel Sea

Why are you sailing with Larry?

Microsoft's murder most foul: TechNet is dead

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Childcatcher

Re: Icon shift/shaft?

It's the creeping arabisation of the whole of the UK. They WANT you to read from right to left!!

Get me the BNP on the phone!!

Brit fantasy artist sues James Cameron over Avatar world

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Facepalm

Next: Personal LSD trips copyrighted!

I saw this blue floating island once with the huge tress and multicolored sky. S'Truth.

PRISM leaks: WTF, you don't spy on your friends, splutters EU

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Meh

Re: Not News

Not News

I wonder what counts as news today?

A new Lohan event?

Lizards discovered during a politician's lobotomy?

Someone denies the Holocaust sotto voce in a bar in Devonshire?

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Paris Hilton

NSA boasted of targeting "third party partners", which do not include second-party countries like Canada, the UK or Australia

Did they mean "third class partners"?

Yorkshire police lose 9,000 guns in rogue BOFH database blunder

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Thumb Down

Useless register to keep old ladies safey-feely goes AWOL, care-o-meter at 0.

So what.

What's the difference between GEEKS and NERDS?

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Facepalm

It's exactly the wrong way round.

Supercomputer efficiency jumps, but nowhere near exascale needs

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Thumb Up

Re: "you will still need a 42 megawatt nuke plan to power an exascale machine."

Toshiba 4S (Super Safe, Small and Simple)

"The actual reactor would be located in a sealed, cylindrical vault 30 m (98 ft) underground, while the building above ground would be 22×16×11 m (72×52.5×36 ft) in size. This power plant is designed to provide 10 megawatts of electrical power with a 50 MW version available in the future."

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Holmes

> 2,351 megaflops per watt

I never understand this unit. That's in effect just "megaflop/joule". Why not use that?

An interesting point from "Energy Oddities, Part 2: Why Green Computing Is Odd by Kirk W. Cameron (IEEE Computer, March 2013)":

Consider the power profile of an average system with two 4-core Intel Xeon processors under various loads. (...), the power consumption varies according to the system’s use of memory, disks, and processors, fluctuating from about 120 W at idle to more than 200 W under an intense CPU workload. This constitutes about a 90-W or 42 % up-swing in energy use, which typically occurs in less than 50 ms.

Now, consider a datacenter with 1,000 or 10,000 of these types of systems. The largest possible increase in power consumption in less than 50 ms in the case of 1,000 systems is about 90 kW, and in the case of 10,000 systems, it is about 900 kW (...) power companies prefer steady power consumption to the impractical nature of spinning generators up and down and the high cost of overprovisioning. So, for a single datacenter with less than 10,000 systems using a typical Xeon server, these energy swings are real but not troubling because power providers operate in the range of tens to hundreds of MW.

General-purpose graphics processing units (...) engines consume significant amounts of power, ranging from 30 to 200 W per GPGPU. (---An example--) system’s baseline power increases about 40 watts with the GPGPU card installed. Furthermore, under a matrix multiply workload running on the Nvidia card, the power can fluctuate as much as 62 percent, or 270 watts, in less than 50 ms.

What are the implications for the datacenter? For 1,000 systems, swings of about 270 kW would occur, whereas for 10,000 systems, swings could exceed 2.7 MW. These are big numbers, and we have no idea whether they will wreak havoc on the power grid. Certainly a 2.7-MW swing is less than ideal from a power company’s perspective. (...) If we extrapolate the data from our system to 10,000 nodes with three GPGPUs each, swings could exceed 8 MW.

(...) individual datacenters and colocation facilities, such as those Google and Facebook are building, are getting larger. For various reasons, companies are clustering datacenters in certain areas—for example, Salt Lake City, UT, and Herndon, VA. With these types of observed fluctuations across multiple datacenters, potentially dramatic power swings in the tens of MW can place additional strains on the power grid.

NASA to flip ion engine's 'OFF' switch after brilliant 5.5 year burn

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Holmes

Re: electrons ?

They go back into the ion stream:

"....and neutralize them"

30 years on: Remembering the Memotech MTX 500

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Windows

Damn. The younger Boyd looks like "Shaft" from those blaxploitation movies.

And that advertisement looks like a vinyl cover.

Stop trying to pull me back to the Reagan years!

Voyager 1 'close' to breaking through to DEEP SPACE - boffins

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Pint

Re: Good until 2050

> Wireline phones

I know what these are. The Battlestar "Galactica" (BSG-75) was running on those.

Retired 4-star general probed over Stuxnet details leak - report

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Big Brother

Unapproved leaks shall be prosecuted to the full extent of my law!

Vader: Where are those transmissions you intercepted? WHAT have you DONE with those plans?

Antilles: We intercepted no transmissions...

Antilles: ... This is a free country ... We're on a -

Antilles: whistleblowing mission...

Vader: If this is a whistleblowing mission, WHERE is the WHISTLE?

Crack! Another one bites the dust.

Vader: Commander, tear this nation apart until you find those plans! And bring me all leakers, I want them ALIVE!

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Holmes

Oh, FFS

widely interpreted as a scheme

"Widely" == Israel, people in the pay of Israel (yeah, those AIPAC bags of greenbacks really get the tongues wagging), scumbag politicians looking for a quick way to the top using the lifes of others and our friendly terror-supporting guys of Saudi Arabia, more like.

Hope this helps.

MSX: The Japanese are coming! The Japanese are coming!

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Windows

Re: Will we be talking about Xbox in a similar fashion in 20 years time?

Hell yeah.

> Get the latest Scientific American in snail-mail (quite a few were lost in transit, but that's another matter)

> Flip to "Computer Recreations"

> Mandelbrot Sets Explained with formulas and pretty pictures.

> Can't wait for school to finish, if only the girls weren't so distracting.

> Get home

> Fire up that Sony machine

> Fiddle around to get something working, only getting 20% of the math

> A FORM appears on the screen. One pixel every 5 seconds.

> Success!!??

> It doesn't look right...

> But at least there is something!

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Paris Hilton

Re: Girl in the Sony ad

Please go on....

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Burnt out the CPU fan playing gaunlet.

There were no CPU fans back then. Really. There weren't even fans for the transformers and rectifiers inside those little boxes.

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Mushroom

It was training in autism.

"And then find out that it's not working due to a printing error in the book and you have no idea what the correct value should be?"

This. Much later did I realize that, had those editors not been clueless brats they would have included error-detection and possibly correction codes.

To be fair, books about arcane things like coding theory were hard to come by, but I'm sure there must have been articles on this in IEEE Computer or CACM, which did arrive in the mailboxes even in Yurop.

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Pint

The Amiga monitor was a refurbished Philips/Magnavox TV, wasn't it?

(Btw.... I remember an advertisement for a whole video manipulation set by Sony meant to be used with the Sony MSX 2 - never saw it anywhere in any store.)

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Thumb Up

Re: Mine was the one with Hit Bit written on it

Hell yes, it's amazing what Konami and a large ROM cassette could do with that crappy TI graphics thing (on an 8-pixel wide strip, chose two colours, no more!) and the Z80.

"Penguin Adventure II" and "Nemesis" ... back then I thought the graphics were amazing.

Idaho patriots tool up to battle Jihad with pork bullets

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It isn't even a "Ground Zero", which used to be the place where nukes are detonating.

Apple threatens ANOTHER Samsung patent lawsuit

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Headmaster

Re: As if there wasn't going to be another one?

Just lay a few gas pipes and get it over with.

UK.gov finally admits it will MISS superfast broadband target

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Facepalm

I like the smell of politically-remeaninged "austerity" in the morning

It’s absolutely crucial, if we want to rebalance our economy .... that we are providing a further £250m to ensure that...

Right. And here I was thinking that savings, tax reductions and spending reduction as well to STOP PRINTING MONEY so that all the financial clowns DIE THE FUCK OFF would be the way to rebalance the economy. Silly me.

We need a "Statler and Waldorf" icon because the Reg readership is not getting younger... cough!!

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Trollface

Re: No shit.

Oh come on. Those fibers feel pretty lonely all by themselves.

Boffin's claim: I have found how to get girls into tech

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Holmes

Re: Doesn't it miss the point somewhat?

You can't model the world "emotionally".

PlayStation 4 is FreeBSD inside

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Facepalm

I hope to $DEITY all of the posts above are SAMEFAG!

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Facepalm

Re: The righteous

Is this a /b/ raid in action?

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Devil

Wouldn't it be better to have a REAL-TIME OS?

Finally a good use for "process must finish before now + 5 ms"

Windows 8.1 start button appears as Microsoft's Blue wave breaks

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Trollface

Re: @hungee

Woah seems WIn8 really is for the Power User Master Race.

"A major boon in analytics, optimisation, specialisation and customization! Superior WiFi controls in one-click! End process, actually works - immediately!"

Really! Don't know whether "Babby's First Computer" or a Microsoft Marketing Campaign.

Where is mmeier btw?

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Paris Hilton

Re: @AndrueC

> boot to explorer as the shell

Can anyone enlighten me as to what people consider a "shell" in Windows?

In Unix, the "shell" is the command interpreter (the program) input/outputting to an interactive text interface (in olden days, a line printer complete with fanfold (hell yeah!), nowadays, some window in graphical user interface)

Clearly that's not it.

The "Windows shell" seems to be something on a sliding scale between the whole UI system (corresponds to X, swappable in Unix, not so much in Windows unless you want to look into the kernel), the look and feel of it (Gnome, KDE, XFCE) and some file navigator / application (Dolphin, Konqueror etc.)

'Do the right thing and tell on a pirate' - software bods

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Holmes

Re: IANAE

> I think the money would be parked in an account in Ireland?

Which would be cool too. That would be savings. Savings decrease the cost of borrowed money (i.e. interest rates). Hence investments can take off. Of course, in these fairy tale days of neverending bubbles, interest rates are kept low by ministerial decree followed by printing press noises, which causes inflation, puts the economy on amphetamine (no teeth after a decade or so) and nukes your pension scheme. But hey, that's pretty complex for people to understand. And the minister can take a hefty wank because he "helped the economy", natch.

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Flame

Re: IANAE

Of course.

Someone from dim & slow-witted country thinks that people have a money printing machine like a Central Bank and thus should be forced to keynesianistically pump it out to increase GDP. Similar ideas can be heard from 5-year olds and Krugman. Doesn't mean they make any sense.

Guess he's just shilling for the software rent seekers though (who brought us such nice presents like software patents and similar rapes of Joe Public) who have marginal production costs anyway, so don't expect a job to be created for a guy to watch the shrink-wrapping machine if you shell out for overpriced buggy stuff.

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Big Brother

"I he clicks on something, say something!"

Planetary data merge shows three Earth-like planets in close star system

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Alien

Re: Erm...

Yes, because these are not their ARSES, you idiot.

Boffins create tabletop ANTIMATTER GUN

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Coat

Re: Nobody talked about the Bremsstrahlung. Nobody ever talks about the Bremsstrahlung.

No Bremsstrahlung today. Bremsstrahlung tomorrow. There is always Bremsstrahlung tomorrow.

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Headmaster

> relatavistic

relativistic!

Apple reveals payouts for parents of in-app purchase nippers

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Paris Hilton

Re: My darling daughter

> the cost of their trinkets are far beyond their worth

So does anyone buy them? Worth is a relative notion.

Paris, obviously.

PRISM leaker strands hacks on booze-free flight

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Big Brother

Re: International law?

Note that the "we" Kerry is talking about is basically the administration of a proto-authoritarian state talking to the administration of a proto-authoritarian state, and in a pretty gangster fashion, too. Quid-pro-quos, you smoke one, we smoke one etc.

Mobsterism is now ingrained in their blood and second nature.

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Big Brother

Re: the press had to endure a long flight with no alcohol

Expecting articles about "sex with prawns" to appear any minute now.

Snowden dodges US agents in Moscow, skips out on flight

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Devil

Re: PHEW! What's that stench?

Oh hey Schumer is showing up:

Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.), the third-ranking Senate Democratic leader, warned that Russia could face serious consequences if it harbored Snowden. If Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin offered him asylum, it could impact negotiations to reduce nuclear arsenals, Schumer said.

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Pint

Re: It's just a matter of time

> It is illegal for them to deny a US Citizen entry into the country.

Correct. They just put you on the no-fly list while you are abroad.

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Re: @sisk It's not illegal, but it is uncool

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

Not Illegal?

GET. THE. FUCK. OUT.