Just what I needed
great episode
Posts by Michael H.F. Wilkinson
4255 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2007
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BOFH: Getting to the brown, nutty heart of the water cooler matter
Business or pleasure? Crucial MX200 and BX100 1TB SSDs
Tuesday 12th May 2015 20:22 GMT 
Re: Very interesting
Yes it is the extreme bursty nature of the data. I take mosaic shots like this twenty-three paner (do click on the image to see the full 3541x3451 res ;-)) and there is nothing more frustrating than to see the HDD suddenly throttle your speed from 100FPS to 4 or 5FPS just as cloud is approaching and you want to catch just one more pane. No doubt if acquisition was faster, I would catch more than "just" 80 GB per session.
GCHQ puts out open recruitment call for 'white hat' hackers
BILLION YEAR SECRETS of baking hellworld Mercury UNLOCKED by NASA probe crash
All-Russian 'Elbrus' PCs and servers go on sale
How Groucho Marx lost his voice and found his funny bone
Hawking hologram comforts One Direction fans with Zayny parallel universe claim
Tuesday 28th April 2015 08:48 GMT 
It is of course possible to create your own custom universe in your office, so you can research stories in the daytime, and still go to parties in the evening.
Where I read that? Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy of course
OK, so I would like one universe to go, with extra Ford Prefect and Zaphod Beeblebrox, but hold the One Direction, Justin Bieber, and the entire Kardashian clan
China tackles vital strippers-at-funeral problem
SEX: Naughty female stegosauruses offered it on a PLATE
Fed-up Colorado man takes 9mm PISTOL to vexing Dell PC
Don't shoot the Messenger: NASA's suicide probe to punch hole in Mercury
Nvidia's GTX 900 cards lock out open-source Linux devs yet again
Thursday 16th April 2015 15:05 GMT
Re: firmware
Yep, must agree there. I am quite pragmatic when it comes to software, we have some CUDA stuff running here so nVidia is needed. I used to download the nVidia propriatary drivers, but I have run into two instances where they borked the system. Scrapping the nVidia stuff and switching to nouveau sorted it, and let me keep some older hardware alive. If nVidia ships working stuff I will happily install it again, but not before I am sure it won't bork my system again.
NASA probe sent to faraway planet finds DWARF world instead: Pics
Rand Paul puts Hillary Clinton's hard drive on sale
Monday 13th April 2015 08:29 GMT 
"Does the world want a president who is unaware of the passing of IDE and the ascent of SATA?"
Well, the more serious issue is: Does the world want a president who wants to be president, as it is a well-known and much lamented fact that those people who most want to rule people are ipso facto those least suited for the job.
The one with the cassette tapes of the Hitchikers Guide radio play in the pocket please
Indian cops spice up protests with pepper spray-armed DRONES
ALIENS ARE COMING: Chief NASA boffin in shock warning
Operation Redstone: Microsoft preps double Windows update in 2016
Wednesday 8th April 2015 09:01 GMT
Re: Windows-as-a-Service
I must say I will not use Windows as a service should it materialize. I was considering buying Photoshop, but the new CC versions with their rental model really don't appeal to me. I can understand renting storage space, paying monthly for a mobile phone subscription, but not my software. A key reason is that I want to decide when and indeed if I want to upgrade software. The "as a service" model will almost certainly foist stuff on me that I neither want nor need.
Others may of course have different ideas, but I like to have more control over the software on my machine than most, perhaps
Bone-tastic boffins' breakthrough BRINGS BACK BRONTOSAURUS
Aw, snap! How huge HTML links can crash Chrome tabs in one click
It's the FALKLANDS SYNDROME! Fukushima MELTDOWN to cause '10,000 Chernobyls' in South Atlantic
ESA reveals Rosetta's snaps of MARS and EARTH
Cross-dressing blokes storm NSA HQ: One shot dead, one hurt
Ding Dong, ALIENS CALLING
Tuesday 31st March 2015 13:15 GMT
Alternatively
Hook up the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 submeson brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian motion generator (say a cup of hot tea), feed it the improbability for an infinite improbability drive, and away you go. No more mucking about in hyperspace.
Unless you want to deal with Bistromathics, of course
Encryption is the REAL threat – Head Europlod
Tuesday 31st March 2015 09:26 GMT
Re: Headache eh?
It will get worse. They should take a paracetamol, and have a little lie down.
What I do not get is that they complain about encryption provided by technology firms, whereas I can happily send one-time-pad encrypted messages through open channels without anybody being able to crack them. The only problem is getting the pad to my intended receiver (not too hard really). The "algorithm" is extremely simple, all you need is to do bitwise XOR with a stream of random bits (easily obtained from any natural noise source).
There are many less strong ways of sending encrypted data through open channels in such a way that it isn't even readily visible (steganography). Thus, if bad guys want to encrypt stuff, they can already do that. Given that fact: what do they really lose if they are no longer able to view everybody's mail? The ability to leer at somebody's selfies?
EMC and Cloudera withdraw from Indiana big data event
Monday 30th March 2015 09:29 GMT
Re: Well that does it. I'm not going to Indiana either.
I might have expressed that a bit more succinctly, but I do agree that allowing people to discriminate based on their religious beliefs is plain wrong. It could readily be argued that this is unconstitutional. After all, it didn't say: "all men are created equal, but some more equal than others" last time I looked
UN inflicts 10,000 flat pack IKEA shelters on Iraq - WITHOUT TOOLS
BOFH: Never mind that old brick, look at this ink-stained BEAUTY
Amazon cloud threatens to SMASH the fundamental laws of PHYSICS
Force your hand: Apple 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display
Friday 27th March 2015 09:29 GMT
Like the screen and format, but need CUDA
The older 13" Macbook were equipped with an nVidia graphics card, and as such offered support for code our students develop in CUDA, and had sufficient graphics grunt for 3D visualization code we develop. The later ones don't. Real shame, because I hate lugging a 15" along for conferences. As my code is OS agnostic, I was seriously considering the older MacBook, but I will have to pass this one for lack of video grunt.
I recently got a quote in the same price range from a Dutch company for a 13.3" at 2560x1600 resolution, Core i7 processor, 16GB RAM, one 1TB HDD, + one 256GB SSD, and Geforce 860 (or so) graphics card. Weight 1.9 kg, so a bit heavier (and a bit bulkier to allow for cooling). The cost (with OS, you can also order it without) was just a shade under a MacBook pro 13.
Google throws a 180 on its plans for Dart language
Chipzilla spawns 60-core, six-teraflop Xeon Phi MONSTER CHIP
Marathon race ace FOUND ON MARS – NASA boffins overjoyed
SCARESTEROID of the week to miss Earth on Friday
ROBOT INVASION has already STARTED in HIPSTERLAND
Google Glass NOT DEAD. We're just making it 'ready' says chief
Boffins FOAMING over a Nickel's worth of hydrogen
Curiosity rover's broken arm heals, exploration-as-normal resumes
Sir Terry remembered: Dickens' fire, Tolkien's imagination, and the wit of Wodehouse
Monday 16th March 2015 10:31 GMT
Re: "Anthill inside"
Got that t-shirt, will wear it with more pride. It generally takes my CS students a little while to realise I am not wearing a T-shirt with an Intel ad.
What I will miss most about Terry Pratchett is the warmth and love of humanity with all its shortcomings that oozes from all his work. The one thing that really offended him is "treating people like things". He was a wonderful man with an unparallelled talent
Rosetta probe to try contact with Philae lander on Thursday
Wednesday 11th March 2015 09:07 GMT 
Fingers crossed!
I really hope the probe wakes up from its hybernation without issues. I cannot help wondering if, when it wakes up, Philae will say:
"I have worked out that if I stick my left arm in my right ear, I can electrocute myself ..., terminally"
or alternatively
"I think you ought to know I am feeling very depressed"
Or simply:
"It's c c cold"
Super SSD tech: Fancy a bonkers 8TB all-flash PC?
Shove off, ugly folk, says site for people who love themselves
Friday 6th March 2015 08:09 GMT
The shallow end of the gene pool
Even by the standards of the general internet, this is an extreme load of vacuous twaddle. I would not want to spend any time in the presence of said Tawnie, let alone in the confined spaces of an elevator, where the stench of her (no doubt liberally applied) perfume would probably trigger an allergic attack. Besides, to paraphrase the immortal words of Marvin the Paranoid Android: "I get a headache trying to think down to their level"
Biting the hand that feeds IT
