Posts by Tom 7

Judging from the attrition rate once they get home social media doesnt seem to be of much help.

Re: Two and a half years ago I wrote

"If designing a GPU from scratch is so easy why it intel's so poor." You gave the reason for that in your next sentence: "Even if you do design your own GPU you're going to still need to use a lot of other companies patents."

I think there are only a couple of GPU patents that are actually worthwhile in the sense they were not obvious but I have a feeling AI will producing speedups to make people eyes water soon - see the 3 body problem 'solution' recently. Admittedly the data required for this may only be available to large firms at the moment but it would be great if we could get a Risc-V type approach to GPU design with some open source data sets. Patents just slow everyone down.

Re: Apple's walled garden

I prefer to call it a walled prison.

Re: Unacceptable

As the owner of the device am I allowed to fix bugs in the software percussively?

Re: Double negative

Engineers should try not to get too interested in accounting. For people who like things to add up accounting shall make ye fret.

Re: Super Magnets

My dad was a mad professor and had access to things beyond normal ken - like Electron microscopes and centrifuges that did 50,000 rps. On day he came home with a magnet that was so powerful it stuck to the car door as he tried to bring it into the house and stayed there until one of his colleagues de-gaussed it with whatever he'd used to gauss it with. The window winder never worked again.

The best pen I ever had was a fibre tip one that I won for drinking about 15 pints of Guinness one night at uni. It took about two weeks of lecture notes - we had around 20 hrs a week of them - until the tip wore down to a point where it was an utter pleasure to write with and performed brilliantly until I lost it on a Badger Ales promotion night!

Dont feel too agrieved - I personally find the holdiay season a good time to be at work earning shit loads. I always find the xmas/ny period to be the dullest of the year, sparkly but dull - there is nothing to buy in the shops, theres fuck all on the TV you havent seen 30 times before and the amateur drinkers are out in force getting morose as they remember why they dont drink normally or just blocking the bar^ while trying to remember the order for 10 drink for their group. Highly overated time of the year unless you are a child and I'm glad my bro and family drove to ours in 3 times the normal journey time thus wasting 8 hours of serious drinking.

* my local used to turn over three times the saturday on xmas eve with 5 times the bar staff all on bonuses though we used to get some impressive tips too and the landlord did ask me why there was a £1/4 million time checked in which was me being too tall to see the till screen without standing back and not being able to do so with all the bloody staff in the way and not realising it had not rung up properly in the days when you did the sums in your head and I concatenated two rounds!

Re: I wonder if this is why

A few weeks after 11/9 I was flying to Mexico and scheduled for a 20 minute non getting off stop at somewhere in Florida to refuel. We were taken off the plane. Made to wait an hour and a half before we went and picked up our luggage from the runway and then had to queue up to take it through US customs before another long wait to re-board and finally get to our destination 5 hours late. Even the customs guards at the airport were apologising to us for the inanity of the exercise. At least this was in the days before many people had phones or laptops.

Re: don't go with just one supplier

Might be worth investigating 4G and fibre/landline. And 5G if it exists where you are. I could probably run a couple of hundred workstations on 4G if i blocked 'socia'l media for those that didnt have a business use for it.

Re: Deleted

"The functionality has to exist." but for how long?

Re: Peter Norton's commercial UNERASE from '82 was probably ...

It was a very very useful program - and surprisingly easy to write your own version. I say surprisingly easy in the sense the code is a lot easier than getting your head round the actual disk structures.

Re: "says a lot about the quality of accounting at FB and Google"

In my experience the reason why the ERP did not flag this up is because there is a general agreement about enabling 'fraud' for reasons of untraceable transactions. I've been in a couple of companies where a mere click of a button would prevent this sort of thing happening but mumbled reasons as to why the button cannot be clicked are bandied about.

Re: Hubris

Hang on - those comets are made out of ice aren't they?

It used to be called Quality a long time ago - a fuckup is a learning process and the clean-up should update the Quality process too where necessary. Alas Quality doesnt seem to count at management level - even after they've seen it save them half their budget.

Re: It's not about JavaScript

I'd be quite happy to work on a JS project if it adhered to simple software management standards* and KISS - not found one yet.

* perhaps the Unix idea of "Do one thing and do it well" is all we need..

JS is like any other language - but it seems to have far too many self taught code warriors who can produce a simple flashy interface with all the bells and whistles but none of the organised back end supply lines required to keep it fighting for long.

I think its fair to say legacy C and FORTRAN code is easier to work on - but only because the code warriors who wrote this stuff had experience of keeping the supply lines going - if they hadn't we wouldn't need to keep supporting it as it would have died out long ago,

Re: For that price I can get handmade socks

My mum used to knit socks that you couldn't wear in shoes or boots but by god you could watch telly in them - the gaming equivalent in the '70s.. Wool - there's a reason sheep go to all the trouble of growing it.

I often wonder if we should just get all Ayn Rand for a while. That would mean Amazon would have to pay road tolls to get their shit delivered and, unless Amazon was going to pay for their deliveries to be policed, we could shoot the aerial deliveries down with relative impunity. They'd last two weeks.

Ditto Google - we could just high-jack their traffic for our own needs and reduce their revenue to negative in a moment.

The industrial revolution would have died on its feet with that model - it nearly did in the UK - public roads came about as many businesses were destroyed by toll roads popping up at their gates.

Re: smoking gun

It is strange that people who claim to be 'protecting the British identity' are incapable of writing a sentence of the lingua franca without copious errors.

In the UK they charge you per person generally. In the US its per room. I was staying in a motel with my family of 5 in a cramped family room and as we prepared to leave in the morning the identical room next door to ours emptied into a 17 seater which they filled. I have no idea how they managed that with 3 double beds - they must have brought their own bunk camp beds!

Re: Sitcks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me.

Except perhaps "Fire" when tied to a pole.

Re: They have nothing to fear...

The ultimate effect of Amazon will be to have no market to sell to.

Nice work if you can actually do it.