Posts by Tom 7 8318 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
I always felt the one thing that gave Apple an edge was they took a OS OS and polished it till it shone. Now they just add lots of glitter,
A Jeston Nano burns near 1/2Tflop dangling on a USB and 50 of them would do the same for 250W.
I think the new MAC is not trying to simulate nuclear fusion but achieve it.
I'd steer clear of the pavement if I was you!
The nematode brain modelled as a NN managed character recognition using considerably less neurons than 'standard' methods. I was alluding to the idea that AI will probably come to be made from 'brain units' that are sort of pre-wired NN that perform certain 'brain functions' from which we can produce far more reliable AI and I thought atmega328p might be worth looking at for hosting these components. Looking at the spec though they are on 20mips and a PiZero GPU can achieve 24Gflops for 10 times the price so I deleted the post you were answering to and decided to reply to yours!
I do however believe that AI is almost pre-nascent at the moment. When people look at actual brains in nematodes, insects and eventually mammals we will be able to identify processes that make up intelligence and behaviour developed and refined over some 600million years of evolution. We're barely modelling the AI equivalent of NAND gates at the moment!
If they can see there is an atmosphere then they can tell from absorbtion lines what the atmosphere is. Could be worth hunting down the original paper.
As for why its still there I'm wondering whether its proximity to its star and the fact it is a gas giant could lead to a very powerful magnetic field being sustained thus protecting it from flares and the high gravity doing the rest!
I can easily imagine algorithms routing items of low worth (to FedEx) via various low cost routes that dont quite lead to the savings they were hoping for - indeed I've helped write similar algorithms that try and reduce costs by trying to shift things to bulk carriers on longer distance routes that may or not make the connection and as a result go round the houses a bit.
However I find it very hard to imagine that FedEx routing algorithms could send stuff from China to Japan via the US on the off chance of them saving some cents on bulk carriers without them having gone bust long ago.
I have a friend on 1Gbps fibre (B4RN). When he got it installed he pissed me off by complaining he was only getting 760Meg. He is a uni prof who does massive data processing and rather than drive into the office he can now do this at home but rarely gets near needing full capacity as even streaming files onto a massive parallel machine doesnt need that kind of bandwidth.
The only 'personal' use I can think of for 5G would be sharing over the whole village should a desperate deal become available!
Also what baffles me is that the keep saying 5G will help the IOTs but presumably that would only mean each IOT device would need 5G and all the updates and security maintenance that entails. Surely the sensible thing would be for your fridge to be behind your home firewall so you dont need 5G for it at all. I reckon my fridge only needs 10**-60 baud anyway.
We used to have a Vax 780 with 15 or so chip design engineers doing chip designy things on it and someone decided there was enough spare CPU to stick about 60 secretaries doing what passed for word processing in those days. Most of the time it was OK but certain things only launched batch jobs and got less than 1% of the cpu and so took hours rather than the minutes they had previously done. For some reason I had a bit of code that I could get to crash out in supervisor (or whatever VMS speak for that is) mode and I could up my batch job priority to finish asap which would of course leave everyone else cursing for a few minutes and the system managers flailing about while there terminals went to about 0.2baud. My job would finish and everything would return to normal and the system managers would look around the system and find no reason for the problem.
I once stupidly set a Win NT screensaver to that 3d pipe thing on a server. It took me nearly two hours over the net from the UK to turn it off in the Paris office as it took so much CPU everything ground to a near halt. I did think I might get flown out there again for another Camembert and baguette fest but no such luck.
Not just bitcoin wankers, AI seems to be getting more popular on the domestic front if only people learning about it. As far as I can tell an £80 Coral USB dongle which can be driven from a RaspberryPi outperforms a £300 graphic card that needs a similar priced PC to host it.
Is it not more silage these days? If the sunflower plant itself can be digested by the cattle then the whole crop is just cut down and chopped to a small size (so it flows and is easily handled) and fed to the cattle like that rather than piss about trying to extract the seeds. Near me farmers do the same with maize (fuck me that makes a mess) and my next door neighbour grew peas and barley together and that made a great silage - even it if was impossible to chase my escaped weaners through it thought it did look like salmon leaping through a green sea as they bounded through it!
Re the 10% on exchange rate. It can be higher than that. If you watch the exchange rate markets the variation of 'exchange rate' (volatility) is a factor on the % markup 'tourist rate' you tend to pay. If the pound is steadyish for a while the markup drops quite low so the money costs you not much more than the market rate. If the rate varies a lot then the supplier can be hit buying the money for you after you have paid for it so, like any well managed supply chain, the spot price is a lot higher than the market price. There's even good maths/stats to support it.
Shouty people are often weak sadistic arseholes who like to see you belittled. I had a teacher at school who loved to make me cry. I read a book which mentioned imagining people like that as being in their underwear and at the next contrived shouting session I calmly imagined him in a pair of dirty y-fronts and after about 10 minutes of him screaming at me I calmly turned round and left the purple speechless shaking mess and walked out of the room trying hard not to jump and click my heels. He was still an utter cunt to others but he left me alone after that, though I did offer the advice to his victims he still had 120 new kids starting every year to work through. The school thought it character building FFS.
I recently got a compact camera for my daughters photography gcse and it took me a long time to realise the number on the screen was not the seconds to the heat death of the universe but number of photos that could be taken. I did calculate that it would take till the heat death of the universe to ..er.. collate them!
My second accent (after NW coast Yank) is black country from 25 miles from Straford-OA and when I was 15 I read all of Shakespeare and kept falling into my brummie in my head and it works a lot better than you would imagine!
As for your idea of what Stratford sounded like in the 16thC I'd bet very similar to how it sounded 50 years ago. There are a few (including some renowned linguists) who think it changes a lot over time but I lived in Suffolk for 10 years and spent a lot of time in N.Norfolk. I moved to the Herts/Essex border and was surprised to find locals with basically the same accent as those in N.Norfolk and Suffolk which leads me to believe accents must be a lot more stable than some suppose - well until Radio and TV came along.
They did my local exchange FTTC. The cabinet for the whole village is just outside the exchange, My 6km of cable went from 2.4 to 2Mb! Everyone in the village itself just took the free upgrade (they were all on 17Mb anyway) and I think 2 businesses went to 70 for while. All paid for by the local council!
Mine is now down to 1,2Mb and I'm trying to get 4G - the government Better Broadband scheme should pay for the installation of an external aerial which should cost £100 but for some reason through the scheme the free aerial only comes with an 18month contract that costs £180 more than the contract I can have if I buy the aerial myself!
It may only take two minutes to crack - in theory, The thing is to know you have cracked it and just because you solved some maths doesnt mean you solved the right maths, Quantum computers can get the right answer but at the same time they can get a near infinite number of not right answers that you can only prove they were wrong (or right) if you have the original to compare with, We are at the stage where even medium end GPU can parse a Shakespeare play from white noise in an afternoon!
Many years ago someone went through Win95 (or something) binaries and replaced all the repeated code for loops etc they could recognise with one where only one was needed. The whole caboodle fitted in 1MB!!!!!
I run Xubuntu and like to think I have a clue and have a lot of code floating about the place - mostly other peoples but even my own shows massive redundancy. Pretty much all code can be found in Knuth - if we all had a Knuth core we could all write OSes that would fit in 1MB and all our other code in 1MB and then only the DATA segment needs to be managed!
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