* Posts by Spacedman

45 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Sep 2012

2 + 2 = 4, er, 4.1, no, 4.3... Nvidia's Titan V GPUs spit out 'wrong answers' in scientific simulations

Spacedman

Re: Are they using the wrong datatype?

Not necessarily. Floating point arithmetic is not commutative - (a+b)+c =/= a+(b+c) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associative_property]. If you are running on a parallel system you can't be certain which order operations will be done in - it will depend on how the system has scheduled your calculation out to the processing units. I've had this happen when running statistical models using OpenMP on a single CPU, on a GPU it wouldn't surprise me at all.

Neil Young slams Google, after you log in to read his rant with Google or Facebook

Spacedman
Angel

Neil Young spends years railing against the quality of internet downloads and then records an album on a refurbished 1947 vinyl-cutting booth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Letter_Home - but that's the genius of the man....

Sci-Hub domains inactive following court order

Spacedman
Pirate

I am leet hacker

sudo echo "80.82.77.83 sci-hub" >> /etc/hosts

Hackers can turn web-connected car washes into horrible death traps

Spacedman
FAIL

More things to play with.

I thought it was going to be an open VNC system. Oh the hours of fun browsing these:

https://worldofvnc.net/browse.php?id=2774

Not sure how many are read-only screen mirrors though. I did see one that looked like a nuclear power station...

Microsoft drops Office 365 for biz. Now it's just Microsoft 365. Word

Spacedman
Facepalm

Re: What is Microsoft 365?

A C# battery, surely?

India's Martian MOM clocks up 1,000 days circling the red planet

Spacedman
Alien

What's eclipsing?

What's actually doing the eclipsing here? Its not the teeny tiny martian moons. I can't see how a martian orbit would put a satellite on the night side of Mars for so many full orbits. What is going on?

It's paydaygeddon! NatWest account transfers 'disappearing' (not really)

Spacedman
FAIL

They should use mongodb. Mongodb is web scale.

Don't pay up to decrypt – cure found for CryptXXX ransomware, again

Spacedman
Thumb Up

Re: I'll leave this here...

you mean, roughly:

mount /backupdevice

rdiff-backup /home /backupdevice

umount /backupdevice

these malwares could mash any mounted filesystem. You could (also) backup to a remote machine but if that gets malwared at the same time....

But yeah, proper backuop

Meet Hyper.is – the terminal written in HTML, JS and CSS

Spacedman
FAIL

The latest web technologies?

The latest web technologies eh? Their web page has a Flash object embedded in it.

Take me away now.

Hyperloop One settles hangman lawsuit

Spacedman
WTF?

I can't even see their web page working because the first item is a Flash video. Are these Hyperloop things steam-powered?

Google man drags Emacs into the 1990s

Spacedman
Joke

Re: Going on a tangent

He's probably got Richard Stallman on his Facebook friends list.

Reports: Twitter chainsaw massacre redux on the cards

Spacedman
WTF?

Re: More than 140

They're advertising for a bunch of Revenue Compensation Managers whose jobs will be to manage one Revenue Compensation Analyst each. Okay, I have no idea what these roles are, but is that top-heavy management or what?

Dyn dinged by DDoS: US DNS firm gives web a bad hair day

Spacedman
FAIL

SO up GH down

StackOverflow is ok, so I can still cut and pas- I mean I can still write code, I just can't push it to GitHub.

Dutch bicycle company pretends to be television company

Spacedman
FAIL

Tale from the last century...

Reminds me of the story of the postie who had a parcel labelled "FLOPPY DISKS DO NOT BEND" and was joyfully demonstrating that they clearly do.

Pass the 'Milk' to make code run four times faster, say MIT boffins

Spacedman
Joke

Got Link?

Labour's Jeremy Corbyn wants high speed broadband for all. Wow, original idea there

Spacedman
Go

A money-saving expert writes...

What happened to the study that reckoned the cost of laying fibre everywhere could be paid for by selling the copper that was taken up?

Shopped in an Eddie Bauer store recently? Your card's probably gone. It's just gone

Spacedman
Holmes

Re: What a steaming pile of crap...

Where do you get your cash from? A cash machine/ATM? Sure it's not being skimmed there?

Question: What's missing in Microsoft's data science professional degree?

Spacedman

Re: ACID

All they care about is "Is it web scale?": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

Politician claims porn tabs a malware experiment, then finds God

Spacedman
Joke

I got accused of this once. It was actually a Google Analytics tab with a truncated title.

Wi-Fi network named 'mobile detonation device' grounds plane

Spacedman
WTF?

The Batman approach to labelling

Its like having one of those round bombs with a fizzing fuse and the word "BOMB" written on it.

Critical VMware bug needs patching ASAP

Spacedman

Re: keep it

I go through hell whenever I need to access VMs to install. Its not something I do often, so every time there's a new barrier. First there's the issue of getting the latest version of Flash working with Linux and whatever browser I find most stable at the time. Then there's the Client Integration Plugin to deal with. Which doesn't exist for Linux with vSphere 6.0 now. So I logged in remotely to a Windows box, tried the native client there, it didn't do things the Web client could do, so I was flipping between them, and after a day I did eventually have a new VM sitting there waiting to be virtually booted.

At which point I noticed it didn't have a network interface. I couldn't add a network interface. At this point I sent an email to the cluster admins (because it smelt like a "we havent given you permission to create networks, but we're not going to give you an error message that explicit" situation) and I've heard nothing since.

How one developer just broke Node, Babel and thousands of projects in 11 lines of JavaScript

Spacedman

Re: Bloody stupid!

Unless you're a real idiot developer and deserve to have a broken site you *wont* be loading your JS from lots of random sites. You'll use bower to download the dependencies into your project where they will live quite happily. You then push your site to the server. And the site will work even if the original dependency developer throws their toys out from the package archive.

What will then break is the build process. The site wont. Nobody has <script src="http://npm.org/left-pad.js"> in their site - alongside the other 2000 script tags you need it would take forever to load.

Spacedman

Re: This whole debacle mirrors Gamergate

Well not really much. Developers will get the dependencies as they work (using bower or whatever the JS dep manager tool of the week is), and then build a single JS file at deployment time (using webblywobblify or the JS build tool of the week), and that goes up to the server for production. I doubt anyone has every done <script src="http://randomsite.com/pad-left.js">

I'd only ever load something from a non-local site if it was something I regard as stable, popular, and coming from a robust CDN.

Linux lads lambast sorry state of Skype service

Spacedman
Linux

Re: Just hack your own version per the open source spirit

Read the quoted tweet - Pinar's Granny *is* running Linux. She's probably writing Linux kernel device drivers in Erlang and currently using wireshark to reverse engineer the Skype protocol and implement her own updated client. You know, usual Granny stuff.

Land Rover Defender dies: Production finally halted by EU rules

Spacedman

Re: also..

They're not leaking, they're just marking their territory.

Microsoft releases deep learning toolkit on GitHub. Now bring on the AI research

Spacedman

And is it written in one of their non-portable "sharpie" languages?

Oh my. Its C++. There's a Makefile with "Linux/GCC build..." in it. Pick me up off the floor please.

Now we just have to decide how to pronounce CNTK....

BTC dev: 'Strangling' the blockchain will kill Bitcoin

Spacedman

Well according to the article, BitCoin is now Chinese. What are you waiting for? BritCoin?

Microsoft’s Revolution Analytics buy pays off, Linux-based R Server launched

Spacedman

Re: but Python is creeping up there

Maybe now, back in t'day it (well, "S") was for people whose tool set was FORTRAN. An interactive data analysis n stats platform with graphics? Flip yeah. No more compiling, linking, running, dumping output to some format UNIGRAPH could understand for plotting...

Python is really getting there for data analysis with numpy and pandas, still lags R on graphics though. However I reckon the machine learning people - and lets face it, that's what Teh Big Bznesses want to use their analytical engines for - are 50/50 Python/R.

Spacedman
Thumb Down

Well, if you want to call John Chambers a "new-to-programming stats geek" then yes:

http://statweb.stanford.edu/~jmc4/vitae.html

But yes, its still a horrendous language but great for data munging and advanced stats methods that are almost exclusively first implemented in R (but Python is creeping up there).

Drivers? Where we’re going, we don’t need drivers…

Spacedman
Thumb Up

Drivers?

I thought the article was going to be about device drivers.

Mozilla to boot all plugins from Firefox … except Flash

Spacedman
Boffin

Re: So no AdBlock, NoScript, or RequestPolicy then

Just stick "about:plugins" in the URL to see what plugins you have installed with version numbers and paths and all that icky technical stuff they don't want you to know.

Go to "about:addons" and get a more fruity page where you can also list "Extensions" (which aren't going away) as well as the "Plugins".

My big gripe is the VMWare web interface plugins - they are NPAPI and so don't work on Chrome, and VMware show no sign of porting them. My current solution for VMware host management on Linux is Firefox with Pepper Flash via FreshPlayer (so I get a high enough version number of Flash) and the VMware plugins via NPAPI. Fragile as heck.

Wanted: beta testers for El Reg’s Android app

Spacedman
FAIL

Re: Why?

I think the only reason news sites like to have an app version is because they are still surfing on the "There's an app for that" buzz from the old iPhone launch however many years ago, and there's an expectation of appyness, and branding, and Siobhan from Perfect Curve suggested it.

But mostly...

Because....

Your ad blocker will not be able to block ads in a news site's app.

Facebook's React Native is exciting devs. Or is it, really?

Spacedman
Devil

Search for "Facebook React Native"...

Go to "Getting Started" page...

See "Requirements: OS X"

Close browser tab.

UK safety app keeping lorries on the right side of cyclists

Spacedman

I think its a subsidiary of Siobhan Sharpe's Perfect Curve agency. They've coined the word "Imovation" but that's painfully close to "Winbledon". They were probably going to use "Imobility" until someone pointed out how you could read it.

What is Apple's idiot tax on Watch these days? 'About $265 or 80%'

Spacedman
Joke

Re: Idiot Register

You're thinking of the Huffington Post.

Cyanogen finds $80m in collecting tin after busking session

Spacedman

Bloatware free? Maybe, but it still ground my 5-y-o Samsung Galaxy S to a halt. Now running Slimkat and its slicky slick slickness. Just don't use the Google Launcher or its back to stuck in treacle mode for me.

Samb-AAAHH! Scary remote execution vuln spotted in Windows-Linux interop code

Spacedman
Devil

Re: Another Open Source security problem

Its hard to hide "if NSA==True" in code, but not impossible. You need a C compiler for that, right? So you better check your C compiler sources. They look fine, so you compile your C compiler. With a C compiler binary. What could possibly go wrong?

vSphere 6.0 is BADASS. Not that I've played with it or anything. Ahem

Spacedman
Facepalm

plugin hell

Getting the current VSphere web client working on a Linux desktop was fun. Firefox doesn't support a high enough flash version, and Chrome doesn't support NPAPI plugins anymore which you need to mount local ISOs. Eventually found a shim for FF that lets it load Chrome's PPAPI-interfaced Flash. But I get the feeling its very fragile. Anything fixed in that regard?

Maybe I should ask our IT managers for a Windows VM just for running the native client...

UK flights CRIPPLED by system outage that shut ALL London airspace

Spacedman

Lots of birds on the ground: http://www.flightradar24.com although I'm now fascinated with this glider soaring north of the Thames at 2,500ft and its getting dark... http://www.flightradar24.com/GDCFA/5066834

Infosec geniuses hack a Canon PRINTER and install DOOM

Spacedman

Frame rate

I was expecting 3 frames-per-minute, except on really dark frames where it would be 1fpm...

Microsoft fixes all those shaky GoPro vids nobody wants to watch

Spacedman
Holmes

Hours...

Their SIGGRAPH paper gives some timings, and it does take hours (and these guys had access to clusters) for a few minutes of video. Not going to happen on your phone any time soon, except maybe as a service.

Brit lands on Rockall with survival podule, starts record attempt

Spacedman
Joke

Re: anyone who can't really see the point

... and look what happened to him.

"Because its there" isn't a reason to go up it. Its a reason to go round it. - Linda Smith

Rotten to the core: Apple’s 10 greatest FAILS

Spacedman
Holmes

Like what?

"But, like so many of Apple’s belly flops, the Pippin was wildly overpriced."

So like all Apple products then?

FBI cuffs 14 over $1m 'Gone in 60 Seconds' casino scam

Spacedman
Thumb Up

Race conditions?

Is this just a race condition? The machine spits out the cash without getting an exclusive lock on the account? Oh exploitable.

McFlurry McMisdemeanour costs Welsh lass McJob

Spacedman
Joke

Not a Euphemism

Who else thought "an extra dose of chocolate pieces" was a euphemism? Although that might not get you sacked from McDs - how would they know?