Posts by Michael H.F. Wilkinson

Honey I shrunk the chip ... now what?

@ BristolBachelor: Wirth's law

"Software is getting slower faster than hardware is getting faster"

The fact that the minimum specs for Office 2007 equaled those of a Cray Y-MP performance and memory wise is telling

One problem with light is the wavelength

Even blue light is at 450 nm (in vacuum, about 300 in glass), MUCH larger than the components used today. Therefore, within a chip, you have to use near-field calculations, and interference is more complicated. This gets messy quite quickly. Besides, if both transmitter and receiver have dimensions much smaller than the wavelength, it is difficult to impossible to get any directional sensitivity. Optical interconnects between chips seem more feasible.

Microsoft to Apple: 'Oh, yeah? Well, your font is too small'

Frankenstein or Euler Fractur

are also nice

AMD claims 'fastest graphics card in the world'

I still opt for nVidia

due to CUDA, and Linux support. We have a lot of code for 3D visualization that I also run at home.

How languages can live together without killing each other

I thought someone had

i) spilled coffee

or

ii) fallen asleep

on the keyboard

Tag?

I could not resists following the tag

Jorge_MirapÃÂÂÂÔ

However, unsurprisingly the response was

"

Jorge_MirapÃÂÂÂÔ

Sorry, there are no articles for this tag.

Try searching for all relevant articles.

"

It still leaves me wondering, what does

Jorge_MirapÃÂÂÂÔ

mean?

Amanfrommars, where are you?

Obama to overhaul heinous US patent system

Well put!

The patent system in Europe works much better, because there is a proper evaluation of novelty BEFORE granting a patent. Only (comparatively) rarely are court battles needed. By penalizing the USPTO for granting idiotic patents (a method to LOSSLESSLY compress ANY bit string (including its own output) is probably my favourite) we may get rid of a lot of junk. In this instance the US should take a close look at the European system of patents.

No mathematical equation can be patented

This is an exception written down in most if not all patent laws. As any algorithm can be expressed as a (sufficiently complex) lambda-calculus expression, no algorithm should be patentable, by this logic.

This is not my argument, by the way, but one put forward in an editorial in IEEE Computer Magazine. It does have logical merit, but I do see the point tat some algorithms might be patentable, because they are sufficiently innovative. The problem is that far too many obvious ones slip through (making a cursor blink by performing repeated XORs with the content of video memory is one). I also found that when implementing LZW efficiently, several optimizations I cooked up in a single afternoon violated patents (7 in all). Now I might be a brilliant programmer, if I can think of 7 patentable things in a single afternoon, but it may also be that some of these patents are indeed obvious.

Cure for BALDNESS causes IMPOTENCE, says new study

Mycoxaflopin

new keyboard please!!

Captain Kirk hails space shuttle Discovery

But that's not as bad

as the Azgoths of Kria, or Paul Neil Milne Johnstone from Earth.

Apple: If you're under 17, you can't use Opera

Seconded!!

letters and digits

Half a million Germans rally in support of 'Baron von Googleberg'

But he lied.

He lied about the fact that it was not his work when handing it in, he then lied that there were only one or two "accidental copies". What he did was very serious, in terms of scientific behaviour, simple ethics, and certainly leadership.

Sinclair ZX81: 30 years old

If so many ZX81s are still around

why not make a cluster of them. It should only take about a million Z80 cores to compete with a netbook

Microsoft tablet OS to see light of day in 'autumn 2012'

Fetid dingo's kidneys

is another

New charge against alleged WikiLeaker carries death penalty

Equallity?

"Endangering or getting operatives killed is a very serious crime and Manning is being held accountable for his actions."

So why did some members of a previous US administration not face similar charges? A Pfc is easier to bully than a member of the administration?

In the case I refer to the name of an operative was maliciously leaked. The "revelations" so far in Wikileaks seem humdrum (though they may do damage).

Apple T&C upsets philanthropic developers

don't be too harsh

Just the word "Sometimes" in the quote is superfluous

;-)

Exactly

my thoughts to a letter

German 'minister for cut'n'paste' resigns over PhD plagiarism

but with Putin

if you make a noise, some thing BAD will happen to you

Anybody in science knows

that correct attribution of ideas is essential. Creating new ideas is what us scientists are about. You cannot touch them, but you can certainly steal them. (Almost) NOTHING makes scientists madder than others walking away or taking the credit for other peoples' ideas.

Budget cuts also make them mad of course.

Microsoft plans June Windows 8 tablet tease?

but a lot of people

buy all sorts of kit for no better reason than that it is the newest. Whilst a more rational approach is better for your wallet, people wanting the latest do keep the economy ticking over, and lead to a supply of good s/h stuff which us cheapskates can snap up ;-)

Oracle gives 21 (new) reasons to uninstall Java

There is a lot of scientific stuff in Java

Therefore I cannot do without it (alas, I prefer coding in C(++))

Sun spews out massive solar flare

With a near full moon

it's going to be hard to spot any northern lights.

Coming soon: Die Hard 5 - The Zimmer Frame

Die Hard just won't DIE

obviously

One third of Russians say Sun revolves round Earth

Rubbish!!!! HERESY!!!!!

It's on elephants, standing on the back of a turtle.

After that, it's turtles all the way down!!

Man matches machine in Jeopardy! showdown

Overconfidence?

This is anthropomorphism at its best. A very human trait: interpreting actions of machines in human emotional terms (which is why I call my windows system a complete bastard (and much, much worse)).

Microsoft's IE9: Don't believe the hype

"deep integration into Windows 7"

-- FACE-PALM --

Don't they learn? How many security issues in earlier incarnations of IE stem from deep integration with the OS?

English Defence League site pulled offline after defacement

Extremists go off rampantly in any direction

left, right, up, down, backward (often), and forward (rarely).

As the French say: "Les extremes se touche"

(which could be mistranslated as "The extremists touch themselves" ;-) )

Whatever the direction, they take themselves too seriously.

DEC: The best of systems, the worst of systems

We used a PDP11/34

as a front end for a CDC Cyber 170/760, WITH A STAGGERING 4MFlops speed!!!!

Those were the days

TERRORISTS IN SUBMARINES menace the Free World!

HMS Valiant??

Don't slag frogmen or minisub assaults on warships. HMS Valiant was seriously damaged in such an attack.

But you are right in stating that governments are overreacting.

Apple under threat from ... Windows tablets

17.4 media tablet shipped

Imagine getting the .4 tablet in a box ;-)

DEC founder Ken Olsen is dead

Brings back memories

We also used several PDP11s at the university. My master's project involved running thermal simulations on a VAX, until I realized my then new PC (80386 at 25MHz with Cyrix math co-processor) outperformed it.

BOFH: There's no 'I' in team, but there's a 'u' in suck

Back on form

and no cattle prod in sight

Stephen Fry cans Japan trip over nuke survivor quip

It is good

I had it in Japan. Really nice.

Mexican woman gets litigious on Top Gear's ass

If SOuth Park is censored,

Mexican viewers must be puzzled that these strange creatures in South Park only ever beep, and never use any words then

Photo loss blogger to Flickr: You're f*cking kidding

True

but at the same time: why does flickr not have a roll-back system in place to cope with such mishaps?

Gates: Killing the internet is easy

But of course

"And yet the Egyptian protests continue - without Twitter and Facebook."

Of course, once the fire has reached the powder keg, a fuse is no longer needed.

Boffins hope for dimensional portal event at LHC by 2013!

Before opening doors to higher dimensions

should we not work out how to fire missiles at right angles to reality?

Malawi poised to outlaw farting

particularly worrying

for politicians and other wind-bags

I'll get my coat

Beeb say sorry for Stephen Fry A-bomb quip

well precisely.

And neither did the Japanese need to tie up Dutch soldiers who had already surrendered in wicker cages weighted down with stones, and throw them in the sea. Hatred begets hatred, atrocity begets atrocity. QI did not imply the bombs were a good idea, nor do most posts in the forum. Japan can however not solely be portrayed as the victim in this case.

The embassy represents the goverment

does it not?

I have been in Japan twice, like many of the people I met there, found them courteous and helpful, but I do feel many of their official positions on the events in the war are very biased indeed, as I explained above. There are many Japanese individuals who distance themselves (politely) from the official line, but the official line does seem to be very much "don't mention the war!" This is a pity, as Japan would gain a great deal of respect if they owned up to the wrongs that were committed in the past.

As should every imperial(ist) power.

The comment was on being unlucky

or lucky, depending how you look on it. If you saw the actual program as I did, you would at most smile at the wry irony of fate in this man's past. In my opinion, they did not make light of the war or the bomb, they just pointed out an extremely unlikely (and unfortunate) series of events.

I have been in Japan twice

but that this caused offense baffles me. Especially when at the ground-zero museum in Hiroshima there is precious little mention whatsoever of Japan starting the war against the US, or any of the atrocities committed by the Imperial Army. The anti-war attitude of the museum is fine, but the overall picture is rather unbalanced.

Researcher cracks Wi-Fi passwords with Amazon cloud

not quite correct

You can rely on entropy reduction in the out put of your decryption to be informative as well. The cracking of the Enigma code resulted from knowing the coding mechanisms (it was after all patented) and knowing what letter combinations occur with which frequency in the plain text (assuming it was German). Knowing actual words is a great boon, but not strictly necessary.

If you really need provably uncrackable security on a document: use a properly randomized one-time-pad, i.e. an unguessable password of the same length as the plain text, and doing e.g. a bit-wise XOR. You cannot brute force this, because you need to generate all character sequences of the same length as the document, which leaves you to select which of the 27^N (assuming no caps, digits, or punctuation, with N the number of characters) outputs is the correct one. Apart from all nonsensical N character texts, only one of the sensible N character texts is the right one.

or beavers

for that matter

ISPs battle EU child pornography filter laws

Agreed, up to a point, good sir!

If I should accidentally come across child pornography, I would report it instantly, as would many people, so yes, blocking might be counterproductive. However, I trust the perpetrators of this kind of crime protect their content anyway, so you would need passwords to get at that kind of smut. Stumbling across it may be unlikely.

Archeologists toast world's oldest wine press

A toast!!

to mankind's ability for creating booze!

Apple refuses frozen iPhone repair

Check your physics

1: The object brought from the house into a cold car will have been warm

2: Air in a cold car is dry

3: If the temperature of an object is higher than ambient, no condensation forms, even at 100% relative humidity.

4: If you heat up a (cold) car the air becomes dryer.

And even IF condensation forms, electronic circuitry can easily be made robust against that, in particular low-voltage stuff. Actually, just a bit of insulating coating does the trick.

EU in Chinese garlic-crushing operation

Different food stuffs have different values per kilogram

That can make a BIG difference. Try buying a kilogram of white truffles ;-)

George Nazi assumes Alcatel 'senior execution role'

Can they supply me

with a new keyboard!

We haf veyz of making you use our product!!

(use Dr. Strangelove voice)

Samsung shows off tablet-cum-netbook convertible

That looks really slick

if the price is right, I might just want to get one.