Posts by Stuart 2

Pssst.... build your own machine learning computer, it's cheaper and even faster than using GPUs on cloud

MSDN

If you have an MSDN subscription, perhaps through work, then the free credit that you get allows you to run a decent machine learning rig in the cloud for several days a month.

Mars, Moon, solar system could be littered with alien artifacts

The chances of voyager 1 or 2 _ever_ coming close to another object after leaving the solar system are almost zero. I have read estimates that only one star in 100 billion will ever collide with another star. In conclusion, there might be trillions of alien artefacts floating through the galaxy, but they will never come close to a star in their entire existence, let alone end up on the surface of a planet.

Best skiing in space is on Saturnian ice moon Enceladus

Rubbish

Read an article about this before. The ice would not melt as it is too cold, so there is lots of friction, hence it is rubbish for skiing on, would be like skiing down a sand dune made of talcum powder.

Microsoft Xbox 360 Kinect

How much did you get paid for this one?

Review seems oddly positive, given other people's complaints of input lag, insufficient space in most people's living rooms, the pretty poor showing of games in comparison to the competition, the badly thought out lack of any standards for menu/gesture control, and some problems with lighting and clutter. Essentially a flawed product which doesn't compare vary well to either the move, or to the wii, in various respects.

BBC workers lose £240k of tech gear in two years

cost per laptop seems a tad high

So, the BBC equips its staff with laptops that cost £1500?

Google heats up native code for Chrome OS

good thing

The advantage of NaCL is that you will be able to compile most reasonably cross platform code to work with NaCL, with relatively little effort, once some of the cross-platform gui/graphics libraries are ported to it, e.g. openGL, wxWidgets, QT. This means that countless linux programs could be made to work with little effort. No doubt google will use it to deploy office apps to PC's running Chrome OS.

Compared to Java, the chief advantage is that it is native code, and thus there is no translation/interpretation step. In addition, there is a lot more existing code written in C/C++ than java.

Ocarina compresses Flash and MPEG2s

spammy advert

Reads like an advert. You gaming the stock market or is this a paid for piece?

Light bulbs inspire boffins to find fast data transfer trick

Big whoop

If they can find a way to use this technology with some kind of long-wavelength light, which is invisible to the human eye, and which can defract around corners, they will be on to a winner!

Intel says warranties evaporate when kit resold

Actually, it's pretty clear in the warrenty information...

Intel warrants to the purchaser of the Product (defined herein as the Intel® X25-E, X25-M, and X18-M SATA Solid-State Drives)

in its original sealed packaging (“Original Purchaser”) and to the purchaser of a computer system built by an Original Purchaser

containing the Product (“Original System Customer”) as follows:...

http://download.intel.com/support/ssdc/hpssd/sb/english_ssd_3_year_warranty.pdf

Asus Eee PC 1005PE

Pinetrail

The pinetrail ATOM processor is about saving money for intel, not boosting performance; the chipset is to all intents and purposes the same as the old one, it's just moved from two chips to one. There is an article about it on anandtech: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3728

O2 and Be Broadband speeds dip

Acess package

The 'access' (non LLU) speeds were down to 0.5 megabit for a couple of months, due to them totally ****ing up the implementation of bandwidth throttling. It's mostly fixed now, but speeds are still only ~4 meg.

EA exec punts 96,000rpm e-car engine

96,000 RPM seems like a bad idea

Having the engine spin at 96,000 RPM seems like a really bad idea.

(a) it's not very efficient

(b) the wear would be terrible

(c) if it breaks it will be pretty spectacular

(d) the gyroscopic effect will reduce handling

Asus waves farewell to (laptop) fans

Speed holes

Reminds me of the episode of the simpsons where a car salesman tries to sell a car to Homer that has "speed holes"

'Overweight' people live longer than those of 'ideal' weight

BMI does make sense.

The register's comments that BMI require two dimensional people are incorrect.

BMI assumes that weight is proportional to volume.

Then weight/height^2 is proportional to the radius of a person, i.e. how fat they are.