* Posts by Tom 7

8318 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009

Beagleboard peeps tease dual-core 64-bit RISC-V computer with GPU, AI acceleration, more for $119

Tom 7

Re: but ....

Its got 3 ai chips on it - it will rewrite it so it can!

Boffins store text message inside E coli bacteria using electromagnetic signal – and you'll never guess what it says

Tom 7

Re: "Hello world!" ?

They've been doing this for a while then - I've had an e-coli infection that tried to turn me into a rocket.

International Space Station scores powerup with solar panels that 'roll out like a tape measure'

Tom 7

There you are resting in you cucoon

on the station and then weowwoosh bong and the lights go out as the solar panels retract at speed.

Like all good tape measures.

Theranos destroyed crucial subpoenaed SQL blood test database, can't unlock backups, prosecutors say

Tom 7

Re: Sure thing

And yet if you lose your decryption key...

US backs down from slapping import taxes on French goods over Macron's web giant tax

Tom 7

You're saying the the UK (say) should impose a tax on shareholders in the US?

Leave.EU takes back control – and shifts its domain name to be inside the European Union

Tom 7

Re: ....and the beat goes on.............

No, it looks like our fishermen have opened up a new market: Surströmming!

Tom 7

Re: ....and the beat goes on.............

You won! Get over it!

Tom 7

Re: .eu domains

So they're bloody foreigners interfering in the UK's politics and should FRO.

Pizza and beer night out the window, hours trying to sort issue, then a fresh pair of eyes says 'See, the problem is...'

Tom 7

Re: The value of not working all hours

In my first proper job we worked on things like Vax780s and things of less power.That, in my job, left a lot of waiting time for jobs to finish and I used it to learn new skills. Because of the nature of the job you could do create some moderately accurate productivity data. Over about 6 years I worked our a continuous 37 1/2 hr week was the most productive. I could do a couple of weeks of 60hr weeks to get a job finished on time and then it would take a month of normal to get back up to normal. A month of 60hrs would lead to lower than normal productivity, largely due to recovering from errors but also from lack of enthusiasm.

The real answer to loss of productivity in longer hours I discovered working in the US where 12 hr days 6 days a week seemed to be the norm: just dont do anything that might tire you out like work.

Tom 7

Re: a shamefaced colleague stepped forward to confess to the deed.

Its always worth noting that even in the days of floppies etc there is almost always a way that intelligent forensics will reduce the possible perpetrators to a manageable level. I've even managed to convict myself of a Friday afternoon cock-up after I left someone I detested's leaving do early and returned to the office to wait for a lift home. I have no memory of the incident but I figured it can only have been me but no-one noticed I'd gone and it was a couple of weeks later when the system crashed and the date stamp on the file probably didnt lie. No-one else worked it out though.

Tom 7

Using a version control system and Diff for anything going near production is handy too. When working from home your cat can get paid for those mods he's done while you make a cuppa.

Tom 7

One of the first think I used to do was to create a file of all the reserved word in a language so that something could be done with them - editor highlighting or a shell script to grep them on save. That was before it took longer to learn how to program the editor than it did several languages. Thank god error reporting has improved faster than documentation.

Titanium carbide nanotech approach hints at hydrogen storage breakthrough

Tom 7

Re: It's not just the storage

Storage has never really been a problem technically. We used to have gas manometers in every town and now we have the technology to compress the gas and recover most of the energy used in compressing it it should be less of a problem these days.

Tom 7

Re: It's not just the storage

Over 80% efficiency was achieved in the 1990s.

Tom 7

Re: I hope this isn't like fusion

Hydrogen generation and storage for non-vehicular use has been there for decades. Its just lacking the investment. Renewables development has had practically no government investment when you compare it with the subsidies the oil/coal industry has received..

Tom 7

In the 1990s electricity could be used to electrolyse water and the resulting hydrogen could be used in a power cell and 82% of the energy could be recovered. You are saying 30 years later I couldn't buy the cheap electricity (or even the negative prices sometimes seen) convert it to Hydrogen, store it and use it in power cells and sell that back at a profit at peak times? I dont know what these problems are of yours but it could be Chemistry and Physics GCSE defecit.

UK's NHS Digital hands £8m contract to lab data biz after trouble matching COVID-19 tests to health records

Tom 7

Re: £8m contract without competition

Seem the new head of the BBC has donated a mere £400k to the tories over time. Nothing to see there click pop.

Brexit freezes 81,000 UK-registered .eu domains – and you've all got three months to get them back

Tom 7

Re: This is normal idiocy

I dunno, the tories seem to be cornering the market. Foreign idiots will have to do something that makes them extinct to even get a footnote in the advertising. Its a defacto monopoly already!

Lay down your souls to the gods of rock 'n' roll: Conspiracy theorists' 5G 'vaccine' chip schematic is actually for a guitar pedal

Tom 7

Wah Wah Wah Waaaaaaaaaah

New term to coin, Raise you arm above your head and rotate it: Air News.

New year, new rant: Linus Torvalds rails at Intel for 'killing' the ECC industry

Tom 7

TBF running life critical software on a laptop (assuming it leaves the office/house) is a bit of a no-no. And that software and its results would be better served by being run on something more efficient and not so portable. I've got a screamer of an 8 core laptop but am moving my crunching off to a more cost effective GPU on a shit motherboard, or I was until I read this and am wondering about ECC packed GPUs.though I think I'd probably do my error correcting by re-running certain proofs - I can probably cope with 10 errors a year as I'm still in learning/exploratory mode but in a business mode I could easily get away with selling that error rate but wouldnt feel happy about it.

This does make me wonder about the problem domain. I have just tried running some tests on some AI problems and these seem largely immune to bit flip type errors as they tend to try and converge and an error just slows down the convergence in training. And I guess one could use an ECC mainboard to drive a GPU relatively safely by refreshing the model on the GPU on a regular basis..

Linux 5.11 dominated by descriptors for new AMD silicon

Tom 7

AMD GPU header files

lead to loss of an audio channel?

Explained: The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32

Tom 7

Re: "Def-Pro"

My school had Nissen huts that were build during WWII and still used into the late 70s when I left and never went back. They were actually more watertight than the late 60s built secondary modern in town. But they took out the stoves so seriously cold in winter for those in short trousers!

Tom 7

Re: Future proofing size constraints

I was doing chips for 400mb Trans Atlantic FO cables in the mid 80s. Never thought I'd have about 15 times that capacity in my own house for the kids homework and games. I can get twice that during the day to the rest of the world and haven't used a phone yet this year!

Tom 7

Re: Future proofing size constraints

Nowadays it would probably be quite easy - have a look at how a few million disks are used and extrapolate from that. Back then we were veering all over the place and had no tools to collect the data required. I still remember saying the internet would never catch on at home as you really needed a network card and 10mbps to make it faster than ordering a tape or some floppies over the phone. But as a chip designer I underestimated the power of porn in the hands of management!

Realme 7 5G: Parents, this is the phone you should have got your kids for Christmas

Tom 7

Re: I grew up with PAL

Can people actually see any difference in what I would call normal viewing? i.e. not in the dark so the background light noise drowns out any of the supposed benefit.

Watt's next for batteries? It'll be more of the same, not longer life, because physics and chemistry are hard

Tom 7

Re: still remember that fantastic 2005 article

Where can I get a few hundred? Might need them in the brexit wars!

Tom 7

Re: On the subject of EV recharging

The logistics dont work? The auto-mobile would never have taken off with that 'mind' set.Bertha Benz makes today's entrepreneurs look like the unimaginative twats they are.

Tom 7

Re: On the subject of EV recharging

The London Electric Tram company could replace a battery in less than 3 minutes in 1910. Beats any charging point I've heard of.

You dont even need the whole car battery to be replaceable. Imagine if you could just pop out and in something that gives you (say) 50 miles so you can get to a proper charging point. Could revolutionise the whole industry.

Tom 7

Re: Pedot

And possibly the wind err cycle.

One thing seemingly not mentioned were flow batteries where the chargy containing thing is a liquid and can be flushed one way during charging into a store and then back to make the battery provide power, You can get a lot of umph in a bath full of chargy juice.

Tom 7

Re: Pedot

That explains why, when walking home from the pub recently, I could only get my phone to work by leaning against a wall.

Or it could have been the singing...

Tom 7

Re: For an expendable battery, such as a lead-acid battery

That's 4500 milliamp-hours in modern bullshit.

Brexit trade deal advises governments to use Netscape Communicator and SHA-1. Why? It's all in the DNA

Tom 7

Re: 20 year old tech...

And the EU and China have just sorted a trade deal and the US is not happy at not getting input. So our sovereignty on a China trade deal just went west. Literally!

All I want for Christmas is cash: Welsh ATMs are unbeatable. Or unbootable. Something like that

Tom 7

Re: Social Distancing

Most shops I've been in seem to have hand sanitiser dispensers except our local chemists!!!!

And now for something completely different: A lightweight, fast browser that won't slurp your data

Tom 7

Re: Pretty naive

It depends. haven't looked at the full docs but last time I did something with HTML I just parsed some tables from the documentation and it practically wrote the code itself. That was HTML4 - I've just had a quick look at 5 and cant find the same sort of data but it may be there somewhere. The docs look parse able for a lot of the data one would require.

Tom 7

Pi-400

presumably that means it will just run on a Pi-4 then?

Tom 7

about:config

extension.pocket.enabled false

Yes, Microsoft Access was a recalcitrant beast, but the first step is to turn the computer on

Tom 7

Re: Access

Access could go to good places if you connected into SQLServer rather than the JET thingy - indeed plugging it into MySQL for development was my favourite time saver. Discovering VB had gone OO just before I wandered off leaving MS to their own devices makes me wonder what I could do with it today.

Tom 7

Re: Yep

You've just reminded me of a job interview I had for working in a fruit machine company. It was all going well until I suggested simulating the machines to ensure they were fully random and then realised from the look on the interviewers face that perhaps these sequences people jabbered about allowing them to win on supposedly random machines were in fact real after all! I let myself out.

Tom 7

Re: I always worry

The ability of the system to route around problems require someone to build the routes to be able to route a round the problem.

We had 3 ISDN Private Wire routes out of the building for our IT data centre heading in different directions and only discovered BT had decided to re-route two of them on the same trunk as the other a couple of hundred yards from the building when someone dug it up. I cant remember if we got a refund or not.

Roma, we've had un problema: When every flight's final destination is a date with Windows Boot Manager

Tom 7

You should try a proper airport

There's one on a little Caribbean island I like to frequent where the pilot comes to get you from the bar when its time to leave.

North of England NHS buyers name IT consultants who got in on £200m framework deal

Tom 7

Re: Wouldn't it be cheaper....

We need to modify covid to seek out those with MBAs and implant 30 years of IT experience in them. Or just kill them. it would save more lives in the long run.

UK on track to miss even its slashed full-fibre gigabit coverage goals, warn MPs

Tom 7

Re: Virgin shouldn't be included

"I don't see who that service is useful to" I'd imagine 95% of the population would be more than happy with it. Very few consumers need 50Mbps upload. Who needs to send 25 video feeds out simultaneously?

Tom 7

Re: Openreach foryourwallet

What rules? Have you seen how small a FO cable can be? Presumably it would be replacing the phone line anyway so in reality you would be relieving the poles of stress not adding it.

The same goes for underground though I accept there may not be the space to get the first FO cables down the line, that once there should really start to make space in the duct.

Tom 7

Re: GigaClear

I've imagine 90% of the houses in the villages around here are either ancient which presents problems, or modern in which case the front garden will either be concreted over for parking or be three toot deep in builders rubble.

Just let this sink in: Capita wins 12-year £1bn contract to provide training services to the Royal Navy and Marines

Tom 7

As a pacifist

I welcome our new incompetent military overlords.

'Best tech employer of the year' threatened trainee with £15k penalty fee for quitting to look after his sick mum

Tom 7

Given that even for employees there’s no elements of an employee/employer relationship that ones easy to get by the courts.

'Following the science' rhetoric led to delay to UK COVID-19 lockdown, face mask rules

Tom 7

Re: The Institute for Government, a bunch of non-scientists

30th in the world in infection and they've not reported in 4 days though it was climbing exponentially? I hate to see what the positive lessons are here, cant see a single on myself.

Tom 7

Re: The Institute for Government, a bunch of non-scientists

"Would love to hear what the dissenters would have done differently." What Taiwan, Vietnam etc etc did

Taiwan 2.5% growth in GDP this year. That is saving your economy AND people.

Tom 7

Re: The Institute for Government, a bunch of non-scientists

It does if you dont let the one or two patients wander around, or others let in at 120 planes an hour.