Posts by Brian Wright

So, what IS the worst film ever made?

Worst! Film! Ever!

especially for IT geeks, must be Hawk the Slayer

David May, parallel processing pioneer

Another OCCAM university user

Maths & Computation undergrads at Oxford did Parallel computing practicals in OCCAM back in 1991. I remember reading Tony Hoare's text book, and still have my practicals...in print out form :)

No transputer in the computing lab then though - instead we compiled to run over as many of the Sun computers in the lab as we needed processors. It was great to watch those engineers wonder why their computers were so slow. And the editor was good old 'ved'.

Happy days.

Windows HPC server courts supercomputing greenhorns

Fortran for Windows....

I cannot see the adoption of Windows in any Academic HPC environment. Here (in our UK University site) we are lucky if the apps customers submit are written in fortran - many are much older than this. And what about those obscure libraries - FreeBUGs anybody?

In a nice clean, rich, oil exploration company maybe everybody has upgraded since 1989, but experience shows this isn't the case at the research end - and it is here that the next generation of users and supporters are made.

Book publisher steals Google laptops

Hmm...

I am not sure that there can be any problem with digitising a book - as an analogy think of transferring a work you own from Vinyl to CD - from an outdated old fashioned media to a new one. Surely the whole issue is how the digitised copy is handled. If royalties are paid (where appropriate) and local laws are followed is there then an issue? Surely it can only help authors with their meager incomes if another revenue stream was generated.

So maybe stealing the laptops was an analogy for how the digitised copies are currently handled, but rather than through all the toys out of the pram and do something criminal to prove a point (although with no intention to permanently deprive I am not sure that it is theft), how much *serious* negotiation has taken place on alternatives. I suspect none, as the people that could negotiate en-masse for authors are their publishers, and it is the publishers that would be cut out of the loop by digital publication!