Posts by tojb

RUMPY PUMPY: Bone says humans BONED Neanderthals 50,000 years B.C.

With blonde hair and hem-hem generous figure then you are ahead of the game, brow-ridge shmrow-ridge.

Want a more fuel efficient car? Then redesign it – here's how

Re: Mr ChriZ Advanced Motoring

Surprising number of people have zero or poor 3D vision. It is quite OK to get/keep a driving licence with one eye, so being merely crosseyed or having a neurological impairment to depth perception goes by the board.

'George Orwell was an optimist. Show me a search history, I'll show you a perv or a crook'

corollary

The corollary to this rule (lets call it the Richelieu principle) is that people are way too uptight about a whole load of stuff. If everyone does something which could see them in the dock, then maybe we should take a collective chill pill?

Lies, damn pies and obesity statistics: We're NOT a nation of fatties

artificial sweeteners make you fat

Nature article here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v514/n7521/full/nature13793.html

Looks conclusive to my reading, saccharin et al throw a spanner in your gut ecology leading to fatness and other digestive & metabolic difficulties.

X-Men boffins demo nanomagnets to replace transistors

Re: I dont know enough

Proper shielding would increase the cost, but not by much. Vaguely remember something called mu-metal (alloy that is mostly just iron and nickel) is cheap and has high permittivity, thus bends the field around whatever is inside. Tinfoil hat for your computer.

Are you a fat boy? Get to university now, you penniless slacker

Re: Flaw in the argument

"correlation/causation confusion anyway"

It was a study on brothers: from that I'm getting that they were controlling for background by comparing guys from the same family.

iOS 8 release: WebGL now runs everywhere. Hurrah for 3D graphics!

Re: WebGL Demo

That is absolutely gorgeous. Note to others: if it doesn't look like its working, try clicking on the middle of it.

Nvidia builds CUDA GPU programming library for machine learning – so you don't have to

If it has just enough sophistication to crack a captcha, then it is probably at the same level of sentience as the average commentard anyway. That is the beauty of the captcha system.

Meet the 'smallest GPU' for wearable gizmos ... wait, where did it go?

Re: Must be in the iWatch.

@Charles 9: yes, the block diagram looks vaguely familiar, they have an architecture that seems to work, with some patents that protect it and that is what they are sticking with. If better solutions are known, they probably require a lot of M&A or patent trading to be allowed to use them.

@Denman: they've tried to the one-big-customer high wire act before, with Sega as Charles9 remarked. They muddled through when that came to an end, I'm sure good old British pluck will see them through the next crisis too.

Mwa-ha-ha-ha! Eccentric billionaire Musk gets his PRIVATE SPACEPORT

This reminds me of Neal Stevenson's discussion about the point when (nearly) every guy realises that not only is he not Batman, but in fact he is *never* going to be a serious martial-arts stunt-drivin two-AKs badass. Usually late adolescence, but sometimes delayed for quite a while.

The corresponding case here is the point when an engineering graduate realises that he is never going to have his own personal fleet of nuclear-capable interstellar craft. Musk isn't there yet, and I hope that I never am either.

Get an EYEFUL OF CURRY for the sake of your brain

Re: memories

Actually there is a marine snail, aplysia, which uses the controlled formation of amyloid (not full-scale plaques) as an information storage mechanism. Also Saccaromyces Cerevisiae (brewers' yeast) has been shown to store information by this mechanism, and pass it on through cell division.

No, it does. The wikipedia post is accurate but incomplete: the substance shows up in turmeric AND cumin.

In about 2008, when the binding activity of curcumin to ABeta was discovered, researchers rushed off to stuff mice with as many different biphenolic spices as they could, and even observed a therapeutic effect.

Unfortunately, when the doses are scaled up to humans you would have to inject a tablespoon of curry powder directly into your brain every day to actually remediate AD by this approach, but I'm glad someone has found a use for the effect as a test.

Europe's highest court: Apple CAN trademark its retail store layout

Sigh... insanity as usual. Noone is likely to mistakenly think they are in an apple shop and accidentally pay double what their new ithing is worth, just because the layout is about the same as one. Or are they? Surely the presence or absence of a big fruit sign is clue enough?

Luxembourg patent troll suing world+dog

Their motives probably weren't as simple as making money by selling licences. It had the hallmarks of an attempt to defeat open standards on portable devices, facilitating a walled garden approach, back when they thought their garden might have more than one or two vegetables in it......

Re: vFAT

slaps forehead.... of course. It should always be easy to work around something that was just a hack in the first place. :-D I'm glad that they were wasting their own time as well as everyone else's.

Remember when MS decided to retro-patent vFAT? And how that seemed like a massive obstacle to developing mobile electronic devices such as MP3 players? People got around it somehow. Whatever solution was adopted in that case should also work out for the impedence-sensing jack, for instance. Can anyone remember what the answer was to the vFAT issue?

UK's pirate-nagging VCAP scheme WON'T have penalties – report

Re: I am very strongly in favour of reducing copyright infringements ...

It still is 50 years in the UK, except for Peter Pan.

Chap builds mobe based on Raspberry Pi

Daddy, can I have a mobile phone? Can I Daddy Can I?

Why sure thing (Son/Daughter) here are the parts

Plus you'll have to earn some money down't pit if you want to pay for making calls with it...

Intel sees 'signs of improvement in the PC business' but earnings remain 'Meh...'

Bad or good news for UK competitors?

"Mobile and Communications Group's $156 million fairly stunk up the balance sheet, down 61 per cent y/y"

Are they losing market share to ARM, IMG etc or is the market shrinking? Both?

Blighty teen boffin builds nuclear reactor INSIDE CLASSROOM

Ahh yes... and when Womersley brought in a pair of cow lungs.

We were told to shove a gas tube down the trachea and blow to inflate the lungs (everyone else had rabbit or similar). Some scamp had pre-lacerated Womersley's lungs with a scalpel, so the dead-cow mucus spluttered out everywhere. Such fun.

gimp suit: because you'd wish you were wearing one if you'd been anywhere near

Facebook: We want a solar sky cruiser comms net that DARPA couldn't build

This may actually be a good idea

Comms infrastructure in Africa is seriously bedevilled by cable theft. Unless you think its possible to get everyone on the continent up to a standard of living where 1km of copper wire is no longer a desparately-needed meal ticket, then some kind of up-high platform (be it satellite, drones or whatev) seems like a good solution. Fortunes have already been made by providing mobile voice coverage to some regions of the continent, larger fortunes remain to be made.

Mobile base-stations with an integral power source and someone guarding them are an option, but sooner or later the guard will be intimidated or take a bribe. Seriously, in Congo or even SA being nailed down is no deterrent to theft. Put it out of reach.

Nokia launches Euro ANDROID invasion, quips: 'Microsoft knew what they were buying'

Re: Here maps for Android?

navfree has decent maps (from openstreetmap.org) and can be made to work on even my quite feeble small form-factor droid although it is by no means slick and the ui is a little odd.

The permissions, as is becoming sadly commonplace for android apps, are absurd: it wants to read my contacts list? Will that help it work out where I am?

Open MPI hits milestone with FORTRAN-ready 1.7.4 release

F90 is great

Back on topic, if OpenMPI can indeed sort out task affinity then that should bring it back in the running as something fit for actual production numerics. Currently, by managing this trick intel's MPI implementation (and perhaps others I haven't tested eg MPICH) leave poor old OMPI in the dust.

Altcoins will DESTROY the IT industry and spawn an infosec NIGHTMARE

Re: All your passwords are belong to us!: not just UNIs

A mate went freelance as a drug design consultant, a couple of years ago now. No wet lab, no supercomputer, just a couple of machines with not-even-top-of-the-range Nvidia cards (plus his biocad subject knowledge, of course).

He reckons that he has customers and is doing OK: this kind of proposition would not have been tenable pre GPU computing, but it will become increasingly common as people realise that they don't need the mainframe in the basement of their company/university to convert their science knowledge into cash.

Botnet PC armies gulp down 16 MILLION logins from around the web: Find out if you're a victim

Gov encouraging citizens to use pgp?

"erhalten Sie eine von uns per PGP signierte E-Mail"

That's pretty encouraging. Even if UK.gov knew themselves what that means, use of technical terms or ideas would probably fall foul of their inclusivity guidelines.

Boffins hampered by the ampere hanker for a quantum answer

a little harsh

"joking or senile" seems a bit excessive.

Perhaps the point being made is that its easier to count electrons (eg Millikan's oil drop experiment, which wasn't that easy at the time but should in some form straightforward be today) and measure their charge statically. Then you just need mu_0 and epsilon_0, bingo, Ampere's law gives you the definition of an Amp as quoted. I'm guessing that this plan is why the definitions were set up the way they were.

Top Microsoft bod: ARM servers right now smell like Intel's (doomed) Itanic

>>The truly disruptive CPU architectures are the ones running on GPUs, and these aren't ready for non-embarrassingly-parallel workloads

sorry but I use cuda quite a bit, sure comms can be the bottleneck but it is by no means limited to trivial or embarassing parallelisation. Embarassing parallelism is exactly what I'm hoping for from 64-bit ARM: cores that are big enough to take care of something all by themselves, but cheap enough to have a lot of them. If these run, for instance, molecular dynamics half as fast as an intel core but are considerably less than half the price the I want some.

Boffins claim battery BREAKTHROUGH – with rhubarb-like molecule

DMC cells

Anyone remember the hype around direct methanol conversion fuel cells a while ago? Great energy density, apparently and relatively non-toxic.

Whatever happened to those things? Why didn't they make it to market?

Evil Dexter lurks in card reader, ready to SLASH UP your credit score

The only secure bank account is an empty one, with no overdraft facility.

Brit inventors' GRAVITY POWERED LIGHT ships out after just 1 year

Horse powered

Reminds me of an old photo I saw of a bloke in a flat cap leading a shire horse connected to some pulleys, connected to some very big weights in a very high-roofed barn, connected to a genny to run the squire's newfangled galvanic illuminators.

Amazon lashes Nvidia's GRID GPU to its cloud: But can it run Crysis?

Scientific computing, eg molecular dynamics. They list AMBER, a popular MD code for biomolecules, as an example application that has been benchmarked so that must be pretty much what they are expecting people to use it for.

http://aws.amazon.com/gpu/

Helium-filled disks lift off: You can't keep these 6TB beasts down

He isn't that cheap

Helium isn't that cheap. Liquid He is the biggest annual budget item for our physics dept. Possibly we are paying for the cryo and transportation, but all the same.

SUPERSIZE ME: Nokia unveils Surface rival and 2 plumped-up phablets

Re: If we can shoehorn linux

--My guess is that cygwin won't work

--Bluestacks (android support layer) doesn't support RT. They've said that they might, next year.

--Wait for an unlocking sploit and put cyanogen or one of hundreds of excellent ARM-compatible linuxen on board.

--Just buy a different one.

Volvo: Need a new car battery? Replace the doors and roof

Re: Bang the car, short the battery

Easy: break the battery up into cells which are insulated from each other. Damage-limitation ensues.

Luxembourgeois data protection watchdog probes Microsoft in Skype PRISM complaint

Re: "1, avenue du Rock’n’Roll"

Avenue du Blues appears to be a block west of avenue du Rock'n'Roll.

Lonely street and Heartbreak hotel are however not evident on the map you posted.

LinkedIn fires back against 'hack-and-spam' US class-action sue bomb

Second: facebook behave in the same way

I clicked "find friends" thinking this was a search dialogue that would let me message someone I wanted to get hold of, tab, return, tab, return, passwords etc (stupid, but I was in a hurry) and the asstards had harvested my email contacts.

Ensue embarrasing spamathon of business contacts, yea even knights and dames no less, to announce that I had uploaded photos they would like to see. Horrified. Also very surprised at how many of them opened an account apparently just to see the aformentioned photos of my lunch, cats.

First rigid airship since the Hindenburg cleared for outdoor flight trials

Re: it will probably be an expensive @ Jess

No, my friend. Europe is a continent, which Britain is in, but it is also a state of mind, which it is not.

Science fiction titan Frederik Pohl dies, aged 93

Zearly 1940s

"the late 1930s and zearly 1940s." Advanced thought-rays have expunged all memory of the Zearl incident of 1941. Only I and the author of this article remember it, although the horrific events which it set in motion remain common knowledge among all Earth peoples.

The Pirate Bay's new censorship-dodging browser 'not secure'

Re: If people want something for nothing, they'll find or make a way to get it!

Au contraire, internet censorship can and has been made to work.

By "work" I mean seriously obstruct totally innocent daily internet use for millions of people.

Down with the jackbooted oppressors!

Give up your privacy so Big Data can FIX GOVERNMENT

"

MSD has 20 years of data to inform its plans and the analytics tools to put that data to work.

Most nations possess the latter two assets. The first may be in short supply in a post-Snowden world.

"

Did you mean to have a list of three things in there? The "latter two" of a list of two is a bit of a silly construction to when using natural languages.

Google Glassholes can't take long walks off short piers thanks to Merc app

Travelling internationally.... people with facemasks on (OK usually just in Asia)..... and wearing cybervisors telling them what to do and where to go.

Its just freaking creepy.

Take this idea to the US, add a gun (or just use the one that many of them have anyway) and "retarded doofus" becomes the new "predator drone".

Nvidia buys Portland Group for compiler smarts

amanfrommars1's comment appears to be have been machine-generated by the schizophrenic AI built into emacs

For pity's sake: DON'T MOVE to the COUNTRY if you want to live

Re: And what about the stress?

If you want a "slower pace of life" try crossing London from one side to the other during the day.

ARM servers to gain boost from ARM, Oracle Java partnership

Er... aren't most/all android apps written in Java? From that it seems to follow that this is a useful move for tablet & phone development.

I can't avoid the suspicion the press release: "ARM, ORACLE JAVA PARTNERSHIP" might not connect to a very inspiring reality: "INTERN TOLD TO TRY AND BRUSH UP JVM PERFORMANCE FOR NEXT RELEASE OF CHIP"

Boffins chill out with new temperature measurement

Re: Something is wrong here

Au contraire: if we posit that the particle is coupled to a heat bath, then its temperature is well defined but energy will fluctuate.

You can work in an NVE ensemble (energy fixed) or an NVT ensemble (temperature fixed) as you prefer, providing you don't bugger off and try to actually realise either of these cases in an experiment.

Cloud computers are like bananas, says Deutsche Börse

Looking forward to massive speculation-driven overproduction of cloud computing followed by a crash (the financial kind) that leaves us all communicating with cups and string.

Way to go Deutsche-Borse!

(Rushes off to stake €1,000 confident that he alone can time the bubble)

Myanmar picks for telecoms jackpot stoke controversy

Censorship in Myanmar has previously been a real pain

Guy Delisle describes in his "Chroniques Birmanes" that after mentioning something in which triggered a filter, the Medecins Sans Frontieres emails in and out of Myanmar were all then subsequently censored "by hand": read by a human before being allowed to go through, causing them to take weeks to be delivered, if at all.

A friendly word with the appropriate bureau restored normal service, but all the same....

It puts the current hoo-ha with the NSA in perspective: imagine waiting a week for the government to read each one of your emails before passing them on.

*Chroniques Birmanes is a graphic novel: not exactly the most official of news sources. Very good though.

Nearly-transparent screen adds solar charge to phones

LED display == solar cell run backwards

Teh fizzicks of an LED display, if I remember rightly, is the same as that of a standard photovoltaic cells:

Electron on high-voltage side of junction <-> photon + low-voltage electron.

Therefore if your phone has an LED display it should be able to push a trickly charge-voltage with only minimal rewiring behind the scenes. In fact this is an occasionally-used test procedure for PV cells, to run them backwards and see what comes out.

It has been bothering me for a while that I can't harvest power from my LED telly when it is turned off, multiple square metres of perfectly good PV cell should be in use, even if it is only enough to drive the standy mode, that is better than nothing! Can anyone explain why this is not already a reality?

COLD FUSION is BACK with 'anomalous heat' claim

Re: Having not read the paper yet

Seconded: every time I get a report in MS word my heart sinks. Someone has decided its easier to spend two days trying to squeeze equations and figures onto the page through an interface that wasn't designed for them than 1 day learning tex and 1 day writing.