Posts by tojb 216 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Oct 2010
@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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
"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.
>>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.
--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.
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.
"
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.
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".
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"
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.
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.
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?
"Of course, this brings the added benefit that you won't be subject to any 1984-esque moments, too; but you wouldn't get all the automagic synchronisation of books and bookmarks over wifi."
Just open a books folder on your dropbox account (my low-tech version of this), or pay a couple of quid to get Moon+ reader, which .... opens a books folder on your dropbox account, and also (probably) uploads a few bits and bobs of metadata, bookmarks etc.
Mines the one without a kindle in the pocket.
"Win8 is not appealling (sic) to a lot of people. However MS can easily address its problems, and Win9 could be a really good thing....."
Sorry, you are making me feel old:
"98 crashes a lot but ME will be better"
"XP has security issues, vista will fix these" (well, OK things did get a bit better)
I haven't tried win8 (I'm important enough now that if someone sends me a doc that doesn't display on libre I can send it back and tell them to get a proper computer) but I'm sure that further sarcastic comments are there to be made by people with first hand experience.
I changed planes at Washington Dulles back in the summer, on my way from Mexico to Yurp. No intention to step out of the airport, but all the same they made me go through the whole rigmarole. Took 6 hours of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with sweaty fat people in a series of humid, dingy rooms. Light relief was being harrased and having my luggage tossed by sweaty, bullying, fat people in uniforms.
I travel all over the world for my work, you can bet next time I'm doing my dammnedest to avoid the US. Why do they do it? I've no idea but I hear that their cops are about the same.
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