Posts by Ramiro

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

And they are really terrible, terrible phones. Some sites already have hands on reviews. Super slow, super laggy. These phones are made to make WInphone look good.

Bold Bezos aims skywards with liquid hydrogen and SPACE ROCKET engine

Super compact

It's amazing how compact that looks for something that puts out 50.000 kgf of thrust.

Everything's going to be all white: Google Nexus 5 mobe expected Friday

Sold in Brazil also

Moto X is sold in Brazil as well, at it is being heavily (for an android phone) advertised.

ATOM SMASHER ON A CHIP technology demonstrated

X-Ray generators

Fun as that would be, the more practical applications are portable x-ray generators,

How could portable x-ray generators be "not fun"?

You lack imagination...

Rare gold iPhone 5s goes up against 50 caliber high precision rifle

Re: Amazing video

Yes, I was very impressed by that too. It seemed like a frigging laser shot! It's incredible how little energy is transferred to the parts of the target not exactly under the bullet.

I was also impressed by the water test too, nice ninja move ;) I can only hope to be as fast if the same thing happens to me.

For the record, I never have and probably never will use an Apple product, not even for target practice (the fact that I don't own a gun and have never shot anything but my granpa's .22, under his supervision of course, some 35 years ago does help of course :)

Microsoft Xbox One to be powered by ginormous system-on-chip

Re: Better than my new PC?

Certainly not. By most people reckoning, consoles nowadays are much more about the convenience than raw performance.

Kiwi jetpack gets all-clear for manned tests

Re: But mythbusters sez it can't be dun!!!1

I think three people didn't get the "sack people" reference, and thought it's something quite offensive. It isn't.

Webcam stripper strikes back at vicious 4Chan trolls after year of bullying

Re: darn, i missed that one.

The first time I realized that humour is the appreciation of human suffering was when I read Stranger in a strange land, a long long time ago, as an impressionable teenager (of course), when the main character (I forget his name, the martian) discovers humour by watching some monkeys beating up another other in a cage.

I was *really* impressed, that scene changed me forever.

Many many times since then I have challenged people to tell me a joke that does not derive its humour from the suffering of a human, animal, etc, and is not a simple word play or pun.

I don't remember anyone ever managing to do it, even though almost everyone strongly disagrees, at first.

Bugs in beta weather model used to trash climate science

Re: How can so many not see the article isn't about the validity of the software?

It's not even a bug, at this stage of development, although it's not a feature either.

It's an "interesting observation" :)

Re: In this case ElReg is being even handed on the debate.

Somehow I fear most hpc programmers would just use a blas function and hope for the best ;)

Beautiful implementation though, thanks for the link!

I, for one, welcome our GIANT TITANIUM INSECT OVERLORDS

Re: Terrific

Yeah, I thought that too. Giant?

You can find bigger ones easily on any tropical forest.

Can Microsoft's U-turn stop the Xbox 360 becoming another XP?

Re: No.

Playstation 2 are still big sellers in Brazil. Only very recently PS 3 became reasonably affordable to a normal middle class family, and these are a minority here. The market for PS 2 is still huge, if they know how to handle it.

Review: Sony Xperia SP

Re: As a piece of hardware...

You can tape it to the top of your head and pretend to be a Cylon.

'Liberator': Proof that you can't make a working gun in a 3D printer

Re: Call that a gun!

That looks like something Hellboy would be proud of.

Re: Way to miss the point...

Or a glass knife that you make yourself, if you are of an Inuit persuasion (thanks Neal Stephenson).

Are we all going to be interviewed by the british secret service?

Scramjet X-51 finally goes to HYPER SPEED above Pacific

Re: (... for some values of ordinary)

The reg is the only place where I meet the word "hypergolic" (which I didn't even know existed) regularly!

Japan's naughty nurses scam free meals with mobile games

Re: Judeging by your

I love how we all think it's important to emphasize *live* woman.

Norkoshop: How Pyongyang well and truly forked Adobe

Fusion no fission

That's a fusion device, I'd expect fission devices to be a lot more compact, a lot simpler, and a lot more rugged.

I'm told even fission devices can make a loud bang.

Blighty's revolutionary Cold War teashop computer - and Nigella Lawson

Cryptonomicon

Excuse my ignorance, but I didn't know acoustic memory was real. I thought Stephenson had made that up. I should have known better, of course.

On a different note, Nigella is milftastic.

Florida fisherman bags two-headed MUTANT SHARK

Re: Film or True Story

Your wish my command.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2043757/

It's got Carmen Electra on it, so it must be good.

To be honest, I'm sure I saw a different one, so there are probably more two headed mutant shark films around.

Reg live natter with GNOME superstar Miguel de Icaza

Isn't it a bit late now?

Hasn't he moved on to Apple?

(Much to my great joy, being the committed freetard that I am and having always considered him a traitorous Judas ;)

LibreOffice 4.0 ships with new features, better looks

You are implying that there is 100% compatibility between different versions of PowerPoint, I don't have the same experience. In fact, (I'm in academia) we mandate students to print all presentations to pdf files to avoid surprises.

I agree with everything else though (except for outlook, but then again I'm not in the industry.) The typical user doesn't even know Word numbers pages automatically.

Review: Living with Microsoft's new Surface Pro

Magnesium?

I don't know if it blends, but it should burn most beautifully.

Wheee....CRUNCH: Google chucks Moto's set-top box biz out window

Re: Goog.TV

The YouTube application for the PS3 works like this, it can be controlled by the smartphone. It's quite uncanny.

PGP, TrueCrypt-encrypted files CRACKED by £300 tool

Re: I always say.....

I was halfway posting very much the same comment, but saw yours.

I had also considered giving you laptop to relatives, and forgetting to wipe the disk, and having everyone in the family having a laugh at your "media files"...

Canadians nab syrup rustlers after massive maple sap heist

Scott "Renton" Pedigo

Seek help :)

Re: Best application is drenched over three slices of Canadian bacon

I'm a lousy cook, but I have one culinary principle:

Everything tastes better with bacon.

Facebook ditches mobile HTML with native Android app

Re: Oh, awesome.

I'm going through the bother of rooting my phone *exclusively* to uninstall the facebook app.

Stroustrup on next-gen C++: I didn't want to let go of my baby

Re: Scientific and Engineering Computing

Have you ever seen Holerith format used in anger? I have :)

I know about the Fortran holdouts, they're the crazy people I mentioned :)

Things are of course different when you have a code base in Fortran that has been developed for 35 years, you'd be crazy to just chuck that out of the window and restart from scratch in C++. Perhaps the majority of academic and scientific programming is writing and modifying a couple of subroutines in an existing program. Even if it takes the student six months to make heads or tails of the program, it's still better than rewriting from scratch. It'd be years before you had anything working, without any scientific advance, and no M.Sc., no Ph.D., and no papers during this period. All around Career Seppuku.

However, every once in a while, people do start new projects from scratch. It's a good time to start looking around for alternative development environments. If the project involves computational mechanics and finite elements, it's quite likely that by using FEniCS/Dolfin (for instance), you'll get results a lot faster.

At the end of the day, I think we'll see evolution in action, if you depend on writing computational mechanics code to get scientific results, you'll get them so much faster with a proper environment (say FEniCS/Dolfin or OpenFOAM) that you'll leave old school scientists/programmers behind. You can't just wait for the old professors to die out (that hurts a little bit because I think I can be considered one of them), because they (we) tend to leave our disciples in our places. It's necessary to out evolve the strain :)

I'm pretty language agnostic as well, and I also use Python a lot (and matlab, and fortran, and macro languages of commercial finite element programs, and pretty much whatever it takes..) It's not really a question of C++, it's much more a question of the supporting frameworks, that nowadays are mostly written in C++. In fact, some of these have excellent interfaces to Python, using these interfaces really is the best of all worlds.

Scientific and Engineering Computing

Which was once the domain of Fortran, is now almost exclusively C++.

The computing core, not the the GUI, of course.

There many high quality, high performance frameworks that can be used to write amazingly complex simulations that would be just impossible to do in a single lifetime (ok, I exaggerate) if you'd start from scratch.

If you're curious about what can be done with C++, check these things out:

http://www.dune-project.org/

http://www.samrai.org/

https://computation.llnl.gov/casc/SAMRAI/SAMRAI_Software.html

http://fenicsproject.org/

These are just a few I have used one way or another, there are many many more. These mostly use very advanced C++ techniques, template metaprogramming and all that horrible stuff to provide tools that do very sophisticate operations with a reasonably simple interface. It's basically what one of the first posters to this discussion said: you have to encapsulate the C++ complexity. For many domains in scientific computing, this has been already done for you.

It really is quite unthinkable today to consider developing a large, complex simulation code in another language (but of course there are a lot of people who do that; I just think they are crazy :)

Is this the sleek new BlackBerry mobe that will save RIM jobs?

Re: A proper keyboard?

There aren't many left...

Review: Mio Cyclo 300 cycling satnav

Re: Or you could just use your mobey?

I think the problem with this, for cyclists, is the british "weather".

I think that was the point of the main picture in the article showing it soaked.

Most smartphones wouldn't survive that. (Apart from defys, etc.)

(It's a raincoat, obviously.)

Amazon unzips its digital-only Brazilian, waves Kindles at Canada

I've just checked it out

There is only one model of kindle advertised, one of the simplest ones, I think. It doesn't have touch or a keyboard or a backlight. It's the 6 in e-ink e-book reader.

No mention of 3g, so I guess it's wifi only.

It's selling for about US$140. So it's about twice as expensive as it is in the US, which is pretty much the normal mark up we have to pay due to import taxes, duties, etc. etc.

I don't know about the book selection, sadly I've been out of the market of reading for pleasure for a few years, but there are no engineering books, which probably isn't their fault, most probably the publishers don't see a market.

You can buy e-books in other languages, probably amazon is making available everything they can from around the world that is not subject to regional controls. This is very good, the prices are very good compared to printed books, most of which you wouldn't be able to find anyway. I typed Nel Gaiman, just to see what would come up, and there were thirty *pages* of stuff.

It's claiming that the top selling book at the moment is Fifty Shades os Gray, so it seems that ipad wielding moms are the main market right now.

The second one is another Fifty shades of bullshit.

The third one is a hagiography of the founder of one of the largest evangelical churches in Brazil

The fourth is a self help diet book.

The fifth is a George Martin book.

Interesting variation!

It'll be interesting to see how this holds up against the e-shops of the other large brazilian bookseller chains, Cultura, Saraiva and Siciliano, which also sell e-books (and real books, and other physical stuff like the american amazon store.)

Microsoft braces for Surface RT feedback storm

Re: Looks nice, but horrible to use

Lynx? It sucks.

I think you meant "links".

(Yay,! Text browser flamewar!)

Japanese firm offers 4-tonne GIANT MECHs for just $1.3m

Re: Call me back...

Yes, I was mildly disappointed too.

It would be ok to ride on wheels if it *transformed* into (and out of) a vehicle. A rolling humanoid shape is kind of daft. That said, I wouldn't mind having a go at one :)

Ramiro.

Ten badass brainy computers from science fiction

Colossus

I saw this movie as a child and was rightfully impressed for years and years.

For some reason better left to child psychologists, I was really shocked when it "says": There is another system.

I say that, every once in a while, to this day :)

Auto

From Wall-E.

Industry in 'denial' as demand for pricey PCs plunges

Engineering and Scientific Software

Engineering and Scientific software still can make use of the fastest, largest desktop machines you can find.

It's a cliché, I know, but nowadays we run simulations on our desktops that would have required supercomputers a few years ago. And we are very happy for it. It really *does* make a big difference whether you're running on a dual core atom (or equivalent) laptop, or on a 8 or 12 core desktop beast.

It's a bit worrisome to me that if "normal" people stop buying fast desktop computers, we'll return to the time when to run engineering software you had to buy dedicated workstations that cost 25.000 dollars.

Perhaps we'll have to run this stuff "in the cloud"...

Intel Xeon Phi battles GPUs, defends x86 in supercomputers

Up to 1.7x

For a finite element code, isn't really that much, is it?

Customers are *not* seeing big performance gains from Xeon Phi coprocessors.

Might as well use another cpu, simpler and possibly more power efficient.

At last, a bionic arm that passes the Beer, Egg and Looks Cool tests

Training

Top Bloke. I wonder how long it took to train the muscles to control the hand. I'd expect it to be the most difficult part of the process, but perhaps not that much different from what they already have to go through with physical therapy after a traumatic accident.

I'm curious about how long the battery lasts, I suppose it'll be a battery race, hand or smartphone ?

Of course you could put a bigger battery in the arm, an usb plug, and chard the phone from the arm. Or just embed the smartphone in the arm,

Or a laser.

The possibilities!

Microsoft Surface ad targets preppy, Glee-watching youngsters

Is this russian product?

Why "Surface this", "Surface that", and not "The Surface blah blah blah" ?

Sounds like fake russian villain accent.

Genuine question, I'm not a native english speaker.

Boffin named Jubb to fire whopping hybrid thruster

Re: Hard as I try

At these speeds, doubling the power would most certainly not double the speed (I know you didn't say that, but people might be tempted to do the linear extrapolation ;) considering the air resistance would grow at the very very least quadratically with the speed.

.A less lazy mechanical engineer than I could probably guesstimate the extra speed of the full power run. I'm not saying that their achievement is not amazing, I love things that burn stuff to go really fast, just pointing out that it's not a given that they'd be supersonic at a full power run (you didn't say that either ;)

The iPHONE 5 UNDERMINES western DEMOCRACY: 5 reasons why

Re: Points 2 and 2 ...

I'm going to root my android phone pretty much just to remove the built-in facebook app, whose very existence annoys me. While I'm a it, though, there's a load of rubbish that'll hit the bin too, but I really wouldn't bother to go the trouble were it not for facebook.

Chick-lit star snubs Menshn.com password flaw alert

Not even then

After the french found the black box of that downed flight, I wouldn't trust "hiding" anything at the bottom of the ocean.

I'd drop it inside an iron smelter.

Olympics TV HQ future: Catwalk beauties elbowed out by IT bods

Re: Thermodynamics FTW.

How you disapoint me.

"... all your JOULE are belong to HEAT".

What passes for engineering education these days...

Asus Transformer Pad Infinity 64GB Android tablet review

Re: Proper resolution!

As fate would have it, it got here a couple of hours after I posted ;)

Didn't put it to any serious use though. Looks gorgeous, IMHO. The screen is excellent.

The problems are what I knew beforehand: small ssd disk (128G), small memory (4G), no VGA connector, colleagues get really jealous, etc.

Re: Proper resolution!

You could take a look at a Samsung Series 9 (NP900X3C-[I think this last bit varies with the country]). It supposedly has a 1600x900 screen. I've requested one, but it hasn't been delivered yet, so I cannot actually recommend it.

Curiosity snapped mid-flight by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

Of all the many *impossible* things that actually happened

This picture of the parachute phase takes the top spot.

It's just totally, completely, incredible.

Cheers all around!

Xiaomi to go quad core with iPhone challenger

Re: Fantastic OS

Please excuse the bad form of replying to myself.

I just checked out their site, and an *obvious* model for this project just jumped out: motorola milestone 3 (I'm one of those sad sad people who loves hardware keyboards.)

The choice would be between this and CM, and I don't think it's clear which one is "better" (if we can even ask this without objective criteria.)

Re: Fantastic OS

I think he meant it could be an interesting alternative to, say, cyanogen, to use on western handsets.

You could then buy a pretty decent handset, that has been released one or two years ago, and has been abandoned by the manufacturer (plenty of samsung models spring to mind) relatively cheaply, and have a nice modern looking smooth os running on it. It would be a nice geekish project.