Posts by phil dude

Go for a spin on Record Store Day: Lifting the lid on vinyl, CD and tape

Beatles USB...

A USB stick with all the Beatles albums remastered by Maccer and the 5th Beatles , in FLAC and MP3 in a very cute metal Apple.

Available from Amazon and other fine online sales marketplaces...

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FCC hit with SEVENTH net neutrality lawsuit

Re: This just feels wrong...

mod-up , nice observation.

I have AT&T as local phone and DSL from another provider.

AT&T mail me offers at least twice a week to buy their new "U-verse fiber" service.

They actually called me (on the local phone I need for DSL), and the guy on the phone said it was 6 Mb/s.

I said "So it is fiber but only as far as the DSL cabinet".

He said "No it is fiber, and 6Mb/s has been shown to be sufficient for HD movies"

Me: "Netflix says that is 25 Mb/s? Where are you getting your numbers".

So we go back and forth and then he says "We can give you this for $X/mth".

I ask "Can I have it in writing?".

He says "No, you can confirm the offer once I enter it and cancel it if you don't like it".

The FCC must be doing something right unless AT&T just wants to show me they care....

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Gwyneth Paltrow flubs $29 food stamp dare, swallows pride instead

Re: A matter of perspective ...

Yes, that is the thing about the US being so large. "Local" food is a highly variable designation.

In TN they grow tomato's, chilli's, limited citrus, etc... Living near a campus, the food is pretty economical...especially if you like the adventure of the non-English speaking shops just off campus.

However, adjacent states (of which there 7), opens up a whole other world of food (distance of 500 miles say).

I'm curious how hard this challenge would be in Southern California which caters to large ethnic populations. Was GwnthPltrw just unable to negotiate the landscape or is it genuinely not feasible?

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Give Jay-Z's Tidal tune stream thing a chance, says indie label boss

saturation...

I have written this before, but we have become media saturated. The subjective assessment of good or even great music is prejudiced by what came before.

Hence, with an effectively infinite supply (from the perspective of a finite human), the cost will converge to zero, or a minimal cost.

Walmart here has a $5 DVD/$1 CD bin. Secondhand even cheaper. "Now that's what I call music 99"?

The only music they are left to control is the live performances, and artists have a habit of dying...

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RADIOACTIVE WWII aircraft carrier FOUND OFF CALIFORNIA

Re: No shit. We've known this for over half a century.

"Shorter life spans would result in less overall exposure, but shorter life spans would also mean more generations and more genetic mutations being passed on."

I'm not so sure about that....having a shorter life suggest you have a broken genome and therefore have NO offspring!!!

In addition, radiation doesn't care where it goes, and will mutate gestating organisms too.

An example of a microbe that has done well out of radiation dumps is Deinococcus Radiodurans ....now there is an example of a well 'ard bug!!

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Remember SeaMicro? Red-ink-soaked AMD dumps it overboard

Re: Hope this isn't going to sink the Seattle chips.

I gave you an upvote for the sentiment.

My desire (with my HPC hat on) is for low latency and higher density of computation.

Hence I am messing around with Xeon-phi and Nvidia CUDA.

Both have the disadvantage of needing PCie - AMD could have a pulled coup off if they could have gotten a faster, denser , x86 box together using a faster interconnect.

My $0.02.

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Default admin password, weak Wi-Fi, open USB ports ... no wonder these electronic voting boxes are now BANNED

public /private keys?

So how about voting machine being an exercise in public key crypto?

Voter enters booth, and selects candidate(s), this generates a unique key and they get a physical result with the key and a receipt for their vote ( a table , say). The vote is signed by the machine, and using the public key of some local neutral authority, and the key of the dynamic voter. Hence, corrupt officials can't change the vote without the voter and the specific machine.

Therefore, the votes have receipts that can be checked if fraud is suspected. Anonymity is preserved.

Voters will be able to go on line and check their vote hasn't changed (they get key generated on the receipt).

Have I missed something?

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PS. and obviously this would be FOSS....

'Hackers racked up $$$$s via the Android Play Store, and Google won't pay me back'

that's what....

the Mary Jane stores are for...

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LA schools want multi-million Apple refund after kids hack iPads

Re: compulsory education == compulsory profit.

you are an AC, and you jump in with "donate time for free". What else is there with children?

Giving children any specific brand of machine is an attempt to pattern their adult buying behaviour. The computer companies *know* this. So this is no different than Fizzy beverage machines in schools, which has been flogged at length.

This was the reason behind the RaspPi surely? children should be taught how a computer works by building one, and then writing code to solve problems. Good students will get access to better machines. Students with rich parents will get bling ANYWAY, so no reason to subsidise them.

The point about FOSS in schools, is that it can be shared for ALL SCHOOLS. If one school improves the software it can be shared with others. The education authorities can even PAY local folks like you (I assume) to write them software, to be used by others. Or even pay to fix the bugs. Y'know, as I am sure you want to?

FOSS isn't a magic fix, but non-FOSS is opaque and an impediment to education. Payment is an entirely separate issue.

No high-school student needs M$ office to learn how to type, or an iPad to browse the web, but the assumption is they will not understand anything else?

With the world that is evolving as it is, it would seem a generation of educated hackers is something we would all support...

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compulsory education == compulsory profit.

It should be flat out illegal to buy any closed source, proprietary equipment for compulsory education (e.g. up to 16).

Education needs to be taught on the basis of the need for knowledge, not profit.

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ICANN banked $60m from dot-word auctions. Just what exactly is it going to spend it all on?

H&B

I believe the technical term for the spending off large amounts of unexpected cash is "Hookers and Blow".

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Nvidia's GTX 900 cards lock out open-source Linux devs yet again

Re: One of the reasons I abandoned them years ago

@Bernardo Sviso:

You get no argument from me that it can be flaky. But as someone who has a few cards and some Quadro ones, I find that submitting support requests with sufficient information, you can often get a response or a fix.

But in general, I have had far greater success with Nvidia blobs than AMD blobs.

And besides GROMACS runs really fast using Nvidia blob, as does MATLAB,VMD... and my dual-monitor 6400 x 2160 desktop is stable.

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unfortunately, or perhaps ok....

NVIDIA software binary blob is actually pretty good.

So is CUDA - Perhaps in API terms a touch messy, but a REALLY useful piece of kit.

BTW @Bronek Kozicki there is a patch to get kvm to hide itself better...though I agree it is a bit of an obfuscation arms race...

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Labour policy review tells EU where to stuff its geo-blocking ban

Re: So pay will still be a viable option

As a bi-lingual in one European language and statistically fluent in another, dubbing is usually horrible when going from English to another language. Subtitles are even worse, but at least don't get in the way (can be covered on a computer/TV).

English is more compact lexically than most other languages, and the vocabulary is not constrained by central authority, making translation a moving target.

Interesting that the OECD is "How words come to be", suggest why English is so rich and hard to learn non-natively....

As an aside, on a trip to Finland I asked why their English was so good (amazing if you know that Finnish is Urgo-Baltic in origin). The explanation was that as such a small country (5 mill), it was though that if they did not speak English too, there would be noone left to speak Finnish.

An interesting trip that....

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Nuclear fusion simulator among boffinry tools picked for monster Summit supercomputer

C'ant.....

WAIT!

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Googley TENTACLES reach towards YOUR email

google eats itself...

That's why I have a gmail account so that google can send email to itself , which I can then ignore.

I love the fact that spam is so tasty. Even when the ISP sends it, my Thunderbird is always hungry...

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Incomprehensible boffins bring quantum computers a step closer

Re: At Last!

To solve the SE it starts to look NP complete pretty rapidly, so we approximate it. No citation necessary, just need to know the results we count on and the fact we only have:

1) Solved for hydrogen

2). Sort of solved for Helium (Hartree-Fock etc).

3) Everything else - See 1) (Slater orbitals, HF, DF etc...).

BTW "Bog standard differential equation" is the understatement of the week ;-)

This is not really my field (!) but I have written enough MD simulations to know that there are many approximations required, starting with the 2-body truncation of the many-body expansion. You gain very subtle improvements by expanding the terms, hence ab initio (Carr-Parinello) is useful for systems with known geometry (e.g. crystal structures of enzyme catalytic sites), and really useful (though still approximate) chemistry. When I first saw a visualization of protons hopping around ab initio water molecules, the hairs on my neck stood up....! *Phenomenal accuracy*.

I stand by my comment that the N-body problem is at the heart of why NP != P.

It is a fascinating constraint on the universe structure though...

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Re: At Last!

but then again there are special cases for graph theory called cliques (used for expression array analysis).

But generally the proof of P=NP is not going to exist without us solving the many-body problem first...

As the canonical physical problem we know (according to our best understanding) there is NP complexity behind the Schrodinger equation. The universe might need NP complexity to work, but things such as having a finite "c" seems to suggest something else is going on. This implies some of approximations might help at least reduce the search space....far from a solution but might be useful.

This is sort of what ab initio MD does; a pile of approximations/constraints that yield incredibly accurate results due to a greatly increased phase space for particles (and more accurate energetic states).

It really does make you wonder what is further on down there...more turtles?

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Need speed? Then PCIe it is – server power without the politics

pcie vs hypertransport...

I did some research on this a few years ago, looking into the limitations of MD scaling.

Hypertransport has less latency than Pcie. More importantly it permits multiple-streams to exist (rather than waiting for a transaction to finish). More lanes helps to move data, but doesn't help the first byte. Useful for GPU's which I read have been too fast for PCIe for a while

This is part of my reason for messing Xeon-phi's, to see if there are close tolerance latencies possible within the CPU's.

The use of the 512-bit instructions is looking interesting though...

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Grandmaster FLUSH: Chess champ booted for allegedly cheating with iPod app in the loo

Re: Fact and fiction mix

a modern smartphone and a bit of "MATLAB" and that is definitely plausible. I read about this somewhere and I recall that the prediction narrowed down the ball to a quadrant of the wheel, and roulette permits bets spread that way.

I feel sure that a US casino would toss you out if your smartphone was pointed at the roulette wheel for any length of time....

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Welcome to the FUTURE: Maine cops pay Bitcoin ransom to end office hostage drama

no substitute for backups...

but COW (Copy-on-write) is a great deal more convenient.

I just hope BTRFS can become stable, so this can become standard.

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NSA: 'Back doors are a bad idea, give us a FRONT door key'

Re: Sounds vaguely familiar?

I head the voice in my head too...!

Carry on...

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Pregnant pause: Ancient JUMBO MARINE LIZARD pushed out sprogs in open ocean

Re: lol

were you being sarcastic?

I don't mind paleontologists having an educated guess about bones etc... There is some very cool stuff that was logically deduced to make some of the modern view of the world possible...

It beats the uneducated guessing that came before and which always seems to be making a comeback....

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Nokia may tell struggling HERE Maps division to get lost – report

Re: Installed Here locally on my Nexus 4...

I agree. As a Nokia refugee it is nice to have HERE on Android....

I guess, at least you can download all the maps, and that will be sufficient for most purposes...

It's a strange world that has evolved in that technologies get invented, refined and yet inexplicably we don't end up with the best technology - just the most commercially viable...

Just a thought...

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Intel and LG: Our new mobe cams COULDN'T CARE LESS about pixels

interesting...

I'd be interested in that for better microscopes and other clinical measurement apps.

Surprising what you can do with a RAW image and some mathematical filtering when used with a calibrated light source.

If any of you folks have ever had your retinas photographed, the data is fascinating!!!

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Bad news everyone: Cybercrime is getting even easier

Re: Missing the point ...

depends on your paranoia. I have been using firefox profiles to put distance between activities.

If you are Mac/Linux/BSD you can created a "toxic" user and run the browser in there. Or even within a VNC session. Very little chance of it hurting the user/system then.

I do the same using chromium and chrome (used primarily for google products), but some websites only work with chrome* (wtf?).

I even have an ad-block free opera window to make sure sites that I like, that need to push ads...

So in general URL's are agnostic. But probably a good idea to have some differing user environments to match the viewing target...

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Ex-cop: Holborn fireball comms outage cover for £200m bling heist gang

easter weekend....

I agree....The offices were empty for the weekend. surely more of a contributory factor?

Also, I don't think there would be sufficient noise would attract much attention...

Of course, it could be an inside job....uninsured jewels!!!

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Cloudy McCloud Cloud HP just said public cloud 'makes no sense for us'

Re: I wander stable as a cloud...

Thanks ;-)

Not a really hater...but a realist that this stuff has been greatly oversold...

I use Owncloud at home which is nice to back up stuff from phones, tablets etc... There is a proper android client!!!! That *is* cool.

I have also heard that for applications that are deployed this way, the scaling that is afforded by having the infrastructure in "the cloud" is incredible. You simply spin-up more machines, and the cloud feeds it.

There may well be more scenarios that are appropriate. But as a backup?

You're having a larf...

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I wander stable as a cloud...

The problem with cloud is 3 fold:

1) Spying by (insert choice).

2) Paltry internet (insert choice of monoply).

3) Not a backup.

1) and 2) is outside of user control, and can be considered broken politics.

3) is the users responsibility, a might involve a tape, or at least removable media of some sort....

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This will crack you up: US drug squad's phone call megaslurp dates back to 1990s

public service....

They could do a real public service by making it a key searchable database, using your phone number as the key.

I'd love to know who some of the id*ts are that are calling me...

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Apple swears that NO FANBOI will queue for its new gumble

Re: PR move

@skeptical i: "A downvote? Really? [* scratches head *] People ... are funny."

It's the Russian funded astroturfers we've been told about, making sure the new "Watchski Pravda" is not over shadowed.

Guaranteed to show the time that Putin's reality is on...

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Instead of public sector non-jobbery, Martha, how about creating real entrepreneurs?

Re: Change needed, please. Get rid of the hooks and crooks in suits making nothing

mod-up.

The Golgafrincham ship B is not full enough....

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get rich quick - just inherit.

The running joke in biology is if you want a long and health life, pick good parents.

So if you want a wealthy life, pick rich parents.

Or at least find someone to pay for your education.....

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Google Ads go NUCLEAR, foist exploit kit

Re: AdBlock

Or someone could realise that ads are just plain old crap.

It is not just the random nature of them , but the simple fact that no person could possibly purchase even a small %age of the ad volume on ANY website.

A bit like Amazon and their REALLY stupid algorithm.

"You just bought a DVD of X. Perhaps you would like the Bluray version?"

See Icon.

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Re: AdBlock

mod-up "telling lies for money".

And yet, you have to *work* for a living, eh?

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Non-American nerds jam immigration pleading for right to live in the US

Re: Looks tricky ...

It all *sounds* good until it is made into a movie with G. Depardieu....

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Choc Factory's king codec serves 25 BEELLION Tube hours

Re: "instant, high-quality, buffer-free videos"

mod-up for Mythbusters reference.

Perhaps we need a "Dept of Mythbusting" instead on one of the useless* ones...

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*insert choice

Intel shows Google how to stick it real good

Re: Hello darkness my old friend

I *HATE* CSS.

Carry on...

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Here we are now, entertain us: Caltech team designs micro, high-res 3D imager

Re: diagnostics....

i think the scanning described does not need to be in contact.

Nevertheless since the technology is minatuised for a tablet, it would seem possible to put on an electric toothbrush as a new attachment!!!

Many diseases are too slow to perceive but micron accuracy might possibly measure cell growth.

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diagnostics....

might be useful for assessing dermal growths, changes in muscle structure, and other morphology.

How about for dental inspection? Instant home diagnosis before a dentist drills your tooth away.

This world needs more refined tech, not less. Of course we also need the human capital to make productive use of it.

But, add this capability to a tablet I could think of a great many uses...

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To defend offshore finance bods looting developing countries of their tax cash

Re: nice one tim....

@Tim Worstall: Please excuse my sweeping generalisations for brevity!

I am in agreement with your general point. See my other post about equilibrium, it is why planned economies fail and free markets don't really exist when a company gets too big.

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Re: nice one tim....

@Ossi: Your second point.

As a human you MUST eat, drink and sleep and pay for housing. These are basics you must purchase but cannot pass the costs on, and yet they can consume a considerable amount of any income. And yet you are taxed before hand.

No company pays taxes on these things because they pass the costs on to you. If a company pays "business rates" , the costs to the customer go up. Maybe they will have less profit. Maybe they will fire someone. But either way the burden is disproportionate on the human.

I am not arguing against capitalism as I think it is a pretty obviously good idea. I am arguing that the implementation needs careful regulation as the natural equilibrium point, is a company that achieves monopoly presence.

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Re: nice one tim....

@Ossi: The natural end state of capitalism is monopoly or oligopoly. This is wrecking the system because there can be no free market as this state is approached.

Just look at the state of ISP's in the USA. One choice in many areas. The laughable "press release bingo" when google annouces a new fibre city!!!

How about computers? Decades after Microsoft was declared a monopoly made almost no difference. Facetious press release about "open source". Complete bollocks.

What about Intel vs AMD? I love Intel hardware but it is sooo *expensive* for what is mediocre performance.

The point is NOT that Microsoft is crap. It is not. It has some brilliant people working there. The point is it is so large that it is able to use the inertia of its capital resources to distort the market. Why else would an Android phone not allow the native Linux filesystem? What about the huge number of devices with "windows only" drivers?

As a result of effective competition Microsoft software only needs to be "so good" because they have a huge legacy footprint.

This is the problem with capitalism. Once a company reaches a certain size relative to its market, it no longer has the same competitive restraints (i.e the need to compete) and the humans within become cannon fodder.

An example that many people reading here will understand is the late payment by big corporations to SMEs.

Maybe they delay payment on purpose hoping the small biz will go out of business before they have to pay?

Or perhaps they are so big and as there are no effective sanctions, they simply *DON'T* care.

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Re: nice one tim....

@Ossi, that was not my intent. It is simply a description of their function. Also an indication of their limitations.

Capitalism is "just" a system of goods and services exchange. Although it is often portrayed as an ideology (to prevent discussions of any detail), it really is a simple idea.

The problem is the optimisation mechanism works really well for problems that fit within a small set of well regulated (i.e. low %age of fakes and frauds) markets. The mechanism of capitalism fails when there is essentially nothing to stop it destroying the system of one part of the planet to benefit another as they cross boundaries and distort the system. And I don't even mean oil, to pick an obvious example. I mean business can cross borders where *MANY* people cannot.

Humans are mortal , frail beings and the corporations as legal agents in our society have no such weakness. Therefore, layoffs, arbitrary profit returns are all part of the currency of "being a good business".

Profits are not the problem. It is the massive inequity of how individuals are treated versus corporate organisations.

I'll say it again, as I think it is a point often overlooked. Humans can deduct little of their living expenses. Corporations can deduct a great deal. As the corporations use their "flexible accounting" advantage to change the law via lobbying and the humans can't, this optimises society to run a business. Not live as a human.

I'm not saying there is malintent (that would be human). It is a statement of fact that corporations act like sociopaths because they *have* to to survive within the law we currently have.

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nice one tim....

Tim's statement about "corporations being people and therefore any tax on them is real money from the wallet of a real person", is the real issue.

Scenario A: you have a job you are taxed on your income, but you can offset very little of your expenditure for "project life".

Scenario B: you are a company doing that same job, you get to write off all the expenses (including the wages of the guy in Scenario A!), and the net profit is taxed and shareholders might even get a dividend.

The economy has become bifurcated due to the positive-feedback possible for Scenario B, that does not exist for Scenario A. All taxes are paid by group A. Group B can modulate their accounts to exploit the loopholes politicians leave in for one lobby group, but which get used by others!!

Big companies can afford the best lawyers and accountants, so much so they can even delay the govts long enough to wait for a change. When big enough (especially when multi-national) they can exploit the differences in the "political tides", where it is elections not the moon that causes the shifts in capital....

Off-shoring is part of the anatomy of a large corporation, but it only happens when you have sufficient capital to overcome the lead time to get things up and running.

Corporations live to maximise profit at any cost.

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Midlife crisis, suck ingenuity? Microsoft turns 40; does the dad dance

Re: Oddly enough...

and see you picked up a downvote for saying so!

Basically if you need windoze to live, I wish you the absolute best.

I might pity you, but...

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and in other bollocks...

Micro$oft will open source windows with a GPL license when Satan (or insert your dogma's bad deity of choice) skates to work in Hell.

Computing is AMAZING. Too amazing a human creation to be left to the vagaries of the market. Microsoft was very lucky and Bill Gates is a smart man.

Windows as the lowest common denominator was only possible because of the IBM PC architecture. The last time I ran Windows was XP but then it got overrun by, well, profiteering.

FOSS or liability for your crap software.

We'll all be better off.

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Stress me, test me, vex me ... boffins seek Hall Effect in frustrated magnets

Re: I don't know about quantum stuff, but I do know about frustration

Biology is driven by thermodynamics.

"Equilibrium is death" (one of my Oxford lecturers).

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Al Franken to FBI: We need MORE revenge smut arrests

bigotry hates privacy...

It is quite simple. Bigotry demands being able to judge and segregate from afar.

How you look (colour, body shape, facial features ,wealth).

How you sound (accent, language, education).

How you are different (displays of non-conformant belief, expressions of unwelcome humanity).

Ultimately bigotry hates the way you think, because this cannot be seen from afar to judge you. So digging this out is important to make you compliant.

That's why we need Privacy - freedom of speech does not exist where there is no freedom of thought.

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Re: "walking sack of crap" @Trevor_Pott

@Hargrove mod-up.

It seems though of us who had a childhood mostly devoid of communicating tech, don't realise the complete change in the liability dynamic for children today.

Privacy should be along the same lines as always. If I put it in my garden then it is public view, but not in my front room when I close the curtains.

The problems are:

a) define the public garden

b) the NSA/GCHQ/Google has firebombed our curtains

c) Privacy does not make profit for advertisers and those companies that sell our data.

Perhaps liability needs to be attached to the use and collection of personal data such that there is a PRESUMPTION of care as a basis for punitive redress.

Then companies will only collect and store what is necessary for their business.

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