Posts by Eaten Trifles

AI running out of juice despite Microsoft's hard squeezing

Re: My experience with AI

I tried that, couldn't even get close to full. Why is this then?

CrowdStrike apologizes to Congress for 'perfect storm' that caused global IT outage

Love the excuses

You say "If you think about a chessboard trying to move a chess piece to someplace where there's no square. Effectively, this is what happened at the sensor, so when it tried to assess the rule, it was not able to do what the rule was asking it to do, which triggered the issue within the sensor."

But all I hear is "our software is shit and we don't do proper quality control."

Humanity has officially touched the Sun (or, at least, one of its probes has)

Re: Jorge Cham's graphical illustration

Your thinking appears to be on the same lines as mine regarding the effect of external temperature on the balance of radiation coming in and going out. Not sure you could do your experiment in a way that would give you confidence, as a real-world flask will be losing temperature by conduction too.

I think you just convinced yourself that the space probe can quite effectively dump heat into the vacuum of space though. Just as well, since that's what the actual probe is doing.

Re: Jorge Cham's graphical illustration

Would your thermos flask keep your tea warm for long if the environment outside the flask was only three Kelvin?

(I don't actually know the answer to this. Does heat loss by radiation across the vacuum flask depend on the temperature differential? I'd guess it does, and the tea is normally receiving almost as much energy radiated in as it loses by radiating out - which won't happen in outer space.)

IT god exposed as false idol by quirks of Java – until he laid his hands on the server

Re: For the non-programmers amongst us...

Sort of, but what you would call a memory leak in C or C++ isn't really relevant in Java, precisely because of the garbage collector. The programmer isn't responsible for de-allocating the memory that was allocated to an object when it goes out of scope, as they would have been in C or C++. Programming is therefore done in a style which would cause big memory leaks in C or C++. The garbage collector is what frees this memory.

Study: While text-generating AI can write like humans, it lacks common sense

Re: When are they going to stop pretending ?

It's not surprising that there is no easily-agreed definition of artificial intelligence. No-one really has the slightest idea how to define 'intelligence' (the non-artificial kind, I mean).

The engineer lurking behind the curtain: Musical monitors on a meagre IT budget

I am in awe

True genius. And completely believable.

Microsoft: 14 January patch was the last for Windows 7. Also Microsoft: Actually...

Re: Freebies?

Most of those security flaws were there on the day you bought the machine; the only ones that weren't are the ones introduced by later patches. Your machine has never been safe to use. I bet the salesman didn't mention that either.

Breaker one-nine, this trucker's rubber ducked, facing a year in the slammer for Acer laptop thefts

One of the many problems with Thatcherism seems to be that you eventually run out of publically-owned assets to flog off on the cheap to your mates.

Linux in 2020: 27.8 million lines of code in the kernel, 1.3 million in systemd

Re: "It solves a problem that people have."

Actually, I think it's excellent advice.

The acceptance that "all software has bugs" is one of the biggest drags on the software profession in existence. It might have been true in the early days of software development when that was almost entirely done by amateurs, but it certainly doesn't need to be true now, with the kind of modern software development, verification and proof techniques that are available. I can't think of any other industry where catastrophic failure of its products would be so airily dismissed on a regular basis.

Software developers could develop applications that didn't crash (or very, very, rarely crashed) if they were prepared to put in the engineering effort, and sometimes they do. You wouldn't think much of the Linux kernel if it fell over every five minutes, or even every five months.

'Evolution of the PC ecosystem'? Microsoft's 'modern' OS reminds us of the Windows RT days

Re: If you want seamless updates...

This isn't correct. Linux uses mmap() to map the executable in storage into the address space read-only and shared across processes, in a similar way to how you describe Windows operating. There's certainly no "extra copy". When a new process is forked, it initially maps the same executable image as its parent, unless and until exec() is called to map a replacement executable image.

I've no idea how Windows works.

Cinema voucher-pusher tells customers: Cancel your credit cards, we've been 'attacked'

Even before I clicked on your link I thought "oh, that sounds just like the Maxime."

Is there another cinema as good anywhere else in the UK?

Eight cores good, ten cores better: MediaTek resumes Qualcomm multi-core war

Re: How about honoring GPL

Could a competitor obtain an injunction to prevent Android phones containing Mediatek cores from being imported into a country that takes copyright law seriously? Mediatek may not be directly at fault if they're providing source to the phone manufacturers, but what good is that if the end-user can't get hold of it?

GPL code without source availability is just pirated software.

Maplin Electronics sold for £85m to Rutland Partners

Re: Building online portion

The Maplin internet site is truly awful for buying components. I was after a transistor the other day. The search returned a fairly pathetic 27 products, but the worst thing was trying to find the one I needed. I could refine my search by, er, price range, depth, height, width, weight, cable length or, get this, star rating. Star fucking rating! Who on earth wants to choose a transistor on the basis of popularity?

The old Maplin catalogue used to include a table of transistors, a damn sight more than 27 of them too, listing the things you might actually want to select a transistor on the basis of. Such as case style, type, polarity, current gain, power dissipation, breakdown voltage, etc.

Anyway I was in a rush so eventually worked out which one I needed and popped into my local branch to collect it. It was out of stock.

I too buy online from CPC or Farnell now; both do free delivery. CPC is cheaper and you only need a minimum order of £5. I think it's closest to what Maplin used to be. Farnell needs a minimum spend of £20 but has a much wider range of stock available.

How to catch a fraudster – using 'top cop' Benford and the power of maths

Re: How to deal with limits?

The thing about Benford's is that it applies to numbers that are logarithmically distributed, i.e. most real-world numbers. If you got a sheet of logarithmic graph paper and threw darts at it at random you'd get most darts landing in a "number begins with a 1" section, because those sections are wider than the others. Benford's distribution. It works no matter what units (scaling factor) you use because log distributions are scale invariant.

So here's my idea.... if you need to check using limits, get out your sheet of log graph paper again and mark off the limits of the data range. Scale the data to fit the paper if necessary. Then plot your data points. If the data is Benfordly-distributed, the points will appear to be randomly spread. If it isn't, the points will be clustered in the narrow-line sections of the graph and out of the wider-line sections.

Beer, in case it doesn't work.

Ancient Earth asteroid strike that dwarfed dinosaur killer still felt today

Re: Point of order.

Yeah, and if they were roughly spherical, that would be "twenty-seven times as massive"!

James Bond's 'shaken not stirred': Down to trembling boozer's hands, claim boffins

Shrublands

In Thunderball, M sent Bond to a health clinic because of his poor results in a physical assessment due to all the booze and fags.

Bond got into a squabble with one of the SPECTRE guys and got stretched on a rack, so it wasn't that great for his health ultimately. Boiled him in a sauna by way of revenge though, which was quite classy.

Beer, obviously.

Thirty-five years ago today: Space Invaders conquer the Earth

Boot Hill

I remember seeing the cowboys and cactus one in an amusement arcade in Porthmadog, circa 1980.

It wasn't called "Western Gun" though. It was called "Boot Hill" and was brilliant.

Crap PINs give wallet thieves 1-in-11 jackpot shot

Re: "repeated digits"

Out of 10000 possible four-digit numbers, 2710 contain at least one repeated (adjacent) digit.