Posts by Ian Bush

LibreOffice 7.6 arrives: Open source stalwart is showing its maturity

Re: LO 7.6 - Outline View

Indeed - give me EDLIN every time

Ian (emacs user)

Errors logged as 'nut loose on the keyboard' were – ahem – not a hardware problem

Re: Aaaaargh!

Please see the British education system

Arm co-founder: Britain's chip strat 'couldn’t be any worse'

Re: oxbridge

Note both Oxford and Cambridge give BAs for all their first degrees - I hold a BA (Oxon) in Chemistry

But a large part of the problem is successive ministers have seen the science and technology budget as there to fund their own pet projects, rather than supporting any coherent national plan. IMO millions have been hived away and wanted that way. Boris Johnson and George Osborne are especially at fault here.

British government torched over lack of chips strategy

Re: No tar and feathers please! I'll go peacefully

No. Some MPs form the government, but not all. Quoting https://www.parliament.uk/about/how/role/relations-with-other-institutions/parliament-government/

"Parliament and the Government are different. They have different roles and do different things."

"HM Government consists of the Prime Minister, their Cabinet and junior ministers, supported by the teams of non-political civil servants that work in government departments."

And

"Parliament is there to represent our interests and make sure they are taken into account by the Government. The Government cannot make new laws or raise new taxes without Parliament's agreement.

Parliament is made up of people we have elected and people who have been appointed. They sit in two separate Houses:

The House of Commons, where all the people we have elected at the General Election work, as MPs, for the next five years. This includes people in other political parties, as well as those in the winning party who were not chosen to be ministers."

Thus all MPs are members of the House of Commons, but not all MPs are members of the Government

Japan tests probe to land on Martian moon Phobos, bring a chunk of it back to Earth

Re: Oh shit..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leather_Goddesses_of_Phobos

?

City-killing asteroid won't hit Earth in 2052 after all

Genius! Have one of these

Chinese Go Association suspends player 'for using AI'

More than that, it's quite possible that the games are analysed afterwards by some software to find indicators as to whether it is a human playing, or if there is computer "assistance". I can't tell you about the Go world, but this certainly happens in Chess - any rated online tournament will likely be sent for analysis, and yes, people have been disqualified and/or banned for use of a computer having been detected by this method. Ken Regan (https://www.buffalo.edu/news/experts/ken-regan-faculty-expert-chess.html) is probably the best known researcher in this area.

Virgin Media fined £50,000 after spamming 451,000 who didn't want marketing emails

Re: Wow!

At least a factor of 10 too small

Cisco requires COVID-19 shots for all US staff – even remote workers

Re: how to prove it

"We know now that the antibodies created thanks to those shots tend to be pretty much gone after two months already"

Link to peer-reviewed research, please

Sir Clive Sinclair: Personal computing pioneer missed out on being Britain's Steve Jobs

First computer a (home made) ZX81. 1k of memory, in practice nearer 800 bytes IIRC due to the system variables, taught you a lot about programming. Wouldn't be where I am today without it. Recquiescat in pace Clive.

England's controversial extraction of personal medical histories from GP systems is delayed for a second time

Yes, Priti Patel is evil She wants to kill people (https://www.indy100.com/news/priti-patel-resurfaced-clip-death-penalty-ian-hislop-question-time-video-home-secretary-9020006) unlike mini-Trump who merely colludes in trying to get them beaten up (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jul/14/black-eyes-boris-johnson-plot-attack-reporter-darius-guppy). Both liars though. And these are the people wanting to hand over our personal data ...

Tiananmen Square Tank Man vanishes from Microsoft Bing, DuckDuckGo, other search engines – even in America

I remember that day. I remember as a student sitting in the common room watching the television footage. Crying. Crying for the people of China. Crying for a people being told lies. Crying for all of us whenever we unquestioningly forgo freedom for security. World, don't forget this. This is what the Chinese government is all about. Every time you have dealings with the Chinese government remember Tiananmen Square.

Intel throws sand in the face of 'musclebooks' with 10nm Tiger Lake tech

Well to convert the archaic units to something I understand that's 0.38Jb (https://www.theregister.com/2007/10/28/additional_reg_standards/). Nope, not going to put my back out.

Explained: The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32

"temporary solution becoming de-facto permanent"

Like the increasingly common but incorrect hyphen in de facto, ab initio and similar?

Not the Wright stuff: Bitcoin 'inventor' loses bid to sue YouTuber who called him a liar

Re: Judges names

> Which publication used “Sue, Grabbit & Runne. Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths.”?

Private Eye, when not discussing Ugandan Affairs

What do Nginx, Twitch... and the English Premier League have in common? Russians. It's always the Russians

Re: Wait a minute

"Weird" is not the word I would use. As they live in The People's Democratic Kleptocracy of Russia I would use either "sensible" or "brave", and I haven't decided which yet

UK govt snubs Intel, seeks second-gen AMD Epyc processors for 28PFLOPS Archer2 supercomputer

Re: Money/oomph

I hope you work for Intel ...

Re: Money/oomph

Macho flops/£ and achieved flops/£ are very different things, especially once software development and maintenance costs are factored in, and also electricity bills. But the honest truth is for this project the vast majority of users didn't need or want GPGPUs to do their science, and in many cases GPU versions of the applications just don't exist, so early on a decision was made to be purely CPU based - the machine is there to do science, and if it can't do the science the user base needs it doesn't matter how many macho flops it can do. As a result I can't answer your question as we never did that calculation.

Re: I have to wonder

Yes - it will run Linux.

Actually it should be fairly high unless there is a rush of new machines at the top end. Speaking as someone on the evaluation team for the project ... But as for GPUs the users (mostly) didn't want them, so we didn't get them.

Toodle-oo Raijin and g'day Gadi, you beauty! Australia's fastest super 'puter will bench 38 PFLOPS later this year

After looking at the grid you can decide where to place your supercomputer - power cost and consumption is a major factor in deciding where to place the thing. People are not so accommodating in their accommodation requirements.

Operation Desert Sh!tstorm: Routine test shoots down military's top-secret internets

Temperature Units

Sigh ... To all those who don't understand the archaic temperature units which are the primary measure in the article can I remind you of

https://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/page/reg-standards-converter.html

so they can be converted into something more comprehensible. For starters 120F=2.9Hn

HPC processor project tosses architectural designs on desk of the European Commission

Re: Just what we need

Icon noted, so let's just note that while Horizon 2020 is not by any means the only way we get money back from the EU it does constitute almost 20% of our academic research budget.

Re: Just what we need

Just to add some numbers over the period 2014-2016 UK researchers and Innovators received 15.2% of the Horizon 2020 funding, for a total of just under €3.8bn funding. This was the second highest in Europe, just behind Germany (16.7%): https://ec.europa.eu/unitedkingdom/news/horizon-2020-three-years-uk-tops-league-participants_en

UK Space Agency cracks open its wallet, fishes out a paltry £2m for Brit plans to return to orbit

Can't be - Chris Grayling wouldn't be interested if it's a paltry £2M to be wasted.

Supreme Court says secret UK spy court's judgments can be overruled after all

Re: re: "section 67(8) was clear...

Exactly. In an age were we have judgements which can't be appealed, and a government that believes it can rule by diktat without consulting the People's representatives, this is a glimmer of light.

Boffins baffled by planet nugget whizzing round white dwarf that should have killed it

Re: Leftover core, or an ark ship?

Nah, it would have been eaten by the enormous mutant space goat

Which scientist should be on the new £50 note? El Reg weighs in – and you should vote, too

Not a mention of Paul Dirac. But to be honest if it's not Dalton or Maxwell it's criminal

US Republicans bash UK for tech tax plan

"The United Kingdom’s introduction of a new tax targeting cross-border digital services – which mirrors a similar proposal under consideration in the European Union – is troubling,"

We thought with brexit coming the Limeys would just do what we told them ...

AI can predict the structure of chemical compounds thousands of times faster than quantum chemistry

Re: "SwiftML [..] can perform as accurately as DFT programmes in some cases."

"To be sure, 6 minutes instead of 16 years is quite the improvement, but only some cases ?

I do hope that they know which cases, because it would be a shame if they applied it wrong yet still used the answer that their statistical analysis machine gave them."

Well speaking as somebody who develops DFT codes on HPC machines I would use the following technical term to describe their comparison: Bollocks. You can solve systems with a few thousand atoms relatively easily on a few 10s or 100s of cores on a modern HPC machine, maybe 1200 hours is fair, but 16 years, WTF are they on?

Oh, and of course out of a quantum mechanical calculation you get the wavefunction which allows deep insight into the properties of the system under investigation. Out of curve fitting you get the fitted curve. Don't get me wrong, this can be extremely useful in certain circumstances. But what is being presented here is complete over-sell - "News: Drawing a line through some points is quicker and easier than solving the fundamental laws of nature, film at 11!!!"

Brit comms providers told: You must tell people when their cheap contract's about to end

Just like ISAs

"We want people to be able to take advantage of the wide choice of communication services available and shop around with confidence, so that they can get the best deals for their needs."

On the other hand we could have a situation where companies don't have the right to rip the customer off the moment they put a foot wrong. We could have a situation where the default is that companies can not rip off consumers at will. Maybe governments could understand that while representing me one very important responsibility is to spare me working through a plethora of compare the market type sites and rather let me HAVE A LIFE. But no. As long as their hedge fund managers maximise their profit that is all that matters. I am just a working droid to maximise somebody else's profits. Fuck 'em.

Europe's scheme to build exascale capability on homegrown hardware is ludicrous fantasy

What about the software?

Great, we can build these machines on some kind of timescale. But without the applications that can exploit them what is the point? Where's the funding for the software development, especially if novel architectures require a large overhaul of existing million line codes?

RIP: Sinclair ZX Spectrum designer Rick Dickinson reaches STOP

Sad day. Started with a ZX81, progressed to a ZX Spectrum, and now program HPC machines. Wouldn't be doing that if it weren't for Mr Dickinson, and the lessons that you HAD to learn about memory usage are still with me today - you can't always just plug in another DIMM.

Facebook can’t count, says Cambridge Analytica

Re: Refuted?

They probably mean "repudiated", it seems increasingly common to confuse the two

Still 30 million too many ...

BOOM! Cambridge Analytica explodes following extraordinary TV expose

Re: Should be interesting to hear their excuses

"You're forgetting one important detail: Only little people like us get to taste porridge. Rich **** get a slap on the wrists and told not to do it again."

I think you've misspelt "****", there should be an extra * at the end

UK Home Sec Amber Rudd unveils extremism blocking tool

You can see it happening already - it's blocked some of your vowels, replacing them with stars

MPs: Lack of technical skills for Brexit could create 'damaging, unmanageable muddle'

When Rees-Mogg takes over the tax system will be greatly simplified - we'll all have to pay scutage along with the forelock-tug, and be glad of it.

Borked bog forces flight carrying 83 plumbers to bug out back to base

"The airline's comms handler confirmed the U-turn in a statement sent to The Register."

Shouldn't that read U-bend?

Trans-Pacific Partnership returns, without Trump but more 'comprehensive'

Re: Ask Liam Fox

Actually most current practice is not to write it in the first place - See David Davis

Ask Liam Fox

That wonderful gentleman Liam Fox must know the details as he seems keen that the UK should join the TPP

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/04/liam-fox-brexit-trade-policy-trans-pacific-partnership

Maybe we could ask him for details. It might protect our chicken.

The UK's super duper 1,000mph car is being tested in Cornwall

Re: Cool, but why?

"So, the answer is... no... there is no why. They simply justify it as being cool."

Getting kids excited by science, bringing on the next generation of technologists, finding the engineers of the future is "no why"?

Re: Cool, but why?

From http://www.bloodhoundssc.com/project

"The BLOODHOUND Project is a global Engineering Adventure, using a 1,000mph World Land Speed Record attempt to inspire the next generation to enjoy, explore and get involved in science, technology, engineering and mathematics."

Go and see one of their presentations. They are bloody brilliant.

Shock: Brit capital strips Uber of its taxi licence

"What is disappointing is that Uber's immediate response is throw rattles out of the pram and publicly state that they will go to the courts"

Disappointing maybe, but surprising, no. This seems to be their basic corporate policy - if crossed threaten litigation. One wonders if they learnt from a certain well known cult.

Unable to give up on life on Mars, bio-boffins now thrilled to find boron

Re: The chances of anything coming from Mars...

Obscure!? Sigh ... kids these days

That said I'm mildly confused by this. There's no reason boron won't be found in Mar's surface, and it's no big surprise that any boron on Mars will be in the form of borates given the highly oxidised state of the surface - on Earth (almost?) all boron containing minerals are borates. So given that why the big fuss about life? For me the most amazing thing is that the truly amazing Curiosity rover can detect a rare element like boron - I wonder what the concentration is?

Re: The chances of anything coming from Mars...

Pterry said that one

Good news: Samsung's Tizen no longer worst code ever. Bad news: It's still pretty awful

There have been legitimate uses for comparing a variable to itself - in particular under IEEE754 all comparisons that have a NaN as one of the operands return false, so checking for equality of a variable with itself was a way of detecting whether the variable held a NaN. Unfortunately optimising compilers used to think "what is this idiocy" and throw it away, hence many languages contain a isNaN function or similar.

Time to rethink machine learning: The big data gobble is OFF the menu

I mentally replaced ML with HPC throughout and the articles was still close to coherent and relevant. OMO the ultimate issue here is valuing programmers (both in industry and academia) with relevant specialist skills and rewarding them - that would encourage others to follow down their path.

The cloud is great for HPC: Discuss

"You may want to try throwing a set of GPUs at a particular computational fluid dynamics problem to see if that architecture can handle the workload in a more effective way. If it doesn’t deliver the gains you expected, then you haven’t sunk capital into a hardware investment"

Yada, yada, yada. I take the point, effectively renting unusual hardware, but GPUs are a poor example, in academia (if not Industry) they have moved into the mainstream and any self respecting central University service will offer nodes including them. So how about FPGAs or Xeon Phi's? You offer them, great ... how much ?!?

The cloud being of use to academic HPC currently is a myth. High throughput computing, yes there is a place. But at the moment not HPC.

Russian raids sweep up 20 malware scum

Re: Big mistake..

I just assumed they didn't pay the local "taxes"