Brilliant!
Excellent ideas for surviving zoom meetings there. Must start recording some footage, and learn to play guitar
Posts by Michael H.F. Wilkinson
4257 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2007
Page:
BOFH: I'm so pleased to be on the call, Boss. No, of course this isn't a recording
BOFH: But we think the UK tax authorities would be VERY interested in how we used COVID support packages
Yep, the 'Who owns Linux?' case is back from the dead
Turns out humans are leading AI systems astray because we can't agree on labeling
Friday 2nd April 2021 15:11 GMT 
I don't like saying i told you so, but ...
I frequently rail against claims made in AI papers that if the ground truth contains a percentage of errors, any AI system trained on them is likely to end up with a similar actual error rate. I have seen people claim an increase in performance from 97.6% to 98.1% (error bars not included) on data sets where there are two ground truths, drawn up by to medics, which are at odds with each other. In our own earlier work, we managed to get a sort of pareto optimum of 92.5 ± 0.6% on both ground truths, but were in places penalised for finding blood vessels the doctors had missed. It turns out, somehow ground truth 1 has been elevated to The Ground Truth, and the other demoted to "a human observer". And now AIs are better than the poor "human observer" simply because they have been taught to copy all the mistakes the other human has made.
If ImageNet contains up to 6% error, I will continue to take all claims of 99% or better performance with a considerable pinch of salt. Furthermore, if error bars ar not included, how can they claim to be better than an earlier method if the differences are sub 1%.
I am not saying deep learning and CNNs are useless, it is just that sloppy science does them a disservice.
Yes, there's nothing quite like braving the M4 into London on the eve of a bank holiday just to eject a non-bootable floppy
BOFH: Bullying? Not on my watch! (It's a Rolex)
BOFH: 7 jars of Marmite, a laptop and a good time
You would expect a qualified electrician to wire a building to spec, right? Trust... but verify
BOFH: Are you a druid? Legally, you have to tell me if you're a druid
Windows might have frozen – but at least my feet are toasty
Monday 21st December 2020 10:23 GMT
I did once blow up a 80287 co-processor inserted in the image processing "workstation", inserted there by our supplier. When I opened the case to inspect the damage, I noted the lettering on the chip: 80287-10, indicating it was a 10 MHz part inserted in a 12 MHz machine. Not a massive degree of unintentional over-clocking, but enough to fry the part after some time. I complained about the issue, and the company in question first stated I was wrong, after which I gave them my copy of the Intel data sheet on said component. I got an 80287-12 as replacement after that.
I actually inserted a home-made, hand soldered ISA-bus board to control both the exposure time on our cameras and the shutters on the fluorescence and phase contrast light sources on our microscopes. Switching the computer on after installing the experimental board was quite scary, but nothing shorted. Much to my surprise, it worked straight away (once my heart rate was back to something approaching normal)
BOFH: Switch off the building? Great idea, Boss
Voyager 2 is back online after eight months of radio silence
Start Me Up: 25 years ago this week, Windows 95 launched and, for a brief moment, Microsoft was almost cool
Tuesday 25th August 2020 11:44 GMT
Re: it's infamous need to be rebuilt literally every couple of months
I skipped the 95 and 98 editions, and went from 3.1 directly to NT workstation edition on our home machine (in part so the missus wouldn't inadvertently "clean" some mess from the root directory (like config.sys or the like)). Rather liked its stability, even though it was quite resource hungry. Mostly used SUSE Linux on the machine, however.
Fusion boffins apply plasma know-how to building thrusters
This PDP-11/70 was due to predict an election outcome – but no one could predict it falling over
Monday 24th August 2020 09:25 GMT
I remember writing code for several PCs with different Matrox frame-grabbers and image processing boards (PIP-1024A or B, and the more powerful MVP-AT/NP boards). In software, the diversity was solved by cordoning off the diversity of hardware platforms in separate libraries that were linked as needed. This worked fine in the medical microbiology lab, where I developed the code. However, once the department of dermatology had got themselves a shiny new MVP-AT/NP in their lab, and wanted to run my code, things constantly crashed, or froze. It turned out, this happened only when using a huge beast of a power supply for their mercury vapour light source for their Leitz fluorescence microscope. Bit of a bummer, as the code was intended to capture and analyse fluorescence microscopy images. The power supply produced so much RFI that the MVP-AT/NP electronics borked if you used any of the hardware image processing accelerator electronics. In microbiology we used Olympus microscopes, with a much smaller, more modern power supply, feeding the same type of mercury lamp with no issues at all. I had to write a separate MVP-AT library that didn't use any of the hardware acceleration to get the code to work in the dermatology lab.
Putting the d'oh! in Adobe: 'Years of photos' permanently wiped from iPhones, iPads by bad Lightroom app update
Monday 24th August 2020 07:20 GMT
Re: Class action suit in 3... 2... 1...
Adobe should certainly shoulder much of the blame. After all, if this bug effects everyone on said OS, how on earth did this bug escape the testing phase? However, if your photos are so valuable, why on earth do you only store them on just one device? What if your device was lost, stolen, or broken beyond repair?
Single-line software bug causes fledgling YAM cryptocurrency to implode just two days after launch
America's largest radio telescope blind after falling cable slashes 100-foot gash in reflector dish
Why so salty, Ceres? Is it on account of your underground oceans and cryovolcanism?
Uncle Sam says it's perfecting autonomous AI-powered drone, vehicle swarms to 'dominate' battlefields
Tuesday 11th August 2020 12:30 GMT 
Sounds thrilling
I suddenly have this image of a swarm of drones, overwhelmed by a much larger swarm of seagulls, as in the film "Birds". Spraying the drones with something like fish oil might do the trick
I'd better be going. Doffs hat (grey Tilley once more) to the late, great Alfred Hitchcock.
Twitter says hack of key staff led to celebrity, politician, biz account hijack mega-spree
Thursday 16th July 2020 07:35 GMT
I see, there was "a coordinated social engineering attack", or in layman's terms: "some of our staff fell for phishing"
or should that be "some of our soon to be ex-staff fell for phishing"
It does make you wonder how sophisticated it was, how they are going to prevent this in the future, and of course how many heads will roll.
Someone recently asked me whether I was on Twitter. The answer was "no", and that doesn't look like it is going to change any time soon, not just because of privacy concerns, but I also have the El Reg Commentard section to vent my more unhinged opinions
Cool IT support drones never look at explosions: Time to resolution for misbehaving mouse? Three seconds
Friday 3rd July 2020 08:27 GMT
Reminds me of the user claiming that since my last software update the mouse was consistently moving in reverse: pointer moving left as the mouse went to the right, or up as the mouse was moving down. I asked her to demo this, and noticed she was somehow holding the mouse with the wire (no wrireless in the early 90s) towards her. A quick 180 degree turn of the offending rodent solved it.
I honestly did toy with the idea of introducing a software option that would invert directionality of the mouse, preferably switching on or off at random intervals for seriously annoying users (complte with undocumented key combination that would kill that behaviour), but I thought the better of it.
Remember that black hole just 1,000 light years from Earth? Scientists queue up to say it may not exist after all
Thursday 2nd July 2020 09:37 GMT 
It's called rigour
This is why scientists always check each other's work, and don't take results posted by others at face value. More data are needed, as so often. Whatever the outcome, something interesting is going on. Either there is a black hole so close to earth (for a typically astronomical value of "close"), or a binary star system has been caught in the midst of a short (for a typically astronomical value of "short") evolutionary phase
Boffins baffled as supergiant star just vanishes – either it partially blew itself apart or quietly turned into a black hole
With intelligent life in scant supply on Earth, boffins search for technosignatures of civilizations in the galaxy
Check out the night sky in all its X-ray glory: Everything from hot gases to supernovas and massive black holes
NASA scientists mull sending a spacecraft on a 13-year mission to visit Neptune's 'bizarre' moon, Triton
HTC breaks with tradition to push out 2 phones someone might actually want to buy
There's no accounting for TITSUP*: Beancounters bemoan Sage cloudy sync software outage
Don't like Mondays? Neither does Microsoft 364's Outlook Exchange Online service
Overload: A one-way ticket to a madman's situation
Monday 15th June 2020 09:42 GMT
Brings back memories
of my first PC. Quite a beast it was in its day, sporting an 80386DX with Cyrix 387 floating point coprocessor, a whole 4 MB of RAM (later upgraded to 8), a graphics card with a whole further MB of RAM) and an Adaptek SCSI Controller with 88 MB disk! Cost quite a fortune at the time. Sped up my development work no end, and Windows 3.1 and MS-Office worked quite happily in 4 MB. I don't think that would do for the latest incarnations, would it now.
Oh crap: UK's digital overlords moot new rules to help telcos lay fibre in sewer pipes
As Uncle Sam flies spy drones over protest-packed cities, Homeland Security asks the public if that's a good idea
Yeah, great start after sacking human hacks: Microsoft's AI-powered news portal mixes up photos of women-of-color in article about racism
Wednesday 10th June 2020 12:33 GMT
Re: It's a trifle early for the silly season, but ...
I know many a developer (including myself) that has yelled at his or her computer at some point in time. Indeed, yelling by itself doesn't solve the problem but:
a) it is good to blow off steam, and,
b) it did warn off users not to bother me with questions about a word processing package I never use, at that point in time, if they wanted to reach beer o'clock unscathed
Now where is that BOFH-grade cattleprod
The only way is bork for the UK's embattled rail travellers
Ooo, a mystery bit of script! Seems legit. Let's see what happens when we run it
Monday 8th June 2020 11:00 GMT
Descriptive names can still be enticing
Way back when in the days I was coding MS-DOS machines for image processing, I wrote two (harmless) programs that simply trapped interupt 9 (keyboard), discarded keyboard input, and did nothing except blink the screen and say the computer has crashed. Only a hard reset worked. I called these two variant HANG.EXE and CRASH.EXE. Everyone had to try them at least omce
Zealous Zoom's zesty zymotic zone zinger: Zestful zealots zip zillions
We spent billions building atom smashers – and now boffins think nature's doing the same thing for free?
Linus Torvalds drops Intel and adopts 32-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper on personal PC
Monday 25th May 2020 10:47 GMT
Re: AMD vs. Intel: War Games v3.0
I have a 64-core Opteron compute server at work (512 GB RAM is also nice), and tried make -j 64 on a big code base and was very impressed to see that fly. In practice make -j 32 generally maxes out the speed, simply due to IO limitations, but it is fun to watch things compile and install really fast. The machine is getting old, so I hope to weedle out funds for a replacement, and maybe while I am at it try to slip a 32 core desktop machine into the budget. Maybe I should connect to my inner BOFH to make this happen
Chicago: Why I just grin like a dork... It's my kind of Bork
Monday 25th May 2020 09:48 GMT
Re: Jumped up quiche?
I once observed an Italian (from Naples, too) who was confronted with the Chicago style deep pan pizza. An explosion resulted, not quite Trinity Test level, but getting there (hence icon).
Granted, several Neapolitans I have met tended to explode at any pizza NOT from what they consider the only authentic pizzeria in Naples (and they tend not to agree on what the ONLY authentic place is), but this person really got incandescent.
I tend not to be too bothered with what is authentic, food wise, just what tastes good. My preference is definitely with the Italian thinner base, but I refuse to get all religious about it.
A real loch mess: Navy larks sunk by a truculent torpedo
Micros~1? ClippyZilla? BSOD Bob? There can be only one winner. Or maybe two
Russia admits, yup, the Americans are right: One of our rocket's tanks just disintegrated in Earth's orbit
Tuesday 12th May 2020 07:32 GMT
Elon Musk isn't helping, is he
Recently saw several of his swarms fly by. Quite apart from being annoying to astronomers, crowding LEO with loads of little satellites make the issues of space debris much worse, as the likelihood of collisions increases rapidly. Fewer, bigger satellites are much easier to manage (also not trivial) than swarms of little ones. Space may be big (you might think it's a long way to the chemist, but that's peanuts to space), but we only have a little speck of it, surrounding our pale blue dot, at our disposal.
Incredible how you can steal data via Thunderbolt once you've taken the PC apart, attached a flash programmer, rewritten the firmware...
Tuesday 12th May 2020 07:16 GMT
A reason for all the glue?
I almost expect hardware manufacturers use this exploit as an excuse to for the use of glue in their laptops. Cheap cutting of corners during manufacture? Mais non!! We were thinking about security!!! Honest!!!!
Oh dear. I feel an extra exclamation mark coming up!!!!!
I'd better be going. The one with "Maskerade" in the pocket, please.
We dunno what's more wild: This vid of Japan's probe bouncing off an asteroid to collect a sample – or that the rock was sun-burnt
Behold: The ghastly, preening, lesser-spotted Incredible Bullsh*tting Customer
FYI: Your browser can pick up ultrasonic signals you can't hear, and that sounds like a privacy nightmare to some
Friday 8th May 2020 09:58 GMT 
I am tempted ..
to build a little ultrasound broadcasting device, that emits all sorts of random signals just to screw this kind of eavesdropping up. A smart system could even listen for covert ultrasound broadcasts, and either try noise cancelling techniques on it, or (much simpler) do the ultrasound equivalent of Brian Blessed bawling "Blood! Death! War! Rumpy pumpy!!"
Electronic countermeasures, if you like. Icon, well, because of Brian Blessed, of course
Now where is that Arduino kit?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
