* Posts by Michael H.F. Wilkinson

4248 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2007

Microsoft's saucy compiler exposes privates to devs

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Rewriting compilers from C++ to Basic and C#??

Is this me, or does this remind others of Niklaus Wirth's (failed) attempt to write a Pascal compiler in FORTRAN?

Or are they just modifying the compiler to make interim listings available in C# and Visual Basic showing the transformations performed by the code optimizer (in much the same way as the Cray FORTRAN and C compilers I used in the 90s?

Jobs was 'working on future product day before he died'

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

However

The claim that Steve Jobs may have had a good idea for a product the day before he died is still more believable than a similar claim about Steve Balmer on any arbitrary day.

More seriously, though I am not an Apple user in any form, I do not find the former claim beyond the realm of the possible. Though the story does have a strong ring of spin on it, it may well be true, and it may be a bit cynical to reject it off-hand (though cynics are right depressingly often). Trying to keep working may be a good way of keeping your thoughts off what must be scary to anyone. It can also take your mind off pain, or give you some positive feeling.

0.5mm2 ARM chip offers 5X energy efficiency, jacks up performance

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Pint

Sounds neat!

We are living in amazing times, aren't we. At some point you will hold the compute power and memory storage of a Cray Y-MP in your pocket.

At which point it becomes possible to run MS-Office 2010

;-)

Japanese take World Solar Challenge

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Pint

Cheers to the lot of them

Glad to see the Dutch team on the podium (as me mum is Dutch), kudos to Tokai and Michigan too of course!

Ballmer disses Android as cheap and complex

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Thumb Up

Balloon, buffoon, baboon, they all mix nicely to spell Balmer, don't they?

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Balmer apparently needs to vent vast quantities of hot air from time to time, or else he might burst.

(Oh bleeding hell, now I cannot get that image out of my mind).

If he means what he says, Microsoft shareholders might be in for a rocky ride, if he stays at the helm.

Team Philippines solar car in self-combustion drama

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Coat

They just look at the situation through rose-tinted rather than polarizing glasses

I'm on my way

Michael Dell declines to eat his Apple (humble) pie

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Joke

@Steve Evans

"In the parallel universe where 1997 saw the end of Apple, I don't think anyone will be casting any blame for not sticking with it. Jobs pulled off a 1000:1 shot."

I think it was a million-to-one shot, and everybody knows you can always pull those off! Just ask Sergeant Colon

Man 'drinks 2 pizzas' before skidding off road

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

The real question is

Did he put the pizza or his brains in the blender.

By bet is on the latter

DeLorean goes electric for 2013 roll-out

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Joke

"... whereas if you open a normal car door six inches you couldnt get a sheet of paper out , never mind a person!"

Certainly not certain American persons

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Coat

But will it do time travel?

Or can it not hit 88 mph?

Hundreds of Mr A N OTHERs discovered on payrolls

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

there was a BOFH episode

featuring:

A.N. Other

C. Omputer (you mean Chaz!)

and many others, all receiving payment as consultants

great epsiode

Back to the Future DeLorean to go under the hammer

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Joke

stop this sketch

it's getting silly

The Rt Hon. Major Smyth-DeVere-Charteris, in a sauce of green herbs

Intel mad for power, but stacked-up dies keep MELTING!

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Coat

Wasn't he a pet halibut?

Ubuntu's Oneiric Ocelot: Nice, but necessary?

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Joke

What will be the next names?

Some modest proposals:

Peripatetic Panther

Querulous Quagga

Revolting Rhino

Sociopathic Salamander

Maybe I should not get into marketing

BOFH: Where's my free fondleslab?

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

@Chriss007

exactly, the editors may expect a visit with a cattle prod.

or a modded security robot

Iranian TV claims royals ordered Ofcom to ban it

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Coat

Old men shouting at pigeons often make more sense

Millennium hand and shrimp, buggrit, buggrit. I told em, I told em, I told em, I told em. They'd only run out. Doorsteps!

Mine's the long trench coat.

Solar car teams bask in Darwin sunshine

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Pint

And of course

WHY on earth would you bring a trailer full of cans of "Bud" to Australia when you can drink Aussie beer?

Mine's a James Boag's please.

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Joke

And under the hood of the solar car

are hundreds of duracel bunnies

AMD 'unleashes' unlocked FX processor family

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Boffin

Could be of use to me though

I write some heavily multi-threaded stuff at work, and could test these when working at home before running it on the 24-core Opteron beasts we have here. We should be getting a 48-core one shortly, but maybe I will delay the purchase until the 64-core versions with Bulldozer cores come out. For our research purposes, testing for scalability over many cores is more important than absolute speed. For production machines, that changes, of course.

Gigantic KRAKEN fingered in prehistoric murder mystery

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Coat

So I guess nobody

wants to welcome are hyper-intelligent qiant kraken overlords?

I'll have mine sliced, battered, and deep fried (and with garlic sauce)

Solarcars are hot!

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

A stabilizer requires extra weight, complexity and electricity, all of which come at a premium in these vehicles, I would guess. There may also be regulations against it.

Post-pub nosh deathmatch: Kapsalon v quesadillas

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Pint

Will you compare it to:

Deep-fried pizza?

I have never tasted (not do intend to taste) this artery clogging horror, but I would be interested in a fair comparison. All in the interest of science, of course.

Beer, because it is Friday afternoon.

Gay-bashing cult plans picket of Steve Jobs funeral

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Re: Shouldn't be any such thing as hate crimes

If people beat people up, that's bad: agreed, it's just the level of badness that is at stake.

In my book at least, it is worse if someone beats you up because he hates the group you belong to, rather than, e.g., what you said about him or his mother, or because you took a swing at him. There is even a sort of "bad sense" in mugging: people do it for profit. It is definitely bad, but not as bad as an unprovoked attack based on a person's religion, race, or sexual orientation.

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

or

let every male mourner embrace, and perhaps even kiss a male protester (I realize this requires setting aside your natural revulsion, but be strong!!).

For a nice touch add: "I forgive you."

I think this might freak these guys out, and they could hardly sue you for it, you are merely following the example set by by Christ, showing love to thy neighbours.

Quote of the Week: 'I shave my balls for this?'

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Joke

"Now is the time to take advantage of the large webOS user base."

What? Both of them?

Sorry, I like WebOS, I even got the SDK out of curiosity as a long time user of Palm hardware (my Tungsten T3 was only retired last year). The joke is bittersweet in that a good idea seems to have been ruined by bad marketing. The HP statement is just surreal.

Can general relativity explain the OPERA neutrino result?

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

According to inflation theory

it was space that moved faster than the speed of light. This is perfectly allowable according to relativity. It is hard to get your mind around, I agree.

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

The 60ns difference equates to 18 m

I trust there has not been an 18m shift in position, as that is earthquake magnitude. The mean temperature of rock beneath the ground is really stable, simply due to its HUGE thermal capacity, and high degree of thermal insulation. This is why (wine) cellars often have high thermal stability.

Previously, the peculiar, apparently superluminal motion of jets in quasars and active galaxies could be explained elegantly by invoking special relativity. by assuming the jet is traveling at near light speed almost directly towards us. Here general relativity may well be an explanation (but it may not)

Chaos feared after Unix time-zone database is nuked

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

be careful!!

Someone may have copyrighted the phrase "Tick Tock"

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Facepalm

Now astronomers have one more reason to detest astrology

only lawyers will benefit from this.

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Keyboard, eat hot, er,.... tea!

Apple cofounder Steve Jobs is dead at 56

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Pint

He will be missed most by those near to him of course, but many others will miss his undoubted leadership. Though I am not an Apple user, many Apple designs set new standards, and gave others a point to aim at.

I will join you in raising a glass to his memory and achievements.

Put down the Java manual

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

I can see why you might take offense

but I read the "as well" as meaning that it is OK to learn Java, and "real programming" also can be done in Java.

On the topic of teaching programming: Some years ago we decided to use C in the initial programming course (Imperative programming). This allowed us to ditch the object-oriented overhead of Java which was used before. We go on to teach them algorithms and data structures in C, complete with structs containing function pointers. The latter paves the way for understanding what objects actually do for you. They also learn to clean up any mess they leave behind. Object oriented programming is then done in Java. Later courses include functional programming (I think in Haskel), and parallel programming and concurrency.

This is just the main programming track of the curriculum, other tracks focus on software engineering and architecture, database theory, operating systems, compilers, etc. Many of these skills might never be used in practice, but they do give better insights, and mean you have learned to learn difficult topics.

The best reason to learn a programming language is to learn new ways of thinking about problems. It does not help to learn 15 subtly different OO languages at university, it is important you learn different programming approaches. Once you have learned a style well, it is trivial to learn another. I learned programming in Pascal, the switch to C was quite trivial; I started OO programming in C++, learning Java was quite simple.

Premier League loses footie decoder case

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Thumb Up

Ruling makes sense

These are the kinds of rulings that let ordinary people believe there are benefits to being part of the EU.

October 14 declared 'Steve Jobs Day'

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Pirate

Darn!

I missed taking a towel to work on May 25

I missed saying "ARRH" on September 19

I think I will give October 14 a miss as well

Pirate, because, well AAARRRRHHH!

The plane story of galactic clusters

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Happy

I thought they just made planets

but they might be branching out into whole galaxies.

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Boffin

re: dark matter

I just love it when people come by and start saying: look scientists got it wrong in the past, current science must also be wrong. This shows they do not quite get the scientific process.

"Getting things wrong" is part and parcel of science. All current theories do is model the world in such a way that a large set of observations are explained. Testing theories consists of making predictions, doing experiments and seeing where the theory gets it wrong. If it gets things wrong, we have to make a new theory which explains all the old observations AND the new. Alternatively, there may be a mistake in the new observations, and the theory survives to be tested again. Each new theory offers a better approximation of the behaviour of nature, which should be harder to prove wrong than the previous. However, even if it mimics the behaviour of nature exactly, we have no guarantee it is the real mechanism behind nature, it is just a perfectly good model.

It is natural for scientists to be cautious when a theory confirmed by thousands of experiments is contradicted by a single experiment. At the same time many physicists are unhappy with the notions of dark matter and dark energy, and are looking for alternatives. Where there is disagreement there is progress in science.

Innovatio targets Wi-Fi users with patent suits

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Joke

And there I was thinking

they might be suffering from dyslexia.

Or they were in such a hurry to make money they forget the last letter of their nam.

having said that, their behaviour causes dyspepsia.

AMD Llano vs Intel Sandy Bridge

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

"Intel hardware can't run the OpenGL test"

Why not, is the OpenGL support incomplete, does it lack required extensions?

If so, it is wholly unsuitable for me, alas.

Life-size Lego assault rifle really works

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Coat

or

Niccce fissshesssss, gollum!

Don't bother with that degree, say IT pros

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

@Blitterbug

I actually state that there are those who can teach themselves, but maybe I should have stressed that more. I studied astronomy, and am therefore largely self taught, when in comes to computer science. This is why I am still learning more about core computer science today.

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Quite right

When I take on PhD students for projects with a lot of coding, I always look for passion, for people who do extracurricular stuff (not just in terms of coding, mind you). One problem is that 3-5 years is way too short to learn to code REALLY well. You typically need ten years (as for any real skill). A Uni can give you the theoretical foundation, you have to build a house on that by work experience (or hobby).

A nice site on this topic is

http://norvig.com/21-days.html

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

@J.G.Harston

We do teach computer science. There are IT courses taught by the Hanze University of Applied Sciences next door, but we, and all other traditional universities over here still teach computer science. However, very few of our graduates ever become coders. They become researchers (in academia or industry, a lot of ours go to companies like Philips Medical Systems) , or become software engineers and architects (OK, they are also involved in coding, but cost a lot more ;-) )

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

@Blitterbug

I actually state that there are those who can teach themselves, maybe I should have stressed that point more. In fact I studied astronomy, so much of my computer science and coding skills is self taught. This is why I am still learning new things about core computer science.

I also notice there are huge differences in IT degrees themselves. Some degrees are much more oriented to learning to use available tools and languages than to actual problem solving. We sometimes get students from these courses applying for our MSc course in computer science. These guys no way more than our students when it comes to common tools out there. Where they have huge problems in in their problem-solving skills. The best acquire theses skills, there rest flunks the course.

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

@CD001

Good point. We TRY to teach them, but then some just replicate instructions until they pass the exam, and then forget all about it. Some people are, as we say "resistant to education." At the same time there are many self-taught people who are excellent. Besides, there are many practical skills we do not teach (especially on the wealth of different tools out there).

The most important thing you can learn in education is learning itself. I have had no formal training in lattice theory, but I have acquired the skill set to learn it, and now contribute to the field. Many of my coding and debugging skills I learned in practice, in my first job as scientific programmer (developed a 150 kloc image processing system). That is when theory gets turned into practice.

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Happy

Re: Rather ironic

I stand corrected.

It is a good thing I don't teach language ;-)

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

I taught programming

and have seen quite some horror's produced by various "bedroom coders". They do get things to work, but the code is often not an "oil painting". There are certainly those who can teach themselves, but there are those who do benefit from learning a more disciplined approach.

The lack of discipline can be really astounding in some. There was one guy who insisted he wanted to hand code in in C# rather than Java. I told him of course he could hand his assignment in in C#, so long as he did not mind failing the course. He found this unreasonable. I suggested my attitude reflected that of a potential employer or customer, who more often than not have some requirements on programming languages, coding style, comments. If you hand in your work in a different language, you would be in breach of contract, or get fired.

He still thought I was being very unreasonable.

Another story I like is the guy who handed in an iterative solution where the assignment explicitly stated: "implement a recursive method to compute ....." He argued this was more efficient, we said that was true, but that the assignment was to learn recursion. He said but my implementation is more efficient, we said that was true, but that the assignment was to learn recursion. He said but my implementation is more efficient, we said that was true, but that the assignment was to learn recursion. ..............................

This went on a while until we terminated this infinite loop (not by kill -9, but more humane methods)

This is not to say the tuition fees aren't outrageous. You can get a much more favourable deal in the Netherlands, and the university I work at (Groningen) is drawing more and more students from the UK. Our MSc courses are English language anyway, and our BSc courses are headed that way as well.

Air traffic control data found on eBayed network gear

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Coat

Play "Air Traffic Controller" with added realism !!

I'll get me coat

Mighty trash-bag balloon cluster soars above Nevada

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Pint

Now that is cool

I'll doff my hat

(the Tilley today, the Barmah is too hot in this weather)

Later today, I will no doubt raise a glass as well

Journo register gaffe a boon for media overlords

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Childcatcher

But,

WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!!!

Surprised that did not pop up in this context.