* Posts by Michael H.F. Wilkinson

4248 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2007

Early Earth’s ‘golden shower’

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Alien

If you want a planet made of gold

just order one from Magrathea

HP plucks webOS team out of departing PC division

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

I do not think WebOS is a pile of junk

Maybe you are right that good people will leave, but WebOS is interesting. The big question is what to put it on. If HP can license it to hardware makers they could be on to something. Do not forget that there is a far bigger profit (margin) to be made on software than on hardware.

Jeff Bezos' spaceship self-destructs in test flight

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Coat

You mean

Playmobil, or it didn't happen

don't you?

Sweden rolls out invisible infrared tank

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Or:

How not to be seen

Teen tags disintegrating comet

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Boffin

Scientists are usually enthusiasts as well

Rigour need not be questioned. And anyway, Twitter is not meant to be used exclusively for meaningless chatter, as far as I know.

Samsung outs MacBook Pro lookalike laptop

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Oh Please!!!!

Now I have this image of Steve Balmer in turtle neck sweater (and BOY will it be sweaty) bouncing around yelling "Developer, developers, developers,......."

Dell Alienware M18x 18.4in gaming notebook

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Alien

That is not a moon!!

Having said that, why does the styling remind me of the cylons in the early Battlestar Galactica series?

Cool specs, but what a monster. Must start weightlifting to handle that beast

Alien, because well,....

Acer claims first Core-i7 Ultrabook

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Coat

Acer running Windows?

Not when I have finished installing Linux.

Only I wouldn't because it seems to lack a good enough video board for my kind of OpenCL and CUDA code. Shame that.

Mine is the one with the OpenCL reference card in the pocket

You like Flash, you like cache: Put 'em together to form ...

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Coat

You like Flash, you like cache: Put 'em together to form ...

Clash ?

Mine is the one with the "London Calling" CD in the pocket

Sharp shows off 8K4K hi-res prototype telly

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

I saw a similar high res machine on display

It was a 6k3k demo AFAIK. The models on display on it did not really like the result, as it showed all kinds of blemishes on the skin ordinary HD does not. Make-up artists will have to go to new lengths to keep Hollywood stars looking picture perfect (silicone skin anyone?)

Post-Jobs Apple: New research shows Cook will do fine

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

I would have thought

a big mouth and loud voice would do.

A Farewell to Oates: Adios, El Reg

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Pint

So long and thanks for all the fish!

Raises glass

'Devastating' Apache bug leaves servers exposed

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Coat

So what is the name of this Apache bug?

Geronimo?

Mine is the one with the Karl May books in the pocket

Woman in strop strip for Bermuda airport customs

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Playmobil?

Or it did not happen

Nervous Samsung seeks Android Plan F. Or G, H ....

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Nah

There are plenty of Parks and Lees too.

Argentina: home of Bavarian lager

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Boffin

Yeast spores could potentially travel far

even by wind. So maybe this species of yeast is more widely spread than was thought.

Ofcom mulls smackdown for rogue religious TV channel

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

That could be seen as an instance of evolution in action

but then they would not believe you

and anyway, by NOT allowing this atheists (often) do have a strong sense of ethics, and thus show that atheism != satanism. This confuses the hell out of the more mindless type believers (which are the ones "self-selected" by this channel).

Note that I have quite a number of Christians, Jews, Hindus and Muslims as friends, and none are mindless (mindless believers (or atheists) I tolerate, rather than befriend)

Amateur balloonists hit record 40,575m above East Anglia

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Pint

But they did get to the pub to finish their "work"

good planning, that

Beer icon, obviously

Boffins build powerful yet 'table-top size' atom-smasher

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Coat

So we could have sharks

with frikkin' particle beams instead?

sounds cool

God particle back in hiding

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Just like quarks quirks have flavour

disappointment, in this case (also known as "rock bottom")

Afghan coppers trained with Playmobil

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Thumb Up

Brilliant

You just cannot make up this kind of stuff!

LOHAN rival to inflate bulging orbs with hydrogen

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Mushroom

For added bang

fire the rocket payload straight up through the balloon.

I just like things that go WOOOMP

BOFH: Beer, shinies, death by fire, rats IN THAT ORDER

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Pint

Re: You need 3 screens

Play DOOM on 3 screens?

Don't be so modest, we have a set-up with a 3D immersive virtual reality system (like a CAVE)

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Pint

Brilliant episode

Really on form

LOHAN spaceplane project starting to shape up nicely

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

or a donut-shaped balloon

for a really weird-looking solution. The rocket could fire straight through the centre hole. You might even be able to get sponsored by any well-known maker of donuts..

I know such a balloon will not be available off-the-shelf, but it would look cool.

It's official: IE users are dumb as a bag of hammers

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Boffin

If I were needlessly nasty

I could suggest that Opera is so difficult to install and use, and thus requires more intelligence to use. As I have on occasion used it I know this is not true. It could be a small-number effect. If the number of Opera users in the survey is comparatively small, random fluctuation are more likely. It would have been nice to have error bars in the graphs, so we could judge whether or not the differences are significant.

Obama drops Twitter bombs on debt-ceiling foes

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

taxed too much?

Come over to the Netherlands, or most European countries. We seem to pay rather more.

'Missing heat': Is global warmth vanishing into space?

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Wha?

You should go to the parties with the finite improbability machines.

Jupiter spacecraft mounted atop bloody big rocket

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Mushroom

Bloody big rocket?

Of course it's bloody big! Would you prefer a damp squib?

Apple MacBook Air 13in Core i5 laptop

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Visa should be CUDA

Bloody autocorrection

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

I am looking for a new lightweight,

For a machine this expensive, I would like more graphics grunt. For people who do not need OpenCL or Visa it may not be a problem.

Mega-colossal space raincloud found at moist black hole

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Coat

So

I'll get me raincoat, I suppose

Nuclear Mars tank to roam imposing crater

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Coat

How about using the lesser known virtues as names?

Tubso and Bissonomy spring to mind.

Mine is the one with "Going Postal" in the pocket.

BOFH: Axe handles - occasionally quite slippery

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Coat

Cannot resist asking

which occurs more often?

PLEASE DO NOT ANSWER THAT!!

I'll get me coat

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Really nice

What will the revenge be?

AMD readies Bulldozers to ship next month

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Totally agree

The opteron machines here have been great. The old Xeons (pre-Quickpath) were not very good on shared memory parallel computing, because the front-side bus throttled the memory bandwidth. The opterons have given 75-80 % efficiency on 24 cores. Really neat.

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Interesting news

I am about to start looking a new machine (looking for something like a 48-core 256 GB RAM job), even if the bulldozers arrive too late, prices of older machine might drop.

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy: Blu-ray extended edition

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Luddite that I am

I just read the books. Nothing about Gandalf's staff broken by the Witch-king in there (though only a purist would complain). I only got to see the Fellowship, and liked the more active role given to Arwen, so I will not say all changes are for the worse. I did feel the fighting was a bit much, compared to the more sedate pace of the book. However, if you kept to that pace, the film would have to become a (very long) series.

Regarding the increased length, Tolkien said in the preface to the book that the main criticism he agreed with is that it was too short.

Cameron: Murdoch son of Murdoch needs another grilling

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Flame

Grilling again?

Roasting over a slow fire is better at his age, to achieve properly tender results.

Flame set to low/medium

Big Blue boffins scan 10 billion files in Flash in a flash

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Thumb Up

I am not too surprised you got a response

because doing it allows them to show off their system again. And Big Blue does have a lot of smart people, AND allows them to talk to the outside world.

'There's too much climate change denial on the BBC'

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Actually, some "facts" are routinely manipulated

Like the output of weather stations in the USA to "correct for changes in the station's environment." This is not a good idea, it is better to let the raw data out, and explain any trends later. Anyway, the debate is not so much about climate change per se, but about the underlying causes. As we cannot see the causes, only correlations, it makes perfect sense to argue about that. It might well be argued that the Earth is unusually cold (starting in the Pleistocene), or that we are in an interglacial era.

Whatever the outcome of the debate, we still should not be wasting energy and other resources.

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Some very good questions indeed

I have read one report that the ice caps of Mars are receding, but the mechanism is not fully understood. We also don't have temperature readings over anything like the period we have for Earth. Venus is even more difficult, because it really is a runaway greenhouse, and surface probes do not tend to survive for any length of time (the Russians hold the record, I think). I remember reading a letter in Science in about 1989, that some Danish astronomers (IIRC) had found a 98% correlation between sunspot activity and temperature on Earth, over a period of some 150 years. That is quite a coincidence supposing there is no causal link.

Again, it is definitely wise to move towards more sustainable energy sources, but I am certainly not sure the solar cycle is not involved in some way.

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Say not: I will believe

say: I will understand

;-)

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Thumb Up

I live in the Netherlands

but still watch Beeb more than most other channels

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Boffin

As if science should be based on consensus?

Science makes progress whenever there is a lack of consensus. When everybody agrees, and we therefore think we are right (for a given value of right), and there is little incentive to refine our knowledge.

By contrast, whenever we disagree we work hard to prove the other guy/girl wrong. In the best cases, we do that indirectly, by trying to prove ourselves wrong. If we fail to prove our theory wrong, it may be right.

As an example, astronomy progressed a great deal simply from being annoyed by Fred Hoyle, who proposed preposterous (they thought) theories which were consistent both internally, and with observations (at the time), and very hard to prove wrong. They often were proved wrong, but the proof taught us a great deal.

If all scientists vote on an issue, say global warming, the outcome has no effect on the truth of the matter. Suggesting global warning has been proven beyond all doubt is not very scientific.

Fujitsu installs Windows 7... on a phone

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Coat

Why does nobody ask

if it will run Crysis?

I'll get me coat

Hubble detects new Plutonian moon

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Thumb Up

and of course he is feeling that cold and lonely

so thumbs up to that name

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Alien

P4 stands for Pentium 4

Imagine the overclocking you could do at -240 ambient temperature

On the other hand, imagine the overclocking you would NEED to do to stay warm enough

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Alien

Plutonian Ice and Molases

New flavour of icecream? At -240 deg centigrade, it may be a bit cold in the mouth.

Still sounds better than the tunafish flavour favoured by Kzinti in one Larry Niven story

Mobile coverage comes to embattled Misurata

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Thumb Up

Thumbs up to Ousama Abushagur

great work!