* Posts by Tom 7

8318 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009

To preserve Earth's treasures, digital silence is golden

Tom 7

Re: Hawaii you say

They do that in NZ but its only a few places that are sufficiently remote to prevent interlopers getting there.

Tom 7

Re: Yeah it's a bummer when it happens

Its not just getting it a bit wrong - even entering the water safely can result in thermal shock as the water is bloody cold all year round there. I was in Lake Garda a while back and the water by the shore was 20C or more but the following week a bloke dived off a boat and and wasnt seen again for a couple of days.

Tom 7

NZ restricts access to many places and the best walks are ticket only and they dont seem to have the urge to throw rubbish and shit randomly there either.

Tom 7

Went to a place in Greece that was only accessible by boat and once of the beach it looked like someone had blown up a sewage works.

Tom 7

Re: As Jean-Paul Sartre put it...

I spent a lot of time in the Caribbean and its turned into a sort of US clone holiday resort most places now. Cant find a decent goat water soup anywhere!

Tom 7

Re: a black sand beach

Some amazing blisteringly white beaches round there. Went snow blind on one reading a book! Though it could have been whisky poisoning...

Tom 7

Re: a black sand beach

Very impressive - however you might not want to walk on it on a sunny day. There's a cracker in NZ which is also a good surf beach and you can have a laugh at people doing impressions of Dudley Moor in 10.

Keeping printers quiet broke disk drives, thanks to very fuzzy logic

Tom 7

Re: Other things can get clogged too

I frequently had Win95 up for very long periods but then I was only running cygwin which was pretty well behaved.

Tom 7

Re: The Ex

Anyone remember nylon sheets*? On a dry day with woollen blankets you could light up a room while engaged in vigorous sex.

*not my choice - in digs at the time!

Tom 7

I'd imagine the stuff to be highly flammable and a spark could set it alight, or the vapour from the stuff its made from?

Tom 7

I had an old Cossard Dual Beam all valve oscilloscope that I dropped a screw on and of course it slipped through an air hole. It weighed about 80lbs so I unplugged it and sat on the floor and took the case off, located the screw and then caught my cuff on something and managed to discharge the HT capacitor of its 4kv (IIRC) and launched the thing about 12' across the room tearing a few intercostal muscles. The scope survived its trip seemingly unharmed! It was still working 20 years later when I got rid of it.

Tom 7

Re: Way Back...

Used to use a Calcomp 8 pen plotter about 6' wide for chip layout. Hypnotic to watch and a pen would almost always run out when you needed a plot in a hurry - they were made of brass so you could only guess how much ink was in them by how heavy they felt.

Spent a rather unpleasant time on evening when it ate my tie and had to wait for the security guard to do his rounds and set me free!

The next deep magic Linux program to change the world? Io_uring

Tom 7

I'm currently trying to build some documentation that shows how Fuzix works. Basically hyperlinking the code with explanations. Perhaps not the best place to start as there's a lot of cpu dependent code. Its quite an eye opener and I hope it will be a useful educational tool. I may move onto Linux when done.

Tom 7

Re: Wondering about sched policies

I'm wondering how SystemD will fuck with this. Because it surely will.

Tom 7

Re: Io-uring is not new news

From the word hyperbollocks!

Isnt the data plane pretty much all hardware with mac addresses triggering the routes through a crosspoint switch? Trying to remember from a 1.6Ghz crosspoint for TV routing from 30 years ago.

Arm execs: We respect RISC-V but it's not a rival in the datacenter

Tom 7

Re: What goes around comes around

The idea never went away. The major reason CISC survived is down to MS. I think its only recently Windows stopped needing to run some 16 bit 8086 code to get the full works.

White House puts $50m into floating wind turbine projects

Tom 7

Re: Quite literally a drop in the Ocean

Probably a floating wind turbine requires better anchoring than a floating oil rig? No an oil rig would almost certainly have more drag than a wind turbine. Rotating blades only catch at best 40% of the available power. Sails on rails are actually better!

Tom 7

Has the US shrunk or something?

Even if you reduce the cost of floating wind by 70% it will still be more expensive than land based. Mind you you'll probably be able to sell it to idiots like Truss.

China can destroy US space assets, Space Force ops nominee warns

Tom 7

Re: In the words of a certain Ferengi

luminance? Albedo shirltey!

Brain-inspired chips promise ultra-efficient AI, so why aren’t they everywhere?

Tom 7

Re: For power reductiong the big thing is going clockless

The brain runs on around 20W and even thinking really hard doesnt increase the load much though its obviously pretty hard to work out its power consumption as stressing the brain excites the body as well though fMRI scans indicate the bits that are running hot at any one moment they can as yet measure calorifically I believe.

Tom 7

Re: Don't feed your AI any cheese

Dreaming is just part of the data processing engines: Rats trained to run around mazes seem to dream of running and re-running the mazes to improve their efficiency. And they do perform much better the next day!

Tom 7

Re: If they are inspired by the brain, how are you "programming them"

Brains have evolved so they born with structures that can perform certain tasks very efficiently, evolution has also managed to work out ways so that their start up state is such that it will probably start to perform its intended task from 'birth'. Even small brains (<200 neuron ones from nematode worms) are capable of learning from the off and reproducing them in code can achieve surprising results using simple training methods.

The programming of brains is both structural and the setting of initial states somehow - chicks dont learn to eat they learn to eat effectively being programmed to eat, move and later on fuck and look after their young but all animals seem to have a degree of pre-programming (which may be purely morphological for some requirements) and others actions are controlled by hormones and I'd bet there's bits of ROM all over the place too. Epigenetics suggests things can be programmed by inheritable changes to methylisation of genes. Brains do learn, and how, but their is far more programming in there at bootup than simple* PhD students can get a grip on. The mining of the existing brains and nervous systems is far bigger a task than any company should be allowed to exploit (and patent FFS) and really needs something like an open source version of the genome project

Rare hexagonal diamond formed by crash of dwarf planet and asteroid, scientists believe

Tom 7

Believe?

Believe its 58% harder? I'd imagine they are pretty convinced. For it not to be 58% harder we'd have to chuck a lot of physics out the window.

China discovers unknown mineral on the moon, names it Changesite-(Y)

Tom 7

Re: Weight

I still remember the horror of trying to eat pasta that had been cooked at 16000 ft up Kilimanjaro several hours before the midnight start of the final ascent. It achieved a consistency of extractal dente in that it was impossible to chew and then stuck to your teeth sufficiently well to pull them out should you wish to speak!

Tom 7

Re: Weight

Before or after he got hit by the apple and presumably ate it?

Tom 7

Re: Curly -- or Straight?

Down here in the west country we have the anti-pasty particle. Sampling it is very difficult as it seems to transform into a seagull emitting charmless radiation at the same time.

Chemical plant taken offline by the best one of all: C8H10N4O2

Tom 7

(helpfully A: not C:)??

And does anything respond well to vending machine vegetable soup? I never did understand why they decided to use non-water soluble ingredients in it/

Retbleed slugs VM performance by up to 70 percent in kernel 5.19

Tom 7

Re: Faster, better, cheaper, WWW.

"We really can't have it all." Take WWW away and you probably can. Many of the really good advances are fine for things that really need every last drop of grunt which should already be isolated from potentially suspect stuff.

DuckDB, database wrangler used by Google, Facebook, and Airbnb, hits 0.5.0

Tom 7

I've had a wander around the site but finding it difficult to find decent use cases. My worry is in the wrong hands its will lead to massive tables and the grinding of gears as indexes are updated. There are reasons why OLAP has gone a different way before now.

Tom 7

Re: Wilbur

Call Ducks are white occasionally with a bit of colour - the one in the Guardian picture is a Mallard. Call ducks have a different morphology.

Tom 7

Wilbur

is not a Call Duck. Peak Guardian again!

BOFH: It's Friday, it's time to RTFM

Tom 7

Re: I need some THC

At least on a wiki you have the option of clicking on the acronym to get to a page explaining it in detail.

Hype versus reality: What you can't do with DeepMind's AlphaFold in drug discovery

Tom 7

Are you accusing AI of being an MBA?

Because they and their controllers seem to be happy for them to try and do things they've never been trained for too!

Scientists pull hydrogen from thin air in promising clean energy move

Tom 7

Re: Storage ? Transport ?

CH4? No C2H5OH - far more uses and means you can have a tipple when you drive it into a ditch while you wait for the cops!

Tom 7

Re: Storage ? Transport ?

Distribution is the problem (for the moment), not storage? It always amazes me how petrol cars got going - all exactly the same problems existed when they first came out and yet here we are.

Tom 7

Re: Storage ? Transport ?

You crash your car the petrol pools underneath it and burns you to death. You crash your H2 fuel cell machine and the H2 magically rises up (try it with a helium balloon) and out of the way.

Tom 7

You dont even need to put it into R&D. Just put it into renewables and there will be so much peak oversupply the R&D will pay for itself.

Tom 7

Re: HVDC

It seems your not there yet: a 1,100 kV link in China was completed in 2019 over a distance of 3,300 km (2,100 mi) with a power capacity of 12 GW

Tom 7

Re: Title not included...

The pipes are calling...

Tom 7

Re: Clean but not green

"and leaving them lying around is in itself pollution." I really dont want to work for you if your business acumen leads your to not maintaining or replacing your main source of income.

I've heard some really pathetic stuff against PV but the worst has to be 'the steel supports only last the lifetime of the cells and somehow you cant just unscrew a weary old panel and stick anew one on'.

Tom 7

Re: Storage ? Transport ?

It never ceases to amaze me how far backwards we have gone! We used to store coal gas and even pipe it to heart out homes and yet now we can do that because apparently H2 is leaky. Coal gas was 50% h2!!!!

Judge tells Elon Musk he can't stall Twitter trial

Tom 7

Re: Fanboi

All the pieces are on the floor though!

SiFive RISC-V CPU cores to power NASA's next spaceflight computer

Tom 7

Re: In these apps speed and feature size are way less important.

"but it's difficult to see how they're going to exploit the extra grunt."

Never used a computer before?

Tom 7

Re: Size matters

TBF diffusion of doping elements at RT is so glacially slow that the chance of it being the reason for a chip failure is pretty close to zero.

Tom 7

Re: The wait is over.

"because it allows adversaries like China and Russia keep up with Western CPU technology." You mean CPU technology with a racist sheen?

IBM wins contract to support NHS App

Tom 7

Re: Mistake

Silly reasons? How about a forty minute phone call to arrange a couple of blood tests that are not available on the standard menu like what I done today.

Tom 7

So they will be killing off older people then?

NT.

Bye bye BoJo: Liz Truss named new UK prime minister

Tom 7

Keir himself by the looks of it.

Tom 7

AUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH!

NASA scrubs Artemis mission yet again because SLS just can't handle the pressure

Tom 7

Re: Sausage Rolls (Part 2)

I like the idea of Bhaji mixed nibbles being stored in Hydrogen for rapid heating and sharing when needed.