* Posts by Enki

8 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Feb 2011

Cloud vendors can't resist the lucrative smell of gaming dollars – and they're all in it to win it

Enki

I know that Unity was used for Heartstone, which alone might put it at the top for game engines. I know it's also used for Harebrained Studios Battletech series and for the new Lion King movie. I'm sure there are others, but I don't know any of the top of my mind. It's definitely becoming popular among my daughter's IMGD major crowd, and I would guess they are young enough not to get the Crisis joke.

Who needs a supercomputer when you can get a couple of petaflops on AWS?

Enki

Or AWS on some instances (https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2019/02/aws-nitro-system/). I wouldn't be surprised if Google can on some cases as well.

Another AI attack, this time against 'black box' machine learning

Enki

Re: let's look at this a little sceptically

One potential is to perturb signs in the real world for autonomous or assisted cars. Another would be to perturb faces to prevent recognition. This is research now, but there is the potential to use this type of attack to determine the most effective perturbations to modify real world to prevent detections. Since the attack only requires the classifications, it could build it's own set using say an online API or other external method, determine the proper attack, and then modify the real world situations to avoid or mislead classification.

How Rogue One's Imperial stormtroopers SAVED Star Wars and restored order

Enki

Re: Not seen R1 yet but...

The Force Awakens was fine, but it really was a New Hope with what my son would call "Power Creep". Luke, born as one of the most powerful wielders of the force, still had to train to gain cool Jedi powers. Rey just calls up whatever power she needs instinctively.

Rogue One has flaws especially around the gratuitous CGI, but I would rather have that with a reasonable story rather than the other way around.

I love you. I will kill you! I want to make love to you: The evolution of AI in pop culture

Enki

Re: thanks for the pointers

Another good one to add to the list is the anime "Time of Eve", which also explores AI independance and discrimination within the context of Asimov's three laws.

Hey, Intel and Micron: XPoint is phase-change memory, right? Or is it? Yes. No. Yes

Enki

Same Difference

While XPoint does work through a phase change, its behavior is different from PCM. Since PCM works through the relative resistance of the amorphous/crystalline material itself, it is slower to write (you have to get the state within the tolerance) and slower to read. It also suffers from wear out as the ability to be sufficiently exact breaks down over time (I am simplifying of course). On the plus side, it allows for multi-bit cells based on intermediate states.

XPoint, the phase change is just a mechanism to allow or block the wire through the cell. This means that reading and writing are much faster, and there is less wear out risk, but there are no intermediate states for multi-bit cells.

Since the behavior is different, I'm sure the marketing guy did his job and told the engineers to give it a new name and avoid the words phase change. In this case it is the right decision as knowledge of PCM would lead you away from understanding the behavior of these new cells.

El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

Enki

Hover

The popup mouse hover has too short of a delay before the popup. I get lots of distracting popups when I am scrolling using my touchpad. If you add a couple seconds, you will retain the effect while allowing for easier reading and scrolling.

Intel 'Sandy Bridge' mobile platform

Enki

Battery Drain

Flash isn't necessarily less overall power if you don't account for the amount of work done. If you ran the system full tilt, you would spend less time waiting for disk. This implies more time the CPU spends in an active rather than a sleep state, and therefore at a higher power drain.

To test, you would need an application that has a fixed transaction rate versus time so that the SSD based machine would spend additional time in a low power state.