File under “Lusting After One” Dept.
Specs:
Gumstix single-board computer, which combines a 400 MHz Intel XScale PXA255 processor with a Bluetooth transceiver, USB, a serial port and an MMC card reader.
They claim 11/1/2005 availability. Guess I’ll have to check around then.
Link here
One way to promote your favorite programming language is to write a
useful tool then put a clause in the license like this:
4. You must agree not to port or translate Chronos into any programming
language whose syntax, semantics and computational model are not substantially
compliant to the ANSI Smalltalk Language Specification. Porting Chronos to
non-Smalltalk programming languages is strictly prohibited. However, you are
welcome to enter into negotiations with the copyright owner for permission to
port Chronos to non-Smalltalk programming languages. In some cases, permission
may be granted at no cost or other encumberance.
Very amusing. The author’s website also has many really useful links and
references on trying to represent the date and time on a computer. (It is
not as easy as it looks. The simple stuff is simple. The complete version
is quite tricky)
The Inquirer reports that FEMA is only allowing users of the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser to apply for hurricane relief funds. “The now very much criticised US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has stopped Mac and Linux victims of hurricane Katrina from applying for relief. The agency, which is already in hot water for its lack-lustre rescue efforts in New Orleans, has created a web-based service that only works for users of Windows and IE6.”
File this under the WTF Were They Thinking Dept.
If you’ve not heard of Arc
from Paul Graham you probably don’t
follow programming language wanking that much. Philip Greenspun decided
to offer his thoughts on Arc:
No hopes for Arc, though Paul is a nice guy, unless someone writes a ground-breaking must-have open-source application in Arc that others want to modify. Lisp is more tasteful than C or Java but not that dramatic a help unless the programmer is very smart and tasteful him or herself. The average programmer seems to be getting progressively less devoted to taste and quality and therefore I would think that Lisp will continue to dwell in obscurity as things like PHP ascend to popularity.
To me
Arc sounds like an interesting
idea but if you take 100 years to design
the 100-year language
you’ll have to re-advertise again since all the people who first heard of
such a great idea will probably be in their graves. But if you have it
made financially what’s the
rush? Unless you’re trying to become ultra-famous…
Paolo Amoroso posed an interesting
question on the comp.ai newsgroup
(yes newsgroups still exist!) regarding what has happened to Expert Systems
since the AI Winter.
He got some very enlightening responses on what
has happened with these systems since their introduction a couple of decades
ago. Here is a choice quote from one of the replies:
In financial fraud detection, particularly the problem of finding
credit card transaction fraud, expert systems were an early candidate.
Based on experts’ experience, rules were posed which characterized
known fraud and the output on unseen data was used to figure out how
the rules would go wrong. These systems did as well as the state of
the art at the time which was considerably worse than the state of the
art now.
Go right to the discussion
Paolo’s blog post on Expert Systems
Paolo’s blog post on LISA and rule-based Programming
After my previous whining
about the Croquet download site being
down for repairs. A recent email on the Croquet Mailing Lists led me to
believe they had fixed the download service.
I double check it to find it’s back up. Awesome. Kudos to a quick
recovery. And non-kudos to my crappy timing on checking the Croquet site
when they were caught under repair.
For you blog folks that love keeping up with display technologies (that
never seem to ever make it to the market… or at least the market that I
and normal people shop at) does anyone know what ever became of the
Mitsubishi DLP PocketProjector?
Here is one of the earlier announcements from
chait.net:
The PocketProjector will be available in July at an SRP of $699 US, not cheap certainly, but a fair price for an SVGA projector with multiple inputs, multiple portable power solutions, and that is pocketable.
And yet another one from Gizomodo:
I am confident that portable front-projection is going to be one of the break-out products this year. Look at this new Mitsubishi PocketProjector: weighing only 14 ounces.. [blah blah blah]
I searched in July and ended up finding this from Chait.net:
In addition to the updated pictures, the following is the latest data off the preliminary spec sheet for the Pocket Projector. Note that it includes an estimated ship date of September, and estimated street price of $799 (which is extremely competitive for such advanced technology).
Alrighty, a $100 US price bump for no explained reason. I can deal with that.
The average small-sized projector still clocks in at over $1k US if you want
semi-decent specs. So back into the waiting queue…
Okay, it’s September 2005…
I searched
PriceGrabber.com,
Mitsubishi’s website and
a couple of other random online merchants AND of course
Amazon.com and still
can’t find it. Okay, so what gives? It certainly would be nice if Mitsubishi
actually bothered to update their Release Date to something realistic like…
before the end of the decade rather than ‘Summer 2005′ which is quite over.
This was absolutely hilarious although extremely crude:
Open Sores versus Professional is the difference between green and brown shit, and anyone who tells you different is trying to grab your wallet while you are otherwise occupied. At least the Open Sores people are only wasting THEIR time, and not billable hours…
Original Link to quote. (Note it got a little preachy about
PG)
Once again, I tried sitting down and working a little bit with
Croquet. However the
tutorials that are available at DMU
break with the version of Croquet that I have on my system.
I have applied all the updates by using the Big Updates button in Croquet.
This might have been my problem. Unfortunately, Croquet is a moving target
and the Updates come steadily and as a poor beginner it isn’t always
easy to keep up if you aren’t following the curve. Just for note it
seems the last updates I have according to the Change Sorter tool is
August 18th, 2005. That seems a little old…
I took a shot at downloading a new version of Croquet from the website
however got this message:
download is currently disabled due to technical difficulties
d’oh
While I do understand that Croquet is a moving target and at any time
things will not be working. It seems my timing for trying to goof around
with Croquet is impeccably bad. In theory, I could sit through and
figure out what the problem is (actually I know: the problem after
tracing the debugger is that when trying to load a texture it is
trying to use some function pathFromURI: however there is NO Class
that implements this function anymore… oops) and fix it and keep
on going or perhaps submit a fix. My gut feeling tells me this is an
old problem and I’m really not helping the Croquet folk move forward by
fixing this problem and telling them. More likely they are trying to
get this all working in the background and will have something up
’soon’.
So I’m left with one option…
Wait until another version comes out. Again. Welcome to the bleeding
edge.
Speed eating
seems to be the coined phrase for the ability to stuff your face with
a huge amount of food in a short amount of time. The Japanese have pushed
it past an art into a competitive sport it seems.
Takeru Kobayashi polished off 83 of the steamed vegetarian dumplings in eight minutes
…
“I feel very excited,” he told the Associated Press news agency after the race.
I wonder if you’ll ever hear any of these competitors say, “I’m very full.”
The GPU
has seen an amazing jump in power over the past few years. It has moved
from just processing graphics to handling more general types of computations.
This general purpose computing on a GPU has been dubbed
GPGPU (General Purpose
GPU). If the computation matches the computational model that the GPU
provides a tremendous speedup is possible.
However, lately OSes have been learning to take advantage of using the
GPU for their own graphics operations. Mac OS X tries to offload as much
of the fancy graphics effects on their desktop by giving it to the GPU
to process. This is great as it leaves the main CPU free for the OS
and other applications to process more.
But if GPGPU and OSes are both using the GPU very intensely this seems
to suggest that the GPU would become a contended resource in future
computing environments. The rather straightforward answer to people
wanting to take advantage of GPU computing in this case is to buy another
GPU and use that as the co-processor and leave the main GPU for handling
the desktop. But in a 1 GPU only environment I wonder if the resource
contention will become heavier in the future…
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