Stuffis

Still "Brent's pile o' stuff" but at least now there are sections.

Smart Phones

• Ars Technica's Jon Stokes says RIP Palm: it's over, and here's why and I have to agree with him. Such a sad end for a long-time market leader. Engadget also weighs in. I was a long-time PalmOS user, before WebOS and the Palm Pre.
• Four stories on why iPhone third-party apps matter, from a long-time Treo user: For 3 years I used the Treo 755p which met my needs admirably; the above article sums up nicely why platform openness matters to me. I was among those who "watched with frustration as [Palm] stopped innovating and was passed by" but when it was time to switch I went with Android and not the iPhone, due to openness.

Emulation

• All the browser makers' work in optimizing their JavaScript engines is leading to a new trend of browser-based computer emulators including one that boots Linux and a GameBoy Color emulator, etc.

Hobbyist Computer Construction

• Unix Pipe Logic — this is just awesome on so many levels (all of them geeky)
• Virtual computing with Minecraft
• $20 8-Bit "Wikipedia Reader"
• Steve Chamberlin's "Big Mess o' Wires" (BMOW), a custom-built 8-bit CPU
• Babbage Difference Engine with Lego

Other Hardware

Nice overview of some parallel-computation issues: locking, load-link/store-conditional (LL/SC), and IBM's new transactional memory hardware

MIT quadcopter based on the Kinect, can map a room in 3-D in real-time

3-D printing allows rapid prototyping of flying-insect wings

High speed network research: Intel achieves 50Gbps in the lab with silicon photonics (silicon-based laser devices, 12.5Gbps per wavelength, times 4); could scale to 1Tbps.

I'm not the only one to notice that certain Diebold ATMs make Woody Woodpecker sounds (and other Diebold ATMs play the "cavalry charge") when dispensing cash.

The TonidoPlug and the GuruPlug: $99 wall-wart sized (SFF) Linux computers. The GuruPlug has 802.11 b/g, Bluetooth, and ZigBee.

An amazing, fast book scanner that allows you to just rapidly flip the book pages by it; it flattens the curved images

tweenbots (urban roamers that explore human-robot interaction)

MIT team builds an Indoor Autonomous Helicopter which functions in a GPS-blocked environment, and can autonomously map out an area, avoid obstacles, etc.

Description of the Microsoft/Danger catastrophic data loss disaster (T-Mobile Sidekick phones). More details are emerging.

• This is a big deal, and a cautionary tale with regard to "cloud services". Clearly Apple architected a safe solution (iPhone syncs to PC which syncs to the cloud), and Danger did not (Sidekick syncs to the cloud which (optionally) syncs to a PC — oops, what happens when your cloud data gets destroyed?).
• The root cause of the data loss hasn't yet come out; I think it's too soon to say it was sabotage, but given Microsoft's history (e.g. Hotmail), "dogfooding" would not surprise me.
• "Pink" is the Microsoft project to create a (Microsoft-grown) Zune Phone. "Yes, they set ambitious and clearly fictitious target dates and then make hard decisions based on those dates. Yes, they half-developed features and then cut them to bring their dates in." (Sounds exactly like Vista.) "Yes they cut SMS from the phone recently (because SMS is 'too hard'); no doubt someone beat them up about that, but the point is that the decision makers are beyond clueless." (If true, that is an incredible decision.) "[N]o one really grasps how dysfunctional Microsoft has become."

Yet another reason why I love AMD's HyperTransport. AMD really shines in 4-way and larger configurations (NUMA).

My TINI site.

My contact information, brief autobiography (such as it is), and family tree. back to Nordist.net