Patrick Logan refers to Ted Leung observing that quad-core and octo-core MacPros don't show anything like linear speedup. This accords with my own fanaticism about the manycore future. A question I don't know the answer to: Do the CLR & JVM have characteristics that dramatically help or dramatically hinder their suitability …

I'm not sure that I'd feel comfortable carrying a fan rotating at 20,000 revolutions per second in my cellphone, which I keep in my pocket, which is next to my...

The thing produces 10 watts. I don't know if I'm just being paranoid about wondering how it might fail …

The Made In Express contest is over, with the winner being an "All Terrain Self-Maneuverable Robot." This is unfair for at least two reasons:

1. It's a group entry ("Group entries will not be accepted"), and
2. It's been under development for years

I downloaded the source to the robot and the …

Tina and I dove this area of Irian Jaya years ago. It was beautiful and very wild. We didn't see any fin-walking horn sharks, though. (We did see a species of stonefish that is classified as deadly and the locals were like: "Oh, if you get stung, you chew that …

I'm hiring.

This is fascinating: in a time where the common wisdom is that "big" industry conferences have met their doom, the Game Developer's Conference has just announced that they are doubling the size of their floor space (i.e.: making money from people spending tens of thousands of dollars in setting …

The slow boat from Amazon finally brought my copy of Test Drive Unlimited, a "massive multiuser online racing game" set on the island of Oahu. At first, I was slightly disappointed, since while the layout of the streets is based on reality, the scenery isn't. So it's not like you're …

Pete Wright, whose TabletPC Sudoku program was "shot in the head" by Microsoft's surprise release of their own version (join the group, Pete!), has ended his long relationship with MS consulting in order to fully embrace a job working with Ruby on Rails. His post is obviously cathartic, but he …

I greatly regret having missed this conference, but personal issues trumped my travel plans. Videos (audio over PPT) of many presentations are now available. I haven't watched them myself yet, but word is that Cory Doctorow's presentation on SecondLife was a standout.

The most-excellent SF author David Brin has an article on Salon called "Why Johnny Can't Code" (you have to sit through a commercial to gain access). In it, he laments the approachability of dear-old "line oriented" BASIC, by which, I think he means that era of BASIC when every line …