Ugly Betty has the exact same plot (including must-be-from-the-same-source-material stuff about how the perfectly routine magazine process called "Run of Book" has special fashion-industry quirks and at least one identical "Are you the 'Before'?" joke), is funnier, and (with the exception of Meryl Streep, who's fantastic) is better cast. (They …

http://www.google.com/search?q=vista+architecture

It seems to be the common wisdom that programmers, as well as the general public, are hesitant about embracing Vista. With results like the above, it's no wonder: at the moment it takes until page 5 to see a relevant text article …

Hoowee! Even with a bad cold, New Year's in Hawaii is a special thing: with July 4th, it is one of 2 days per year that fireworks are legal. I imagine that it's the Asian influence on the society, but for whatever reason, New Year's is much louder than the …

According to InformationWeek, Umakant Sharma, seeded 2nd in a tournament in New Delhi, was caught with a Bluetooth headset stitched into a cap that he wore "pulled down over his ears" during competition. According to the All India Chess Federation, accomplices fed him moves from a chess program. He's been …

Well, more or less...

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There's really no way to program XNA, even in 2D modes, without learning HLSL.

Damien Guard has released a preview of Envy Code R , a good-looking programming font. At the moment, I think it looks best at higher font-sizes: I would definitely consider this for use in presentations.

Incidentally, the image is from some utility programs I've been writing for iTunes. I got an …

Absolute times to calculate a fixed range of the Mandelbrot set:

Machine Concurrency Language Time

Dual-Opteron Singlethreaded C# \~0.81

Dual-Opteron Multithreaded C# \~0.45

Dual-Opteron Singlethreaded C++ \~0.50

Dual-Opteron Multithreaded C++ \~0.38

XBox 360 Singlethreaded C# \~4.4

XBox 360 Multithreaded C# \~2.1

XBox 360\ GPU …

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Ah, that's more like it. This is a graph of duration (in seconds) versus the number of threads during a calculation of a Mandelbrot set using the XNA Framework on the XBox 360 (Neil: The previous graph …

Properly chastised by Neil Bartlett for not labeling my Y Axis on a graph, I added such a title to my next attempt. I then cut-and-pasted that image, which resulted in this being pasted into my blog editor:

And yet, I had already typed the Axis Title, as this screen …

UPDATE: See this new post ~~It looks like XNA does not distribute processing across the multiple cores of the 360:~~

This is identical code (a Mandelbrot calculation of a fixed size) running with multiple threads. While my desktop machine speeds up with more threads (peaking at 3), the XBox 360 …