Does It Come With a Fake Male-Model Face, Too?

Given the cheesy Photoshoppery of the image, I suspect this is fake, but supposedly, this is a pullover that you slip into for a videoconference. Given my recent 4 AM local-time teleconferences, I might be able to use this.

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Alan Zeichick Joins Blogosphere

Alan Zeichick, the man who put the "Z" in BZ Media, has started to blog. Alan's been in the "writing about computers" business since Radio Shak Model 100 days and we've worked together since 1989. I have no idea where he'll find the time to blog, but on the other …

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Smalltalk Daily

James Robertson is producing a series of screencasts providing a Smalltalk overview. I highly recommend taking a look if you are not familiar with Smalltalk. You've undoubtedly heard of Smalltalk and perhaps have seem some Smalltalk syntax, but if you've not seen the Smalltalk development environment in use, you might …

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Exceptions in the Manycore Era

Here's some interesting reading on the challenges of and possible strategies for dealing with exceptions in concurrent versions of C++. The try...catch...finally model of exception handling introduces its own control flow. How will that interact with concurrent models in which you're passing around a "future" (essentially, an IOU …

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When Things Go Awry Writing

I've been writing a series of articles for DevX on concurrent programming. The final installment was supposed to be "Multicore for multimedia." Plan A was to speed up the MAD (MPEG Audio Decoder) processing library using OpenMP. That went well enough except for the fact that the code was so …

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Laser-Based Processor: A Nanosecond is Still A Foot

Intel's announcement of a laser-based chip is frickin' cool and, at the practical level, may be a big deal (beats me). But one thing that blows my mind every time I think about it is that light can only travel \~11.8 inches in a billionth of a second. And …

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HP: I'm A Little Confused

One of the things that differentiates me from many of my analyst colleagues is that I don't generally delve into business stuff: I'm a technology guy. So normal boardroom shenanigans and so forth aren't "my beat." So let me see if I have this straight: the chairwoman of HP hired …

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Are the CLR & JVM Well Suited For The Manycore Era?

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 …

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Is That A Turbine In Your Pocket?

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 …

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Made In Express Winners Announced: I Call "Shenanigans!"

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 …

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