October 7, 2008 – 12:56 pm
From Maximum PC’s “Intelligent” Supercomputers Put to the Turing Test: “The [Turing] test consists of a machine attempting to fool a judge into believing that it could be a human by having a text-based conversation on any subject. If the computer’s responses convince the judge that they are speaking with a human, then it has [...]
October 1, 2008 – 11:06 am
From Mark Buchanan’s This Economy Does Not Compute: “If we’re really going to avoid crises, we’re going to need something more imaginative, starting with a more open-minded attitude to how science can help us understand how markets really work.”
From Ars Technica’s Syncing vs. saving, and the case for a home storage cloud: “A ‘disk’ is…a storage abstraction that hides all sorts of sync activity from you, the user. So as you use a computer, the different levels of the storage hierarchy (registers, cache, main memory, hard disk) are all ’syncing’ different copies of [...]
From Daring Fireball’s Sixty-Six: “The idea that Apple now sells two-thirds of retail computers costing $1000 or more is simply stunning. I (along with many others) have long argued that a simplistic ‘overall PC market share’ number has never been a good metric for gauging the Mac’s success because the ‘overall PC market’ includes millions [...]
February 22, 2008 – 11:11 am
From Apple Insider’s Mega Apple filing details next-gen ‘multi-touch input surface’: “The latest patent filing from Apple Inc. hints at a next-generation multi-touch ’surface’ that would combine typing, pointing, scrolling, and handwriting capabilities into a single ergonomic design aimed at replacing traditional input devices such as the keyboard, mouse, and drawing tablet.”
February 1, 2008 – 11:29 am
Back in October, I wrote about My Leopard Installation Adventure, but before that, I explained why I was becoming an early adopter of the new Macintosh operating system, which was, namely, that my Mac mini was broken and I hoped Leopard could fix it.
One week ago today, I finally admitted that it couldn’t.
Here’s what happened. [...]
October 24, 2007 – 12:31 pm
Many of you may not know this, but on Friday, Apple will release its new operating system, OS X 10.5, a.k.a. Leopard, into the wild. This is the sixth major operating system that Apple’s delivered in six years (compare to Microsoft, who has said there will only be one major upgrade to Windows during the [...]
September 25, 2007 – 10:15 am
From NY Times’ article, Buy a Laptop for a Child, Get Another Laptop Free: “One Laptop Per Child, an ambitious project to bring computing to the developing world’s children, has considerable momentum. Years of work by engineers and scientists have paid off in a pioneering low-cost machine that is light, rugged and surprisingly versatile. The [...]
From For Certain Tasks, the Cortex Still Beats the CPU : “‘Basically, I want to make all of humanity more efficient by exploiting the human cycles that get wasted,’ [the inventor of Captchas says]. ‘As humanity goes online, it’s becoming an extremely advanced, large-scale processing unit.’” An interesting article on how average humans like you [...]
December 11, 2006 – 12:22 pm
From Computers that digest the news to change trading: “Computers that read news stories and use the information gleaned as a basis for trading will become widespread over the next five years, Reuters said yesterday.” That’s right: the invisible hand is becoming the digital hand.
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