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Robotics

The Best Robots of 2009 51

kkleiner writes "Singularity Hub has just unveiled its second annual roundup of the best robots of the year. In 2009 robots continued their advance towards world domination with several impressive breakouts in areas such as walking, automation, and agility, while still lacking in adaptability and reasoning ability. It will be several years until robots can gain the artificial intelligence that will truly make them remarkable, but in the meantime they are still pretty awesome."

Comment Re:Serious question (Score 1) 168

Besides all the other posts, this might just be a small improvement in rare cases:

The V8 javascript engine does some clever work when performing regular expression matching. Normal engines would compare one character at a time, but whenever the possibility occurs V8 matches several characters at once (eg. for /foobar/ it will try fo match "foob" instead of just first "f", then "o", then "o"), doing comparison on longer segments than just (usually) 8 bits at a time. This usually means that comparisons are grouped together as 32 bit values matching several characters at once.

I reckon the 64-bit edition would simply match up to 64 bits as well.

There are a lot of exceptions where the engine can't just simply match long segments (unicode, case-insensitive searches and so on) and there surely are operations that are a lot more cpu intensive than just comparing strings. I'm just excited about that simple optimization :)

Comment Re:I was pleasantly surprised... (Score 5, Funny) 223

I got eight new channels on Friday -- the MHz and ION networks went digital in my area, so now I can watch Bollywood movies, English-language Russian TV, NHK Today, and some Chinese thing, among others.

These actually can be quite interesting to browse -- the Russian take on the Iranian election was kind of interesting.

Caveat: These reports origin from foreign dubious sources and haven't been processed by the US News un-bias-o-matic.

Comment Re:Software really has yet to catch up to hardware (Score 5, Funny) 177

Care to count how many layers of abstraction there are between a typical GUI application and the bare metal on a modern *nix?

I look forward to reading /. in fifteen years.

"Windows FOX is bloated. Why does it require 2 TB of ram just to boot when I can browse the intercloud without problems on Gnubun*x running with only 512 GB ram?"

Windows

Submission + - Free Windows XP to Vista Transformation Pack!

xt writes: If you think Vista is just a visually glorified version of XP, not worthy of your money, rejoice; using the free Vista Transformation Pack, you can transform your Windows user interface to ultimate Windows Vista! The project has no ties with Microsoft. It's a clever hack, replacing various resources and files to achieve the Vista look. Details and downloads at the project's forum and various other sites!

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