DollyTheSheep - Slashdot User

An Open Source Compiler From CUDA To X86-Multicore 71

Posted by timothy on Wednesday December 23, 2009 @03:06PM from the abstraction-gains-a-layer dept.

Gregory Diamos writes "An open source project, Ocelot, has recently released a just-in-time compiler for CUDA, allowing the same programs to be run on NVIDIA GPUs or x86 CPUs and providing an alternative to OpenCL. A description of the compiler was recently posted on the NVIDIA forums. The compiler works by translating GPU instructions to LLVM and then generating native code for any LLVM target. It has been validated against over 100 CUDA applications. All of the code is available under the New BSD license."

Best Man Rigs Newlyweds' Bed To Tweet During Sex 272

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday December 17, 2009 @09:40PM from the nice-feed dept.

When an UK man was asked to be the best man at a friend's wedding he agreed that he would not pull any pranks before or during the ceremony. Now the groom wishes he had extended the agreement to after the blessed occasion as well. The best man snuck into the newlyweds' house while they were away on their honeymoon and placed a pressure-sensitive device under their mattress. The device now automatically tweets when the couple have sex. The updates include the length of activity and how vigorous the act was on a scale of 1-10.

What Does Google Suggest Suggest About Humanity? 513

Posted by samzenpus on Friday November 06, 2009 @03:40PM from the fire-makes-things-hot dept.

CNETNate writes "You'll laugh, but mostly you'll cry. Some of the questions Google gets asked to deliver results for is beyond worrying. 'Can you put peroxide in your ear?', 'Why would a pregnancy test be negative?', and 'Why can't I own a Canadian?' being just a selection of the truly baffling — and disturbing — questions Google is regularly forced to answer."

D&D On Google Wave 118

Posted by Soulskill on Friday October 30, 2009 @03:53AM from the i-failed-my-invite-throw dept.

Jon Stokes at the Opposable Thumbs blog relates his experience using Google Wave as a platform for Dungeons and Dragons — the true test of success for any new communications technology. A post at Spirits of Eden lists some of Wave's strengths for gaming. Quoting: "The few games I'm following typically have at least three waves: one for recruiting and general discussion, another for out-of-character interactions ('table talk'), and the main wave where the actual in-character gaming takes place. Individual players are also encouraged to start waves between themselves for any conversations that the GM shouldn't be privy to. Character sheets can be posted in a private wave between a player and the GM, and character biographies can go anywhere where the other players can get access to them. The waves are persistent, accessible to anyone who's added to them, and include the ability to track changes, so they ultimately work quite well as a medium for the non-tactical parts of an RPG. A newcomer can jump right in and get up-to-speed on past interactions, and a GM or industrious player can constantly maintain the official record of play by going back and fixing errors, formatting text, adding and deleting material, and reorganizing posts."

Comment The best way to keep a secret (Score 1) 72

by DollyTheSheep on Wednesday September 23, 2009 @10:34AM (#29515329) Attached to: Research Determines Women Can Keep a Secret For 47 Hours

The best way to keep a secret is .. to forget it :-)

Comment Meta-Critique (Score 1) 383

by DollyTheSheep on Wednesday August 19, 2009 @05:23AM (#29116327) Attached to: The Mindset of the Incoming College Freshmen

Compiling lists such as the Beloit College Annual Mindset List is in itself 20th century old-think about large collections of people like the baby boomer generation. Did they ever heard about concepts like the long tail? No one likes generalizations, which are applied to himself (as many posts above) point out.

Comment Got me into functional programming (Score 1) 299

by DollyTheSheep on Tuesday August 18, 2009 @02:37PM (#29109275) Attached to: Scala, a Statically Typed, Functional, O-O Language

Back at university I somehow dodged functional programming. I knew functional programming was and is an important concept, but besides an excursion to Prolog and some SQL I never went outside imperative and/or object-oriented programming. I never wanted to learn Lisp or Scheme, Haskell seemed to much for mathematicians back then. Scala intrigued me enough to give functional programming a try again. It's object-oriented, has generics, is strongly typed, but has a powerful inference systems, so declaring things is not too tedious. Java classes and packages can be used within. It has not only builtins for concurrency but also for parallelism. However, it was the functional programming paradigm opened my eyes, what I was missing yet.

Comment It's the Yrr (Score 1) 424

by DollyTheSheep on Thursday July 16, 2009 @01:04PM (#28719015) Attached to: Huge Unidentified Organic Blob Floating Around Alaska

It's one manifestion of the "Yrr" from The Swarm

Repent, the end is nigh!

Comment Accidently tattooed myself (Score 2, Interesting) 68

by DollyTheSheep on Thursday July 16, 2009 @04:36AM (#28713907) Attached to: World's Oldest Tattoo Written In Soot

While I admire artistic tattoos, I probably won't get one for myself. The idea of something on my skin that is forever, but is perhaps not looking good or cool forever repels me.

But when I was a kid, I accidentally tattooed myself, atleast with one dot of ink :-) It was in arts education in school. We did calligraphy with old fashioned dip pens. I had the habit then to gnaw on all my writing utensils like pencils, pens etc. So I did that with my dip pen too. Something fell on the floor, I bent down to get it and ...ouch... I had the tip of the nib in my thigh. It's still a small greenish dot after 30 years.

Comment KDE 4.0 reason to try out GNOME (Score 1) 869

by DollyTheSheep on Sunday January 25, 2009 @05:18AM (#26596701) Attached to: Linus Switches From KDE To Gnome

I was a long time user of KDE (I think, it goes back to the early 1.x releases) and never even bothered to try out GNOME. I knew, that some of the really cool apps (Mozilla, Gimp etc.) are GTK+ and the KDE and GNOME both share technology from FreeDesktop.org), but overall I always had the impression, that KDE was so flexible in configuration and the use of Qt superior to GTK+) that a change wasn't needed and not even desired. But with KDE 4.0 I had big usability problems that even KDE 4.1 did not really solve. One of the reasons was immaturity, it had fewer features than 3.5 and the remaining one were often buggy. The other reason was a change in usability that I did not understand in the beginning. GNOME is less functional even compared with KDE 4.0 but I appreciated it's stability for a while. I used it extensively with Compiz and found few stability issues. It's less configurable, but the handling is solid. In the meantime, I switched back to KDE 4.1, because it begins to look usable again. I simply appreciate Qt more than GTK+ and overall I have the impression there are more (and more really usefull) apps in KDE than in GNOME. KDE 4.2 will hopefully implement everything what was promised for 4.0.

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