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Hardware

Submission + - Will Cheap 3D Fab Start a Innovation Renaissance? (oreilly.com)

Submitted by blackbearnh
blackbearnh writes: An article over on O'Reilly Radar makes the argument that, just as inexpensive or free software development environments has led to a cornucopia of amazing web and mobile applications, the plummeting cost of 3D fabrication equipment could usher in myriad new physical inventions. The article was prompted by a new Kickstarter project, which if funded, will attempt to produce a DIY CNC milling system for under $400. TFA: "We're already seeing the cool things that people have started doing with 3D fab at the higher-entry-level cost. Many of them are ending up on Kickstarter themselves, such as an iPhone 4 camera mount that was first prototyped using a 3D printer. Now I'm dying to see what we'll get when anyone can create the ideas stuck in their heads."
Google

Submission + - Google Plans "Searchless" Search (internetevolution.com)

Submitted by rsmiller510
rsmiller510 writes: Google has a vision for the future of search where instead of explicitly entering keywords, Google serves you results automatically based on what it "knows" about you and where you are in the world at any given moment. Creepy, fascinating or both?

Submission + - RIM's Jim Balsillie: Mobile is All About The Web (oreilly.com)

Submitted by blackbearnh
blackbearnh writes: There's been a lot of noise recently about which mobile devices will support what development environments, and whether the iPhone's lockout of Flash hurts Apple more, or Adobe. But Jim Balsillie, co-CEO of Research in Motion (you know, the Blackberry guys...) is betting the house that HTML5 and the mobile web is really where the future lies. In an interview promoting the Web 2.0 Summit, Balsillie talks about RIM's new emphasis on the web, what the reemergence of Microsoft in the mobile market might mean, and if cell phones and tablets need to converge. "You start asking the question: If you're carrying around a tablet, how much performance do you want in the smartphone? Because you want to do a certain set of tasks really well, but you don't want the smartphone to be a proxy for a tablet-type job because now you've got the tablet. The interplay is uncertain."
GNOME

Submission + - GNOME's executive director resigns, joins Mozilla (networkworld.com)

Submitted by Julie188
Julie188 writes: Stormy Peters is stepping down as GNOME's executive director and heading to Mozilla to work on developer engagement. Peters says she is leaving the GNOME Foundation to join Mozilla and work on "pushing freedom on the Web as much as we've pushed for it on the desktop." GNOME is in rough waters these days, what with Ubuntu's plans to move away from it in favor of its own Unity UI and the endless delays on GNOME 3.0.

Submission + - How To Tell A Software Developer What You Want

Submitted by
Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: "Too often, we've seen the software that results from poor communication between user/client and developer. Every developer wishes that users would do a better job of explaining what they need, but we never give them the instructions for "How to tell us what they (think they) want." How To Tell A Software Developer What You Want is a checklist for non-programmers, with suggestions like "Don't tell the developer about the solution. Describe the problem" and "Define the users." It also explains why the user should include those items and the terrifying results if these instructions are ignored.

This is a suitable document to hand to a prospective client who has only a vague notion of what he wants, and thus can save the developer's sanity, the client's budget, and the need to submit posts to Clients from Hell."
Games

Submission + - Adding a Gaming Layer to the Real World (oreilly.com)

Submitted by blackbearnh
blackbearnh writes: Anyone who's ever seen a LARP (Live Action Role Playing) run at a science fiction convention know that you can take the real world and add a game on top of it. Kevin Slavin has been doing the same thing, but one a much bigger scale. He has spent the last decade designing "big games", games that are played out over entire cities using the existing landscape as part of the story. In an interview running today, he talks about the attraction of big games, why seemingly 'mindless' games like FarmVille have value, and why virtual realities like Second Life are going about it wrong. "One thing that Second Life and the movement toward augmented reality have in common is that they both believe the pleasure of a game and the meaning of a game and the experience of a game rest primarily in the optics. But I think that there's a fundamental misunderstanding about what makes games fun. Chess wouldn't be more fun if you had perfectly rendered kings and actual castles. I think one of the best examples of this is Tamagotchi. The creature itself was maybe eight pixels by eight pixels and black and white. What made it feel real wasn't that it looked real; it was that it acted real. It could articulate demands upon you that your eye itself couldn't do. In Tamagotchi versus Second Life, I'll go with Tamagotchi."
Programming

Submission + - Integrating Flash with the Arduino (oreilly.com)

Submitted by blackbearnh
blackbearnh writes: I know, you're already screaming "But why?!!!" However, as it turns out, there are lots of valid reasons you might want to stick a nice UI frontend on top of something tiny, like an Arduino. Mike Chambers, who manages the Flash product line for Adobe, is also an ardent tinkerer with little computers, and talked to O'Reilly about the ways in which people are integrating Flash with SBCs and other small beasties. He even raises the possibility that Flash itself could run on an Arduino-like device. "We have already seen people run Adobe Flash on the BeagleBoard, which is similar to the Arduino. Given how fast the speed of these devices is increasing and the costs are falling, I suspect well will see more and more examples of Flash running directly on these types of devices."

Comment Re:grammar (Score 1) 98

by blackbearnh (#33002768) Attached to: Managing the Most Remote Data Center In the World
I'll take credit for the gripped vs griped issue (I'll blame it on the fact I posted it past midnight, 3 timezones west of my normal). But if you check Firehose, the story started out with the headline of "Most Remote". And for the record, I'm neither a Wookie, nor related to Humpty Dumpty. I'm a Ninja Coder of the Kung Fu Panda school.
IT

Submission + - Managing the Most Remote Data Center in the World (youtube.com)

Submitted by blackbearnh
blackbearnh writes: Imagine that your data center was in the most geographically remote location in the world. Now imagine that you can only get to it 4 months of the year. Just for fun, add in some of the most extreme weather conditions in the world. That's the challenge that faces John Jacobsen, one of the people responsible for making sure that the data from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory makes it all the way from the South Pole to researchers across the world. In an interview recorded at OSCON, Jacobsen talks about the problems that he has to face, which includes (surprisingly) keeping the data center cool. If you're ever gripped because you had to haul yourself across town in the middle of the night to fix a server crash, this interview should put things in perspective...
Hardware

Submission + - Why "Gaming" Chips Are Moving Into the Server Room 1

Submitted by
Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: "After several years of trying, graphics processing units (GPUs) are beginning to win over the major server vendors. Dell and IBM are the first tier-one server vendors to adopt GPUs as server processors for high-performance computing (HPC). Here’s a high level view of the hardware change and what it might mean to your data center. (Hint: faster servers.) The article also addresses what it takes to write software for GPUs: "Adopting GPU computing is not a drop-in task. You can’t just add a few boards and let the processors do the rest, as when you add more CPUs. Some programming work has to be done, and it’s not something that can be accomplished with a few libraries and lines of code.""
Science

Submission + - SETI Institute's Looking for a Few Good Algorithms (oreilly.com)

Submitted by blackbearnh
blackbearnh writes: For years, people have been using SETI@Home to help search for signs of extraterrestrial life in radio telescope data. But Jill Tarter, director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute, wants to take things to the next level. Whereas SETI@Home basically used people's computers as part of a giant distributed network to run a fixed set of filters written by SETI researchers, Tarter thinks that someone out there may have even better search algorithms that could be applied. She's teamed with a startup called Cloudant to make large volumes of raw data from the new Allen telescope available, and free Amazon EC2 processing time to crunch over it. According to Tarter: "SETI@Home came on the scene a decade ago, and it was brilliant and revolutionary. It put distributed computing on the map with such a sexy application. But in the end, it's been service computing. You could execute the SETI searches that were made available to you, but you couldn't make them any better or change them. We'd like to take the next step and invite all of the smart people in the world who don't work for Berkeley or for the SETI Institute to use the new Allen Telescope. To look for signals that nobody's been able to look for before because we haven't had our own telescope; because we haven't had the computing power."
Cellphones

Submission + - Symbian: The Biggest Mobile OS No One Talks About (oreilly.com)

Submitted by blackbearnh
blackbearnh writes: The iPhone vs Android wars are in full swing, but no one talks about the operating system that most of the world uses, Symbian. Part of that, perhaps, is that the Symbian developer infrastructure is so different from the Wild West approach that Apple and Google take. Over in O'Reilly Answers, Paul Beusterien, who is the Head of Developer Tools for the Symbian Foundation, is talking about why Symbian gets ignored as a platform despite the huge number of handsets it runs on. "Another dimension is the type of developer community. Symbian historically, it's type of developers were working for consulting houses or working at phone operator places or working specifically doing consulting jobs for enterprise customers who wanted mobile apps. So there's a set of consulting companies around the world that have specialized in creating apps for Symbian devices. It's a different kind of dynamic than where iPhone has really been successful at attracting just the hobbyist or the one or two-person company or the person who just wants to go onto the web and start developing."
Google

Submission + - Does the world need another programming language? (oreilly.com) 1

Submitted by blackbearnh
blackbearnh writes: It seems like boutique languages have become all the style, and not a week doesn't go by that someone isn't promoting some new languages as the next great hope to save the industry. So you might be excused if you wrote off Go as just another new language. But Go has an impressive parentage, counting among it's creators Robert "Commander" Pike, one of the early Unix pioneers at Bell Labs who worked with greats such as Brian Kernighan and Ken Thompson, and now works at Google. In an OSCON preview, Pike talks about Go at Google, and compares the work environment of Google and Bell Labs. According to Pike, Go is an attempt to produce a robust programming language that is easy to parse and compile, and produces small binaries. " A lot of the ideas and changes in hardware that have come about in the last couple of decades haven't had a chance to influence C++. So we sat down with a clean sheet of paper and tried to design a language that would solve the problems that we have: we need to build software quickly, have it run well on modern multi-core hardware and in a network environment, and be a pleasure to use."
Education

Submission + - Parallel Programming Comes to the Arduino (oreilly.com)

Submitted by blackbearnh
blackbearnh writes: As more non-traditional programmers start playing around with embedded platforms like the Arduino, the limitations and complications of interrupt-driven event handling can become an annoying barrier to entry. Now a group of academics have ported the parallel-processing language Occam to the Arduino. In an interview on O'Reilly Answers, Matt Jadud of Allegheny College describes how Occam helps artists using the Arduino in their installations, and how the advent of low-cost computing platforms is changing the educational experience for proto-makers in school. "Basically, an artist or a tinkerer or a hacker has a goal. They don't really care about learning Occam. They don't care about how this language is different from C. They just want to make a cat door that keeps their cat out when the cat comes back with a mouse. Or they want to make some kind of installation piece. Trying to focus as much on the user and the possible goals they might have is what's motivating our work right now."
The Internet

Submission + - The Smithsonian, Web 2.0 Edition (oreilly.com)

Submitted by blackbearnh
blackbearnh writes: Museums are all about the preservation and display of physical items. But like everything else, Web 2.0 and social media is changing the way that museums look at their collections, and how their visitors interact with them. With 137 million objects spread over 28 facilities, the Smithsonian Institution is certainly one of the largest, and Michael Edson is in charge of figuring out how to leverage these new technologies to increase access, not only to the items on active display, but to the entire collection and the researchers behind the scenes. In a recent interview, he talks about efforts underway to crowdsource categorization of artifacts, how the web may have more to offer about a piece on display than the sign on the wall, and many other topics. "A mobile platform that you can have in the museum with you that allows the curatorial team to say more about a work, or provide multiple perspectives, presents an incredibly seductive idea. We don't think anyone's really hit a home run with that yet. We realize people are bringing mobile devices with them. They have instant access to deep, broad content about the things in front of them that, in many cases, might surpass and be more relevant to that person's own learning journey than what we've chosen to silkscreen on a wall. The stuff we put on the walls is a seed that can grow into many different kinds of plants outside the walls of the institution."

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