That looked incredibly fiddly. Invisible corners (I use 'em on my mac but only for multi-desktop). Tricky start "screen". Why do I want to stick things to the side of the screen? Why does the weather app need to take over the whole screen?! Anyway... I'm sure it will improve and I'll get it. Damn, I've changed UI so often another change means nothing to me - maybe I'm commonly using half a dozen UI's a day. Lemme count - WinXP, Gnome, Blackberry, Playbook, iPad, HTC One X, plain Android not to mention a variety of applications and there UIs... then there's the ones I create!

I think that the sort of $stuff being done there is much more suited to a touch screen.

However, my lad has been using his mummy's "Tap Tap" (iPad) for a few months. He's just turned 2 and accomplished those tasks being shown there in a fraction of the time - in large amount because the device is that easy and the touch screen allows for direct manipulation which little 'uns get much more than mice and gamepads (he hasn't figured out the Nintendo DS yet which annoys him as he loves Yoshi) . He knows what the home button does, knows about Youtube "cows, cows, cows", old Pingu and steam trains!. He tries to play Angry Birds, World of Goo, Bad Piggies but really he likes sit on daddy's lap and watch (that's me BTW). He gets to the pictures and scrolls them around etc. I put Geometry Wars on there... he tried to play it but that's HARDCORE!!! (and nothing beats 2 analogue sticks anyway).

I do wonder about what effect this will have on him but, TBH, as a parent I've learnt if it isn't one influence it's another and this one doesn't seem bad at all. He's been playing on it for about 5 months I suppose and pretty much has it nailed although he will stick all his fingers on the screen then be a bit baffled when the task manager appears.

He's learnt that whenever he gets lost or confused that he should go for the home button. My mama-bear pointed that out a few times - he understood.

He loved it till I got a Playbook - which has excellent speakers (compared to iPad). Now he wants "daddy tap tap" so we can listen and dance to Surfin' Bird!

Anyhoo... Gotta crack on with work so I can go home and play with my boy!!!

Any other geeky mum's and dad's got a story about tech and their little ones?

I was at the Multicore Challenge at the UWE in Bristol, UK on Monday.

I went last year. It was fascinating.

Anyhoo... David May was there talking about multicore parallelism. It turns out that the last patent protecting the Transputer designs has lapsed.

SOoooo... if you want some open hardware get cracking! You can probably run them fast enough these days to bit-bang an LVDS/HDMI/CSI interface with little more than an amp.

Make mine the one with the 16 by 16 array please....

Seriously. Anyone got the balls to try it? I'm in!

Much cheaper to make too...

I am intrigued by your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

But seriously, Mankind really needs to take a leap into a deep space network seriously.

Automated drones (lots of technology, blasted into space) sent on crazy-long orbits through the Solar System (and beyond?) bringing multi-scopic, n-D views of the heavens in every colour of radiation for less than a round of bankers KY errr... Quantitive Easing. Pfft, write it off as Job Creation.

"Now, you must remember: the enemy has only images and illusions behind which he hides his true motives. Destroy the image and you will break the enemy."

That one?

X

For a start, visible (and invisible) light has a frequency of between 400 and 800THz (800 and 375nm), which is unlicensed spectrum worldwide.

My God! They're broadcasting my movies over an unlicensed, unregulated carrier! This MUST be stopped! This "visible" light will aid paedophiles, piracy, terrorists, drug dealers and all manner of criminality!

I think the bee demo was from Sensaura. I worked up there for a few happy years until Creative ermmm... 'nuff said.

Maybe both companies had a bee demo...

I have done the same with my boy. Me and the missus weighed up the risks and it was a no brainer. He's 3 months and already had plenty of vaccinations. TB being one oft he most important for now. I knew several older people who had polio as children when I was a child and it radically and not pleasantly altered their lives.

MMR jabs will come soon (at around a year old) and I have NO hesitation in taking these...

OK, I hesitate for just a few seconds. I'll admit that every time I see someone approach him with a needle my instinctive reaction is to punch them in the back of the neck.

I suspect this is true of many people and maybe, in some way, when parents/guardians here about a correlative link they can use that to justify not sticking poor little Charlie with a needle.

If I could vaccinate him against many other vile diseases I would (assuming a very low risk of side effects). For example... cancer causing virus and bacteria, strep, all forms of clap, HIV, malaria, food poisoning... I mean... why not?

Ahem...

Add to that this... Most SoC's run a fairly narrow and slow memory bus. Also, GPU's tend to be WAY slower than CPUs...

Fancy racing a 4 * 150Mhz pipe GPU against a 1 Ghz, superscalar CPU with 64/128 bit SIMD extensions?

Who will win?

Answer... the memory bus. You can TRY and get the CPU and GPU to work together but all that will happen is that the memory bus will get swamped and everything slows down.

GPUs can render polys with straight edges. UIs frequently want curved, rounded objects with complex gradients and complex blend modes not supported by GPUs.

TBH the article is nonsense. Android composites using OpenGL. Individual applications render with SKIA for 2D. The SKIA API is deliberately immediate mode to reduce latency (GPU's do not multitask and have rubbish MMUs). All applications are back buffered so they cache bitmaps pretty well. Bitmap copying is minimal.

Maybe a scene graph would help - but you'd increase latency greatly and (if GPU accelerated) you'd make the GPU task switch - not quick on many (most) GPUs.

Also - Poly throughput isn't the problem - fill rate is... (see Memory Bus above).

Burnttoys.

I'm afraid my language is going to be blunt.

The USA, UK and Italy are prime examples that you can fuck a population sideways, remove their rights, lock a bunch of them up for no apparent reason, allow massive unaccountable kakistocratic companies to buy and do whatever the hell the like in the most inefficient way possible and piss off nearly everyone so long as there's plenty of food, oil and housing.

Cover that and that's all the general population give a damn about. I mean... why the hell would I rebel? I make just about enough to keep me, the wife and kids going, pay the bills... what else do I want? Why should I give a damn that students will have to pay huge amounts of tuition fees very likely making university education the preserve of the elite. Why should I care that my way to "the top of the tree" is blocked by funny handshakes and old-boy networks. Why should I care about the dismantling of the social state. Why should I care that the President owns and corrupts all the media, gets fucked up with coke and whores?

Why should I try and see the future when I'm feed and watered today with a leather chair in the car to absorb my well fed arse...

Why should I give a fuck? I'm alright jack...

That doesn't impact the rest of "us"?

Yeah, My girlfriend watches it!

*ZING!*

My computing (big towers + Linux stuff) is relegated to the back room along with the musical gear ('cept the acoustic, natch) for wandering around "computing" I've got me MacBook. That's pretty typical.

When the boy gets a bit older then we'll probably play games together on the TV. Till then... I just use my DS

Don't make me laugh...

By Aristid Lindenmayer and Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz. Absolutley stunning book. Several (many) of the renderings (the palms in particular) are verging on realistic. It's out of print now and you definitely can't have my copy. I won't give it up!

It turns out it's available here http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/#abop on the interweb for free.

Sadly Lindenmayer died the year before the book was published and the book itself is dedicated to him. It's one of those rare science books that makes a good coffee table book too.