Technology

A lot of people do not seem to realise what JDF is or stand for so heres a little bit of information about this standard which is becoming more popular especialy in light of POD and other services which are now becoming streamlined.

Its really kool for gaming. BlueGene/L's top speed of 280.6 teraflops (1 teraflop is one trillion calculations in 1 second). This is more than three times faster than its closest rival, another IBM-built machine called Watson Blue Gene.

Read more here
newscientist

I love this keyboard, don't ask me why but it's one of those things, I don't like much tech, but this one is a must have, some users love macs, not me! some users love Ipods, not me, I just like this visual programmable keyboard.

optimus

I recently came across a movie about "Trusted Computing" that in my opinion is worth mentioning here.

The basic message is "why trust the industry if they do not trust their customers?" The movie is nicely animated and obviously origins in the anti tcpa movement. By Benjamin Stephan and Lutz Vogel

(Their server is a bit slow, so I have put a copy of the medium size file on the MA Rave College network, however, you can also use the torrent file.)

(by christoph burgdorfer)

Timeframe: 2 to 5 years from now.

A couple of days ago, Google launched its new service "Google Reader" which is basically a RSS aggregator. I do not think, this is a coincidence. I believe that Google has realized that at some point, everybody will use his personal news feeds to get informed rather than just checking up a few news sources on a regular base. This will lead into a weakening of the current information sources' positions and support the possibility to get a wider variety and more independent opinions on topics of interest.

The way most of us read the news today has a long tradition. It originated in the 15th Century with the invention of the printing with movable letters by Johannes Gutenberg. Since then, the format has not much changed, we still get the newspapers printed out black on grey paper. At some point, there were pictures, then they became colorful, but let's face it, that doesn't make much of a difference, does it?

If, like me, you're interested in making devices to do things that Should Be Possible but currently aren't, you'll want to put in an order for some of these with the MAIDM acquisitions department (sorry, Karel!)

'PICAXE' is a powerful, low cost, microcontroller programming system designed to simplify educational and hobbyist use of microcontrollers. The unique feature of the PICAXE system is you program it via a direct cable link straight into the microcontroller -- so no expensive programmers or erasers are required. The the 'Programming Editor' software. software to program it is also free.

Programs can be created graphically using flowcharts, or programmatically using a simple BASIC style language. The ultimate result is a chip that does what you want it to.

LINKS to happy PICAXErs:

Happy Hippy:
http://www.hippy.freeserve.co.uk/picaxe.htm
Peter H Anderson:
http://www.phanderson.com/picaxe/picaxe.html

Examples like Google Maps and Google Suggest demonstrate the importance of AJAX -- and why it's more than just a fad.

Critics (there are always critics: ignore them at your peril) will say that AJAX is nothing new. They will be right. Javascript has been around for years and the XMLHttpRequest tool that provides the whizz-bang application-style updates to a page has been around along with it. But they're missing the point: it's only in the last couple of years that last-mile bandwidth (read: ADSL) and raw processing power have made browser-based Java & Javascript applications that AJAX enables possible. Google maps works real sweet, but 3.5 years ago it would have crawled across your browser like a lead slug.

So what is AJAX and how do you get involved in it? The short answer is: scroll to the bottom of this piece and click the links. The slightly-longer answer is: AJAX isn't a single new thing, it's several things working together: XHTML and CSS at the front end, and the Document Object Model for dynamic stuff; XML and XSLT for data interchange and manipulation using; and XMLHttpRequest for asynchronous data retrieval. With JavaScript binding everything together, you have what's commonly known as AJAX.

Inquisitor is now my Home page in Konqueror (the native, crash-proof browser of KDE). Why? Because I'm always curious about new entries into the search space -- and it's pretty in a ripped-off-from-Apple sort of way.

Of course this a metasearch, not an offering proper -- through Inquisitor you search various other search engines, including Google. So far, so what: but Inquisitor has some tricks up its sleeve in the form of AJAX (that's Asynchronous Javascript and XML to you) enabled predictive searching. That means (as you'll see if you try it out) that Inquisitor guesses what you're searching for as you type words in the search form and offers suggested results before you've hit 'Return.'

Now you might guess that this is some hardcore functionality for a lonely coder to put together, and you'd be right: Inquisitor is not in fact a separate engine -- its predictive functionality is powered by Google Suggest. Unlike Google Suggest, which gives suggestions of possible search terms you might be interested in, Inquisitor gives you search results as you type. (More on Google Suggest in future posts.)