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Comment Huh? (Score 1) 224

by Whispers_in_the_dark (#32323974) Attached to: Seagate Launches Hybrid SSD Hard Drive
FTA: "To put it simply, the most commonly accessed data on the platters get's copied to the much higher performing, SLC Flash memory, which results in a performance boost." Read more: http://hothardware.com/Articles/Seagate-Momentus-XT-Solid-State-Hybrid-Preview/?page=2#ixzz0orEbgttB This makes no sense to me -- that would seem to imply the most likely thing to end up on the SSD is my swap partition, which is the last thing I want on SSD. Yeah, read would be faster, but the wear would be awful. Maybe I'm missing something. I'd probably be happier if it just exposed the 4GB as a different partition...

Comment Re:Using Java for web development (Score 1) 253

by Whispers_in_the_dark (#31894958) Attached to: Thoughts On the State of Web Development
Jython supports Django I've read, so again you can theoretically get the best of both if that's important. Personally, I dislike the Java ecosystem due to its bulkiness. However, for some particularly high-CPU tasks (complex search), it can fit into a larger REST environment nicely via Restlet or Django.
Hardware Hacking

Home-Built Turing Machine 123

Posted by Soulskill from the i'll-order-a-dozen dept.
stronghawk writes "The creator of the Nickel-O-Matic is back at it and has now built a Turing Machine from a Parallax Propeller chip-based controller, motors, a dry-erase marker and a non-infinite supply of shiny 35mm leader film. From his FAQ: 'While thinking about Turing machines I found that no one had ever actually built one, at least not one that looked like Turing's original concept (if someone does know of one, please let me know). There have been a few other physical Turing machines like the Logo of Doom, but none were immediately recognizable as Turing machines. As I am always looking for a new challenge, I set out to build what you see here.'"

Comment Huh? (Score 1) 330

by Whispers_in_the_dark (#31596962) Attached to: Commodore 64 Primed For a Comeback In June

"During the same panel, Apple co-founders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs approached Commodore with an Apple II prototype, which was much more advanced in color, graphics, sound and games. Apple at the time didn't have the money to make and sell the Apple II, and was hoping Commodore would push the design to market. Commodore, however, preferred to develop the Commodore 64 as a simpler, lower-cost, black-and-white-only machine. "

AFAIK, the C-64 was never a black-and-white only machine and had a very good color spectrum (16 prinicple colors to apple's six -- 15 if you used "color mixing"). Yeah, there were limitations to which colors were assigned to which 8x8 pixel blocks on C-64, but game developers seemed to get by just fine. I have no clue where they got the idea that the Apple had better sound (or games for that matter).
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Modernizes IE 9 with HTML5 SVG Chakra JS (cnet.com)

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes: At its Mix 10 conference Tuesday, Microsoft gave programmers, Web developers, and the world at large a taste of things to come with its Web browser. Specifically, Microsoft released what it's calling the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview, a prototype designed to show off the company's effort to improve how the browser deals with the Web as it exists today and, as important, to add support for new Web technologies that are coming right now.

Coming in the new version is support for new Web standards including plug-in-free video; better performance with graphics, text, and JavaSript by taking advantage of modern computing hardware.

One big change in the JavaScript engine Hachamovitch is proud of is its multicore support. As soon as a Web page is loaded, Chakra assigns a processing core to the task of compiling JavaScript in the background into fast code written in the native language of the computer's processor.

With the Chakra approach, "developers don't have to change their markup. The Web page didn't have to change. Essentially, dual- and quad-core machiens get put to good use," Hachamovitch said.

Microsoft already showed off IE9's use of Direct2D and DirectWrite, interfaces in Windows Vista and Windows 7 that can accelerate graphics and text. At Mix, Hachamovitch's demonstration shows the technology works to speed up SVG graphics as well.

CNET News : http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20000433-264.html

Test Drive IE 9 : http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/
Handhelds

Submission + - SPAM: Your body as the ultimate portable gaming console

Submitted by almehdaaol
almehdaaol writes: Researchers from both Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University are working on a new type of technology called Skinput that essentially turns your entire body into a giant touch screen. It's an interesting project that could have some long-term implications.
Link to Original Source
Earth

Submission + - Scotish Wave Energy Plans Move Forward (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by krou
krou writes: Believed to be the first project of its kind in the world, the BBC is reporting that ten sites on the seabed off Scotland in Pentland Firth and and around Orkney have been leased to energy companies with the hopes of generating wave and tidal energy. 'Six sites have been allocated for wave energy developments potentially generating 600 megawatts (MW) of power and four for tidal projects, also generating 600 MW.' The leases were awarded to SSE Renewables Developments, Aquamarine Power, ScottishPower Renewables, E.ON, Pelamis Wave Power, OpenHydro Site Developments, and Marine Current Turbines. Scotland's First Minister Alex Salmond said that "These waters have been described as the Saudi Arabia of marine power and the wave and tidal projects unveiled today — exceeding the initial 700MW target capacity — underline the rich natural resources of the waters off Scotland."
Data Storage

Submission + - Exploring Advanced Format Hard Drive Technology (hothardware.com) 1

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Hard drive capacities are sometimes broken down by the number of platters and the size of each. The first 1TB drives, for example, used five 200GB platters; current-generation 1TB drives use two 500GB platters. These values, however, only refer to the accessible storage capacity, not the total size of the platter itself. Invisible to the end-user, additional capacity is used to store positional information and for ECC. The latest Advanced Format hard drive technology changes a hard drive's sector size from 512 bytes to 4096K. This allows the ECC data to be stored more efficiently. Advanced Format drives emulate a 512 byte sector size, to keep backwards compatibility intact, by mapping eight logical 512 byte sectors to a single physical sector. Unfortunately, this creates a problem for Windows XP users. The good news is, Western Digital has already solved the problem and this quick overview at HotHardware offers some insight into the technology and how it performs.

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