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Fedora 9 Released:
So my favorite distro – Fedora has come up with an update. You can download the new release here:
http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora
The video about new features directly from Paul Frields (Fedora Project Manager).
http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2008/05/15/video-fedora-project-leader-on-fedora-9/
Most of the existing programming languages were designed for earlier generation of machines. But now since we have more processing power in terms of parallel processing, High Performance Computing(HPC) is now accessible for everybody. But all said and done writing algorithms that can take advantage of parallel processors isn’t easy in today’s languages. Lose track of what’s happening in the system and you can quickly end up in a “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” scenario.
Fortress is a new programming language designed for high-performance computing (HPC) with high programmability. In Fortress, language constructs such as for-next loops are parallelizable by default. This parallelism is potential, not required; if only one processor is available, then evaluation will be serial. This potential parallelism is managed using work-stealing, which was developed for the Cilk programming language at MIT. Informally, whenever a thread encounters potential parallelism, it splits it roughly in half, sets one half aside on a stack/queue of future work, and starts work on the other half. Any thread that runs out of work to do may “steal” work that was set aside by another. The crucial trick is that work is stolen from the LIFO (queue) end of the work/stealing queue; this both reduces the need for synchronization betweeen threads, and ensures that the largest, oldest, and stalest tasks are what is stolen. This same trick also tends to be beneficial for memory locality.
The Fortress specification supports the concept of transactions within the language itself, which means that complex calculations can be computed as atomic units, independent of any other program threads that might be running. Fortress’ syntax is based on mathematical notation. The goal of the language is to do away with obsolete programming concepts and concentrate on making the coder’s job easier. In addition, Fortress was designed to be a “growable” language, to which new features can be added easily.
A reference interpreter that implements most of the core language features is available from the Fortress project community site
For more information check out the Fortress wiki
Jixpert – Interesting Concept:
The new search start up called Jixpert is based on some odd concept. Here what they say:
Have you ever felt like talking to your favourite character from some movie or cartoon? to a politician, philosopher, or some other famous person? The mission of our project is to allow you to freely and enjoyably communicate with the characters you like. Jixperts.com allows you to not only talk to existing experts, but also to create new ones and teach them by simply asking and answering questions! Passing Turing test? Easy! Characters are taught by real people asking and answering questions!
Though it’s weird to understand, it’s working for them 🙂
Android Project – Top 50 Applications:
As you may have heard, the results from Android Developer Challenge Part 1, Round 1 were announced to all the participants late last week. We’re still working on pulling together a more extensive listing for each application that made it into the top 50, but in the spirit of releasing early and often, here’s a list containing the name of the application and its author(s):
* AndroidScan – Jeffrey Sharkey
* Beetaun – Sergey Gritsyuk and Dmitri Shipilov
* BioWallet – Jose Luis Huertas Fernandez
* BreadCrumbz – Amos Yoffe
* CallACab – Konrad Huebner and Henning Boeger
* City Slikkers – PoroCity Media and Virtual Logic Systems
* Commandro – Alex Pisarev, Andrey Tapekha
* Cooking Capsules – Mary Ann Cotter and Muthuselvam Ramadoss
* Diggin – Daniel Johansson, Aramis Waernbaum, Andreas Hedin
* Dyno – Virachat Boondharigaputra
* e-ventr – Michael Zitzelsberger
* Eco2go – Taneem Talukdar, Gary Pong, Jeff Kao and Robert Lam
* Em-Radar – Jack Kwok
* fingerprint – Robert Mickle
* FreeFamilyWatch – Navee Technologies LLC
* goCart – Rylan Barnes
* GolfPlay – Inizziativa Networks
* gWalk – Prof. Dr.-Ing. Klaus ten Hagen, Christian Klinger, Marko Modsching, Rene Scholze
* HandWx – Weathertop Consulting LLC
* IMEasy – Yan Shi
* Jigsaw – Mikhail Ksenzov
* JOYity – Zelfi AG
* LifeAware – Gregory Moore, Aaron L. Obrien, Jawad Akhtar
* Locale – Clare Bayley, Christina Wright, Jasper Lin, Carter Jernigan
* LReady Emergency Manager – Chris Hulls, Dilpreet Singh, Luis Carvalho, Phuong Nguyen
* Marvin – Pontier Laurent
* Mobeedo – Sengaro GmbH
* Multiple Facets Instant Messenger – Virgil Dobjanschi
* MyCloset – Mamoru Tokashiki
* PedNav – RouteMe2 Technologies Inc.
* Phonebook 2.0 – Voxmobili
* PicSay – Eric Wijngaard
* PiggyBack – Christophe Petit and Sebastien Petit
* Pocket Journey – Anthony Stevens and Rosie Pongracz
* Rayfarla – Stephen Oldmeadow
* Safety Net – Michael DeJadon
* SocialMonster – Ben Siu-Lung Hui and Tommy Ng
* SplashPlay
* Sustain- Keeping Your Social Network Alive – Niraj Swami
* SynchroSpot – Shaun Terry
* Talkplay – Sung Suh Park
* Teradesk – Jos
Powerset Launches – Understanding Relations:
After nearly two years in the making — and plenty of hype — Powerset has finally rolled out a “natural language” search engine. It’s not a Google killer. It’s barely a business model right now. But at least it’s something the world can finally play with, and under the hood, there’s lots of potential.
By the time you read this, the Powerset site should have changed into a tool that allows you search against material within Wikipedia. Why bother using Powerset rather than using Wikipedia’s own search tool or even Google set to look only within Wikipedia pages? The Powerset pitch is that you’ll get better results because Powerset’s technology has read and understood what every word within Wikipedia actually means.
Watch the demo video: http://vimeo.com/994819
Source: Full Analysis
KPCB – iFund Challenge for iPhone’s:
Another challenge, fight guys-
KPCB
Explore Google Maps:
The new feature added by Google Maps, apparently allows you to view images & user created custom maps related particular area. It even brings back geocoded videos related to that area.
Here is the video explaining the feature:
http://www.youtube.com/v/nUxg1a_J0VE&rel=0
It’s similar to Yahoo-Flickr’s user interactive service http://www.flickr.com/tour/maps/. So now we have a new player in the Maps market. 🙂
Best Free XML Editor – Exchanger XML Lite:
The Exchanger XML Lite is an XML Editor that is free for use in non-commercial environments.
Exchanger XML Lite is a comprehensive multi platform XML Editor bringing you lots of the great features you have come to expect. The XML Editor facilitates easy editing, browsing, managing and conversion of XML Documents.
Exchanger XML Lite is a Java-based product that provides unique functionality for viewing, authoring and editing XML data and documents.
It features XML Schema, RelaxNG and DTD based editing, tag prompting and validation, XPath and regular expression searches, schema conversion, XSLT, XQUERY and XSLFO transformations, comprehensive project management, an SVG viewer and conversion, easy SOAP invocations
Complete Features list is here:
http://www.exchangerxml.com/editor/whatsnew.html
Guys you might be enjoying your weekend but it’s a wake up call for YouTube in short Google. YouTube is down since Saturday Morning & it’s been atleast 3 hrs EST.
People already speculating YouTube DNS hack. 88|
But Shane pointed out that it’s doesn’t seem to be DNS hack http://www.askshane.org/news-links/youtube-is-gone.php
Ever I tried to research a bit, all records look clean 🙂
http://whois.domaintools.com/youtube.com
Well now I think the IPTools domain might be hacked somewhere, because it’s displaying some wierd server names. Have a look http://www.iptools.com/dnstools.php?tool=whois&user_data=youtube.com&submit=Go
Or is it intelligent editing for avoiding spammers???
Update:– 10.45 YouTube is backkk
How Vinod Khosla created Sun Microsystems:
Here are some extracts from the Harvard Business School case study (by Dr. Amir Bhide) that were interesting:
How a Stanford secretary “linked up” SUN’s co-founders:
“I’m probably more of a conceptual engineer, and I can draw block diagrams for almost anything I can think of, but I can almost never implement them. So I started looking for someone who had done this kind of stuff before. I heard of a project at Stanford called the Stanford University Network, or Sun.workstation project. I called the computer science department, and some secretary who did not want to bother a professor gave me the name of a graduate student from Germany, Andy Bechtolsheim.
Apparently, Andy, who was also at Carnegie at the same time I was, but I did not know him there, had come to Stanford to do his Ph.D. in CAD tools. I think he realized there was no appropriate machine to develop CAD tools, following the same discovery process I had gone through, so he decided to build one himself. His specs fit mine almost to a T.
Andy had developed the workstation concept in a fair amount of detail and had a prototype implementation of lt. Stanford had assigned the technology to him because, in their great wisdom, and after calling DEC and Prime, they had decided it had no value.
So, for over a year he had been licensing the technology to six or seven companies. He had invested $25,000 of his own money into building prototypes, and as a grad student licensing it at $10,000 a pop, he thought that was just wonderful.
Bechtolsheim offered Khosla his usual $10,000 license. Instead, Khosla tried to persuade Bechtolsheim to join forces to start a company to build workstations based on his designs.
I said to him, “I want the goose that laid the golden egg, and I don’t want the golden egg.” I thought that kind of resource is very rare to get. So I would rather have him than any one design he would come up with. I had nothing very concrete to offer. I told him we could build a big company, that we could raise a few million dollars. He would be a founder of the company.
Andy Bechtolsheim agreed to participate by late January 1982. The two started working out of Andy’s office at Stanford and in a couple of weeks had produced a brief plan.
It was a real concise statement of the reasons for making an investment: how the economics had changed, what the product would be, when it would be out, and how big it could be and why the market made sense.
The next day, February 12, we met with two venture capitalists, one of whom, Bob Sackman, had helped me write the Daisy business plan. Within three or four days, they agreed to give us $300,000 in equity. They gave us a $100,000 check right away and said, “You can get going and let’s work on the paperwork.” On February 22, we formally incorporated the company and received the remaining $200,000. The price of the stock was $2.75 a share. We also gave them an option to put an additional $2.2 million for a total of $2.5 million at $5.60 a share, that option to expire on June 30, 1982. By that date we were supposed to hire a marketing person, write a business plan, and demonstrate a prototype.
Bob Sackman led the thing, and he trusted me. It was really on trust. There was very little due diligence on their part- – they just believed in the concept and said, “Yes, we think you can do it.
We were unlike most start- ups. Most start- ups have everything- – marketing, sales, support, advertising, and PR- – in place even before they have a product to sell. They get up to $600,000 to $800,000 a month of expenses before they’ve really started selling anything. In that range, given you’re starting out with low gross margins because your product costs are high, you’ve got to start selling $1.5 million worth just to break even in 8 month.”
Source Article: http://startupjourney.blogspot.com/2004/09/how-vinod-khosla-created-sun.html