Random Accesses

You don’t need to go through years of school and computer science classes to learn how to program robots. With the new Hawk robot from Dr. Robot, programming is as easy as playing with an action figure. The Hawk has two long arms with a full range of motion that looks something like an orange robot butler. Like some bizarre puppetry act, you can program the large robot by moving the limbs on a smaller Hawk bot (I call him Mini-Jeeves). The larger Hawk robot mimics and records the actions for playback later.It’s the simplest robot programming technique I’ve seen.

The real life Dr. Robot, Dr. Haipeng Xie, has been providing us with a constant stream of interesting and practical robots from his Ontario based company. Hawk, though, is the first I know of where the interface itself is rather revolutionary. By translating movement into programming, he’s managed to take robotics in a very user-friendly direction.

Source:http://singularityhub.com/2009/05/22/robot-see-robot-do/

The OpenSolaris development community launched version 2008.11, its second release ever, recently. The new version boosts hardware compatibility and brings some impressive improvements that illuminate the potential of OpenSolaris as a desktop platform. It's still not capable of replacing Linux on the desktop, but it shows promise.

OpenSolaris is Sun's desktop-oriented open-source distribution of the Solaris operating system. It is designed with a strong emphasis on ease of use and is intended to provide a fully functional desktop system right out of the box. It includes the latest software and offers a diverse assortment of applications ranging from development tools to multimedia players.

OpenSolaris emerged from Project Indiana, an effort to reinvent the disparate open-source Solaris bits as a cohesive desktop solution that could be installed from a Live CD.

Source: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081204-hands-on-opensolaris-2008-11-a-major-step-forward-for-sun.html

Intel have introduced Parallel Studio, a suite of four tools to help application developers write parallel programs on multicore and manycore platforms.

The suite is aimed at the millions of C and C++ programmers struggling to incorporate parallelism into their applications, and it does so not just by providing tools, but also by baking the expertise needed to use them effectively right into the toolset.

Intel is highly motivated to help programmers get the most out of its processors. The multicore change that Intel is educating programmers through at the moment is, as we've known in HPC for at least two decades, a fundamental change in the way developers think about programming. Engineering (and re-engineering) software for good performance on more than one processor is difficult work.

Estimates of the number of software developers in the world vary widely, but most of them are between 1 million and 12 million. Even if the real number is toward the low end of that range, that's still a whole lot of parallel programming education.

Source: http://www.hpcwire.com/features/Intel_Develops_Toolset_for_Parallel_Programming.html

The number of cores--or number-crunching units--in microprocessors is doubling with each generation, providing enormous computing potential for desktops, laptops, and, eventually, handheld gadgets. Current quadcore machines, for example, are particularly useful for such computation-hungry applications as video processing and gaming. However, the new multicore machines are basically small-scale supercomputers, and in order to take full advantage of the computing power they offer, software must be written with multiple cores in mind--a time-consuming and difficult task known as parallel programming. And many experts believe that unless parallel programming can be made easier, computing progress will come to a grinding halt.

Researchers at MIT are looking for a way to ease the pain of parallel programming. They have designed a computer language and a compiler--a specialized tool that converts the language into computer instructions--that essentially hides the parallel-programming challenges, yet takes advantage of the power of multiple cores. The language and compiler, called StreamIt, were developed by Saman Amarasinghe, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT.

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18597/

Yahoo announced the release of an early version of a tool designed to help users personalize the Internet. The tool, called Pipes, lets people combine all sorts of oft-updated Internet information, known as feeds.

Pipes could, for instance, enable a feed that includes New York Times articles featuring the phrase "plasma TV," Flickr-posted pictures taken in a specific neighborhood, and traffic updates along a commute. So, instead of drowning in headlines from standard feed aggregators, the user gets information that is winnowed down and personal.

The basic idea behind Pipes, says Yahoo, is to give software developers and motivated nondevelopers a simple programming tool to mix and match collections of data on the Web, says Pasha Sadri, principal software engineer at Yahoo and developer of Pipes. "The goal of Pipes," he says, "is to significantly lower the barrier to writing simple applications by eliminating the need to write code and by hosting the application for you."

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18185/