This is very cool. From way back in 1971 a professor Leon Chua at the University of California (Berkeley) wrote a paper describing four basic passive electrical components: resistors, capacitors, inductors, and memristors. Until this year, the last one of these was only theoretical in nature, but some bright folks have finally cracked it.
This is likely to crack open a whole boatload of new types of circuits and electronic applications. Very, very cool.
Why on earth build a relay computer when there are already computers over a hundred thousand times faster? Well, for two reasons: to prove that silicon is not magic and because I want to.
The simple relay adder was built using free NOS relays sometime in 2005, but my goal was to someday build a more elaborate one that could run programs but not fill up a room like the early computers. Harry Porter built an incredible 415-relay computer which can be seen at this page: http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~harry/Relay/
I never thought I'd fully understand how his computer worked, let alone build one. Finally in spring 2007, I gained more understanding of computer systems from a course in college then joked to a friend about using the x86 instruction set for a relay computer to boot up Windows, which would’ve taken several hundred years on a relay computer running on a 50Hz clock. And so the inspiration began... (note: if you want to skip the hardware details of the computer, the pictures and videos are at the end of this page).
Okay, the name of the article really bears very little on what the heck the video is about, but...
Basically, some very smart guys figured out a very slick way to decide what parts of an image can be dropped or expanded in order to resize an image without noticeable distortion, and still keep all the components in the image more or less intact.
What this means in a more specific fashion is that if you have a picture of two people, and you resize it to half the original width, instead of getting two very anorexic-looking people in the image, they will simply look like they're standing closer together.
Technology has always been about hope. As the pace of technological innovation has intensified over the past two decades, businesses have come to expect that the next new thing will inevitably bring them larger market opportunities and bigger profits. Software, a technology so invisible and obscure to most of us that it appears to work like magic, especially lends itself to this kind of open-ended hope.
... Management became accustomed to the idea that buying more computers and more software would continue to cut costs and improve operations. But there are limits, some of which are inherent in the nature of software itself.
The proposed fix for these problems — the next new thing — is service-oriented architecture.
The Lego dream has been a persistent favorite among a generation or more of programmers who grew up with those construction toys. Unfortunately, however, software does not work as Legos do.
Posting this here is probably a great way to find out what people should not do with technology, but at any rate it beats the retarded spamming that's being attempted.
This is a remarkable little howto that shows one how to convert a mini-maglite into a burning laser that you can use to light matches, pop balloons, melt candles, and um, other things over a distance. Very, very sweet.
Actually, I wouldn't suggest letting anyone under the age of 14 know about this link. The eyes you save may be your own.
