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| About site: http://www.exaflop.org/ |
Title: Programming/Games - Exaflop A programmers' resource with extensive resources related to graphics and games programming.
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Tucows_Macintosh_Software Offers the largest software downloads of shareware, freeware and demos for Macintosh.
| Acme_Technology Computer case distributor. Also sells rack mount, server and PC cases.
| Thomas_Creek_Terragen Several tutorials and animations created using Terragen. Where possible, the files used to make the images or animations may be downloaded.
| aTerra Builds category specific search engines for web sites. Also develops autonomous intelligent search agents.
| SimpleFTP Offers secure transfers, drag-and-drop, bookmarks, multi-threading, and transfer resume. Donationware for OS X 10.2 or higher. Includes feature list and free download.
| BASH_FAQ A BASH Frequently Asked Questions Page
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| BSPlab An environment for experimenting with BSP programs on different parallel architectures. Source code and documentation. | | Roof_Genius Roof calculator, calculates a detail list of roof materials, and a complete estimate. Two ways to determine roof pitch. Offers tips and how tos on roofing. [Windows 95/98/2000/Me/XP/NT] | | RFC_0929 Proposed Host-Front End Protocol. J. Lilienkamp, R. Mandell, M.A. Padlipsky. December 1984. | | Kontact A Personal Information Management suite that can be used as client for different groupware servers. It provides an email client, calendaring, meeting scheduling, a task list, contact management and sy | | RFC_0076 Connection by Name: User Oriented Protocol. J. Bouknight, J. Madden, G.R. Grossman. October 1970. | | iMac_and_Mac_OS_Support_Site Help and support for all iMac users from the ground up. Includes a getting started guide and many useful pages. | | RFC_1329 Thoughts on Address Resolution for Dual MAC FDDI Networks. P. Kuehn. May 1992. | | Yes_IT_Offsite_Backup_Service Yes IT prove secure and reliable offsite backup for servers and workstations. | | RingSurf Growing webring service. Navigate related websites organized by areas of interest. Join a Ring or start your own. | | Name_for_the_Net Global domain registration, web hosting, e-commerce service and other Internet business solutions. | | RFC_2265 View-Based Access Control Model (VACM) for the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). B. Wijnen, R. Presuhn, K. McCloghrie. January 1998. | | GridNets_2006 3rd International Workshop on Networks for Grid Applications. October 1–2, San Jose, California, USA. | | RFC_2968 Mesh of Multiple DAG Servers - Results from TISDAG. L. Daigle, T. Eklof. October 2000. | | Mental_Motions__Calendarium A wallpaper changer with a see-through desktop/wall calendar. Also offers a screen saver, wallpapers, and Photoshop tutorials. | | KJweb_com Offers design, graphic design, hosting assistance, maintenance, and promotion services. | | WebFX Offers site design, e-commerce, graphics and search engine submission. Located in Garden Grove, California. | | Webstix_Inc Features web design, hosting, copywriting, logos, E-commerce and CMS systems. | | Alert_Ping Verifies accessibility of your host computers. | | RockYou Photo sharing, MySpace slide shows, codes, and music. | | Lassalle_Technologies A software components (ActiveX or .NET) for the creation of diagrams (process flow, workflow, flowchart) and for graph drawing layout. |
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This is websites2007.org cache of m/ as retrieved on 2008.08.30 websites2007.org's cache is the snapshot that we took of the page as we crawled the web. The page may have changed since that time.
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[Exaflop.org] Technology News and Discussion  Site News Time to get this thing moving again 28 February 2007 - 17:09 Yes, this blog isn't quite dead yet. With the new Formula 1 season approaching, the Racing Blog will be back in action with more commentary and analysis. The tech blog on the front page of Exaflop.org will be a lot busier I hope. I've been wanting to buy a portable music player for years but been put off by a number of things. First was that I really wanted a flash-memory based player (rather than harddisk based) so that I could carry it while running, but I wasn't happy with the capacity offered by most models. Then Apple released the first iPod Nano with 4Gb of memory and as Apple have done so many times before, they changed the market. All of a sudden 1Gb was no longer the top capacity available in a flash-memory based player. However it's taken a long time for other manufacturers to catch up with Apple's iPod Nano.Before I talk about the player I eventually bought, the Samsung YP-Z5, let me explain why I didn't just buy an iPod Nano. If I just wanted to rip my own CDs and maybe play a few mp3 files I *ahem* collected from other places, the iPod would have been a fine choice. But ever since all-you-can-download subscription services have been available (like Napster, Rhapsody, etc.) I've been quite taken with the idea of being able to fill up the player with whatever music I want, all for a flat fee. Sadly, Apple has not seen the light on subscription services and their iTunes Store only supports pay-per-track downloads. Due to all the incompatabilities that DRM (Digital Rights Management) introduces, that means all Apple players are out of consideration. The other big player in DRM is Microsoft and the good thing about Microsoft's Windows Media DRM is that it is licenced to many manufacturers so you get a wide choice of players rather than being locked into those of one manufacturer (Apple). It has to be said that there are very few products as good as Apple's, but I believe the YP-Z5 is one of them. [Read More] / No comments / § ¶ Napster blames Micrsoft for it's own failings 07 March 2006 - 05:11 Napster got itself some publicity last week when their Chairman CEO Chris Gorog publically blamed Microsoft for their inability to dent the market share of Apple's iTunes Store. I posted previously about the Napster user experience. I don't doubt that a lot of Napster's failure is down to the failure of Creative and iRiver to make mp3 players that are as innovative and desireable as the various iPod models, but there's plenty Napster could do to improve their service. They don't have the right to sit there and say "we have this service that's so much better than iTunes, why is nobody using it?" First of all they need to understand that because they provide a subscription service they're not going to sell nearly as many tracks per-user as iTunes Store is. Secondly, they need to sort out the audio quality issue - 128kpbs WMA is not good enough when you are paying £0.79 for around 3 minutes of audio. Lastly there are a number of things in the client application that really need a revamp:- The interface uses multiple instances of the Internet Explorer control. The problem is that it switches between them almost instantly, then it loads the new content in. So you can hit the back or forwards buttons on the toolbar and get the incorrect pages appear before the correct pages are loaded. I don't know why they thought using multiple IE controls would be a good idea - maybe it works well on their LAN were the new pages get loaded intantaneously, but when you are on a slower internet connection, it sucks. What also sucks is that the main front page displays a "Working..." animation while it loads. I'm sure they thought it would look nice to have all the content appear at once in a flash, but it really slows things down massively. Browser writers put a lot of effort into making web pages render progressively as the content loads because it makes the whole experience more fluid. The Napster designers have seen fit to undo that work because they don't want to it become too apparent - at least on the first page - that they are using browser controls in their application. Quite often the web page part of the display that shows the album name, cover and related artists loads fine, but the grid-view below it where the tracks are supposed to be listed, doesn't get populated. I guess the data is comming from different servers and one of them isn't very reliable. Anyway, it sucks also. The recommendations system is fairly useless. They need to take a long look at Amazon.com's system. That managed to predict much of my CD collection after I'd listed about 10 albums. I've listened to countless albums on Napster now and it still recommends stuff that I've never listened to and never will listen to. Oh, and unlike Amazon, it doesn't have a "never show me this again" button for recommendations that are way off. The radio station system is broken as I detailed previously. The Napster catalog is too simplistic. It groups tracks into albums and assigns albums to artists. To be fair it does have the smarts to assign tracks to artists as well, so that when you search by artist you get the tracks they contributed to compilations as well. However there is no way to browse albums that are not by a particular artist. Searching for "various artists" doesn't get you far either. Another problem with the catalog is that every collection of tracks is an album. That includes CD singles and EPs. So you can get a band that's only a few years old with 20 to 30 albums and most of them are just multiple single releases. And it's not clear in the user interface which albums are real albums and which are just singles. They need to colour them differently or something and also add a checkbox to the page to filter out albums that aren't real albums. There are probably lots of other things that are wrong with Napster as it stands, but another problem is the lack of marketing. Very few people I speak to know that Napster runs a legal download service now. It's also difficult explaining the subscription service. Napster really needs to do a better job of getting the word out if it wants customers.Oh, and I'm posting all this to my blog because Napster is one of those companies that puts as much distance between itself and it's customers as possible. They have a "user feedback" form, but there's no conversation with that - they might read your comments, they might not, either way you're not getting a response from them. They have a forums system build into the application, but there are no staff to be seen there - it's just all 15 yearolds slagging each other off. Maybe I should recommend them a copy of Scoble's Naked Conversations. / No comments / § ¶ Prepare for Cell Processor hype onslaught 08 February 2006 - 08:44 Just watching the US CNBC Squawkbox over here in England and they're going on about how amazingly powerful and revolutionary the new IBM Cell Processor is going to be. And if a product that isn't available yet and for which there is no new news available to get appearances on CNBC means that the PR engine has swung into full-on hype mode. Expect floods of blog postings about the chip and stories in all the news websites.It's all PR hype though. We know the Cell is going to be the core of the Sony Playstaion 3 and there are possibly other applications for it in workstation accelerators. But don't expect to see it as widely used as IBM would like it to be. Firstly the Cell is not a cheap chip to manufacture. Some of the early hype made claims that by putting lots of simple processors together on one die they could make a very powerful chip at low cost compared to traditional solutions. This is just not the case though. The primary determiner in the manufacturing cost of chip is the die space it takes up and the Cell is as big as any high performance design. Even though the individual units of the Cell (SPE or Synergistic Processing Elements in IBM speak) are small and simple, when you jam 8 of them together (and add another true PowerPC processor to co-ordinate them) you end up with a big chip.The other concern over the Cell is the ease of programming. Writing highly multi-threaded code is difficult anyway unless you have an easily seperable algorithm as your main computation task. But if you then take into account that the SPEs don't have access to main memory - only the 512KB they are bundled with - the whole business of co-ordinating data transfers to and from the SPEs adds an extra layer of complexity that any programmer would rather do without.There is plenty of debate among game programmers over whether the PS3 offers as much useable processing power as the more conventional three-core PowerPC CPU in the Xbox 360 because the potention of the Cell will be so hard to realise. Being able to decode 48 MPEG2 streams simultaneously isn't that useful in most applications. / No comments / § ¶ Google "does evil", MSN nods knowingly 26 January 2006 - 19:06 I never really bought the whole "Do no evil" thing from Google. It just sounds like the kind of thing you come up with when you're 13 years old and you think big companies are evil and bad and you don't want to be like them. You don't want to pay what is effectively minimum wage to the majority of your employees while hyping up how cool it is to work there. So when Microsoft gets slammed for censoring (really just refusing to host - there are plenty of other hosting options available) a Chinese blogger according to state rules there and claims that this is just "the cost of doing business in China", it comes as a great surprise to anyone that Google is under the same pressure when they are trying to do business in China as well? Liberals will say that Google (and MSN) shouldn't do business in China if those are the rules, but as public companies they have a duty to pursue relevent revenue opportunities and although there is a limit to what a responsible company should get involved in, providing web services in China, with all that entails, isn't crossing over that line in my opinion. Maybe applying state censorship laws on your web services is evil, maybe it isn't, but if you thought to write something like "do no evil" into your company's mission statement, you probably believe it is. In that case I strongly suggest Google quietly removes it, because as a multi-national, they are going to have to do plenty of similarly 'evil' things to compete. technorati tags (experimental): Google, MSN, Evil / No comments / § ¶  Calendar /**/The calendar provides a means to access entries in this weblog«August 2008SMTWTFS 12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031 Archives 01 May - 31 May 2007 01 Feb - 28 Feb 2007 01 Sep - 30 Sep 2006 01 Aug - 31 Aug 2006 01 Jun - 30 Jun 2006 01 May - 31 May 2006 01 Mar - 31 Mar 2006 01 Feb - 28 Feb 2006 01 Jan - 31 Jan 2006 01 Dec - 31 Dec 2005                     |
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I've been wanting to buy a portable music player for years but been put off by a number of things. First was that I really wanted a flash-memory based player (rather than harddisk based) so that I could carry it while running, but I wasn't happy with the capacity offered by most models. Then Apple released the first iPod Nano with 4Gb of memory and as Apple have done so many times before, they changed the market. All of a sudden 1Gb was no longer the top capacity available in a flash-memory based player. However it's taken a long time for other manufacturers to catch up with Apple's iPod Nano.Before I talk about the player I eventually bought, the Samsung YP-Z5, let me explain why I didn't just buy an iPod Nano. If I just wanted to rip my own CDs and maybe play a few mp3 files I *ahem* collected from other places, the iPod would have been a fine choice. But ever since all-you-can-download subscription services have been available (like Napster, Rhapsody, etc.) I've been quite taken with the idea of being able to fill up the player with whatever music I want, all for a flat fee. Sadly, Apple has not seen the light on subscription services and their iTunes Store only supports pay-per-track downloads. Due to all the incompatabilities that DRM (Digital Rights Management) introduces, that means all Apple players are out of consideration. The other big player in DRM is Microsoft and the good thing about Microsoft's Windows Media DRM is that it is licenced to many manufacturers so you get a wide choice of players rather than being locked into those of one manufacturer (Apple). It has to be said that there are very few products as good as Apple's, but I believe the YP-Z5 is one of them. [Read More] / No comments / § ¶ Napster blames Micrsoft for it's own failings 07 March 2006 - 05:11 Napster got itself some publicity last week when their Chairman CEO Chris Gorog publically blamed Microsoft for their inability to dent the market share of Apple's iTunes Store. I posted previously about the Napster user experience. I don't doubt that a lot of Napster's failure is down to the failure of Creative and iRiver to make mp3 players that are as innovative and desireable as the various iPod models, but there's plenty Napster could do to improve their service. They don't have the right to sit there and say "we have this service that's so much better than iTunes, why is nobody using it?" First of all they need to understand that because they provide a subscription service they're not going to sell nearly as many tracks per-user as iTunes Store is. Secondly, they need to sort out the audio quality issue - 128kpbs WMA is not good enough when you are paying £0.79 for around 3 minutes of audio. Lastly there are a number of things in the client application that really need a revamp:- The interface uses multiple instances of the Internet Explorer control. The problem is that it switches between them almost instantly, then it loads the new content in. So you can hit the back or forwards buttons on the toolbar and get the incorrect pages appear before the correct pages are loaded. I don't know why they thought using multiple IE controls would be a good idea - maybe it works well on their LAN were the new pages get loaded intantaneously, but when you are on a slower internet connection, it sucks. What also sucks is that the main front page displays a "Working..." animation while it loads. I'm sure they thought it would look nice to have all the content appear at once in a flash, but it really slows things down massively. Browser writers put a lot of effort into making web pages render progressively as the content loads because it makes the whole experience more fluid. The Napster designers have seen fit to undo that work because they don't want to it become too apparent - at least on the first page - that they are using browser controls in their application. Quite often the web page part of the display that shows the album name, cover and related artists loads fine, but the grid-view below it where the tracks are supposed to be listed, doesn't get populated. I guess the data is comming from different servers and one of them isn't very reliable. Anyway, it sucks also. The recommendations system is fairly useless. They need to take a long look at Amazon.com's system. That managed to predict much of my CD collection after I'd listed about 10 albums. I've listened to countless albums on Napster now and it still recommends stuff that I've never listened to and never will listen to. Oh, and unlike Amazon, it doesn't have a "never show me this again" button for recommendations that are way off. The radio station system is broken as I detailed previously. The Napster catalog is too simplistic. It groups tracks into albums and assigns albums to artists. To be fair it does have the smarts to assign tracks to artists as well, so that when you search by artist you get the tracks they contributed to compilations as well. However there is no way to browse albums that are not by a particular artist. Searching for "various artists" doesn't get you far either. Another problem with the catalog is that every collection of tracks is an album. That includes CD singles and EPs. So you can get a band that's only a few years old with 20 to 30 albums and most of them are just multiple single releases. And it's not clear in the user interface which albums are real albums and which are just singles. They need to colour them differently or something and also add a checkbox to the page to filter out albums that aren't real albums. There are probably lots of other things that are wrong with Napster as it stands, but another problem is the lack of marketing. Very few people I speak to know that Napster runs a legal download service now. It's also difficult explaining the subscription service. Napster really needs to do a better job of getting the word out if it wants customers.Oh, and I'm posting all this to my blog because Napster is one of those companies that puts as much distance between itself and it's customers as possible. They have a "user feedback" form, but there's no conversation with that - they might read your comments, they might not, either way you're not getting a response from them. They have a forums system build into the application, but there are no staff to be seen there - it's just all 15 yearolds slagging each other off. Maybe I should recommend them a copy of Scoble's Naked Conversations. / No comments / § ¶ Prepare for Cell Processor hype onslaught 08 February 2006 - 08:44 Just watching the US CNBC Squawkbox over here in England and they're going on about how amazingly powerful and revolutionary the new IBM Cell Processor is going to be. And if a product that isn't available yet and for which there is no new news available to get appearances on CNBC means that the PR engine has swung into full-on hype mode. Expect floods of blog postings about the chip and stories in all the news websites.It's all PR hype though. We know the Cell is going to be the core of the Sony Playstaion 3 and there are possibly other applications for it in workstation accelerators. But don't expect to see it as widely used as IBM would like it to be. Firstly the Cell is not a cheap chip to manufacture. Some of the early hype made claims that by putting lots of simple processors together on one die they could make a very powerful chip at low cost compared to traditional solutions. This is just not the case though. The primary determiner in the manufacturing cost of chip is the die space it takes up and the Cell is as big as any high performance design. Even though the individual units of the Cell (SPE or Synergistic Processing Elements in IBM speak) are small and simple, when you jam 8 of them together (and add another true PowerPC processor to co-ordinate them) you end up with a big chip.The other concern over the Cell is the ease of programming. Writing highly multi-threaded code is difficult anyway unless you have an easily seperable algorithm as your main computation task. But if you then take into account that the SPEs don't have access to main memory - only the 512KB they are bundled with - the whole business of co-ordinating data transfers to and from the SPEs adds an extra layer of complexity that any programmer would rather do without.There is plenty of debate among game programmers over whether the PS3 offers as much useable processing power as the more conventional three-core PowerPC CPU in the Xbox 360 because the potention of the Cell will be so hard to realise. Being able to decode 48 MPEG2 streams simultaneously isn't that useful in most applications. / No comments / § ¶ Google "does evil", MSN nods knowingly 26 January 2006 - 19:06 I never really bought the whole "Do no evil" thing from Google. It just sounds like the kind of thing you come up with when you're 13 years old and you think big companies are evil and bad and you don't want to be like them. You don't want to pay what is effectively minimum wage to the majority of your employees while hyping up how cool it is to work there. So when Microsoft gets slammed for censoring (really just refusing to host - there are plenty of other hosting options available) a Chinese blogger according to state rules there and claims that this is just "the cost of doing business in China", it comes as a great surprise to anyone that Google is under the same pressure when they are trying to do business in China as well? Liberals will say that Google (and MSN) shouldn't do business in China if those are the rules, but as public companies they have a duty to pursue relevent revenue opportunities and although there is a limit to what a responsible company should get involved in, providing web services in China, with all that entails, isn't crossing over that line in my opinion. Maybe applying state censorship laws on your web services is evil, maybe it isn't, but if you thought to write something like "do no evil" into your company's mission statement, you probably believe it is. In that case I strongly suggest Google quietly removes it, because as a multi-national, they are going to have to do plenty of similarly 'evil' things to compete. technorati tags (experimental): Google, MSN, Evil / No comments / § ¶