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OCAU News |
I love Sunday when you're full from lunch, and it's kinda quiet in the neighbourhood. It's even kinda quiet on the news front - I guess everyone's all tuckered out after the fun of April's Fools news posts.
Speaking of which, you may have seen Google's effort, the Gmail Motion. Well, researchers at USC have responded with the real deal. As one of the comments says for the second video, there's nothing worse than someone making your April Fools joke into reality.
If you've ever wondered about the testing behind hard drive reviews, Tweak Town have expanded on testing SSD drives: "It would be difficult for most people to imagine the amount of testing that goes into a product review. I think most reading this have run a benchmark on their system before, but few can really grasp what it means to systematically run test after test without varying order or timeline. We run a lot of tests, several more than what makes it into a final review. Once you master the art of testing and the discipline of keeping a dedicated test machine, certain patterns emerge. Some of these show up in the tests that are published and sometimes they show up in others. When a test shows something of value and isn't redundant with another test, we typically bring that test into the review. This can sometimes be to explain something we saw in another test or at times add a way to look at a product."
If you're really not clued-in about CPU's, cores, hyperthreading and all that, you should read Funky Kit's article about just that: "When researching processors these days one runs into talk of Cores, Threads, HyperThreading, Turbo Boost, Turbo This, Hyper That, HT, mhz, ghz, it's a mess! This article aims to be a basic guide to what it all means, in as simple of terms as possible."
Ars Technica had a good look at high performance computing on gaming PC's this week: "It is hard to imagine performing research without the help of scientific computing. The days of scientists working only at a lab bench or poring over equations are rapidly fading. Today, experiments can be planned based on output from computer simulations, and experimental results are confirmed using computational methods. For example, the Materials Genome Project is currently plowing through the periodic table looking for structures and chemistries that may lead to enhanced materials for energy applications. By allowing a computer to perform most of the work, researchers can concentrate their valuable time on synthesizing and characterizing a small subset of interesting compounds identified by the search algorithm." The article should be particularly interesting for a lot of OCAU'ers involved in distributed computing, in our ever-popular Folding@Home Team 24.
MegaTech News have released small "Robo showcase": "It’s not uncommon for articles to be written over persons of valor. If someone does a good deed or meets a historic achievement, they will be praised, held up on the shoulders of the printed word for all the world to see. Extraordinary acts and those responsible are often showcased to set examples and instill hope in others. That isn’t what I’m doing here. This isn’t for showcasing weak humans and their paltry accomplishments. I’m here to talk about robots, our soon-to-be masters and overlords." I just want one that can serve drinks on my sail barge.
Still on robotics, watch this great vid of a surgeon folding a paper aeroplane, using the Da Vinci robot, a tool more often used for prostate surgery and other surgeries. Keep watching to the very end for a small twist. You can read more about the robotic system at http://www.intuitivesurgical.com/. Thanks to everyone who sent in links to this!
Finally, we've got another article from Ars Technica, but this one is a photoessay, collating the first images from various probes that we've sent to other planets in the solar system. "This week, NASA released the first images that its Messenger probe sent back after it went into orbit around the solar system's innermost planet, Mercury. These weren't the first images taken of Mercury from a spacecraft, nor even the first images of Mercury taken by Messenger, which had passed by the planet several times as it maneuvered into orbit. So why is entering orbit a big deal?"
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All original content copyright James Rolfe.
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