Monthly Archives: November 2009

SparkFun’s Free Day

Posted by decoy on November 25, 2009 1 comments

I’ve only been watching their site for a few months now, but everything I see over at SparkFun Electronics gets me excited.  I’ve got so much of their stuff on my Christmas list I should invest in their company.

And, since I like you guys so much, I’m going to head out on the proverbial limb and risk my shot at SparkFun’s Free Day, and share it with you guys in case you haven’t heard about it yet.  SparkFun is going to be giving away $100 worth of stuff on January 7th (you pay shipping) until time’s up or they hit $100k worth of free stuff.  Head on over to their post about it if you’re interested: Free Day is January 7th, 2010!

Technorati Claim!

Posted by Tom Schultz on November 24, 2009 None comments

I have a token for Technorati 5TP7TXMF64V7

AMD’s chance to gain power

Posted by Tom Schultz on November 15, 2009 1 comments

I know I’m a little late on news here but I just read this(IEEE Spectrum) and I thought it was kind of interesting. Apparently Intel is paying AMD 1.25 billion united states dollars!

Can you say “give me a raise”…if you work for AMD that is.

They say that 1.25B was “a small multiple” of what they may have had to pay in court.  Now my question is, what kind of position does this put AMD in for the future? Their stock jumped 16% on the news and their market cap is only 4.38B, so 1.25B is over 25% of what they may be worth.  The down side is that AMD hasn’t posted a profit in a while.

The interesting part is that AMD doesn’t just make desktop processors anymore right? They also have ATI and a few other irons in the fire. So my question is “what is AMD going to do with their 1.25 billion?”

AMD’s processors have kind of let people down in the last few years but they’re starting to turn things around by doing things like making a processor that is capable of breaking the 7Ghz barrier(Gizmodo).

We’ve heard a lot in the past of AMD’s grand plans for new processor platforms and their crazy modular ideas but what is really feasible and what would be generally accepted and bought by people?

I think it could be time to start watching AMD again because there should be some crazy stuff coming down the pipes from them.  I mean heck what could you do with 1.25 billion?

World Usability Day @ Michigan State University

Posted by Tom Schultz on November 13, 2009 2 comments

Today is World Usability Day, and I am at Michigan State University which is hosting conferences.   I’m here with Davin Granroth, and he’s showing me some of the ropes on usability.  So far today I’ve seen exactly how hard it is for visually impaired people to use the web. So many websites are made so poorly(even 508 aside) that screen readers really have a hard time making any sense of the data that’s on there.  Think of some sites that you thought were really terrible to look at(*cough*myspace*cough*) and then think about writing software that can read those out loud for people that cannot see…good luck!

So you might be wondering, “Is there ANY good news??”

Read more »

Microsoft Patents sudo

Posted by decoy on November 11, 2009 None comments

Since I never get enough legalese from reading corporate documents on a daily basis, I’ve resorted to reading documentation that our wise patent office publishes. They’re pretty good about granting patents that stimulate intellectual growth and collaboration rather than hindering it as well as only granting patents for very unique, distinct concepts.  When it comes to technology, they never grant patents to the undeserving.  Which is why it makes complete sense that the patent office granted Microsoft a patent on sudo.  Microsoft just deserved a go at some of the fun after the UNIX/Linux crowd had their way with sudo for 30 or 40 years.

And for the readers of Pointless Rants that don’t know me too well yet… </sarcasm>.  :mrgreen:

LeapFish

Posted by Eric Shull on November 6, 2009 None comments

I came across LeapFish this morning. It’s a new search engine that promises to aggregate everything that’s touted about the new web, web 2.0, real-time web, whatever you like to call it. While they have “an introductory video that can only be described as epic,” I think that LeapFish has a fundamental problem.

It’s not that it’s slow (it is, even when typing in the search box). The problem is that the term that comes to mind to describe it is not “search engine” but “distraction engine.” The front page is littered with News, Celebrity News, Mashable, Popular Videos, Facebook, Twitter, Weather, and Deal of the Day. Ultimately, LeapFish shows me a bunch of things I don’t care about, but will probably get distracted by anyway. I know where to find the things that I want, and at present I’m not interested in finding more things to do online just for the sake of doing things online.

The LeapFish video quotes Charles Darwin in observing that the organisms which survive are those that adapt fastest to change. I take a much more Boyd-like approach when it comes to people: he who makes the change survives. If businesses are trying to keep up, they’ve already lost. This is why no one has yet become a Google-killer: Google changes the game faster than others do; that’s how they stay on top. I remember watching Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail play catch-up with GMail’s storage and archiving capabilities. Google constantly innovates, changing the game, not playing catch-up. If LeapFish thinks it’s ahead of the curve because it adapts fast, it’s already lost to those who are creating the change it’s adapting to.

Clojure: Where’s the Elegance?

Posted by Eric Shull on November 3, 2009 10 comments

I’ve looked at the relatively new functional programming language Clojure a bit and I have to say, I’m not impressed. Functional programming is an interesting pastime, and I’m sure it has it’s uses, but when it comes to language design, it’s as if the creators are deliberately going out of their way to make things difficult.

This site has a few tips for beginners, but I was especially struck by the section about namespaces, in which the author says, “There’s ns and in-ns and use and require and import…”

What first clued me in to some bad design ideas, however, was Clojure’s sequence functions (see the bottom of the page). The fact that there are 7 separate functions for getting a specific element from a sequence (first, ffirst, nfirst, second, nth, when-first, last) is strongly at odds with my preference for Python’s there-should-be-only-one-way-to-do-it philosophy. Also, why the inconsistency of having first and second functions but no third, fourth, fifth, and so on? (I think we know why.)

I know Clojure is young, but there’s a difference between a language that’s not mature and a language that’s immature. Design features like this don’t make me want to say, “Boy this is great; I can’t wait ’til Clojure is more developed.” It makes me want to say, “Oh grow up.”

This concludes another Truly Pointless Rant.