“Boffins ‘write directly to memory’ of living brains”
Happy Hallowe’en! Here’s a vaguely Hallowe’en-themed article I stumbled across last week. It’s exciting, but the scary part is what an amoral dictator could do with it once it’s perfected.
Archive for October 2009
VMware Fusion 3
The guys at VMware have really improved VMware Fusion.
Most of the claimed improvements were apparently made for Windows 7, which I’m not running yet, but it’s a major improvement even without that. With version 2 (at least on this MacBook Pro), hard drive accesses from the VMs were extremely slow, though the virtual machines ran at essentially bare-metal speeds otherwise. I bought version 3 very early yesterday, and after fixing a minor problem with the VMware Tools installation script on Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit, it ran beautifully — and disk accesses are much faster now, with both it and my Windows XP VMs. Ridiculously so, in fact… they seem to be at near-bare-metal speeds too now.
I’m seeing some odd behaviors with memory on my Ubuntu (64-bit) VM. Memory usage climbs to well over 90% usage over about fifteen seconds sometimes, for no apparent reason, then later drops back to less than 50% at about the same rate — again, for no reason I can find. But the VM seems to work fine throughout it, so maybe it’s not a problem.
In addition to the speed improvements, several minor irritations when running some programs have been fixed: shift-select operations (which didn’t work at all in v2), Windows mouse cursor stuff (the cursor would appear in odd colors, or only appear as a solid black block, in 8-bit color mode in v2 — required by some games), and various occasional screen resolution bugs. Probably others too, those are just the ones that I’ve noticed so far.
I’m very happy with the upgrade. Well worth the money, in my opinion.
“Comcast pop-ups alert customers to PC infections”
I don’t know why ISPs didn’t start doing this ten years ago. It was easily possible then, and there was certainly a need for it at that point too. I hope more of them pick it up in the future.
“Airlines that charge fees lost more money than airlines that didn’t”
Proof positive that greed doesn’t pay. We may be nothing but “self-loading cargo” to the airlines, but we’re not completely stupid.
“Proving a Computer Program’s Correctness”
It sounds great, but isn’t viable in practice.
“Idle wild: how Intel’s mobile Core i7 speeds up to slow down”
It seems that Intel has found a way around the major complaint about multi-core CPUs, which is that they run single-threaded applications slower than single-core CPUs: they’ve come up with a technology to shut down unused cores to boost the speed on the remaining active cores.
It’s not a perfect solution, but it’ll probably help us get over the single- to multi-threaded hump.
“Nice Use of Diversion During a Robbery”
Wow, those Swedes even have smarter bank robbers! 
“Was our oldest ancestor a proton-powered rock?”
Some fascinating evidence suggesting just that.