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 of entries posted on October 2009
“Six diseases you never knew you could catch”
More fascinating research.
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 [...]
“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.
“Sawfish: mining the forgotten forests of the sea”
Interesting use of resources.
“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 [...]
“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.