July 25, 2007, 6:00 am
Interesting, my analysis from last November is unchanged other than time-shifting and yet, emotionally, the availability of TiVo makes a huge impact. On the other hand, I am not sure that they would allow me to change my current TiVo lifetime subscription over to the TiVoHD, so I’d be facing another recurring monthly bill.
So it’s HDTV ~$2500 + Tivo HD $300 + XBox 360 HD DVD Player $200 + monthly fee and neither Comedy Central nor AMC nor TCM broadcast in HD. Mmm…. temptation decreases …
July 24, 2007, 6:00 am
John Lam details the first public availability of IronRuby. Couple reasons why I’m interested in this:
- It’s Ruby
- It’s the CLR
- It’s a second data point for how to code for the DLR
I don’t think I’m going to be able to resist the temptation to write a compiler for the DLR. I know I should resist, but I spend so many cycles thinking about programming languages and the DLR seems to have so much promise to language implementors.
Argh, I can’t believe I have such a busy week in front of me.
July 23, 2007, 6:00 am
I’ll be interviewing Jonathan Schaeffer next week about his amazing checkers solution. Right now, he’s busy at a big man-machine poker showdown. Suggested questions welcome…
July 23, 2007, 6:00 am
Joe Gregorio reports the First Public Working Draft of Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) Format 1.0. Even that name stinks of bureaucratic ineptitude.
This is my early contender for Worst Idea I’ve Heard This Year. Or maybe I should save that for this sub-idea:
EXI processors MAY provide the capability to specify different built-in types or user-defined encoder/decoders (CODECS) for representing specific schema types. This capability is called Pluggable CODECS.
Oh yeah, perfect. Because the only thing that could make a non-human-readable data interchange format more valuable would be to marry it with the robustness, ease-of-use, and interoperability that we associate with video and audio codecs.
And the wonderful thing about this is that this will be marketed as having something to do with performance, because, oh yeah, a linear decrease in the size of your messages — that will solve your architectural problems. So people with performance issues with their Web services will solve them by introducing another layer of complexity, making the data non-readily inspectable, and throwing proprietary codecs into the midst. I can’t see why that wouldn’t work.
July 21, 2007, 6:00 pm
Wesner Moise’s NStatic static-analysis tool for .NET appears to be approaching its initial beta. Moise has made a number of exciting claims for this technology since he began discussing it about 18 months ago. If I understand correctly, NStatic involves considerably “deeper” analysis than most quality-assurance tools; it almost seems it applies the field of constraint-based programming to parsed program structures. At least, that’s the only way I can get my head around this post.
July 21, 2007, 12:00 pm
Wow! Jonathan Schaeffer of the University of Alberta has solved the game of checkers. Games like tic-tac-toe, checkers, chess, and go are all known to have optimal strategies (I don’t recall of the exact game-theory restriction that describes such games: “perfect information, sequential”?). That’s why tic-tac-toe is boring — it’s always correct to first play to a corner and its always correct to respond by playing to the opposite corner middle .
The bigger games like checkers, chess, and go have such huge solution spaces that one wouldn’t think their solutions could be discovered by brute force. Schaeffer’s calculation has been ongoing for 18 calendar years (no word on total processing time) and involved “just” 10^14 calculations. It seems that he reduced the tree by finding many equivalent positions and then brute-forcing every possible endgame involving fewer than 10 pieces. The conclusion is that perfect play leads to a draw (I believe it’s still unknown if perfect play in chess leads to a draw).
What I’m impressed by from a software standpoint is that obviously he figured a way to maintain the partial calculations of his system over 18 years, even as he undoubtedly brought newer generations of hardware and software to bear on the problem. Well done!
July 21, 2007, 6:00 am
A few weeks ago I got an email asking if I was interested in selling one of my idle domain names — inkpositive.com. “Sure,” I said, and named a price that covered the hour of time it would take me to transfer the domain. The subsequent process (contract, escrow.com, “I can’t tell you who my associate is…”) makes me think I could have asked for a couple more hours worth of revenue…
July 19, 2007, 3:06 pm
Looking for enough cores to start seeing complex behavior? Check out this Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Acer Aspire from CompUSA for $750 (sheesh, the chip goes for about $580!).
Or, if you’re rolling in the dough, CNet quite likes the HP Pavilion Media Center TV m8120n, which will set you back ~$1200. It comes with a cheap graphics card, but sounds like a good media server.
