MetaFilter posts tagged with Computer

“Better finish it while there’s still an Apple II market out there,”

loquacious — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:13:35 -0800

The development blog for the original Prince of Persia from Jordan Mechner.

unbump.

kaibutsu — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:11:50 -0800

SAGE is a free, open-source computer algebra system. SAGE is notable for bringing together a number of existing (and extremely fast) open source projects under a single umbrella, and religiously avoiding redundant code. The idea is to create a free alternative to closed-source systems like Mathematica, Maple, and MATLab. In spite of its buffet-style approach to computation, it already runs considerably faster than Mathematica in many situations. Importantly, open-source software is easier to ethically cite in academic papers, since the code is available for review. As a result, a number of researchers (including me) regularly use SAGE in their work, using its massive computational power to find new results to prove.

10/GUI

Plutor — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:22:07 -0800

Since SRI and Xerox invented the GUI and the mouse in the late 1970s, technology has leaped forward, but the way we interact with our computers has stood still. "10/GUI aims to bridge this gap by rethinking the desktop to leverage technology in an intuitive and powerful way."

Expandable to 16k!

MtDewd — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 21:53:40 -0800

50 years ago today, IBM announced the 1401 Data Processing System. Originally designed as a spooling system for the larger machines, the 1401 became very popular as a mainframe in its own right, eventually being called 'The Model T of Computers'. By the end of 1961, the number of 1401s installed in the United States alone had reached 2,000 - representing about one fourth of all computers installed by all manufacturers at that time. 15- 20,000 were eventually built. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View is having a 50th anniversary celebration on November 10th. Here's what $125,600 (or $2500/month rent) would get you: 1401- 6-bit processor with 1400 bytes of core storage. Clock speed 87KHz 1402- combination card reader (800 cards per minute) & punch (250 cards per minute) 1403- 600 lpm printer If you're willing to spend more you could get up to 16k of memory by getting a 1406 Then you might want some 729s (featured here) for card to tape or tape to print operations, at $30k-60k apiece. If you need some disk space, you could try the 1405, for up to 20MB. The processor was approximately 30"x58"x58", and used a 30A, 208V power connector (3 phase). The entire system needed 23,000 BTU of cooling per hour. The Computer History Museum has been restoring two systems for the last 5 years, the second of which it acquired from a father and son who were using it to operate a billing service business until 1995 out of their home in Darien, Connecticut. Those without access to their own 1401 can download an emulator. (You might need reference material, or at least the reference card). Here's a Hello World to get you started. Previously: Music , History

A Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich of a Computer Case

filthy light thief — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:49:55 -0800

The use of cardboard for things other than packaging is not new to the blue, from detailed artwork to furnature (and even re-making the Tron light cycle scene), and now computer cases. Brenden Macaluso's design is not the first, with a Japanese design from 2005 (the original site is down, but Archive.org has a backup, with more versions archived), and other kludged fixes for an existing case missing parts. Recompute wasn't the only cardboard case in the 2009 Greener Gadgets design competition. The other was Cardboardcase, by Francesco Biasci and Martina Becattini, which is a more of a traditional computer case form. On the DIY side, Instructables provides plans for a DIY cardboard laptop case. Recompute is inspired by the amount of computer hardware being recycled at the end of the product's lifecycle. The video section of the related website has additional associated clips. According to an interview with Macaluso, the design wasn't initially limited to cardboard as a material, but as he researched the components he found that cardboard had some bonus features, such as a greater tolerance for heat (cardboard has a higher fire and ignition point -- 258°C and 427°C, respectively -- where plastics begin to melt at about 120°C - source), and the corrugation ventilates the entire structure. The processor has its own cooling fan built in and the power supply and mother board are isolated from each other to keep heat from one affecting the other (source).

The Little Mac Classic That Could

ignignokt — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:46:28 -0800

A Mac Classic shows bullies what's for in "3½ inches is enough" by Unreal Voodoo. This demo (actually written to run on a Mac Classic) was presented at ASSEMBLY, Finland's largest computer festival. More highlights from ASSEMBLY are available at GameSetWatch. The demos are mostly trippy and impressive hand-coded animations as one might expect, but there's also a live action short featuring a Rube Goldberg machine.

"We have approximately 3 million bytes of memory just used to store an image..."

Mr. Anthropomorphism — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 20:47:27 -0800

The Computer Chronicles.

George Julius' Mechanical Totalisator

Fiasco da Gama — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 19:41:29 -0800

Sir George Julius's Automatic Totalisator, first used by the public in New Zealand, and quickly taken up by racetracks throughout Australasia and North America (warning hideous HTML), automates parimutuel betting.

"How would it be, for example, to relate to a machine that is as intelligent as your spouse?"

flapjax at midnite — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 07:46:05 -0800

Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone. From the NYT: Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man.

"All I got in this world is my balls and my word and I don't break either of 'em for nobody!"

bigmusic — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:43:12 -0800

Before the mouse, there was the trackball. Built for DATAR in 1952, DATAR turned out to be a complete failure. The next user interface device that used a ball was the mouse at Xeroc Parc in 1972. Trackballs are a dying breed of interface devices. But sometimes a trackball just seems more natural choice for certain applications - not so obvious for others. Would you sit on one?

You sure don't see a lot of sidecars nowadays.

Afroblanco — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:36:48 -0800

15 Classic PC Design Mistakes, along with explanations as to what exactly they were thinking at the time.

300 baud of awesome in a wooden box

loquacious — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 11:47:03 -0800

This is what 300 baud looks like online today.

Homebrewed CPU

jim in austin — Thu, 28 May 2009 05:51:41 -0800

Intel’s fabrication plants can churn out hundreds of thousands of processor chips a day. But what does it take to handcraft a single 8-bit CPU and a computer? Give or take 18 months, about $1,000 and 1,253 pieces of wire.

The machines are making such a wonderful music, who would want to pull the plug?

filthy light thief — Tue, 26 May 2009 12:48:53 -0800

Computer music is relatively old, going back to the very early 1950s. In the following decades, people have been creative with programmable technology, leading to "She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain" being played on an IBM chain printer back in 1966, and in more recent years, HP ScanJet 5100c included an Easter Egg. The HP ScanJet 4c's SCL (Scanner Control Language) unofficial PLAY TUNE command lead to these fine little ditties. Now over a decade ago, the duo known as [The User] enlisted three specialists to operate a computer program via a server that synchronized the dot-matrix printers and read complex ASCII text files in order to create musical compositions. The result was a techno-sounding piece that was performed by the administrators of the system, rather than one that was simply being played. Like a symphony of car horns, the coordination of these printers became Symphony #1 and #2 for Dot Matrix Printers (samples of Symphony #2, Symphony #2 Slashdot thread). [More computer music exploration inside] A track from Symphony #1 was used as the soundtrack to Radiohead - Skyscape [10], part of Radiohead TV, and another track was used for this short, odd juggling video. The Austraialian sound artist, Sue Harding is making music in the realm of [The User], but she's going it alone with her collection of printers. She has released a few tracks as part of experimental electronic compilations. Want to try your hand at this chaos? Hack A Day has some information, but mostly takes the chance to show off some videos. If you want to get into the software of printers, you may want to try fine-tuned printing. As is usually the case, you can find more odd computer music previously discussed on MetaFilter. Bonus videos: Younnat's "Dot Matrix Printer Etude", Mistabishi's drum'n'bass "Printer Jam" music video, Cornelius' "Toner," the mysterious "Star Wars floppy", and so much more.

Pixel City

GuyZero — Fri, 15 May 2009 10:58:45 -0800

Pixel City is a procedurally generated cityscape by Shamus Young. Procedurally generated graphics have a long history of producing attractive results with extremely small amounts of code, like Elevated, which was generated by just 4K of code, automatically generated video game content (also, Spore) or the generation of realistic water flows. Note the last demo reel may have been the test for a new film mentioned previously.

Dad, are we, relatavistically speaking, there yet?

zardoz — Thu, 07 May 2009 16:57:28 -0800

Project GREAT: General Relativity Einstein/Essen Anniversary Test
Clocks, Kids, and General Relativity on Mt Rainier

Think your dad was a nerd? A mad genius? Was he a Clark Griswold-esque cheerleader for outdoor family vacations? You ain't seen nothin' yet.

Before everything, there was PLATO

WolfDaddy — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 18:29:57 -0800

Touch screen. Awesome graphics. Online community. No, I'm not talking about the latest handheld device to hit the market, I'm talking about Control Data's PLATO system. PLATO People. Preservation efforts. Empire.

What you see is what you hear

finite — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 20:09:22 -0800

Queen Bohemian Rhapsody Old School Computer Remix

Rethinking the higher education computer lab at U of VA

porn in the woods — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 09:10:22 -0800

Time to reconsider the traditional campus computer lab? The University of Virginia has begun a three-year process of shutting down its public computer labs to shave costs, citing 99% laptop ownership of incoming 2007 students and the predominant usage of free software in their computing facilities. Issues such as printing and software distribution have yet to be ironed out. [/. thread]

spammen all over you

mwhybark — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 07:54:43 -0800

overclockblocked , by Sumit Dan. short story told in speculative chippy dialect. Fucken AIbrid think he so fucking cool with he retrofleshy stylen. Like you don’t already know he dealin double-helix, not just some two-bit qubit.

80 Million Tiny Images

carsonb — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 17:46:00 -0800

A visualization of all the nouns in the English language arranged by semantic meaning. [NSFW words included!]

Currently computers have difficult recognizing objects in images. While practical solutions exist for a few simple classes such as human faces or cars, the more general problem of recognizing all different classes of objects in the world (e.g. guitars, bottles, telephones) remains unsolved. Computer Vision researchers are currently investigating methods that can recognize and localize thousands of different object categories in complex scenes. A key component of these algorithms is the data used to train the computers' model of each object. Current approaches use collections of images gathered by hand. Our research explores how the billions of images available on the Internet can be used to train models for object recognition. With overwhelming amounts of data, many problems can be tackled with simple algorithms. We gathered from the web 79 million images. We are using this massive dataset to train a computer to recognize objects within an image and to understand the scenes depicted in photographs. You can help... get better training data for computer vision algorithms by labeling some of the images.

WordNet prev iously

It's only a yellow line. How hard can it be?

SpacemanStix — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:50:10 -0800

The computer generated first-down line in American football is something we take for granted these days. However, the logistics required to make this work is pretty complex. At the very least, have you considered this: if it's computer generated on a moving image, how do they draw it under the people running around on the field, and not over them? And it gets a bit more complicated than this. "Here are some of the problems that have to be solved in order for this system to work: * The system has to know the orientation of the field with respect to the camera so that it can paint the first down line with the correct perspective from that camera's point of view. * The system has to know, in that same perspective framework, exactly where every yard line is. * Given that the cameraperson can move the camera, the system has to be able to sense the camera's movement (tilt, pan, zoom, focus) and understand the perspective change resulting from the movement. * Given that the camera can pan while viewing the field, the system has to be able to recalculate the perspective at a rate of 30 frames per second as the camera moves. * A football field is not flat -- it crests very gently in the middle to help rainwater run off. So the line calculated by the system has to appropriately follow the curve of the field. * A football game is shot by multiple cameras at different places in the stadium, so the system has to do all of this work for several cameras. * The system has to be able to sense when players, referees or the ball cross over the first down line so it does not paint the line on top of them. * The system has to be aware of superimposed graphics that the network might overlay on the scene." Here's a detailed explanation regarding how it's done. And here's a cool video showing it in action.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

up in the old hotel — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 16:49:40 -0800

The National Security Agency is building a data center in San Antonio that’s the size of the Alamodome. Microsoft has opened an 11-acre data center a few miles away. Coincidence? Not according to author James Bamford, who probably knows more about the NSA than any outsider. Bamford's new book reports that the biggest U.S. spy agency wanted assurances that Microsoft would be in San Antonio before it moved ahead with the Texas Cryptology Center. Bamford notes that under current law, the NSA could legally tap into Microsoft’s data without a court order. Whatever you do, don't take pictures of it the spy building unless you want to be taken in for questioning.

Reuse

Blazecock Pileon — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 09:18:39 -0800

Computer Art

Coming from Uranus to check my style

Smedleyman — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 10:25:38 -0800

Another dimension, new galaxy - J.C.R. Licklider was one of the most influential people in the history of computer science . Dr. Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (or “Lick”), was the Director of ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office and from 1963-64 put in place the funding priorities which would lead to the Internet, and the invention of the mouse, windows and hypertext. In 1960 he was writing about Man-computer symbiosis and The Computer as a Communications Device . He also wrote epic memos such as his 1963 memo to “Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network ”