Multi-core ahead of programmers

Source: NY Times

Technology
Faster Chips Are Leaving Programmers in Their Dust
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: December 17, 2007
Newer computer chips with multiple processors require dauntingly complex software and programmers are having a hard time keeping up.

Off the cuff I'd think that living systems have the answer as anything with a brain is massively parallel.

One more quote from the article:

...He envisions modern chips that will increasingly resemble musical orchestras. Rather than having tiled arrays of identical processors, the microprocessor of the future will include many different computing cores, each built to solve a specific type of problem. A.M.D. has already announced its intent to blend both graphics and traditional processing units onto a single piece of silicon....

Whatever the answer it reasonable to me that whomever gets it right will lead the computer world and everyone else will be forced to follow.

Balance and pregnancy

Source: NY Times

Science
Why Pregnant Women Don’t Tip Over
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: December 12, 2007
Researchers have found evidence that evolution produced a stronger and more flexible lower spine for women.

Bigger tropics from global warming

(click on post title to go to article)
Source: National Geographic

Climate Change Pushing Tropics Farther, Faster
Richard A. Lovett
for National Geographic News
December 3, 2007

Over the past 25 years the tropics have expanded by as much as 300 miles (500 kilometers) north and south—evidence of climate change in action, a new study says....

Class Viewer D?

Continuing to think about the next thing for Class Viewer I am coming now to the idea of variations on the theme, where now I'm wondering about a Class Viewer D, where "D" is for Development. The main thing new there would be that along with being able to go to javadocs when you click on a method, you'd be able to open the source code if it is available in your classpath and go directly to that method in the code in a programmer's text editor.

Thing about this idea is that it seems to me that it'd be rather easy to program though now I'd need to bundle a text editor but there are open source ones available, and if they do not allow being opened with a call to a line number, then I'd just add that feature.

That has me thinking then about plug-ins for Class Viewer where I set things up where additional features can be done by other developers as I think about a lightweight development suite around my little program. But that is more the dreaming stuff, as knowing me it's quite possible I'll still be muttering about these things a year from now.

Oh yeah, I'm still pondering the Class Viewer Enterprise variation as well, where Class Viewer is a gateway to any company's codebase, where the opening second screen which is all whitespace now would have some kind of branded welcome and maybe news where it could be on an intranet or the Internet.

I am currently looking a having some ideas really nailed down by June 2008, but may do something sooner if I could get some kind of partnership with funding going.

Without that I think the odds are increasing that Class Viewer D might move forward sometime in Fall 2008, with rapid development, so I'd have something out that fall, but with me there is no telling if I'll change my mind later or not.

Fractal digital watermarking

I was thinking about my DMESE idea earlier today while on the bus, and it occurred to me that the concept would allow Original Equipment Manufactured media, which I'll call OEM media from here on out, to be designed to be hard to forge, as digital media equipment would encrypt copies they make only for OEM's that asked for it, so that a person could, for instance, copy their own videos that they made without the copies being forced to be encrypted.

That would put pressure on illegal copiers to counterfeit the OEM's to fool the equipment--or simply get it convinced that they were not copies of OEM media at all.

So digital watermarking would be necessary on data stored on the OEM disks so that, for instance, your DVD drive knew it was dealing with copyrighted material even if other signs said it was not.

And thinking about digital watermarking as the bus rode on got me to considering a fractal based watermarking scheme in the red color zone, where fractal images would be embedded in the red frequency range in such a way that they would be invisible to the human eye (so no you would not see this red thing on your screen).

I thought fractals because mathematically a fractal image could have an infinite number of components while practically there would be a finite but very large number of fractals embedded in the red zone which, for instance, a DVD drive could detect so it would know it had an OEM disk.

It would be very difficult though for a counterfeiter to remove ALL the fractals, and the presence of fractals in the red zone would indicate an OEM media.

So manufacturers would just make equipment that detected fractals in the red zone, which would tell the equipment it was dealing with an OEM, and then some other detail, like holograms on the disk itself would tell it that it had a valid copy, forcing counterfeiters to counterfeit everything or not fool the machine.

Then there could be a continual battle, like with currency, to keep counterfeiters from succeeding with making passable copies of OEM media, while it would be very hard for them to try to simply erase the digital watermark, as every single OEM could have a different fractal watermarking in the red zone, and equipment would assume any fractal in the red zone meant it had an OEM.

Thoughts I had while musing on the subject on the bus this morning.


James Harris