Headworx

Catching up with post - CES comments, my attention has been captured recently by the press release from AMD, referring to the peta-flop supercomputer project powered by 1000 (one thousand) ATI Radeon GPUs and running... surprise surprise... the OTOY software. OTOY has been mentioned here a few times . I was the lucky one to attend two sessions by Jules Urbach (2007 and 2008) and they were just blowing the audience away... When Jules was presenting his real time rendering software, there was complete silence in the room with an occasional sound of people picking their jaws from the floor... Jules has been promising us the render cloud for some time. Algorithms constructing the virtual reality that is undistinguishabe from real reality running on massive server farms and client computers running just a tiny layer of client software to display the rendered VR. There is a short interview with Jules on the AMD site ( http://www.amd.com/us/fusion/Pages/otoy.aspx ). In the background you may ...

Netbooks are just great. Simple, inexpensive, portable computers with a primary function to access the Internet. It would not be a far stretch to bring the 80/20 Pareto rule here, saying they deliver in terms of personal computing 80% of what we expect from a personal computer. Or may be even for 80% PC users they deliver all the need? Netbooks are great, but really both the hardware and the software is not ready for netbooks yet. I mean client side hardware and software. We are getting close. Intel with the Atom chip is aiming at perfect netbook design. Perfect meaning enough processing power to render Web pages quickly and very little battery drain to keep the machine running for hours (if not days) on a single charge. But what we really still lack is a client operating system designed from scratch to be a Web - client operating system. At 2009 CES this month Qualcomm demonstrated Google's Android OS on the Snapdragon platform. Android had initially been targeted at mobile phon...

Last week Slacker announced the Slacker Mobile application for Blackberry smartphones. I downloaded it almost immediately to find out it is one of the must have applications for the device. Slacker is a music service, similar in nature to the Pandora , mentioned here a number of times . Both stream personalized music and both have been available for the iPhone for some time. But the difference Slacker gives is station caching. So you can create your personalized radio stations and pre - cache some or all of them (in my case the Slacker Mobile says it can cache 53 stations on the 16GB micro SD card, half occupied by songs I transferred there from iTunes). 53 stations is a lot. The idea of caching is fantastic for mobile personalized digital radios. Cellular data connectivity is still too slow (in many places where 3G coverage does not exist), too expensive (when roaming) or non existent in places you would like to listen to music (like a plane). Of course both Pandora and Slacker know y...