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Thursday, August 09, 2007
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Dell Considers Bundling Virtualization on Mobos. castrox writes "Ars Technica is reporting that Dell may be considering bundling virtualization on some of their motherboards. No more dual boot or VMs inside the running OS? 'Any way you slice it, though, putting the hypervisor in a chunk of flash and letting it handle loading the OS is the way forward, especially for servers and probably even for enterprise desktops. Boot times, power consumption, security, and flexibility are all reasons to do this ... The big question is: which hypervisor will Dell bundle with its machines? Vance suggests hypervisors from XenSource and VMware as two options, but I think that VMware is the most likely candidate since it seems to be the x86 virtualization solution of choice for the moment. However, if Dell doesn't try too hard to lock it down, this system could easily be modified in an aftermarket fashion to include almost any hypervisor that could fit on the flash chip.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
6:00:58 PM 
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Edu.Software in Facebook. This morning, the Facebook Blog drew attention to Courses++, a user-generated course management application for Facebook. I've played around with it some, and my first impression is that Facebook should have let this mature a little before sending attention its way. Courses++ primarily acts as a forum for a class, but the developers unfortunately forgot that classes have sections, so there's no standard to differentiate my INLS 490 (Sec. 151, Online Social Networks) from the other INLS 490 (Sec 01W, People and Information). I'll keep an eye on it and hope it matures a little bit. ...
I look forward to seeing other course management apps as they come online; if you are working on one, drop me a line. The course I'm teaching begins on Aug 23, and if you're working on something cool, I'll be happy to try it out and potentially use it for my course. If I get a lot of responses, I may begin reviewing FB Educational software apps here - let's see what happens. [Unit Structures]
5:59:28 PM
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Pay-For-Visit Advertising. theodp writes "US patent office documents released Thursday show that a startup named Pelago is seeking a patent covering Pay-For-Visit Advertising, which uses GPS, Bluetooth, or RFID on your mobile devices to track your travels to see if you wander into a place of business that appeared in an ad shown earlier on your cellphone, PDA, or laptop. To maximize ad revenue, phone calls are also tracked to see if you dial a number associated with an ad, and financial transactions are examined to see if you make a purchase from an advertiser. The application goes on to note that the system may be of interest to government agencies. Pelago just raised $7.4M from the likes of KPCB and Jeff Bezos."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
12:32:06 PM
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Google News Allowing Story Participants To Comment. Jamie found this analysis of Google News's foray into community commentary. They are starting it off by only allowing people involved with the story to comment — and participants must first be authenticated by email. The article rounds up other bloggers' views on the game-changing nature, and the possible dangers to Google, of this new feature. Here is a sample of comments to a Google News story.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
12:30:33 PM
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How to Turn a Mini Maglite into a Laser. Lucas123 writes "Using the laser from a DVD burner, this instructional video shows you how to create a hand-held laser that is powerful enough to light a match and pop a balloon. There's some soldering involved and the Maglite's bulb housing needs to be drilled out to fit the new laser diode, but with some basic skill, most people could do this. Just plain cool." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
8:13:20 AM
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DARPATech Shows off Robot Doc and Cancer Breathalyzer. mattnyc99 writes "DARPATech, the Pentagon research arm's annual R&D free-for-all, has some pretty groundbreaking stuff on display this year: the first portable, self-contained robotic surgeon (which a Defense Dept. scientist said would be deployed by 2009), plus a breath-testing gadget that can scan for multiple diseases (including breast cancer) and three new autonomous 'bots that reflect the Pentagon's increasing need for autonomous machinery as the IED-filled Iraq war continues."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
8:07:37 AM
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Algorithm Seamlessly Patches Holes In Images. Beetle B. writes in with research from Carnegie Mellon demonstrating a new way to replace arbitrarily shaped blank areas in an image with portions of images from a huge catalog in a totally seamless manner. From the abstract: "In this paper we present a new image completion algorithm powered by a huge database of photographs gathered from the Web. The algorithm patches up holes in images by finding similar image regions in the database that are not only seamless but also semantically valid. Our chief insight is that while the space of images is effectively infinite, the space of semantically differentiable scenes is actually not that large. For many image completion tasks we are able to find similar scenes which contain image fragments that will convincingly complete the image. Our algorithm is entirely data-driven, requiring no annotations or labelling by the user."Read more of this story at Slashdot.[like what the brain does with the blind spot -- fills in seamlessly so even with one eye covered there is no hole for the blindspot -- BL]
8:02:56 AM
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© Copyright
2007
Bruce Landon.
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9/2/2007; 10:45:14 AM.
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