Wednesday, August 15, 2007

AI 10 Years After Big Blue Beat Garry Kasparov. Jamie found another MIT Technology review story, this time about Chess, Supercomputing, Garry Kasparov, and trying to make sense of just exactly it all meant when a computer finally beat a grand master. An interesting piece that touches on what it means to play chess, the difference between humanity and machinery and how super computers don't care when they are losing. Worth your time.Read more of this story at Slashdot. 9:10:50 PM    comment [] javascript Cross-Platform Microsoft. willdavid sends us to the ZDNet blogs for a provocative opinion piece by John Carroll. He points to Microsoft's evident cross-platform strategy with Silverlight, and wonders whether the company couldn't make money — and win friends — by extending its excellent development ecosystem cross-platorm. "Microsoft, apparently, is helping the folks at Mono to port Silverlight to Linux. This is good news, as the primary fear I've heard from developers is that Silverlight will be locked to Microsoft platforms and products. Microsoft has already committed to supporting Silverlight cross-browser on Windows, and has a version that runs on Mac OS X (which is even available from the Apple web site). The last step is Linux, and Microsoft is working with Novell and Mono to make this happen."Read more of this story at Slashdot. 9:09:01 PM    comment [] biotech MIT Team Creates Cancer Stem Cells. MIT scientists and colleagues have found a way in the lab to create large amounts of cancer stem cells, the cells that can initiate tumors. The work, reported in the August 13 issue of Cancer Cell, could be a boon to researchers who study these elusive cells. Labs could easily grow them for use in experiments.Read more of this story at Slashdot. 9:05:21 PM    comment [] video 3D Animations In Mid-Air Using Plasma Balls. An anonymous reader clues us to research at Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology that has produced the ability to make animations by creating small plasma balls in mid-air. The technology doesn't use vapor or strange gases, just lasers to heat up oxygen and nitrogen molecules above the device: up to 1,000 brilliant dots per second, which makes smooth motion possible. When the tech improves it could be used for street signs or advertising.Read more of this story at Slashdot. 9:03:47 PM    comment [] course management system Learning Joomla! Extension Development. Michael J. Ross writes "One of the most powerful and popular content management systems (CMSs) is Joomla, a superior derivative of Mambo. Out of the box, Joomla makes it relatively easy to build Web sites that allow collaborative editing of content, attractive styling via prebuilt templates, and many more features. A Joomla-based site can be further improved by adding custom modules, components, and other extensions to the CMS, without any modification to the core Joomla code. A resource that explains how to do this, is Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development: Creating Modules, Components, and Plugins with PHP, by Joseph L. LeBlanc." Read on for the rest of Michael's review.Read more of this story at Slashdot. 9:01:58 PM    comment [] ecology Wozniak's New Goal is Efficient Housing. Steve Wozniak is developing techniques to build homes with the least energy usage and pollution (using, for example, ram-dirt) and the least energy to operate. ... [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News] 6:09:29 AM    comment []

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