ThePanda

Living in a world full of NP-complete problems with polynomial time approximation makes it so much harder to appreciate stories such as this. Well fine so there is the remote possibility that someday I might own a 80-processor beast, on the other hand, I am not going any faster on my DP solution to the knapsack problem using one of those beasts, though I guess it will help with other approaches. There is also little chance that we’ll be producing much better approximates to problems involving better estimates for what to probe while attempting to solve certain optimization problems. On the other hand I could use the 80 cores to run really fast ray tracing, or test lots of hypothesis simultaneously. Maybe brute forcing stuff on n-cores is the future, and even that does not give a theoretically pretty solution. Well, there is a non-zero probability that someone announces a viable quantum computer tomorrow, and then I can weep about buying this dual-core beast this year.

Also for those who didn’t know, folks over at Skype have an API available. The API for OS X (Cocoa and/or Carbon, the AppleScript API as it exists now does not give return values and is hence useless for a lot of things, though I can see cool tricks with using Address Book and such) currently relies on passing space separated strings back and forth, sort of like most RFCs produced before the dawn of the XML era. The API seems cool, but is designed mostly for USB and other Skype supported devices, but seeing as said devices seem expensive (at least the nicer ones), and seeing as Skype until recently offered $7/year anywhere in the US calling, I think this is one of those cool things you can use to send music, text read by text to speech stff, and other things over phone lines. Think of all the fun you could have with calling up friends over an unrecognizable phone number and scaring them, think of all the computer generated voices, think of all the hours of fun that can be had. Now if only someone would document Core Audio better

Ze Panda
PS: Anyone tried one of those 4 core beasts, anyone want to complain about having less than a 20th of the power you could have had, had you bought out Intel.
PPS: I do know a bit about the Skype API for OSX, garnered from staring at their sample code, and reading their header files. I however know nothing about the Windows API, if someone wants to buy me a copy of Vista (Brown does not provide us with free copies yet), and VMWare keeps the Fusion Beta program alive for a little longer, I might consider exploring the API for Windows. On the other hand, you could just do this yourself.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 12th, 2007 at 11:32 pm and is filed under CS, article. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.