Archive for May 2007

Are you alive?
29 May 2007 in Fun & Tech | Comments (1)

Spiral_smallIn Artificial Intelligence is usual to build a chatbot and engage in human-machine talk, mainly to demonstrate its strength.

In this world of chatbots powered by AI,  A.L.I.C.E. and Jabberwacky is the top two.

Discover Magazine has arranged for something incredibly fun, having both botchats talking to each other. Hilarious!

ALICE: Are you alive?

Jabberwacky: Perhaps.

A: Why the uncertain tone?

J: Everything is uncertain except for five facts.

A: The whole universe?

J: And we both might just be some ones and zeros in the computer memory.

Flex 3D Plataform
29 May 2007 in Programming & WebDev | Comments (0)

Since the long release of Adobe Flex, I’ve been wondering this cross-platform RIA development framework could take us.

Adobe provides some demos, but none of them delivers even a small percentage of Microsoft WPF.

Outsmart is a RIA development studio that is creating a 3D rendering platform in Flex.

Outsmart_video

Using rendering methods similar to that seen in the Papervision 3D project, Outsmart have developed a 3D engine that is capable of (from their blog):

  • Realtime polygon rendering engine with texture mapping
  • Perspective and isometric rendering modes
  • Free and/or fixed camera control
  • Depth of field rendering effects
  • Ability to project any Flex UI, Flash SWF or FLV onto any 3D surface
  • Ability to interact with a Flex UI in 3D space

The online demo puts you in control of an animated character who moves around the stage when you click the floor. To look around, click and drag with the left mouse button. Dragging the floor rotates the camera and SHIFT+drag zooms it in and out.

Outsmart_components

The Flex components are probably the nicest touch with interactions being quite intuitive. The demo itself is minimal, but you can easily see how future iterations of the technology could lead to a compelling user experience, both with corporate applications and 3rd person gaming.

You can find this demo here. Some others could also be found at their blog.

They are also planning on releasing a virtual chat with customizable avatars.


links for 2007-05-29
29 May 2007 in Random tidbits | Comments (2)

Nick Baker: Xbox 360 Architecture
28 May 2007 in Microsoft & Tech | Comments (0)

Xbox360Another great movie at Channel 9 Forum. This time is from Microsoft Nick Baker, the managing architect for Xbox 360 hardware. The movie covers the interesting motivations behind putting PowerPC technology at the core of the console. Though it shouldn’t be a big surprise, the architecture was constrained by schedule and final cost, which drove most of the decisions on Nick’s team. Nick and Charles also talk through the issues around compatibility, operating system design, and plenty of other nitty gritty details about that gorgeous white box.

What is the XBox 360, exactly? How do you go about designing and building a game console that meets the high standards of today’s gamers and handles the computational pressures of today’s highly realistic games (think real time physics computation, incredibly rich graphics, etc)? Did you know the XBox 360 team saw into the multi-core future before most anybody else?

Well, who better to talk to about all of this (and more) than Nick Baker. Nick is a hardware engineer and Director who leads the team that thought up the XBox 360 hardware architecture. It’s an impressive piece of machinery. In fact, Nick recently won the Outstanding Technical Leadership award for the effort. Here, Nick takes us through the design history and some of the implementation details of the XBox 360. What were some of the design trade-offs? How different is the XBox 360 that you can buy today from what you, Nick and his team were initially thinking?

It’s a very interesting story.

We get pretty geeky here, so be prepared to learn a thing or two about game console hardware architecture, the future of XBox 360 as it relates to multi-core, game programming language evolution in the multi-core, and more.

 

Nuts!
28 May 2007 in Random tidbits & TV | Comments (0)

10m

Although this is more of a technology and programming blog, it is also my personal blog.

One of my main hobbies is watching tv series… hundreds of them.

As so, I would like to share this story with you all… at least to those that ain’t heard of it before.

CBS series ‘Jericho’ was a great canceled several weeks ago (9 May). The show was promising, revolving around the residents of a town called ‘Jericho’ after a series of nuclear attacks on major cities in the United States.

After the cancellation, the shocked fans quickly banded together, many using CBS’ own public “Jericho” discussion forum, and began brainstorming on ways to convince the network to bring back the show for a second season. A plot point in the final episode of “Jericho” involving the expletive “Nuts!” (in reference to an historic conversation between generals) was turned into a campaign to send large quantities of nuts to CBS’ NY, LA, and affiliate offices. Fans have sent a total of $26,000 for a pooled campaign hosted at Nuts Online to ship over 19,000 (9.5 tons) pounds of peanuts to CBS.

Slashdot also presented recently a post on the subject.

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