KludgeHack

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

In 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.

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

Another 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.

Conan O’Brien visits Intel
16 May 2007 in Fun & Tech | Comments (0)

This is a cool video I found on YouTube.

It’s really funny. Take a look…

Microsoft’s Center for Information Work
9 May 2007 in Microsoft & Tech | Comments (0)

Apparently Microsoft have a extremely cool department working to explore how productivity could be improved in the future.

The Center for Information Work (CIW) is trying to innovate workspace, hardware and software concepts for the future electronic productivity.

You can take a look at this Virtual Tour.

“Revista PROGRAMAR”
9 May 2007 in Portuguese & Programming & Tech | Comments (0)

“Revista PROGRAMAR” is a Portuguese magazine about programming created and developed by the community at Portugal-a-Programar. The magazine is mainly distributed online (for free).

The newly 7th edition got released yesterday, and brings my article about Microsoft Vista (.NET 3) as cover.

If you are Portuguese or understand the language, take a look.