The Cell processor is shown on the right (image from AP via the BBC). Chips of similar scale can hold gigabytes of storage space.

Will the entire human knowledge fit in a matchbox one day?

One of the notable pioneers of modern computing and mathematics died in February 8th 48 years ago. I found writings relating to his death quite mystifying:

… his mind, the amulet on which he had always been able to rely, was becoming less dependable. Then came complete psychological breakdown; panic, screams of uncontrollable terror every night. His friend Edward Teller said, “I think that von Neumann suffered more when his mind would no longer function, than I have ever seen any human being suffer.”

Von Neumann’s sense of invulnerability, or simply the desire to live, was struggling with unalterable facts. He seemed to have a great fear of death until the last… No achievements and no amount of influence could save him now, as they always had in the past. Johnny von Neumann, who knew how to live so fully, did not know how to die.

As already said, if you are not familiar with syndication and aggregators, now is a good time to discover them. Information will reach you, rather than being looked for.

There is an excellent index of RSS services from all over the world. It can help you become almost hyper-text-independent. All information that is of interest to you will be aggregated. This is probably the next generation of Web exploration.

Albert Nurick from comp.sys.palmtops writes:

In an article with a slightly inaccurate headline, MSNBC carries the AP story about declining PDA sales.

Reading the story reveals some interesting details.

PalmOne’s shipments are down 9% to 3.7 million, from 4 million in 2003.

Sony’s dropped to 419,000 from 1.4 million. (Sony pulled out of the US market)

A very interesting note at the bottom:

“Shipments from other leading PDA makers, such as Hewlett-Packard Co., Dell Inc. and Medion AG, increased, but not enough to offset the overall market’s downward spiral.”

“Those three companies all make PDAs that run Microsoft operating systems.”

So it appears that PalmOS sales are down, and Pocket PC sales are up; that wouldn’t have been as good of a headline, though.

Read it all: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6906812/

Cited by: PalmAddict

Many ways exist to search and download images by keyword/s. Nevertheless, copyright issues are usually raised. One source of graphics that is both extensive and free is stock.xchng. Its servers tend to be busy during daytime (America and especially Europe), but nothing else seems to beat it.

As a side note, Google Images will collect and index any image regardless of copying permissions.

If anyone is interested in research that I do (model-based image analysis and image registration), there is a 2-page abstract in print (PDF format, 1.8 MB). My work is described in pages 16-17.
 
 
 

MATLAB Central had me ranked 4th (world-wide) for my code contributions this month with over 1,600 downloads. This nearly tops July 2004 when I was ranked 2nd with almost 2,000 downloads. I was then only surpassed by the product manager, Stuart McGarrity.