Topic: Computing (Page 34)

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πŸ”— Surface-conduction electron-emitter display

πŸ”— Computing πŸ”— Television πŸ”— Electronics

A surface-conduction electron-emitter display (SED) is a display technology for flat panel displays developed by a number of companies. SEDs use nanoscopic-scale electron emitters to energize colored phosphors and produce an image. In a general sense, an SED consists of a matrix of tiny cathode ray tubes, each "tube" forming a single sub-pixel on the screen, grouped in threes to form red-green-blue (RGB) pixels. SEDs combine the advantages of CRTs, namely their high contrast ratios, wide viewing angles and very fast response times, with the packaging advantages of LCD and other flat panel displays. They also use much less power than an LCD television of the same size.

After considerable time and effort in the early and mid-2000s, SED efforts started winding down in 2009 as LCD became the dominant technology. In August 2010, Canon announced they were shutting down their joint effort to develop SEDs commercially, signalling the end of development efforts. SEDs are closely related to another developing display technology, the field emission display, or FED, differing primarily in the details of the electron emitters. Sony, the main backer of FED, has similarly backed off from their development efforts.

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πŸ”— Mozilla made $436M from search deals in 2018

πŸ”— California πŸ”— Companies πŸ”— California/San Francisco Bay Area πŸ”— Computing πŸ”— Open πŸ”— Mozilla

The Mozilla Corporation (stylized as moz://a) is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates and integrates the development of Internet-related applications such as the Firefox web browser, by a global community of open-source developers, some of whom are employed by the corporation itself. The corporation also distributes and promotes these products. Unlike the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, and the Mozilla open source project, founded by the now defunct Netscape Communications Corporation, the Mozilla Corporation is a taxable entity. The Mozilla Corporation reinvests all of its profits back into the Mozilla projects. The Mozilla Corporation's stated aim is to work towards the Mozilla Foundation's public benefit to "promote choice and innovation on the Internet."

A MozillaZine article explained:

The Mozilla Foundation will ultimately control the activities of the Mozilla Corporation and will retain its 100 percent ownership of the new subsidiary. Any profits made by the Mozilla Corporation will be invested back into the Mozilla project. There will be no shareholders, no stock options will be issued and no dividends will be paid. The Mozilla Corporation will not be floating on the stock market and it will be impossible for any company to take over or buy a stake in the subsidiary. The Mozilla Foundation will continue to own the Mozilla trademarks and other intellectual property and will license them to the Mozilla Corporation. The Foundation will also continue to govern the source code repository and control who is allowed to check in.

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πŸ”— Microsoft Kin

πŸ”— Technology πŸ”— Computing πŸ”— Telecommunications πŸ”— Brands πŸ”— Microsoft

Kin was a short-lived mobile phone line from Microsoft designed for users of social networking. The phones, aimed at people between ages 15 and 30, were manufactured by Sharp Corporation and sold through Verizon Wireless.

Microsoft invested two years and about US$1 billion developing the Kin platform, beginning with its acquisition of Danger Incorporated. The Kin was based on Windows CE.

The Kin ONE and TWO went on the market on May 14, 2010. Within two months, Verizon stopped selling the phones because of poor sales. Microsoft scrapped its planned European release, stopped promoting the devices, ceased production, and reassigned the Kin development team to other projects.

Microsoft updated its unsold Kin inventory with firmware that removed social and web-based features, and in December 2010 offered these re-purposed units through Verizon stores as limited feature phones, the Kin ONEm and the TWOm. In January 2011, Microsoft shut down the kin.com website, which controlled most of the earlier phones' features.

The Kin TWOm was discontinued in August 2011; unsold inventory could still be found for sale on deals sites as late as June 2013.

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πŸ”— Note G

πŸ”— Computing πŸ”— Computer science

Note G was a computer algorithm written by Ada Lovelace, and was designed to calculate Bernoulli numbers using the hypothetical analytical engine. Note G is generally agreed to be the first algorithm specifically for a computer, and Lovelace is considered as the first computer programmer as a result. The algorithm was the last note in a series labelled A to G, which she employed as visual aids to accompany her English translation of Luigi Menabrea's 1842 French transcription of Charles Babbage's lecture on the analytical engine at the University of Turin, "Notions sur la machine analytique de Charles Babbage" ("Elements of Charles Babbage’s Analytical Machine"). Lovelace's Note G was never tested, as the engine was never built. Her notes, along with her translation, were published in 1843.

In the modern era, thanks to more readily available computing equipment and programming resources, Lovelace's algorithm has since been tested, after being "translated" into modern programming languages. These tests have independently concluded that there was a bug in the script, due to a minor typographical error, rendering the algorithm in its original state unusable.

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πŸ”— Possible explanations for the slow progress of AI research

πŸ”— Computing πŸ”— Computer science πŸ”— Science Fiction πŸ”— Cognitive science πŸ”— Robotics πŸ”— Transhumanism πŸ”— Software πŸ”— Software/Computing πŸ”— Futures studies

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the hypothetical intelligence of a machine that has the capacity to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can. It is a primary goal of some artificial intelligence research and a common topic in science fiction and futures studies. AGI can also be referred to as strong AI, full AI, or general intelligent action. (Some academic sources reserve the term "strong AI" for machines that can experience consciousness.)

Some authorities emphasize a distinction between strong AI and applied AI (also called narrow AI or weak AI): the use of software to study or accomplish specific problem solving or reasoning tasks. Weak AI, in contrast to strong AI, does not attempt to perform the full range of human cognitive abilities.

As of 2017, over forty organizations were doing research on AGI.

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πŸ”— Hacker's Delight

πŸ”— Computing πŸ”— Books

Hacker's Delight is a software algorithm book by Henry S. Warren, Jr. first published in 2002. It presents fast bit-level and low-level arithmetic algorithms for common tasks such as counting bits or improving speed of division by using multiplication.

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πŸ”— OpenMusic: visual programming env for musical composition based on Common Lisp

πŸ”— Computing


OpenMusic (OM) is an object-oriented visual programming environment for musical composition based on Common Lisp. It may also be used as an all-purpose visual interface to Lisp programming. At a more specialized level, a set of provided classes and libraries make it a very convenient environment for music composition.

πŸ”— OpenDoc

πŸ”— Apple Inc./Macintosh πŸ”— Apple Inc. πŸ”— Computing πŸ”— Computing/Software

OpenDoc is a multi-platform software componentry framework standard created by Apple for compound documents, intended as an alternative to Microsoft's Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). As part of the AIM alliance between Apple, IBM, and Motorola, OpenDoc is one of Apple's earliest experiments with open standards and collaborative development methods with other companiesβ€”effectively starting an industry consortium. Active development was discontinued in March 1997.

The core idea of OpenDoc is to create small, reusable components, responsible for a specific task, such as text editing, bitmap editing, or browsing an FTP server. OpenDoc provides a framework in which these components can run together, and a document format for storing the data created by each component. These documents can then be opened on other machines, where the OpenDoc frameworks substitute suitable components for each part, even if they are from different vendors. In this way users can "build up" their documents from parts. Since there is no main application and the only visible interface is the document itself, the system is known as document centered.

At its inception, it was envisioned that OpenDoc would allow smaller, third-party developers to enter the then-competitive office software market, able to build one good editor instead of having to provide a complete suite.

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πŸ”— Principle of Least Astonishment

πŸ”— Computing πŸ”— Philosophy

The principle of least astonishment (POLA), also called the principle of least surprise (alternatively a "law" or "rule") applies to user interface and software design. A typical formulation of the principle, from 1984, is: "If a necessary feature has a high astonishment factor, it may be necessary to redesign the feature."

More generally, the principle means that a component of a system should behave in a way that most users will expect it to behave; the behavior should not astonish or surprise users.

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πŸ”— Perl 6 new regexp rules

πŸ”— Computing πŸ”— Perl

Raku rules are the regular expression, string matching and general-purpose parsing facility of Raku, and are a core part of the language. Since Perl's pattern-matching constructs have exceeded the capabilities of formal regular expressions for some time, Raku documentation refers to them exclusively as regexes, distancing the term from the formal definition.

Raku provides a superset of Perl 5 features with respect to regexes, folding them into a larger framework called rules, which provide the capabilities of a parsing expression grammar, as well as acting as a closure with respect to their lexical scope. Rules are introduced with the rule keyword, which has a usage quite similar to subroutine definitions. Anonymous rules can be introduced with the regex (or rx) keyword, or simply be used inline as regexes were in Perl 5 via the m (matching) or s (substitution) operators.

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