Fapuma

Canonical Working on Android App Compatibility for Ubuntu

2009-05-27T07:02:00.000-07:00

OsNews.com->

There has been a lot of talk about Android maybe making its way to various netbooks. However, thanks to the boys and girls at Canonical, Android might be taking a completely different direction when it comes to these little laptops: they're building an execution environment which will allow Android applications to run on normal Linux distributions.
here

Boosting

2009-05-27T06:55:00.000-07:00

Recently I found a celebrated tutorial on boosting from Robert Schapire (from Princeton), a programming technique used widely in Machine Learning ( here ).

FreeBSD kernel support in Debian

2009-04-06T05:22:00.000-07:00

According to news , Debian got released along with another open source kernel FreeBSD kernel. According to my experiences, benefit software architecture always benefit from introducing generic abstract interfaces above resources. The fact that it is already possible in a GNU operating system over kernel APIs is over the proof-of-concept furthermore will likely to elicit more convergence in platforms which is also desirable.

Firefox plugins in IE 8.1

2009-04-01T02:56:00.000-07:00

As it seems, IE slowly recongizes the power of open source and in general the merits of the open and standardized technologies. According to the Smashing Magazine, IE 8.1 tries to get the wind out of the sail and success of Firefox by being able to use Firefox plugins in the new IE.
here

Android on Netbooks

2009-03-25T08:38:00.000-07:00

For long Google denied the existance and purpose to release a Google desktop operating system instead targeted for the networked "desktop" environment. However, once upon a time they decided to make an iPhone like software for HTC hardware to release a first G mobile. Since this is based on Linux it was not a huge step to move toward the desktop. To enter the market in these hard times is only possible when no royalty fee applies. Netbooks are already sold with quarter priced XPs ($16) so it will be a one more head kick to M$.
We will see what will come out of this. here

Matrix factorizations

2009-02-13T03:47:00.000-08:00

One of the fellow of Geoffrey Gordon, named Ajit Singh gave a talk on matrix factorizations techniques.

Why is this so important?
We believe that the world is inherently simple (ie. Occams razor), however, we just see a projection of this that makes it difficult to perceive it in its simple form. Interestingly, the projection may even be linear transformation and this will enable us to see things in this particularly simple form. I call things being simple if only a few causes (factor loadings) are active at a time. If applying projections on these causes will fit the observed data than we can assume that we are likely to know the true causes. But Ajit talks much clearer about this...

A Unified View of Matrix Factorization Models

Ajit Singh, Geoffrey J. Gordon

Intel's operating system

2009-02-04T07:44:00.000-08:00

Our beloved Onews.com announced the hidden developed new operating system by Intel.
This is extremely fast. The boot up time is about the third of an ubuntu on the same machine.
(less then 10 seconds)

It is told to be based on ubuntu but during the development it has shifter toward fedora. Interestingly it uses .deb. From this speed I have two conclusions:

- Finally, someone took the time and the effort to look through the already extreme number of services running in a general purpose linux distro (such as ubuntu and co.)

- Developers will likely to be faced with lot of hardware issues I suspect so stable version won't come easy and nor support will be very much limited.

We will see however I am very much hoping to have something really new on desktop.

KDE on windows

2009-01-27T14:41:00.000-08:00

I always love when linux stuff can run on Windows (henceforth on Mac, too). This why I feel that linux apps are synonyms for "open" and in fact they are mostly conceptually open things.
It is even more interesting when not only an application along with its way of using the OpSys API is so versatile that it can be transplanted to other platforms but the entire window manager.
And KDE is a very nice example for this.

This is not only a proof of concept but as you can see the new KDE is very nice and not only cool.
Indeed, it does not have much significance. But still... Nice try... Nice guys!

Gmap sold to yahoo, Google rescanned Budapest

2009-01-22T05:55:00.000-08:00

There plenty of online maps available today such as Yahoo map, Google maps, Michelin. Some of them comes with the advent of satellite image too.
The first two vendors have mobile versions, too. For some reasons mobile service providers charge extra for downloading the corresponding applications. I found no reason why. Later I will make a test drive on both of them.

Today, I checked Ymaps on the web. Sometimes, I check my house, which is badly scanned in Gmaps and for my surprise I see that yahoo gained the resolution of the former Gmaps and the
badly scanned house of mine appeared in Ymaps. Then I checked Gmaps and I saw a brand new image of my house.

New Google satellite image of my house

The Ymaps image of my house. This is the same as it was on Gmaps formerely.

What a hack?!. I started to search on the internet if anybody knows about this and I saw no comment on this. I suspect some undisclosed agreement between the two giants.
However, as I see the Geo database remained still separate according to this.

The reason why google can do it was simply the fact that they have started thier GeoEye-1 satellite which scans the earth as frequently as there are certain cities (e.g. Edinburg) that can be observed online. Amazing. Isn't it?

-----------

As of today (20-02-2009), I opened microsoft virtual earth. What my eyes can see there is the same failure of scanning of my house as it was formerely on google and now is on Yahoo!

The same area on Microsoft Virtual Earth...

netbooks

2009-01-13T03:43:00.000-08:00

After Apple comment on netbook arena such as they can't produce a apple quality laptop under $500, it was not clear if the market segment will further grow inspite of the recession. However, new players come into the field such as Longson (Chinese, some of those who still believe in the MIPS architecture) or Freescale.
The latter one says it will release a $200 laptop with linux only. Good choice.

As I see, Microsoft gained the game againts IBM by playing on the field of cheap IBM machines believing that it will overgrow the quality market. And it did. Selling linux laptops may would be the same game again.

One might also realize that an Ubuntu derivative EEEbutntu have already been created for this segment.

Memento for HM - Neuroscience's most unforgettable amnesiac

2008-12-15T03:20:00.000-08:00

The famous patient HM. HM. now revealed Henry G. Molaison, was a famous case study of an individual who had major invasive brain surgery performed to relieve epilepsy. The resulting effects of the surgery which included removing most of his hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus, and amygdala and entorhinal cortex, were that HM was unable to form any new declaritive memories. His case inspired the movie Memento .

Gates / Google / nano scale mechanical power source

2008-12-04T06:58:00.000-08:00

Bill Gates questions bailout for Big Three automakers

There are only a few things I admire from Bill Gates. However, his in latest move "Bill Gates questions bailout for Big Three automakers" here Gates is against saving US car industries. This is not right way of using tax payers money. He says no other investor is
taking part in investing in these company why should than the public push more money in private companies. Instead do long term investment in educational system which will make the country a better place to live.

Google was just three hours away from being filed an antitrust lawsuit by DOJ as a consequence of Google/Yahoo agreement here .

Talk-powered cell phones? Nanoscale piezoelectrics could make it real

Sometimes people ask me if I believe in science. Well, what if this is not something that can
make things significantly better. I believe this device will be very expensive at the beginning
but might will change the entire energy politics in the future.

Gcc hacks / Microsoft / Red Hat / GE

2008-11-22T09:31:00.000-08:00

Recently I have found a very useful page about gcc hacks .
Some of them remains platform independent (no harm on different platforms) others don't. However many of them seem to be very practical. Worth checking.

And another news.
Microsoft and Novell has the growing the relationship in a very positive
attitude still.

Quote from the article:
In terms of helping customers migrate from Red Hat, it would be based on our existing sales model of pro-actively reaching out to enterprise customers and educating them on the offering," Microsoft's Sidhu said.

So they are eating up Red Hat piece-by-piece.
Microsoft is probably more than happy to do this.

From the market side, RH seems to suffer a lot anyway. 10 years of support instead of 7 for Mainframe class computers!?.. This won't save the skin RH ... Does it?

GE - Tungsram

I suspect that one of my Compact Fluorecent Light source seem to have died before the normal
lifespan. So I started to go after it and a I found a very good comparison test. Unfortunately, the most important thing is missing.
The ratio of promised lifespan and real lifespan.

This is the hardest to test but this would be probably the most valuable.
However, the outcome is difficult to render:) I got the idea that in general Philips is a worth buying brand compared to GE's blub.

openmap

2008-10-03T01:55:00.000-07:00

Octave appeared on the list of GNU priority list .
There I found another project open maps . This is to replace google maps data Certainly, those guys are not happy with google maps or yahoo maps whatever. What is worth noticing is the density of the map. This somewhat reflects the activity in open software of the countries and areas ...
However there are pretty hopeless works, such as gNewSense which can be useful for other for many other linux distro's by the end of day but considering myselft to be a user I wouldn't vote for it.

Google Research

2008-09-17T03:45:00.000-07:00

At the page of Google Research a memorial has been published. The legendary Randy Paush a CMU professor of many leading researchers has passed away. On 20th of Decembre 2007, he gave a influential lecture "Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams" that became a starting point a series. This is about life and motivation. Worth looking at.

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Physics

2008-09-11T04:32:00.000-07:00

In my perspective, almost everything depends on physics guys. Whether we wanna look in the future or in the past, very far or very small things. Fast IC production depends on how much physics people understand the matter and the optics.

LHC started its operation yesterday. Fortunately, it did not generate black holes in with would disappear.
This is largest thing that human beings can build with good reasons to find the fundamental particles and to understand their interaction. The key would be the observation of the Higgs boson which would confirm or reject the competing theories on the matter and gravity.
If nothing reasonalbe is found then we are left in the middle of universe again and can wait for large collisions in stars while being observed close enough to find out the same thing.

Loongson - Physics again.

Godson is name of the Chinese processors that is meant to compete with Intel and AMD.
Formerely, the infant versions were cheap but still unfortunate in 2002 and 2005. However, the new version is elusive. The MIPS derivative is extended with Inter instruction sets support. It took a long time to catch up with the competitors but as it seems they are doing well. The next generation is an asymmetric 8 core structure resembling to IBM's cell processor. Each is a 64bit running at 1G-1.2GHz designed for cheap workstations.

Osnews details
Loongson at wiki

Goo's Automated News Crawling Evaporates $1.14B of Uniter Airlines

Well, when the big G does something unintentionally but still badly, well,..., then a large pile of money can away instantly. Interestingly, a news from 2002 appeared again at news.google.com which made sharp drop of United Airlines shares (from $12 to $3) This caused $1.14B loss for the company in a day. The news was correct in 2002 saying that the UA is facing bankrupt but the threat was diminished in the mean time and company flew nicely.
When google bug was confirmed the share price increased up to $10 so the loss was about
$300M.

My question:
- Who is responsible for this drop for this $300 M loss by the end of the day?
- If directly nobody then the question is even more fundamental:

Does the share price explains the value of the company (certainly counting the beliefs and faiths in it)? Or it counts much more our gut feelings about the future. If it is so then we should polish everything properly rather than making it right. Right?

2008-09-08T01:49:00.000-07:00

Contiki

Once upon a time I developed a device in a small company that focuses on industrial electronics. Since this I know how much of a pain can be to develop a reliable small multitasking real time operating system with communication abilities. And this question always causes headaches when a new processor is out that you are eager to use in your product line. Last 10 years, many options have been developed. Many of them are linux based: Monta Vista
uC simm but there are others that are worth looking at; uC OS and a new comer Contiki.

Version 2.2.1 of the Contiki operating system has just been released. The Contiki operating system is designed for wireless deeply embedded systems that have memory on the order of a few kilobytes and a power consumption on the order of a few milliwatt. Within these severe resource constraints, Contiki provides a low-power multi-hop TCP/IP stack, a command-line interface, a flash-based file system, and loadable modules. Release 2.2.1 improves network performance, reduces power consumption, and fixes a number of bugs from previous releases. wiki

Yandex - a "local" Google competitor?

A Russian search engine that still calls him self a search company as opposed to ad company (ie. Google) focuses on Russian language speaking world where they see Google's weaknesses (more ... ). They are already the largest in Russia and along with Goo they cover the 90% of the market. It is worth noting that the services and software gadgets that Yandex offers are pretty much similar to what his bigger cousin did.

Faceless

2008-09-04T12:56:00.000-07:00

Skype security problems

If there certain can be companies that can survive w/o customer service dept then the firsts to name are probably Google and Skype.
Two giants. One of them uses a secret technology
to transmit (and listen) your voice and charge you, the other one is accused of possibly monitoring all activity of your life. And still, we chose them.

Interestingly, as it seems, the phone company can't protect himself form hijacking.
Well. Skype has security problems. So if I can suggest something, then this is surely not skype auto recharging mechanism. (ie. this refills your skype account when it drops below 2 bucks).

Read more here.

Chrome - The Google's web browser

Every IT media has its mouth full of news that Google released its web browser.
Open source. But still, there are some objections against it.
according to the changed policy in the End-Users-License-Agreement.

"In response to the reaction to Chrome's terms of service, Google has truncated the offending Section 11, apologizing for the oversight. The new Section 11 contains only the first sentence included in their Universal Terms of Service, now stating: 'You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.'"

2008-09-02T03:13:00.000-07:00

Android is the name of the Google's experimental mobile OS

G announced a API developer contest. Now, the final phase of Android Developer Challenge I is now complete. Out of 50 teams of finalists, 10 teams received a $275,000 award each and 10 teams received a $100,000 award each. All of the teams' hard work during the past several months is apparent in the final 50 entries. The teams have each provided overviews of their applications and the technologies they used to create them; learn about all 50 applications and the teams that created them here in their own words. more on this

Mozilla labs / Uniquity

2008-08-28T08:35:00.000-07:00

Day to day we do the same sort of thing when communicating with friends.
Sending pointers to something but cannot show where it is located on the map, mailing meeting
times and writing it in the calendar, or forwarding reviews. Question: Could it be made faster and
more intelligent way?

Well, as it seems mozilla guys seem to be eager to replace the commonly used tools with an intelligent one that does this type of thing automatically for you whenever you type something.
I guess the reason why the whole thing began was the fact that gmail proved that AJAX technology is not a very fragile thing but can be used to make user experiences on the web that was not visible before. And all this is just because the web is inherently stateless notion.
So it just forwarded lot of people back to web based mail systems so Ad companies have a chance to flash even more ad in the face. Don't bother but the new tool is impressive.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Android, Secret weapons?

2008-08-27T12:14:00.000-07:00

Android - The new Mobile OS ?

Well. Many of us feel that we are living in a brave new world and there is big machine who provides the technology and we all pay for this with our click or simply by attention ( Hey bless display ads! ).

Than the question comes: Where all the money goes to?

This is not clear. The new G brother has not clearly decided where it can go.
Rumors comes and goes about the Google OS ( Better not to mix with the linux based very nice product called gOS ) but it never come true in the form it was believed.
But they felt they can have a better grounding in mobile platforms. So they in the process of releasing an open source OS for a wide range of hardwares (not even the list is disclosed).

From undisclosed sources I know that they also think to move forward being an mobile internet (phone?) provider too. But this is only in the exploration phase.

So, lot of talks go around Android. And the G is already welcomed in the era of product cycle of boxed software with its typical features: release announcement, delays, dropping features

So here are just two demos of the operating systems:

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LLVM - The Secret Weapon from Apple

One of my recent finding is the LLVM. A mostly GCC compatible compiler that produces
30% faster code than GCC on average.

See a short intro to the story of this project at Appleinsider Magazine

Chris Lattner, the ultimate person behind this project gave a presentation about the new features
of version 2 at Google seminar series in 2007.

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Are cloud engines ready for exploitation, are they secret weapons too?

Amazon and Google is about to monetize its extra computing power.
I guess the idea must have come from a tech guys who dream about breaking in the pharmacological computing world.

Both company had a framework for it.
The App Framework seems to be beautiful but the reality says something else:
A guy made a test computation on those well publicized computing engines and got
smashed in each and every of his trials for various reasons.

Alternative operating systems

2008-08-26T02:50:00.000-07:00

Once someone feels to be either caged by the M$ empire along with its taxes and troubles
he/she may takes a look at alternative technologies. Perhaps, most of the users don't even have an idea that there exists a world outside Microsoft but if so, still has the fear of no being
technical geek enough to overcome all difficulties that might emerge or won't have the XY (otherwise stolen) software alternative on the given operating system.

But if someone feels a strong urge to make a survey typical series of operating systems (an accompanying software technologies) come into the picture.
Such as MacOS X, Linux versions or BSD version.
But, interestingly, there are other gamers. Some of them are free (open source) some of them are not, however, all of them benefits from the power and the merits of the open source community. So it is probably worth have an blink on this project time-to-time.
One thing that is common among them, the user and developer basis is very small but very concentrated. We will see where they can get from this.

SkyOS - The solo way

The first on my list is SkyOS. The core is developed by Robert Szeleney an Austrian guy (presumably with Hungarian roots) as an experimental OS.
Now, the OS lives its non-free age. The price is in the range of fund raising rather (EUR 30)than in a profession product line. It currently seems to go over kernel restructuring and
lost most of its popularity. Indeed, it looks nicely shaped and shows coherent user experience.

ReactOS - a real Windows replacement for GNUs

This project was elicited by the fact that there always be windows applications that
won't have a perfect match in the open source arsenal. So there will be needed either
a Windows API implementation over an existing operating system on which Microsoft product can run
(this is the Wine project ) or complete rewrite of the
operating system along with its API. The latest one is the ReactOS ( wiki )
After long years of independent development of there projects,
the merger come true. It is worth noting that: None of them is perfect. React OS is note recommended for use as a primary OS. Personally, I would not even recommend it as an operating system. The only recommended usage I suggest is to run it in a virtual machine (either VmWare or QEMU .
I have to explain my greatest honor to the developers. They do very nice and important job.

(to be continued...)

Where does c++ go to? C++x0

2008-08-21T04:57:00.000-07:00

DevX has published an interview with the guy, Bjarne Stroustrup, a name impossible to pronounce on
its site. Shortly, no garbage collection yet. It would interfere with the RAII concept and cause too much hassle right know. May be in the future. However, regex feature is included.

Robots of Boston Dynamics

2008-08-21T03:50:00.000-07:00

A company called Boston dynamics (wiki ) specialized for robotics and human simulation, created an extremely stable mobile robot called BigDog .

After a little bit of investigation, the only guy that seem to publish anything on these robots is Martin Buehler, the editor of the special issue of Journal of Field Robotics" (from Wiley press), however, after starting this (mainly) DARPA founded company not much publication has came out of his hands but this one
is probably worth to have a read through.

Geoffrey Hinton's presentation at Google

2008-08-18T12:48:00.000-07:00

G. Hinton is known mainly for its network in neural community.

( See Geoffrey Hinton's Neural Network Tutorials )

He gave a presentation at Google's seminar entitled "Next Generation Neural Networks". This is a very nice overview of the development of the Neural Networks and a outlook at the same time in one hour. It's worth watching for everybody who is interested in the story by any means.

"In the 1980's, new learning algorithms for neural networks promised to solve difficult classification tasks, like speech or object recognition, by learning many layers of non-linear features. The results were disappointing for two reasons: There was never enough labeled data to learn millions of complicated features and the learning was much too slow in deep neural networks with many layers of features. These problems can now be overcome by learning one layer of features at a time and by changing the goal of learning. Instead of trying to predict the labels, the learning algorithm tries to create a generative model that produces data which looks just like the unlabeled training data. These new neural networks outperform other machine learning methods when labeled data is scarce but unlabeled data is plentiful. An application to very fast document retrieval will be described."

Unfortunately Google Tech talks cannot be embedded here sorry.
See the video here

WikiMapia

2008-08-17T01:10:00.000-07:00

I was always wondering if institutions, buildings, places could be better identified on free map services such as maps.google or map.yahoo. On the other hand, wiki articles in many cases require pointers on map. Well, the resolution is here. Not very fast, not very accurate, but still. It solves both questions jointly.

Bojar University

2008-08-15T07:35:00.000-07:00

For long I have been talking about the plausibility, even in the Hungarian business environment,
a profit oriented University for elite education as a response to the tragical movements apparent in the Hungarian higher education induced by the subsidization system.
Gabor Bojar, the founder of Graphisoft (Archicad) and owner of several prizes (Business man of the Year, Ernst and Young; Eötvös Lóránd prize 1996; Széchenyi prize; Hungarian Order of Merit - Commander ) had the same idea.

(In Hungarian)
ItCafe
Nepszabaság Online

Photosynth from Microsoft / Washington Uni

2008-08-14T16:23:00.000-07:00

First, I have to say, thay Microsoft knows what to support or buy or
push down from the market. But this one is something amazing. I just can't get enough of it.

First, it was this demo

But now a new show
came through slashdot as

The latter one is much more about the technology.

2008-08-12T05:23:00.001-07:00

Popular Science / Tudomány népszerűsítés

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Source / Forrás: Slashdot/

6 chips Standalone Linux Device

2008-08-11T09:34:00.000-07:00

On site:

This is a long story. UcLinux.com made a Simm (memory size) linux device along with a tailored (dropped memory management unit related stuff) linux long long time ago. It reached only a limited success on the embedded market. This probably due to the strong USD at those times.
Now a guy from Arizona produced a micro linux device
again ( with a few comments:
on Device Guru ) and opens up all parts of the hardware design . Nice.

Good luck guys.

This day is for conspiracy.

2008-08-11T09:06:00.000-07:00

See an article from my beloved www.Osnews.com :

Why Microsoft and Intel tried to kill the XO $100 laptop?
This is the well known predecessor of the well known OLPC (One-Laptop-Per-Child)
project set up for helping Afrians and developing countries.

And another example

The Great American Economy? Take a Closer Look from SeekingAlpha portal.

A mai nap a konspirációkról szólna...

Az első szemelvény az általam kedvelt www.OsNews.com portálról
vettem át:

Miért akarta a Microsoft és az Intel az X0 $100 laptop projektet tönkretenni?

A másik szemelvény egy végtelen pesszimista fejtegetésse támasztja alá, hogy a világ gazdaságának mutatói valójában egy folyamatos közös játék mérő számai, de egyáltalán nem jelzik az élet szinvonalat, vagy bármilyen valós gazdasági folyamatot. Az ok pedig az, hogy igazából mindenki aki a mérőszámok méréset befolyásolhatja, meg is teszi. Önös érdekből. A politikusaink, statisztikuaink közösen alakítják ki az "igazságot".

2008-08-10T03:03:00.000-07:00

Berecz jegy

Elfogyott a jegy a
Berecz András előadásra Szentendrén
úgyhogy ismét sikerült magam elszervezni.
Az ördögbe is. Azért a youtube most is kegyes hozzánk.
Fabry show 1.
illetve:
Fábry show 2.
Sajnos a Fábry lelőtte ezt a mesét pedig ez nagyon édes.

SearchMe.com

Recently, I've found an interesting (next generation) search engine. Its technology is amazing.
Search hits are not that much well good but hopefully it will improve. It helps to look through lot of pages extremely fast w/o opening them.

Legutóbb találtam egy érdekes keresőgépet. Lenyűgöző a technológiája. Bár a találatai nem annyira jók viszont piszok gyorsan lehet vele rengeteg találati oldalat anélkül, hogy megnyitnánk őket.

Fapuma-üvegtigris

2008-08-10T02:37:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my Blog,

Fapuma - Üvegtigris.
This translates to Wooden Puma and Glass Tiger.
The latter one is a well known comedy produced in Hungary.
And question "Why is it Glass Tiger?", the answer "Why? Should it be Wooden Puma?"

In this blog, I collect links of I've found recently, along with short comments both in English and in Hungarian.

Not a big deal, but I hope others will find it interesting.

Üdv a Blog-omon!

Fapuma-Üvegtigris.
Sokan ismerik a filmet és benne kérdést: "És miért pont Üvegtigris?", a válasz
"Miért? Lett volna inkább Fapuma?"

Ezen a blog-on elsősorban érdekes linkeket és rövid megjegyzéseket fogok gyűjteni (angolul és magyarul). Nem tervezek hosszú gondolat fejtegetésekbe bonyolodni, de remélem más is érdekesnek fogja találni.