In the continuing quest to see if humans can outpace their electronic creations, the humans have lost another, perhaps decisive, round.

Once Again, Machine Beats Human Champion at Chess - New York Times

Brick storage, anyone?

LaCie - Brick Desktop Hard Drive - Hi-Speed USB 2.0

Taiwanese electronics maker AOpen plans to launch an updated version of a small desktop PC that closely resembles Apple Computer's Mac mini but runs the Microsoft Windows operating system and will carry Intel's latest dual-core microprocessors for mobile devices.

AOpen Readies Yonah-Based Mini PC

What seems certain is that bugs are here to stay. Here, in chronological order, is the Wired News list of the 10 worst software bugs of all time … so far.

Wired News: History's Worst Software Bugs

We have begun an effort to clarify the meaning of multi-threaded C programs, and to provide some standard thread-related APIs where those are currently missing. Here we list some of the documents relevant to that effort.

Hans Boehm gave a talk about this stuff at work today. The main takeaway I got was that the compiler, optimizing for single-threaded execution, can reorder instructions in such a way as to create race conditions when executed concurrently. What a mess...

Threads and memory model for C/C++

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based start-up this week is set to unveil its plans for a microprocessor based around the Power architecture--the same architecture behind chips in IBM servers and current Macs--that consumes only a fraction of the energy of existing chips.

Looks like a bunch of old Alpha and ARM guys from DEC have gotten back together...

Start-up plans new energy-efficient processor

AT NEXT WEEK'S Intel developer forum, the firm is due to announce a next generation x86 processor core. The current speculation is this new core is going too be based on one of the existing Pentium M cores. I think it’s going to be something completely different.

I'm not entirely sure this guy knows what he's talking about but it gives one an idea, at least, about what Intel might be up to.

The hidden currents powering Intel's next gen chips

] A Stratellite%u2122 is a high-altitude airship that when
] in place in the stratosphere will provide a stationary
] platform for transmitting various types of wireless
] communications services currently transmitted from cell
] towers and satellites. It is not a balloon or a blimp. It
] is a high-altitude airship.

Apparently, this is getting "close" to being able to be deployed... they're working on FAA approval right now, apparently.

About the Stratellite

] The goal of this project is to build an optimization
] framework for trees based on the Static Single Assignment
] (SSA) form [1]. The implementation currently lives in the
] tree-ssa-20020619-branch branch.

Some folks have implemented a new intermediate representation to
enable a bunch of optimizations; its now been merged in GCC 4.

GCC: SSA for Trees

The standard C string library is horribly inadequate for almost
all applications. They aren't 8-bit clean, they aren't counted (overflows), in general, you have to do a lot of needless work yourself.

A better one goes a long way towards civilizing
C. I wish ANSI/ISO would recognize this and standardize something.

glib doesn't have equivalents of index(), strstr(), etc ...
WTF not?!

String Library Comparison