Akira

Akira IMDb (7,8 out of 10)

Akira Official (Japanese)

Akira is a 1988 Japanese animated film co-written and directed by Katsuhiro Otomo based on his manga of the same name. The movie led the way for the growing popularity of anime in the West, with Akira considered a forerunner of the second wave of anime fandom that began in the early 1990s. One of the reasons for the movie's success was the highly advanced quality of its animation. At the time, most anime was notorious for cutting production corners with limited motion, such as having only the characters' mouths move while their faces remained static. Akira broke from this trend with meticulously detailed scenes, exactingly lip-synched dialogue — a first for an anime production (voices were recorded before the animation was completed, rather than the opposite) — and super-fluid motion as realized in the film's more than 160,000 animation cels. It is regarded by critics as one of the greatest animated films ever made.

SGI O2

The Silicon Graphics O2 (codename "Moosehead") is as an entry level workstation the successor to the Indy line of desktop workstations. It doesn't have the various graphics options that other Silicon Graphics machines have but it comes with built in graphics and support for more advanced digital media solutions (audio and video). The Silicon Graphics O2+ extends and updates the original O2 series from 1996, but offers no change in the underlying architecture.



History

1996, October: Introduction of O2 family
1998, February: Dual display solution announced
1998, May: 250 MHz R10000 processor introduced for O2 series
1998, July: 225 MHz R10000 processor replaces 175/195 systems
1999, April: 270 and 300 MHz R10000 processors announced. Standard system configurations enhanced.
1999, July: Availability of QED RM5200 processor running at 300 MHz announced
2000, July: New processor: 400 Mhz R12000A with 2MB secondary cache
2001, August: O2+ announced at SIGGRAPH 2001 in Los Angeles, California
2002, May: End of Production (EOP) announced for O2 and O2+
2002, October: O2 and O2+ have disappeared from the SGI website

Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla Wikipedia

Nikola Tesla (10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943) was an inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer and electrical engineer. Tesla is best known for his many revolutionary contributions to the discipline of electricity and magnetism in the late 19th and early 20th century. Tesla's patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current electric power (AC) systems, including the polyphase power distribution systems and the AC motor, with which he helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution.

After his demonstration of wireless communication (radio) in 1893 and after being the victor in the "War of Currents", he was widely respected as America's greatest electrical engineer. Much of his early work pioneered modern electrical engineering and many of his discoveries were of groundbreaking importance. During this period, in the United States, Tesla's fame rivaled that of any other inventor or scientist in history or popular culture, but due to his eccentric personality and unbelievable and sometimes bizarre claims about possible scientific and technological developments, Tesla was ultimately ostracized and regarded as a mad scientist. Never putting much focus on his finances, Tesla died impoverished at the age of 86.

The SI unit measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B\,), the tesla, was named in his honour (at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris, 1960).

Aside from his work on electromagnetism and engineering, Tesla is said to have contributed in varying degrees to the establishment of robotics, remote control, radar and computer science and to the expansion of ballistics, nuclear physics and theoretical physics. In 1943, the Supreme Court of the United States credited him as being the inventor of the radio. Many of his achievements have been used, with some controversy, to support various pseudosciences, UFO theories and new age occultism. Contemporary researchers of Tesla have deemed him "the man who invented the twentieth century" and "the patron saint of modern electricity."

Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point of the universe.

—"Experiments With Alternate Currents Of High Potential And High Frequency" (February 1892)

Syd Mead

Syd Mead Official

Syd Mead is one of the most celebrated concept designers of our time, having been responsible for many memorable designs from feature films to interiors and even toys. His most well-known works include production designs for Blade Runner, TRON, Aliens and 2010, the pivotal science fiction movies that got many budding visual effects artists inspired to enter professional careers in this field.

Ideas come from stimulation provided by challenge: from clients, from idea starters I invent myself or am 'inspired' by something I notice, think about or read about. I find that 'future' stuff I read about happening 'now' I either illustrated twenty or thirty years ago, or have thought about and inserted, visually into a painting.

January 19, 2038

03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, January 19, 2038

The year 2038 problem may cause some computer software to fail before or in the year 2038. The problem affects programs that use the POSIX time representation, which represents system time as the number of seconds (ignoring leap seconds) since January 1, 1970. This representation is standard in Unix-like operating systems and also affects software written for most other operating systems because of the broad deployment of C. On most 32-bit systems, the time_t data type used to store this second count is a signed 32-bit integer. The latest time that can be represented in this format, following the POSIX standard, is 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, January 19, 2038. Times beyond this moment will "wrap around" and be represented internally as a negative number, and cause programs to fail, since they will see these times not as being in 2038 but rather in 1901. Erroneous calculations and decisions may therefore result.

time_t time()

#include < stdio.h >
#include < time.h >

int main(void)
{
time_t now;
struct tm ts;
char buf[80];

// Get the current time
time(&now);

// Format and print the time, "ddd yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss zzz"
ts = *localtime(&now);
strftime(buf, sizeof(buf), "%a %Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %Z", &ts);
printf("%s\n", buf);

return 0;
}

DesktopTwo

DesktopTwo

Desktoptwo is a free web-based desktop or webtop that mimics the look, feel and functionality of a local computer, all contained within one browser window and fully accessible from any Internet-connected device.

"Wherever you go, whatever you do, you can bring your desktop too."

Inosensu: Kôkaku Kidôtai (2004)

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence

ProductionIG GITS 2

GITS 2 Wikipedia

Batou is a living doll.

His arms, his legs, his whole body are entirely artificial.
What remains of his human past are traces of his brain, and memories of a woman named Motoko.

In a time when the boundary between humans and machines has lost meaning, humans have forgotten they are humans.

This is the story of an "orgy of ghosts" inside a lonesome man who is still striving to retain his humanity.

Life is... innocence.

Nine years after his hugely influential Ghost in the Shell burst onto the international film scene becoming one of the most successful anime films of all time, acclaimed writer/director Mamoru Oshii returns with the long-awaited sequel, Innocence.

The story is set in 2032, when the line between humans and machines has been blurred almost beyond distinction. Humans have forgotten that they are human, and the few who still own an organic body coexist with cyborgs (human spirits inhabiting entirely mechanized bodies) and dolls (robots with no human elements at all).

Detective Batou, an agent for covert anti-terrorist unit Public Safety Section 9, is assigned the case of gynoids -hyper-realistic female robots created specifically for sexual companionship- that have apparently malfunctioned and started slaughtering their owners. In the course of the investigation, Batou and his partner Togusa take on violent Yakuza thugs, devious hackers, government bureaucrats, and corporate criminals to uncover the shocking truth behind the crime.

More than a visually stunning futuristic hard-boiled mystery, Innocence is the story of a solitary cyborg that desperately wants to hold on to what's left of his humanity in a world where the value of the human soul has largely been forgotten.

Innocence is the first Japanese animated feature film to be nominated for the Palm d'Or at the Festival de Cannes.

Sony Ericsson W960i

Sony Ericsson W960i

*Size: 109 x 55 x 16 mm
*Weight: 119 g
*Screen: 262,144 color touchscreen; 240x320 pixel; 2,6"
*Phone memory 8 GB
*3.2Megapixel
*FM RDS Radio
*Wi-Fi & Bluetooth
*Symbian OS 9.1 UIQ 3.0

MESSENGER (NASA)

MESSENGER NASA Official

The MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging (or MESSENGER for short) is a NASA mission, launched August 3, 2004, designed to study the characteristics and environment of Mercury from orbit. Specifically, the scientific objectives of the mission are to characterize the chemical composition of Mercury's surface, the geologic history, the nature of the magnetic field, the size and state of the core, the volatile inventory at the poles, and the nature of Mercury's exosphere and magnetosphere over a nominal orbital mission of one Earth year. The mission will be the first to return to Mercury in over 35 years — the only previous probe to visit Mercury was Mariner 10, which completed its mission in March, 1975. MESSENGER will offer several vast improvements in scanning ability, with cameras that can resolve surface features down to just 60 feet across (18 meters) compared to the one mile (1.61 kilometer) resolution offered by Mariner 10. MESSENGER will also be the first probe to image the entire planet; Mariner 10 was only able to observe one hemisphere that was lit during its flybys.



In addition to being an acronym, MESSENGER was chosen as the probe's name because Mercury was the messenger of the gods in Roman mythology.

Colin McRae (1968-2007)

colinmcrae.com

Colin Steele McRae, (5 August 1968 - 15 September 2007) was a Scottish World Rally Championship driver, the son of five-time British Rally Champion, Jimmy McRae and older brother of professional driver Alister McRae. He won the world driver's title in 1995, was championship runner-up in 1996, 1997 and 2001, and third in 1998.



He helped Subaru to the Manufacturers' title in 1995, 1996 and 1997, and Citroën in 2003. He was appointed MBE (Member of the Order of British Empire) by Queen Elizabeth II in 1996.

An AS350B2 Squirrel helicopter registered G-CBHL to McRae crashed 1 mile north of Lanark, Scotland on 15 September 2007, which is close to the McRae family home. McRae was known to be a keen helicopter pilot, and his agent Jean-Éric Freudiger has stated that McRae was piloting the helicopter at the time of the crash. Police confirmed the next day that McRae, his five year old son Johnny, and two family friends, Graeme Duncan and Johnny's six year old friend Ben Porcelli, died in the crash. The ColinMcRae.com homepage was removed on the day of his death and replaced with a black screen.

WRC starts: 146
first: Sweden 1987
latest: Turkey 2006
Results wins: 25 (17.1% of starts)
second places: 9
third places: 8
total podiums: 42 (28.8% of starts)
points finishes: 79
total points scored: 626 (drivers' championship points)
DNF's: 60 (41.1% of starts)
Stage wins: 477

Solar System Simulator

Solar System Simulator



See where the planets, spacecrafts are...

Io and Jupiter

Here Io is seen just passing in front of Jupiter, as seen from the Galileo spacecraft on the day of its arrival at Jupiter. Galileo has since flown by the other three Galilean satellites of Jupiter (Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto) during its orbital tour of the Jovian system.

Paul Éluard

Éluard: Twenty-Four Poems In English

Paul Éluard

French poet, a founder of Surrealism with Louis Aragon and André Breton among others, one of the important lyrical poets of the 20th century. Éluard rejected later Surrealism and joined the French Communist Party. Many of his works reflect the major events of the century, such as the World Wars, and the political and social ideals of the 20th-century.

...
And her dreams in the bright day
Make the suns evaporate
And me laugh cry and laugh
Speak when I have nothing to say.

BumpTop, Rethink Your Desktop

bumptop.com

BumpTop is a fresh and engaging new way to interact with your computer desktop. You can pile and toss documents like on a real desk. Break free from the rigid and mechanical style of standard point-and-click desktops. Interact by pushing, pulling and piling documents with elegant, self revealing gestures. BumpTop's stunning interface makes clever use of 3D presentation and smooth physics-based animations for an engaging, vivid user experience.

Technology Review

www.technologyreview.com

Technology Review is a magazine published by Technology Review, Inc, a media company owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was originally founded in 1899, and was re-launched on April 23, 1998 under then publisher R. Bruce Journey. In September 2005 it underwent another transition under the current editor in chief and publisher, Jason Pontin, to something again resembling the historical magazine.

Before the 1998 re-launch, the editor stated that "nothing will be left of the old magazine except the name." It is therefore necessary to distinguish between the modern and the historical Technology Review. The historical magazine had been published by the MIT Alumni Association, was more closely aligned with the interests of MIT alumni, and had a more intellectual tone and much smaller public circulation.

Under R. Bruce Journey, the magazine, billed from 1998 to 2005 as "MIT's Magazine of Innovation," focussed on new technology and how it gets commercialized; was mass-marketed to the public; and was targeted at senior executives, researchers, financiers, and policymakers, as well as for the MIT alumni.

On August 30, 2005, Technology Review announced that R. Bruce Journey, publisher from 1996 to 2005, would be replaced by the current Editor in Chief, Jason Pontin, and would reduce the print publication frequency from eleven to six issues per year while enhancing the publication's website. The Boston Globe characterized the change as a "strategic overhaul." Editor and publisher Jason Pontin stated that he would "focus the print magazine on what print does best: present[ing] longer-format, investigative stories and colorful imagery." Technology Review's Web site, Pontin said, would henceforth publish original, daily news and analysis (whereas before it had merely republished the print magazine's stories). Finally, Pontin said that Technology Review's stories in print and online would identify and analyze emerging technologies, and would no longer offer coverage of business models and the financing of new technologies. This focus resembles that of the historical Technology Review.

Palm V

Palm V Review (Feb 1999)

Processor: Motorola Dragonball EZ MC68EZ328
Operating System: Palm OS 3.1
User Storage Memory: 2MB
Display: 160x160 pixel, high contrast and backlit
Power: Lithium-ion rechargeable
Size and weight: 4.5" x 3.1" x 0.4", 4oz

The Palm V is a very sexy looking PDA with an excellent display and a nice rechargeable battery. But, should you buy it? At $449, you'd better think about a few things first. First of all, the Palm V can not be upgraded to add more memory (except by 3rd party vendors like EFIG.COM which will split the Palm V open, make the upgrade and then glue it back together). This is a big deal to someone like me who has an 8meg TRG board in their Palm III that has only 125k free! 2meg is not a lot of space when you start adding all the cool applications that are available. I sure wish Palm would have at least made the Palm V a 4meg device. Also, if you already have a Palm III, you really shouldn't upgrade to the Palm V unless you really need the better screen. Basically the Palm V is the same as the Palm III except that the memory can't be easily upgraded.

Contact (1997)

Contact Official

Contact is a 1997 science fiction film adapted from the novel by Carl Sagan. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, it stars Jodie Foster as Dr. Eleanor Ann "Ellie" Arroway, Matthew McConaughey as Palmer Joss, James Woods as National Security Advisor Michael Kitz, and Tom Skerritt as Dr. David Drumlin.

For as long as I can remember, I've been searching for some reason why we're here -- what are we doing here, who are we? If this is a chance to find out even just a little part of that answer, I think it's worth a human life, don't you?

Ellie Arroway

From the distant star Vega, a radio message comes to Earth and Ellie receives it. As the countries of the world unite in an effort to decode the transmission, the planet faces the message with equal parts hope and fear, for contained within it are blueprints for a machine of intergalactic travel capable of transporting its passenger to deep space. It could mean the dawning of an astounding new era -- or certain Armageddon.

Production PhotoAmid the worldwide tumult, Ellie becomes a lightning rod of controversy. Fighting for her rightful place as leader of the scientific investigation, she turns to her one potential ally among those wielding influence on the world stage: Palmer Joss (MATTHEW McCONAUGHEY), a respected religious scholar and top-level government advisor. Years earlier, Ellie and Palmer had shared a brief and passionate relationship that ended because of Ellie's single-minded pursuit of her career. Now, estranged by time and their divergent beliefs, but brought together by their joint passion for understanding the message, the scientist and the spiritual leader find themselves struggling with their renewed mutual attraction.

As the world wrestles with the questions raised by the message, and humanity warily approaches the brink of a new millennium, Ellie vies to be selected as the single representative who will leave the Earth to explore the galaxies, seeking the unknown extraterrestrial source -- and becoming the first person to make contact.

But her personal voyage will take her beyond theory, beyond knowledge, beyond experience, to the realization that true vision is ultimately the union of fact and faith.

Erwin Schrödinger (1887 – 1961)

Erwin Schrödinger Wikipedia

The Erwin Schrödinger International Institute for Mathematical Physics

Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger; August 12, 1887 – January 4, 1961) was an Austrian - Irish physicist who achieved fame for his contributions to quantum mechanics, especially the Schrödinger equation, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1933. In 1935, after extensive correspondence with personal friend Albert Einstein, he proposed the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment.

Schrödinger's cat is a seemingly paradoxical thought experiment devised by Erwin Schrödinger that attempts to illustrate the incompleteness of the Copenhagen interpretation when going from subatomic to macroscopic systems. Schrödinger proposed his "cat", after a suggestion of Albert Einstein's, stating in essence that if a scenario existed where a cat could be so isolated from external interference (decoherence), the state of the cat can only be known as a superposition (combination) of possible rest states (eigenstates), because finding out (measuring the state) cannot be done without the observer interfering with the experiment — the measurement system (the observer) is entangled with the experiment.

The thought experiment serves to illustrate the strangeness of quantum mechanics and the mathematics necessary to describe quantum states. The idea of a particle existing in a superposition of possible states, while a fact of quantum mechanics, is a concept that does not easily scale to large systems (like cats), which are not indeterminably probabilistic in nature. Philosophically, these positions which emphasize either probability or determined outcomes are called (respectively) positivism and determinism.

Books by Erwin Schrödinger

* "Nature and the Greeks" and "Science and Humanism" Cambridge University Press (1996) ISBN 0521575508.
* "The interpretation of Quantum Mechanics" Ox Bow Press (1995) ISBN 1881987094.
* "Statistical Thermodynamics" Dover Publications (1989) ISBN 0486661016.
* "Collected papers" Friedr. Vieweg & Sohn (1984) ISBN 3700105738.
* "My View of the World" Ox Bow Press (1983) ISBN 0918024307.
* "Expanding Universes" Cambridge University Press (1956).
* "Space-Time Structure" Cambridge University Press (1950) ISBN 0521315204.
* "What is Life?" Macmillan (1946)

Esperanto

Esperanto Wikipedia

Esperanto and Education: Toward a Research Agenda

Universala Esperanto-Asocio

Esperanto is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. The name derives from Doktoro Esperanto, the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof first published the Unua Libro in 1887. The word itself means 'one who hopes'. Zamenhof's goal was to create an easy and flexible language as a universal second language to foster peace and international understanding.

Although no country has adopted the language officially, it has enjoyed continuous usage by a community estimated at between 100,000 and 2 million speakers. By some estimates, there are about a thousand native speakers.

Today, Esperanto is employed in world travel, correspondence, cultural exchange, conventions, literature, language instruction, television (Internacia Televido) and radio broadcasting. Some state education systems offer elective courses in Esperanto, and there is evidence that learning Esperanto is a useful preparation for later language learning.

Propaedeutic Esperanto is the theory that teaching the Esperanto human language to first-year language students before they embark upon other secondary (non-native) languages, makes learning the additional languages more effective. Helmar Frank's experiments and research at Paderborn and for the San Marino International Academy of Sciences concluded that one year of Esperanto in school, which produces a communication ability equivalent to what the average pupil reaches in other European languages after six to seven years of study, accelerates and improves the learning other languages after learning Esperanto. The propaedeutic value of Esperanto was described for the first time by Antoni Grabowski in an article of 1908.

AJAX

Mozilla Developer Center: AJAX

AJAX Wikipedia

AJAX Tutorial

Ajax, or AJAX, is a web development technique used for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user requests a change. This is intended to increase the web page's interactivity, speed, functionality, and usability.

Ajax is asynchronous in that loading does not interfere with normal page loading. JavaScript is the programming language in which Ajax function calls are made. Data retrieved using the technique is commonly formatted using XML, as reflected in the naming of the XMLHttpRequest object from which Ajax is derived.

Ajax is a cross-platform technique usable on many different operating systems, computer architectures, and Web browsers as it is based on open standards such as JavaScript and XML, together with open source implementations of other required technologies.

Kurt Cobain (1967-1994)

justiceforkurt.com

The Smoking Gun

cobaincase.com

Kurt Donald Cobain (February 20, 1967 – c. April 5, 1994) was an American musician, best known for his roles as lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter for the Seattle-based rock band Nirvana.

Cobain formed Nirvana in 1988 with Krist Novoselic. Within two years, the band became a fixture of the burgeoning Seattle grunge scene. In 1991, the arrival of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" marked the beginning of a dramatic shift of popular rock music away from the dominant genres of the 1980s (glam metal, arena rock, and dance-pop) and toward grunge and alternative rock. The music media eventually awarded the song "anthem-of-a-generation" status, and, with it, Cobain was labeled a "spokesman" for Generation X.



During the last years of his life, Cobain struggled with drug addiction and the media pressures surrounding him and his wife, Courtney Love. On April 8, 1994, Cobain was found dead in his home in Seattle. His death was ruled a suicide by self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head. Since then, the circumstances surrounding his death have fueled much analysis and debate.



Books about Kurt Cobain:

# Azerrad, Michael. Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana. Doubleday, 1994. ISBN 0-385-47199-8
# Cross, Charles. Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain. Hyperion, 2001. ISBN 0-7868-8402-9.

HP iPAQ 210 Enterprise PDA

HP iPAQ 210 Enterprise PDA Official

Specifications

HP iPAQ 210 First Thoughts

Highlights:

* Processor: Marvell PXA310, 624 MHz
* ROM: 256MB
* RAM: 128MB for running applications
* Display: 4-inch VGA TFT with touch screen, portrait oriented
* Wireless LAN: IEEE 802.11b/g1
* Bluetooth: v2.0 with EDR1
* Connectors: 24-pin connector and Mini USB
* Battery: 2200 mAh
* Expansion: SDIO (high-capacity), CF
* Headphone jack: 3.5mm 4-pin
* Speaker: 2
* Microphone: 1
* Input: touch, stylus
* Buttons: 5-way navigation with press to activate, 4 programmable, voice recorder, power, reset
* LED: 8
* Operating System: Windows Mobile® 6 Classic Edition

Alone (E.A. Poe)

Alone

From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then - in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life - was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by,
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.

Edgar Allan Poe

mental images GmbH

Mental Images Official

mental images GmbH is an award-winning computer generated imagery (CGI) software firm based in Berlin, Germany. The company provides rendering and 3D modeling technology to the entertainment, computer-aided design, scientific visualization and architecture.



Its products include the high performance, photorealistic rendering software mental ray® which produces images of unsurpassed realism from computer-aided design and digital content creation data by relying on patented and proprietary ray tracing algorithms.

mental ray dynamically supports the latest graphics hardware processors for maximum rendering speed. mental ray is the first rendering software which combines the physically correct simulation of the behavior of light with full programmability for the creation of any imaginable visual phenomenon.



mental images supplies, among others, the high-end rendering software component of Autodesk® 3ds max® and Autodesk® VIZ by Autodesk, Autodesk Image Studio™ and Maya®, Avid® 3D and SOFTIMAGE ®|XSI® by Avid/Softimage, CATIA® V.4 and V.5 by Dassault Systèmes, FreeForm® by SensAble and PhotoWorks™ by SolidWorks. In addition to integrating mental images's technologies in their own products on an OEM basis, most also re-sell the standalone versions of mental ray to end users.

Hardware Hacking

Hardware Hacking: Have Fun While Voiding Your Warranty (2004) amazon.com

# Paperback: 576 pages
# Publisher: Syngress Publishing; 1 edition (January 1, 2004)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 1932266836
# ISBN-13: 978-1932266832

Grand, president and CEO of a product design and development firm, shows how to modify personal computer and electronics equipment at the hardware level. He describes essential tools for hardware hacking and reviews electrical engineering basics, then gives instructions, illustrated with b&w photos, for modifying the CueCat, building a custom Terabyte FireWire hard drive, taking apart the Mac, hacking Atari and PlayStation 2 systems, and upgrading memory on palm devices. Final chapters overview operating systems and introduce basic concepts of coding.

Cell

Cell Wikipedia

Cell Broadband Engine resource center

Cell Broadband Engine (SONY)

Cell is a microprocessor architecture jointly developed by a Sony, Toshiba, and IBM, an alliance known as "STI." The architectural design and first implementation were carried out at the STI Design Center over a four-year period beginning March 2001 on a budget reported by IBM as approaching US$400 million. Cell is shorthand for Cell Broadband Engine Architecture, commonly abbreviated CBEA in full or Cell BE in part. Cell combines a general-purpose Power Architecture core of modest performance with streamlined coprocessing elements which greatly accelerate multimedia and vector processing applications, as well as many other forms of dedicated computation.

The first major commercial application of Cell was in Sony's PlayStation 3 game console. Mercury Computer Systems has a dual Cell server, a dual Cell blade configuration, a rugged computer, and a PCI Express accelerator board available in different stages of production. Toshiba has announced plans to incorporate Cell in high definition television sets. Exotic features such as the XDR memory subsystem and coherent Element Interconnect Bus (EIB) interconnect appear to position Cell for future applications in the supercomputing space to exploit the Cell processor's prowess in floating point kernels. IBM has announced plans to incorporate Cell processors as add-on cards into IBM System z9 mainframes, to enable them to be used as servers for MMORPGs.

The Cell architecture includes a novel memory coherence architecture for which IBM received many patents. The architecture emphasizes efficiency/watt, prioritizes bandwidth over latency, and favors peak computational throughput over simplicity of program code. For these reasons, Cell is widely regarded as a challenging environment for software development. IBM provides a comprehensive Linux-based Cell development platform to assist developers in confronting these challenges. Software adoption remains a key issue in whether Cell ultimately delivers on its performance potential. Despite those challenges, research has indicated that Cell excels at several types of scientific computation.

In November 2006, David A. Bader at Georgia Tech was selected by Sony, Toshiba, and IBM from more than a dozen universities to direct the first STI Center of Competence for the Cell Processor. This partnership is designed to build a community of programmers and broaden industry support for the Cell processor.

In 2000, Sony Computer Entertainment, Toshiba Corporation, and IBM formed an alliance ("STI") to design and manufacture the processor.

The STI Design Center in Austin, Texas opened in March 2001. The Cell was designed over a period of four years, using enhanced versions of the design tools for the POWER4 processor. Over 400 engineers from the three companies worked together in Austin, with critical support from eleven of IBM's design centers.

During this period, IBM filed many patents pertaining to the Cell architecture, manufacturing process, and software environment. An early patent version of the Broadband Engine was shown to be a chip package comprising four "Processing Elements," which was the patent's description for what is now known as the "Power Processing Element." Each Processing Element contained 8 "APUs," which are now referred to as SPEs on the current Broadband Engine chip. Said chip package was widely regarded to run at a clock speed of 4 GHz and with 32 APUs providing 32 GFLOPS each, the Broadband Engine was shown to have 1 teraflops of raw computing power.

In March 2007 IBM announced that the 65 nm version of Cell BE is in production at its plant in East Fishkill, New York.

Hot Fuzz (2007)

Hot Fuzz Official

Hot Fuzz IMDb (8.2 out of 10)

Hot Fuzz is a 2007 British police action comedy film written by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright and starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. They worked together previously on the 2004 motion picture Shaun of the Dead and the television series Spaced. It was directed by Edgar Wright and produced by Nira Park. Wright revealed that he wanted to write and direct a cop film because "there isn't really any tradition of cop films in the UK... We felt that every other country in the world had its own tradition of great cop action films and we had none."