Month: January 2010
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Worth more than you’ll pay?
I remarked today to someone that a PS3 is “worth more than I’d pay for it”. (Specifically, receiving a PS3 as a gift is worth more than I’d pay for it.) What I really meant to say is “worth more than the maximum I’d pay for it”. So the question is, is that true, and…
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Conservation Cores (ASPLOS ’10)
I read (part of) an interesting paper today out of UCSD. The main premise of the paper is that “the rate at which we can switch transistors is far outpacing our ability to dissipate the heat created by those transistors.” The rest of paper is then devoted to describing a system they have of determining…
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Chrome vs Firefox: Extensions
One of the reasons that I haven’t switched my main browser to Chrome is the lack of extensions. Chrome has been great for running JS-intensive web apps, but for everyday stuff it just can’t keep up with all the functionality that Firefox gains from having extensions. This is actually the main reason I haven’t switched;…
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GNOME Shell: it’s awesome, but I won’t use it
I attended a talk today from some of the developers on the GNOME Shell project. I have to say, the stuff they’re doing is pretty visually impressive. They seemed to have some pretty solid design ideas from a UX perspective. And watching how easy it was to add extensions was really cool. Basically, they have…
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Google vs Wolfram Alpha: Control
There’s a new dimension that I’ve started judging computer tools and software on: how much control I have over what it does. There aren’t many things more frustrating than a program that you’re trying to use, that you know it should be able to do the right thing, but you can’t convince it to do…
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Rosetta Stone
I did a bunch of traveling over winter break. And there are a few things that are a constant about traveling: the first is the hassle, which I partially deal with by taking trains whenever I can instead of flying. The other is seeing large displays of Rosetta Stone boxes. It’s to the point that…
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