Windows 7 Getting (Kinda) Optimized for Parallel Processing [Windows 7]
It's actually a significant process, since as Craig Mundie, Microsoft's Chief Research and Strategy Officer, admits, "Win32 was never designed for highly concurrent, asynchronous processing" and "parallelism requires adjustments at every level of the stack." The first steps toward the larger project of re-arranging tasks and runtimes in different layers to take advantage of multiple-core will happen in Windows 7 though, such as an updated scheduler. There will be other adjustments along these lines as well, though we probably won't know everything until October.
So while it's unlikely that Windows 7 be as deeply in tune with parallel processing as Snow Leopard looks to be, it'll definitely be able to use a SWAT team of cores better than your Vista box will, and set the stage for Windows 8 to have a solid parallel processing foundation. [ZD Net]
While Namco jumped headfirst into the Android Market by giving away Pac-Man, EA Games is going to sit out for the time being, at least until there's a billing system in place for apps in the Android Market: "EA will support the Android platform...but has elected to wait for the launch of a content billing solution to bring their premier IP to market."
TDK has announced a new hard drive at CEATEC that manages to fit 260 GB of data into a 1.8-inch form factor. Using their prototype TMR head, TDK is able to attain a surface recording density of 803 gigabits per square inch, besting Toshiba's previous 378 gigabits per square inch. The leap was possible by combining the TMR head with recent perpendicular magnetic recording techniques, and TDK personnel still think its possible to reach 1 terabit per square inch. [
When I see images of Bruce Munro's Field of Light installation, whatever glumness I might have felt during the day disappears, and that Beatle-esque Lenny Kravitz song of a similar name starts playing in my head. If I had the chance to check out Munro's light installation, coming to Project Eden in Cornwall, England on November 1, I would totally wander through the fields—slowly, slowly through the fields, in fact—touching the acrylic globes that float at the ends of 6,000 fiberoptically united tubes.
Munro has actually set up Field of Light shows on a number of occasions in the past, each successive installation growing in some way. His next all-new project is "a massive illuminated maze synchronized with choral music" named (what else?) Water Towers. That will be on display next March in Frome, Somerset, so yes, again again with the England. You lucky Limeys had better send pictures! [
Research into invisibility cloaks, which work by bending light around 2D objects, could end up protecting offshore rigs and vulnerable coastlines from water. Scientists at the Fresnel Institute in Marseille, France said that established cloaking principles can be applied to ocean waves, and built a 10cm model to show how carefully placed concentric pillars make objects in the center "invisible" to the sea.
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