Monthly Archive:: December 2008

Many sophisticated machine learning algorithms cannot process large amounts of data on a single node, but Parallel Machine Learning Toolbox (PML) can do so by distributing the computations. This distribution speeds up computations and expedites training by weeks, days, or even hours in an easy, reliable way. PML can run on a wide array of architectures including single-node, small clusters, grids, and BlueGene.

Apart from its use as a powerful Web application development platform, in combination with the Rails framework Ruby is also a powerful scripting language. It has immense capabilities, owing to the availability of many built-in and external libraries, the power of which can be harnessed to solve a great deal of the scripting needs that surface in typical systems administrative work environments.

In an almost indiscernible and confusing article filled with various scientific terms that most cringe to hear, it was described how in October of 2008 scientists successfully stored and retrieved data on the nucleus of an atom-- and all for two short lived seconds. With this new type of storage, a traditional bit can now be both zero and one at the same time, but in order to understand just how this is possible, translate the article linked above to plain English. Data integrity returns after two seconds at 90% and storage is obviously impermanent, so there are many kinks to work out before atomic storage actually serves a purpose, but give these scientists a couple of decades, and it's theoretical that we'll one day have nuclear drives the size of USB drives today (or MicroSD cards, or why not even specs of dust?) that can hold hundreds of terabytes-- even pentabytes-- of information.

Smolt is a hardware profiler developed by Fedora Project to enable users to submit their hardware profiles during installation. Smolt, like PackageKit from Fedora is also a distribution neutral tool and collects stats anonymously and sends it to a central database . The tool is also completely opt-in and guarantees your privacy. While openSUSE has been including Smolt in their repositories for sometime, they have now taken next step and added installer integration to it. There is also a call for other distributions to participate in this effort instead of reinventing the wheel. "Smolt is a project started by Fedora to collect information about the hardware that is used with computers running Linux. We at (open-)SUSE were seeing this demand as well and also were discussing a solution. But it became clear quite quickly that it does not make sense to have a per-distro solution for that - if we want to have momentum with a hardware database a combined effort promises the most."

Always wanted to try out RISC OS, but were you set back by the fact that you had to buy a new computer? RISCOS Ltd. has released a very cheap ROM image of RISC OS 4.02 which you can use in a free emulator like RPCemu. At only 5 GBP, this image, dubbed "Virtually Free" by the company, is the easiest way of trying out RISC OS. "RISC OS "Virtually Free" is a fully licensed complete package. It consists of a single 4 MB zip file containing a RISC OS 4.02 ROM image with the !Boot structure and other necessary applications and utilities. It is designed to be unzipped and installed in the emulator itself with most of the work being done from within the host environment." It will be available from RISCOS Ltd.'s sales page starting December 8.

Version 6 of the popular Perl programming language will not be compatible with previous versions, but will open up a new world of custom "languages" and interpreters, according to its founder Larry Wall. Wall and his co-developers are doing with Perl 6 -- starting again. "It will break backward compatibility in order to simplify it we have to get rid of old cruft, particularly the regular expression cruft," Wall said. "A lot of the unreadability of Perl is related to the regular expression syntax – and we didn't do that, we got it from Unix. It needs to be end-of-lifed."