General Development Archive

Neural nets, also known as artificial neural networks, mathematically model bioelectrical networks in the brain. Massively parallel and more inductive than deductive, they are used for everything from voice and character recognition to artificial intelligence. Python developer Andrew Blais introduces you to the simplest of the neural nets, the Hopfield -- and his net.py application gives you a hands-on opportunity to explore its ability to reconstruct distorted patterns.

This article gives an overview of Visual SourceSafe, Microsoft's version control technology, and provides a look at where this technology is headed in the future.

There has been a lot of commentary recently about Gnome, and a common source of confusion seems to be Gconf - what is it, how does it work, and so on. Some people even seem to confuse Gconf with the registry database in Windows. I will attempt to clear some of this confusion and give an overview of Gconf, and why it looks the way it does.

Though not mentioned on the main Eclipse website yet, Eclipse 3.0RC1 is available for download on their main download site.

Example: You have the Linux 2.4.26 kernel source. Fact: You want to install the newest 2.4.xx kernel. Problem: You have GCC-3.4.0 installed. Solution: Temporarily install GCC-3.3.3. Here's where relink comes in!

The performance of computer hardware typically increases monotonically with time. Even if the same could be said of software, the rate at which software performance improves is usually very slow compared to that of hardware. In fact, many might opine that there is plenty of software whose performance has deteriorated consistently with time. Moreover, it is rather difficult to establish an objective performance metric for software as complex as an operating system: a "faster OS" is a very subjective, context dependent phrase. Read the article at KernelThread.