There is apparently a lot of stuff going on to honor of the 35th anniversary of Intel’s first microprocessor, the 4004. Most of it is being done by Intel (surprise). One of these things, however, is pretty beautiful to look at. It is a software “simulation” of how the chip works. It is represented by an animated schematic of all the circuitry that was shrunk down to be put in the chip. Unfortunately it doesn’t really explain what it is doing–but if you find intricate line drawings intriguing it might be a fun diversion.

The Java 4004 simulator from 4004.com
(download, unzip and read the README.TXT file — on a Mac, double-click the .jar file to run the simulator)

Intel’s 4004 Anniversary Site 

The Wikipedia page on the 4004    

Cali the drinking robot is showing some progress. Take a look at Cali’s new blog:

http://drinkingrobot.wordpress.com

Looks like Mac OS X update 10.4.11 includes Safari 3. Good. Testing Web apps was getting boring…

Update release notes via Apple

10 minute presentation – onscreen or printed or both, about a direction that your team would like to explore:

for example:

Today it was announced that a French tech company was awarded the contract of running fiber optic internet to Nairobi Kenya – promising inexpensive internet for the public in 2 years. What could Kenyans do with this new ability – how can it be harnessed in homes or businesses or schools? Our team (my fictitious one in this case) will explore how local craftspeople could use the internet in order to stay a viable business and cultural asset (not just ebay) — what could be digital craft…?

or how the UN there could use it to communicate with people in rural villages about health or violence or crime… or — crime report call stations or …

How it could be used to take weapons off the black market

or ….

I know that this is hard. The hardest part that I did not predict, is that many of the concepts that you might have could use the internet but might not require physical interfaces. This is a challenge. We will discuss it tomorrow and stay flexible to change and project concept development.

Good Luck, Matt

P.S. look at lifehacker and instructables – maybe some cheap hacks applied to the right problem could be inspirational.

Article on super-fast elevator in Taipei from Gizmodo

There is a fantastic article on CNET.co.uk today listing the author’s top ten favorite on-off switches:

CNET article

HPC Wire has an article about how SGI has built what is supposedly the world’s largest FPGA-based supercomputer. I didn’t even realize they had built *any* FPGA-based supercomputers. This crazy machine is actually a nework of 70 FPGAs. Seems to me an awful lot like building a tank out of Legos just because you might want to make it twice as tall and half as wide next Wednesday.

HPC Wire Article

More proof that Design is Serious Business. According to the NY Times, MIT is suing Frank Gehry for problems in the building he designed for them:

NYTimes article

Asus is (supposedly) now shipping their Eee laptop computer line. It’s a Linux-based, super light machine co-developed with Intel. They originally said it would be $250, but the street price of $400 is still not bad at all. That’s 200 less than a Mac Mini.

Froogle
and
Asus Eee product page