Techno Babble

13 September 1956 saw the first release of the RAMAC, the Random Access Method of Accounting and Control.

It weighed a ton and was about the size of a refrigerator. It boasted fifty 24-inch disks, coated with iron oxide and stored five million characters – or about 5 MB.

The RAMAC generated so much heat that it had its own separate air compressor to protect the two moving heads that read and wrote information. That made the unit rather noisy. If the size and the noise didn’t deter you the price surely would. IBM didn’t sell them – the company leased them by the year. One RAMAC would set you back $35,000 annually. (Today that would be about $250,000)

Ok so what am I talking about ?

The Hard Drive, of course.

So Happy Birthday to the Hard Drive ….

Microsoft have recently announced Live Search as a replacement for MSN Search.

Microsoft’s share in the search engine market was 11 percent last January, but dropped to 9.6 percent in July, forcing Microsoft into third place after Google and Yahoo.

Microsoft also plans to launch local search engines called “Live Local Search” in the U.S. and Britain. Extensive map services will also be included in the program, now in its testing period

I guess they had to respond in some way to their relatively low percentage share in the search market (and also gearing up for the release of Vista?)

A “live search blog” is available which contains additonal useful information.

I really like some of the features including the image searching, and academic searching capabilites available in the new “Live” search – reckon they’ve done a good job. (Built using the MSN SOAP API ?).

Also check out the Windows Live Toolbar, details at

http://toolbar.live.com/,

which I’ve been using for a few days.

XFLOW is an accurate fluid simulation tool for Engineering and Scientific purposes from Next Limit, who also created Maxwell Render a render engine based on the physics of real light.

XFlow uses a novel particle simulation technology that improves upon existing methods and overcomes many of the shortcomings of other CFD tools. It has a coherent formulation that minimizes interpolation error and guarantees the physically accurate imposition of boundary conditions.

Sample videos demonstrating the product are available from the XFLOW homepage.

Next Limit have explored other fields for potential applications of this technology, looking to see whether the simulation concepts can be applied to complex behaviours which are currently not well understood.

Such as

• Traffic simulation
  The particles can represent the flow of traffic in roads. Every particle behaves like a car and depends on other cars in the locality.
• Cell simulation
  The particles can represent the behavior of cells in interaction with the vicinities.
• Crowd simulation
  The particles can represent the behavior of a crowd in different critical conditions, for example the evacuation of a public area.

Check out videos demonstrating possible applications of the technology from the XFLOW homepage.

Soap is a project from Microsoft Research aimed at developing an alternative pointing device to the mouse.

Soap is a pointing device based on hardware found in a mouse, yet works in mid-air. Soap consists of an optical sensor device moving freely inside a hull made of fabric. As the user applies pressure from the outside, the optical sensor moves independent from the hull. The optical sensor perceives this relative motion and reports it as position input. Soap offers many of the benefits of optical mice, such as high-accuracy sensing.

This is one of the projects being undertaken by Patrick Baudisch. Find out more at his web-site