Andrew Viterbi, who donated $52 million to the USC School of Engineering, joined a communications research group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) upon graduating from MIT in 1957. It was “the most intriguing job he was offered”. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in 1962, invented the Viterbi algorithm in…Continue Reading…
I’ll be operating at maximum stress level in hopes of accomplishing more that way. On the other hand, I’m naturally not stressed out enough, and I sit back yawning and just staring at the world around me. So it’s time to buckle down. This summer, I’m doing two major things, each of which could easily…Continue Reading…
Watch this Google video from yesterday on Microsoft’s new voice recognition software. One of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while. “Dear aunt, let’s set so double the killer delete select all.” It’s drawing a lot of comparisons with All your base are belong to us, which is also what I thought it sounded…Continue Reading…
The 50th anniversary of hard-disk storage is coming up in a little over a month. On Sept. 13, 1956, IBM shipped the first hard disk drive. It was the size of two refrigerators, weighed a ton, stored 5 megabytes on 50 spinning iron-oxide-coated disks– and cost $250,000 a year in today’s dollars to lease. Newsweek
In 1990, we had some brand new HP disks the size of a washing machine. Capacity 650MB. Some software was written to move the head assembly from end to end. This would cause so much vibration the the whole machine would “walk” around. The machine room had video cameras, and sometimes if you saw some…Continue Reading…
Some new Apple Mac laptops and IBM Thinkpads have sudden motion sensors inside, which park the hard drive heads in the event of a fall which protects your data from being damaged. It’s being used for all sorts of things, including a way to turn your Mac into a Jedi weapon. It’s surprising how many…Continue Reading…