ClearSpeed plots 1 TeraFlop floating point pizza box
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1U rocket ship IDF Floating point whiz ClearSpeed continues to round out its software play ahead of several major product upgrades.â¦
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A library providing easy, flexible, and efficient read/write access to video files using a wide variety of codecs in MATLAB on Windows and GNU/Linux platforms, using DirectShow and ffmpeg backends, respectively.   The 0.5-beta3 version has been released.  It includes full 64-bit support, new imread and load plugins, and numerous fixes and improvements.
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The Java Parallel Processing Framework is a grid framework for Java, focused on performance and ease of use.   The JPPF team has the pleasure to announce a new maintenance release.  The communications and execution performance was increased by 10% Numerous bugs were fixed in the server, increasing its stability and scalability. A bug was fixed in the distributed class loader, that would cause the client to crash. The graphical administration console was upgraded to use Substance L&F v3.1 and JFreeChart v1.0.3  The files for this release can be dowloaded from this location: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=135654 The project home page can be found here: http://jppf-project.sourceforge.net/ Documentation on the project can be found here: http://jppf-project.sourceforge.net/wiki
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ClamTk is a GUI front-end for Clam Antivirus using gtk2-perl. It is designed to be an easy-to-use, lightweight, point-and-click desktop virus scanner for Linux.   This release introduces a right-click "save-as" feature. This is useful for when opening downloads (from Firefox, for example) with ClamTk to scan them first: one can then save it from the usual temp (/tmp) directory as desired.
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Asymptote (http://asymptote.sourceforge.net) is a powerful descriptive vector graphics language for technical drawing, inspired by MetaPost but with an improved C++-like syntax. Asymptote provides for figures the same high-quality level of typesetting that LaTeX does for scientific text.    A new picture size routine, which maps specified user coordinates to a given final size, provides a convenient way of forcing the plotted  subregion of a graph to have a fixed size. The correct surface normal is chosen when calculating lighting. The comment character can now be escaped when reading strings from data files (but is disabled when reading raw characters with getc). The new word file mode is useful for reading  white space-delimited strings. PostScript output files are now explicitly designated as EPSF in the header line. The minimum width and height of flowchart blocks may now be controlled separately. Interpolation and knot theory modules were added. The usage of path vs. guide in the base files was  standardized.   https://sourceforge.net/projects/asymptote
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A new release of the Zip PECL package has been made according to this post on Pierre-Alain Joye's blog today. The main update in this release is to counteract a Windows bug that's interfering with binary file opens.   The issue is actually a windows bug. No matter if I give or not the "b" flag to fopen, the write operations are not binary safe. It seems to be a known issue as many projects use the same trick.   The problem comes up when PHP forces the binary mode in SAPI and CLI, making the binary writes to a file non-binary safe no matter what. Pierre is also asking for help from anyone out there with any information/bug reports/references about this issue that would yield something useful.
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A discussion of how to use frame styles in OOo Writer.
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Corrects percentage change in first paragraph and headline to year-over-year figure, from sequential figure
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In response to this previous post, Ben Ramsey has relayed some of this thoughts on the benchmarks that were done by Jonathan Street comparing functions and their aliases:   Mmy first reaction was something like: "Egads! These benchmarks are stupid and misleading! These functions are simply aliases of each other. There should be no discernible difference, and any buffoon should realize this fallacy!" This was before I clicked through from PHPDeveloper.org to read his post.   After reading his data and going on to the Better Benchmarks post that followed it, he found that most of the results of additional testing came out negligible and that there was almost no difference between the two.    Ben illustrates the proof of this with a few lines pasted from the "ext/standard/basic_functions.c" in PHP's source showing that the code is shared via a PHP_FALIAS function call.
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Avoiding errors In a recent article here in The Register we saw some of the problems that result when floating point numbers are misused or chosen inappropriately.â¦
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MeshLab is a GPL portable and extendible system for the processing and editing of unstructured 3D triangular meshes. The system is aimed to help the processing of the typical not-so-small meshes arising in 3D scanning, providing a set of tools for editing, cleaning, healing, repairing, inspecting, rendering and converting this kind of meshes.    This release adds various new filtering tools like a much improved automatic hole filling algorithm vrml/dxf output and improved format support for obj files.   More info and screenshots of the system are available at   http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/
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(InfoWorld) - Following their march from standard processors to dual-core and quad-core designs in 2006, Intel researchers have built an 80-core chip that performs more than a teraflops (trillions of floating point operations per second) while using less electricity than a modern desktop PC chip. First described by Intel executivesÂ at a September trade show, the chip fits 80 cores onto a 275-square millimeter, fingernail-size chip and draws only 62 watts of power -- less than many modern desktop chips. The company has no plans to bring this "teraflops research chip" to market, but is using it to test new technologies such as high-bandwidth interconnects, energy management techniques, and a tile design method to build multicore chips, said Jerry Bautista, director of Intel's tera-scale research program. He spoke in a conference call with reporters on Friday before presenting technical details of the research at the ISSCC (Integrated Solid State Circuits Conference) trade show in San Francisco. Intel engineers are also using the chip to explore new forms of tera-scale computing, in which future users could process terabytes of data on their desktops to perform real-time speech recognition, multimedia data mining, photo-realistic gaming and artificial intelligence. Until now, that degree of computing performance has been available only to scientists and academics using machines like ASCI Red, the teraflops supercomputer built by Intel and its partners in 1996 for U.S. government researchers at Sandia National Labs, near Albuquerque, New Mexico. That system handled a comparable amount of computing as the new chip, but demanded an enormous 500 kilowatts of power and 500 kilowatts of cooling to run its nearly 10,000 Pentium Pro chips. Shrunk onto a single chip, that power would allow average consumers to use their PCs in new ways. They could use improved search functions on the vast amounts of digital media stored on home desktops, searching large photo archives for specific attributes such as all the shots where a certain person is smiling, or where that person is posing with a friend, Bautista said. Running at 3.16GHz, the new chip achieves 1.01 teraflops of computation -- an efficiency of 16 gigaflops per watt. It can run even faster, but loses efficiency at higher speeds, performing at 1.63 teraflops at 5.1 GHz and 1.81 teraflops at 5.7 GHz. The processor saves power by shunting idle cores into sleep mode, then instantly turning them on as they're needed. Each modular tile has its own router built alongside the core, creating a "network on a chip." Despite using such an efficient grid, the researchers found they could actually hurt performance by adding too many cores. Performance scaled up directly from two cores to four, eight and 16. But they found that computing performance began to drop with 32 and 64 cores. "If we simply added more than 16 cores, we would get diminishing returns, because the threads and data traffic would not be used properly, so the cores get in the way of each other. It's like having too many cooks in the kitchen," said Bautista. To solve the problem on the new chip, they used a hardware-based thread scheduler and faster on-chip memory caches, optimizing the way data flows from memory into each core. To improve the design, Intel researchers plan to add a layer of "3D stacked memory" under the chip to minimize the time and power required to feed the cores with data. Next, they will create a mega-chip that uses general purpose cores instead of the floating-point units used in the current design.
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On the SitePoint PHP Blog, there's a new post from Harry Fuecks pointing out an extension for PHP that allows it to use the Cairo graphics library.   Cairo is the "next generation" vector graphics library for Linux and very cool to have it available in PHP. Also cool about the extension was created using PEAR::CodeGen_PECL, which Hartmut describes here: look Mum - no C! (well almost).   Harry also asks if, with the rise of new technologies like this, if it's time to make the move to deprecate GD from normal PHP use - at the same time, removing another hurdle in PHP's path towards being thread safe.
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New PostScript RIP gives designers more options in output formats.
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TA-Lib provides more than 130 technical analysis functions for financial and trading applications.  Main feature of this release is a new generated XML file to provide meta information of the interface. This facilitate integration within .NET and Java applications.  New Features ============ - New Functions: BETA, MINMAX, MINMAXINDEX, MININDEX, MAXINDEX - Debian and RPM packaging available. - Java JAR packaging available. - New TA_FunctionDescription() returns XML description of API. - New ta_func_api.xml file generated in root directory of the package. - Support for unmanaged static libraries with Visual Studio 2005.  Fixes ===== #1526632 : Fix bug in LINEARREG_ANGLE #1544555 : Now do proper divide by zero detection in TA_ADX  Other Changes ============= - Better Java/.NET naming convention. - ta_func_list.txt moved in root directory of the package. - Removed dependencies on trio and Mersenne Twister functions. - Volume and Open Interest are now double instead of integers. - Add license specific to Excel users.  Info: http://ta-lib.org
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A GNOME 2 frontend for the Visual Boy Advance emulator.
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Tony Freixas has posted a new article covering his thoughts on high-performance debugging with PHP5:   In this article, I will show you how to use PHP 5 input filters to support debug, trace and assert statements so that a one-line change disables these statements and restores your script to full production performance.   He makes a custom solution, a simple method for just outputting simple debug statements via his own custom debugging classes - thDebug, theTrace and thAssert. He wraps all of these in a thDebugManager class to make them all play nice together.   With these in place, he moves on to the real key to the debugger, using the input filter extension that comes with PHP5. He makes a thAbstractStreamFilter abstract class to base the filtering on and, using this interface, makes his thDebugFilter class to handle the various debugging outputs. He uses the __autoload functionality to load it correctly into each page that needs it.