Larry Osterman's WebLog : Why is the DOS path character "\"?
http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2005/06/24/432386.aspx

And how DOS builders added secret support to make it more like unix.

SWITCHAR

Why \ was used for paths in DOS.

The reason why DOS (and subsequently Windows) went with the backslash character to convey path information, instead of UNIX's forward-slash.

Why is there a "\" key on the keyboard in the first place? As far as I know, they aren't used in English grammar, and to this day, most common users don't know which is "back" and which is "forward."

Thanks Reddit! If you've ever wondered why all the paths on Windows machines are wrong, why the escape character on Windows is "^" and so on, please read this little piece.

IBM has announced it will lead a US government-funded collaboration to make electronic circuits that mimic brains. Part of a field called "cognitive computing", the research will bring together neurobiologists, computer and materials scientists and psychologists. As a first step in its research the project has been granted $4.9m (£3.27m) from US defence agency Darpa.

"The key idea of cognitive computing is to engineer mind-like intelligent machines by reverse engineering the structure, dynamics, function and behaviour of the brain."

IBM has announced it will lead a US government-funded collaboration to make electronic circuits that mimic brains. Part of a field called "cognitive computing", the research will bring together neurobiologists, computer and materials scientists and psychologists. As a first step in its research the project has been granted $4.9m (£3.27m) from US defence agency Darpa.

IBM has announced it will lead a US government-funded collaboration to make electronic circuits that mimic brains.

IBM will join five US universities in an ambitious effort to integrate what is known from real biological systems with the results of supercomputer simulations of neurons. The team will then aim to produce for the first time an electronic system that behaves as the simulations do. The longer-term goal is to create a system with the level of complexity of a cat's brain.

This article explains what native memory is, how the Java runtime uses it, what running out of it looks like, and how to debug a native OutOfMemoryError on Windows® and Linux®

from ibm developerworks

IBM's browser as platform project

He replied that customers have been consistently telling them for 1-1.5 years now that they don't want to do installs anymore. Their customers want the rich experience that desktop apps have traditionally provided, but they want to have it in the browser. Collaboration and sharing data is also a trend that IBM is tapping into with Blue Spruce.

Interesting piece about what IBM's Emerging Technology team is up to.

ReadWriteWeb was given an exclusive first look at Blue Spruce.

this is for when you have to write your own policy

its past. The push for control of attention, creativity, measurements and inventory will reshape the advertising value chain and shift the balance of power.

Research report w/ PDF download by IBM Research on the future of ad models

Based on IBM global surveys there are four change drivers shifting control within the ad industry: 1. Attention – Consumers are increasingly in control of how they view, interact with and filter advertising in a multichannel world. 2. Creativity – Thanks to technology, the rising popularity of user-generated and peer-delivered content, and new ad revenue-sharing models (e.g., YouTube, Crackle, Current TV), amateurs and semi- professionals are now creating lower-cost advertising content. 3. Measurement – Advertisers are demanding more individual-specific and involvement- based measurements, putting pressure on the traditional mass-market model. 4. Advertising inventories – Will be bought and sold through efficient exchanges, bypassing traditional intermediaries.

# Attention – Consumers are increasingly in control of how they view, interact with and filter advertising in a multichannel world. # Creativity – Thanks to technology, the rising popularity of user-generated and peer-delivered content, and new ad revenue-sharing models (e.g., YouTube, Crackle, Current TV), amateurs and semi- professionals are now creating lower-cost advertising content. # Measurement – Advertisers are demanding more individual-specific and involvement- based measurements, putting pressure on the traditional mass-market model. # Advertising inventories – Will be bought and sold through efficient exchanges, bypassing traditional intermediaries.

and a significant share of ad space is sold through auctions and exchanges. Advertisers know who viewed and acted on an ad, and pay based on real impact rather than estimated “impressions.” Consumers self-select which ads they watch and share preferred ads with peers. User-generated advertising is as prevalent (and appealing) as agency-created spots.

It’s tough enough for a small business. What if you’re #2 on Business Week’s best global brands list, with nearly 400,000 employees across 170 countries? At IBM, it’s about losing control.

Good post on LOSING CONTROL in #socmedia "How IBM Uses Social Media to Spur Employee Innovation | Social Media Examiner" http://j.mp/bqP38E

A case study on IBM's decentralized social media program which relies on crowd-sourcing and is driving unprecedented collaboration and innovation.

スクリプト　入門　変数

Vim script の初歩。

IBM’s got BlueTwit. Oracle’s testing OraTweets. SAP’s experiments include ESME, SAP Talk (laconi.ca), ShoutIt and apparently others. Yammer has an ad-hoc base at thousands of companies. But so ...

yammer

Internal microblogging/sharing at Best Buy.

CoScripter is a system for recording, automating, and sharing processes performed in a web browser such as printing photos online, requesting a vacation hold for postal mail, or checking flight arrival times.

Firefox automation for websites testing

Learn to scale your UNIX® Python applications to multiple cores by using the multiprocessing module which is built into Python 2.6. Multiprocessing mimics parts of the threading API in Python to give the developer a high level of control over flocks of processes, but also incorporates many additional features unique to processes.

In a previous article for IBM® developerWorks®, I demonstrated a simple and effective pattern for implementing threaded programming in Python. One downside of this approach, though, is that it won't always speed up your application, because the GIL (global interpreter lock) effectively limits threads to one core. If you need to use all of the cores on your machine, then typically you will need to fork processes, to increase speed. Dealing with a flock of processes can be a challenge, because if communication between processes is needed, it can often get complicated to coordinate all of the calls. Fortunately, as of version 2.6, Python includes a module called "multiprocessing" to help you deal with processes. The API of the processing module has some similarities to the way the threading API works, but there are also few differences to keep in mind. One of the main differences is that processes have subtle underlying behavior that a high-level API will never be able to completely abst

physical

Useful, in-depth discussion of how memory is handled on Windows and Linux with respect to Java Virtual Machines. How to diagnose memory problems; dealing with Java heap as well as native memory exhaustion issues. Source code / demo

Processors are described as being a certain number of bits. This normally refers to the size of the registers, although there are exceptions — such as 390 31-bit — where it refers to the physical address size. For desktop and server platforms, this number is 31, 32, or 64; for embedded devices and microprocessors, it can be as low as 4. The physical address size can be the same as the register width but could be larger or smaller. Most 64-bit processors can run 32-bit programs when running a suitable OS.

Resources

This article explores some of the Linux architectures that support real-time characteristics and discusses what it really means to be a real-time architecture. Several solutions endow Linux with real-time capabilities, and in this article I examine the thin-kernel (or micro-kernel) approach, the nano-kernel approach, and the resource-kernel approach. Finally, I describe the real-time capabilities in the standard 2.6 kernel and show you how to enable and use them.

very good summary about linux and rt

For the last three years, I.B.M. scientists have been developing what they expect will be the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution — “natural language,” as computer scientists call it — and respond with a precise, factual answer. In other words, it must do more than what search engines like Google and Bing do, which is merely point to a document where you might find the answer. It has to pluck out the correct answer itself.

long, but very interesting read on IBM's "answering machine": http://nyti.ms/czrluK - big data, parallel queries, etc... aka, google. – Ilya Grigorik (igrigorik) http://twitter.com/igrigorik/statuses/16866126164