Japanese researchers at NEC System Technologies and Mie University have made a robot that is designed to analyze wine.

At the end of the robot’s left arm is an infrared spectrometer. When objects are placed up against the sensor, the robot fires off a beam of infrared light. The reflected light is then analyzed in real time to determine the object’s chemical composition.

The key quote that prompted the title…

When a reporter’s hand was placed against the robot’s taste sensor, it was identified as prosciutto. A cameraman was mistaken for bacon.

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I thought about this briefly, myself, while in computer architecture optimization classes. As the GPU is basically a tailored CPU used to offload graphics processing from the main CPU, why can’t you offload more things onto it?’

And the answer is: you can. Folding@Home is a distributed computing project that is developed by Stanford University, and has been around awhile. While I don’t currently use it, I have in the past. I support the World Community Grid project, currently, because it gets me free gigs on Easynews, and it works with the Boinc client for my linux machines. But, Folding@Home always seemed to be the most efficient at what it does. No frills, no fancy screensavers, little overhead. It just folds and folds and folds protein.

Now, it can stake claim to unused GPU cycles on that roaring video card you have. And you only use a fraction of those while not going for that next rank in Battlefield 2. Desktop computing can even consider to have an idle 3d processor, for the most part.

Unfortunately, they only have this working on ATI cards. They couldn’t get it working on the Nvidia flavors. This leaves me out in the cold, at least for now. The chips are just a bit too specialized, and not in the “general” category of GPU’s anymore.

Andy Keane, general manager of visualization applications at Nvidia, said in response to the ATI/Stanford announcement that general processing graphics processing units (GPGPUs) so far have been “fundamentally flawed” in a sense that there has not been a lot of “commercial exploitation with GPUs as a processor.”

He mentioned that Nvidia wants to change this situation and considers the GPGPU market as “exciting” and something that “the company has been looking at for years.” He stated that he had no personal knowledge of the development of a Folding@Home client for the Nvidia platform, but stressed that the company has a “long-standing relationship with Stanford.”

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Nintendo said they wanted two million Wii sales in North America the first year of release. The shocker is that they are now saying they will have one million of those at launch.

I think they may still be slightly hard to get because of the pricepoint, but for one million consoles, anyone should be able to easily get one the first week. At least it won’t be the same crunch as the XBOX360 had. Sony still says they will have around 300K PS3’s at launch, but with their price (even after the 20% decrease announced a week aggo) the demand will not be as high. And their hype is in the crapper.

Yet another reason for the Wii, a new Tony Hawk game that combines his old style of games with an SSX racing style. You don’t use the Wii Remote for this one, but it still uses the motion sensing controller, as can be seen in this video for Tony Hawk’s Downhill Jam:

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Bored? Hunkering for some retro text game goodness?

If you don’t know exactly what a Commodore64 is, or don’t recognize any of the game names below, you may want to skip this post.

Use whatever handy-dandy internet messenger you want and login to AIM. (yeah, I know, AIM sucks blah blah). Add to your friends Infocombot, Infocombot2, and Infocombot3. Send any of them a message, and choose your own Adventure!

Welcome to Waxy.org’s InfocomBot… If you get delays, try InfocomBot or Infocombot3 instead! For help and
more info, go to http://waxy.org/projects/ifbot

Type a game to play:
adventure, deadline, enchanter, hitchhikers_guide,
leather_goddesses, ludicorp, lurking_horror, planetfall, quake,
shade, sherlock, wishbringer, zork1, zork2, zork3

(I didn’t know there was a Quake text adventure!)

Probably a cryptic title to many of you. Compiz is a modification/replacement of the linux X desktop environment (I believe it’s Gnome-only, but not positive). It was originally developed by Novell. It progressed, by third party devs, to a combination with XGL to make very fancy desktop features. Notably, desktop cube, wobbly windows, transparency, windows on a plane, etc. It really was quite impressive, even in its first releases. It’s easy to see the influence OSX had on it, as it emulates a lot of OSX features, but it also adds things I haven’t seen before. The current iterations are also very snappy performance-wise.

I thought I had already written my experiences with it, as I installed the compiz/XGL stuff on by Ubuntu partition a couple months back. But apparently I didn’t get to that in my big linux project post. I will. And I think I’ll make a little desktop movie of my compiz, even though a ton of people already have them on youtube.

Anyways. The project has been forked to Beryl. I mean, I think Compiz will still be around, just that the main third-party devs for it at compiz.net have decided to make their version more of a total project rather than a mod.

They don’t have a working version of Beryl yet, so don’t fret about how to changeover quite yet.

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Nintendo announced today the price and release date for it’s hyped-to-the-breaking-point system, the Wii. It will be $250 MSRP in the US and will hit the shelves November 19. With the launch package you get one multi-game called Wii Sports, which features Tennis, Ping Pong, Baseball, Golf, and Flying.

Also, the official Wii website was launched today.

If even someone such as I (a lover of PC gaming) am tempted to pre-order, this thing is going to be huge.

I must have had a premonition about this yesterday, because I signed up for another free hardware site, for, of course the Wii. If you love me, you will sign up. Really!

not exactly work safe, and not exactly in english, but funny!

The Project Reality Mini Mod team has finally released version .32 of their Battlefield 2 mod. They had been waiting on the Battlefield 2 1.4 patch to release this update. There are no knew features, but some tweaks and fixes. Mostly the patch is to release new maps. 4 of them are included, and it also allows PRMM to play on the new Road to Jalalabad official map.

There are 4 new custom maps in this update:
EJOD Desert by [R-DEV]Thomazz
- USMC vs MEC in a battle over a city in the desert

Mao Valley by [R-CON]xtrm2k
- USMC vs PLA infantry combat in a jungle setting

Hongshangu Winter by GA-KnomboeBoy
- USMC vs PLA infantry combat in a snowy valley

Goods Station by [R-CON]spfreak
- USMC vs MEC infantry combat in a tight industrial setting

This update also includes Project Reality support for Road to Jalalabad. In addition Songhua Stalemate makes a return after some Reality tweaks have been applied.

CP Abadan and Muttrah City maps have been updated with some minor tweaks and some fixes to address a couple of glitches.

While there are no new features in ths update, some minor bug fixes are included:
- fixed supply drop height; supply drops should now arrive closer to where you requested them and should take about 90 seconds to descend
- altered BF2 1.4 “no vehicles” mode so that all vehicles EXCEPT Jeeps and Transport helos are ommitted. This can be changed by editing the /mods/pr/gamelogicinit.con file
- changed round start delays to 90 seconds for all game modes
- removed Operation Nightshift due to unresolvable CTD issues
- added back in a default map rotation list that includes game mode switching and the new v0.32 maps
- worked around a BF2 server crash bug. PRMM servers should crash significantly less frequently now
- fixed the issue where single player conquest was not working properly

We hope you enjoy these new maps while the team works on v0.4.

As always, thanks for your continued support of Project Reality!

egg

Version .4 is also not not far down the road, which will boast a ton of new features and a revamp of the classes.

I have no idea what it means, but that is the battlecry of the Albatross18 golf game.

While I’m not a big fan of golf, I have enjoyed a few rounds of Tiger Woods on the XBOX in my time. Albatross18 was introduced to me a couple weeks ago as Korean MMO golf game. I was slightly intrigued by a couple demo movies on their site, so I signed up. It turns out this game is a blast and the physics in it work surprisingly well.

There are a few modes of gameplay. The most popular is versus, where you play against up to 4 other people trying to get the lowest score and the highest Pang. This is played similar to real golf, where everyone takes a turn until everyone sinks the ball. There are also 30+ player tournaments which you don’t directly see the other players and play pretty much as fast as you can swing. You can see other players ball locations and standings, but that’s it. I learned quickly that you really have to book to finish 18 holes in 30 minutes.

While it seems to have a bit of lolicon influence, the characters are really well animated. Where they make their money is from the hordes that love to trick out the styles and ubergame the stats of their characters. This can be done with “Pang”, which is a money type system earned through game wins and extra style. Also, you can use “Cookies” which are only available by purchasing with real money. Most of the stuff bought with Pang is pure fluff, while Cookies buy the majority of the sought after stat boosters and outfits.

I actually have no problem with no stat enhancements, but I can see where they would be helpful. I have already won many versus games against people who are relatively decked out. Skill is definitely the main factor.

Speaking of skill, there are many “special move” type shots, such as the tomahawk, cobra, and super spins. More are expected in the next “Season” (they call new versions of the game “Seasons”).

The current season:

Upcoming Season 3:

What I just found out yesterday is that they are making a version of this game for the Wii. It will be called PangYa, and, of course, utilizes the versatile Wii Remote for the golf swings. It looks like a blast. I swear I haven’t wanted a console so bad since I was a kid.

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