in collaboration with
Fast Company magazine recently published the list of Most Innovative Companies 2010.
Facebook jumped from its no.15 ranking last year to top the chart this time, while amazon jumped from no.9 to no.2.
Interestingly there is a link specific to most innovative Indian companies and the leader of this lot is the Indian Premier League.
In the Design section IDEO, my personal favorite, comes second to the BMW Group Designworks.
The movie Minority Report (starring Tom Cruise) presented new methods of interactions with information. Looked very sci-fi back then, but not any more. Oblong Industries is working towards making the concept a reality.
John Underkoffler (co-founder of the company and lead of the team that created the Minority Report interfaces) recently demonstrated the interface at a TED conference.
The product is called the g-speak spatial operating environment.
As the name suggest its an Operating System that handles interactions in space. It is a combination of gestural i/o, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels. I have tried to put some brief explanation about these 3 concepts below the video.
Disruptive Innovations as the name suggests is about innovations that disrupt the market. A disruptive innovation makes a product (which was earlier accessible only to richer or more skillful consumers) accessible to a whole new population of consumers.
The term disruptive technology was coined by Clayton M. Christensen in an article in 1995.
Recently Ars Technica published a good article about Google being awarded a Software Patent (by USPTO) that covers the principle of distributed MapReduce.
The importance of this event lies in the fact that many of todays leading software companies use MapReduce based projects. It is slightly scary for these players especially the users of the Hadoop and the CouchDb projects Read more…
Integer Cache is an interesting concept in Java 1.5 that I recently discovered while reading a blog post.
Here is a post on another blog that explains the concept of Caching Integer Objects in detail: Integer Cache in JDK1.5.
Today I got an email from Google (as a google apps admin) saying that over the course of 2010 they we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0. The same is also communicated at their blog.
Email from Google
Also when opening Facebook from IE7 browser I got a box on the top suggesting me to upgrade to IE8. Earlier last year similar phase out warnings had started to appear on YouTube as well.
Read more…
I heard Amber Case case speak at a 5D (Future of Immersive Design) Conference at the Hammer Museum in LA. Apart from the fascinating discussion that she had with other panelists (from Allosphere and Hanson Robotics), she introduced to me the new field of Cyborg Anthropology. Its a funky name for something that lot of other people do but still it caught attention and stuck on to my memory. In short it is the study of the evolution of the fusion of the human and the machine. Another related field is the field of Cyber (not cyborg) Anthropology.
Here is Amber herself explaining Cyborg Anthropology in a short presentation for Ignite.
PS: Cyborg is short for “cybernetic organism,” a being that is part cybernetic machine and part organism.
Breadth first search is a strategy in which root node is expanded first and then all successors are expanded. It means that all the nodes at a given depth are expanded before any other node at the next depth level can be expanded. While expanding the nodes the information of the successors needs to be stored in the memory so that in the next iteration those particular nodes can be expanded.
For the given tree the BFS expansion will be :
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
Read more…
This one was created a while ago (more than a year ago i suppose), but I read the article only today.
This is a USB design that won a Seriban Design Community competition where the aim was to design a flexible USB, so it won`t break if someone accidentally hit it while it stuck out of the computer case.
Look out for the cool idea and the great presentation from serbian designer Damjan Stankovic.
I couldn’t resist posting this for its cool design and look, along with showing how much is possible with the smallest of things that we see around us everyday.
Check out the source article here
USBee
.
If a waiting thread wakes up without notify being called it is called Spurious wakeup.
synchronized (obj) {
while (){
obj.wait();
… // Perform action appropriate to condition
}
}
This is the standard idiom to use wait() method. In above scenario if a notify() is sent by any other thread then the condition will not hold and wait() will be skipped. Consider if there is no while loop and some other thread calls notify before wait() is called by this thread, then it may happen that it could wait forever or till next notify is called.
The javadoc of wait method in JDK 5 has also been updated
A thread can also wake up without being notified, interrupted, or timing out, a so-called spurious wakeup. While this will rarely occur in practice, applications must guard against it by testing for the condition that should have caused the thread to be awakened, and continuing to wait if the condition is not satisfied. In other words, waits should always occur in loops.
Src : Effective Java By Joshua Bloch
Stay updated on my meandering thoughts & activities via RSS (Syndicate).