I am always amazed by the brain power that would be required to understand and design a CPU. Obviously it's not done by one person, but still I'm sure there are people that understand how it all works. I was looking at the Unofficial 4004 Website recently, which contains recently released schematics and a simulator for the Intel 4004 processor. This processor is a predecessor of the 8086 processor, the basic idea of which (arguably) still lives on today in the latest Intel CPUs - even though they dropped the 80#86 naming convention awhile back.
Given how relatively complex the schematic and functioning of the 4004 is, at least to someone who doesn't know much about Electrical Engineering like me, imagine what the circuit diagram (if you can call it that) for the Intel Core 2 Duo must look like.
So yeah, that's my bit for the day - my occasional reminder that all these bits of technology we take for granted every day were actually conceived, designed and built by actual people. It's not just CPUs, but things that use them, like mobile phones, microwaves and music players.
Posted by Marcin on
16/11/2006 @ 18:11 +1100
Tags: blog, tech
Adobe Flex (formerly Macromedia) is a tool for writing "Rich Internet Applications" (or RIAs). This is a buzzword that means a normal application like interface but via the web - kind of like AJAX stuff. The difference is that Flex applications compile down to a Flash (SWF) file. The advantage of this is that the performance is much better than that of a pure Javascript/HTML app, and the Flash Player is very ubiquitous, so chances are your users will have no problem using your Flex front end. The only negative is that Flex 2 requires Flash Player 9, which doesn't quite have the penetration that Flash 7 and 8 do at this stage.
Being a Domino developer, the first thing I had to try was how hard it would be to get at Domino data using Flex. Short answer: not too hard!
Okay, so this is technically Show-n-tell Tuesday (Australian time), but I was working out some kinks.
Continue reading Domino: Accessing Domino Views from Adobe Flex applications
Posted by Marcin on
14/11/2006 @ 20:19 +1100
Tags: tech, domino, show-n-tell thursday, sntt, flex, xml