There's even more on RSS auto-discovery on Mark's site. Looks like it'll reach critical mass soon ;-)

Ha! the Linux Journal On-Line | Obsolete Microkernel Dooms Mac OS X to Lag Linux in Performance article is rightly being derided as troll fodder. Although interesting from the point of view of an exposition of monolithic vs microkernel the article seems fundamentally flawed - not least because Mac OS X is not an example of a traditional microkernel OS!! The comments on the article are interesting too ;-)

Dave's been busy! - Aggregator Auto-Discovery

This page details the changes in the implementation of RSS Auto-Discovery in Radio and Frontier, and includes a heads-up for developers who have built on the aggregator, your code may have to change to support redirected subscriptions.

QUEEN NIGHT ON CHANNEL 4 has been playing in the background on the TV. I'm reliving some of my student days through the music of Queen and, earlier tonight, the Kenny Everett comedy sketches.

Quite rightly Paul Snively backlashes against the backlashed Ted Nelson:

The thing that always strikes me about the backlash against Nelson is that no one is willing to address his points about the disparity between the Web and Xanadu. No one has the intellectual honesty to examine the materials that Nelson has made available whether it's in the form of writing, such as Computer Lib/Dream Machines, or in the form of the Xanadu Green or Gold code or the ZigZag codand explain why Nelson's specific architectural vision is wrong. All of the attacks are ad hominem in nature.

Ted Nelson used to be visiting professor in the Department of Information Science at Strathclyde. I remember his inaugural lecture at the university. A very interesting guy. I seem to recall thinking during his lecture that the concepts in Project Xanadu were well ahead of their time but I couldn't imagine they'd ever make it into a real implementation.

It's a long story. Suffice to say that I've just had to re-install Radio Userland following the advice/steps in Radio UserLand : Re: Help....please.

via ranchero.com - Mac OS X: Version Control with CVS

Mark Pilgrim morphed Matt Griffith's question "Do any RSS aggregators use the HTML LINK Element?" into an implementation of RSS auto-discovery with a Radio auto-subscribe bookmarklet.

It's such a good idea I'm just about to add a <link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="XML" href="http://duncan.smeed.org/rss/jotter.rss"> to my site template.

Jim [hbwt] is home at last!. Have Browser Will Travel may be a bit of a misnomer for a while ;-)

EE Times - Iconoclast designers choose MIPS

A group of engineers in Calabasas Hills, Calif. wants to turn the microprocessor world on its head by doing the unthinkable: tossing out the clock and letting the signals move about unencumbered. For those designers, inspired by research conducted at nearby Caltech, clocks are for wimps.

The Fulcrum Microsystems Inc. design team isn't the first to propose an asynchronous processor, but president and chief executive officer Robert Nunn wants to be the first to take a clockless, fire-breathing processor mainstream. "We really deal with an asynchronous world," he said. "We only make it synchronous for our own convenience."

In fact the article concentrates more on MIPS and its willingness to license the MIPS ISA than it does on asynchronous processor design. If you want to learn more about unclocked processors than a Google Search: asynchronous processor is a good starting point ;-)

With this emphasis on the MIPS architecture and its design wins, perhaps my students will be well equipped to participate in the embeeded systems industry as they (should) really know all about the MIPS architecture ;-) They even had an exam question or two about it! B-}

The Register: Intel targets Sun with Itanium 2 benchmarks

Sun's director of marketing for its processor products group, Sue Kunz, questioned how far Intel's figures went in giving a true comparison between the platforms. She said the benchmarks Intel used "fitted" into the 3MB cache the McKinley will ship with, which made for high scores. But, she said, "customers are going to wait and run real apps to see what they're going to get."

She added that Intel appeared to have compared the Itanium 2, which will debut at 1GHz, with a range of different Sparc processors. "The numbers are fairly muddled."

Judge for yourself. Starting point - the Intel spin-meisters at Intel Projects Record-Setting Intel® Itanium® 2 Processor Performance On Key Enterprise, Technical Applications. But note the caveat on that page ;-):

Performance tests and ratings are measured using specific computer systems and/or components and reflect the approximate performance of Intel products as measured by those tests. Any difference in system hardware or software design or configuration may affect actual performance. Buyers should consult other sources of information to evaluate the performance of systems or components they are considering purchasing.

The exam for my Computer Architecture and Design class finished 45 minutes ago. It was a good sign that more than 80% of the students were still there at the end and hadn't left early. I'll probably be busy marking these exam papers (and some courseworks) over the holiday (Jubilee) weekend so expect more postings than normal as sanity-restoring displacement activities kick in ;-)

There are only(!) 105 exam papers to mark - 3 questions per paper. In a week's time, the exam for my first year Computer Organisation class takes place. About twice the number of students and only a few days grace in which to mark the papers.

So much to do. So little time...

Project:Omega - Developing on Mac OS X:

This document provides an overview of the development tools and environments currently available for Mac OS X (