EkosDeux

The other day I heard about Hulu developing and releasing a desktop application native to Mac OS X. I was immediately off to download it, and put it through a very light test. I downloaded, and mounted the image file. Inside there was the application, and a file folder with plugins. After the installation, I started the application. It was fairly fast and the GUI was nice and simple.

The initial launch has what I assume to be the show of the week, and as you can see mine was “The Listener”. I hadn’t even heard of this show, but found it very interesting.

The Menu was very simple, and easy to use. The selections cascaded and allowed for faster flow.

You also have an option for selecting the popular shows, and episodes. This was the route I took, and selected a show.

After the choice it allows for watching, queueing, and recommending. I chose to watch the show.

Finally, the quality of the image was good. It was an easy to use application, and for those of us on the move its great. I enjoyed the app, and use it to keep up with my shows. It comes with 15 sec, and 30 sec commercials. The alternative is up to 20 minutes of commercials, so I will continue to use this app.

Howdy Folks!!!
Welcome back to another session of the perfect machine. This time around we will discuss the limitations I encountered when building this beast. The first thing I learned was to check EFI-X and review their approved parts list. This was crucial as the module was only proven on a growing list of hardware. Second, develop an idea of what kind of machine you want to build. This is important as certain parts are limited in where they can be used. For example, take my motherboard, I wanted a smaller tower and this led me to choose the only MicroATX on the list. The
DFI LP JR P45-T2RS is a good bang for your buck. The board can handle a variety of quad core processors. It can take up to a 16GB of memory, and comes with overclocking software. This is a gaming board built specifically for lan parties, and for my purpose it was more than enough.

Second, the processor was an Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300 2.5GHz. This part almost ended up being wrong, but luckily I checked DFI’s website and was able to select the correct processor for my board. I wanted the quad core in order to be able to run a virtual machine and give it 2 cores and 4GB of memory. The VM runs as if it was a stand alone PC. Awesome!!!

Memory was not hard too choose, and I basically knew I wanted 8GB. I chose to get 2 G.SKILL PI Black 4GB (2 x 2GB) as they were affordable and had a good reputation. After this, it gets ridiculously expensive. ***Don’t forget that you need a 64bit operating system to run all 8GB.***

The video card was last, and it had to be decent. I am not a gamer by any means, but do play the occasional shooter. I also knew I wanted a dual monitor set up in order to facilitate working and researching. The candidate came down to XFX GeForce 9800 GT
. The card has 512Mb of memory and can handle 2 DVI monitors.

The setup seemed perfect so far, until I ordered the case… Stay tuned.

Have you built an EFI-X system? What was your experience? Leave a comment, and we’ll share notes.

I was reading an article today that said google was releasing Squared… “The Wolfram Alpha killer”. Immediately I was intrigued by this declaration, and read a couple of other blogs. I thought to myself, “If this is supposed to be a Wolfram Alpha killer… Let me test it”. As an engineering student I thought of a couple of things that Wolfram Alpha can do, and compared two stocks. The results were below…

First, I wanted the integration of Cos(x)… Easy enough, but unfortunately Squared could not perform the operation. Winner= Wolfram Alpha

Second, I asked the gravitational constant. Simple enough, just spit out a number, but squared built some knowledge boxes and failed to provide the answer at all. Winner= Wolfram Alpha

Last, but not least. A small comparison, but squared did not comply. Winner= Wolfram Alpha

Conclusion, Google Squared is a good data gathering site. Wolfram Alpha is a computational site capable of performing mathematical operations. The two should be in separate categories as Squared has a long way to go before it can even be considered a contender. I know these test were a little biased, but I wanted to see if it could truly kill Wolfram Alpha. What are you thoughts?