FPGAs or Field Programmable Gate Arrays are essentially programmable/reconfigurable hardware. A particular CPU architecture can be thought of as hardcoded whereas in contrast, FPGAs let you change the processor “architecture” any time you like. The trade-off is performance versus flexibility. While their gate configurations are reprogrammable, the different process utilized to make FPGAs mean that [...]
Finally, we have a book that vindicates the desirability of a REST interface over AJAX and SOAP. http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/01/a_year_in_oreilly_books.html, I remember back when SOAP, UDDI and all the rest of the corporate web services stack was introduced, many people in the open source community saw it as an attempt to recapture the web, making it complex [...]
David Mertz, in this Charming Python column, makes multimethods sound hopelessly complicated like he always manages to do in his own inimitable way (sorry, David). After coming across the enlightening wikipedia article on multimethods though, I have since discovered that the concept is really quite simple to understand. In a nutshell, Multimethods are nothing more [...]