This has to be the best news since I don’t know when. Flash is finally coming to the iPhone and iPod Touch (sort of). Because of Apple’s refusal to allow interpreted code the applications are compiled to native code, so there is no Flash Player and interpreter. This means you can’t load external swf files or run ActionScript bytecode. The other biggie is the fact that Flash web applications in Safari are a no-no as well (because there’s no Flash Player). So, it’s Flash but it’s not Flash. The fact that there’s no Flash Player or Safari integration is no big deal for me, I’m interested in writing native application only. The big deal is all I need is Flash CS5 (a beta will be available this year, apparently) and all the development can be done on Windows! That’s right, no Apple Mac needed – way cheaper and it takes up less space.
You can get all the details here.
written by Paul
\\ tags: Flash, iPhone, iPod
Here’s an impressive example of number crunching (and pushing current hardware to its limit). A team in the UK resolved the Congruent Number Problem which was first posed about a thousand years ago for the first 10^12 (one trillion) cases. The problem with this solution is that the numbers are just too large to fit into conventional computer memory so the researchers had to do some creative work with hard drives.
For the uninitiated, congruent numbers are the whole number areas of right angled triangles whose sides are either whole numbers or fractions. For example, a 3-4-5 right angled triangle has an area of 6, which is a congruent number. All counted, the researchers found 3,148,379,694 congruent numbers in the range up to 10^12. Impressive going, but it doesn’t quite give you the rock star status of finding the next largest prime number!
written by Paul
\\ tags: Math