Tuesday, November 25, 2003

XLStatistics Home Page - Excel, Statistics, Data Analysis Excel stat package..
Is It Practical To Use Excel For Stats?: "Is Microsoft Excel an Adequate Statistics Package?
It depends on what you want to do, but for many tasks, the answer is �No�"
JSI Tip 4802. Windows XP allows you to determine which process uses or blocks a TCP port: " Windows XP allows you to determine which process uses or blocks a TCP port.



The Netstat.exe utility has added a -o switch"
Ace's Hardware: "The schedule slips of the 'Itanic' have become almost legendary. Originally slated to be launched in 1998, the Itanium finally saw daylight on the 29th of May 2001."

Sun's Hero project for HPC..
Ace's Hardware Some multicore roadmaps...

Monday, November 24, 2003

Thursday, November 20, 2003

Intel sets the bar at 4GHz | CNET News.com: "Otellini also disclosed that Intel will ship 100,000 Itanium chips in 2003, a figure that the company says is higher than most industry expectations. "

Tuesday, November 18, 2003

Sunday, November 16, 2003

Crooked Timber: Neighborhood values
Best review of Mystic River I've seen. Actually explains the meaning behind the parade scene at the end.

Saturday, November 15, 2003

Windows Tips - Internet Explorer Fix IE view source problem -- have a NotePad short cut on the desktop..

Friday, November 14, 2003

5 Chinese Brothers, Ronny Cox..
Winter Corporation
List of largest production data bases...

World's Biggest Production Databases Now Include Windows

by Scott Bekker

11/13/03 � Windows servers and SQL Server 2000 now power some of the world's biggest production databases, according to an annual survey from data management analysts at Winter Corp.
Waltham, Mass.-based Winter Corp. recently released results of its Winter TopTen Program, which is done annually based on customer surveys and a script run on the databases to verify the facts submitted in the survey.

For the first time, Microsoft products made their way onto some of Winter's "All Environments" TopTen lists, which include Unix and mainframe systems. A massive SQL Server 2000 production database run by Verizon Communications placed sixth for overall OLTP database size and third for largest number of rows in an OLTP database. The Verizon database is 5.3 terabytes and has more than 33 billion rows of data.

-- advertisement --



"We think it's a great win because a lot of times customers or partners don't think about SQL Server being this enterprise, mission-critical database," says Tom Rizzo, director of product marketing for SQL Server. "It's great that it's a third-party validation. We've always been saying, 'Hey, SQL Server can scale.' A lot of people looked at that and said, 'Hey, that's Microsoft saying that.'"

Meanwhile, an Oracle database running on a Windows server at HP also made the OLTP TopTen, sliding in at No. 8 at 3.2 terabytes in size.

According to Winter Corp., the largest OLTP production database is an IBM DB2 cluster system run by Land Registry. That mainframe-based system is 18.3 terabytes.

Two other SQL Server-based databases made the TopTen list for most rows in an OLTP database across all environments. A 17-billion-row database at Commander Communication ranked fourth, and another database at Verizon with nine billion rows ranked ninth.

Microsoft products were not yet competitive in Winter's other database category -- decision support systems. The TopTen consisted entirely of Unix-based systems ranging from a 29.2-terabyte Oracle database to a 9.1-terabyte NCR Teradata database. The largest Windows-based DSS database found in the survey was an 8.9-terabyte Sybase IQ system at ComScore Networks Inc. Sybase IQ systems at ComScore accounted for the top three Windows-based DSS systems. The fourth- and fifth-largest Windows-based DSS systems were Oracle databases at HP.

The largest Microsoft SQL Server-based DSS system was sixth on the list of the TopTen Windows-based DSS systems -- a 1.6-terabyte system at Arclight Systems, LLC.

To be considered in its annual survey Winter Corp. requires Windows-based databases to be at least 500 GB in size. Some 25 SQL Server implementations were entered in the 2003 run with databases that big or larger. Of those, 15 of the databases were 1 terabyte or larger and four were 2 terabytes or larger


EE Times - Sun said to be planning family of 64-bit Opteron machines

Plus news on dual-core IPF:

Intel's first dual-core Itanic, 'Montecito', will sport a whopping 24MB of L3 cache, the chip giant said yesterday, by way of Reuters.

And in a staggering feat of processor engineering that has clearly wowed the news agency's hacks, the chip will "be able to run several applications at once".

Gosh. If only we could do that now...
EE Times - Darpa seeds a petaflops push

Wednesday, November 12, 2003


68.98.127.167
Free BSD ISO:
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/ISO-IMAGES/5.1/5.1-RELEASE-i386-miniinst.iso
Where is Madison (Intel' IPFs named after mountains...)

At the northern end of the Presidential Range in north-central New
Hampshire. It summit affords a panoramic view of the Carter-Moriah range to
the east, significant wilderness (including lesser peaks) to the north,
Adams (and beyond the peaks leading toward Crawford Notch) to the west, and
the balance of the northern Presidentials (Jefferson, Monroe, and
Washington) to the south.

An Appalachian Mountain Club hut on the plateau below Madison's summit
offers three-season accommodations for hikers.

Bill Todd on comp.sys.intel

Tuesday, November 11, 2003

The Register: "HP also announced that is has reached a 'Memorandum of Understanding' with SAP. The two companies have agreed to create tighter links between their various software management packages and to go after helping larger enterprises together. Touching. "

"The adaptive enterprise is an umbrella," said Peter Blackmore, executive vice president at HP, during a press conference held today in Germany.

The most important message on the day, however, came from Nora Denzel, a senior vice president and head of the adaptive enterprise at HP. Denzel is a rising star at HP and eloquent - to say the least.

"The more standardized you are the less costly it is to manage IT," she said, during the press conference.

For all of HP's slogan slinging, this really is what the company is getting at and doing a nice job of providing.

"IBM and Sun are still in separate domains," said RedMonk's Governor. "I think from their perspectives, they realize they have to change."

HP has all the right pieces in place thus far. It has a single chip vendor strategy with Xeon and Itanium, the HP OpenView package as a leading management platform and technology such as Utility Data Center humming away in the labs for future use.


Sunday, November 09, 2003

Saturday, November 08, 2003

Favorites Photo Gallery by Pablo Righi at pbase.com
Kahoolawe: "Kahoolawe is visible from the south shore of Maui. "
Honolulu Star-Bulletin Hawaii News: "Another seal, RM34, born on the Big Island, has recently been relocated twice. Swimmers in Kealakekua Bay said they were 'nipped and groped' by the seal Oct. 17, prompting wildlife officials to move it Oct. 20 to South Point, its birth area. By last weekend the seal was back at Kealakekua Bay.
On Tuesday, RM34 was taken by boat to Kahoolawe in hopes that the island's small population of seals and lack of humans might prove a suitable new home, said Jeff Walters, a biologist with the state Division of Aquatic Resources."
Seal swims back to Big Island bay - The Honolulu Advertiser - Hawaii's Newspaper: "Posted on: Monday, October 27, 2003
Seal swims back to Big Island bay
By Karen Blakeman
Advertiser Staff Writer
The frisky monk seal of Kealakekua Bay on the Big Island was back at his old stomping grounds this weekend after he swam back from the waters off the southern tip of the island last week.
The 2 1/2-year-old Hawaiian monk seal called RM34 was sent to his birthplace off South Point after his antics � which included nipping and groping � became a danger to himself and swimmers.
But he traveled about 50 miles back to Kealakekua Bay, where he was spotted late Saturday, said Margaret Akamine, a wildlife manager with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who overseas monk seals.
Conservation officials are asking Big Island residents and visitors to stay clear of the 300-pound, exuberant and endangered animal until they can find a new home for him.
'This is a very endangered animal,' Akamine said. 'Interacting with him is bad for people and bad for the animal.'
Bad for the animal, she said, because if RM34 is to survive in the wild, he needs to learn that he is a seal in search of other seals, not humans. Bad for people, she said, because RM34's seal games, which witnesses characterized as 'nipping and groping,' can be extremely dangerous when played with much smaller animals like people.
RM34, Akamine said, will grow to weigh more than 600 pounds. His groping behavior, she said, 'is just what it sounds like.'
'He's a young boy,' she said. 'He's just playing out normal field behavior. Unfortunately, he should be playing it out with other seals.'
If RM34 does not learn to play with other seals and avoid humans, he may end up living out his life i"
SurfWax -- News and Articles On Hawaiian Monk Seal: "Seal swims back to Big Island bay Oct 27, 2003
The frisky monk seal of Kealakekua Bay on the Big Island was back at his old stomping grounds this weekend after he swam back from the waters off the southern tip of the island last week. The 2 1/2-year-old Hawaiian monk seal called RM34 was sent to his birthplace off South Point after his antics which included nipping and groping became a danger to himself and swimmers (Honolulu Advertiser, HI).

Friendly seal moved to isolated waters Oct 23, 2003
A frisky Hawaiian monk seal was moved from Kealakekua Bay on the Big Island after its playful antics became a danger to swimmers, federal marine fisheries officials said yesterday. Close interaction with people, as displayed in this photo taken Sunday, led to the transfer of a 2 1/2-year-old Hawaiian monk seal from Kealakekua Bay to waters closer to its birthplace (Honolulu Advertiser, HI).

Big Island Briefs Oct 23, 2003
KAILUA - KONA (AP) - A two - year - old Hawaiian monk seal has been returned to his birth area after he was reported to have come into contact with some swimmers in Kealakekua Bay, wildlife officials said Wednesday. The seal was captured and returned to his birth area in a remote location at the southern end of the Big Island to prevent further interaction with swimmers and possible harm, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Marine Fisheries Service said (West Hawaii Today, HI). "
Ace's Hardware: "RDRAM could make a surprising comeback, thanks to SIS. SIS and Rambus launched today the SISR659, a chipset that is capable of using 4 (16 bit) 1200 MHz RDRAM channels. When you do the math you'll see that those four RDRAM channels can deliver no less than 9.6 GB/s (4 x 2 bytes x 1200) to the chipset. Of course, this awesome amount of bandwidth is going to be bottlenecked by the 800 MHz FSB of the Pentium 4.
To get better performance out of the otherwise wasted bandwidth, a Dynamic Look-ahead Cache and Adaptive Page Management can be found within the R659 chipset. The Dynamic Look-ahead Cache Intelligently prefetches data into an on-chip chipset cache, and lowers the latency of the memory subsystem. Normally, a pagehit on a well-designed DDR 400 controller like the i875p results in a 5 cycle latency: 2 cycles through the controller, 2 cycles for the CAS latency (assuming CAS = 2) and 1 cycle back through the controller. The look ahead cache reduces this to two cycles. If a page hit does not occur, PC1200 RDRAM should have a latency that is very similar to DDR400. Rambus and SIS claim that the latency of the RDRAM channels vary between 10 (cache) and 35 ns, while DDR400 memory latency should vary between 25 and 35 ns. "
Ace's Hardware: "Thanks to Arcadian for posting about HP's recent TPC-C submission for the 64-way Itanium-based Superdome. With 64 1.5 GHz Madison Itanium processors, each sporting a 6 MB L3 cache, and 1 TB of main memory, the Superdome has achieved 1,008,144 tpmC at a cost of US$8.33/tpmC. This is the first machine to break one million transactions per minute. The score is roughly 20% higher than HP's previous result of 824,164 tpmC. The primary difference between that result and the new one is a doubling of main memory from 512 GB to 1 TB"
ENT News | News: Itanium System Breaks 1 Million Transactions on TPC-C: "The result also widens the performance gap between scale-up Unix/Oracle and scale-up Windows/SQL on HP's own 64-processor Integrity Superdome system. HP is now getting 28 percent better performance with its own Unix operating system and Oracle's new 10G database on the system than it got with Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition, and SQL Server 2000, Enterprise Edition. Both the Unix and Windows software stacks used in the tests are 64-bit."
ENT News | News: High-end Microsoft Stack Cheaper Than TPC Comparison Suggests: "When running basically on the same huge HP Superdome server with 64 Itanium 2 processors, the HP-UX/Oracle combo performed 17 percent better than Windows/SQL. HP-UX/Oracle 10G scored 824,164 transactions per minute on the TPC-C (tpmC). Windows/SQL reached 707,102 tpmC. The cost per transaction for HP-UX/Oracle was $8.28/tpmC on the $6.8 million configuration. Microsoft's cost per transaction was $7.16/tpmC on a $5 million total configuration"

Sunday, November 02, 2003

Created comedy cd with itunes. Only way I found in Windows to get CD label was export song list, import into Excel and format..

Downloaded a few songs from Austin Lounge Lizards.

Few other CDs I would like to do:
- Lounge stuff
- Swing (new)
Previous from Notes.txt file:
Oct 14th:
Basic install steps (or there abouts!!)
Get OutLook express & favorites set
-authorize MusicMatch
-mount D: on homesps as data
-mount c:/user as user
-Quicken
-cygwin copy + change nklm/software/Cygus .. to have mount points
-MS Office
Put outlook express back by properties/customize off Start menu (sigh)
-MS Streets

Oct 18th:
Installed vstudio 7.0
Coef of Variation is std/mean

Oct 20th:
Install itunes

Oct 21th:
Uninstall aol

Oct 31st:
Tuesday, October 28, 2003
Monk seal moved again


By MAILE CANNON/ West Hawaii Today


A monk seal, already once removed from Kealakekua Bay, is in captivity again and en route to a new undisclosed location after reappearing at the snorkeling site over the weekend.

Authorities hope the latest attempt to relocate the seal will be effective in reintegrating it into its natural habitat and are calling on the public to help.

"These are wild animals and people need to leave them alone," said Margaret Akamine, of the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration.

The manager of the protected resources division of the NOAA Fisheries Pacific Islands regional office said the endangered seal has been interacting with people and such behavior is detrimental to the animal and people.

The seal weighs 300 pounds and is about 3 years old, she added.

The seal was captured last week in Kealakekua Bay and returned to its birth place near South Point. Authorities began looking for the seal when radio signals from its transmitter tag stopped, Akamine said.

Relative to human development, the seal is a teenager, Akamine said. It's necessary for the seal to interact with seals its own age to properly develop and interaction with people stints that process, she said.

The options of places to relocate the seal are limited, Akamine said, and if the seal continues to interact with people it may have be kept in captivity. In an attempt to thwart the seal's efforts to get friendly with people, she said, its new locale is not being disclosed.

The estimated 1,200 to 1,400 Hawaiian monk seal population is protected by the federal Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act, Akamine said. It is a crime to harass or interact with them, she added.