Thursday, July 28, 2005

Intel Ramping Low-Power, Dual-Core

Intel Ramping Low-Power, Dual-Core: "Intel is planning beyond dual-core with its multicore 'Reidland' and 'Whitefield' chipsets, which aren't slated to appear until 2007 and will also be in the 7000 series. The 5000 series, designed for high-volume dual processor servers, are based on dual-core Xeon processors and are due in the first quarter of 2006. The dual-core Pentium D is part of the newly christened 3000 Series. "

Service-Oriented, Distributed, High-Performance Computing

Service-Oriented, Distributed, High-Performance Computing

Monday, July 25, 2005

My Way News

My Way News: "John Mitchell and Dan Boneh will unveil Pwdhash, software that scrambles passwords typed into Web sites,"

Friday, July 22, 2005

The New York Review of Books: The Tragic Tale of a Genius

The New York Review of Books: The Tragic Tale of a Genius: "The Bell system became operational and the Wiener-Bigelow system never saw combat. In the end, the choice of the Bell system probably had little effect on the course of the war. The big breakthrough in antiaircraft technology was the invention of the proximity fuse, a radar-controlled fuse that enabled a shell to explode and destroy an airplane nearby without directly hitting it. Without proximity fuses, neither the Bell system nor the Wiener-Bigelow system was accurate enough to shoot down airplanes reliably. After proximity fuses became available in 1944, the Bell system was good enough. "

Wednesday, July 06, 2005

ONJava.com: Introduction to Aspect-Oriented Programming

ONJava.com: Introduction to Aspect-Oriented Programming: "Before we delve too deeply into AOP, let's introduce some standard terminology to help us understand the concepts.
Cross-cutting concerns: Even though most classes in an OO model will perform a single, specific function, they often share common, secondary requirements with other classes. For example, we may want to add logging to classes within the data-access layer and also to classes in the UI layer whenever a thread enters or exits a method. Even though the primary functionality of each class is very different, the code needed to perform the secondary functionality is often identical.
Advice: This is the additional code that you want to apply to your existing model. In our example, this is the logging code that we want to apply whenever the thread enters or exits a method.
Point-cut: This is the term given to the point of execution in the application at which cross-cutting concern needs to be applied. In our example, a point-cut is reached when the thread enters a method, and another point-cut is reached when the thread exits the method.
Aspect: The combination of the point-cut and the advice is termed an aspect. In the example below, we add a logging aspect to our application by defining a point-cut and giving the correct advice. "

ONJava.com: Introduction to Aspect-Oriented Programming

ONJava.com: Introduction to Aspect-Oriented Programming: "Before we delve too deeply into AOP, let's introduce some standard terminology to help us understand the concepts.
Cross-cutting concerns: Even though most classes in an OO model will perform a single, specific function, they often share common, secondary requirements with other classes. For example, we may want to add logging to classes within the data-access layer and also to classes in the UI layer whenever a thread enters or exits a method. Even though the primary functionality of each class is very different, the code needed to perform the secondary functionality is often identical.
Advice: This is the additional code that you want to apply to your existing model. In our example, this is the logging code that we want to apply whenever the thread enters or exits a method.
Point-cut: This is the term given to the point of execution in the application at which cross-cutting concern needs to be applied. In our example, a point-cut is reached when the thread enters a method, and another point-cut is reached when the thread exits the method.
Aspect: The combination of the point-cut and the advice is termed an aspect. In the example below, we add a logging aspect to our application by defining a point-cut and giving the correct advice. "

SOC

SOC: "Tenets of SOA by Rich Turner
Service Boundaries are Explicit: Services are expressed at their boundary and there is only ONE way to access the information and/or functionality held within a service - through capabilities exposed at the Service Boundary. Also, assume that calling methods on a Service may take time and may be unreliable.
Services are Autonomous: A service should not have hard-dependencies on other services. You should design your Services to be isolated, independent and interchangeable otherwise you'll end up with a closely coupled system that is fragile and overly complex. Services should maintain all the information needed to operate in isolation so that should one or more supporting services become unavailable, your service will not fail.
Services expose Schema and Contract, not Class and Type: Services should expose their interfaces and shared information interchange structures through well understood schema, rather than a particular language or platform's representation of class or type. By adopting standards based schema can we hope to build truly interoperable systems.
Services negotiate using Policy: This is quite possibly the most valuable, most differentiating tenet. Services must comply with one another's policy requirements in order to interoperate. If you offer a secure, reliable, transacted service, a caller must also support the necessary protocols etc. This protocol negotiation should be performed dynamically which will help ensure that systems do not take hard-dependencies upon one another, and will allow Service designers to largely abstract away the actual �hook-up� mechanisms between systems focussing instead on the functional semantics of their service. "

SOC

SOC: "Tenets of SOA by Rich Turner
Service Boundaries are Explicit: Services are expressed at their boundary and there is only ONE way to access the information and/or functionality held within a service - through capabilities exposed at the Service Boundary. Also, assume that calling methods on a Service may take time and may be unreliable.
Services are Autonomous: A service should not have hard-dependencies on other services. You should design your Services to be isolated, independent and interchangeable otherwise you'll end up with a closely coupled system that is fragile and overly complex. Services should maintain all the information needed to operate in isolation so that should one or more supporting services become unavailable, your service will not fail.
Services expose Schema and Contract, not Class and Type: Services should expose their interfaces and shared information interchange structures through well understood schema, rather than a particular language or platform's representation of class or type. By adopting standards based schema can we hope to build truly interoperable systems.
Services negotiate using Policy: This is quite possibly the most valuable, most differentiating tenet. Services must comply with one another's policy requirements in order to interoperate. If you offer a secure, reliable, transacted service, a caller must also support the necessary protocols etc. This protocol negotiation should be performed dynamically which will help ensure that systems do not take hard-dependencies upon one another, and will allow Service designers to largely abstract away the actual �hook-up� mechanisms between systems focussing instead on the functional semantics of their service. "

Longhorn Developer Center Home: Programming Indigo: The Programming Model

Longhorn Developer Center Home: Programming Indigo: The Programming Model: "Programming Indigo: The Programming Model"

Paul Fallon's Blog - SO and SOA

Paul Fallon's Blog - SO and SOA: "Peter Deustch�s �The 7 Fallacies of Distributed Computing� , probably cause it gets used more in the Java world than in the DCOM/.NET world. For those that are unfamilar with the notions that Peter Deustch proposed so long ago (in internet time terms) back in the 90�s (I think), they are the following:-
1. The network is reliable
2. Latency is zero
3. Bandwidth is infinite
4. The network is secure
5. Topology doesn�t change
6. There is one administrator
7. Transport cost is zero"

15 Seconds : Indigo Programming Model

15 Seconds : Indigo Programming Model: "Indigo is the latest Microsoft implementation of service oriented architecture. Indigo provides a rich set of technologies for 'creating, consuming, processing and transmitting messages'. "

The State of Standards @ WSJ

The State of Standards @ WSJ: "One of the most important concepts to understand about the WSF is that it is not a distributed object system. Web services communicate by exchanging messages - it's more like JMS than RMI. The WSF doesn't support remote references, remote object garbage collection, or any of the other distributed object features developers have come to rely upon in RMI, CORBA, or DCOM"

Grid Services Extend Web Services @ WSJ

Grid Services Extend Web Services @ WSJ: "Distributed systems research has a rich literature where virtualization of resources and objects is a common solution to many problems. This virtualization results in a 'transparency.' Nine of these show up again and again. They are used with respect to accessing a remote service or object. Usually the intent is that the programmer/user need not know or deal with something, but can if they want to. The transparencies are:

Access: The mechanism used for a local procedure call is the same as for a remote call. Many have argued that this is a special case on location transparency.
Location: The caller need not know where the object is located, California or Virginia - it makes no difference.
Failure: If the object fails the caller is unaware. Somehow the requested service or function is performed, the object is restarted, or whatever is needed happens.
Heterogeneity: Architecture and OS boundaries are invisible. However, objects cannot migrate without limitation. At a bare minimum communication with objects on other architectures requires no data coercion.
Migration: The caller need not know whether an object has moved since they last communicated with it.
Replication: Is there one object or many objects behind the name? The caller need not know or deal with coherence issues.
Concurrency: Are there other concurrent users of an object? The caller need not be aware of them.
Scaling: An increase or decrease in the number of servers requires no change in the software. Naturally, performance may vary.
Behavioral: Is it live or not? Whether an actual object or a simulation of the object is used is irrelevant. For example, am I talking to a host object, or a virtual host objec"

Grid Services Extend Web Services @ WSJ

Grid Services Extend Web Services @ WSJ: " mechanically, the differences between Grid services (as defined in the Open Grid Services Infrastructure [OGSI] V.1.0 specification) and Web services are few: a Grid service is simply a Web service that conforms to a particular set of conventions"

Message Passing Interface

Message Passing Interface: "MPI is a library specification for message-passing"

SOA Pipeline | Well on Our Way to SOA? Still Much To Do

SOA Pipeline | Well on Our Way to SOA? Still Much To Do: "SAP's Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA) � SAP's own brand of service-oriented architecture (SOA). SAP claimed that ESA lets you change your processes and create new composite applications not by coding but through model-based design and configuration"

SOA Pipeline | Well on Our Way to SOA? Still Much To Do

SOA Pipeline | Well on Our Way to SOA? Still Much To Do: "SAP's Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA) � SAP's own brand of service-oriented architecture (SOA). SAP claimed that ESA lets you change your processes and create new composite applications not by coding but through model-based design and configuration"

Friday, July 01, 2005

NewsForge | Linux to the rescue: A review of three system rescue CDs

NewsForge | Linux to the rescue: A review of three system rescue CDs: "System Rescue CD is the largest download at 110MB. It includes:
Linux-kernel-2.4.27-xfs
GNU-Parted-1.6.11 -- This reliable text-based partition editor is the best Linux partition tool.
QtParted and PartGui are regarded as the best free PartitionMagic clones for Linux, and you can use these two graphical partition tools without XFree86. They work with QtEmbedded and allow you to see a chart of your hard disk, create, format, delete, and modify partitions.
Partimage-0.6.4 is a Ghost/DriveImage clone for Linux.
GRUB-0.94 / LILO-22.5 -- These tools are the most common bootloaders used with Linux. You can restore your bootloader from this System Rescue CD. For example, if Windows removed GRUB, you can run GRUB from this CD and reinstall the bootloader.
File system tools
Evms 2.3 is a powerful logical volume manager.
Archiving tools tar/gzip/bzip2 are provided for Unix users. Zip/unzip, while rar/unrar/unace are provided for Windows users. "

Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas

Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas: "If you want to learn what people want, read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. [8] When a friend recommended this book, I couldn't believe he was serious. But he insisted it was good, so I read it, and he was right. It deals with the most difficult problem in human experience: how to see things from other people's point of view, instead of thinking only of yourself.

Most smart people don't do that very well. But adding this ability to raw brainpower is like adding tin to copper. The result is bronze, which is so much harder that it seems a different metal."

Microsoft's message for AMD | Perspectives | CNET News.com

Microsoft's message for AMD | Perspectives | CNET News.com: "AMD's unit share of the worldwide x86 CPU market was more than 20 percent in 2001. Last year, it fell to less than 16 percent--and this despite its tech leadership over Intel."

Will SAP sample hosted recipe? | CNET News.com

Will SAP sample hosted recipe? | CNET News.com: "Salesforce has grown rapidly in recent years--it reported just more than $176 million in revenue for fiscal 2005--and it has become nearly synonymous with on-demand business applications"