Writing Debug and Trace Messages :: BlackWasp Software Development

Writing Debug and Trace Messages :: BlackWasp Software Development: "Debug messages are created using the Debug class in the System.Diagnostics namespace. By default, when using the debugger within Visual Studio, these messages are displayed in the Output window if running software in debug mode. However, listeners can be added that write messages to other locations, such as text files. The methods used to generate the messages are decorated with the Condition attribute and the DEBUG symbol, so are not called when the program is compiled in release mode. This ensures that debug messages are not seen by the end-user and do not cause any performance impact.

Trace messages are written using the Trace class in the same namespace. They are different to Debug messages because they are included in the code when the TRACE symbol is defined, as it is by default for Visual Studio users. Trace messages can exist in code that has been compiled in either debug or release mode. They are useful when you do wish to log information from the software that you distribute to end-users."

Jeffrey Richter's Blog : Receiving notifications when garbage collections occur

Jeffrey Richter's Blog : Receiving notifications when garbage collections occur: "ool little class that will raise an event after a collection of Generation 0 or Generation 2 occurs."

How the brain encodes memories at a cellular level

How the brain encodes memories at a cellular level: "'One reason why this is interesting is that scientists have been perplexed for some time as to why, when synapses are strengthened, you need to have proteins degrade and also make new proteins,' said Kosik. 'You have the degradation of proteins going on side by side with the synthesis of new proteins. So we have now resolved this paradox. We show that protein degradation and synthesis go hand in hand. The degradation permits the synthesis to occur. That's the elegant scientific finding that comes out of this.'"

Restaurants Use Menu Psychology to Entice Diners - NYTimes.com

Restaurants Use Menu Psychology to Entice Diners - NYTimes.com: "Allen H. Kelson, a restaurant consultant, wrote, “If admen had souls, many would probably trade them for an opportunity every restaurateur already has: the ability to place an advertisement in every customer’s hand before they part with their money.”"

Git: The Lean, Mean, Distributed Machine

Git: The Lean, Mean, Distributed Machine
Good overview presentation -- nice form, nice data.

Atheist Ethicist: Climate Change: The Need for Proof Argument

Atheist Ethicist: Climate Change: The Need for Proof Argument

You are the first mate on an ocean liner, when the Captain gives the following order. "You are to proceed at full speed without any deviation in course and speed unless and until you have absolute proof that there is an iceberg straight ahead. Then and only then are you permitted to take preventative action."

Or, you are an adult supervisor on a bus trip with a bunch of school children. The bus is approaching a train crossing. Yet, the driver says, "I am not slowing down unless and until I have absolute proof that the bus will not be across the tracks before the train gets here."

We know these people to be guilty of the moral crime of reckless endangerment.

If these types of people wish to take actions that risk their own lives, we may leave that up to them. They pay the costs for their own mistakes. However, when they put the lives of others at risk, then they are guilty of a moral crime.

We have good reason to condemn people like this and to condemn them in very harsh terms. They are responsible for the deaths and suffering of a great many people every year.

Now, we have a whole slew of these types of people engaging in reckless endangerment of whole cities and whole populations. They have already maimed and killed a great many people and destroyed a great deal of property, and they seem to have no qualms about continuing along the same course of action. In all cases, they behave as people who are almost if not entirely indifferent to the death and suffering of others - because they are not motivated to take any action that would avoid potential death and suffering.

The morally responsible person would not demand proof that there is an iceberg straight ahead before slowing down and taking precautions. The mere possibility of an iceberg is good enough. His responsibilities to his passengers demands that he take precautions to reduce the possibility of catastrophe - not that he act as if there is no risk until catastrophe is certain.

The responsible bus driver will not risk racing the train at the crossing. She will take precautions to protect the well-being of the children trusted to her, which means slowing down and avoiding the possibility of harm coming to them.

These same principles of moral responsibility demands that, in the face of risk of massive destruction due to climate change, that people slow down and reduce the risk. It does not require absolute proof.

Principles of rationality give us a simple formula for determining how much caution to use in the face of risk. The basic form states that the amount that it is rational to spend avoiding risk is equal to the cost times the probability.

It is worth spending up to $250 billion to avoid a 1% chance of suffering $25 trillion in harm.

It is worth spending up to $2.5 trillion in avoiding a 10% chance of suffering $25 trillion in harm.

It is worth spending $12.5 trillion to avoid a 50% chance of suffering $25 trillion in harm.

It is worth $22.5 trillion to avoid a 90% chance of suffering $25 trillion in harm.

EETimes.com - How much of a lead does Intel have at 32nm?

EETimes.com - How much of a lead does Intel have at 32nm?
We plotted (Figure 1 online) the minimum interconnect line pitch for all three manufacturers as a function of the technology node. All three players had comparable critical dimensions, illustrating that Moore's law is alive and well with no sign of slowing.
Interestingly, TSMC has slightly smaller dimensions than the two other manufacturers, probably because TSMC's customers are mainly SoC manufacturers, such as graphics processor and FPGA makers. With the latest graphics processors having more than a billion transistors, any reduction in chip size is highly beneficial to foundry clients, even though the individual transistors may not be as fast as Intel's or AMD's.
Every new technology node both reduces critical dimensions and improves process. Two fundamental process innovations being adopted by the main semiconductor companies are embedded silicon-germanium source/drain regions (eSiGe) and high-k metal gate technology (HKMG). eSiGe increases the performance of the slower type of transistors (PMOS), while HKMG helps the transistors switch faster and reduces the gate leakage.

Red Hat Open Sources Desktop Application Protocol - PC World Business Center

Red Hat Open Sources Desktop Application Protocol - PC World Business Center

SPICE can be used to deploy virtual desktops from a server out to remote computers, such as desktop PCs and thin-client devices.

It resembles other rendering protocols used for remote desktop management and deployment, such as Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) or Citrix's Independent Computing Architecture (ICA). Brennan said SPICE has advantages over those other protocols, in that SPICE can dynamically customize desktop instances to fit specific operating environments.

Crossbow Virtual Wire: Network in a Box

tripathi.pdf (application/pdf Object)

and so on. These components can
be combined to build an arbitrarily complex virtual network
called virtual wire (vWire) which can span one or
more physical machines. vWires on the same physical
network can be VLAN-separated and support dynamic
migration of virtual machines, which is an essential feature
for hosting and cloud operators.
vWires can be reduced to a set of rules and objects

Natural selection 150 years on : Article : Nature

Natural selection 150 years on : Article : Nature

But can speciation be observed? Yes. Field biologists have witnessed speciation in action among several plant, amphibian, bird and fish species18. What matters for Darwin's theory is that the process by which populations of interbreeding individuals split into two non-interbreeding populations follows straightforward routes of natural selection. One good example is that females of a cichlid fish species vary genetically in their preferences for males of red and blue colours. Biologists are witnessing red males occupying the lower depths of Lake Victoria, in Africa, and females with matching preferences are following them. These mating preferences are causing this single species to split into two19.

What Does it Really Take to Maintain Weight Loss « Correct Weight Loss Blog

What Does it Really Take to Maintain Weight Loss « Correct Weight Loss Blog: "According to data collected by the NWCR, people who have been able to maintain weight loss had the following characteristics.

* 78% eat breakfast every day
* 75% weigh them self at least once a week
* 62% watch less than 10 hours of TV per week
* 90% exercise on average, about 1 hour per day"

HPCwire: An Ethernet Protocol for InfiniBand

HPCwire: An Ethernet Protocol for InfiniBand
The catch is that it will be based on Ethernet, so performance will initially be constrained to 10 gigabits/second throughput and multi-microsecond latencies. InfiniBand, of course, already offers much better performance, which is why it continues to expand its footprint in the HPC market. But since the technology behind lossless Ethernet is coming to resemble InfiniBand, vendors like Voltaire and Mellanox are using the convergence as an opportunity to enter the Ethernet arena. "We're not naive enough to think the entire world is going to convert to InfiniBand," says Mellanox marketing VP John Monson, who joined the company in March.
Voltaire has announced its intention to build 10 GigE datacenter switches, which the company plans to launch later this year. Meanwhile at Interop in Las Vegas, Mellanox demonstrated a number of Ethernet-centric technologies, including an RDMA over Ethernet (RDMAoE) capability on the company's ConnectX EN adapters.
RDMAoE is not iWARP (Internet Wide Area RDMA Protocol), which is currently the only RDMA-based Ethernet standard that has a following with NIC vendors like Chelsio Communications and NetEffect (now part of Intel). Mellanox never jumped on the iWARP bandwagon, claiming that the technology's TCP offload model makes the design too complex and expensive to attract widespread support, and that scaling iWARP to 40 gigabits per seconds (datacenter Ethernet's next speed bump) would be problematic. More importantly, for a number of reasons Linux support for TCP offload never materialized.

The Copenhagen Diagnosis

The Copenhagen Diagnosis: "If global warming is to be limited to a maximum of 2oC above pre-industrial values, global emissions need to peak between 2015 and 2020 and then decline rapidly. To stabilize climate, a decarbonized global society – with near-zero emissions of CO2 and other long-lived greenhouse gases – need to be reached well within this century."

crosby-timing2009.pdf (application/pdf Object)

crosby-timing2009.pdf (application/pdf Object)
Many algorithms can take a variable amount of time to complete depending on the data being
processed.

Microsoft denies it built 'backdoor' in Windows 7

Microsoft denies it built 'backdoor' in Windows 7
The compliance management toolkit provides a set of security configurations that address additional levels of risks beyond those addressed out of the box, as well as tools to deploy these configurations and monitor what Microsoft calls "configuration drift." The toolkit is aimed at enterprises, government agencies and other large-scale organizations.

Microsoft and SAP Again Team Up Against Oracle - Digits - WSJ

Microsoft and SAP Again Team Up Against Oracle - Digits - WSJ
Microsoft will name the German software maker the “preferred provider” to its customers of software for budgeting, planning and forecasting.

Levi's commercials, now starring Walt Whitman. - By Seth Stevenson - Slate Magazine

Levi's commercials, now starring Walt Whitman. - By Seth Stevenson - Slate Magazine: "From the moment we see that 'America' sign half-sunk in inky water, we know we're watching something new. The campaign inhabits a different universe from the one depicted in 'Live Unbuttoned.'

For one thing, it's a universe in which the ever-present soundtrack is Walt Whitman poetry. This spot uses a wax cylinder recording believed to be audio of Whitman himself reading from his poem 'America.' The second spot in the campaign employs a recording of an actor reading Whitman's 'Pioneers! O Pioneers!'"

Intel's newest lawyer..

antitrust:
http://www.wilmerhale.com/files/Publication/ad127e35-c391-4c32-af63-67a840080b61/Presentation/PublicationAttachment/e4c04a7f-c942-4923-af07-6cb5a18dca9c/Melamed_ExclusiveDealingAgreements.pdf

Market power, while a necessary condition of illegality, should not be
sufficient to condemn such exclusionary agreements because they might
be the most efficient form of distribution, even if used by a monopolist.
In that event, the market power gained by the manufacturer can be said
to be the result of its “superior skill, foresight and industry” and would
not provide a sufficient basis for condemning the agreement.

IBM Reveals New Security Product for Virtual Environments

IBM Reveals New Security Product for Virtual Environments
the product provides virtual network access control as a means to prevent network access from a virtual server until its security posture is confirmed. It also features virtual infrastructure monitoring and reporting to identify vulnerabilities, as well as autodiscovery and virtual network segment protection to provide visibility and control of the virtual infrastructure.

Intel places barbed wire fence ahead of haredi protest - Israel News, Ynetnews

Intel places barbed wire fence ahead of haredi protest - Israel News, Ynetnews: "'After what happened in Jerusalem, can't Intel see the responsibility lies on their shoulders? If Intel is first, other factories will come and do the same. This cannot come at the expense of the Shabbat. Shabbat is above all,'"

Remus

Remus: "Remus provides transparent, comprehensive high availability to ordinary virtual machines running on the Xen virtual machine monitor. It does this by maintaining a completely up-to-date copy of a running VM on a backup server, which automatically activates if the primary server fails. Key features:

* The backup VM is an exact copy of the primary VM. When failure happens, it continues running on the backup host as if failure had never occurred.
* The backup is completely up-to-date. Even active TCP sessions are maintained without interruption.
* Protection is transparent. Existing guests can be protected without modifying them in any way.

For a full description and evaluation, see our NSDI paper."

Samsung Launches Open Mobile Platform | bada

Samsung Launches Open Mobile Platform bada: "The name ‘bada’, which means ‘ocean’ in Korean, was chosen to convey the limitless variety of potential applications which can be created using the new platform"

Twitter-equipped bathroom scale tells the world how much you weigh | Technology | Los Angeles Times

Twitter-equipped bathroom scale tells the world how much you weigh Technology Los Angeles Times

But weight, there's more. Today the French company behind the scale, Withings, announced it has added Twitter capability to the scale, enabling the user to automatically tweet the weight/fat info to followers.

Virtualization Changes Application Deployment But Not Development

Virtualization Changes Application Deployment But Not Development: "Virtual machines virtualize the operating system; a complete environment. They do not virtualize an application, nor even an application server environment. Indeed, one could successfully argue that web application servers have long virtualized applications through the automated provisioning and management of isolated, virtual instances of applications. At lease enterprise-class web application servers have, the story is very different when you look at scripting-based languages like ASP, PHP, and Ruby and their deployment on web-servers where isolation is not provided for nor considered."

Intel's cloaking driver reveled

Intel graphics drivers employ questionable 3DMark Vantage optimizations - The Tech Report - Page 2
Intel appears to be offloading some of the work associated with the GPU tests onto the CPU in order to improve 3DMark scores. When asked for comment, Intel replied with the following:

We have engineered intelligence into our 4 series graphics driver such that when a workload saturates graphics engine with pixel and vertex processing, the CPU can assist with DX10 geometry processing to enhance overall performance. 3DMarkVantage is one of those workloads, as are Call of Juarez, Crysis, Lost Planet: Extreme Conditions, and Company of Heroes. We have used similar techniques with DX9 in previous products and drivers. The benefit to users is optimized performance based on best use of the hardware available in the system. Our driver is currently in the certification process with Futuremark and we fully expect it will pass their certification as did our previous DX9 drivers.

The Higher Arithmetic » American Scientist

The Higher Arithmetic » American Scientist: "The incident of the Debt Clock brings to mind a comment made by Richard Feynman in the 1980s—back when mere billions still had the power to impress:
There are 1011 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers."

The "NoSQL" Discussion has Nothing to Do With SQL | blog@CACM | Communications of the ACM

http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/50678-the-nosql-discussion-has-nothing-to-do-with-sql/fulltext
Using either stored procedures or embedding, the useful work component is a very small percentage of total transaction cost, for today’s OLTP data bases which usually fit in main memory. Instead, a recent paper [1] calculated that total OLTP time was divided almost equally between the following four overhead components:
Logging: Traditional databases write everything twice; once to the database and once to the log. Moreover, the log must be forced to disk, to guarantee transaction durability. Logging is, therefore, an expensive operation.
Locking: Before touching a record, a transaction must set a lock on it in the lock table. This is an overhead-intensive operation.
Latching: Updates to shared data structures (B-trees, the lock table, resource tables, etc.) must be done carefully in a multi-threaded environment. Typically, this is done with short-term duration latches, which are another considerable source of overhead.
Buffer Management: Data in traditional systems is stored on fixed-size disk pages. A buffer pool manages which set of disk pages is cached in memory at any given time. Moreover, records must be located on pages and the field boundaries identified. Again, these operations are overhead intensive.

What the Cisco/EMC/VMware Trinity Means For Cloud Computing

What the Cisco/EMC/VMware Trinity Means For Cloud Computing
Cisco, EMC and VMware, the trifecta of companies putting their own proprietary stamp on cloud computing for the enterprise, today created a partnership to offer equipment called Vblocks and support a new joint venture called Acadia that will help business customers and service providers build out clouds based on the Vblock gear packages. The partnership can be read as an attack on hardware providers building gear for the clouds and a potential threat to cloud providers like Microsoft Azure and Amazon’s cloud services that aren’t building VMware clouds.Cisco, EMC and VMware, the trifecta of companies putting their own proprietary stamp on cloud computing for the enterprise, today created a partnership to offer equipment called Vblocks and support a new joint venture called Acadia that will help business customers and service providers build out clouds based on the Vblock gear packages. The partnership can be read as an attack on hardware providers building gear for the clouds and a potential threat to cloud providers like Microsoft Azure and Amazon’s cloud services that aren’t building VMware clouds.

Discovery Blog: Archives

Discovery Blog: Archives: "'Mother Theresa spent her whole life saying (that what Calcutta needs) is a huge campaign against family planning. I mean, who comes to that conclusion who isn't a complete fanatic? She took - and I would directly say stole...millions and millions of dollars and spent all the money not on the poor, but on the building of nearly 200 convents in her own name around the world to glorify herself and to continue to spread the doctrine that, as she put it -- when she got her absurd Nobel Peace Prize -- that the main threat to world peace is abortion and contraception. The woman was a fanatic and a fundamentalist and a fraud, and millions of people are much worse off because of her life, and it's a shame there is no hell for your bitch to go to.'"

cbrumme's WebLog : Asynchronous operations, pinning

cbrumme's WebLog : Asynchronous operations, pinning: "Along the same lines, managed Delegates can be marshaled to unmanaged code, where they are exposed as unmanaged function pointers. Calls on those pointers will perform an unmanaged to managed transition; a change in calling convention; entry into the correct AppDomain; and any necessary argument marshaling. Clearly the unmanaged function pointer must refer to a fixed address. It would be a disaster if the GC were relocating that! This leads many applications to create a pinning handle for the delegate. This is completely unnecessary. The unmanaged function pointer actually refers to a native code stub that we dynamically generate to perform the transition & marshaling. This stub exists in fixed memory outside of the GC heap."

Vastus Medialis Oblique - VMO

Vastus Medialis Oblique - VMO: "Holding the Contraction:
Sitting on a chair with the knees bent, palpate the VMO
Start to slowly straighten the knee and ensure the VMO contracts
Maintain the contraction throughout the movement as you fully straighten the knee and bend it again
Repeat this twice daily until you can maintain a strong constant contraction 10 times in a row"

H1N1 Flu Shot: 3 Major Fears Debunked | Magazine#&mbid=cnn#&mbid=cnn#&mbid=cnn#&mbid=cnn#&mbid=cnn

H1N1 Flu Shot: 3 Major Fears Debunked Magazine#&mbid=cnn#&mbid=cnn#&mbid=cnn#&mbid=cnn#&mbid=cnn

Attacks on the vaccine boil down to three major arguments, each playing on different fears. These arguments may seem persuasive on the surface, but they’re not supported by the science.

CouchDB Implements a Fundamental Algorithm : Daytime Running Lights

CouchDB Implements a Fundamental Algorithm : Daytime Running Lights: "To get to the core of how CouchDB provides these properties in a lockless way requires understanding the append-only file format, but I'll give you the basic picture: Each db file has a single writer process and multiple reader processes. Readers can proceed independently of the writer, getting a consistent snapshot of the data, even as changes are being made."

Technology Review: Vulnerability Seen in Amazon's Cloud-Computing

Technology Review: Vulnerability Seen in Amazon's Cloud-Computing


Ron Rivest, a computer science professor at MIT and pioneer in cryptography, says the four researchers have "discovered some troubling facts" about cloud-computing services, which rent out computing resources, including storage and processing power, on a by-the-hour basis. Specifically, the potential weaknesses were found in the basic computing infrastructure services that are provided by Amazon and Rackspace and are widely used within many in-house corporate datacenters.
These technologies involve "virtual machines"--remote versions of traditional onsite computer systems, including the hardware and operating system. The number of these virtual machines can be expanded or contracted on the fly to meet demand, creating tremendous efficiencies. But the actual computing is, of course, performed within one or more physical data centers, each containing thousands of computers. And virtual machines of different customers sit on the same physical servers.
The attack involves first figuring out which physical servers a victim is using within a cloud, then implanting a malicious virtual machine there, and finally attacking the victim.
Hunting down a victim who might be on any of tens of thousands of servers might seem a needle-in-haystack enterprise. But the paper concludes that with some simple detective work, "just a few dollars invested in launching [virtual machines] can produce a 40 percent chance of placing a malicious [virtual machine] on the same physical server as a target." They dub this mapping process "cartography."

CommsDesign - Symbian opens source microkernel, ahead of schedule ....

CommsDesign - Symbian opens source microkernel, ahead of schedule ....
The release of the microkernel demonstrates three vital, guiding principles of the foundation: first, the commitment of many community members to the development of the platform - in this case, Accenture, ARM, Nokia and Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) all made contributions; second, progress in fulfilling our commitment to a complete open source release of Symbian; and third, a tangible example of providing the most advanced mobile platform in the world," said Lee Williams, Executive Director, Symbian Foundation.
To enable the community to fully utilize the open source kernel, Symbian is providing a complete development kit, free of charge, including ARM's high performance RVCT compiler toolchain.

IBM tackles the virtual data center | The Pervasive Data Center - CNET News

IBM tackles the virtual data center The Pervasive Data Center - CNET News
The new product, IBM Systems Director VMControl Enterprise Edition, is focused on virtualized environments. It supports IBM's PowerVM and z/VM as well as x86 virtualization technologies such as VMWare, Hyper-V and open x86 virtualization solutions. IBM plans to first offer it on IBM Power Systems running AIX in December, 2009 with other platforms coming next year

Cloud Testing Comes to the Fore

Cloud Testing Comes to the Fore
CSC also provides "Testing as a Service" (TaaS) within its Trusted Cloud Services offering. Testing as a Service is available on-demand in public, private and hybrid cloud networks to meet customers' business requirements, security needs and regulatory standards."

Colleagues Finger Billionaire - WSJ.com

Colleagues Finger Billionaire - WSJ.com: "Some of the allegations describe trading based on advance knowledge of developments at Intel Corp., where the federal criminal complaint alleges Mr. Rajaratnam boasted of having a source. One of those facing conspiracy and securities-fraud criminal charges, as well as civil insider-trading charges, is Intel executive Rajiv Goel, an executive in Intel's treasury department. The SEC complaint alleges he gave Mr. Rajaratnam information about impending Intel earnings releases and also information related to Intel's dealings with Clearwire Corp. That wireless Internet carrier was recapitalized as part of a transaction that included an Intel investment. Clearwire declined to comment.
The criminal complaint says that in a call intercepted in 2008, Mr. Goel asked Mr. Rajaratnam to get him a job 'with one of your powerful friends,' as he was 'tired' of working at Intel."

Federal Bureau of Investigation - The New York Division: Department of Justice Press Release

Federal Bureau of Investigation - The New York Division: Department of Justice Press Release: "From approximately March 2008 until around October 2008, RAJARATNAM and GOEL engaged in insider trading schemes involving the stock of Clearwire. GOEL obtained Inside Information regarding investments in Clearwire made by his employer in Spring 2008, and provided it to RAJARATNAM in violation of duties of trust and confidence he owed to Intel. RAJARATNAM caused Galleon to trade on the basis of this Inside Information, earning a total profit of approximately $579,000. In exchange for the Inside Information RAJARATNAM received from GOEL, RAJARATNAM placed profitable trades for the benefit of GOEL in a personal brokerage account maintained by GOEL at Charles Schwab."

Cloud Standards are Misunderstood | Cloudscaling

Cloud Standards are Misunderstood | Cloudscaling: "the short term standards that matter are the simple control & management APIs for the lower layers of the ‘cloud stack’. Obviously, that means standards for controlling infrastructure are of pre-eminent importance with platforms (PaaS) following right behind. Standards for control of applications (SaaS) will be difficult and probably vertical driven."

Dr. Dobb's | Protecting Critical Applications on Mobile Platforms | July 10, 2009

Dr. Dobb's Protecting Critical Applications on Mobile Platforms July 10, 2009
P-MAPS is a processor-measured service layer that reduces the trusted computing base and improves the runtime security of user applications
The authors are research scientists and engineers for Intel Labs. They can be contacted at ravi.sahita@intel.com, ulhas.warrier@intel.com, and prashant.dewan@intel.com, respectively. Copyright (c) 2009 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved

Linux and the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) - The H Open Source: News and Features

Linux and the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) - The H Open Source: News and Features
You can check a Linux machine for its level of TPM support with the following command line –
ls -la /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel/drivers/char/tpm

Linux and the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) - The H Open Source: News and Features

Linux and the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) - The H Open Source: News and Features
You can check a Linux machine for its level of TPM support with the following command line –
ls -la /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel/drivers/char/tpm

PGP/GPG for GMail « The Life of a Silicon Valley Rockstar

PGP/GPG for GMail « The Life of a Silicon Valley Rockstar

It’s a Firefox extension and pushes itself right into Gmail. I wish they’d make a solution for IE7 as well since for better or worse it’s still the de facto standard web browser. You’ll note I said it’s a firefox extension. It’s not a key manager. For that you’ll need to download GNUPG or my preference, GPG4Win which also has a file encryption plugin GPGee and an Outlook 2003 plugin, GPGol.

Getting an SMIME certificate - MozillaZine Knowledge Base

Getting an SMIME certificate - MozillaZine Knowledge Base
Certificate Authorities

Sources of Free SMIME Certificates
Free certificates usable for S/MIME are available from:
Thawte
Verisign
InstantSSL / Comodo
TC TrustCenter and ChosenSecurity
ipsCA
CAcert (CAcert is NOT one of the trusted authorities built-in to FireFox and ThunderBird)
StartCom

LYSP

"result is LYSP: is a tiny, lightweight
Lisp interpreter following closely the tradition of the earliest Lisp
implementations."
http://www.piumarta.com/software/lysp/lysp-1.0/00_README

"The Silicon Age: Virtual I/O
Since 2005, VMware and Xen have gradually reduced the performance overheads of virtualization, aided by the Moore’s law doubling in transistor count, which inexorably shrinks overheads over time. AMD’s Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI – 2007) and Intel’s Extended Page Tables (EPT – 2009) substantially improved performance for a class of recalcitrant workloads by offloading the mapping of machine-level pages to Guest OS “physical” memory pages, from software to silicon. In the case of operations that stress the MMU—like an Apache compile with lots of short lived processes and intensive memory access—performance doubled with RVI/EPT. (Xen showed similar challenges prior to RVI/EPT on compilation benchmarks.)
Some of the other performance advances have included interrupt coalescing, IPv6 TCP segmentation offloading and NAPI support in the new VMware vmxnet3 driver. However, the last year has also seen two big advances: direct device mapping, enabled by this generation of CPU’s (e.g. Intel VT-D first described back in 2006), and the first generation of i/o adapters that are truly virtualization-aware.
Before Intel VT-D, 10GigE workloads became CPU-limited out at around 3.5GB/s of throughput. Afterwards (and with appropriate support in the hypervisor), throughputs above 9.6 GB/s have been achieved. More important, however, is the next generation of i/o adapters that actually spin up mini-virtual NIC’s in hardware and connect them directly into virtual machines—eliminating the need to copy networking packets around. This is one of the gems in Cisco’s UCS hardware which tightly couples a new NIC design with matching switch hardware. We’re now at the stage that if you’re using this year’s VMwar"

The Black Art of Optimising -- www.volker-lanz.de

The Black Art of Optimising -- www.volker-lanz.de: "static unsigned int itoa(char* p, unsigned int n)
{
char tmp[MAX_DIGITS + 1];
char* s = tmp + MAX_DIGITS;
*s = 0;

do
{
*--s = '0123456789'[n % 10];
n /= 10;
} while (n > 0);

strcpy(p, s);

return tmp + MAX_DIGITS - s;
}"

Win32_Tpm Class (Windows)

Win32_Tpm Class (Windows): "Win32_Tpm Class
The Win32_Tpm class represents the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), a hardware security chip that provides a root of trust for a computer system."

Windows Trusted Platform Module Management Step-by-Step Guide

Windows Trusted Platform Module Management Step-by-Step Guide: "Windows Trusted Platform Module Management Step-by-Step Guide"

Rewriting the rules: Intel's software chief challenges convention | Oregon Business News - - OregonLive.com

Rewriting the rules: Intel's software chief challenges convention Oregon Business News - - OregonLive.com

Even so, Intel has repeatedly sought to branch out in software as a complement to its chips and as a tool for breaking into new technologies. “The results have been very consistent,” Grove, now 73 and retired, says. “They amounted to nothing.” It’s James’ job to break that losing streak.

Share your favourite nerd, geek, science jokes! : funny

Share your favourite nerd, geek, science jokes! : funny
The past, the present, and the future walk into a bar. It was tense

Improbable Research

Improbable Research: "'Are Full or Empty Beer Bottles Sturdier and Does Their Fracture-Threshold Suffice to Break the Human Skull?' Stephan A. Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael J. Thali and Beat P. Kneubuehl, Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, vol. 16, no. 3, April 2009, pp. 138-42. DOI:10.1016/j.jflm.2008.07.013."

Bertrand Meyer's technology blog » Blog Archive » The CPU Clock principle of software releases

Bertrand Meyer's technology blog » Blog Archive » The CPU Clock principle of software releases: "CPU Clock principle: release at fixed frequency."

Amicus Curiae: Bilski v. Kappos - Software Freedom Law Center

Amicus Curiae: Bilski v. Kappos - Software Freedom Law Center: "In Microsoft v. AT&T, this Court recognized that “[a]bstract software code [uninstalled in a machine] is an idea without physical embodiment.” 550 U.S. 437, 449(2007). The court below correctly decided that, on the basis of this Court’s prior holdings, such abstract ideas without physical embodiment cannot be the subject of a statutory patent monopoly."

Windows Remote Management (Windows)

Windows Remote Management (Windows): "Windows Remote Management
Purpose
The Windows Remote Management (WinRM) is the Microsoft implementation of WS-Management Protocol, a standard Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)-based, firewall-friendly protocol that allows hardware and operating systems, from different vendors, to interoperate.
The WS-Management protocol specification provides a common way for systems to access and exchange management information across an IT infrastructure. WinRM and Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI), along with the Event Collector are components of the Windows Hardware Management features."

Intel SOC

"First products out the gate such as the Tolapi chip for data center appliances and Canmore for digital TVs and set-tops have largely flopped.
But Intel continues to invest in SoCs, and there are signs it is gaining traction. A second-generation TV chip called Sodaville is said to be getting good reviews among consumer OEMs, and a new networking chip called Jasper Forest has won sockets in Hewlett-Packard storage arrays and wireless infrastructure gear from Nokia Siemens Networks and China's ZTE"
http://www.eetimes.com/rss/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=220200034&cid=RSSfeed_eetimes_newsRSS

But melts just like a little girl (Ftrain.com)

But melts just like a little girl (Ftrain.com)

But melts just like a little girl

Bob Dylan plans to release a collection of familiar yuletide tunes... with proceeds of the album to benefit hunger-relief charities... —"Sleigh, Lady, Sleigh: Bob Dylan to Release Christmas Album," Dave Itzkoff, the New York Times

• Snowin' in the Wind
• Reiny Deer Women #12 & 35
• If Not for Yule
• Can You Please Crawl Down Our Chimney?
• Just Like a Snowman
• Positively 34th Street
• Ain't No More Cane
• Gotta Serve Somebody Eggnog

VMware’s vCloud API Forces Cloud Standards | Cloudscaling

VMware’s vCloud API Forces Cloud Standards | Cloudscaling: "We’re in the midst of a monumental transformation of the IT space, namely cloud computing, and the transformation is stalled. Or, it was, until today when VMware released their vCloud API at VMworld under an extremely permissive license. A FAQ is here. So what’s the big deal you say?"

Deltacloud | Many Clouds. One API. No Problem.

Deltacloud | Many Clouds. One API. No Problem.: "Start an instance on an internal cloud, then with the same code start another on EC2 or Rackspace. Deltacloud protects your apps from cloud API changes and incompatibilities, so you can concentrate on managing cloud instances the way you want."

hackers-with-attitude: Interactive Programming with Clojure, Compojure, Google App Engine and Emacs

hackers-with-attitude: Interactive Programming with Clojure, Compojure, Google App Engine and Emacs: "The Google App Engine SDK includes a development server (based on Jetty) that allows you to test your application in an environment that is close to the real one. This is nice for a pre-flight check but for every change you make in the code you must stop the devserver, recompile and start the server again. You can't develop your code incrementally and interactively as you're used to in a lispy language."

InformIT: Profiling .NET Applications: Part 2 > Using the Performance Monitor and PerformanceCounters to Profile .NET Applications

InformIT: Profiling .NET Applications: Part 2 > Using the Performance Monitor and PerformanceCounters to Profile .NET Applications

InformIT: Profiling .NET Applications: Part 2 > Using the Performance Monitor and PerformanceCounters to Profile .NET Applications

InformIT: Profiling .NET Applications: Part 2 > Using the Performance Monitor and PerformanceCounters to Profile .NET Applications

Download .NET Memory Profiler

Download .NET Memory Profiler: "Here you can download the full version of .NET Memory Profiler"

Codeka.com • Got Visual Studio 2008 Professional, Want Profiling?

Codeka.com • Got Visual Studio 2008 Professional, Want Profiling?: "Visual Studio 2008 Professional doesn’t come with the built-in profiler (that’s a feature reserved for the Team Suite edition). But that doesn’t mean you can’t profile your applications! Microsoft actually provides a stand-alone verson of the profiler, which you can use from the command-line."

CLR Inside Out: Using concurrency for scalability

CLR Inside Out: Using concurrency for scalability: "ny algorithm managing real resources also has to take into account cross-machine utilization. Software that makes entirely local decisions to maximize parallelism—especially in a server environment such as ASP.NET—can (and will!) lead to chaos as well as an increase in contention for resources, including CPUs. A ForAll-style loop, for example, might query the processor utilization before deciding the optimal number of tasks dynamically."

ANATP

ANATP: "ASICs-based SoC designs are not money pits if properly managed even though costs can quickly spiral out of control, potentially derailing product development plans and leaving manufacturers and semiconductor supply partners vulnerable to lower priced options from competitors."

Eurotech - Digital technology for a better world

Eurotech - Digital technology for a better world: "Eurotech, a leading provider of special purpose computing platforms, today unveiled Aurora, a revolutionary supercomputer that sets the pace for performance and efficiency. Aurora is packed with the most advanced solutions, such as quad-core high performance Intel® Xeon® 5500 processors series, 100Gbps per node bandwidth capacity, programmable on-node acceleration, multi-level synchronization networks and direct liquid cooling. Aurora sets a new standard of excellence in high performance computing."

Technorati: Discussion about “IBM gives workers ten days to switch from Microsoft Office to Lotus Symphony - OR ELSE!”

Technorati: Discussion about “IBM gives workers ten days to switch from Microsoft Office to Lotus Symphony - OR ELSE!”: "IBM There's word today today that IBM has finally ordered its staff to abandon Microsoft Office immediately and switch to their own Lotus Symphony suite. Symphony has been around since 2008 , and apparently IBM is now confident enough in its office work kung fu that it's going to take over full time duties. The move makes perfect sense. It's hard to imagine any company using someone else's software to do the chores that their own app is designed to tackle. Why ask your customers do something you can't even ask your own staff to do? Symphony, of course, is based on OpenOffice.org and recently gained support for Office 2007 ."

Industry Veteran Pat Gelsinger Joins EMC as President & COO of Information Infrastructure Products; Howard Elias Promoted to President & COO of Information Infrastructure and Cloud Services - Yahoo! Finance

Industry Veteran Pat Gelsinger Joins EMC as President & COO of Information Infrastructure Products; Howard Elias Promoted to President & COO of Information Infrastructure and Cloud Services - Yahoo! Finance
Pat Gelsinger has joined the company from Intel Corporation as President and Chief Operating Officer, EMC Information Infrastructure Products. Gelsinger, 48, will be responsible for EMC's Information Infrastructure product portfolio, including its Information Storage, RSA Information Security, Content Management and Archiving and Ionix IT management divisions. EMC also announced the promotion of Howard Elias, 52, to President and Chief Operating Officer, EMC Information Infrastructure and Cloud Services.

Fifth-Generation iPod Nano Teardown Posted - Mac Rumors

Fifth-Generation iPod Nano Teardown Posted - Mac Rumors
The main ARM processor is Apple-branded and expected to be a Samsung processor as in the past, and the 8 GB flash memory chip in the dissected unit is from Toshiba.

VMworld session DV2363 – CVP Tech Deep Dive « VM Junkie

VMworld session DV2363 – CVP Tech Deep Dive « VM Junkie
CVP is a powerful client hypervisor solution, which is part of the greater VMware View offering. It is not going to be offered standalone, it is a View product only. It helps create what the presenters called a “thin” thick client.
There are two approaches to doing a client hypervisor: Direct Assignment or Advanced Device Emulation.
In Direct Assignment, technologies like Intel VT-D or other software techniques are used to pass through a physical device (such as a video card) directly into the VM. This has some advantages such as lower overhead, and if you’re running Windows in your VM then all you need is a set of Windows drivers, which are easy to find. Passthrough is also much easier to program…
It has several downsides, however. For example, it ties your VM to that particular hardware which reduces portability. It also becomes difficult to interpose on that device. For example, if the video card is owned by the VM, there’s no way for the hypervisor to access it. Same goes for the network card. The point being – if all you’re doing is passing through your physical devices, why do you need a Client Hypervisor? Just run native. You can’t add value when using passthrough on everything. For some device types (such as USB) where the O/S is expecting hardware to appear and disappear, passthrough is okay

Getting to grips with VDI | Client

Getting to grips with VDI Client
Who’s who in VDIVMware has the most complete offering of any vendor and is widely credited with creating the term VDI. From hypervisor to client, management infrastructure to application virtualisation, VMware has a complete solutions stack and is the only vendor with a mobile offering. Citrix is the latest entrant into the VDI space. Years of experience in thin client and the purchase of XenSource give Citrix a complete stack to rival VMware. Despite being well established in the thin client space and having virtual desktop and server tools, Microsoft only has parts of the VDI solution and currently relies on Citrix and Quest Software to provide the broker and other services.Symantec purchased Altiris two years ago, becoming a major player in application virtualisation and is currently building a VDI solution: it is not known if it will include a hypervisor. Quest Software is the leading third-party broker for VDI and has tools including software preparation and virtualisation. Heavily used by Microsoft and Parallels.

Lactic Acid Is Not Muscles' Foe, It's Fuel - New York Times

Lactic Acid Is Not Muscles' Foe, It's Fuel - New York Times: "'Lactic acid will be gone from your muscles within an hour of exercise,' he said. 'You get sore one to three days later. The time frame is not consistent, and the mechanisms have not been found.'

The understanding now is that muscle cells convert glucose or glycogen to lactic acid. The lactic acid is taken up and used as a fuel by mitochondria, the energy factories in muscle cells.

Mitochondria even have a special transporter protein to move the substance into them, Dr. Brooks found. Intense training makes a difference, he said, because it can make double the mitochondrial mass."

Moblin Zone

Moblin Zone: "Tool-based optimization. This means taking advantage of tools that can help mobile developers create more power-efficient applications, including:

PowerTOP is a Linux tool that helps you find programs that are misbehaving while the computer is idle.

Battery Life Toolkit is a Linux framework to measure battery life on a MID.

Application Energy Toolkit helps you simulate power status, graph power consumption, and measure total power consumption.

Using those techniques, your applications can make intelligent choices about when to aggressively switch devices to sleep modes, take advantage of hardware-accelerated codecs, reduce application demand for wakeups (and improve overall perceived responsiveness), and use the appropriate power policies depending on context.
In the second part of this article, we’ll explore how to optimize mobile applications for maximum performance – critical when multithreading, doing a lot of network IO, engaging in CPU-intensive tasks, or displaying multimedia.
Inside the Intel Atom Processor
When it comes to power management, there are some cool features in the Intel Atom processor (pun intended). The first is the C6 power state, mentioned above. Intel calls that Deep Power Down Technology. To quote Dileep Bhandarkar, an Intel engineer,
We save away the entire processor state for the cores and turn off the caches and put the cores in an extremely low power state. This significantly reduces processor power consumed in idle mode and extends battery life. The OS initiates this with an MWAIT instruction and the CPU works with the chipset VRM to enter the deep power down state. On a wake up event (interrupt), voltage is increased, clocks and CPU state re"

Get ready for virtualization to affect you, too | Deep Tech - CNET News

Get ready for virtualization to affect you, too Deep Tech - CNET News


--virtualization could become more widely used as a way to smooth the differences between people's own computer preferences and their employers' needs.
In the "employee-owned IT" vision, virtualization could let people put a corporate-managed virtual machine on an personal computer. The corporate partition would run only company-approved applications and could connect to the company network; the personal half could run the chaos of other programs that cause corporate IT folks to grind their teeth.

...VMware also is trying to stake a claim on another facet of cloud computing, in which companies can shift workload from their own data center's virtualization foundation to one housed at a remote data center operated by a third party. At VMworld, the company announced that AT&T, Savvis, Terremark, and Verizon Business all are offering that cloud service. VMware also said it's trying to standardize its cloud-foundation interfaces through a standards group called the Distributed Management Task Force.

The Keene View on Web 2.0, Ajax and SaaS

The Keene View on Web 2.0, Ajax and SaaS
Evaluating SaaS Platforms For ISVs
Here are important criteria for ISVs to consider in evaluating SaaS platforms (sometimes called Platform as a Service, or PaaS):
Open hosting: can I move applications I build to another SaaS hosting providers? Many SaaS platforms lock the ISV into a proprietary hosting provider (e.g., SalesForce). ZDNet says that ISVs need to offer their SaaS software both on demand and on premises.
Full platform: does the SaaS platform offer a complete development solution with presentation layer, business logic, security, database and web services? Some SaaS platforms only offer part of the development stack (e.g., DabbleDB, Tibco GI)
Standard language: does the SaaS platform support development using a standard language such as Java? Many SaaS platforms are based on proprietary languages (e.g., Apex, the proprietary language for SalesForce).

Linus Torvalds, Patterson and different views (or different worlds?) « Multicore NZ

Linus Torvalds, Patterson and different views (or different worlds?) « Multicore NZ: "we already pretty much know the solution to scientific computing: throw lots of cheap hardware on it (where “cheap” is then defined by what is mass-produced for other reasons).
Designing future hardware around the needs of scientific computing seems ass-backwards. It’s putting the cart in front of the horse."

System.Diagnostics.PerformanceData Namespace ()

System.Diagnostics.PerformanceData Namespace (): "System.Diagnostics.PerformanceData Namespace
Use the classes in this namespace to provide counter data. The counters are used to expose performance metrics to consumers such as the Performance Monitor. The namespace does not contain classes for consuming the counter data. For a complete description of the performance counters architecture, see Performance Counters."

Providing Counter Data Using a Performance DLL (Windows)

Providing Counter Data Using a Performance DLL (Windows): "Providing Counter Data Using a Performance DLL
A service, driver, or application that wants to provide counter data can write a performance DLL to provide the data."

vmware vsphere counters..

2009 July
The vSphere Client Online Help has this to say about Virtual Machine Performance:
“In a virtualized environment, physical resources are shared among multiple virtual machines. Some virtualization processes dynamically allocate available resources depending on the status, or utilization rates, of virtual machines in the environment. This can make obtaining accurate information about the resource utilization (CPU utilization, in particular) of individual virtual machines, or applications running within virtual machines, difficult. VMware now provides virtual machine-specific performance counter libraries for the Windows Performance utility. Application administrators can view accurate virtual machine resource utilization statistics from within the guest operating system’s Windows Performance utility.”
Did you notice the explicit statement about Perfmon? Perfmon is Microsoft Windows Performance Monitor or perfmon.exe for short. Whereas the legacy VMware Descheduled Time Accounting Service supported both Windows and Linux guest VMs, its successor currently supports Perfmon ala Windows guest VMs only. It seems we’ve gone backwards in functionality from a Linux guest VM perspective. Another pie in the face for shops with Linux guest VMs.
Rant…

hot chips..

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13512_3-10321740-23.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5
"How would you like a single-chip microprocessor with more than four times the performance (on some applications) of Intel's best Core i7?
Then consider that up to 32 of these chips can be directly connected to form a single server, achieving four times the built-in scalability of Intel's next-generation Nehalem-EX processor.
That's IBM's widely anticipated Power7, which it described at last week's Hot Chips conference. But if you're interested, you'd better be prepared to spend a lot more than four times as much per chip. IBM isn't talking about pricing, but large Power servers can cost more than $10,000 per processor"

On Being a Writer: Scene & Sequel

On Being a Writer: Scene & Sequel
Simply put, a scene defines a goal, presents conflict, ends in disaster, thus driving the story forward. The sequel ties that scene to the next, gives the reader and your hero a bit of a rest. It’s much like inserting peaks and valleys in your writing. In the scene we climb to the peak and descend to the valley which is the sequel, then we climb up to the next peak or conflict that is going to fall into the valley on the next disaster. Others relate the sequel to the bridge between scenes.

The three things a scene should include are:
Goal: A hero wants to posses something, wants revenge for something or wants to be relieved of something. Thus she wants to achieve something or she wants to resist something.
Conflict: Not argument between characters as some might believe, but rather is what happens in opposition to what hero wants.
Disaster: Something happens to prevent the hero from reaching her goal. It need not be disastrous in the strict sense of the word. It might simply be someone showing up she did not expect with information she did not know that puts an entirely new light on her struggle to achieve her goal. Or it can simply be a dark hint of what may happen if she pursues her goal, rather than a specific disaster.

VLDB09 Overview, part 2 « Technofeel

VLDB09 Overview, part 2 « Technofeel: "the '10-year award keynote', rewarding the most influencing paper of the last decade. The award was attributed to the MonetDB staff for their paper 'Database Architecture Optimized for the New Bottleneck: Memory Access' describing a novel approach to database storage (column storage, well known nowadays) and to the join operation optimized for the CPU cache, thus avoiding the overhead of memory access, and how the column oriented engine allow for . They also talked about vectorwise and its enhanced query computation pipeline performing batch hit operations. Well done guys, it's a pretty impressive work !"

EETimes.com - Sun, IBM push multicore boundaries

EETimes.com - Sun, IBM push multicore boundaries
Sun Microsystems claimed a new watermark for server CPUs, unveiling Rainbow Falls, a 16-core, 128-thread processor at the Hot Chips conference Tuesday (August 25). But analysts gave the IBM Power7 kudos as the more compelling achievement in the latest round of high-end server processors.
Power7 packs as many as 32 cores supporting 128 threads on a four-chip module with links to handle up to 32 sockets in a system. "It is scaling well beyond anything we've ever really seen before," said Peter Glaskowsky, a technology analyst for Envisioneering Group (Seaford, NY).

China Daily Website - Connecting China Connecting the World

China Daily Website - Connecting China Connecting the World: "Intel, which established operations in China in 1985, has more than 7,000 employees in the country"

Fred Hahn: How Do We Become Fat?

Fred Hahn: How Do We Become Fat?: "High blood glucose elicits the release of insulin, which speeds the uptake of glucose by tissues and favors the storage of fuels as glycogen and triaglycerols, while inhibiting fatty acid mobilization in adipose tissue."

YouTube - Lisp for High-Performance Transaction Processing

YouTube - Lisp for High-Performance Transaction Processing: "Lisp for High-Performance Transaction Processing"

Linux-Kernel Archive: Re: Implementing NVMHCI...

Linux-Kernel Archive: Re: Implementing NVMHCI...: ".. and the point is, if you have granularity that is bigger than 4kB, you
lose binary compatibility on x86, for example. The 4kB thing is encoded in
mmap() semantics.

In other words, if you have sector size >4kB, your hardware is CRAP. It's
unusable sh*t. No ifs, buts or maybe's about it."

Water before meals

http://www.ipwr.org/publications/WaterWeightLoss.Obesity.2009.pdf
when combined with a hypocaloric diet, consuming 500 ml water prior to each main meal leads to greater weight loss than a hypocaloric diet alone in middle-aged and older adults.

DBMS2--Database management and analytic technologies in a changing world - Part 2

DBMS2--Database management and analytic technologies in a changing world - Part 2: "For example, if you look at some details, the ParAccel 30-terabyte benchmark ran on 43 nodes, each with 64 gigabytes of RAM and 24 terabytes of disk. That’s 961,124.9 gigabytes of disk, officially, for a 32:1 disk/data ratio. By way of contrast, real-life analytic DBMS with good compression often have disk/data ratios of well under 1:1.
Meanwhile, the RAM:data ratio is around 1:11 It’s clear that ParAccel’s early TPC-H benchmarks ran entirely in RAM; indeed, ParAccel even admits that. And so I conjecture that ParAccel’s latest TPC-H benchmark ran (almost) entirely in RAM as well. Once again, this would illustrate that the TPC-H is irrelevant to judging an analytic DBMS’ real world performance.
More generally — I would not advise anybody to consider ParAccel’s product, for any use, except after a proof-of-concept in which ParAccel was not given the time and opportunity to perform extensive off-site tuning. I tend to feel that way about all analytic DBMS, but it’s a particular concern in the case of ParAccel."

The Cost of Not Understanding Probability Theory | Math-Blog

The Cost of Not Understanding Probability Theory Math-Blog
An increased awareness of probability and statistics can only improve society and its ability to assess situations and make rational decisions. How do we begin to remedy this situation, not only in Italy, but around the world? We can start by devoting far more time in grade, middle and high school math classes, in order to teach students about this important subject and the implications that it can have on their everyday lives, understanding of society, and ability to make wise financial decisions.

The Old New Thing : Common gotchas when writing your own p/invoke

The Old New Thing : Common gotchas when writing your own p/invoke: "n 64-bit Windows, the LONG and DWORD members are four bytes, but the dwExtraInfo is a ULONG_PTR, which is eight bytes on a 64-bit machine. Since Windows assumes /Zp8 packing, the dwExtraInfo must be aligned on an 8-byte boundary, which forces four bytes of padding to be inserted after the time to get the dwExtraInfo to align properly. And in order for all this to work, the MOUSEINPUT structure itself must be 8-byte aligned."

CMN90091_virt_swit_728x90

CMN90091_virt_swit_728x90: "we will consider two broad categories:
Client partitioning, in which multiple virtual machines are executed locally on a single client PC
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), in which, through whatever mechanism, the desktop software is managed and/or executed centrally via your server infrastructure"

AMD IBS

http://developer.amd.com/Assets/AMD_IBS_paper_EN.pdf
Instruction-Based Sampling is a feature introduced in AMD Family 10h processors. Although IBS is a statistical method, the sampling technique delivers precise event information and eliminates inaccuracies due to skid.
The processor pipeline has two main phases: instruction fetch and instruction execution. The fetch phase supplies instruction bytes to the decoder. Decoded AMD64 instructions are executed during the execution phase as discrete operations called "ops." Since the two phases are decoupled, IBS provides two forms of sampling: fetch sampling and op sampling. IBS fetch sampling provides information about the fetch phase and IBS op sampling provides information about the execution phase.
IBS fetch sampling and IBS op sampling use a similar sampling technique. The IBS hardware selects an operation periodically based on a configurable sampling period. The selected operation is tagged and the operation is monitored as it proceeds through the pipeline. Events caused by the operation are recorded. When the operation completes, the event information and the fetch (or instruction) address associated with the operation are reported to the profiler. Thus, events are precisely attributed to the instruction that caused them. IBS does not impose any overhead on instruction fetch or execution -- everything runs at full speed.

Stress tests rain on Amazon's cloud - Storage - Technology - News - iTnews.com.au

Stress tests rain on Amazon's cloud - Storage - Technology - News - iTnews.com.au: "Stress tests conducted by Sydney-based researchers have revealed that the infrastructure-on-demand services offered by Amazon, Google and Microsoft suffer from regular performance and availability issues"

IBM 'Smart Analytics System' Aimed at Reinventing Data Warehousing - Storage - Byte and Switch

IBM 'Smart Analytics System' Aimed at Reinventing Data Warehousing - Storage - Byte and Switch: "Big Blue says the new IBM Smart Analytics System will deliver optimized combinations of hardware, software and business-problem-specific applications that will reset deployment-speed, cost and performance expectations for 'analytics-ready' data warehouses."

Mitsubishi LT-46244 Vertical Line - AVS Forum

Mitsubishi LT-46244 Vertical Line - AVS Forum: "Mitsubishi extends warranty 1 extra year for 144/244/133/134 Series LCD modules
For those of you affected by the vertical green or red lines on last generation Mitsubishi LCDs, it appears that Mitsubishi has acknowledged this issue and is extending the warranty on LCD modules for one extra year. I think this is likely an issue covered by this warranty extension. Here's the warranty paragraph from mitsubishi-tv.com:

If you have one of the following models please read below for an important announcement - LT-40133, LT-40134, LT-46144, LT-46244, LT-52133, LT-52144, LT-52244. It has come to our attention that a limited number of these Premium Flat Panel Televisions may have performance issues related to the LCD Module used in these sets. As part of our commitment to quality and customer satisfaction, MDEA is announcing an extension of the warranty coverage applicable to the LCD Module for the models listed above. For a period of one additional year beyond the one year limited warranty, MDEA will cover the cost of repair or replacing the LCD Module (parts and labor) at no charge to you. All other terms and conditions of the MDEA limited warranty will continue to apply.

I just hope they've fixed the issue in the 148/246 Series panels."

Stephen Colebourne's Weblog

Stephen Colebourne's Weblog This blog explains the JCP IP process in pictures. And how Sun have managed to use it to block Apache Harmony.

My Way - Sports News

My Way - Sports News: "That was 0.11 seconds faster than the mark he set last year at the Beijing Olympics - the biggest improvement in the 100-meter record since electronic timing began in 1968."

Like a complete unknown: Bob Dylan frogmarched to collect ID after rookie policewoman fails to recognise scruffy music legend | Mail Online

Like a complete unknown: Bob Dylan frogmarched to collect ID after rookie policewoman fails to recognise scruffy music legend | Mail Online

It was in 1965 that Dylan wrote Like A Rolling Stone, with its line: 'How does it feel to be on your own, a complete unknown?'

He found out while staying at the Ocean Place Resort in Long Branch. Before taking part in a concert with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp, he decided to take a stroll through the town's Latin quarter.

'Residents called to complain there was an old scruffy man acting suspiciously,' said officer Spencer. 'It was an odd request because it was mid-afternoon. But it's an ethnic Latin area and the residents felt he didn't fit in.'

This is not the first time that Dylan has wandered off alone while on tour.

After a concert in Belfast in 1991, he shunned his chauffeur-driven limo and was captured by a TV crew waiting at a bus stop.

And in the middle of an American tour he popped unannounced into the childhood home of author Mark Twain.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/bigbrother/article-1206617/Like-complete-unknown-Bob-Dylan-frogmarched-collect-ID-rookie-policewoman-fails-recognise-scruffy-music-legend.html#ixzz0OCmAFdHJ

GFS: Evolution on Fast-forward - ACM Queue

GFS: Evolution on Fast-forward - ACM Queue
it's atypical of Google to put a lot of work into tuning any one particular binary. Generally, our approach is just to get things working reasonably well and then turn our focus to scalability—which usually works well in that you can generally get your performance back by scaling things.

The powerful and mysterious brain circuitry that makes us love Google, Twitter, and texting. - By Emily Yoffe - Slate Magazine

The powerful and mysterious brain circuitry that makes us love Google, Twitter, and texting. - By Emily Yoffe - Slate Magazine
"Seeking is the granddaddy of the systems." It is the mammalian motivational engine that each day gets us out of the bed, or den, or hole to venture forth into the world. It's why, as animal scientist Temple Grandin writes in Animals Make Us Human, experiments show that animals in captivity would prefer to have to search for their food than to have it delivered to them.

..
Wanting is Berridge's equivalent for Panksepp's seeking system. It is the liking system that Berridge believes is the brain's reward center. When we experience pleasure, it is our own opioid system, rather than our dopamine system, that is being stimulated

Official Google Blog: Introducing the Google Chrome OS

Official Google Blog: Introducing the Google Chrome OS
Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies.

GLADINET - About Gladinet Vision and Technology

GLADINET - About Gladinet Vision and Technology: "Mission
Access Without Boundaries
Function
Web 3.0 Software, Web Service Platform
Gladinet as Personal Software
a: Integrates web storage/applications to your desktop. Web Applications Made Local.
b: Connects your computers together to share files and services.
c: Share your files with friends.
Gladinet as Service Platform
a: A platform for different cloud services to interact with each other.
b: A platform for end users like you to access online data and services directly from Windows® Operating System instead of from a Browser.
c: A platform for service providers to deliver and integrate services to your desktop"

reddit.com: what's new online!

reddit.com: what's new online!: "tool in any developers tool box can be the well known 'cheat sheet'. Today, we will have a look at 30 essential web developer cheat sheets, ranging from MySQL to Photoshop"

fefoo search app

fefoo search app: "Besides managing search engine there are 19 webmaster tools that are part of the webmasters category which you can use to manage your websites"

"XML is a specialized alphabet that can capture any kind of computer file as a regular text."

fallon_300x250_map_working_tex

fallon_300x250_map_working_tex: "The Zune HD will be powered by the Tegra APX 2600 chip, which has an Arm11-based processor core, a GeForce graphics core and other components. The chip also has specialized cores to encode and decode high-definition video, which will enable the Zune HD to play 720p HD video, Rayfield said."

My Way News - Review: Password management eases with Net storage

My Way News - Review: Password management eases with Net storage: "Roboform Online and LastPass"

Understanding Linux CPU Load - when should you be worried?

Understanding Linux CPU Load - when should you be worried?: "Unix refers to this as the run-queue length: the sum of the number of processes that are currently running plus the number that are waiting (queued) to run."

Feature Column from the AMS

Feature Column from the AMS: "his brief example points to the beginnings of a field known as principal component analysis, a set of techniques that uses singular values to detect dependencies and redundancies in data.

In a similar way, singular value decompositions can be used to detect groupings in data, which explains why singular value decompositions are being used in attempts to improve Netflix's movie recommendation system. Ratings of movies you have watched allow a program to sort you into a group of others whose ratings are similar to yours. Recommendations may be made by choosing movies that others in your group have rated highly."

Q&A With Intel CEO Otellini: All About the Chip at SmartMoney.com

Q&A With Intel CEO Otellini: All About the Chip at SmartMoney.com
But at the end of the day, we want computing to be like Star Trek, right?

Greg Fish - World of Weird Things - How order comes from chaos - True/Slant

Greg Fish - World of Weird Things - How order comes from chaos - True/Slant: "Sarah Palin’s official resignation speech this past weekend was a haphazard swarm of words trying to merge into sentences with the hope of masquerading as a coherent thought."

"An 80GB Intel X25-M costs just under $600 – about 30 (!) times the price of a similar sized conventional hard drive."

Technology@Intel · Why would a 32GB SSD cost more than an 80GB SSD?

http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2009/05/why_would_a_32gb_drive_cost_mo.php: "These two analogies are exactly what's different between the two types of flash. The same shotglass (or cell), is holding either a 1 or a 0 in SLC, or 11, 10, 01, 00 in MLC. It takes a bit more work to fill that second glass. It's not that hard to read between the lines, but filling... that's a harder story."

Intel Contracts TSMC to Make Langwell Chipsets | CENS.com - The Taiwan Economic News

Intel Contracts TSMC to Make Langwell Chipsets CENS.com - The Taiwan Economic News: "Intel will launch the Moorestown platform next quarter. The platform design has integrated graphic core and memory control devices with the Atom family of processors codenamed Lincroft, with NAND and USB control chips, CE-ATA hard-disc interface, MIPI CSI mobile interface, audio code, and wireless network and power management ports to be built into Langwell chipsets"

Partial Penetrance - How Evolutionary 'Leaps' Might Have Happened

Partial Penetrance - How Evolutionary 'Leaps' Might Have Happened

Qualitative changes from one form to another can proceed through changes in the relative frequencies—or penetrance—of those forms

Monster Merger: IBM Buys SPSS For Approx. $1.2 Billion In Cash Deal

Monster Merger: IBM Buys SPSS For Approx. $1.2 Billion In Cash Deal

IBM says it will continue to support and enhance SPSS technologies while allowing customers to take advantage of its own product portfolio. SPSS will become part of the Information Management division within the Software Group business unit, led by Ambuj Goyal, General Manager, IBM Information Management.

Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around? | Print Article | Newsweek.com

Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around? | Print Article | Newsweek.com: "The discovery of genes as young as agriculture and city-states, rather than as old as cavemen, means 'we have to rethink to foundational assumptions' of evo psych, says Miller, starting with the claim that there are human universals and that they are the result of a Stone Age brain. Evolution indeed sculpted the human brain. But it worked in malleable plastic, not stone, bequeathing us flexible minds that can take stock of the world and adapt to it."

quote

“I’m just another one of the prophets that went to jail for the Gospel”
-evangelist Tony Alamo found guilty of taking girls as young as 9 across state lines for sex

First Concert at Camelback Ranch – Glendale Features Bob Dylan, John Mellencamp & Willie Nelson | Camelback Ranch - Glendale: Spring Training Home of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chic

First Concert at Camelback Ranch – Glendale Features Bob Dylan, John Mellencamp & Willie Nelson | Camelback Ranch - Glendale: Spring Training Home of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chic: "Seating is first-come, first-serve, allowing fans to seat themselves in stadium seats or on the playing field grass. Gates open at 5 p.m."

Quote Details: M. Cartmill: As an adolescent I... - The Quotations Page

Quote Details: M. Cartmill: As an adolescent I... - The Quotations Page: "As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.
M. Cartmill"

Apple drops to 5th position in US computer sales

Apple drops to 5th position in US computer sales: "Apple has shipped 12.4% fewer computers than it did last year, falling to 1.21 million Macs. Its market share will remain the same at 7.6% but will have"

DBMS Musings: Announcing release of HadoopDB (longer version)

DBMS Musings: Announcing release of HadoopDB (longer version): "Our paper (that will be presented at the upcoming VLDB conference in the last week of August) shows that HadoopDB gets similar fault tolerance and ability to tolerate wild fluctuations in runtime node performance as Hadoop, while still approaching the performance of commercial parallel database systems (of course, it still gives up some performance due to the above mentioned tradeoffs)."

TechCrunch publishes 'hacked' Twitter secrets | News | News.com.au

TechCrunch publishes 'hacked' Twitter secrets News News.com.au: "TechCrunch has obtained sensitive internal documents belonging to microblogging site Twitter, including financial projections, sent to them by an unidentified hacker.
It reported that a hacker had gained 'easy access' to hundreds of pieces of internal Twitter information - from pass codes to meeting minutes to job interviews - and then forwarded all of the data to the news website.
'We are going to release some of the documents showing financial projections, product plans and notes from executive strategy meetings,' TechCrunch founder and co-editor Michael Arrington said."

The Gap Widens in Online Population - Digits - WSJ

The Gap Widens in Online Population - Digits - WSJ: "Asia’s share of the world’s online population will swell to 43% in four years, while North America will represent just 13% of Internet users, according to a new report by Forrester Research"

Metamagician and the Hellfire Club: More on H.E. Baber's piece in The Guardian

Metamagician and the Hellfire Club: More on H.E. Baber's piece in The Guardian: "I do believe that religion should be challenged publicly, and I'm frankly amazed at the suggestion that nothing turns on the question of whether the epistemic content of the various religions is actually correct. Much, very much, turns on it. The Catholic Church and other religious organisations claim to be in a position to speak with great epistemic and moral authority. This enables them to pronounce in public on all sorts of issues, including abortion rights, censorship, gay rights, stem-cell research, IVF, and on and on. I can think of no more important issue for public consideration than whether or not these organisations really do possess the epistemic and moral authority that they claim - and which politicians and journalists are all too ready to assume they actually have."

The Technium: Increasing Diversity

The Technium: Increasing Diversity: "The invention of life greatly accelerated the diversity in the universe many fold. From a very few species 3.8 billion years ago, the number and variety of living species on Earth has increased dramatically over geological time to the 30 to 100 million now present."

The Technium: Was Moore's Law Inevitable?

The Technium: Was Moore's Law Inevitable?: "Consider the recent history (for the last 10-15 years) of the cost per performance of communication bandwidth, and digital storage.

The picture of their exponential growth parallels the integrated circuit in every way except their slope — the rate at which they are speeding up. Why is the doubling period in one technology eight years versus two? Isn't the same finance system and expectations underpinning them?"

Tom Paine's Ghost

Tom Paine's Ghost: "The real hurdle to unleashing the floodgates of the 'Saudi Arabia' of wind power that exists all over our fruited plains is an effective means of energy storage and transfer. If"

Roger Ebert's Journal: Archives

Roger Ebert's Journal: Archives: "I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting. My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris."

Paul Begala: Sarah Palin Turns Pro

Paul Begala: Sarah Palin Turns Pro: "Her statement was incoherent, bizarre and juvenile. The text, as posted on Gov. Palin's official website (here), uses 2,549 words and 18 exclamation points. Lincoln freed the slaves with 719 words and nary an exclamation; Mr. Jefferson declared our independence in 1,322 words and, again, no exclamation points. Nixon resigned the presidency in 1,796 words -- still no exclamation points. Gov. Palin capitalized words at random - whole words, like 'TO,' 'HELP,' and 'AND,' and the first letter of 'Troops.'"

Summer reading: Killer thrillers | Salon Books

Summer reading: Killer thrillers | Salon Books: "What's summer without a big, fat vampire novel? 'The Strain,' by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, doesn't have the Old World moodiness of Elizabeth Kostova's 2005 bestseller, 'The Historian,' but what it lacks in misty Carpathian landscapes and haunted libraries it makes up for in apocalyptic action and supersize portions of gore."

Carrie Fisher, "Wishful Drinking" | Salon Books

Carrie Fisher, "Wishful Drinking" | Salon Books: "Maybe I shouldn't have given the guy who pumped my stomach my phone number, but who cares, my life is over anyway."

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
Part of Sarah Palin's irresistible appeal to her fundamentalist base is her ability to look at the camera with utter conviction and declare black to be white.

The ability to lie well is a valuable part of the fundamentalist psychology. My son isn't gay, he just hasn't found the right woman! Those rocks aren't 50 million years old, they just look like it as a test of our faith! My sexless marriage isn't foundering, it is filled with God's spirit! The minister isn't molesting little Maria, they're just very close! It isn't torture, it is being tough on terrorists!

Fundamentalists can recognize a truly audacious and talented liar from miles away. Instead of running the other way, as you might expect, they gather around the powerful liar, for they know that their own lies will be respected and protected by a leader who understands the paramount importance of preserving their whole system of denial.

Science, religion and our shared future | Madeleine Bunting | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Science, religion and our shared future | Madeleine Bunting | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: "'Transformed knowledge,
which is an unknowing,
it is the way of transparent knowing,
it is the way of unselfconsciousness.

When you learn this,
you can learn everything,
and return to everything,
and praise everything'

translation: if you forget the things you know based on evidence, you will be able to believe in anything, and it will give you the illusion of knowing everything."

Resp:

And if you don't understand the point Eckhart was making about 'transformed knowledge' being an 'unknowing', then it might be a good idea to actually study Eckhart seriously. And I would also point you to the sources of information that I suggested to Foolfodder. Once you've got a good grasp of the subject matter then you might actually be in a position to debate it seriously.

I wouldn't dare to rubbish the fundamental tenets of mathematics or physics because quite frankly my understanding of it is limited. But you feel that it is perfectly valid to throw around cynical, ignorant comments about things you clearly don't grasp.

Quotations

Quotations: "We may be confused about the distinction between tolerance and the refusal of evaluation, thinking that tolerance of others requires us not to evaluate what they do.
Martha Nussbaum
--Cultivating Humanity"

About Butterflies and Wheels

About Butterflies and Wheels: "it is never a good idea to allow one’s political, ideological and moral commitments to infect the judgements that one makes about truth-claims which have nothing to do with such considerations."

how accommodating can you get? « weird things

how accommodating can you get? « weird things: "One of the accommodationists’ favorite tenants is that religion and science pursue different knowledge so in theory, they should have no problem co-existing. But the reality is very different. Religion is a social construct which exists to perpetuate its traditions rather than actually acquire any new insight. All the knowledge it wants is already contained in its holy books and the lengthy ruminations on them. Those who feel inspired to go out and explore, find themselves in the realm of science, a bureaucratic entity which gathers, documents and sifts through new knowledge. It started off as a nearly blank slate and its entire purpose is to find new information and grow with each discovery.

The conflict between the two spheres happens when scientists discover something that contradicts religious dogma and the people who rigidly follow their holy texts mount a campaign to defend their worldview from the new information. Do you honestly think that fundamentalists are interested in broadening their horizons when their primary concern is to make sure everyone around them does as they say? In the supposed war between science and religion, the actual facts take a back seat. Rather, the debate is about whether we could pick and choose our personal worldview regardless of the facts. Creationists aren’t mad because they did a study that found major contradictions in evolutionary biology. They’re mad because scientists dare to tell the world about evolution and use facts they passionately want to ignore to teach this knowledge in schools.

Stephen Jay Gould, "Nonoverlapping Magisteria," 1997

Stephen Jay Gould, "Nonoverlapping Magisteria," 1997: "I am not, personally, a believer or a religious man in any sense of institutional commitment or practice. But I have enormous respect for religion, and the subject has always fascinated me, beyond almost all others (with a few exceptions, like evolution, paleontology, and baseball). Much of this fascination lies in the historical paradox that throughout Western history organized religion has fostered both the most unspeakable horrors and the most heart-rending examples of human goodness in the face of personal danger. (The evil, I believe, lies in the occasional confluence of religion with secular power. The Catholic Church has sponsored its share of horrors, from Inquisitions to liquidations—but only because this institution held such secular power during so much of Western history. When my folks held similar power more briefly in Old Testament times, they committed just as many atrocities with many of the same rationales.)

I believe, with all my heart, in a respectful, even loving concordat between our magisteria—the NOMA solution. NOMA represents a principled position on moral and intellectua] grounds, not a mere diplomatic stance. NOMA also cuts both ways. If religion can no longer dictate the nature of factual conclusions properly under the magisterium of science, then scientists cannot claim higher insight into moral truth ...

The Censorship Canard, Again | The Intersection | Discover Magazine

The Censorship Canard, Again | The Intersection | Discover Magazine: "29. Peter Beattie

I’d be happy to defend the position that science has plenty to tell us about how our actual behavior actually affects other people and ourselves. And how science can help us peer into moral gray areas. And tell us about how we make moral judgments in reality, and how that might contrast with how we think we should be making moral judgments. And how are supposed values line up with how the world actually is. And how knowing how the world actually is can help us make better value judgments, and help set priorities among competing values, and how realistic or arbitrary our values are, and so on."

Metamagician and the Hellfire Club

Metamagician and the Hellfire Club: "The sad thing about this is that church is, among other things, a way to get together with other people and focus the mind on being good. The religious version of being good is not always on the mark, to put it mildly, but even the opportunity to contemplate goodness seems valuable. This is something it's truly hard to reproduce with secular institutions. Politics seems like the closest thing to a substitute, and it's not a very close match."

Seeing and Believing

Seeing and Believing: Jerry Coyne

Scientists do indeed rely on materialistic explanations of nature, but it is important to understand that this is not an a priori philosophical commitment. It is, rather, the best research strategy that has evolved from our long-standing experience with nature. There was a time when God was a part of science. Newton thought that his research on physics helped clarify God's celestial plan. So did Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who devised our current scheme for organizing species. But over centuries of research we have learned that the idea "God did it" has never advanced our understanding of nature an iota, and that is why we abandoned it. In the early 1800s, the French mathematician Laplace presented Napoleon with a copy of his great five-volume work on the solar system, the Mechanique Celeste. Aware that the books contained no mention of God, Napoleon taunted him, "Monsieur Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator." Laplace answered, famously and brusquely: "Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothese-la," "I have had no need of that hypothesis." And scientists have not needed it since.

...

Perhaps what we mean by "religious truths" are "moral truths," such as "Thou shalt not commit adultery." These rules are not subject to empirical testing, but they do comport with our reasoned sense of right and wrong. But for almost every "truth" such as this there is another one believed with equal sincerity, such as "Those who commit adultery should be stoned to death." This dictum appears not only in Islamic religious law, but in the Old Testament as well. (It seems wrong, by the way, to call these truths religious. Beginning with Plato, philosophers have argued convincingly that our ethics come not from religion, but from a secular morality that develops in intelligent, socially interacting creatures, and is simply inserted into religion for convenient citation.)

In the end, then, there is a fundamental distinction between scientific truths and religious truths, however you construe them. The difference rests on how you answer one question: how would I know if I were wrong? Darwin's colleague Thomas Huxley remarked that "science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact." As with any scientific theory, there are potentially many ugly facts that could kill Darwinism. Two of these would be the presence of human fossils and dinosaur fossils side by side, and the existence of adaptations in one species that benefit only a different species.