Monday, November 30, 2009

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"

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

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.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

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."

Saturday, November 21, 2009

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.

Friday, November 20, 2009

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.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

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.

Monday, November 16, 2009

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.

Friday, November 13, 2009

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,'"

Thursday, November 12, 2009

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."

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

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.

Monday, November 09, 2009

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."

Saturday, November 07, 2009

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.

Thursday, November 05, 2009

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.

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

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.

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

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.'"

Monday, November 02, 2009

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"