Linux Love - Part 7

Linux Love - Part 7: "To give you some statistics: the drive is rated for 600,000 load/unload cycles, and after 2.5 months of running Feisty I’m already at more than 56,000 load/unload cycles (and only 150 power cycles), according to the SMART data. At this rate the drive will be dead after 2.5 years, and I don’t even use this computer for more than a couple of hours each day. Are YOU affected? If you’re running Ubuntu, you should know that the only way to see the number of load cycles is by using SMART tools which aren’t even installed by default. To install them, simply run: $ sudo apt-get install smartmontools Now, to find your drive’s load cycle count, run this command in a terminal (replace /dev/sda to suit your computer configuration, /dev/hda for example if you have ata drive): $ sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep Load_Cycle_Count You should see an output like this: 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0012 095 095 000 Old_age Always - 55380 In this example, 55380 is the load cycle count which SHOULD increase by 3-5 in an HOUR. But if it’s increasing by 3, 5 or more in a MINUTE, there’s definitely a problem. Think about it: HDD manufactures are claiming that a drive will support about 600.000 load cycles, meaning that your drive should be fine for a few years. But when the count is"

Bug In AMD's Quad-Core Barcelona And Phenom May Be More Serious Than Previously Suspected - Wolfe's Den Blog - InformationWeek

Bug In AMD's Quad-Core Barcelona And Phenom May Be More Serious Than Previously Suspected - Wolfe's Den Blog - InformationWeek: "Erratum 298 will be described as follows: 'The processor operation to change the accessed or dirty bits of a page translation table entry in the L2 from 0b to 1b may not be atomic"

San Jose Mercury News - Out of the box: Valley companies dump cubicles for open office spaces

San Jose Mercury News - Out of the box: Valley companies dump cubicles for open office spaces: "Intel's Tunmore said he anticipates 15 to 20 percent more people will work in the same amount of space. That will allow the company to provide more conference rooms, which are in such demand that they are booked months in advance, he said"

Chip problem limits supply of quad-core Opterons - The Tech Report

Chip problem limits supply of quad-core Opterons - The Tech Report: "The erratum is present in all AMD quad-core processors up to the current B2 revision. AMD has said a revision B3 is in the works and expected in Q1. One source told TR that large quantities of B3 chips might not be available until the end of Q1."

Hassle-Free PC - Forbes.com

Hassle-Free PC - Forbes.com: "he folks at Zonbu, a tiny firm in Menlo Park, Calif., think they've produced the answer: a $99, 2-pound computer about the size of Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people )'s Mac mini. It comes preloaded with a modified version of the free Linux operating system and a set of basic applications, none of them from Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ). There's no power-gobbling microprocessor from Intel (nasdaq: INTC - news - people ) or AMD and no optical or hard drive, just 4 gigabytes of flash memory so you can store a few files locally. The bulk of your files are stashed on the Web, thanks to a deal Zonbu struck with Amazon's S3 online storage service. The catch, if you want to call it that, is that the $99 price requires you to pay a monthly fee for support and software updates. The fee is based on storage, ranging from $13 for 25 gigabytes to $20 for 100 gigabytes. Supposedly the lower-power chip can reduce your electricity bill enough to make up for the monthly fees to Zonbu. Remains to be seen."

Dan Weinreb’s Weblog

Dan Weinreb’s Weblog: "The most interesting thing is that 15% of the residents actually do coding, in a language that lets you make active objects. There are 30,000,000 running scripts, 2.5 billion lines of code. Generally there are 15,000 scripts actively running on each “region” (processor), updating at 45 frames per second, and there are 4,000 processors. There are 30,000,000 concurrent threads. The language itself they described as “terrible”; they are working on bringing up the Mono implementation of the CLR so they can provide good languages."

HP Tacks On More Virtualization and Power Tools

HP Tacks On More Virtualization and Power Tools: "At the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco Nov. 12, HP executives will detail updates to its BladeSystem C-class infrastructure that include new ways to manage virtual environments across thousands of individual blades within a data center. "

An Intel Approach to Meds | Newsweek Enterprise - Technology | Newsweek.com

An Intel Approach to Meds | Newsweek Enterprise - Technology | Newsweek.com: "the number of transistors on a chip went from about 1,000 to almost 10 billion. Over that same period, the standard treatment for Parkinson's disease went from L-dopa to . . . L-dopa. Grove (who beat prostate cancer 12 years ago and now suffers from Parkinson's)"

Phoenix HyperSpace Bypasses Windows With Fast-Boot Technology

Phoenix HyperSpace Bypasses Windows With Fast-Boot Technology
Chipmakers and PC manufacturers have been trying to liberate themselves from lengthy startup times for a while, according to Hobbs, but the experience has been "controlled up in Seattle." Indeed, Hobbs says Microsoft regards HyperSpace as "outside their sphere of influence," and is not too happy with Phoenix's offering, which adds yet another voice to the already loud chorus of voices complaining about operating-system bloat.

FrankFi's view of the world : Does IT matter? Some thoughts on SaaS

FrankFi's view of the world : Does IT matter? Some thoughts on SaaS: "So first let's think what a pure SaaS solution means: The application as well as the data is stored 'in the cloud'. (I do here a simplification I know). Is this enough? Sorry, no. But there are lots of people thinking that it actually is enough and it is totally understandable. If you see IT as a simple tool not as a strategic asset then you can stop reading here. But IT can do more if you release its powers. How can this work? Well, let's extend our definition... There is this nice architecture model with 4 distinct steps to make a SaaS application. It is all about making the application scalable and lower the invest per customer instance in CPU and memory while preserving the agility in it. Applications have to be highly customizable. It starts with the logo in the top left and ends customer specific processes. So I would add: The application is highly customizable."

Angry Richard's WebLog

Angry Richard's WebLog: "I've frequently heard the question asked, 'Can I use the profiler on a Virtual PC?' It has even come up on the blog feedback a few times. My answer has always been, 'Theoretically, yes.' I didn't want to post this answer externally until I'd actually gotten around to trying it myself"

CareerJournal | Why Silicon Valley Firms Are Rethinking the Cubicle

CareerJournal Why Silicon Valley Firms Are Rethinking the Cubicle: "Intel Corp. is often credited, or blamed, for popularizing the office cubicle. Now it is joining some prominent Silicon Valley peers in reconsidering the concept"

Windows Server Division WebLog : IDC publishes whitepaper on x64 Windows Server adoption

Windows Server Division WebLog : IDC publishes whitepaper on x64 Windows Server adoption: "IDC publishes whitepaper on x64 Windows Server adoption [re-posted due to format issues] A colleague, Dan Reger, pointed me to a new IDC white paper on Windows Server x64 adoption. The white paper is titled, “Understanding the Business Benefits Associated with x86 64-Bit Windows Server.” You can download it here."

sfence instruction

simd_ext.pdf (application/pdf Object)
http://download.intel.com/technology/itj/Q21999/PDF/simd_ext.pdf
Fencing
In order to allow efficient software-controlled coherency,
a light-weight fence (SFENCE) instruction was also
included in the new extension; this instruction ensures
that all stores that precede the fence are observed on the
front-side bus before any subsequent stores are
completed. SFENCE is targeted for uses such as writing
commands from the processor to the graphics accelerator
or to ensure observability between a producer and
consumer where communication of data uses stores with
a WC memory-type semantic.

TidBITS Entertainment: Amazon MP3 Takes on the iTunes Store

TidBITS Entertainment: Amazon MP3 Takes on the iTunes Store: "Amazon.com has launched a public beta of Amazon MP3, a digital music store that provides DRM-free downloads of over 2 million songs from 180,000 artists and 20,000 labels. In comparison, Apple says the iTunes Store now contains over 6 million songs."

I've already started to pick and choose what I want, getting the best "deal", as I view it -- either better price, no DRM and probably better quality from Amazon or getting more selection from iTunes.

For instance, on Saturday, the wife and I were listened to Freddy Fender song. She said "play more of those -- do you have the "teardrop" song?" Unfortunately, I didn't have any more Fender songs, so I quickly opened up itunes store and the amazon mp3 store and started digging. I was able to grab a "live" album of all the top Fender songs from Amazon for $5.95. But they didn't have the "orginial" versions of some key songs, those I had to get DRM'ed from itunes.

Slashdot | Intel Chief Evangelist Comments on Linux Scheduler

Slashdot | Intel Chief Evangelist Comments on Linux Scheduler: "If I could get ONE wish fulfilled would be for OS scheduling to focus on processes, and not threads Yeah, a lot of us feel the same way about the fancy-dressing guys that work over in the sales office."

Hassle-Free PC - Forbes.com

Hassle-Free PC - Forbes.com: "I've been using a Zonbu for weeks and have been blown away. It's fast and stable and boasts a clean, simple user interface. First thing you do when you turn on the computer is log on using your e-mail address and a password. From then on, when you save a file it goes to your documents folder just as it would on any PC. The most recently opened documents are stored on Zonbu's flash memory, with everything else stored on a remote server. To fetch files later you just open the folder and click on the document. Best of all, if you're on the road and need that document or photo, you can log on to your Zonbu account from any computer and get it. You can easily store everything locally by connecting an external drive to one of Zonbu's six USB ports."

EETimes.com - Analyst cuts AMD forecast amid MPU snags

EETimes.com - Analyst cuts AMD forecast amid MPU snags

Earlier this month, AMD released pricing for the nine models that make up its newly launched quad-core x86 microprocessor family, codenamed "Barcelona." The processor is based on 65-nm technology.
''We believe the company's late Barcelona introduction and disappointing early performance are an early indication of a bad marriage of process technology and design that will be hard to fix before a move to 45-nm is required,'' said analyst Doug Freedman of American Technology Research Inc., in a new report.
''AMD still has a lot of work to do to fix the architectural mismatch of Barcelona with the 65-nm process node and the poor performance of R600,'' he said, referring to ATI's latest graphics chip. That chip is also late to the market.

Really funny...

Coyote Blog "Apple Computer announced today that it has developed a computer chip that can store and play music in women's breasts as implants. The IBoob will cost $499 or $599 depending on size. This is considered to be a major breakthrough because women are always complaining about men staring at their breasts and not listening to them"

The dumbing-down of programming

Bomb me--please!

Bomb me--please!: "would-be Lisper searching for a Lisp tutorial you can help out: if you have a web page where it would be reasonable to do so, consider linking to the url http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/ with a link text of “lisp tutorial” or “common lisp tutorial”."

So:
Common Lisp tutorial

Virtualization Brings New Data Recovery Concerns, Benefits

Virtualization Brings New Data Recovery Concerns, Benefits: "The data is backed up but the systems are not. How do you effectively recover an entire server? The data is helpful but what about the tuning parameters for a SQL server, the patches and the database drivers? Everything that goes around that data is important. The more you have to do, the longer it takes to recover your environment,' said Stetic. PlateSpin's PowerRecon software basically does an inventory of a datacenter's physical and virtual machines, telling users how much processing capacity is required to keep them humming along and helps locate excess capacity so IT managers know where and how to begin the process of consolidating their datacenters. Its PowerConvert software streams workloads between physical servers, virtual machines, blade servers and back-up archives. 'The biggest challenge of whole system recovery is resolved because you no longer need the same type of hardware to restore your data,' Stetic said. '"

...on pampers, programming & pitching manure: 07/01/2005 - 08/01/2005

...on pampers, programming & pitching manure: 07/01/2005 - 08/01/2005: "Today there was an awesome story about Neal Jing. At the age of 40, with the cutoff date for sabbatical being 8 months away, and never having climbed a mountain, Neal decided he'd like to climb Everest. People said he was nuts, that you need to train for years, etc. He decided to do it anyway. He started training by running 8 miles a day every day but Sunday. Sundays he'd climb a local 1200 foot mountain - twice - wearing a 50lb backpack. Then, within the next six months, he climbed Mt Rainier in Washington (14k ft), Haba mountain in China (18k ft), and mt Aconcagua in Argentina (23k ft). Then he summitted Everest this past May. Some people feel that Everest has gotten easier because you hear about all the 'for hire' expeditions that are doing it. The following quote reminded me of how dangerous it really is: “On the day of the summit, I felt strong and was pushing the Sherpas to move faster,” says Jing. “I had to step over frozen dead people from previous years, some in sitting positions, and some in crawling positions. The only thing in my mind was to reach the summit ASAP.” Holy crap. That's so hardcore. Kudos to Neil for reminding us that 40 is anything but over the hill, and that we all could do with p"

Coyote Blog: More Vista Suckage

Coyote Blog: More Vista Suckage: "Vista is rapidly becoming the New Coke of operating systems."

In particular, the networking is an enormous step backwards from XP. The wireless networking was a real pain to get set up in the first place, in contrast to XP and my wife's Mac which both worked and connected from the moment the power switch turned on.

Now, we are getting two new errors. First, at random times, the computer will stop being able to connect to the internet. It will have a good wireless signal, and see other computers on the network fine, and the other computers on the network will see the internet, but Vista does not. Just rebooted the computer into the XP partition, and XP sees the Internet fine -- its just Vista that is broken.

Gamasutra - The Top 10 Myths of Video Game Optimization

Gamasutra - The Top 10 Myths of Video Game Optimization: "When comparing the growth rate of instructions retired in the past five years, the GPU is the winner. The CPU, by means of increased instruction level parallelism and multi-core is in second place. The slowest growth (of resources commonly utilized in game runtime) is the memory system."

Inside Apple's iPhone: More than just a dial tone - 7/27/2007 - EDN

Inside Apple's iPhone: More than just a dial tone - 7/27/2007 - EDN: "Samsung's nascent MLC (multilevel-cell, aka two-bit-per-cell) NAND-flash-memory program. This is the same NAND flash memory used in the iPod nano."

...confirmed that the applications processor is a Samsung design, thereby following in the footsteps of Samsung's first CPU design win with Apple in the second-generation iPod nano

stevenf.com: Bugs Are Magic Tricks

stevenf.com: Bugs Are Magic Tricks: "Bugs thrive on the same human brain deficiencies that earn magicians their living. We are shown something that is apparently impossible -- but the reality is that we just don't have all the information"

Stevey's Blog Rants

Stevey's Blog Rants: "In the new study, researchers found that Java programmers understand an average of seven fewer Computer Science concepts per hour spent with Java each day compared to similar programmers using other languages. Sun calls the study 'seriously flawed', "

Quad socket Intel Caneland platform benchmarked

Quad socket Intel Caneland platform benchmarked: "The impact of handling four FSB links and a large snoop buffer shows on the latency - a total of 140ns for 64MB random access range, compared to 118ns on Greencreek dual FSB chipset, 71ns on X38 chipset A0 beta version, and 55ns on highly-tuned Asus Striker Extreme Nforce 680i. "

Data Mining Research - www.dataminingblog.com: MLDM 2007: Anil K. Jain's presentation on clustering

Data Mining Research - www.dataminingblog.com: MLDM 2007: Anil K. Jain's presentation on clustering: "s written in the previous post, Anil K. Jain was the invited speaker of MLDM 2007."

Virtual PC Guy's WebLog : Detecting Microsoft virtual machines

Virtual PC Guy's WebLog : Detecting Microsoft virtual machines: "The easiest way to detect that you are inside of a virtual machine is by using 'hardware fingerprinting' - where you look for hardware that is always present inside of a given virtual machine. In the case of Microsoft virtual machines - a clear indicator is if the motherboard is made by Microsoft:"

Quote on bottleneck on Virtual Machines:

Random Musings of Jeremy Jameson : Performance of Virtual Machines: "I have seen many VM environments where organizations use a high-end server with 4 or 8 state-of-the-art processors and 'gobs' of memory and subsequently assume that they can run 4 or more VMs on this one server without a problem. However, as noted earlier, CPU and memory represent only half of the resources that can ultimately become a bottleneck. In my experience, most VMs bottleneck first on disk I/O."

Good oveview of AMD's poor benchmark showing on Barcelona..

This report summaries the current benchmark findings rather well.
And then concludes:

Barcelona needed to be a slam dunk for AMD. It has turned out to be much less. AMD now needs to focus solely on solving their manufacturing issues and releasing faster clocked Barcelonas. AMD's customers need to be knowledgeable of the fact that several of Intel's upcoming 45nm products will be here in a few months. These will likely deliver better performance on less power.

If AMD continues as they have this year. If they continue to lose large amounts of money each quarter. And if they are not able to achieve high clock speeds with their 65nm SOI technology at a pace consistent with Intel's anticipated ramping at 45nm, then this launch will be the turning point. It will prove out to be the beginning of the end for AMD.

Until we saw Barcelona numbers there was always hope. AMD knew this and kept their cards very close to their chest, not even releasing products for review until late last week. Unless AMD can turn it around and significantly ramp up the clock speed to compete with and win against Intel's 45 nm competition, then AMD may be headed into a life-threatening storm.

Best of the Barcelona vs. Xeon reviews:

AnandTech: http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3091
TechTeport: http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/13176/1

Idle power is impressive (p12 in Anandtech),
Barcelona idle: 188W (2P QC, 8x 1GB DDR2)
Clovertown idle: 257W (2P QC, 8x 1GB FBDIMM)
+37%
Barcelona margin more than halved at peak load power (Cinebench)
Barcelona Load: 299.9W
Clovertown Load: 347.3W
+16%

Microsoft Virtual Hard Disk FAQ

Microsoft Virtual Hard Disk FAQ: "Virtual machine technology serves a variety of purposes. It enables hardware consolidation, because multiple operating systems can run on one computer. Key applications for virtual machine technology include cross-platform integration as well as the following: • Server consolidation. If several servers run applications that consume only a fraction of the available resources, virtual machine technology can be used to enable them to run side by side on a single server, even if they require different versions of the operating system or middleware. • Consolidation for development and testing environments. Each virtual machine acts as a separate environment, which reduces risk and enables developers to quickly recreate different operating system configurations or compare versions of applications designed for different operating systems. In addition, a developer can test early development versions of an application in a virtual machine without fear of destabilizing the system for other users. • Legacy application re-hosting. Legacy operating systems and applications can run on new hardware along with more recent operating systems and applications. • Software demonstrations. With virtual machine technology, users can quickly recreate a clean operating system environment or system configuration. • Simplify disaster and recovery. Virtual machine "

AMD Pins Hopes on Barcelona Quad-Core Chip

Quad-Core: Hestor has been vocal about the so-called core wars between AMD and Intel, saying that simply offering more cores to the public is as misdirected as the megahertz wars of several years ago. Because Intel's quad-core chips have been on the market for a year now, Hestor also acknowledges that AMD must deal with a peculiar PR situation: Trying to explain to the public why two cores is actually better than four.

Apple vs. Intel

see: http://www.apple.com/hotnews/openiphoneletter/

versus:

To all Itanium customers:

I have received emails from a few of our handful of Itanium customers, and they are upset about Intel dropping the price of Itanium by $5000 two years after it went on sale. After reading every one of these emails, I have some observations and conclusions.

First, I am sure that we are making the correct decision to lower the price of the 12Mb Itanium from $5999 to $19.99, and that now is the right time to do it. Itanium is a breakthrough product, and we have the chance to 'go for it' this holiday season. Itanium is so far ahead of the competition, and now it will be affordable by even more customers. It benefits both Intel and every Itanium user to get as many new customers as possible in the Itanium 'tent'. We strongly believe the $19.99 price will help us do just that this holiday season.

Second, being in technology for 30+ years I can attest to the fact that the technology road is bumpy. There is always change and improvement, and there is always someone who bought a product before a particular cutoff date and misses the new price or the new operating system or the new whatever. This is life in the technology lane. If you always wait for the next price cut or to buy the new improved model, you'll never buy any technology product because there is always something better and less expensive on the horizon. The good news is that if you buy products from companies that support them well, like Intel tries to do, you will receive years of useful and satisfying service from them even as newer models are introduced.

Third, even though we are making the right decision to lower the price of Itanium, and even though the technology road is bumpy, we need to do a better job taking care of our early Itanium customers as we aggressively go after new ones with a lower price. Our early customers trusted us, and we must live up to that trust with our actions in moments like these.

Therefore, we have decided to offer every Itanium customer who purchased an Itanium from either Intel or its OEMs, and who is not receiving a rebate or any other consideration, a $1000 store credit towards the purchase of any product at an Intel Online Store. Details are still being worked out and will be posted on Intel's website next week. Stay tuned.

We want to do the right thing for our valued Itanium customers. We apologize for disappointing some of you, and we are doing our best to live up to your high expectations of Intel.

Paul Tortellini Intel CEO

My Way News - Major Computer Viruses Over 25 Years

My Way News - Major Computer Viruses Over 25 Years: "LK CLONER, 1982: Regarded as the first virus to hit personal computers worldwide, 'Elk Cloner' spread through Apple II floppy disks and displayed a poem written by its author, a ninth-grade student who was designing a practical joke."

Linux: The Really Fair Scheduler | KernelTrap

Linux: The Really Fair Scheduler | KernelTrap: "o here all the mathematical details necessary to understand what the scheduler does, so anyone can judge for himself how solid this design is. First some basics: (1) time = sum_{t}^{T}(time_{t}) (2) weight_sum = sum_{t}^{T}(weight_{t}) Time per task is calculated with: (3) time_{t} = time * weight_{t} / weight_sum This can be also written as: (4) time_{t} / weight_{t} = time / weight_sum This way we have the normalized time: (5) time_norm = time / weight_sum (6) time_norm_{t} = time_{t} / weight_{t} If every task got its share they are all same. Using time_norm one can calculate the time tasks should get based on their weight: (7) sum_{t}^{T}(time_{t}) = sum_{t}^{T}(round(time / weight_sum) * weight_{t}) This is bascially what CFS currently does and it demonstrates the basic problem it faces. It rounds the normalized time and the rounding error is also distributed to the time a task gets, so there is a difference between the time which is distributed to the tasks and the time consumed by them. On the upside the error is distributed equally to all tasks relatively to their weight (so it isn't immediately visible via top). On the downside the error itself is weighted too and so a small error can be become quite large and the higher the weight the more it contributes to the"

AMD announces 128-bit (GPU-oriented?) SSE5 extensions to x86

AMD announces 128-bit (GPU-oriented?) SSE5 extensions to x86: "EE5 also features new instructions for fused multiply-accumulate, integer multiply-accumulate, compare and test, permutation and conditional move, and precision control, rounding, and conversion. Some of these new instructions work with a new 16-bit floating-point format that SSE5 introduces. This 'half-precision' floating-point format is popular in GPUs, so this format and related instructions are likely intended for AMD's forthcoming 'Fusion' product. All told, SSE5 adds over 100 new instructions (base instructions plus variants) to the x86 ISA. No doubt AMD hopes to repeat history here—x86-64 history, not 3DNow! history—by getting Intel to eventually adopt the extensions. However, my (still fairly preliminary) reading of Intel's QuickAssist technology suggests that Intel will take a different approach to integrating many-core, GPU-style acceleration with the x86 ISA. More on this at a later time, though."

Using a hypervisor to reconcile GPL and proprietary embedded code

Using a hypervisor to reconcile GPL and proprietary embedded code: "The hypervisor can help device vendors maintain control of basic device behavior while being compliant with the GPL license, either v2 or v3. The design of such a system requires the use of different VMs to separate GPL operating systems from non-GPL components whose behavior must be guaranteed."

Electric slide for tech industry? | Tech News on ZDNet

Electric slide for tech industry? Tech News on ZDNet: "Also under way are methods to increase server utilization, so that systems can run closer to top capacity. Turner said many customers sheepishly report their servers are only running at 17 percent capacity on average, but in fact that's better than most. "

IBM Press room - 2006-11-16 IBM BladeCenter Systems Up to 30 Percent More Energy Efficient Than Comparable HP Blades - United States

IBM Press room - 2006-11-16 IBM BladeCenter Systems Up to 30 Percent More Energy Efficient Than Comparable HP Blades - United States: "According to a 2006 report by the Robert Frances Group, across industry, the average utilization of most processors in the data center is between 15-20 percent.[3] Therefore, managing a server at its least productive state becomes critical to managing the issue of energy consumption in the datacenter"

Metaphor of the Branch Predict

"branch predict".

I was struck by that phrase in a meeting a few days ago. It was used by a software engineer describing what he thought the direction of a project management team would be regarding a new product. Rewording his statement: "My branch predict is that they will kill this program".

Of course, these type of metaphors are common. Body-based metaphors are the very common ("the leg of the table"). These are followed closely by metaphors using mechanical analogies arising from common occupations. These are generally used to describe one's internal thought processes and/or personal situation. I have a "sea of troubles", I'm "sailing against the wind", I've "got my nose to the grindstone", that really "fuels my fire" (its fun to think of these -- go ahead try it!).

And so you might expect our age of advanced computers to generate a number of such metaphors. It was interesting to hear this fairly hardware-bound metaphor move into the group think of the software folks..

Many enterprise codes, such as databases or ERP systems, experience lots of branches -- They are "branchy". The standard metric used in analysis is the average number of "instruction between branches". This is a measure on the dynamic instruction stream (tracking the instruction pointer) rather than based just on static analysis. For instance, running SAP SD's benchmark, R/3 executes on the average about 6 instructions before it hits a branch!

Because of the parallel nature of the way our microprocessors' internal architecture works, if we waited to branch our front end instruction decoder till all the conditional values that decide a branch were ready, we could not continue to fill the pipeline and the machine would stall. So we must predict with high accuracy which branch target is taken and start to work down that path. If we do this with high enough accuracy, then we can afford the occasional miss-predict, when we must re-steer the machine and throw away some temporary results.

To do this prediction, the hardware uses a number of heuristics. These are the "branch predict" of the hardware.

Some heuristics are clear. For instance, on x86, loops are written ending in a direct branch backward to the start of the loop. Since most loops actually loop in applications (isn't that nice), then on encountering a backward jump the first time, our best assumption is the take the branch. This is static branch prediction (Intel® 64 and IA-32 Architectures Optimization Reference Manual http://www.intel.com/design/processor/manuals/248966.pdf)

Other heuristics are more complicated to implement but, as you might imagine, attempt to remember the history of the branch. Nothing predicts the future as well as the past, or as Lord Byron (Letters/1821) said: "The best of prophets of the future is the past."

For the most part, the branch predictor in current hardware does a great job. For some floating point/numeric codes (SpecFP) the predictor can get 98%+ accuracy. SAP's R/3, which processes enterprise data from many users, the miss-predict rate is about 6%. (However, even at this rate, we lose 7-10% performance from what an oracle-type -- e.g. "perfect" -- predictor could delivery).

Using "branch predict" in the context that started this article has a certain natural simple charm. After all, its just a slightly geeky way of linking us to our hardware while saying the single word "predict". Which was what my colleague was doing here - simply predicting the future based on his best knowledge. He wanted to let the listener know he wasn't guessing about the future status of the program.

So, in these days, the Dilbert-ian static predict for a project is: "This project will be killed". Augmented with other dynamic knowledge (schedule slips, perceived value to the customer, etc.) my colleague was able to succulently state his informed opinion on the direction of the project he was describing to us.

The Dread of Threads

The Dread of Threads: " 'We get questions along the lines of, 'What could you possibly run that needs 128 cores on a laptop?,'' Patterson told HPCwire. 'This reminds me of the story of the patent examiner in 1870 who decided that everything of importance had been invented, so he quit his job to look for something permanent. Or that 640KB ought to be enough memory for PCs. We think the most exciting software has yet to be written, and it's going to be highly parallel.' "

HotHardware - More AMD G3MX Details Emerge

HotHardware - More AMD G3MX Details Emerge: "We have also received some information that Intel is headed in a similar direction with their future platforms. We’ve heard that Intel is designing an “AMB2”, which like G3MX, is a “BOB” (buffer on board) type implementation, rather than being resident on DIMM modules. We’re not clear on the timeline for AMB2 and whether it will be a discrete chip or an integral block of a future Intel core logic chipset, but we do know it is coming. "

How to Change the World: The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint

How to Change the World: The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint: "The ten topics that a venture capitalist cares about are: 1. Problem 2. Your solution 3. Business model 4. Underlying magic/technology 5. Marketing and sales 6. Competition 7. Team 8. Projections and milestones 9. Status and timeline 10. Summary and call to action"

Breaking News--Server Sales in Q2 Reach Heights Not Seen Since 2000

Breaking News--Server Sales in Q2 Reach Heights Not Seen Since 2000: "In terms of architecture, X86 and X64 platforms accounted for $6.9 billion in sales, up 15.5 percent compared to the second quarter of 2006, and shipments for these type of servers rose by 7.8 percent to 1.8 million units. Sales of servers based on RISC, CISC, and Itanium processors fell by 2.3 percent to $6.3 billion"

GigaOM Why Virtualization Is Hot: Money «

GigaOM Why Virtualization Is Hot: Money «: "Virtualization right now is at the tip of the iceberg. It is going to be complementary to solving the whole power problem. It’s a dirty secret in the industry that most data centers today run inefficiently. Virtualization makes it easier for CIOs who want to run servers at 80 or 85 percent. It’s the only way to get there"

Percent of you ancestor woman: 2to1 over male

See: http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/is-there-anything-good-about-men-and-other-tricky-questions/index.html

why was it so rare for a hundred women to get together and build a ship and sail off to explore unknown regions, whereas men have fairly regularly done such things? But taking chances like that would be stupid, from the perspective of a biological organism seeking to reproduce. They might drown or be killed by savages or catch a disease. For women, the optimal thing to do is go along with the crowd, be nice, play it safe. The odds are good that men will come along and offer sex and you’ll be able to have babies. All that matters is choosing the best offer. We’re descended from women who played it safe.
For men, the outlook was radically different. If you go along with the crowd and play it safe, the odds are you won’t have children. Most men who ever lived did not have descendants who are alive today. Their lines were dead ends. Hence it was necessary to take chances, try new things, be creative, explore other possibilities.

How to survive climbing Mount Everest | COSMOS magazine

How to survive climbing Mount Everest COSMOS magazine: "Mount Everest rises over 8.4 km above sea level and has been ascended by over 2,000 individuals since New Zealander Edmund Hillary first reached its summit in 1953. The mountain has since then claimed the lives of more than 200 men and women."

Death/Success = 10%

IBM Unveils Information Server Blade to Help Enterprises Manage Information Overload

IBM Unveils Information Server Blade to Help Enterprises Manage Information Overload
...
The system runs on Red Hat Linux and is built on IBM BladeCenter HS21 servers with Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors. Based on low-voltage industry standard processors, the energy-efficient system also uses less power and requires less cooling than larger systems.
To ease management and enhance grid and virtualization capabilities, the Information Server Blade uses the IBM Systems Director portfolio to provide users with a centralized dashboard to discover and manage all workloads and physical and virtual machines within the pooled environment. It also provides seamless, integrated grid management with Tivoli Workload Scheduler LoadLeveler so workloads can be easily managed across blades. Tivoli Workload Scheduler LoadLeveler provides high workload throughput and efficient utilization of resources within grid clusters. New blades can be simply snapped into a grid to add more processing power as needed, and Tivoli Workload Scheduler LoadLeveler can be used to coordinate workload dispatching across multiple grids.
"As customers seek to minimize datacenter complexity and power consumption without sacrificing capacity or performance, they are turning more and more to integrated blade server solutions built on Intel Xeon processors to balance these needs," said Elliot Garbus, general manager of developer relations for the Intel Software and Solutions Group. "Together, IBM and Intel have enabled a power-friendly, highly-scalable, turn-key solution to help customers more quickly and easily modernize their information management infrastructure."

Blocking Unwanted Parasites with a Hosts File

Blocking Unwanted Parasites with a Hosts File: "Blocking Unwanted Parasites with a Hosts File"

Justin Tumlison

Seeing as far as we can reach:
Only change necessitates a mirror; for if our appearance never altered, a single baby picture would forever tell us how we looked.

kaourantin.net

kaourantin.net: "As most of you hard core Flash developers know, rendering is a huge bottleneck."

AMD proposes CPU extensions for multi-core apps | InfoWorld | News | 2007-08-13 | By Paul Krill

AMD proposes CPU extensions for multi-core apps InfoWorld News 2007-08-13 By Paul Krill: "This technology will enable real-time feedback for performance optimization that can be directly used by software, said Earl Stahl, vice president of software engineering at AMD. "

Bloglines | My Feeds (3421) (1)

Bloglines | My Feeds (3421) (1): "What could PDF, Adobe's Portable Document Format, possibly have to do with this? It's a 30+ megabyte download living right now in more than a BILLION computers. Same for Flash -- a BILLION computers. That's more than 60 megabytes of Adobe code living in nearly every computer on every desktop or laptop in the world -- greater market penetration by far than even Windows enjoys. And what's IN there? Nobody outside Adobe really knows. Is there room in that 60 megabytes for the Adobe Reader, Flash, and a few hooks or applets Adobe might throw in to assist with some future product or service roll out? Sure, why not? That's the power of invisibility"

Sun releases world's fastest chip - at 1.4GHz | The Register

Sun releases world's fastest chip - at 1.4GHz The Register: "Sun has included an on-chip 10GbE NIC. In addition, you'll find eight crypto acceleration units and eight lanes of PCI Express I/O, along with four memory controllers."

1900s Hits: Pop Music Charts - The Most Requested Popular Music of All time!

1900s Hits: Pop Music Charts - The Most Requested Popular Music of All time!: "The Most Requested Music Hits of the Early 1900s"

Good website with early hits...

Joe Duffy's Weblog

Joe Duffy's Weblog: "Monitors are comprised of two capabilities: critical regions (i.e. Monitor.Enter and Exit), to achieve mutual exclusion, and condition variables (i.e. Monitor.Wait, Pulse, and PulseAll), to coordinate between threads. Any CLR object can be used as a monitor."

Traditional American Music

Some Irish lads wanted "tradition American" music. Is there such a thing? In our early history, we just had Irish, English, Scottish, French, etc. music. And these evolved into the genres we have today.

Here is my list..

* Yankee Doodle (1700's)
* Turkey in the Straw (1820)
* Buffalo Gals (1844, Cool White)
* Camptown Races (1850, Foster)
* Oh! Susanna (1846, Foster)
* Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair (1854, Foster)
* Dixie (1860, Emmett)
* Battle hymn of the republic (1862, Howe)
* John Brown's Body (alt battle hymn)
* When Johnny comes marching home (1863 by Henry Tolman)
* Shortn Break (civil war)
* Abdul Abulbul Amir (1877, Perchy French)
* Oh My Darling, Clementine (1884, Percy Montrose)
* Yellow Rose of Texas (1860s? * Red River Valley (1890+)
* Streets of Laredo (1900s?)
* Home on the Range (Higley 1876)
* I've Been working on the Railroad (1894)
* She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain (1890's)
* Casey Jones (1900+)
* John Henry (1900+)
* Erie Canal (1905, Allen)
* Can the Circle Be Unbroken (By and By) (rework 1900+)
* Keep on the Sunny Side (1928, Carter)
* House of the Rising Sun (late 1800)
* Stack OLee Blues (1928, trad, missi john hurt)
* Corrina Corrina (1930, Mississippi Sheiks)
* Sitting On Top Of The World (1930,The Mississippi Sheiks)
* St. James Infirmary Blues (1900+)
* You are my Sunshine (1940, Mitchell)
* This land is your land (1940, Guthrie)

Here is the itunes playlist:

Name Artist Composer Album
Yankee Doodle Suzzy Roche Songs from an Unmarried Housewife and Mother, Greenwich Village, USA
Turkey In the Straw Fisher-Price Songs from the Farm
Buffalo Gals Camptown Shakers Tooth & Nail
Camptown Races The Duhks Stephen Foster Beautiful Dreamer - The Songs of Stephen Foster
Oh, Susanna Pete Seeger American Favorite Ballads, Vol. 2
Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair Gilbert Kalish & Jan De Gaetani Stephen Foster Songs by Stephen Foster, Vol. 1-2 (Recorded on Historical Instruments at the Smithsonian Institution)
Dixie The Union Confederacy American Songs of Revolutionary Times and the Civil War Era
Battle Hymn of the Republic Patriotic Songs of America Patriotic Songs of America (Digital Version)
John Brown's Body Paul Robeson Ballad for Americans
When Johnny Comes Marching Home The Princeton Trio Civil War Album
Goober Peas The Princeton Trio Civil War Album
Shortnin' Bread Earthlings Electric Washboard Band Historic Hits - 19th Century Pop! - Vol. 1
Abdul Abulbul Amir Hank Thompson Seven Decades
Clementine (Oh My Darlin' Clementine) Earthlings Electric Washboard Band Historic Hits - 19th Century Pop! - Vol. 1
Home on the Range Michael Martin Murphey Cowboy Songs
The Streets of Laredo Marty Robbins Marty Robbins: More Greatest Hits
Yellow Rose Of Texas The Princeton Trio Civil War Album
Red River Valley Don Edwards Last of the Troubadours: Saddle Songs II
I've Been Working On the Railroad Pete Seeger American Favorite Ballads, Vol. 1
She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain Eight Hand String Band Listen to the Mockingbird
Casey Jones Pete Seeger Folk Music of the World
Erie Canal Bruce Springsteen We Shall Overcome - The Seeger Sessions
John Henry Bruce Springsteen We Shall Overcome - The Seeger Sessions
Can the Circle Be Unbroken The Carter Family Country By
Keep On The Sunny Side The Whites A.P. Carter O Brother, Where Art Thou?
You Are My Sunshine Norman Blake Jimmie Davis, Charles Mitchell O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Sittin' On Top Of The World Mississippi Sheiks Carter/Jacobs The Early Blues Roots Of Bob Dylan
Stack O'Lee Blues Mississippi John Hurt Traditional The Early Blues Roots Of Bob Dylan
Corrina Corrina Bo Carter Chatmon/Parish/Williams The Early Blues Roots Of Bob Dylan
St. James Infirmary Louis Armstrong
House of the Rising Sun Bob Dylan Various Artists Bob Dylan
This Land is Your Land Woody Guthrie

Pipelines, Latencies and Unrolling

Apple documentation!

There is quite a bit of variability between implementations of x86 based processors. Small parts of the design get regular tweaking even in minor updates to the processor. It is difficult to make sweeping generalization about the exact operation of various stages of the x86 pipelines: fetch, decode, dispatch, issue, execution and completion. Please see processor specific Intel documentation for a more complete description of the particular performance characteristics of each processor that you are targeting.

Generally speaking, the smaller register file on the x86 architecture compared to PowerPC is backed by a much larger reorder buffer, to reorder the execution of instructions to keep pipelines full. From the perspective of a developer experienced with AltiVec, it may initially appear difficult to keep pipelines full with eight registers. While this would be true of a strictly in-order architecture, the large reorder window allows the processor to pull future instructions forward to fill gaps in the pipelines to help make sure that the processor stays full. The processor may pull instructions forward from the next loop iteration. Indeed, in some cores it may not be uncommon to see several loop iterations unrolled in hardware in the reorder buffers. This process occurs transparently to the developer and may perform differently on different cores.

Ain't misbehaving

http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9401551

FROM an evolutionary perspective, monogamy looks good for females and bad for males. For mothers, it means devotion as dad is going to be around to help look after the kids. For fathers it is more of a prison sentence, because it restricts a male's ability to inseminate lots of females at relatively low cost. In most circumstances, unless the young are likely to die without paternal support, a male has little incentive to stay with an individual female when he has so many other females to breed with.

That, at least, was the conventional wisdom until fairly recently. But modern genetic techniques have shown that in many species females in apparently monogamous relationships often produce families that have more than one father. To explain this, biologists have theorised that these females are mating with males who are genetically superior to their regular mates, thus getting the benefit of parental assistance from a cuckold and good genes from a Lothario.

Students Trade Bibles for Porn - XBIZ.com

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Kona officials fear shark being lured to harbor

KAILUA-KONA » A 14-foot tiger shark dubbed Laverne has state officials in Kona worried that people are making it too easy for the animal to snack on food close to shore. starbulletin.com/2005/07/01/news/story5.html

Sendto Blogger google toolbar broken - Google Search

Sendto Blogger google toolbar broken - Google Search

Build high-performance apps for multicore processors

Build high-performance apps for multicore processors

Best of TechEd Winners!

Best of TechEd Winners!

On Wednesday, Windows IT Pro, SQL Server Magazine, and Office and SharePoint Pro.com announced the winners of The Best of TechEd Awards 2007 competition. The judges reviewed more than 260 products and services to choose 45 finalists in 15 categories that they interviewed earlier this week at TechEd in Orlando, Florida. In addition, two products were designated for special-recognition awards, Notable Product and Most Innovative Product. We'll feature all the Best of TechEd winners in the August issues of Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Magazine. Here are the winners:


Architecture category winner: Appistry Enterprise Application Fabric

Business Applications category winner: Nintex SmartLibrary

Business Intelligence category winner: SoftArtisans OfficeWriter

Connected Systems category winner: Neudesic Legacy Modernization with BizTalk Server 2006 and Host Integration Server 2006

Database Development and Administration category winner: Symantec i3 for SQL Server

Developer Tools and Technologies category winner: Altova XMLSpy

Management category winner: Microsoft System Center Essentials 2007

Mobility category winner: Zenprise for BlackBerry

Office System category winner: KnowledgeLake Capture

Security category winner: Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2006

SharePoint category winner: Quest Software Site Administrator for SharePoint

Unified Communication category winner: Gold Systems' Password Reset

Web Development category winner: Strangeloop Networks' Strangeloop AppScaler Appliance for ASP.NET/AJAX

Windows Clients category winner: Microsoft Windows PowerShell

Windows Server Infrastructure category winner: InovaWave DXtreme for Windows



Special Recognition Notable Product winner: Idokorro Mobile Admin

Special Recognition Most Innovative Product winner: RapidMind Development Platform

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Mercury Rising

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Mercury Rising | PBS: "Where's Googlization for the rest of us? It's called Appistry.
Appistry application fabrics take an application and spread it across tens, even hundreds of commodity processors. If you need more computing power, just add new nodes and the application will spread to them automatically, speeding up linearly as it does. If one or more nodes fail for any reason, they are simply ignored and the job continues minus those machines.
This is hot stuff and, talking with the St. Louis, Missouri-based company you'd think finding customers would be a breeze, but it wasn't at first. 'We've always been about commoditization and virtualizing lots of machines to one, but it is hard to get people to save 80 percent on something that wasn't broken,' said Appistry founder Bob Lozano, 'Potential customers kept saying, 'Help me fix this problem I can't solve,' instead. Where customers were willing to try us was on these large computational or large data-intensive apps -- tasks for which there was no minimally acceptable solution.'"

Build high-performance apps for multicore processors

Build high-performance apps for multicore processors The RapidMind Development Platform provides a simple single-source mechanism to develop portable high-performance applications for multicore processors. In particular, you can use it to develop applications that fully exploit the power of the Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell/B.E.) processor's unique architecture by writing only one, single-threaded C++ program using an existing C++ compiler. In this article, author Michael McCool takes you on a guided tour of the RapidMind Development Platform.
One we looked at before was ASPEED..

Weighing the value of today's processors - The Tech Report - Page 11

Weighing the value of today's processors - The Tech Report - Page 11: "Among quad-core processors, the picture is much clearer. The Q6600 is quite obviously the most sensible choice compared to both AMD's underperforming Quad FX chips and Intel's overpriced Core 2 Extreme offerings."

LINPACK benchmark

If there is an aspect of the Linpack computation that makes it "easier" than other parallel benchmarks, it is *regularity*. The Linpack computation is fine-grained and requires much communication, but the computation is extremely *regular*, and that regularity can be exploited to minimize synchronization delays and thus keep the processors performing useful work throughout the bulk of the computation, as long as the communication requirements do not create a delay.
Link http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/hpcwireWWW/04/1008/108518.html

Particletree » Web App Autopsy

Particletree » Web App Autopsy: " longer a company has been around the more code it has. Experience also shows that once you are past your base set of code, the percentage dedicated to server side code starts to increase"

iSuppli raises 2007 computer sales forecast

iSuppli raises 2007 computer sales forecast: "global PC shipments to rise to 264 million units this year, up 11.2% from 239 million in 2006. The previous forecast envisioned 10.7 % growth for the year"

AnandTech: Investigating Intel's Turbo Memory: Does it really work?

AnandTech: Investigating Intel's Turbo Memory: Does it really work?: "ReadyBoost also serves as a read cache of the system pagefile, with the idea that swapping to disk is less painful if it's done to a USB flash drive. "

AnandTech: Investigating Intel's Turbo Memory: Does it really work?

AnandTech: Investigating Intel's Turbo Memory: Does it really work?: "The one unique feature that Santa Rosa offered that no other competing mobile platform, Intel or not, could bring to the table was a technology called Turbo Memory. An on-motherboard flash card, Intel's Turbo Memory is designed to act as another layer in the memory hierarchy, "

Linchi Shea : How did Random I/Os Outperform Sequential I/Os?

Linchi Shea : How did Random I/Os Outperform Sequential I/Os?
Granted, the I/O path I was working with was not a traditional hard disk. It was a LUN presented from a SAN with a large amount of cache, and to simplify to some extent, the LUN was a RAID 0 stripe set across 12 virtualized drives with a rather large stripe unit size (960K). But how should I explain why 8K random I/Os could outperform 8K sequential I/Os?
After some discussions with a storage professional, we came up with a theory consisting of the following three key factors:
Random I/Os were able to effectively hash I/Os across multiple drives that make up the RAID 0 device.
Relatively large RAID 0 stripe unit size of 960K caused 8K sequential I/Os to cluster around the same drives. Note that it would take 120 sequential I/Os to fill a single 960K stripe.
A base amount of cache was assigned to each drive in RAID 0. And when random I/Os were hashed across 12 drives, the I/Os benefited from larger amount of cache.
Do I have solid proof that these three factors were the root cause of 8K random I/Os outperforming 8K sequential I/Os? No, I don't. But I do have some circumstantial evidence supporting the theory.

Nintendo surpasses Rival Sony in market value - The Money Times

Nintendo surpasses Rival Sony in market value - The Money Times: "Nintendo has emerged as the numero uno in May for the fifth consecutive month after selling 338,000 units of the popular Wii video game devices in the United States, repeatedly outshining both its rivals Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3 in the US video game consoles market.
The more-powerful systems, Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360, in May, again lagged behind in the fierce battle for dominance in the booming gaming consoles market by moving 81,600 and 154,900 units,"

My Way Finance

My Way Finance: "IBM's services organization — packed with 200,000 of IBM's 355,000 employees"

BM Seer

BM Seer: "'And the good news is that about 40-70% of the stuff we do in performance tuning actually ends up helping end users.'
This means that 30% to 60% of IBM's TPC-C tunings don't help users.
Really beyond the huge disk size of the large TPC-C results (which has a lot to do with the TPC-C being 14 years old), the quote below points to tuning that is legal but seems a bit too 'tricky' for my taste...
'We get down to the level of worrying about the physical column order in the table so the reference columns are near each other, minimizing cache misses during fetching. This is feasible in the TPC-C benchmark because there are only five tables and only ten to fifteen columns in each table. In a more realistic application, where there are many more queries to be considered, the tables are typically much, much wider, in the 80 to 100 column range; and there are dozens if not thousands of tables. Then this kind of analysis is no longer practical.' Bruce Linsay, IBM fellow' "

The YouTube effect: HTTP traffic now eclipses P2P

The YouTube effect: HTTP traffic now eclipses P2P: "Ellacoya Networks, makers of deep packet inspection gear for carriers, has pulled together some statistics on one million broadband users in North America, and its findings show that HTTP traffic accounts for 46 percent of all broadband traffic. P2P applications now account for only 37 percent. "

Technology@Intel · An update on Intel Itanium processors

http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2007/06/i_get_asked_regularly_about.html: "I get asked about why not just focus on Xeon? Xeon is well addressing the needs of the $28B volume server market. This is the fastest growing portion of the server market. However, the mainframe and risc replacement market remains about the same size at $28B and is growing, albeit more slowly than the volume server marketing. Itanium plays a crucial role in the our pursuit of this market — with it’s best in class reliability and scalable performance. It competes head to head with Power and SPARC, creating an open system alternative to these other proprietary high end architectures. "

TG Daily

TG Daily: "Nvidia is well aware of this challenge and has begun assisting universities in establishing classes and developing course material focusing on massively parallel programming and CUDA in particular. Eventually, the company hopes, that GPGPU programming will become a standard part in computer science course work and help to educate a whole new generation of programmers. So far, Nvidia has taught courses at the University of Illinois, The University of California, the University of North Carolina and Purdue University. Nvidia said that several universities are developing their own courses, including the University of Virginia, the University of Pennsylvania, Oregon State University, the University of Wisconsin. Caltech, MIT, Berkeley and Stanford have been offering “legacy” GPGPU and GPU programming classes, according to Nvidia chief scientist David Kirk."

: "'The online gaming market segment is experiencing tremendous growth supported by multiple revenue models from subscription, free to play, advertising supported to micro-transaction and virtual currency,' said Alexander Marquez, director of strategic investments for Intel Capital. 'K2 Network's extensive gaming knowledge along with its unique Free2Play model is well positioned to capitalize on this exciting opportunity in interactive entertainment.' "

TG Daily - Analysis: Has Intel found the key to unlock supercomputing powers on the desktop?

TG Daily - Analysis: Has Intel found the key to unlock supercomputing powers on the desktop?
Hong Wang, senior principal engineer with Intel’s Microarchitecture Research Lab told us that the Exoskeleton employs technology which allows it to operate primarily outside of the OS. The Exoskeleton operates via opcodes inserted directly into the binary executable. In this way, coordinating between external accelerator resources and the main software program is handled directly by the CPU in its own native language - binary code.

Intel CPUs with this new ability will directly recognize those new opcodes. It will immediately instruct the accelerator to handle whatever is required. It does this via something called an Accelerator Exoskeleton software layer, which runs transparently to the OS, yet is visible to the application and communicates with the external resources.

Intel Introduces '3-Series' Chipsets at Computex

Intel Introduces '3-Series' Chipsets at Computex: "The Intel 3 Series Chipsets, formerly codenamed 'Bearlake' enable exceptional PC performance while helping to enable improved energy efficiency, system design and quietness. Computers with these chipsets can deliver CE-like video and sound quality and new data security and manageability features for business users and will be the foundation for Intel's next-generation Intel Viiv processor technology and Intel vPro processor technology, codenamed Salt Creek and Weybridge, respectively. "

Eugene Robinson - An Egghead for the Oval Office - washingtonpost.com

Eugene Robinson - An Egghead for the Oval Office - washingtonpost.com: "I want a president -- and it's amazing that I even have to put this on my wish list -- smart enough to know that Darwin was right."

Pharyngula: “Playing God”

Pharyngula: “Playing God”:

"Playing God" is where you do absolutely nothing, take credit for other entities' work, and don't even exist — scientists don't aspire to such a useless status.

and

"Please, please stop quoting the pope. No one should care what the cranky, irrelevant figurehead for an obsolete superstitious dogma says about science—he's no more a knowledgeable authority on this matter than RuPaul, and it doesn't matter which of them has the more fabulous wardrobe. Seriously, he's nothing but a sour old man yelling at those damn kids to get off his lawn"

15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense: Scientific American

15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense: Scientific American: "5 Answers to Creationist Nonsense
Opponents of evolution want to make a place for creationism by tearing down real science, but their arguments don't hold up
By John Rennie"

IBM alliance will take the fight with Intel down to 32nm

IBM alliance will take the fight with Intel down to 32nm: "So IBM, Chartered, Samsung, Infineon, and Freescale will all be working together on the next-generation 32nm process, with IBM partner AMD also reaping the benefits through an existing deal. (Recall that 32nm is when IBM will introduce its 'airgap' technology.)"

Secretly Monopolizing the CPU Without Superuser Privileges

Note here: http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~dants/papers/Cheat07Security.pdf the use nanosleep, which doesn't work out of box on windows. See next blog post..

Quantifying The Accuracy Of Sleep - The Code Project - System

Quantifying The Accuracy Of Sleep - The Code Project - System: "First, while Sleep(0) performed mostly as expected, there were two notable exceptions (described below). For the most part, Sleep(0) indeed relinquished the remainder of the thread's time slice to another thread. Where there were no other threads, Sleep(0) returned after an extremely short time interval, typically 10-15 microSeconds. Where there were other threads, Sleep(0) didn't return for a much longer period, typically around 100-150 milliseconds, reflecting the fact that Windows didn't give the thread a new time slice for a while. "

Biometrics researchers report on facial recognition technology

Biometrics researchers report on facial recognition technology: "In the recently released NIST report, Bowyer, Flynn and other researchers report that face recognition technology has improved dramatically. False recognition rates produced by the best systems have dropped 90 percent over the last four years. They found that facial recognition technology can be better than human identification of faces, with accuracy rates near 99 percent.
"

Genes take charge, and diets fall by the wayside - International Herald Tribune

Genes take charge, and diets fall by the wayside - International Herald Tribune: "The implications were clear. There is a reason that fat people cannot stay thin after they diet and that thin people cannot stay fat when they force themselves to gain weight. The body's metabolism speeds up or slows down to keep weight within a narrow range. Gain weight and the metabolism can as much as double; lose weight and it can slow to half its original speed"

Windows Server Division WebLog

Link: Platform: resource management has always been part of operating systems, be it mainframe, UNIX and more recently x86-based operating systems. Today, vendors such as Sun, Novell and Red Hat incorporate virtualization into their x86 operating systems. Even a few weeks back we saw KVM added to the Linux kernel. Our desire is to bring hypervisor-based virtualization to Windows Server – and a wider range of customers - with Windows Server "Longhorn." We’re adding some innovative functions to Windows Server virtualization (aka, Viridian), like live migration, support for up to eight virtual processors, and hot add of resources such as disk, networking, memory and CPU, so customers have more flexible and dynamic deployment options for all their workloads.

Management: we want to make Windows the most manageable virtualization platform by enabling customers to manage both physical and virtual environments using the same tools, knowledge and skills. No other virtualization platform provider is delivering this. Today customers can use MOM and the management pack for Virtual Server. We’re extending the virtual infrastructure management capabilities with System Center Virtual Machine Manager, which will allow customers to increase physical server utilization, centralize management of virtual machine infrastructure and quickly provision new virtual machines. And it’s fully integrated with the System Center product family so customers can leverage existing skill sets.

Craig Van Hoy's Go Trek Team Of International Climbing Guides

Craig Van Hoy's Go Trek Team Of International Climbing Guides: "Kent Wagner
Kent grew up in New Hampshire and his love for the outdoors began early in life while hiking, climbing, skiing and running rivers in the northeast. After studying music in college he moved west in 1987 to pursue outdoor activities and photography. Kent is presently a senior guide for Rainier Mountaineering Inc. (RMI) in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, and also guides for International Mountain Guides in Mexico and South America. He has guided more than 50 river trips through the Grand Canyon and leads backcountry skiers in the wilderness areas of Colorado, Utah and Arizona. His work in photography has been featured in numerous outdoor magazines and catalogs. He lives in Boulder, Colorado."

Miles from Nowhere

link: In the contiguous United States, the point that's furthest from any road is in coastal Louisiana, where swamps deter the construction of any type of road, even narrow dirt roads. The most remote landlocked spot is in the southeastern corner of Yellowstone National Park, 20 miles from the nearest road. "That shocks a lot of people," Watts says. "If they don't know the western part of the U.S. very well, they imagine that there are these vast areas where you can ride your horse for days."

IP

The purpose of property is to better manage the allocation of scarce resources. Since the resource is limited and not everyone can have it, property rights and property law make complete sense for a civilized society, allowing those with rights to the property to buy, sell and exchange their property. This allows for resources to be efficiently allocated through commerce and the laws of supply and demand. It's a sensible system for the best allocation of scarce resources. However, when it comes to infinite resources, there's simply no need to worry about efficient allocation -- since anyone can have a copy. The purpose of copyright (and of patent law), then, wasn't the same as the purpose of property law. It has nothing to do with more efficient allocation of scarce resources. Instead, it's a government-granted incentive -- a subsidy -- to encourage the creation of new works. In other words, it was a case where the government believed there was a market failure. That is, they believed that without this incentive, certain intellectual works wouldn't be created -- and the tradeoff between locking up that idea and creating more content was one that was worthwhile.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20070521/015928.shtml

The Traveler's Dilemma -- [ GAME THEORY ]: Scientific American

The Traveler's Dilemma -- [ GAME THEORY ]: Scientific American: "On the Nonexistence of a Rationality Definition for Extensive Games. Kaushik Basu in International Journal of Game Theory, Vol. 19, pages 33-44; 1990.

The Traveler's Dilemma: Paradoxes of Rationality in Game Theory. Kaushik Basu in American Economic Review, Vol. 84, No. 2, pages 391-395; May 1994.

Anomalous Behavior in a Traveler's Dilemma? C. Monica Capra et al. in American Economic Review, Vol. 89, No. 3, pages 678-690; June 1999.

The Logic of Backwards Inductions. G. Priest in Economics and Philosophy, Vol. 16, No. 2, pages 267-285; 2000.

Experts Playing the Traveler's Dilemma. Tilman Becker et al. Working Paper 252, Institute for Economics, Hohenheim University, 2005."

Who to vote for in 2008?

MySpace Videos: Life After Death by PowerPoint by Don McMillan

MySpace Videos: Life After Death by PowerPoint by Don McMillan

Management Exam

Management Exam: "The following short quiz consists of 4 questions and will tell you whether you are qualified to be a professional manager."

Funny!

Lauren Weinstein's Blog

Lauren Weinstein's Blog: "May 11, 2007
Remote Monitoring Capabilities in New Intel Chipsets

Greetings. I haven't seen much discussion regarding Intel's new 'Active Management Technology' being deployed as part of at least some new Intel CPU chipsets. Touted as a grand tool for remote maintenance, repair and monitoring -- including 'compliance with government regulations' -- a key feature is that it apparently works even when the associated notebook is powered off (however 'powered off' is being defined).

While these new capabilities are initially usually disabled, the scope of the possible back channels created by this technology and the possible opportunities for sophisticated abuse, appear significant enough to be worth serious debate.

I'd be interested in the readership's opinions regarding this.

You can read details at Intel's AMT page and from this Intel PDF document.

--Lauren--"

Shamiqa knows P4

p4 think itself very smart. but p4 not so smart as shamiqa. p4 think branch go false false false true true true. but branch go false true false false true true. p4 make bad guess. p4 get confuse then p4 go very slow. shamiqa want to make p4 no more guess but wait until know for sure.

branch prediction very bad idea unless code very simple. shamiqa no write simple code! you tell shamiqa how to make p4 no more guess when run shamiqa code, yes?

speculative execution even more worse idea unless code very simple. shamiqa no write simple code!! you tell shamiqa how to make p4 no more guess when run shamiqa code, yes?

out-of-order execution most worst idea of all unless code very simple. shamiqa no write simple code!!! you tell shamiqa how to make p4 no more guess when run shamiqa code, yes?

Good SW optimization paper -- oldy on TPC-C from IBM

Sofware Optimization for OLTP Workloads
Steven Kunkel,
Bill Armstrong,
and Philip Vitale
IBM


Category Impact (%) Description
Software bottlenecks 30 Eliminating or reducing conflicts on software locks,
minimizing pathlength occurring while a critical lock
is held, and eliminating priority inversion situations
Task dispatches 25 Eliminating unnecessary task dispatches, reducing
dispatches by batching/deferring work, minimizing
dispatcher preemption, and optimizing handling of
lock conflicts
Snoop-hit-modifieds 25 Reducing snoop-hit-modifieds via processor-unique
fields, processor affinity support in the task
dispatcher, and optimal cache-line-based layout of
critical data structures
Pathlengths 10 Reducing the total number of instructions required to
perform critical paths in the operating system kernel
via code improvements and inlining techniques
Feedback-directed profiling 10 Compiler optimization that rearranges instructions in
a module to block the critical instructions together
into the minimum number of instruction cache lines
and converts branch direction to favor not-taken.8

The stone is cast | Salon.com

The stone is cast | Salon.com: "One never wants to speak ill of the dead, but in the case of Jerry Falwell, how can one not? Falwell will always be remembered for his '700 Club' comment in the wake of Sept. 11: 'I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen.''"

Pharyngula: Jerry Falwell struck dead; not yet found worthy of resurrection

Pharyngula: Jerry Falwell struck dead; not yet found worthy of resurrection: "Jerry Falwell struck dead; not yet found worthy of resurrection"

SAP A1S

SAP still on track with A1S
A1S will target midmarket customers who seek an inexpensive, easy-to-deploy, low-risk suite of business applications including ERP (enterprise resource planning), CRM (customer relationship management) and SCM (supply chain management). The hosted application, to be available as a monthly subscription, will give smaller, cost-sensitive companies the flexibility to set up and test the software on their own before deciding to make a purchase, using a "try, run and adapt" model.

The Hat problem

The hat problem goes like this:
Three players enter a room and a red or blue hat is placed on each person's head. The color of each hat is determined by a coin toss, with the outcome of one coin toss having no effect on the others. Each person can see the other players' hats but not his own.
No communication of any sort is allowed, except for an initial strategy session before the game begins. Once they have had a chance to look at the other hats, the players must simultaneously guess the color of their own hats or pass. The group shares a hypothetical $3 million prize if at least one player guesses correctly and no players guess incorrectly.

---
The first thing Dr. Berlekamp saw was that in the three-player case, it is possible for the group to win three- fourths of the time.
Three-fourths of the time, two of the players will have hats of the same color and the third player's hat will be the opposite color. The group can win every time this happens by using the following strategy: Once the game starts, each player looks at the other two players' hats. If the two hats are different colors, he passes. If they are the same color, the player guesses his own hat is the opposite color.
This way, every time the hat colors are distributed two and one, one player will guess correctly and the others will pass, and the group will win the game. When all the hats are the same color, however, all three players will guess incorrectly and the group will lose.

Product List

Product List: "Choose an integrated solution. Get one-stop updates and support from Red Hat."

Blogger for Stephen P Smith - powered by FeedBurner

Blogger for Stephen P Smith - powered by FeedBurner: "Blogger for Stephen P Smith
syndicated content powered by FeedBurnerBlogger for Stephen P Smith
syndicated content powered by FeedBurner"

My Way News - Microsoft Signs Web Video Deals

My Way News - Microsoft Signs Web Video Deals: "Microsoft faces increasing competition in online video. MSN video is now the sixth-place video destination in the U.S., lagging YouTube and sites from Google, Time Warner Inc. (TWX)'s AOL, News Corp. (NWS)'s MySpace and Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) In April, 11.5 million people visited MSN video, and spent an average of five and a half minutes on the site, compared with 45 million people who each spent nearly 41 minutes on YouTube, according to Nielsen/NetRatings."

Linked from - Madville.com - Better Get Your Pix Out of Yahoo Photos

Linked from - Madville.com - Better Get Your Pix Out of Yahoo Photos

Left for Dead by Kevin O'Brien

Serial killer "rembrant" kills his victims after applying makeup. One turns up alive, or it seems she is a victim of the killer...but her husband and best friend and the rest of her island community are behaving strangely..

A little weak writing in places, well paced story, some good twists & turns..

Notes on Andrew Morton's "State of the Kernel" at Google | LinuxWorld Community

Notes on Andrew Morton's "State of the Kernel" at Google | LinuxWorld Community: "On instrumentation: 'I think this is a weak spot in the kernel'

'I don't think we expose enough stuff to sophisticated programmers to tell them what's going on in the kernel.'

Of the three big holes, this is probably the one with the most work going on. Morton listed quite a few high spots in instrumentation, including per-task I/O accounting and per-process memory footprint monitoring.

He also mentioned Matt Mackall's 'PSS' and 'USS' as a good step forward.

Currently IA-64 Linux has access to that platform's hardware performance counters via perfmon, and Morton says 'we'll get there eventually' for other platforms."

My Way News - IBM Adds Video-Game Chips to Mainframes

My Way News - IBM Adds Video-Game Chips to Mainframes: "The powerful 'Cell' microprocessor that fuels Sony Corp. (SNE) (SNE)'s PlayStation 3 video game console will be available in IBM mainframe computers so those high-performance machines can run complex online games and virtual worlds."

IBM, MySQL team up on database software - Yahoo! News

IBM, MySQL team up on database software - Yahoo! News: "International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM - news) plans to start selling products from smaller rival MySQL AB, a developer of an open-source database that is used to help run Web sites, including Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news), Google Inc. (Nasdaq:GOOG - news) and YouTube."

: "Explicit Data Graph Execution) architectures."

Researchers Break Internet Speed Records

Researchers Break Internet Speed Records: "Operators of the high-speed Internet2 network announced Tuesday that the researchers on Dec. 30 sent data at 7.67 gigabits per second, using standard communications protocols. The next day, using modified protocols, the team broke the record again by sending data over the same 20,000-mile path at 9.08 Gbps"

Speak of The Devil by Richard Hawke

Finished Sunday April 22. Good PI tale. Boston PI gets involved in shooting at a parade.

"I brewed up some coffee. I would've as soon flipped upon my skull and poured it directly onto my brain, but the hinges were too rusty."

Flight Plan - DayJet - Ed Iacobucci - Complexity Science

Flight Plan - DayJet - Ed Iacobucci - Complexity Science: "Iacobucci is an expert at building operating systems--he did it for decades at IBM and Citrix. Because of that, he has zero interest in the loosey-goosey world of Web 2.0. He sees the next great opportunities in business as a series of operating systems designed to model activities in the real world. DayJet looks to be the first, but he has no doubt there will be others, and that new companies, and even new industries, will appear overnight as computers tease answers out of previously intractable problems."

My Way News - PC to Leapfrog Standalone Game Consoles

My Way News - PC to Leapfrog Standalone Game Consoles: "he technology behind these improved visuals, called DirectX 10, is the result of a collaboration among video game developers, graphics card makers and Microsoft. For years, they have been working to streamline and standardize the software used by Windows-based PCs to display graphics.

The latest improvements, many believe, far surpass even the very best of what the consoles are capable of. Case in point: the upcoming PC shooter 'Crysis,' where players take the role of a battle-savvy soldier who has to uncover the secrets behind an asteroid that has smashed into Earth.

Beams of light glimmer through a jungle overgrown with swaying palm trees, and the thick underbrush gets more detailed with a closer look. Gaze into the distance and you can see aquamarine waves crashing on a white sand beach. Zoom in on a soldier to see an emotive face with stubble, freckles and other subtle individual details."

Dell Still Losing Market Share to Hewlett and Others, Data Shows - New York Times

Dell Still Losing Market Share to Hewlett and Others, Data Shows - New York Times: "Dell’s shipments worldwide fell 6.9 percent from the first quarter of 2006, pushing its share of the market to 15.2 percent from 18.2 percent last year, according to IDC. "

Intel gives up on super-charged 'Gesher' | The Register

Intel gives up on super-charged 'Gesher' | The Register: "Intel's server chip chief, Pat Gelsinger, told us that the company abandoned Gesher 'for a variety of internal and external reasons' and added that the company prefers 'non-volatile code-names'.

Gesher shall be known from here on out as 'Sandy Bridge'"

AT&T's IPTV service growing | News.blog | CNET News.com

AT&T's IPTV service growing | News.blog | CNET News.com: "-verse TV is an Internet Protocol-based television service intended as an alternative to standard cable. "

Hitachi woos mid-sized Americans with new blade | The Register

Hitachi woos mid-sized Americans with new blade | The Register: "a 6U high chassis that holds 10 two-socket servers. Should those sockets be filled with Intel's quad-core Xeon chip, then you're talking bout 80 cores per chassis and 560 cores per standard 42U rack."

Technology Review: TR10: Peering into Video's Future

Technology Review: TR10: Peering into Video's Future: "TV shows, YouTube clips, animations, and other video applications already account for more than 60 percent of Internet traffic, says CacheLogic, a Cambridge, England, company that sells media delivery systems to content owners and Internet service providers (ISPs). 'I imagine that within two years it will be 98 percent,' adds Hui Zhang, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. And that will mean slower downloads for everyone."

Humans hot, sweaty, natural-born runners

Humans hot, sweaty, natural-born runners: "Over time, evolution favored scavenging humans who could run faster to the site of a kill and eventually allowed us to evolve into persistence hunters. "

VROOM!

VROOM!: "These results show that ESX Server not only achieves higher throughput than VMware Server for a single VMmark tile (6 workload VMs) but also exhibits better scalability when a second tile is added. "

VMware Releases Virtualization Benchmark Software - Yahoo! News

VMware Releases Virtualization Benchmark Software - Yahoo! News: "VMware has released the first public beta of a VM benchmarking tool VMark. Until now, VMware has refused to allow anyone, via its licensing terms, to benchmark its products. But here's the first concrete evidence that it's being forced by market pressure into changing its policy."

Google Buys DoubleClick for $3.1 Billion - New York Times

Google Buys DoubleClick for $3.1 Billion - New York Times: "Google reached an agreement today to acquire DoubleClick, the online advertising company, from two private equity firms for $3.1 billion in cash, the companies announced, an amount that was almost double the $1.65 billion in stock that Google paid for YouTube late last year."

Guardian Unlimited: Technology

Guardian Unlimited: Technology: "The results give Google a market share of 70.6%, followed by Yahoo (18.7%), Microsoft (8.9%) and Ask (1.7%). The numbers may not be exactly right, but who doesn't think they are in the right ball-park?"

Datamonitor ComputerWire - Data Warehouse Appliances: a Profitable Venture?

Datamonitor ComputerWire - Data Warehouse Appliances: a Profitable Venture?: "Data warehouse appliance vendors have several market forces driving them to be profitable in the future, including the advent of low-cost commodity hardware and open source software and an attractive value proposition of doing EDW faster and cheaper than before. "

Another Month And More Google Growth

Another Month And More Google Growth: "Google accounted for 64 percent of all U.S. searches in the four weeks ending March 31, 2007. That's an increase from the year-ago figure of 58.33 percent, according to Hitwise market research. "

Microsoft delays key virtualization pieces - Yahoo! News

Microsoft delays key virtualization pieces - Yahoo! News: "Microsoft Corp.'s plan to catch up to competitors in providing virtualization has hit a snag. The company said this week it has pushed back the release of both a beta of virtualization technology for Windows Server and a service pack to its existing virtualization software.
ADVERTISEMENT

The public beta of Windows Server virtualization, code-named Viridian, will now ship in the second half of 2007, not in the first half, "

Microsoft researcher obsessed with white trash data centers | The Register

Microsoft researcher obsessed with white trash data centers | The Register: "Microsoft would fit this ideal customer profile since it's in the midst of building out huge data centers to keep up with Google, Yahoo! and the like. And, as a Windows Live engineer focused on managing very large scale data center, Hamilton must be on the front lines of Microsoft's efforts."

Google plans international developers day - Yahoo! News

Google plans international developers day - Yahoo! News: "international software developers day "

JA-SIG Central Authentication Service (CAS)

JA-SIG Central Authentication Service (CAS): "Welcome to the home of the JA-SIG Central Authentication Service. CAS provides enterprise single sign on service:
An open and well-documented protocol
An open-source Java server component
A library of clients for Java, .Net, PHP, Perl, Apache, uPortal, and others
Integrates with uPortal, BlueSocket, TikiWiki, Mule, Liferay, Moodle and others
Community documentation and implementation support
An extensive community of adopters "

Self-Help's Slimy 'Secret' - washingtonpost.com

Self-Help's Slimy 'Secret' - washingtonpost.com

he book is not nearly so equivocal. "Imperfect thoughts are the cause of humanity's ills," Byrne asserts, in a stunning sentence that had me pondering how to perfect my thoughts, pronto.

Poverty? "The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts."

Illness? "You cannot 'catch' anything unless you think you can. . . . You are also inviting illness if you are listening to people talking about their illness." So . . . got any sick friends who need a shoulder to cry on? Tell 'em to bug off! As for Elizabeth Edwards -- how selfish is she? By making people think about her cancer, she's basically giving them the disease.

What at first glance looks like the world according to Disney -- wish on a star, and it will all come true -- turns out to be a pretty ugly little secret indeed.

Microsoft is Dead

Microsoft is Dead: "Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare in technology. [2] Their victory is so complete that I'm now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows. Nearly all the people we fund at Y Combinator use Apple laptops. It was the same in the audience at startup school. All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does the desktop no longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses Microsoft's anyway."

Microsoft to boldly go where Apple is already going…eventually | 43 Folders

Microsoft to boldly go where Apple is already going…eventually | 43 Folders: "Microsoft to boldly go where Apple is already going…eventually"

Intel Inks New Blueprints for UMPCs, Plans on Better Battery Life - Gizmodo

Intel Inks New Blueprints for UMPCs, Plans on Better Battery Life - Gizmodo: "hey're building an entirely new UMPC platform. The platform will be dubbed McCaslin and will be based around chip named Stealey. The CPU will support the Premium Vista OS, "

How I Work: Bill Gates - Apr. 7, 2006

How I Work: Bill Gates - Apr. 7, 2006: "I get about 100 e-mails a day. We apply filtering to keep it to that level—e-mail comes straight to me from anyone I've ever corresponded with, anyone from Microsoft, Intel, HP, and all the other partner companies, and anyone I know. "

Microsoft Mulling Portable Data Centers? - Data Center Knowledge

Microsoft Mulling Portable Data Centers? - Data Center Knowledge: "If Microsoft were to pursue a modular data center initiative, it would likely be good news for one of the hardware providers rolling out portable products"

New XenEnterprise boosts virtual Windows | CNET News.com

New XenEnterprise boosts virtual Windows CNET News.com: "Virtualization is a hot idea, and Palo Alto, Calif.-based XenSource faces plenty of other competition, too. Among others: Microsoft's forthcoming Viridian software, due to ship in 2008, from open-source versions of Xen built into Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, newcomer KVM, Virtual Iron, and SWsoft and its OpenVZ project. "