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