Tuesday, December 30, 2008

NoMoreClipboard.com Medical Professional Information - DAVID STEWART MD - Orthopedist

NoMoreClipboard.com Medical Professional Information - DAVID STEWART MD - Orthopedist: "DAVID STEWART MD
Orthopedist

Practice Information:
604 W Warner Rd
SUITE C-3
Chandler, AZ 85225-2906

Business Phone: (480) 899-4333"

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Dispatches from the Culture Wars: The Bush Presidential Library

Dispatches from the Culture Wars: The Bush Presidential Library: "A friend sent me an amusing email with some details on the various rooms that will be available at the George W. Bush Presidential Library. I'll paste it below the fold.

The 'W' Presidential Library will include:

The Hurricane Katrina Room, which is still under construction and will remain so for at least a decade.

The Alberto Gonzales Room, where you won't be able to remember anything.

The Texas Air National Guard Room, where you won't even have to show up.

The Walter Reed Hospital Room, where they won't let you in.

The Guantanamo Bay Room, where they won't let you out.

The Weapons of Mass Destruction Room, which no one has been able to find.

The National Debt room which is huge and has no ceiling.

The 'Tax Cut' Room with entry only to the wealthy.

The 'Economy Room' which is in the toilet.

The Iraq War Room. After you complete your first tour, they'll make you go back for a second, third, fourth, and sometimes a fifth time.

The Dick Cheney Room, in a famous undisclosed location, complete with shotgun gallery.

The Environmental Conservation Room, still empty.

The Supreme Court's"

Friday, December 19, 2008

TG Daily - Solid-state disks hit half a terabyte

TG Daily - Solid-state disks hit half a terabyte: "Toshiba said it will showcase a 512 GB solid-state disk (SSD) drive at next month’s Consumer Electronics show (CES). The 2.5” drive is likely to be the highest-capacity SSD when shown at the tradeshow, but the device will not go into production until the second half of next year."

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Top 12 Tech Embarrassments in 2008

Top 12 Tech Embarrassments in 2008: "“Now I believe the time is right for us to bring in a new leader — someone who will build on the important pillars we’ve put in place and who will take the reins on the critical decisions our company faces.”"

Facebook Growth Explodes, Site Reaches 140 Million Active Users - NYTimes.com

Facebook Growth Explodes, Site Reaches 140 Million Active Users - NYTimes.com: "'the Facebook engineering team has been tweaking its use of memcached, and says it can now handle 200,000 UDP requests per second. Facebook has detailed its refinements to memcached, which it hopes will be included in the official memcached repository. For now, their changes have been released to github.'"

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Google App Engine for developers

Google App Engine for developers: "Purchase dedicated servers or virtualized slices. Estimate necessary CPU, memory, disk space, etc. at each tier.
Configure a web server for dynamic content. Install Python and its eggs, Apache HTTPd and extra modules such as modwsgi. Configure and tweak each. Open appropriate ports. Listen.
Setup a MySQL database server and choose the appropriate storage engine. Configure MySQL, add users, add permissions. Tweak and optimize.
Add an in-memory caching layer for frequently accessed dynamic content.
Monitor your uptime and resource utilization with Ganglia and/or other tools on each machine.
Serve static files such as JavaScript, CSS, and images from a specialized serving environment such as Amazon's Simple Storage Service.
Turn your static server into an origin server for a CDN with points of presence close to your website's users.
Connect each piece of the stack, keep its software updated to avoid security vulnerabilities, and hopefully respond to all website requests in less than a second.
Dedicate work hours and expertise to all the above. Hire outside assistance if needed.
Don't go broke trying."

ongoing · What Sun Should Do

ongoing · What Sun Should Do: "Cloud · Here are some things we don’t know yet about “The Cloud”: ¶
Will it operate at the level of virtual hardware, like Amazon’s AWS, or at Platform as a Service, like Google App engine (and, de facto, much of the PHP community)?
Will buyers accept a certain amount of lock-in, or will they insist on zero barriers to exit?
Will those who deploy enterprise applications be willing to let their data offsite and into the cloud? If so, what kinds of privacy guarantees will they require?
Will those who deploy enterprise applications want to build internal cloud-flavored infrastructure?"

ongoing · 2008 Disk Performance

ongoing · 2008 Disk Performance: "As for the random-access number... words fail me. I’ve never seen numbers like this on any disk-like storage device ever; nearly 8000 seeks/second. This is into getting into territory that’s competitive with memcached and friends."

Article for all Marketing folks

PsycNET - Option to Buy: "Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.By Kruger, Justin; Dunning, David
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol 77(6), Dec 1999, 1121-1134"

NewsFactor Network | The Tech Trends To Expect in 2009

NewsFactor Network | The Tech Trends To Expect in 2009: "How will tiny cell phones handle all those new tasks? The short answer is they won't. New tools called Internet assistants will help wireless devices send demanding computing tasks via the wireless Web to other computers or to servers -- off in what's known as 'the cloud.' 'Someone is going to design a personal assistant -- by that I mean a suite of services, customized just for you, that exists on a server farm,'"

Elastic IT resources transform data centers - Network World

Elastic IT resources transform data centers - Network World: "Private clouds will need a meta operating system to manage all of an enterprise's distributed resources as a single computing pool, Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman said, arguing that the server operating system relied upon so heavily today is undergoing a transition. Virtualization became popular because of the failures of x86 server operating systems, which essentially limit each server to one application and waste tons of horsepower, he says. Now spinning up new virtual machines is easy, and they proliferate quickly."

Private clouds showing up on IT’s agenda - NYTimes.com

Private clouds showing up on IT’s agenda - NYTimes.com: "The corporations building their own private clouds include such notable names as Bechtel, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and BT, according to The 451 Group. The research firm found in a survey of 1,300 corporate software buyers that about 11% of companies are deploying internal clouds or planning to do so."

Qualcomm aims chip at tiny, always-on laptop | Nanotech - The Circuits Blog - CNET News

Qualcomm aims chip at tiny, always-on laptop | Nanotech - The Circuits Blog - CNET News

The new team was tasked to turbocharge typical ARM designs that were "maxing out" at about 500MHz, which isn't enough speed to deliver the experience that Qualcomm is aiming for. (Intel's Atom for Netbooks, by comparison, now maxes out at 1.6GHz.)

"There was a need to go do something beyond this. So, we went and got the architecture license (from ARM) and we have this team of about 50 CPU designers and we put them to task. So, four years and $350 (million) to $400 million later, we have a CPU that actually works better than the (typical) ARM CPU."

The piece de resistance of this strategy is the Qualcomm QSD8672 dual-core Snapdragon that features two CPU computing cores capable of 1.5GHz performance, and a host of other features includes HSPA+, up to 28Mbps download speeds, 1080p high-definition video, Wi-Fi, mobile TV, and GPS. The graphics core is based on Advanced Micro Devices' ATI unit's technology.

Qualcomm is able to achieve this relatively high speed (1.5GHz) for a low-power processor because it did more than simply get a license from ARM. "We went and got an architecture license from ARM. The architecture license was for their new instruction set, the V7 instruction set. There's a difference between getting an architecture license and just getting a core license. A core license means ARM does the (chip) core and they give it to you. The architecture license is different: the actual implementation is your own," he said.

The 45-nanometer processor will be built by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company

Monday, December 15, 2008

Handicapping cloud computing: The big picture | Business Tech - CNET News

Handicapping cloud computing: The big picture | Business Tech - CNET News: "In summary, we think Amazon's Web Services are not a major growth or revenue generator for the company. Instead, they provide benefits such as PR positioning of Amazon as a 'technology' company rather than simply (as) an online retailer. They also provide interesting projects for Amazon's developers, who otherwise would be primarily confined to developing the shopping platform. This, we think, enables Amazon to attract a higher caliber of engineers and developers than (can) its competitors, such as eBay."

EETimes.com - AMD moves to 45-nm process node with Shanghai

EETimes.com - AMD moves to 45-nm process node with Shanghai: "Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) moves to the 45-nanometer (nm) technology node with the launch of its new Opteron server chip, code-named Shanghai. AMD is the third manufacturer to reach this milestone after Panasonic and then Intel."

Saturday, December 13, 2008

Salon Book Awards 2008 | Salon Books

Salon Book Awards 2008 | Salon Books: "A concept Walker calls 'murketing,' in which advertisers refrain from establishing a mass-culture identity for a product and instead encourage various subcultures to project their own meanings onto it, may be the most helpful model for understanding the precedent-busting campaign of Barack Obama."

EC2 Infrastructure - MindTouch Developer Center

EC2 Infrastructure - MindTouch Developer Center: "he migration of the wik.is cluster to Amazon EC2 (using RightScale) has vastly improved the architecture of wik.is. Here are some of the technical challenges we faced and how we addressed them using the RightScale/EC2 platform.



Here is a diagram of our overall infrastructure"

Comfort with meaninglessness the key to good programmers - Boing Boing

Comfort with meaninglessness the key to good programmers - Boing Boing: "To write a computer program you have to come to terms with this, to accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion. In the test the consistent group showed a pre-acceptance of this fact: they are capable of seeing mathematical calculation problems in terms of rules, and can follow those rules wheresoever they may lead. The inconsistent group, on the other hand, looks for meaning where it is not. The blank group knows that it is looking at meaninglessness, and refuses to deal with it"

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Amnesia - Joel on Software

Amnesia - Joel on Software: "And there, on the video, I had to watch myself listening to Babak explaining the timesheet reporting plug-in, and the record shows that I appeared to understand what was being said to me, and, I’m afraid to admit, I appear to have given my tacit approval to the feature.

AHEM.

In short, I’m turning into one of those crazy bosses that approves things, and then gets upset when you do them. This keeps happening. I must be driving people crazy."

The Old New Thing : A bar on Microsoft main campus? What should we call it?

The Old New Thing : A bar on Microsoft main campus? What should we call it?: "A bar on Microsoft main campus? What should we call it?"

Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Materialized Views (MV) with MySQL

Materialized Views (MV) with MySQL: "A Materialised View (MV) is the precalculated (materialised) result of a query"

Monday, December 08, 2008

Overview of IBM DB2 pureXML | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services

Overview of IBM DB2 pureXML | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services: "IBM about DB2 pureXML (most of the IBM side of the talking was done by Conor O’Mahony and Qi Jin)."

The End of Wall Street's Boom - National Business News - Portfolio.com

The End of Wall Street's Boom - National Business News - Portfolio.com: "The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue."

Research@Intel · https://everywhere! Encrypting the Internet

Research@Intel · https://everywhere! Encrypting the Internet: "Using our software we are able to accelerate RSA 1024 from a performance of approximately 1500 signatures per second (OpenSSLg) to potentially 2900 signatures per second on a single Nehalem Core"

Friday, December 05, 2008

Linus' blog

Linus' blog: "because it's a reasonably recent Intel chipset, and some simple debugging facilities is the one thing I've been asking Intel to add to the core chipset for the last several years so that we could do some kind of sane tracing over complete failures where all other devices are unavailable and you have to power off the machine to get it back."

Tuesday, December 02, 2008

InternetNews Realtime IT News - VMware, VDIworks Focus on Virtual Desktops

InternetNews Realtime IT News - VMware, VDIworks Focus on Virtual Desktops: "Storage optimization

In addition, VMware View 3 offers storage optimization through its View Composer feature. This reduces storage requirements by up to 70 percent, Raj Mallempati, VMware's group product manager, desktop products, told InternetNews.com.

'With a typical VDI [virtual desktop interface], you need dedicated storage for each desktop, but with View Composer, you take one 'gold' image and create a bunch of clones, all of which share just the one disk on which the gold image sits,"

Monday, December 01, 2008

Bill Clementson's Blog: Clojure could be to Concurrency-Oriented Programming what Java was to OOP

Bill Clementson's Blog: Clojure could be to Concurrency-Oriented Programming what Java was to OOP


t's the mutable state, stupid. All concurrency issues boil down to coordinating access to mutable state. The less mutable state, the easier it is to ensure thread safety.
Make fields final unless they need to be mutable.
Immutable objects are automatically thread-safe. Immutable objects simplify concurrent programming tremendously. They are simpler and safer, and can be shared freely without locking or defensive copying.
Encapsulation makes it practical to manage the complexity. You could write a thread-safe program with all data stored in global variables, but why would you want to? Encapsulating data within objects makes it easier to preserve their invariants; encapsulating synchronization within objects makes it easier to comply with their synchronization policy.
Guard each mutable variable with a lock.
Guard all variables in an invariant with the same lock.
Hold locks for the duration of compound actions.
A program that accesses a mutable variable from multiple threads without synchronization is a broken program.
Don't rely on clever reasoning about why you don't need to synchronize.
Include thread safety in the design process-or explicitly document that your class is not thread-safe.
Document your synchronization policy.

Saturday, November 08, 2008

Cult Help and Information - Mormon ancestors tell tale of 1857 massacre in Utah

Cult Help and Information - Mormon ancestors tell tale of 1857 massacre in Utah: "Mountain Meadows Massacre shadows each generation, but Scott Fancher said the public knows little of 'one of the single most important historical incidents' in the nation's history.

'Apart from the Oklahoma City bombing, this was the single largest act of domestic white-on-white violence in the history of the U.S."

Cool Tools: Eyephorics

Cool Tools: Eyephorics: "I bought a pair of Eyephorics. Zowee. At 2.5 grams, these glasses are ultra light and ultra, ultra comfortable"

I'm not beaten yet: Terry Prachett on the frustration and fury of Alzheimer's | Mail Online

I'm not beaten yet: Terry Prachett on the frustration and fury of Alzheimer's | Mail Online: "Does he fear death? 'No, it isn't death that worries me,' he says. 'Everyone dies. I'd just quite like to be there when it happens.'"

Thursday, November 06, 2008

Ssds: SanDisk's New Flash File System Improves SSD Write Speeds by 100 Times

Ssds: SanDisk's New Flash File System Improves SSD Write Speeds by 100 Times: "SanDisk has developed a new file system for flash-based SSD drives, improving random write speeds by up to 100 times. The system, dubbed ExtremeFFS, should be coming to products sometime next year."

Sunday, November 02, 2008

Oil leak - 2006 Meanstreak - Kawasaki Motorcycle Forums

Oil leak - 2006 Meanstreak - Kawasaki Motorcycle Forums: "That was my posting on Delphi.

The leak is NOT coming from the clutch cylinder itself... that would be hydraulic fluid and your frame wouldn't have any paint left.

1 - Pull the clutch lever in and secure it with zip-ties
2 - Remove the side cover
3 - Remove the 3 bolts holding the clutch slave cylinder and secure it as you would a caliper.
4 - Note the orientation of the plastic spacer under the cylinder and when you put it back together, put the gaps on the same side (I think toward the case, but I don't recall)
5 - If your bike has the same problem as mine, you will see a 'donut' seal on the pushrod. It should be in the cavity in the case. Carefully remove the pushrod, again noting orientation... it is cupped on one end and domed on the other.
6 - Gently place the seal against the opening in the case
7 - Using a washer slightly larger than the seal, press the seal into the case so it is flush. There is NO stop on the inside of the case, so if you push too far it will make for a very bad weekend. The washer also keeps it square.
8 - Grease the ends of the pushrod and reinsert it.
9 - Reinstall the slave cylinder and spacer, replace the side cover, and you're ready to roll.


On an older bike, the seal could in f"

Windows 7 to scale to 256 processors | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com

Windows 7 to scale to 256 processors | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com: "Russinovich noted with the dispatcher-lock roadblock removed, a second set of locks became the new focus for folks working on the Windows kernel. The PFN database inside Windows, which contains information on all of the physical memory in the system, was becoming another scalability bottleneck when trying to get Windows to handle multithreaded apps on massively multicore machines. With Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 (Windows 7 Server), Microsoft again broke this lock down into finer grain locks, Russinovich said."

Friday, October 31, 2008

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Platform Monetization is a Two Way Street: Lessons from Facebook and Sun Microsystems

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Platform Monetization is a Two Way Street: Lessons from Facebook and Sun Microsystems: "It is interesting to note that after a decade of investment in the Java platform, it is hard to point to what concrete benefits Sun has gotten from being the originator and steward of the Java platform and programming language. Definitely another example of a platform that may have benefited applications built on it yet which didn't really benefit the platform vendor as expected."

transistors per person

In fifty years, the world has gone from the invention of the first transistor to a
$150B industry which produces on the order of 10,000 transistors per day for every
human being on earth.

Thursday, October 30, 2008

InternetNews Realtime IT News - Big Shifts for EMC Into Server Management

InternetNews Realtime IT News - Big Shifts for EMC Into Server Management: "EMC 'is piecing together automation and control for the infrastructure overall, in which storage is another part,"

PDC 2008 thoughts so far

PDC 2008 thoughts so far: "The crux of the Azure announcement really comes down to Microsoft going into web hosting, and while the cloud provisioning model is qualitatively different to your classic rackspace offering, it doesn’t demo any differently. The point of Azure is to make scaling transparent; transparency doesn’t demo well."

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing - O'Reilly Radar

Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing - O'Reilly Radar: "f cloud computing is a commodity business, then the outsize profits that Hugh envisioned are not going to be there. This is a business that will be huge, but it may be more similar to the web hosting and ISP markets, which are also huge, but not hugely profitable"

Friday, October 24, 2008

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

My Way News - Sun Microsystems swings to big quarterly loss

My Way News - Sun Microsystems swings to big quarterly loss: "Sun also plans to write down the value of its business, a sign of the company's deteriorating competitive position and vulnerability to the economic meltdown. Shares fell more than 8 percent in after-hours trading."

Sunday, October 19, 2008

The Progressive Puppy: Ouch! That's Gotta Smart: Newspapers Crucify Palin

The Progressive Puppy: Ouch! That's Gotta Smart: Newspapers Crucify Palin: "'Out of nowhere, and without proper vetting, the impetuous McCain picked Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. She quickly proved grievously under-equipped to step into the presidency should McCain, at 72 and with a history of health problems, die in office. More than any single factor, McCain's bad judgment in choosing the inarticulate, insular and ethically challenged Palin disqualifies him for the presidency.'

Oh my... that's kind of harsh, wouldn't you say? Must be that nasty, liberal, elite, latte-sipping, argula-munching, East Coast, not pro-America media, right?

The New York Times, perhaps? Maybe, Rolling Stone? Vanity Fair? The Nation? Nope. Not even close. That quote was part of the endorsement of Barack Obama from the Salt Lake Tribune. As in Utah. As in the reddest state in the country. Obama has now earned the endorsements of almost 65 newspapers around the country, including some of the most conservative."

Saturday, October 18, 2008

Intel SSDs RAID 0, A Case Study In Speed, Take 2 - HotHardware

Intel SSDs RAID 0, A Case Study In Speed, Take 2 - HotHardware: "ere was no question Intel's SSD flat out smoked the competition in the cost-effective, consumer grade MLC (Multi-Level Cell) SSD market"

Friday, October 17, 2008

IBM profit gains on software, services - MarketWatch

IBM profit gains on software, services - MarketWatch: "IBM noted strong growth in its software division. Revenue for the unit grew 8% from the previous year -- once adjusted for currency fluctuations -- to $5.2 billion. A majority of the business came from its middleware products, which includes brands such as WebSphere, Information Management and Lotus. This unit accounted for $4.1 billion in revenue."

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

CAP ... Palin's Non-Answer Strategy A Hit With Teens

CAP ... Palin's Non-Answer Strategy A Hit With Teens: "Pulling A Palin, or refusing to answer direct questions by stating one does not wish to talk about that topic and then offering an opinion on a totally different and often unrelated topic, is the new 'thing to do' among America's teens."

A comparison of virtualization features of HP-UX, Solaris, and AIX

A comparison of virtualization features of HP-UX, Solaris, and AIX: "A comparison of virtualization features of HP-UX, Solaris, and AIX"

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Hoax Post: Bush's Comments

Hoax Post: Bush's Comments: "Said during an informal meeting with journalists in Rome, Italy, July 22, 2001:

'I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and what I believe - I believe what I believe is right.'"

Friday, October 10, 2008

Finding Lisp

Finding Lisp: "my own personal preference is SBCL on Linux and CLISP on Windows"

Thursday, October 09, 2008

Who writes Linux: Corporate America | Computerworld Blogs

Who writes Linux: Corporate America | Computerworld Blogs: "Breaking it down farther, in the 2.6.24 kernel, it appears 13.9% of Linux had been written by people without a corporate backer. In the case of 12.9% of the contributors, the Linux Foundation was unable to pin point exactly who the programmers were working for. The rest, 74.2% was written by paid developers.
The top ten looks like this: Red Hat, 11.2%; Novell, 8.9%; IBM, 8.3%; Intel, 4.1%; Linux Foundation, 2.6%; independent Linux consultants, 2.5%; SGI, 2.0% MIPS Technology, 1.6%; Oracle, 1.3% and MontaVista, 1.2%. Just underneath the top ten, you'll find Google at 1.1%."

Wednesday, October 08, 2008

Stay on Target: Real Life Tron on an Apple IIgs

Stay on Target: Real Life Tron on an Apple IIgs: "Writing to random locations in system memory isn't generally a wise design practice."

Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Terry Pratchett: I'm slipping away a bit at a time... and all I can do is watch it happen | Mail Online

Terry Pratchett: I'm slipping away a bit at a time... and all I can do is watch it happen | Mail Online: "That’s the gift or the curse of our little variant. We have problems handling the physical world but can come pretty close to talking our way out of it so you don’t notice. We might have our shirts done up wrong, but might be able to convince you it’s a new style."

Linus' blog

Linus' blog: "The kernel summit was two weeks ago, and at the end of that I got one of the new 80GB solid state disks from Intel. Since then, I've been wanting to talk to people about it because I'm so impressed with it, but at the same time I don't much like using the kernel mailing list as some kind of odd public publishing place that isn't really kernel-related, so since I'm testing this whole blogging thing, I might as well vent about it here.

That thing absolutely rocks."

My Way News - SAP says business turmoil hurting its revenue

My Way News - SAP says business turmoil hurting its revenue: "SAP said it expects software and software-related service revenues for the July-September period to come in between 1.97 billion and 1.98 billion euros, or $2.66 billion to $2.67 billion. That is up about 13 percent from the third quarter of 2007, but SAP said in July it expected the figure to increase between 24 percent and 27 percent for the year"

My Way News - AMD to spin off factories in bid to save money

My Way News - AMD to spin off factories in bid to save money: "chip maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) (AMD) said Tuesday it will spin off its factories into a new joint venture with investors in the Persian Gulf state of Abu Dhabi.
The deal should shore up AMD's finances and let it focus on the design and development of computer chips. The new venture, to be based in the U.S. and called Foundry Co., will absorb AMD's manufacturing plants, including two in Dresden, Germany.
In conjunction with the spin off, Abu Dhabi's investment arm, Mubadala Development Co., will invest $314 million to more than double its current stake in AMD to 19.3 percent from 8.1 percent."

Monday, October 06, 2008

Table Top

Table Top: "Table Top Mountain, at 4,373 feet, is the highest peak in the area and its flat-topped summit is a familiar landmark."

Friday, October 03, 2008

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Data Debasement | PBS

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Data Debasement | PBS: "traditional database-centric software industry just in time for it to be declared obsolete."

Storage Startups Turn Cache Into Cash - GigaOM

Storage Startups Turn Cache Into Cash - GigaOM: "companies building out large-scale computing systems to deliver software as a service, and even computing clouds, are far more interested in better storage features than tweaks for servers"

Thursday, October 02, 2008

Read me first: Taking your laptop into the US? Be sure to hide all your data first | Technology | The Guardian

Read me first: Taking your laptop into the US? Be sure to hide all your data first | Technology | The Guardian: "Encrypting your entire hard drive, something you should certainly do for security in case your computer is lost or stolen, won't work here. The border agent is likely to start this whole process with a 'please type in your password'. Of course you can refuse, but the agent can search you further, detain you longer, refuse you entry into the country and otherwise ruin your day"

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

IBM, Sun, Microsoft sink differences on VMs • The Register

IBM, Sun, Microsoft sink differences on VMs • The Register: "Language experts from IBM, Microsoft, and others have converged on Sun Microsystems' Santa Clara campus for a three-day workshop to find ways of delivering Java-like performance for Ruby, Python, PHP, and Scala on the VM that drives Sun's platformLanguage experts from IBM, Microsoft, and others have converged on Sun Microsystems' Santa Clara campus for a three-day workshop to find ways of delivering Java-like performance for Ruby, Python, PHP, and Scala on the VM that drives Sun's platformLanguage experts from IBM, Microsoft, and others have converged on Sun Microsystems' Santa Clara campus for a three-day workshop to find ways of delivering Java-like performance for Ruby, Python, PHP, and Scala on the VM that drives Sun's platform"

Monday, September 29, 2008

Articles: The Subprime Lending Industry: An Industry in Crisis

Articles: The Subprime Lending Industry: An Industry in Crisis: "The growth of the subprime industry is largely attributable to the increase in securitization"

Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder | Technology | guardian.co.uk: "'It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign,' he told The Guardian.

'Somebody is saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it's very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true.'"

Even Heavy-Metal Fans Complain That Today's Music Is Too Loud!!! - WSJ.com

Even Heavy-Metal Fans Complain That Today's Music Is Too Loud!!! - WSJ.com: "'Death Magnetic' has one of the narrowest dynamic ranges ever on an album."

Saturday, September 27, 2008

Intel Thread Checker, Meet 20 Million LOC

Intel Thread Checker, Meet 20 Million LOC: "Wondering how threading thrives in the real-world? The enormous and highly threaded code base at SAS is an example of an application that benefits from the spelunking and debugging the Intel Thread Checker and Thread Profiler tools offer."

Thursday, September 25, 2008

SAP on Microsoft Windows

SAP on Microsoft Windows: "SAP Supports Virtualized Platforms for Windows New!

SAP supports virtualization on Windows 64-bit. In 2007, VMware ESX 3.x was the first available and supported product for virtualization. As of July 2008, also Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 is available. To find out how to get started with virtualization, see Virtualizing SAP Applications on Windows."

Bloglines | My Feeds (1784) (1)

Bloglines | My Feeds (1784) (1): "If you are managing an IT shop and can't write the code to render 'hello world' in C, html, php, and pull 'hello world' from a MySQL database using a perl script, then YOU are in the wrong job."

Monday, September 15, 2008

SaddleSore 1000/Bun Burner 1500 Rules

SaddleSore 1000/Bun Burner 1500 Rules: "he majority of riders will cover their 1,000 miles in about 18 hours (including all stops). The rides do NOT require you to speed. For every hour you are on a major highway riding, you get approximately 40 minutes 'off' rest time. Use that time wisely!"

Friday, September 05, 2008

TaoSecurity

TaoSecurity: "The four challenges to getting the job done can be summarized thus:



Will problem. The party doesn't want to accomplish the task. This is a motivation problem.

Skill problem. The party doesn't know how to accomplish the task. This is a methods problem.

Bill problem. The party doesn't have the resources to accomplish the task. This is a money problem.

Nil problem. The party doesn't have the authority to accomplish the task. This is a mojo problem"

Thursday, September 04, 2008

BBC - Today

BBC - Today: "The most common response in most disasters is not panic, but rather the opposite."

people costs

An inflection on costs has occurred over the last two decades. People cost
dominate.
1995 2000http://www.cra.org/Activities/grand.challenges/goyal.pdf

Apache Geronimo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Apache Geronimo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Geronimo is currently compatible with the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 5.0 specification. When compared to other application servers such as JBoss, WebLogic and WebSphere, Geronimo's most distinctive features are its:"

Apache Geronimo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Apache Geronimo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Geronimo is currently compatible with the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 5.0 specification. When compared to other application servers such as JBoss, WebLogic and WebSphere, Geronimo's most distinctive features are its:"

Wednesday, September 03, 2008

John Resig - JavaScript Performance Rundown

John Resig - JavaScript Performance Rundown: "A new JavaScript Engine has hit the pavement running: The new V8 engine (powering the brand-new Google Chrome browser)."

H3RALD : Chrome: Google did it again!

H3RALD : Chrome: Google did it again!: "Google showed us once more that their “innovation” can be summarized with the following:
“Do not invent new things, just make them better”
They didn’t invent Internet search: they just made it better and smarted. The same philosophy applies to Chrome, too. Some examples? Sure:
They didn’t create a new rendering engine, they used an existing one
They analyzed Safari’s neat GUI tricks and implemented something even better.
They added an IE8-like domain highlight in the URL.
They got the Firefox’s AwesomeBar and improved it.
They got Opera’s Speed Dial and improved it.
They got IE8’s one-process-per-tab architecture and improved it.
They didn’t think of a Javascript JIT first, they just made it widely-available first.
They didn’t think about merging the address bar with the search bar, Mozilla announced it first, but Google released it before they did.
Safari 4 allows users to create shortcuts for their favorite web apps, but unfortunately it’s only out for developers…"

Ajaxian » JavaScript JIT: The Dream Gets Closer (in Firefox)

Ajaxian » JavaScript JIT: The Dream Gets Closer (in Firefox): "I’m extremely pleased to announce the launch of TraceMonkey, an evolution of Firefox’s SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine for Firefox 3.1 that uses a new kind of Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler to boost JS performance by an order of magnitude or more. [Emphasis ours.]"

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Windows Administration: Taking Your Server's Pulse

Windows Administration: Taking Your Server's Pulse: "There are five major resource areas that can cause bottlenecks and affect server performance: physical disk, memory, process, CPU, and network. If any of these resources are overutilized, your server or application can become noticeably slow or can even crash. I will go through each of these five areas, giving guidance on the counters you should be using and offering suggested thresholds to measure the pulse of your servers"

Windows Administration: Taking Your Server's Pulse

Windows Administration: Taking Your Server's Pulse: "There are five major resource areas that can cause bottlenecks and affect server performance: physical disk, memory, process, CPU, and network. If any of these resources are overutilized, your server or application can become noticeably slow or can even crash. I will go through each of these five areas, giving guidance on the counters you should be using and offering suggested thresholds to measure the pulse of your servers"

InternetNews Realtime IT News - IBM's Got SSD in Its Storage Sights

InternetNews Realtime IT News - IBM's Got SSD in Its Storage Sights: "New research from IBM claims the vendor's solid state disk (SSD) storage efforts are attaining greater performance capabilities than competitor's to the tune of a 250 percent increase in input/output per second in current data-transfer rates, while proving more cost efficient.
IBM's (NYSE: IBM) SSD storage research, code-named 'Project QuickSilver' is an 'ongoing cross-IBM initiative' for developing integrated information infrastructures, according to a press statement"

Sunday, August 31, 2008

PowerShell Team Blog

PowerShell Team Blog: "On Monday VMWare offically released their PowerShell cmdlets in a ship vehicle called the VMWare Infrastructure (VI) Toolkit"

Thursday, August 28, 2008

How Fast Can Humans Go? - TIME

How Fast Can Humans Go? - TIME: "Bolt's step was 1 ft. longer, allowing him to cover 100m in 41 steps. The other athletes needed, on average, 47"

What Is Google App Engine? - Google App Engine - Google Code

What Is Google App Engine? - Google App Engine - Google Code: "Google App Engine lets you run your web applications on Google's infrastructure. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow. With App Engine, there are no servers to maintain: You just upload your application, and it's ready to serve your users."

Monday, August 25, 2008

NBC's $1 billion Olympic "research lab" good, not great

NBC's $1 billion Olympic "research lab" good, not great: "BCOlympics.com served 72 million video streams as of this weekend in addition to 1.2 billion web pages. That's pretty darn good for only a couple weeks of coverage, and compared to the 2.2 million video streams total from the Athens games, it's downright explosive. And it wasn't just NBC that benefited online from Olympic coverage—Yahoo came out on top, too, thanks to a number of hot Olympic stories and photo galleries over the last two weeks, according to data from Nielsen Online."

Sunday, August 24, 2008

ScaleMP pools x86 servers to vie with high-end systems and clusters

ScaleMP pools x86 servers to vie with high-end systems and clusters: "vSMP Foundation Embedded, which has been on the market for 18 months and can utilize up to 16 x86 systems to create a single shared-memory system with between four and 32 processors (or up to 128 cores) and up to 1 TB of RAM."

Thursday, August 21, 2008

WARNING: Satan is Using Olympics Volleyball to Get Young Boys to Masturbate!

WARNING: Satan is Using Olympics Volleyball to Get Young Boys to Masturbate!: "From this day forward any member of our congregation caught watching Olympic volleyball or even mentioning Olympic volleyball will be asked to pack their belongings and find a place to live where your filthy, sinful, disgusting, depraved masturbation lifestyle is accepted!'"

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Motherboard Chipsets and the Memory Map : Gustavo Duarte

Motherboard Chipsets and the Memory Map : Gustavo Duarte: "Motherboard Chipsets and the Memory Map"

The mythical bitmap index

The mythical bitmap index: "you have that the compressed size of a bitmap index is at most proportional to the size of your table! Irrespective of the number of distinct values!"

Annals of Mathematics: Manifold Destiny: The New Yorker

Annals of Mathematics: Manifold Destiny: The New Yorker: "“To do great work, you have to have a pure mind. You can think only about the mathematics. Everything else is human weakness. Accepting prizes is showing weakness.”"

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Intel thinks big with solid-state drives | Nanotech: The Circuits Blog - CNET News

Intel thinks big with solid-state drives Nanotech: The Circuits Blog - CNET News: "Initially, Intel will have 80GB and 160GB solid-state drives based on multilevel cell (MLC) technology for the consumer and notebook markets, and 32GB and 64GB drives based on single-level cell (SLC) for the enterprise market. In 2009, Intel expects to have MLC drives with capacities up to 320GB.
MLC allows drive makers to build higher-capacity drives at lower cost but is not as fast as SLC nor inherently as reliable. Though SLC solid-state drives are used currently in some ultralight laptops, in most cases they will be replaced by MLC drives in future laptop models."

Our Electric Future — The American, A Magazine of Ideas

Our Electric Future — The American, A Magazine of Ideas: "We live in a world where just about everything—from a hairdryer to the Internet—runs on electricity. A big exception is the transportation sector"

Monday, August 18, 2008

IBM launches 'Green Sigma' business consulting | Green Tech - CNET News.com

IBM launches 'Green Sigma' business consulting Green Tech - CNET News.com: "IBM on Monday detailed its 'Green Sigma' consulting practice for reducing energy and water usage at businesses by using networked sensors and data analysis software."

Quantum Physics Gets "Spooky" -- Berardelli 2008 (813): 3 -- ScienceNOW

Quantum Physics Gets "Spooky" -- Berardelli 2008 (813): 3 -- ScienceNOW: "there 'really is an intrinsic connection between entangled particles, not that some signal passes quickly between them when an observation is performed.'"

Neowin.net - AMD Readies Shanghai to Battle Nehalem

Neowin.net - AMD Readies Shanghai to Battle Nehalem: "According to AMD Senior Vice President Randy Allen, the chip will ship in Q4 2008, and his company will be ready with its server products before Intel. 'They [Intel] won't be factoring our 45-nanometer Shanghai product and be making shipments of that by the end of the year,' Allen said.

However, despite much talk about how Shanghai will be competing against Nehalem, there was a notable absence of details about Shanghai during Allen's press conference, held on the eve of the Intel Developer's Forum, including specifics on performance improvements. AMD has previously said Shanghai will contain 6MB of Level 3 cache compared with the 2MB of L3 cache in the company's current crop of quad-core Opteron processors."

Saturday, August 02, 2008

Intel, Facebook Sign Infrastructure Solutions Agreement - MarketWatch

Intel, Facebook Sign Infrastructure Solutions Agreement - MarketWatch: "Intel has a wealth of software engineering expertise as well as such tools as Intel VTune(TM) and Intel Thread Checker to help companies improve application performance on multi-core Intel processors. Since Facebook's applications are mostly built on open source technologies, the companies believe that some of the insights from this collaboration may be contributed back to the open source community, benefiting other companies that use similar underlying technologies."

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

FAQs about Mailinator

FAQs about Mailinator: "So if the government issued a subpeona to Mailinator to divulge emails or logs, you'd rat me out?

Holy crap, yes. I'm not going to jail for you, I have a boyish face and very (very) supple skin."

Bloglines | My Feeds (3516) (1)

Bloglines | My Feeds (3516) (1): "I have this theory about the behavior of squirrels and how they are like certain large software companies, especially SAP, the giant Enterprise Resource Management vendor headquartered in Germany. But obviously the most interesting part is the squirrels, so let's start there.

You are driving down a street in your car and up ahead there is a squirrel at the side of the road eating a nut. You aren't on an intercept course, there is no way you are going to hit that squirrel. So what does the squirrel do? At the very last possible moment, rather than watching you drive by, THE SQUIRREL DARTS STRAIGHT FOR YOUR CAR, passing inches in front of or behind the front tires.

Why does he do that?

Obviously I'm a guy with too much time on my hands because I've given this quite a bit of thought."

IEEE Spectrum: Vegas 911

IEEE Spectrum: Vegas 911: "He and his team are currently working on upgrades to IBM DB2 Anonymous Resolution, previously known as ANNA. A more sophisticated spin on NORA, ANNA, in Jonas's words, 'anonymizes' data before it is shared and analyzed. 'It's a new way to find a few bad guys without shaving down the Constitution at the same time,' he says. He also works on data privacy issues with the Task Force on National Security in the Information Age, run by the Markle Foundation, in New York City, and with the Center for Democracy and Technology, in Washington, D.C"

Shared nothing parallel programming - O'Reilly Radar

Shared nothing parallel programming - O'Reilly Radar: "Our small database footprint project had the goal of externalizing as much computation off the database engine - pushing this processing into share nothing parallelizable pipelines. So we also did such things as externalized serialization (no more using the database engine to dole out unique record ID’s) and eliminated virtually all stored procedure and triggers - placed more computational weight on these 'n' wide pipeline processes instead"

Monday, July 28, 2008

Interactive Map Shows Deadliest U.S. Roads | LiveScience

Interactive Map Shows Deadliest U.S. Roads LiveScience: "Driving is one of the most dangerous activities people engage in; the lifetime risk of dying in a motor vehicle accident for U.S residents is 1-in-100. About 57 percent of highway deaths happen on rural roads, according to the Federal Highway Administration"

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

IBM's eight-core Power7 chip to clock in at 4.0GHz | The Register

IBM's eight-core Power7 chip to clock in at 4.0GHz The Register

The IBM documents have the eight-core Power7 being arranged in dual-chip modules. So, that's 16-cores per module. As IBM tells it, each core will show 32 gigaflops of performance, bringing each chip to 256 gigaflops. Just on the gigaflop basis, that makes Power7 twice as fast per core as today's dual-core Power6 chips, although the actual clock rate on the Power7 chips should be well below the 5.0GHz Power6 speed demon.
In fact, according to our documents, IBM will ship Power7 at 4.0GHz in 2010 on a 45nm process. We're also seeing four threads per core on the chip.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Mark's Blog : Pushing the Limits of Windows: Physical Memory

Mark's Blog : Pushing the Limits of Windows: Physical Memory: "The Memory Manager keeps track of each page of memory in an array called the PFN database and, for performance, it maps the entire PFN database into virtual memory. Because it represents each page of memory with a 28-byte data structure, the PFN database on a 128GB system requires about 930MB"

Saturday, July 19, 2008

My Way News - AMD changes CEO as turnaround pressure intensifies

My Way News - AMD changes CEO as turnaround pressure intensifies: "One notable fumble happened in the aftermath of the original Opteron chip's success. A technical glitch delayed the launch of the Opteron's successor by eight months, forcing AMD to slash the price of its existing chips to stay competitive."

Wednesday, July 09, 2008

A Nickel's Worth: Optimizing CL

A Nickel's Worth: Optimizing CL: "This blog is about mechanically optimizing CL code."

Monday, July 07, 2008

How Prozac sent the science of depression in the wrong direction - The Boston Globe

How Prozac sent the science of depression in the wrong direction - The Boston Globe: "In recent years, scientists have developed a novel theory of what falters in the depressed brain. Instead of seeing the disease as the result of a chemical imbalance, these researchers argue that the brain's cells are shrinking and dying. This theory has gained momentum in the past few months, with the publication of several high profile scientific papers. The effectiveness of Prozac, these scientists say, has little to do with the amount of serotonin in the brain. Rather, the drug works because it helps heal our neurons, allowing them to grow and thrive again."

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

AMD Improves CPU Market Share - With Little Impact On Intel - Tom's Hardware

AMD Improves CPU Market Share - With Little Impact On Intel - Tom's Hardware: "iSuppli said that AMD’s market share was at 10.9% in Q1 2007, which climbed to 14.1% in Q4 2007 and fell slightly to 13.00% in Q1 2008. Overall, the trend appears to be positive for AMD."

treatment of bundle branch block

treatment of bundle branch block: "Incomplete bundle branch block sometimes indicates underlying heart disease. But, especially when it occurs on the right side (i.e., incomplete RBBB,) it often has no significance at all."

32 Sci-Fi Novels You Should Read | How To Split An Atom

32 Sci-Fi Novels You Should Read How To Split An Atom: "Below are 32 books that have pushed the boundaries of the genre, inspired generations of thinkers and in some cases have even predicted key aspects of societies development."

Research@Intel · Unwelcome Advice

http://blogs.intel.com/research/2008/06/unwelcome_advice.php: "The second path usually requires at least some degree of going back to the algorithmic drawing board and rethinking some of the core methods they implement. This also presents the “opportunity” for a major refactoring of their code base, including changes in languages, libraries, and engineering methodologies and conventions they’ve adhered to for (often) most of the their software’s existence."

Monday, June 30, 2008

BetterExplained | Learn Right, Not Rote

BetterExplained Learn Right, Not Rote: "BetterExplained Learn Right, Not Rote.
Home All Posts About FAQ Contact
Explanations for everyone"

Vulcan Nomad

Vulcan Nomad: "It was a perfect day for a hike and a ride so I did both. It took the usual three and a half hours to ride up, four and a half to hike in and out of Indian Gardens and another three and a half to get back home. A full day and was it beautiful!"

Saturday, June 28, 2008

vanroy-mc-panel.pdf (application/pdf Object)

vanroy-mc-panel.pdf (application/pdf Object)

The challenge of programming
multi-core processors is real, but it is not a technical
challenge. It is a purely sociological challenge.
Technically, we have known since the 1980s how to
program multi-core processors (in the guise of sharedmemory
multiprocessors) and how to write programs for
them (in terms of parallel algorithms). There is a
simple, natural, and powerful approach for
programming these machines: dataflow programming.
Many languages and systems implement this approach
(see, e.g., Wikipedia for a long list). They are
descendants of the venerable Id, Id Nouveau, SISAL,
and other early dataflow languages. Google's wellpublicized
MapReduce is one of the most popular new
tools that takes advantage of dataflow ideas [1], but
these ideas are not new. In fact, they date from the
1970s [2]. A good exposition is given in chapter 4 of
[3]. The basic insight is that there exists a form of
concurrent programming, deterministic concurrency,
that has no race conditions, is as easy to program as
sequential programs, and can exploit parallel processors
as a bonus. Deterministic concurrency is enjoying a
renaissance thanks to clusters and multi-core processors.

My Way News - Credit scores hit by card limits

My Way News - Credit scores hit by card limits: "For instance, someone taking out a $25,000 36-month auto loan would see an interest rate of about 6.4 percent and a monthly payment of $765 if they were in the highest range of FICO scores of 720 to 850, according to Fair Isaac's Web site myFICO.com.

That then jumps to an interest rate of 7.3 percent and a monthly payment of $776 for those with a score of 690 to 719 and as much as 15 percent or $866 a month for those with the lowest FICO range of 500 to 589."

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Many degrees of multi-tenancy | Software as Services | ZDNet.com

Many degrees of multi-tenancy Software as Services ZDNet.com: "multi-tenancy — the architectural model that allows them to serve multiple customers from a single shared instance of the application — is an article of faith, the one thing that marks them as a tribe apart from traditional software vendors."

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

The new geek sheik: Data centers | Outside the Lines - CNET News.com

The new geek sheik: Data centers Outside the Lines - CNET News.com: "Forget about flashy Web 2.0 applications. The real, geeky coolness of the Web is the growing acreage of data centers that deliver bits to billions of devices. At GigaOM's Structure 08 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, infrastructure--'clouds' of servers, storage and networks--was the headliner"

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

My Way News - World now has 10 million millionaires, report says

My Way News - World now has 10 million millionaires, report says: "Ten million may seem like a big number for such an elite club, but it still represents less than one-fifth of 1 percent of the world's 6.7 billion people.
The rarefied group of the superrich - those with at least $30 million in assets - got richer, too. There were 103,000 of them around the world last year, 9 percent more than the year before, and their wealth grew by nearly 15 percent."

InternetNews Realtime IT News - Improving Virtual IT Management

InternetNews Realtime IT News - Improving Virtual IT Management: "That sort of deeper understanding ties into what Forrester analyst Evelyn Hubbert calls business service management (BSM).
Ultimately, the goal of BSM is to correlate the performance of an application or IT service to the expectations of the business"

Linux Graphics Essay - The Linux Foundation

Linux Graphics Essay - The Linux Foundation: "Around 2005, Intel took the decision to dominate the Linux graphics market using the Open Source philosophy. It formed a team within its Open Source Technology centre to work with the community to produce and distribute drivers for all of its graphics chips which were released to the world in 2006. This strategy has been resoundingly successful in that today the best way to get a laptop that will work with Linux involves the simple question 'does it have an Intel graphics chip' rather than having to get the graphics specs before purchase and check a variety of sources to see what the support is (or indeed whether it is likely to work at all)."

Monday, June 23, 2008

Intel Denies Rumors of SSD Market Exit

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-ssd-drive,5735.html

Samsung for example recently announced SATA 2 SSD drives that delivery very fast performance. According to Samsung, its new drives deliver a read speed of 200MB/sec. and 160MB/sec. write speeds

Rackable Systems Unveils High-density Servers

http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20080623/tc_pcworld/147418
The high-density servers pack two motherboards into a 2U unit with a single power supply, increasing the available processing power while consuming less energy, the company said

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Red Hat Partners With Amazon.com On SaaS | MSPmentor

Red Hat Partners With Amazon.com On SaaS MSPmentor: "At Red Hat Summit in Boston, the open source company disclosed that JBoss Enterprise Application Platform is now available within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Red Hat claims JBoss is the first cloud-based application server."

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Linux.com :: A virtual appliance primer

Linux.com :: A virtual appliance primer: "So, for example, Bugzilla, the popular bug tracking app, is available as a 2.4MB download tarball from Mozilla, as well as a 150MB appliance from appliance vendor Jumpbox So, for example, Bugzilla, the popular bug tracking app, is available as a 2.4MB download tarball from Mozilla, as well as a 150MB appliance from appliance vendor Jumpbox"

Saturday, June 07, 2008

Big fat lie - Telegraph

Big fat lie - Telegraph: "'The natural question is, 'What regulates fat accumulation?'' he begins, swivelling gently in his office chair. 'That was actually worked out 50 years ago. We know that the hormone insulin is what puts fat in fat tissue. Raise insulin levels and you accumulate fat; lower insulin levels and you lose fat. And we secrete insulin as a response to carbohydrates in the diet."

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

David Mandelin\’s blog » Blog Archive » SquirrelFish

David Mandelin\’s blog » Blog Archive » SquirrelFish: "The basic idea is to keep a table of relative offsets to the cases, and then jump using that offset."

Saturday, May 24, 2008

Linux.com :: Comparing Linux USB flash disk distros

Linux.com :: Comparing Linux USB flash disk distros: "Some Linux distributions, such as Mandriva Flash, are specially designed to work from flash devices. Some provide installers to get them onto thumb drives, while others can be coerced onto a USB flash drive with some simple modifications. I tested five Linux distributions -- Damn Small Linux (DSL), Puppy Linux, Pendrivelinux, Ubuntu, and Mandriva Flash -- to see how they fare running from a flash disk.

Of the five, only Ubuntu doesn't offer a native method for getting it to run from flash, while Pendrivelinux and Mandriva Flash are designed to run exclusively from flash. The five Linux distributions can be divided into two classes: the small, compact distributions (DSL and Puppy Linux), which are less than 100MB in size, and the full-blown distributions (Mandriva, Pendrivelinux, and Ubuntu)."

Monday, May 12, 2008

Stevey's Blog Rants: Dynamic Languages Strike Back

Stevey's Blog Rants: Dynamic Languages Strike Back: "I like the story about refreshing the title bar 140 times. It's an example of the principle I always tell everyone: your performance bottlenecks are usually something you would never think of in a million years. You absolutely must use performance tools rather than trying to reason from first principles."

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Vista T-states

required ACPI processor objects to support ACPI processor linear stop clock throttle states (T‑states)
http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/0/b/00bba048-35e6-4e5b-a3dc-36da83cbb0d1/ProcPowerMgmt.docx

Monday, April 14, 2008

Sun's CMT goes multi-chip - Allan Packer's Weblog

Sun's CMT goes multi-chip - Allan Packer's Weblog: "Today Sun is announcing new CMT-based systems, hard on the heels of the UltraSPARC T2 systems launched in October 2007 (the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 systems). Whereas previous Sun CMT systems were based around a single-socket UltraSPARC T1 or T2 processor, the new systems incorporate two processors, doubling the number of cores and the number of hardware threads compared to UltraSPARC T2-based systems"

Saturday, April 12, 2008

Retro Forward Go!: 10 Most Historically Inaccurate Movies

Retro Forward Go!: 10 Most Historically Inaccurate Movies: "According to this film, in year 2001 we would have had manned voyages to Jupiter, a battle of wits with a sentient computer, and a quantum leap in human evolution. Instead we got the Mir Space Station falling from the sky, Windows XP. Apparently the lesson here is that sometimes it's better when the movies get the facts all wrong."

Statically Typed :: Static typing for a static world

Statically Typed :: Static typing for a static world: "EC2 allows you to configure a GNU/Linux environment to your liking and use it almost the same as you would use a dedicated server or VPS. Google’s App Engine allows you to create Google Applications. They’re written in Python (one of Google’s production languages) and need to be written specifically to use things like Google’s Bigtable."

Friday, April 11, 2008

Azul Systems - Cliff Click Jr.’s Blog

Azul Systems - Cliff Click Jr.’s Blog: "But how well do these techniques work as we move from dozens of cores to hundreds (Azul's already there!)? Right now, the Big 3 Application Servers can rarely use more than 50-100 cores before they become choked up on internal locks- and that includes the 20% for GC and using SLE. Maybe we go to individual programs communicating via sockets (SOA?). But isn't this just a very complex version of CSP? Might we be better off just switching to CSP in the first place (or some hopefully more modern version)?"

Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Sunday, April 06, 2008

Dial D for Disruption - Forbes.com

Dial D for Disruption - Forbes.com: "Spencer is picking up a few big allies. Intel (nasdaq: INTC - news - people ) now makes Asterisk-compatible cards for computers and has tested large deployments. 'Open source is one of the hottest topics in telecom today,' says Intel marketing director Timothy Moynihan."

Friday, April 04, 2008

The Green Grid: Content

The Green Grid: Content: "The Green Grid Data Center Power Efficiency Metrics: PUE and DCiE
The Green Grid is an association of IT professionals seeking to dramatically raise the energy efficiency of data centers through a series of short-term and long-term proposals. This is an update to the very first white paper published by the Green Grid in February 2007 called “Green Grid Metrics: Describing Data Center Power Efficiency” to refine the nomenclature and intent of that paper. In that paper, The Green Grid proposed the use of Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and its reciprocal, Data Center Efficiency (DCE) metrics,"

My Way Finance

My Way Finance: "Intel Corp. chief executive Paul Otellini saw his pay package almost double in 2007, receiving compensation valued at $12.3 million as the chipmaker's business rebounded from a rocky 2006."

My Way Finance

My Way Finance: "Intel Corp. chief executive Paul Otellini saw his pay package almost double in 2007, receiving compensation valued at $12.3 million as the chipmaker's business rebounded from a rocky 2006."

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

A Man of Action

A Man of Action: "When it comes to discussing the arts, all opinions are completely subjective and thus equally valid, or so the orthodoxy goes. But surely there are limits. To assert that reading one of Furst’s novels is like hearing “Kafka, Dostoevsky and le Carré … talk to each other” (Kirkus Reviews) is just plain wrong, as wrong as any literary judgment can be."

A Bright Shining Lie

A Bright Shining Lie: "He is often called “a writer’s writer,” with the customary implication that this is far better than being a reader’s writer."

A Reader's Manifesto

A Reader's Manifesto: "Maybe this is the effect that Proulx is aiming for; she seems to want to keep us on the surface of the text at all times, as if she were afraid that we might forget her quirky narratorial presence for even a line or two."

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Good Math, Bad Math : The Real Murphy's Law

Good Math, Bad Math : The Real Murphy's Law: "The real Murphy's law: If there's more than one way to do something, and one way will result in disaster, then someone will do it that way."

We can transform single thread to multithread: Intel

We can transform single thread to multithread: Intel: "“Our answer is CT: C stands for C++ based MPI and T stands for high throughput. So programmers can run C++ like scalar code, and our CT code will do everything that an experienced programmer will do like parallelisation and vectorisation.”

Intel has already got the technology working on quad and eight core platforms, and says its existing test applications can run on upcoming terascale platforms without modification of any code.

The closing words were amusing: “If you are a programmer, please do not worry about being fired because you cannot do terascale programming, because CT will blast you into the parallel era.”
Speculative parallel threading

The next presentation was also on helping programmers with multithreading. However, with this technology, rather than programmers having to do any recoding, it’s a new compiler that can take single thread apps and make them work in a multithreaded mode.

The way it works is it analyses applications to see whether a part of the application can be selected and made to run parallelly. If it executes successfully, the software knows it can, and it allows an application to be recompiled with the settings in place for that thread to run in parallel.

Intel explained, “It’s different from CT because CT is a new progra"

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity

Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity: "ne day in the 1950s, while talking with his colleague Stanislaw Ulam, von Neumann began discussing the ever-accelerating pace of technological change, which, he said, 'gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs as we know them could not continue.'"

Motorola insider tells all about the fall of a technology icon - Engadget

Motorola insider tells all about the fall of a technology icon - Engadget: "Zander, who seemed to care more about his golf score than running one of America's greatest technology companies, left all of the hard work to Geoffrey; I've always considered it Motorola's dirty little secret that the strategy for their entire profit machine was run by the company's CMO -- not the rest of the company's executives, who are as inept now as they have ever been."

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Exegy Ticker Plant :: Exegy Tickerplant

Exegy Ticker Plant :: Exegy Tickerplant: "more than 2 million exchange messages per second, and averaging less than 80 microseconds end-to-end latency per message."

Appistry EAF and Service Virtualization | Appistry Blogs

Appistry EAF and Service Virtualization Appistry Blogs: "When people see the Appistry Enterprise Application Fabric (EAF) solution one of the first things they think of is application virtualization. In this post I will try to resolve the confusion by detailing some of the key EAF features and how they relate to virtualization."

Monday, March 24, 2008

InternetNews Realtime IT News – SAP Open Sources Memory Analysis

InternetNews Realtime IT News – SAP Open Sources Memory Analysis: "was an original member of the Eclipse consortium, which began in 2001, and it was a founding member of the Eclipse Foundation in 2004, so it's not surprising it chose Eclipse to contribute to.
Memory Analyzer provides a graphics-based snapshot of object-retention patterns and provides developers with the information they need to optimize memory usage without interrupting the business applications in use or crashing the Java virtual machine hosting the application.
This belated gift to the open source community comes about two weeks after SAP announced that for the first time since its debut in 2003, developers can now buy an annual developer license for its NetWeaver platform directly from its Web site at a significantly discounted price.
Both of these strategic decisions are intended to grow SAP's Developer Network from roughly 900,000 developers to more than 1.5 million developers by the end of 2008.
Michael Bechauf, vice president of standards for SAP's Global Ecosystems and Partner Group, said SAP held off on sharing the code until it was confident the Eclipse environment was developed enough to support the needs of large enterprise customers running multiple, high-volume applications at the same time.
A Memory Analyzer plug-in has been available for download from SAP's Web site at no cost for more than a year. And customers with full NetWeaver licenses have been using it even longer."

SAP's Peter Zencke on Business ByDesign - Seeking Alpha

SAP's Peter Zencke on Business ByDesign - Seeking Alpha: "DF: What is unique about the architecture of Business ByDesign from other SAP products besides that it is on demand and aimed at companies with 25 to 100 users of the software.
PZ: There are two elements, process integration for services and the process definition level, with small subcomponents. It is not at the database level, which is different from the past in mySAP [now called SAP Business Suite]."

Monday, March 17, 2008

PC Perspective - Intel IDF Preview: Tukwilla, Dunnington, Nehalem and Larrabee

PC Perspective - Intel IDF Preview: Tukwilla, Dunnington, Nehalem and Larrabee: "Today Intel sat down with some of the press to preview the information and technology that will be showcased and demonstrated at the Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai next month. Topic discussed were server products like Tukwila and Dunnington but the really juicy details came from the Nehalem platform and the upcoming discrete graphics chip, Larrabee."

Wearing red makes you more likely to score - Telegraph

Wearing red makes you more likely to score - Telegraph: "Lead author Prof Martin Attrill, of the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Plymouth, said: 'Previous evidence from studies on combat sports and psychological tests suggest that competitors wearing red perform better than average.
'It is believed the colour can stimulate deep-rooted aggressive and dominance in competitive situations. Similarly research shows players who encounter opponents in red display more defensive reactions.'
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The researchers, whose work is due to be published later this year in the Journal of Sports Sciences,"

Virtualization

This paper:
What Programmers Should Care About
The previous sections highlighted the changes a program experiences when being executed in a virtual machine. Here is a summary of the points that developers must be aware of.
Accessing devices, such as hard drives, NICs, and graphics cards, can be significantly more expensive in a virtual machine. Changes to alleviate the costs in some situations have been developed, but developers should try even harder to use caches and avoid unnecessary accesses.
TLB misses in virtual environments are also significantly more expensive. Increased efficiency of the TLB cache is needed so as not to lose performance. The operating system developers must use TLB tagging, and everybody must reduce the number of TLB entries in use at any one time by allocating memory as compactly as possible in the virtual address space. TLB tagging will only increase the cache pressure.
Developers must look into reducing the code size and ordering the code and data of their programs. This minimizes the footprint at any one time.
Page faults are also significantly more expensive. Reducing the code and data size helps here, too. It is also possible to prefault memory pages or at least let the kernel know about the usage patterns so that it might page in more than one page at once.
The use of processor features should be more tightly controlled. Ideally, each use implies a check for the availability of the CPU feature. This can come in many forms, not necessarily explicit tests. A program should be prepared to see the feature set change over the runtime of the process and provide the operating system with a means to signal the change. Alternatively, the operating system could provide emulation of the newer features on older processors.

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Pigs Can Fly : Xperf, a new tool in the Windows SDK

Pigs Can Fly : Xperf, a new tool in the Windows SDK: "Xperf is an important tool for anyone doing system performance work on Windows because it's specifically designed to give you a complete system-wide view of performance over long periods of time (10's of seconds, to minutes)[2]. It's also the only tool that knows how to fully process all the events from the kernel and correlate them into something that makes sense."

Friday, March 14, 2008

SSDs in 2008: fast speeds (200MB/sec) over price cuts

SSDs in 2008: fast speeds (200MB/sec) over price cuts: "The graph below compares drive speed between current SSD models and the highest-end laptop drive available."

Thursday, March 13, 2008

DB2 9 XML performance characteristics

DB2 9 XML performance characteristics: "Use the TPoX benchmark to test the performance of a simulated brokerage scenario"

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

FOCUS: Management
Intel reorg leaves many with chips on their shoulders - Financial Week

FOCUS: <i>Management</i><br> Intel reorg leaves many with chips on their shoulders - Financial Week: "“Several levels of management have stopped listening to the people who are doing the work,” said Kevin Gazzara, a former program manager in Intel’s learning and development group who said he quit in sadness and frustration last year, after 18 years there. “Intel could have done it so much better.”"

Monday, March 10, 2008

Intel set to take leap in solid-state drives | Nanotech: The Circuits Blog - CNET Blogs

Intel set to take leap in solid-state drives Nanotech: The Circuits Blog - CNET Blogs: "Currently, the fastest SSDs from companies like Samsung approach 100MB/second for reading data. 'What I can tell you is ours is much better than that,' Winslow said. Hard drives typically read data at about half this speed.
'We will be supplementing our product line with a SATA offering,' he said. Serial ATA, or SATA, is an interface used in high-performance hard disk drives. Intel's products will be based on the SATA II specification that offers speeds of 3 gigabits (Gb) per second. Samsung is now shipping 64GB SSDs to Dell using the same technology."

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

IBM and SAP briefing on Project Jupiter

IBM and SAP briefing on Project Jupiter: "The configuration deployed in Project Jupiter was based on SAP Business Intelligence 7.0 plus BI Accelerator, and a full IBM infrastructure of IBM Blades, BI Servers, Storage, DB2, and IBM's General Parallel File System (GPFS); specifically designed and proven to handle huge parallel workloads This very large scalability and performance stress test project was concluded in December, 2007. The test ran queries against SAP BI DB2 databases ranging from 5TB all the way up to 25TB, via connected IBM BIA systems at Jupiter size with up to 135 productive blades"

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Optimizing the Virtual Data Center - GigaOM

Optimizing the Virtual Data Center - GigaOM: "What we need is software that continuously analyzes conversations between all servers, then automatically reconfigures the data center so servers that communicate more often are on the same physical hardware. Call it a Virtual Data Center Optimizer."

Friday, February 08, 2008

Java darling Azul Systems is fluxed | The Register

Java darling Azul Systems is fluxed The Register: "Azul crafts server appliances based around its own multi-core chips. The systems - 768 processors and 768GB of memory - scream through Java code. The start-up has also been leading the push around transactional memory."

Wednesday, February 06, 2008

the.codist{} - Writing Multithreaded Code Is Like Juggling Chainsaws

the.codist{} - Writing Multithreaded Code Is Like Juggling Chainsaws: "In job interviews, a popular question is 'what is the major problem you have to solve in writing multithreaded code?' Generally, if they have read a little about it, they often say 'avoiding deadlocks'. If they have done a bit of thread coding, maybe in Swing, they might say 'protected shared data'. Only the truly experienced in complex threaded coding will say 'avoiding doing nothing'."

How To Read C Declarations - USF Computer Science 652 - Programming Languages - ANTLR Project

How To Read C Declarations - USF Computer Science 652 - Programming Languages - ANTLR Project: "The rule goes like this:
Start at the variable name (or innermost construct if no identifier
is present. Look right without jumping over a right parenthesis; say
what you see. Look left again without jumping over a parenthesis; say
what you see. Jump out a level of parentheses if any. Look right;
say what you see. Look left; say what you see. Continue in this
manner until you say the variable type or return type."

Friday, February 01, 2008

Bloglines | My Feeds (2175) (1)

Bloglines | My Feeds (2175) (1): "What strikes me from reading the Nexus specs and that of the associated NX-OS operating system is how this new switch reminds me of an old mainframe. Nearly all services are virtualized, with multiple copies of the OS starting and stopping as needed. Everything is redundant, isolated, and intended for nonstop service. It is hard to imagine when, if ever, you'd even need to reboot. And while the Nexus supports network connections up to 10 gigabits per second, the really fast networking takes place in parallel between cards over a passive backplane. The Nexus 7000 is a data center in a rack, only with dramatically reduced cooling and power requirements which suggest to me that Cisco has a growth strategy for this architecture that will, over time, make it look more and more like a big computer and less like a router. Throw on a virtualized AIX or Solaris and the Nexus will eventually reveal that its true competition is less likely to be Juniper than it is IBM, HP, and Sun."

VMware Spruces up Desktop Offering

VMware Spruces up Desktop Offering: "VDM2 lets companies manage multiple desktop images running on virtual and physical servers in their datacenters. It takes all the computing required for an organization's desktops, laptops and thin clients off the hard drive on the edge of the network to virtual servers where administrators can manage hardware upgrades, monitor application use and secure data access from one central location.

Having the ability to capture 40 or 60 desktop images on a single server sounds great, particularly when these desktops can easily be moved around on virtual machines hosting other application workloads, but so far only the earliest of adopters have embraced desktop virtualization.

'It's absolutely in its infancy stage,' Michael Rose, an analyst at IDC, said in an interview with InternetNews.com.

Rose said few people are deploying server-hosted virtual desktops. 'No one is going to roll out 100,000 virtual desktops tomorrow,' he said. 'It's still very early.'"

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Tanenbaum-Torvalds debate, Part II

Tanenbaum-Torvalds debate, Part II: "The problem with distributed algorithms is lack of a common time reference along with possible lost messages and uncertainty as to whether a remote process is dead or merely slow. None of these issues apply to microkernel-based operating systems on a single machine."

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Derek Powazek - A Savvy Approach to Copyright Messaging

Derek Powazek - A Savvy Approach to Copyright Messaging: "So instead of using code that looks like this:

Use code like this:

And then just set the height to be the height of the photo itself, without the copyright statement. That means the copyright notice is there, just layered behind the page. If you view the image raw on the server (like this), you’d see the copyright notice"

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

VMware employs Stage Manager | The Register

VMware employs Stage Manager | The Register: "More practically, perhaps, Stage Manager has the potential to make thrusting Exchange 2008 or SAP's latest code explosion onto your data center a bit easier. Rather than setting up and maintaining armies of 'shadow instances' to deal with, say, the SAP roll out, customers can create virtual replicas of different hardware and application pairings. Through a slick GUI, VMware's software guides admins through every stage of this process, moving apps from the integration, test, staging and - fingers crossed - user acceptance phases"

Monday, January 21, 2008

IBM and SAP to develop joint software - Yahoo! News

IBM and SAP to develop joint software - Yahoo! News: "he product, codenamed Atlantic, will allow users to access SAP's Business Suite applications for workflows, reporting and analytics through IBM's Lotus Notes desktop software."

Sunday, January 20, 2008

AnandTech: The MacBook Air CPU Mystery: More Details Revealed

AnandTech: The MacBook Air CPU Mystery: More Details Revealed: "The CPU in the MacBook Air is a 65nm Merom based Core 2 Duo, with a 4MB L2 cache, 800MHz FSB and runs at either 1.6GHz or 1.8GHz. The packaging technology used for this CPU is what makes it unique; the CPU comes in a package that was originally reserved for mobile Penryn due out in the second half of 2008 with the Montevina SFF Centrino platform. Intel accelerated the introduction of the packaging technology specifically for Apple it seems"

Thursday, January 17, 2008

SAP Talks Up Business Objects Union

SAP Talks Up Business Objects Union: "Business ByDesign, the company's first on-demand, software-as-a-service offering for the mid-market, Kagermann said SAP engineers will pick the best features from Business Objects and incorporate them in one end-to-end offering so that it's 'more or less transparent' to the end user."