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."

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."

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]."

Tom White: "Disks have become tapes"

Tom White: "Disks have become tapes": "Disks have become tapes."

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.

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."

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."

DB2 9 XML performance characteristics

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

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.”"

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."

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"