Download details: SyncToy v1.4

Download details: SyncToy v1.4

"In the Beginning Was The Command Line" - by Neal Stephenson | Mirror Site

"In the Beginning Was The Command Line" - by Neal Stephenson | Mirror Site: "In the Beginning was the Command Line
by Neal Stephenson"

My Way News - IBM to Open Islands in Virtual World

My Way News - IBM to Open Islands in Virtual World: "IBM Corp. is launching an ambitious marketing campaign in the hip virtual world 'Second Life.'
Big Blue has developed 12 'virtual islands,' and most will be open to anyone with a Second Life account starting next week. Other areas will remain private haunts for about 800 IBM employees - including the CEO - who have cyber alter-egos."

David Dagastine's Weblog

David Dagastine's Weblog: "Java 6 is finally here. Its our fastest, most reliable release and specifically targets out-of-box performance"

Mid-Price software the best...

Beware of mid-priced software :

With most kinds of merchandise, the middle of the price range is the best deal. For half the maximum price, or less, you get more than half the maximum quality. Here's my subjective impression of how it works for computers (where the $500 Wal-Mart special is awfully close to the $2000 custom system), cars, and precision optical instruments (which are labor-intensive):

But several recent experiences have convinced me software doesn't work that way.

"First, software is all design, not manufacturing. Once you've made one copy, almost no labor is needed to make a million just like it. So everything depends on the work done by one person or a small team. "

Techdirt: Can We Have Some Metrics On How Effective Metrics Are?

Techdirt: Can We Have Some Metrics On How Effective Metrics Are?: "In other words, in focusing so much on the 'page views' metric, the incentives encourage bad design. The companies that win the metrics game are the ones who are designed in ways that upset users, rather than those that make their service better, faster and more efficient. Normally, that would be a clear indication that the metrics are all wrong -- but very few people seem to care. They just continue focusing who is ahead of whom on the list -- and plenty of bad decisions continue to get made because of this blind allegiance to metrics."

Brief: SAP Charts Plan To Triple Its Customer Base - News by InformationWeek

Brief: SAP Charts Plan To Triple Its Customer Base - News by InformationWeek: "SAP, with 35,000 customers, wants to hit 100,000 by 2010, getting to where nearly half its revenue comes from companies with less than $1 billion in revenue. It plans to woo them next year with an upcoming version of its midmarket ERP suite, All-In-One, that's more customizable yet easier to implement. While big ERP projects can take several years to complete, Shai Agassi, president of SAP's product and technology group, talked last week about being able to set up ERP for a midsize company within seven days."

Memory chip breakthrough for electronic devices - Yahoo! News

Memory chip breakthrough for electronic devices - Yahoo! News: "Many expect flash memory to encounter significant scaling limitations in the near future. Today we unveil a new phase-change memory material that has high performance even in an extremely small volume.'
The new material was a complex semiconductor alloy that resulted from collaborative research at IBM's Almaden Research Center in the Silicon Valley city of San Jose, California."

SAP Hones the Oracle Dagger

SAP Hones the Oracle Dagger: "IBM, however, has recently formed a relationship with Ants Software, an in-memory database provider based in Burlingame, Calif. (Ants also has a relationship with SAP, but both Sikka and Ants CEO Boyd Pearce declined to comment on it.) "

DMTF - DMTF Releases SMASH 1.0 Specifications

DMTF - DMTF Releases SMASH 1.0 Specifications: "of interoperable management initiatives and standards, today announced the public release of its Systems Management Architecture for Server Hardware (SMASH) Implementation Requirements Specification and the SMASH Server Management (SM) CLP-to-CIM Mapping Specification,"

IBM Sues Maker Of Intel-Based Mainframe Clones - News by InformationWeek

IBM Sues Maker Of Intel-Based Mainframe Clones - News by InformationWeek: "On its Web site, Platform Solutions claims that it offers a 'new generation of compatible mainframe computers designed to meet the rapidly changing business needs of today's enterprise.' The company says its Intel 64-bit Itanium-based systems are fully compatible with z/OS and OS/390. IBM typically offers those operating systems for sale only with IBM mainframes running more expensive dedicated processors of its own manufacture. "

Swivel - Home

Swivel - Home: "Swivel is a place where curious people explore all kinds of data. "

Windows Tips - Internet Explorer - mredkj.com

Windows Tips - Internet Explorer - mredkj.com: "If there is a shortcut to Notepad on the desktop, delete or rename it to something other than Notepad.
JR wrote how to reproduce the problem, then solve it:
Open IE, go to any page, view source, works fine.
Now go to Start menu and navigate to 'Programs\Accessories', and right-click
on Notepad, drag it to the desktop, selecting 'Copy Here' when you let go.
You should now have a shortcut file named 'Notepad' on your desktop.
Go back to IE, view source, and nothing happens.
Go back to desktop and delete or rename the Notepad shortcut.
Go back to IE, view source, and it works again"

It's not always malware: How to fix the top 10 Internet Explorer issues

It's not always malware: How to fix the top 10 Internet Explorer issues

Recent Processor Architects

Recent Processor Architects: "But Olsen had doubts about Alpha. His unshakable faith in the VAX computer, which had turned Digital into IBM's most formidable competitor in the 1980s, made him reluctant to phase it out too soon in favor of Alpha. Olsen asked a team of Digital's top engineers to extend the computer's design for another generation--and he rejected Sculley's proposal.
A few months later, Apple announced that its new Macs would run on the PowerPC chip"

Sifry's Alerts

Sifry's Alerts

KCDX-FM - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

KCDX-FM - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Intel to add prestandard 802.11n to Centrino in '07

Intel to add prestandard 802.11n to Centrino in '07: "Following Crouch on stage was David Leeper, senior principal engineer for UWB at Intel, who continued to talk about UWB's benefits and uses. 'It is a compelling technology, because you can do video streaming at very low power,' Leeper said.
Leeper estimated a full-length feature movie could be downloaded in 80 seconds using UWB. "

XML.com: Hacking iTunes

XML.com: Hacking iTunes

Good Morning Silicon Valley

Good Morning Silicon Valley: "we have recently reached a consumer price on processing power of a penny per MIPS (million instructions per second). Intel's Core Duo running at 2.13 GHz costs around $200 at retail and can perform about 20,000 MIPS."
...
• In 1977, Digital Equipment’s Vax 11/780 was a 1 MIPS minicomputer, and the Cray-1 supercomputer delivered blindingly fast execution at 150 MIPS.
• A 1999 era Pentium III/500 delivered 800 MIPS of processing power.
• A year later, in 2000, the Playstation 2 pumped out an astounding 6000 MIPS.
• Current embedded processors (like the PXA900 in [the] Blackberry Pearl, or the ARM 1136 in the Nokia N93 ...) are capable of 2000-era desktop processor speeds — in the range of 1000 MIPS, depending on battery consumption.

...
It’s 2006 now." Saunders writes. "If the current trend holds true, and we can each carry 20,000 MIPS of processing power in the palms of our hands by 2012, what will we do with that power?"

Cooktop: The free XML editor for Windows

Cooktop:  The free XML editor for Windows

LinuxDevCenter.com -- Virtualization and the POWER5 Architecture

LinuxDevCenter.com -- Virtualization and the POWER5 Architecture: "POWER5 technology is micro-partitioning "

Free WebSphere wins over Java developers | The Register

Free WebSphere wins over Java developers | The Register: "It also plays against commercial software, including IBM's original WebSphere app server and BEA WebLogic.
'We see an emerging opportunity for people who want open source application servers - often that's small and medium businesses. It's a 'light functionality' option,' Jollans said. He added that IBM aims to generate revenue from WAS CE by selling support contracts, as it does for Linux.
WAS Community Edition is based on software which IBM acquired by buying Gluecode Software last year. Free to download and use, it takes the Apache software and adds components, such as web services, security, authentication, messaging and web tier clustering.
Jollans acknowledged that the commercial and community editions of WAS are not as similar as their names might suggest.
'They are different code bases - but they both implement J2EE,'"

Multivariate normal distribution - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Multivariate normal distribution - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia contains a reference to my paper..

Tree’s Blog » Why I’m Not Using LISP

Tree’s Blog » Why I’m Not Using LISP: "Only two open-source LISP implementations support Unicode: CLISP and SBCL. Both are good implementations, but neither work well on my Mac OS X machine. In particular, the FFI in the latest Clisp is busted, and neither seem to work with SLIME. However, OpenMCL does work out of the box on my G5. It works with the latest released SLIME. But it does not have Unicode support. Allegro supports Unicode, but I can’t afford that."

David Dice's Weblog : Weblog

David Dice's Weblog : Weblog: "The biased locking scheme in HotSpot arose from the following paper authored by myself, Mark Moir, and Bill Scherer. "

David Dice's Weblog : Weblog

David Dice's Weblog : Weblog: "The LoadLocked and StoreConditional primitives, commonly referred to as LL-SC, provide for optimistic concurrency control. "

BM Seer : Weblog Benchmarks: Facts & Questions from an Anonymous Source. High performance on UltraSPARC and Opteron desktops and servers

BM Seer : Weblog Benchmarks: Facts & Questions from an Anonymous Source. High performance on UltraSPARC and Opteron desktops and servers: "The Sunfire T1000 (1RU) has a SPECweb2005 of 10466 - that beats the 2 Dual-core Woodcrest-xeon Dell 1950 by 7% in performance. The Sun Fire T1000 draws only 188 watts during the benchmark run: www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/t1000/benchmarks.jsp#m
Why doesn't show their actual power consumption data - like they used to? A glimpse of Dell power consumption can be found in Dell's power configurator. "

Alexa Web Search

Alexa Web Search: "The most popular site on the Web, Yahoo.com gets whopping 28% of all Web visitors"

25 Greatest Science Books of All-Time - Discover Magazine - science news articles online technology magazine articles 25 Greatest Science Books of All-Time

25 Greatest Science Books of All-Time - Discover Magazine - science news articles online technology magazine articles 25 Greatest Science Books of All-Time: " 'There is grandeur in this view of life,' he wrote, that 'from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.'"

Bill Clementson's Blog: We'll always have Emacs

Bill Clementson's Blog: We'll always have Emacs: "Many lispers pine for the days of the LispM's and miss the unique development environment that they provided (and which, sadly, is still not equaled on any 'modern' OS today"

Five Tips for Smarter Playlists » davidgagne.net

Five Tips for Smarter Playlists » davidgagne.net: "Daily Listening
This one’s pretty simple. Give me everything where the genre isn’t Holiday, Speech (to avoid hearing JFK’s Inaugural Address in the middle of the afternoon), or Country. Make sure it’s not a video or a podcast and that it doesn’t have one or two stars. Of course don’t include anything in the “Slow Songs” playlist, and limit it to the 25 items that I’ve heard least recently. "

PRESS RELEASE Cray XT4 Supercomputer Debuts With Petascale Capability and Significant Backlog of Large Orders

PRESS RELEASE Cray XT4 Supercomputer Debuts With Petascale Capability and Significant Backlog of Large Orders: "The Cray XT4 supercomputer uses up to 30,000 AMD Opteron dual-core processors running a highly scalable operating system and interfaced to the Cray SeaStar2™ interconnect chip to provide unsurpassed scalability and performance. Unlike typical cluster architectures, in which many microprocessors share one communications interface, each AMD Opteron processor in the Cray XT4 system is coupled with its own interconnect chip. Providing six links in three dimensions, the unique Cray SeaStar2 chip uses its embedded routing capability to take advantage of HyperTransport™ technology and significantly accelerate communications among the processors"

PRESS RELEASE Cray XT4 Supercomputer Debuts With Petascale Capability and Significant Backlog of Large Orders

PRESS RELEASE Cray XT4 Supercomputer Debuts With Petascale Capability and Significant Backlog of Large Orders: "The Cray XT4 supercomputer uses up to 30,000 AMD Opteron dual-core processors running a highly scalable operating system and interfaced to the Cray SeaStar2™ interconnect chip to provide unsurpassed scalability and performance. Unlike typical cluster architectures, in which many microprocessors share one communications interface, each AMD Opteron processor in the Cray XT4 system is coupled with its own interconnect chip. Providing six links in three dimensions, the unique Cray SeaStar2 chip uses its embedded routing capability to take advantage of HyperTransport™ technology and significantly accelerate communications among the processors"

Intel Vault Program

Intel Vault Program

How to be a genius

How to be a genius: "Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2006, ISBN 052184097X).
The book essentially tells us to forget the notion that 'genius', 'talent' or any other innate qualities create the greats we call geniuses. Instead, as the American inventor Thomas Edison said, genius is 99 per cent perspiration - or, to be truer to the data, perhaps 1 per cent inspiration, 29 per cent good instruction and encouragement, and 70 per cent perspiration. Examine closely even the most extreme examples - Mozart, Newton, Einstein, Stravinsky - and you find more hard-won mastery than gift. Geniuses are made, not born."

Techworld.com - Moore's Law is dead, says Gordon Moore

Techworld.com - Moore's Law is dead, says Gordon Moore: "his law, which states that transistor density on integrated circuits doubles about every two years, Moore said this morning: 'It can't continue forever. The nature of exponentials is that you push them out and eventually disaster happens.
'In terms of size [of transistor] you can see that we're approaching the size of atoms which is a fundamental barrier, but it'll be two or three generations before we get that far - but that's as far out as we've ever been able to see. We have another 10 to 20 years before we reach a fundamental limit. By then they'll be able to make bigger chips and have transistor budgets in the billions.' "

Speed test for virtualization under way | CNET News.com

Speed test for virtualization under way | CNET News.com: "The Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) has launched a subgroup to come up with a benchmark to see how well computers handle a variety of tasks running on a virtualization foundation. Virtualization lets a single computer run separate operating systems in different compartments called virtual machines"

Does XML Suck?

Does XML Suck?: "Why XML is Technologically Terrible"

CESARI MARA VINO DI RIPASSO vintage 2001

Have the 2003 at $16 a bottle..

While the affection for Amarone has slipped because of one nation’s foreign policy, it remains one of the world’s greatest wines. There are bottles available of straight Amarone, a slew of Ripasso (the second-tier Amarone-style wines) and indeed great white Veneto wines from Soave, all at improving prices for the consumer.

Amarone della Valpolicella is a wine so expensive and time-consuming to make that it is difficult to find a bad example of it.

Ripasso Della Valpolicella

AMARONE

Masi, Amarone della Valpolicella Classico Costesera 2001 (90), €40

Zenato, Amarone della Valpolicella Classico 2001 (90), €36

Zenato, Amarone della Valpolicella Classico Riserva 2000 (92), €60

Monte del Fra, Amarone Della Valpolicella 2000 (90), €40

Sergeo Alighieri, Vaio Armaron, Amarone Della Valpolicella 2000 (94), €65

VALPOLICELLA

Sergeo Alighieri, Valpolicella dell’ Anniversario 2001 (91), €36

Sagramoso, Valpolicella Ripasso 2003 (88), €18

Zenato, Valpolicella Ripasso 2003 (89), €20

Tommasi Valpolicella Ripasso 2003 (88), €18

Technology Review: The Trouble with Multi-Core Computers

Technology Review: The Trouble with Multi-Core Computers: "The method that the MIT researchers use relies on a combination of software and hardware to make transactional memory better, says Microsoft's Larus, and there have been numerous designs that rely on software or hardware to varying degrees. 'It's not clear yet where the right line is' between using hardware and software to solve the problem, he says, but the researchers "

Double-checked locking: Clever, but broken - Java World

Double-checked locking: Clever, but broken - Java World

Java theory and practice: Urban performance legends, revisited

Java theory and practice: Urban performance legends, revisited: "The Java™ language is the target of a lot of abuse for performanceThe Java™ language is the target of a lot of abuse for performance"

Update...

Slight mod to template..

Calibration of Microprocessor Performance Models

Calibration of Microprocessor Performance Models: "Calibration of Microprocessor Performance Models "

Good Math, Bad Math : The "C is Efficient" Language Fallacy

Good Math, Bad Math : The "C is Efficient" Language Fallacy: "There's a good reason that Fortran is still the language of choice for real, intense scientific applications that require the absolute best performance that can be drawn out of our machines - applications like computational fluid dynamics."

Specialist servers prove their worth - IT Week

Specialist servers prove their worth - IT Week: "However, Azul servers are not cheap. Current Azul systems, based on the earlier 24-core version of the processor start at around $100,000 (£57,000) and can cost more than half a million."

The Four Hundred--Azul's Network-Attached Processing to Shake Up Server Market

The Four Hundred--Azul's Network-Attached Processing to Shake Up Server Market: "Moreover, these architectures do not scale very linearly, and the best anyone could do is to make a big 32- or 64-way SMP box like the current high-end server vendors already do. When Azul was talking about big, cache-coherent SMP scalability, it had a much larger box in mind. And that's why Azul decided to take the hard road and build a custom processor to do only those functions it would need, like garbage collection or running object-oriented programming routines, to support VMs and their application workloads. "

Dr. Dobb's | Multi-core & Multi-threaded: A New Era in Computing | May 10, 2006

Dr. Dobb's | Multi-core & Multi-threaded: A New Era in Computing | May 10, 2006: "Speculative threads enable the compiler to try all kinds of unsafe, aggressive, optimistic optimizations when generating the precomputation slice"

Shahin's Blog

Shahin's Blog: "For the record, the Azul design is a true SMP."

Azul to go 48-core with Vega 2

Azul to go 48-core with Vega 2: "The first-generation Vega processor it designed has 24 cores but the firm expects to double that level of integration in systems generally available next year with the Vega 2, built on TSMC’s 90nm process and squeezing in 812 million transistors. The progress means that Azul’s Compute Appliances will offer up to 768-way symmetric multiprocessing"

Multicore Systems @ SOA WEB SERVICES JOURNAL

Multicore Systems @ SOA WEB SERVICES JOURNAL: " On the Azul platform, such shenanigans are unnecessary because of our Pauseless Garbage Collection (PGC) technology that "

Wintellog

Wintellog: "reseaching new Windows Vista features that affect threading such as I/O cancellation, wait chain traversal, logical processor information, I/O priorities, transactional file system and registry, and more. "

SAP's Agassi Confirms Oracle Killer Plans, Dishes on SOA

SAP's Agassi Confirms Oracle Killer Plans, Dishes on SOA: "plans with in memory"

Sun Is Setting: Fool by Numbers - Yahoo! News

Sun Is Setting: Fool by Numbers - Yahoo! News: "The cash balance has certainly improved, but not by positive cash flows from operations. Over the past year, Sun has converted $4.2 billion of its long-term investments to cash, leaving only $700 million on that line. At least the company hasn't resorted to large secondary offerings."

Nintendo | Playing a different game | Economist.com

Nintendo | Playing a different game | Economist.com: "IF TALK of synergistic processing elements, parallel floating-point shader pipelines, vector units and 1080p high-definition video sets your pulse racing, you are probably looking forward to the launch of the PlayStation 3 (PS3), Sony's new video-game console, which goes on sale in Japan and America next month.
Most people find such technical trivia baffling, however. As a result, the video-games industry's relentless pursuit of ever more computing power and graphical detail might ultimately prove counterproductive. "

Press Releases

Press Releases: "AMD plans to create a new class of x86 processor that integrates the central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) at the silicon level with a broad set of design initiatives collectively codenamed “Fusion.” AMD intends to design Fusion processors to provide step-function increases in performance-per-watt relative to today’s CPU-only architectures, and to provide the best customer experience in a world increasingly reliant upon 3D graphics, digital media and high-performance computing. With Fusion processors, AMD will continue to promote an open platform and encourage companies throughout the ecosystem to create innovative new co-processing solutions aimed at further optimizing specific workloads. AMD-powered Fusion platforms will continue to fully support high-end discrete graphics, physics accelerators, and other PCI Express-based solutions to meet the ever-increasing needs of the most demanding enthusiast end-users.

“With the anticipated launch of Windows Vista, robust 3D graphics, digital media and device convergence are driving the need for greater performance, graphics capabilities, and battery life,” said Phil Hester, AMD senior vice president and chief technology officer. “In this increasingly diverse x86 computing environment, simply adding more CPU cores to a baseline architecture will not be enough. As x86 scales from palmtops to petaFLOPS, modular processor designs leveraging both CPU and GPU compute capabilities will be essential in meeting the requirements of computing in 2008 and beyond.” "

Outlook Series | Kirk Skaugen: Intel Opens Up Server Acceleration Technology

Outlook Series | Kirk Skaugen: Intel Opens Up Server Acceleration Technology: "“Intel QuickData Technology is a platform solution that addresses the computing overhead and system level bottlenecks associated with TCP/IP based communication as opposed to TCP Offload Engines which only address part of the problem,” said Michael Kagan, vice president of architecture, Mellanox Technologies. “Mellanox is embracing Intel QuickData Technology and will implement support for the technology in our adapters that will seamlessly fit into the total platform solution to accelerate TCP/IP communication.”"

Sun begins work on Niagara 3 chip | CNET News.com

Sun begins work on Niagara 3 chip | CNET News.com: "Niagara 2 doubles the total number of threads from 32 to 64 by supporting eight threads in each of its eight cores. "

: "perfmon2 interface for Linux"

redhat.com | Red Hat speaks

redhat.com | Red Hat speaks: "There are several other performance monitoring tools (Oprofile, valgrind, perfmon, strace, etc.) that are being worked on by Red Hat. Oprofile is one tool that required considerable work to function properly on all of the different architectures. This tool helps identify performance problems such as TLB misses, stalls, memory references, etc. One of the goals of the SystemTap project is to provide an integrated performance platform where all of these projects and future ones can be integrated. "

Cray, Sun, IBM support AMD's Torrenza platform | TG Daily

Cray, Sun, IBM support AMD's Torrenza platform | TG Daily: "Torrenza will provide direct access to an AMD64-based processor via a Hypertransport link. According to AMD, the technology will allow third party hardware developer to integrate their own silicon into a spare socket on a Torrenza motherboard and combine their technology with an AMD Opteron or Athlon CPU. Conceivably, this socket could house co-processors - so-called 'accelerators' - that focus on specialized applications such as physics, floating-point calculations, storage or graphics"

AMD's Winning Ways Underappreciated [Fool.com: Motley Fool Take] October 19, 2006

AMD's Winning Ways Underappreciated [Fool.com: Motley Fool Take] October 19, 2006: "And while we're on the subject of margins, AMD is installing more 300-mm wafer facilities to replace the old 200-mm tools, which should increase output and lower manufacturing costs significantly. In addition, the move from 90-nm to 65-nm technology is underway, with the first 65-nm products shipping this quarter, both from its own factories and from manufacturing partner Chartered Semiconductor. Smaller chip traces mean more chips per wafer -- again increasing manufacturing efficiencies -- as well as cooler, lower-power operation. These attributes are proving more attractive than raw processing power these days, especially to corporate customers who need to power and cool data centers that house thousands of processors."

Official Linden Blog

Official Linden Blog: "So, here’s what’s different under the hood: we’ve been all-AMD for years, but are moving from the Opteron 270 to the Intel Xeon 5148 - a low-power version of Intel’s new Core 2 Duo based server CPUs. This gives us better performance for fewer watts, while supporting our standard 64-bit OS image. We’ve also doubled the RAM per machine from 2GB to 4GB and moved to a faster SATA disk, which usually won’t make much of a difference, but should reduce the stalls sometimes seen by heavy regions during autosaves. Finally, there are fewer, bigger system fans, and power supply efficiency goes from 67% to 84%; power usage while running the sim process is about 175 watts, vs. 230 for a Class 4."

BM Seer : Weblog Benchmarks: Facts & Questions from an Anonymous Source. High performance on UltraSPARC and Opteron desktops and servers

BM Seer : Weblog Benchmarks: Facts & Questions from an Anonymous Source. High performance on UltraSPARC and Opteron desktops and servers: "Solaris zones have virtually no overhead. Sun ran has audited results on the SAP-SD benchmark using Solaris 10 on the Sun Fire T2000. "

The Clingan Zone

The Clingan Zone: " implementation is neither like VMWare/VirtualPC nor IBM Mainframes. VMWare/Virtual PC emulate hardware. IBM's LPAR abstract out the hardware but you are running essentially in a virtual machine. Zones are lighter weight, much more scalable and are a good choice for application consolidation. Both of the above virtual machine models require a running operating system per virtual machine. This is quite a bit of overhead. Solaris zones do not run a seperate instance of an operating system. From a developer (and to a lesser degree administrator) perspective it feels like its own seperate Solaris instance, but there is really only one instance of Solaris running."

James Gosling: on the Java Road

James Gosling: on the Java Road: "To get the best CPU utilization the apps have to be written to be multithreaded on a cluster node, and use MPI between nodes. This is the worst of both worlds because you have to architect for threading and clustering at the same time. This is pretty straightforward in the Java world because we have great threading facilities, but folks with bags of Fortran code have trouble (auto-parallelizing matrix code doesn't help nearly enough).
This is (almost) a non-issue for folks writing enterprise applications using the JavaEE frameworks because the containers deal with both threading and clustering"

/~colmmacc/ � Blog Archive � Niagara vs ftp.heanet.ie Showdown

/~colmmacc/ � Blog Archive � Niagara vs ftp.heanet.ie Showdown: "Sun�s own benchmarks have quoted up to 2500 requests per second, which we didn�t find particularly impressive. Our current box - merely a dual Itanium - can do 2700 requests per-second without much trouble. "

Sun Unveils the Future of Virtualized Datacenters - Project Blackbox: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

Sun Unveils the Future of Virtualized Datacenters - Project Blackbox: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance: "Project Blackbox starts from the world's most broadly adopted industry standard, the shipping container, and asks -- how can we most efficiently create modular, lights-out datacenters from this base? The answer? With one-hundredth of the initial cost, one-fifth the cost per square foot, and with 20 percent more power efficiency, we can deliver an immense multiple of capacity and capability -- anywhere on earth.'"
Sun Link

Sun Microsystems Revamps 'Galaxy' Line of Sun Fire(Tm) Servers: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

Sun Microsystems Revamps 'Galaxy' Line of Sun Fire(Tm) Servers: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance: "Sun Fire X4000 Server Family Powered by Next-Generation AMD Opteron(TM) Processors Are Fastest, Most Scalable and Energy-Efficient Enterprise x64 Systems on the Market "

Google projected to earn 25% of annual online ad revenue - Oct. 17, 2006

Google projected to earn 25% of annual online ad revenue - Oct. 17, 2006: "The online ad giant is projected to take home $4 billion of the expected $16 billion US market, according to eMarketer, an online marketing research company."

ASPCA: ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center Issues Nationwide Update: Raisins and Grapes Can Be Toxic To Dogs

ASPCA: ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center Issues Nationwide Update: Raisins and Grapes Can Be Toxic To Dogs: "ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center Issues Nationwide Update: Raisins and Grapes Can Be Toxic To Dogs"

Steve’s Q3’2006 Sabbatical

Completed a 15 day paddle trip "down canyon" – taking small paddle boats on the Colorado River thru the Grand Canyon from Lee's Ferry to Diamond Creek – for a total of 225 miles. Used the outfitter CanyonX, who I highly recommend.


Figure 1: Our little rafts at a camp … boats were about 14 feet long and has 6 paddlers & one guide who does the steering from the rear..

SAP's Agassi Confirms Oracle Killer Plans, Dishes on SOA

SAP's Agassi Confirms Oracle Killer Plans, Dishes on SOA: "SAP's Agassi Confirms Oracle Killer Plans, Dishes on SOA "

IBM JRD 49-4/5 | POWER5 system microarchitecture

IBM JRD 49-4/5 | POWER5 system microarchitecture: " POWER5 chip, corresponding to an increase from 184 million transistors to 276 million transistors."

Intel Pumps Itanium

Intel Pumps Itanium: "It's the only processor with over a billion transistors; 1.72 billion "

Intel finds itself on the front lines in Israel - Yahoo! News

Intel finds itself on the front lines in Israel - Yahoo! News: "Intel has a total of 5,400 employees at several locations in Israel. Qiryat Gat, in southern Israel, is home to a US$1.6 billion manufacturing plant, Fab 18. The Intel design team in Haifa, on Israel�s northern coast, produced the Pentium M chip and is responsible for the design of the company�s next-generation mobile processors"

Living in a hidden-fee economy

Laibson and Gabaix aren't conspiracy theorists. Their explanation for the persistence of hidden prices, laid out in "Shrouded Attributes, Consumer Myopia, and Information Suppression in Competitive Markets," describes a complex balancing act, in which companies must weigh the costs of educating consumers against the benefits of duping them. And their work relies on the insight, now common in what's called behavioral economics, that many consumers are far less rational than economists used to think.

Training..

least reinforcing syndrome (L. R. S.). When a dolphin does something wrong, the trainer doesn't respond in any way. He stands still for a few beats, careful not to look at the dolphin, and then returns to work. The idea is that any response, positive or negative, fuels a behavior. If a behavior provokes no response, it typically dies away.
Amy Sutherland is the author of "Kicked, Bitten and Scratched: Life and Lessons at the Premier School for Exotic Animal Trainers" (Viking, June 2006).

Intel's Core 2 Duo lives up to hype | CNET News.com

Intel's Core 2 Duo lives up to hype CNET News.com: "Intel's Core 2 Duo lives up to hype"

10 things you need to know about Intel's Core 2 Duo (aka "Conroe")

10 things you need to know about Intel's Core 2 Duo (aka "Conroe"): "About the lame code-naming convention: Conroe, Merom, and Woodcrest don't exactly call to mind 'speed' or 'kickin' performance.' Intel's desktop and workstation CPU design offices are in Oregon, California, and Texas, so it makes sense that the towns of Conroe (Texas) and Woodcrest (California) are represented in Intel's code names. And Merom? That's an ancient lake in Israel, so two guesses where the laptop chips are engineered. "

NewsForge | IBM unveils Lotus Notes on Linux

NewsForge IBM unveils Lotus Notes on Linux: "Lotus Notes on Linux was designed using the Eclipse framework, an open source application development tool. The upcoming 'Hannover' release, slated for 2007, was also designed using Eclipse technology. IBM says that same technology will be used for all future releases of Lotus Notes in order to provide multi-platform functionality."

Strange statues around the world | haha.nu - interesting findings over the net

Strange statues around the world haha.nu - interesting findings over the net: "Strange statues around the world"

Christos Kozyrakis' Web Page

Christos Kozyrakis' Web Page: "'The Common Case Transactional Behavior of Multithreaded Programs,' JaeWoong Chung, Hassan Chafi, Austen McDonald, Chi Cao Minh, Brian D. Carlstrom, Christos Kozyrakis, and Kunle Olukotun, Proceedings of the 12th Intl. Conference on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA), February 2006. http://csl.stanford.edu/~christos/publications/2006.commontm.hpca.pdfslides]"

Memory Wall -- McCalpin

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~mccalpin/MemoryWall2004-02-20.ppt

Inflection

“...a strategic inflection point is a time in the life ofa business when its fundamentals are about tochange. ... Let's not mince words: A strategicinflection point can be deadly when unattended to.Companies that begin a decline as a result of itschanges rarely recover their previous greatness.”– Only the Paranoid Survive, Andrew S. Grove, 1996

Multicore Systems @ SOA WEB SERVICES JOURNAL

http://webservices.sys-con.com/read/175384.htm: "Multicore Systems
Ready or not, here they come
By: Bob Pasker"

DataAllegro WDC benchmarks

􀁉􀁮􀁴􀁥􀁬􀀠􀀠􀁗􀁯􀁯􀁤􀁣􀁲􀁥􀁳􀁴􀀠􀁂􀁥􀁮􀁣􀁨􀁭􀁡􀁲􀁫􀁳 􀂮
􀁐􀁥􀁲􀁦􀁯􀁲􀁭􀁡􀁮􀁣􀁥􀀠􀁴􀁥􀁳􀁴􀁳􀀠􀁵􀁳􀁩􀁮􀁧􀀠􀁲􀁥􀁡􀁬􀀠􀁣􀁵􀁳􀁴􀁯􀁭􀁥􀁲􀀠􀁤􀁡􀁴􀁡􀀠􀁯􀁮􀀠􀁉􀁮􀁴􀁥􀁬􀀧􀁳􀀠􀁗􀁯􀁯􀁤􀁣􀁲􀁥􀁳􀁴􀀠
􀁤􀁵􀁡􀁬􀀭􀁣􀁯􀁲􀁥􀀠􀁘􀁅􀁏􀁎􀀠􀂮􀀠􀁶􀁥􀁲􀁳􀁵􀁳􀀬􀀠􀁉􀁮􀁴􀁥􀁬􀀧􀁳􀀠􀁎􀁯􀁣􀁯􀁮􀁡􀀠􀁳􀁩􀁮􀁧􀁬􀁥􀀭􀁣􀁯􀁲􀁥􀀠􀁘􀁅􀁏􀁎

DBMS2 � DataBase Management System Services�Blog Archive � DATallegro�s technical strategy

DBMS2 � DataBase Management System Services�Blog Archive � DATallegro�s technical strategy: "Like Netezza, DATallegro�s basic strategy is to stream data on and off disk very quickly, sequentially rather than randomly, resolving queries with full table scans. Unlike Netezza, which actually has chip-level optimizations, DATallegro�s most direct I/O acceleration lies in protocol software for talking to Infiniband storage systems"

DBTA 5 Minute Briefing: Data Integration - May 16, 2006

DBTA 5 Minute Briefing: Data Integration - May 16, 2006: "SAP Taps DB2 Viper as Preferred Database
SAP AG and IBM announced that the next version of the industry-leading DB2 data server--code named 'Viper'--will be the preferred and highly recommended database for mid-market SAP applications. DB2 Viper is the second in a series of DB2 releases optimized for SAP solutions. It represents the next milestone in a joint roadmap designed to help customers ease configuration, enhance performance and increase availability of their SAP applications running on DB2. Customers using the new DB2 offering will benefit from embedded capabilities like self-tuned memory, new compression technology, built-in high availability and advanced autonomic capabilities. 'SAP remains committed to working very closely with IBM to deliver tighter integration of SAP applications on DB2 so that our customers, regardless of size, can achieve greater application performance at the lowest license and maintenance cost on the market today,' said L�o Apotheker, a member of the executive board, SAP. 'We also look forward to having our mid-market customers benefit from one year of free maintenance if they select SAP's recommended and preferred database of choice.' For more information, go here"

Linked from - Madville.com - 100 percent undetectable Malware

Linked from - Madville.com - 100 percent undetectable Malware: "She said that the only way her rootkit can be detected is if AMD's Pacifica technology is flawed."

Computerworld Singapore - Dell servers to power Google Search Appliance

Computerworld Singapore - Dell servers to power Google Search Appliance: "Google has been cagey about the hardware that runs its Search Appliance but this week said it will start using Dell servers to power the product later this year. "

Unisys Announces Next-Generation Server Architecture to Target Growing Market for Scalable Enterprise Computing - MarketWatch

Unisys Announces Next-Generation Server Architecture to Target Growing Market for Scalable Enterprise Computing - MarketWatch: "Going forward, market research firm IDC expects the combined midrange and high-end segments of the worldwide server market hosting Windows and Linux environments to show robust growth in terms of customer revenue spent for new systems. Windows servers in the midrange and high-end segments, when combined, are expected to show a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.3 percent, according to IDC's forecast, while Linux servers in those segments, when combined, are expected to have a CAGR of 18.5 percent."

Intel announces Core 2 Xeons, talks optimization

Intel announces Core 2 Xeons, talks optimization: "shipping the new Core 2-based Xeon 5100 series, codenamed Woodcrest"

Net neutrality

Net neutrality is this:

If I pay to connect to the Net with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or greater quality of service, then we can communicate at that level.

Computerworld Singapore - Dell servers to power Google Search Appliance

Computerworld Singapore - Dell servers to power Google Search Appliance: "While revenue from Google's enterprise group are relatively small compared to advertising revenue, as of April, Google had 3,000 customers using the Search Appliance. 'They've outstripped most of the enterprise search vendors out there,' said Creese. He said most other search vendors are proud to say they've attracted 500 users"

The Universe of Discourse : The envelope paradox

The Universe of Discourse : The envelope paradox: "But this is the paradox: there is a strategy you can use that does better than breaking even. "

Aftermarket Pipes: this api can break

Aftermarket Pipes: this api can break

Technical leadership

17 items,

Becoming A Technical Leader - G. M. Weinberg, Dorset House, 1986
Facts And Fallacies of Software Engineering - Robert L. Glass, Addison-Wesley, 2003

VMware: New ESX rocks the datacenter

VMware ESX Server 3.0, which adds new virtual SMP capabilities for as many as four virtual CPUs and 16GB of memory for each virtual machine