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"

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"

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."

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."

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."

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.'"

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."

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"

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"

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."

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"

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."

Linux Love - Part 7

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hassle-Free PC - Forbes.com

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

Dan Weinreb’s Weblog

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

HP Tacks On More Virtualization and Power Tools

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

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

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

Phoenix HyperSpace Bypasses Windows With Fast-Boot Technology

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

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

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

Angry Richard's WebLog

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

CareerJournal | Why Silicon Valley Firms Are Rethinking the Cubicle

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

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

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

sfence instruction

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

TidBITS Entertainment: Amazon MP3 Takes on the iTunes Store

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

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

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

Slashdot | Intel Chief Evangelist Comments on Linux Scheduler

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

Hassle-Free PC - Forbes.com

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

EETimes.com - Analyst cuts AMD forecast amid MPU snags

EETimes.com - Analyst cuts AMD forecast amid MPU snags

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

Really funny...

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

The dumbing-down of programming

Bomb me--please!

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

So:
Common Lisp tutorial

Virtualization Brings New Data Recovery Concerns, Benefits

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

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

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

Coyote Blog: More Vista Suckage

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

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

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

Gamasutra - The Top 10 Myths of Video Game Optimization

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

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

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

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

stevenf.com: Bugs Are Magic Tricks

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

Stevey's Blog Rants

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

Quad socket Intel Caneland platform benchmarked

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

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

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

Virtual PC Guy's WebLog : Detecting Microsoft virtual machines

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

Quote on bottleneck on Virtual Machines:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best of the Barcelona vs. Xeon reviews:

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

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

Microsoft Virtual Hard Disk FAQ

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

AMD Pins Hopes on Barcelona Quad-Core Chip

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

Apple vs. Intel

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

versus:

To all Itanium customers:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Tortellini Intel CEO

My Way News - Major Computer Viruses Over 25 Years

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

Linux: The Really Fair Scheduler | KernelTrap

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

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

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

Using a hypervisor to reconcile GPL and proprietary embedded code

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

Electric slide for tech industry? | Tech News on ZDNet

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

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

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

Metaphor of the Branch Predict

"branch predict".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Dread of Threads

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

HotHardware - More AMD G3MX Details Emerge

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

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

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

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

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

GigaOM Why Virtualization Is Hot: Money «

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

Percent of you ancestor woman: 2to1 over male

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

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

How to survive climbing Mount Everest | COSMOS magazine

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

Death/Success = 10%

IBM Unveils Information Server Blade to Help Enterprises Manage Information Overload

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

Blocking Unwanted Parasites with a Hosts File

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

Justin Tumlison

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

kaourantin.net

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

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

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

Bloglines | My Feeds (3421) (1)

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

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

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

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

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

Good website with early hits...

Joe Duffy's Weblog

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

Traditional American Music

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

Here is my list..

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

Here is the itunes playlist:

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

Pipelines, Latencies and Unrolling

Apple documentation!

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

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

Ain't misbehaving

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

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

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

Students Trade Bibles for Porn - XBIZ.com

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Kona officials fear shark being lured to harbor

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

Sendto Blogger google toolbar broken - Google Search

Sendto Blogger google toolbar broken - Google Search

Build high-performance apps for multicore processors

Build high-performance apps for multicore processors

Best of TechEd Winners!

Best of TechEd Winners!

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


Architecture category winner: Appistry Enterprise Application Fabric

Business Applications category winner: Nintex SmartLibrary

Business Intelligence category winner: SoftArtisans OfficeWriter

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

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

Developer Tools and Technologies category winner: Altova XMLSpy

Management category winner: Microsoft System Center Essentials 2007

Mobility category winner: Zenprise for BlackBerry

Office System category winner: KnowledgeLake Capture

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

SharePoint category winner: Quest Software Site Administrator for SharePoint

Unified Communication category winner: Gold Systems' Password Reset

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

Windows Clients category winner: Microsoft Windows PowerShell

Windows Server Infrastructure category winner: InovaWave DXtreme for Windows



Special Recognition Notable Product winner: Idokorro Mobile Admin

Special Recognition Most Innovative Product winner: RapidMind Development Platform

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Mercury Rising

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

Build high-performance apps for multicore processors

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