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Vulcan Nomad

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

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

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

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

My Way News - Credit scores hit by card limits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

InternetNews Realtime IT News - Improving Virtual IT Management

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

Linux Graphics Essay - The Linux Foundation

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

Intel Denies Rumors of SSD Market Exit

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

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

Rackable Systems Unveils High-density Servers

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

Red Hat Partners With Amazon.com On SaaS | MSPmentor

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

Linux.com :: A virtual appliance primer

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

WikiAnswers - If one has precancerous polyp cut out is this considered a history of cancer

WikiAnswers - If one has precancerous polyp cut out is this considered a history of cancer: "Adenomas are quite common -- approximately 40% of men over the age of 55 will have at least one. Only one in every 200 adenomas will turn into cancer, but we don't know which ones those will be. On the other hand, all colorectal cancers arise from an adenoma."

Welcome to XtreemOS! — XtreemOS : A Linux-based Operating System to support Virtual Organizations for next generation Grids

Welcome to XtreemOS! — XtreemOS : A Linux-based Operating System to support Virtual Organizations for next generation Grids

Big fat lie - Telegraph

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

David Mandelin\’s blog » Blog Archive » SquirrelFish

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

Linux.com :: Comparing Linux USB flash disk distros

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

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

Stevey's Blog Rants: Dynamic Languages Strike Back

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

Windows Virtualization Team Blog : HYPER-V QUICK MIGRATION & VMWARE LIVE MIGRATION PART 1...

Windows Virtualization Team Blog : HYPER-V QUICK MIGRATION & VMWARE LIVE MIGRATION PART 1...: "HYPER-V QUICK MIGRATION & VMWARE LIVE MIGRATION PART 1.."

Vista T-states

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

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

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

Retro Forward Go!: 10 Most Historically Inaccurate Movies

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

Statically Typed :: Static typing for a static world

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

Azul Systems - Cliff Click Jr.’s Blog

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

Paul Edlund (Microsoft): RTO's and RPO's and SPOF's... Oh My!

Paul Edlund (Microsoft): RTO's and RPO's and SPOF's... Oh My!: "Recovery Point Objectives (RPO's) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO's)."

Dial D for Disruption - Forbes.com

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

The Green Grid: Content

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

My Way Finance

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

My Way Finance

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

A Man of Action

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

A Bright Shining Lie

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

A Reader's Manifesto

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

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