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

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

Our Electric Future — The American, A Magazine of Ideas

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

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

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

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

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

Neowin.net - AMD Readies Shanghai to Battle Nehalem

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

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

Intel, Facebook Sign Infrastructure Solutions Agreement - MarketWatch

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

FAQs about Mailinator

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

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

Bloglines | My Feeds (3516) (1)

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

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

Why does he do that?

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

IEEE Spectrum: Vegas 911

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

Shared nothing parallel programming - O'Reilly Radar

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

Interactive Map Shows Deadliest U.S. Roads | LiveScience

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Way News - AMD changes CEO as turnaround pressure intensifies

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

A Nickel's Worth: Optimizing CL

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

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

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

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

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

treatment of bundle branch block

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

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

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

Research@Intel · Unwelcome Advice

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

Corbin Motorcycle Seats & Accessories | Victory Motorcycles | 800-538-7035

Corbin Motorcycle Seats & Accessories Victory Motorcycles 800-538-7035: "Beetle Bags for Victory Vegas & Kingpin"

Motorcycle Saddlebags / Saddle bag bolt-on hardware supports easy on/off system

Motorcycle Saddlebags / Saddle bag bolt-on hardware supports easy on/off system: "Easy on/off Bolt-on Saddlebag Support System for Motorcycles"

Robert Hilliard's Website of the World Kawasaki Vulcan Nomad

Robert Hilliard's Website of the World Kawasaki Vulcan Nomad: "Trip's Kawasaki Nomad Page"

BetterExplained | Learn Right, Not Rote

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

Vulcan Nomad

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

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.'
advertisement
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.