Elastic IT resources transform data centers - Network World

Elastic IT resources transform data centers - Network World: "Private clouds will need a meta operating system to manage all of an enterprise's distributed resources as a single computing pool, Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman said, arguing that the server operating system relied upon so heavily today is undergoing a transition. Virtualization became popular because of the failures of x86 server operating systems, which essentially limit each server to one application and waste tons of horsepower, he says. Now spinning up new virtual machines is easy, and they proliferate quickly."

Private clouds showing up on IT’s agenda - NYTimes.com

Private clouds showing up on IT’s agenda - NYTimes.com: "The corporations building their own private clouds include such notable names as Bechtel, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and BT, according to The 451 Group. The research firm found in a survey of 1,300 corporate software buyers that about 11% of companies are deploying internal clouds or planning to do so."

Qualcomm aims chip at tiny, always-on laptop | Nanotech - The Circuits Blog - CNET News

Qualcomm aims chip at tiny, always-on laptop | Nanotech - The Circuits Blog - CNET News

The new team was tasked to turbocharge typical ARM designs that were "maxing out" at about 500MHz, which isn't enough speed to deliver the experience that Qualcomm is aiming for. (Intel's Atom for Netbooks, by comparison, now maxes out at 1.6GHz.)

"There was a need to go do something beyond this. So, we went and got the architecture license (from ARM) and we have this team of about 50 CPU designers and we put them to task. So, four years and $350 (million) to $400 million later, we have a CPU that actually works better than the (typical) ARM CPU."

The piece de resistance of this strategy is the Qualcomm QSD8672 dual-core Snapdragon that features two CPU computing cores capable of 1.5GHz performance, and a host of other features includes HSPA+, up to 28Mbps download speeds, 1080p high-definition video, Wi-Fi, mobile TV, and GPS. The graphics core is based on Advanced Micro Devices' ATI unit's technology.

Qualcomm is able to achieve this relatively high speed (1.5GHz) for a low-power processor because it did more than simply get a license from ARM. "We went and got an architecture license from ARM. The architecture license was for their new instruction set, the V7 instruction set. There's a difference between getting an architecture license and just getting a core license. A core license means ARM does the (chip) core and they give it to you. The architecture license is different: the actual implementation is your own," he said.

The 45-nanometer processor will be built by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company

Handicapping cloud computing: The big picture | Business Tech - CNET News

Handicapping cloud computing: The big picture | Business Tech - CNET News: "In summary, we think Amazon's Web Services are not a major growth or revenue generator for the company. Instead, they provide benefits such as PR positioning of Amazon as a 'technology' company rather than simply (as) an online retailer. They also provide interesting projects for Amazon's developers, who otherwise would be primarily confined to developing the shopping platform. This, we think, enables Amazon to attract a higher caliber of engineers and developers than (can) its competitors, such as eBay."

EETimes.com - AMD moves to 45-nm process node with Shanghai

EETimes.com - AMD moves to 45-nm process node with Shanghai: "Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) moves to the 45-nanometer (nm) technology node with the launch of its new Opteron server chip, code-named Shanghai. AMD is the third manufacturer to reach this milestone after Panasonic and then Intel."

Salon Book Awards 2008 | Salon Books

Salon Book Awards 2008 | Salon Books: "A concept Walker calls 'murketing,' in which advertisers refrain from establishing a mass-culture identity for a product and instead encourage various subcultures to project their own meanings onto it, may be the most helpful model for understanding the precedent-busting campaign of Barack Obama."

EC2 Infrastructure - MindTouch Developer Center

EC2 Infrastructure - MindTouch Developer Center: "he migration of the wik.is cluster to Amazon EC2 (using RightScale) has vastly improved the architecture of wik.is. Here are some of the technical challenges we faced and how we addressed them using the RightScale/EC2 platform.



Here is a diagram of our overall infrastructure"

Comfort with meaninglessness the key to good programmers - Boing Boing

Comfort with meaninglessness the key to good programmers - Boing Boing: "To write a computer program you have to come to terms with this, to accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion. In the test the consistent group showed a pre-acceptance of this fact: they are capable of seeing mathematical calculation problems in terms of rules, and can follow those rules wheresoever they may lead. The inconsistent group, on the other hand, looks for meaning where it is not. The blank group knows that it is looking at meaninglessness, and refuses to deal with it"

Amnesia - Joel on Software

Amnesia - Joel on Software: "And there, on the video, I had to watch myself listening to Babak explaining the timesheet reporting plug-in, and the record shows that I appeared to understand what was being said to me, and, I’m afraid to admit, I appear to have given my tacit approval to the feature.

AHEM.

In short, I’m turning into one of those crazy bosses that approves things, and then gets upset when you do them. This keeps happening. I must be driving people crazy."

The Old New Thing : A bar on Microsoft main campus? What should we call it?

The Old New Thing : A bar on Microsoft main campus? What should we call it?: "A bar on Microsoft main campus? What should we call it?"

Materialized Views (MV) with MySQL

Materialized Views (MV) with MySQL: "A Materialised View (MV) is the precalculated (materialised) result of a query"

Overview of IBM DB2 pureXML | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services

Overview of IBM DB2 pureXML | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services: "IBM about DB2 pureXML (most of the IBM side of the talking was done by Conor O’Mahony and Qi Jin)."

The End of Wall Street's Boom - National Business News - Portfolio.com

The End of Wall Street's Boom - National Business News - Portfolio.com: "The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue."

Research@Intel · https://everywhere! Encrypting the Internet

Research@Intel · https://everywhere! Encrypting the Internet: "Using our software we are able to accelerate RSA 1024 from a performance of approximately 1500 signatures per second (OpenSSLg) to potentially 2900 signatures per second on a single Nehalem Core"

Linus' blog

Linus' blog: "because it's a reasonably recent Intel chipset, and some simple debugging facilities is the one thing I've been asking Intel to add to the core chipset for the last several years so that we could do some kind of sane tracing over complete failures where all other devices are unavailable and you have to power off the machine to get it back."

InternetNews Realtime IT News - VMware, VDIworks Focus on Virtual Desktops

InternetNews Realtime IT News - VMware, VDIworks Focus on Virtual Desktops: "Storage optimization

In addition, VMware View 3 offers storage optimization through its View Composer feature. This reduces storage requirements by up to 70 percent, Raj Mallempati, VMware's group product manager, desktop products, told InternetNews.com.

'With a typical VDI [virtual desktop interface], you need dedicated storage for each desktop, but with View Composer, you take one 'gold' image and create a bunch of clones, all of which share just the one disk on which the gold image sits,"

Bill Clementson's Blog: Clojure could be to Concurrency-Oriented Programming what Java was to OOP

Bill Clementson's Blog: Clojure could be to Concurrency-Oriented Programming what Java was to OOP


t's the mutable state, stupid. All concurrency issues boil down to coordinating access to mutable state. The less mutable state, the easier it is to ensure thread safety.
Make fields final unless they need to be mutable.
Immutable objects are automatically thread-safe. Immutable objects simplify concurrent programming tremendously. They are simpler and safer, and can be shared freely without locking or defensive copying.
Encapsulation makes it practical to manage the complexity. You could write a thread-safe program with all data stored in global variables, but why would you want to? Encapsulating data within objects makes it easier to preserve their invariants; encapsulating synchronization within objects makes it easier to comply with their synchronization policy.
Guard each mutable variable with a lock.
Guard all variables in an invariant with the same lock.
Hold locks for the duration of compound actions.
A program that accesses a mutable variable from multiple threads without synchronization is a broken program.
Don't rely on clever reasoning about why you don't need to synchronize.
Include thread safety in the design process-or explicitly document that your class is not thread-safe.
Document your synchronization policy.

Cult Help and Information - Mormon ancestors tell tale of 1857 massacre in Utah

Cult Help and Information - Mormon ancestors tell tale of 1857 massacre in Utah: "Mountain Meadows Massacre shadows each generation, but Scott Fancher said the public knows little of 'one of the single most important historical incidents' in the nation's history.

'Apart from the Oklahoma City bombing, this was the single largest act of domestic white-on-white violence in the history of the U.S."

Cool Tools: Eyephorics

Cool Tools: Eyephorics: "I bought a pair of Eyephorics. Zowee. At 2.5 grams, these glasses are ultra light and ultra, ultra comfortable"

I'm not beaten yet: Terry Prachett on the frustration and fury of Alzheimer's | Mail Online

I'm not beaten yet: Terry Prachett on the frustration and fury of Alzheimer's | Mail Online: "Does he fear death? 'No, it isn't death that worries me,' he says. 'Everyone dies. I'd just quite like to be there when it happens.'"

Ssds: SanDisk's New Flash File System Improves SSD Write Speeds by 100 Times

Ssds: SanDisk's New Flash File System Improves SSD Write Speeds by 100 Times: "SanDisk has developed a new file system for flash-based SSD drives, improving random write speeds by up to 100 times. The system, dubbed ExtremeFFS, should be coming to products sometime next year."

Oil leak - 2006 Meanstreak - Kawasaki Motorcycle Forums

Oil leak - 2006 Meanstreak - Kawasaki Motorcycle Forums: "That was my posting on Delphi.

The leak is NOT coming from the clutch cylinder itself... that would be hydraulic fluid and your frame wouldn't have any paint left.

1 - Pull the clutch lever in and secure it with zip-ties
2 - Remove the side cover
3 - Remove the 3 bolts holding the clutch slave cylinder and secure it as you would a caliper.
4 - Note the orientation of the plastic spacer under the cylinder and when you put it back together, put the gaps on the same side (I think toward the case, but I don't recall)
5 - If your bike has the same problem as mine, you will see a 'donut' seal on the pushrod. It should be in the cavity in the case. Carefully remove the pushrod, again noting orientation... it is cupped on one end and domed on the other.
6 - Gently place the seal against the opening in the case
7 - Using a washer slightly larger than the seal, press the seal into the case so it is flush. There is NO stop on the inside of the case, so if you push too far it will make for a very bad weekend. The washer also keeps it square.
8 - Grease the ends of the pushrod and reinsert it.
9 - Reinstall the slave cylinder and spacer, replace the side cover, and you're ready to roll.


On an older bike, the seal could in f"

Windows 7 to scale to 256 processors | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com

Windows 7 to scale to 256 processors | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com: "Russinovich noted with the dispatcher-lock roadblock removed, a second set of locks became the new focus for folks working on the Windows kernel. The PFN database inside Windows, which contains information on all of the physical memory in the system, was becoming another scalability bottleneck when trying to get Windows to handle multithreaded apps on massively multicore machines. With Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 (Windows 7 Server), Microsoft again broke this lock down into finer grain locks, Russinovich said."

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Platform Monetization is a Two Way Street: Lessons from Facebook and Sun Microsystems

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Platform Monetization is a Two Way Street: Lessons from Facebook and Sun Microsystems: "It is interesting to note that after a decade of investment in the Java platform, it is hard to point to what concrete benefits Sun has gotten from being the originator and steward of the Java platform and programming language. Definitely another example of a platform that may have benefited applications built on it yet which didn't really benefit the platform vendor as expected."

transistors per person

In fifty years, the world has gone from the invention of the first transistor to a
$150B industry which produces on the order of 10,000 transistors per day for every
human being on earth.

InternetNews Realtime IT News - Big Shifts for EMC Into Server Management

InternetNews Realtime IT News - Big Shifts for EMC Into Server Management: "EMC 'is piecing together automation and control for the infrastructure overall, in which storage is another part,"

PDC 2008 thoughts so far

PDC 2008 thoughts so far: "The crux of the Azure announcement really comes down to Microsoft going into web hosting, and while the cloud provisioning model is qualitatively different to your classic rackspace offering, it doesn’t demo any differently. The point of Azure is to make scaling transparent; transparency doesn’t demo well."

Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing - O'Reilly Radar

Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing - O'Reilly Radar: "f cloud computing is a commodity business, then the outsize profits that Hugh envisioned are not going to be there. This is a business that will be huge, but it may be more similar to the web hosting and ISP markets, which are also huge, but not hugely profitable"

LessWatts.org - Saving Power on Intel systems with Linux

LessWatts.org - Saving Power on Intel systems with Linux: "It's generally better to run as fast as you can so that you can be idle longer."

My Way News - Sun Microsystems swings to big quarterly loss

My Way News - Sun Microsystems swings to big quarterly loss: "Sun also plans to write down the value of its business, a sign of the company's deteriorating competitive position and vulnerability to the economic meltdown. Shares fell more than 8 percent in after-hours trading."

The Progressive Puppy: Ouch! That's Gotta Smart: Newspapers Crucify Palin

The Progressive Puppy: Ouch! That's Gotta Smart: Newspapers Crucify Palin: "'Out of nowhere, and without proper vetting, the impetuous McCain picked Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. She quickly proved grievously under-equipped to step into the presidency should McCain, at 72 and with a history of health problems, die in office. More than any single factor, McCain's bad judgment in choosing the inarticulate, insular and ethically challenged Palin disqualifies him for the presidency.'

Oh my... that's kind of harsh, wouldn't you say? Must be that nasty, liberal, elite, latte-sipping, argula-munching, East Coast, not pro-America media, right?

The New York Times, perhaps? Maybe, Rolling Stone? Vanity Fair? The Nation? Nope. Not even close. That quote was part of the endorsement of Barack Obama from the Salt Lake Tribune. As in Utah. As in the reddest state in the country. Obama has now earned the endorsements of almost 65 newspapers around the country, including some of the most conservative."

Intel SSDs RAID 0, A Case Study In Speed, Take 2 - HotHardware

Intel SSDs RAID 0, A Case Study In Speed, Take 2 - HotHardware: "ere was no question Intel's SSD flat out smoked the competition in the cost-effective, consumer grade MLC (Multi-Level Cell) SSD market"

IBM profit gains on software, services - MarketWatch

IBM profit gains on software, services - MarketWatch: "IBM noted strong growth in its software division. Revenue for the unit grew 8% from the previous year -- once adjusted for currency fluctuations -- to $5.2 billion. A majority of the business came from its middleware products, which includes brands such as WebSphere, Information Management and Lotus. This unit accounted for $4.1 billion in revenue."

CAP ... Palin's Non-Answer Strategy A Hit With Teens

CAP ... Palin's Non-Answer Strategy A Hit With Teens: "Pulling A Palin, or refusing to answer direct questions by stating one does not wish to talk about that topic and then offering an opinion on a totally different and often unrelated topic, is the new 'thing to do' among America's teens."

A comparison of virtualization features of HP-UX, Solaris, and AIX

A comparison of virtualization features of HP-UX, Solaris, and AIX: "A comparison of virtualization features of HP-UX, Solaris, and AIX"

Hoax Post: Bush's Comments

Hoax Post: Bush's Comments: "Said during an informal meeting with journalists in Rome, Italy, July 22, 2001:

'I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and what I believe - I believe what I believe is right.'"

Finding Lisp

Finding Lisp: "my own personal preference is SBCL on Linux and CLISP on Windows"

Who writes Linux: Corporate America | Computerworld Blogs

Who writes Linux: Corporate America | Computerworld Blogs: "Breaking it down farther, in the 2.6.24 kernel, it appears 13.9% of Linux had been written by people without a corporate backer. In the case of 12.9% of the contributors, the Linux Foundation was unable to pin point exactly who the programmers were working for. The rest, 74.2% was written by paid developers.
The top ten looks like this: Red Hat, 11.2%; Novell, 8.9%; IBM, 8.3%; Intel, 4.1%; Linux Foundation, 2.6%; independent Linux consultants, 2.5%; SGI, 2.0% MIPS Technology, 1.6%; Oracle, 1.3% and MontaVista, 1.2%. Just underneath the top ten, you'll find Google at 1.1%."

Stay on Target: Real Life Tron on an Apple IIgs

Stay on Target: Real Life Tron on an Apple IIgs: "Writing to random locations in system memory isn't generally a wise design practice."

Terry Pratchett: I'm slipping away a bit at a time... and all I can do is watch it happen | Mail Online

Terry Pratchett: I'm slipping away a bit at a time... and all I can do is watch it happen | Mail Online: "That’s the gift or the curse of our little variant. We have problems handling the physical world but can come pretty close to talking our way out of it so you don’t notice. We might have our shirts done up wrong, but might be able to convince you it’s a new style."

Linus' blog

Linus' blog: "The kernel summit was two weeks ago, and at the end of that I got one of the new 80GB solid state disks from Intel. Since then, I've been wanting to talk to people about it because I'm so impressed with it, but at the same time I don't much like using the kernel mailing list as some kind of odd public publishing place that isn't really kernel-related, so since I'm testing this whole blogging thing, I might as well vent about it here.

That thing absolutely rocks."

My Way News - SAP says business turmoil hurting its revenue

My Way News - SAP says business turmoil hurting its revenue: "SAP said it expects software and software-related service revenues for the July-September period to come in between 1.97 billion and 1.98 billion euros, or $2.66 billion to $2.67 billion. That is up about 13 percent from the third quarter of 2007, but SAP said in July it expected the figure to increase between 24 percent and 27 percent for the year"

My Way News - AMD to spin off factories in bid to save money

My Way News - AMD to spin off factories in bid to save money: "chip maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) (AMD) said Tuesday it will spin off its factories into a new joint venture with investors in the Persian Gulf state of Abu Dhabi.
The deal should shore up AMD's finances and let it focus on the design and development of computer chips. The new venture, to be based in the U.S. and called Foundry Co., will absorb AMD's manufacturing plants, including two in Dresden, Germany.
In conjunction with the spin off, Abu Dhabi's investment arm, Mubadala Development Co., will invest $314 million to more than double its current stake in AMD to 19.3 percent from 8.1 percent."

Table Top

Table Top: "Table Top Mountain, at 4,373 feet, is the highest peak in the area and its flat-topped summit is a familiar landmark."

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Data Debasement | PBS

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Data Debasement | PBS: "traditional database-centric software industry just in time for it to be declared obsolete."

Storage Startups Turn Cache Into Cash - GigaOM

Storage Startups Turn Cache Into Cash - GigaOM: "companies building out large-scale computing systems to deliver software as a service, and even computing clouds, are far more interested in better storage features than tweaks for servers"

Read me first: Taking your laptop into the US? Be sure to hide all your data first | Technology | The Guardian

Read me first: Taking your laptop into the US? Be sure to hide all your data first | Technology | The Guardian: "Encrypting your entire hard drive, something you should certainly do for security in case your computer is lost or stolen, won't work here. The border agent is likely to start this whole process with a 'please type in your password'. Of course you can refuse, but the agent can search you further, detain you longer, refuse you entry into the country and otherwise ruin your day"

IBM, Sun, Microsoft sink differences on VMs • The Register

IBM, Sun, Microsoft sink differences on VMs • The Register: "Language experts from IBM, Microsoft, and others have converged on Sun Microsystems' Santa Clara campus for a three-day workshop to find ways of delivering Java-like performance for Ruby, Python, PHP, and Scala on the VM that drives Sun's platformLanguage experts from IBM, Microsoft, and others have converged on Sun Microsystems' Santa Clara campus for a three-day workshop to find ways of delivering Java-like performance for Ruby, Python, PHP, and Scala on the VM that drives Sun's platformLanguage experts from IBM, Microsoft, and others have converged on Sun Microsystems' Santa Clara campus for a three-day workshop to find ways of delivering Java-like performance for Ruby, Python, PHP, and Scala on the VM that drives Sun's platform"

Articles: The Subprime Lending Industry: An Industry in Crisis

Articles: The Subprime Lending Industry: An Industry in Crisis: "The growth of the subprime industry is largely attributable to the increase in securitization"

Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder | Technology | guardian.co.uk: "'It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign,' he told The Guardian.

'Somebody is saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it's very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true.'"

Even Heavy-Metal Fans Complain That Today's Music Is Too Loud!!! - WSJ.com

Even Heavy-Metal Fans Complain That Today's Music Is Too Loud!!! - WSJ.com: "'Death Magnetic' has one of the narrowest dynamic ranges ever on an album."

Intel Thread Checker, Meet 20 Million LOC

Intel Thread Checker, Meet 20 Million LOC: "Wondering how threading thrives in the real-world? The enormous and highly threaded code base at SAS is an example of an application that benefits from the spelunking and debugging the Intel Thread Checker and Thread Profiler tools offer."

SAP on Microsoft Windows

SAP on Microsoft Windows: "SAP Supports Virtualized Platforms for Windows New!

SAP supports virtualization on Windows 64-bit. In 2007, VMware ESX 3.x was the first available and supported product for virtualization. As of July 2008, also Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 is available. To find out how to get started with virtualization, see Virtualizing SAP Applications on Windows."

Bloglines | My Feeds (1784) (1)

Bloglines | My Feeds (1784) (1): "If you are managing an IT shop and can't write the code to render 'hello world' in C, html, php, and pull 'hello world' from a MySQL database using a perl script, then YOU are in the wrong job."

SaddleSore 1000/Bun Burner 1500 Rules

SaddleSore 1000/Bun Burner 1500 Rules: "he majority of riders will cover their 1,000 miles in about 18 hours (including all stops). The rides do NOT require you to speed. For every hour you are on a major highway riding, you get approximately 40 minutes 'off' rest time. Use that time wisely!"

TaoSecurity

TaoSecurity: "The four challenges to getting the job done can be summarized thus:



Will problem. The party doesn't want to accomplish the task. This is a motivation problem.

Skill problem. The party doesn't know how to accomplish the task. This is a methods problem.

Bill problem. The party doesn't have the resources to accomplish the task. This is a money problem.

Nil problem. The party doesn't have the authority to accomplish the task. This is a mojo problem"

BBC - Today

BBC - Today: "The most common response in most disasters is not panic, but rather the opposite."

people costs

An inflection on costs has occurred over the last two decades. People cost
dominate.
1995 2000http://www.cra.org/Activities/grand.challenges/goyal.pdf

Apache Geronimo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Apache Geronimo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Geronimo is currently compatible with the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 5.0 specification. When compared to other application servers such as JBoss, WebLogic and WebSphere, Geronimo's most distinctive features are its:"

Apache Geronimo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Apache Geronimo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Geronimo is currently compatible with the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 5.0 specification. When compared to other application servers such as JBoss, WebLogic and WebSphere, Geronimo's most distinctive features are its:"

John Resig - JavaScript Performance Rundown

John Resig - JavaScript Performance Rundown: "A new JavaScript Engine has hit the pavement running: The new V8 engine (powering the brand-new Google Chrome browser)."

H3RALD : Chrome: Google did it again!

H3RALD : Chrome: Google did it again!: "Google showed us once more that their “innovation” can be summarized with the following:
“Do not invent new things, just make them better”
They didn’t invent Internet search: they just made it better and smarted. The same philosophy applies to Chrome, too. Some examples? Sure:
They didn’t create a new rendering engine, they used an existing one
They analyzed Safari’s neat GUI tricks and implemented something even better.
They added an IE8-like domain highlight in the URL.
They got the Firefox’s AwesomeBar and improved it.
They got Opera’s Speed Dial and improved it.
They got IE8’s one-process-per-tab architecture and improved it.
They didn’t think of a Javascript JIT first, they just made it widely-available first.
They didn’t think about merging the address bar with the search bar, Mozilla announced it first, but Google released it before they did.
Safari 4 allows users to create shortcuts for their favorite web apps, but unfortunately it’s only out for developers…"

Ajaxian » JavaScript JIT: The Dream Gets Closer (in Firefox)

Ajaxian » JavaScript JIT: The Dream Gets Closer (in Firefox): "I’m extremely pleased to announce the launch of TraceMonkey, an evolution of Firefox’s SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine for Firefox 3.1 that uses a new kind of Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler to boost JS performance by an order of magnitude or more. [Emphasis ours.]"

Windows Administration: Taking Your Server's Pulse

Windows Administration: Taking Your Server's Pulse: "There are five major resource areas that can cause bottlenecks and affect server performance: physical disk, memory, process, CPU, and network. If any of these resources are overutilized, your server or application can become noticeably slow or can even crash. I will go through each of these five areas, giving guidance on the counters you should be using and offering suggested thresholds to measure the pulse of your servers"

Windows Administration: Taking Your Server's Pulse

Windows Administration: Taking Your Server's Pulse: "There are five major resource areas that can cause bottlenecks and affect server performance: physical disk, memory, process, CPU, and network. If any of these resources are overutilized, your server or application can become noticeably slow or can even crash. I will go through each of these five areas, giving guidance on the counters you should be using and offering suggested thresholds to measure the pulse of your servers"

InternetNews Realtime IT News - IBM's Got SSD in Its Storage Sights

InternetNews Realtime IT News - IBM's Got SSD in Its Storage Sights: "New research from IBM claims the vendor's solid state disk (SSD) storage efforts are attaining greater performance capabilities than competitor's to the tune of a 250 percent increase in input/output per second in current data-transfer rates, while proving more cost efficient.
IBM's (NYSE: IBM) SSD storage research, code-named 'Project QuickSilver' is an 'ongoing cross-IBM initiative' for developing integrated information infrastructures, according to a press statement"

PowerShell Team Blog

PowerShell Team Blog: "On Monday VMWare offically released their PowerShell cmdlets in a ship vehicle called the VMWare Infrastructure (VI) Toolkit"

How Fast Can Humans Go? - TIME

How Fast Can Humans Go? - TIME: "Bolt's step was 1 ft. longer, allowing him to cover 100m in 41 steps. The other athletes needed, on average, 47"

What Is Google App Engine? - Google App Engine - Google Code

What Is Google App Engine? - Google App Engine - Google Code: "Google App Engine lets you run your web applications on Google's infrastructure. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow. With App Engine, there are no servers to maintain: You just upload your application, and it's ready to serve your users."

Latency is Everywhere and it Costs You Sales - How to Crush it | High Scalability

Latency is Everywhere and it Costs You Sales - How to Crush it High Scalability: "Amazon found every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales."

NBC's $1 billion Olympic "research lab" good, not great

NBC's $1 billion Olympic "research lab" good, not great: "BCOlympics.com served 72 million video streams as of this weekend in addition to 1.2 billion web pages. That's pretty darn good for only a couple weeks of coverage, and compared to the 2.2 million video streams total from the Athens games, it's downright explosive. And it wasn't just NBC that benefited online from Olympic coverage—Yahoo came out on top, too, thanks to a number of hot Olympic stories and photo galleries over the last two weeks, according to data from Nielsen Online."

ScaleMP pools x86 servers to vie with high-end systems and clusters

ScaleMP pools x86 servers to vie with high-end systems and clusters: "vSMP Foundation Embedded, which has been on the market for 18 months and can utilize up to 16 x86 systems to create a single shared-memory system with between four and 32 processors (or up to 128 cores) and up to 1 TB of RAM."

IDF: SSD Myths and Hardcore Gamers - Tom's Hardware

IDF: SSD Myths and Hardcore Gamers - Tom's Hardware: "IDF: SSD Myths and Hardcore Gamers"

WARNING: Satan is Using Olympics Volleyball to Get Young Boys to Masturbate!

WARNING: Satan is Using Olympics Volleyball to Get Young Boys to Masturbate!: "From this day forward any member of our congregation caught watching Olympic volleyball or even mentioning Olympic volleyball will be asked to pack their belongings and find a place to live where your filthy, sinful, disgusting, depraved masturbation lifestyle is accepted!'"

Motherboard Chipsets and the Memory Map : Gustavo Duarte

Motherboard Chipsets and the Memory Map : Gustavo Duarte: "Motherboard Chipsets and the Memory Map"

The mythical bitmap index

The mythical bitmap index: "you have that the compressed size of a bitmap index is at most proportional to the size of your table! Irrespective of the number of distinct values!"

Annals of Mathematics: Manifold Destiny: The New Yorker

Annals of Mathematics: Manifold Destiny: The New Yorker: "“To do great work, you have to have a pure mind. You can think only about the mathematics. Everything else is human weakness. Accepting prizes is showing weakness.”"

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"