Green Datacenter Trends - Web Hosting Unleashed

Green Datacenter Trends - Web Hosting Unleashed: ". They accounted for 1 percent of all U.S. power consumption in 2000, 2 percent in 2005 and are predicted to hit 3 to 4 percent by 2010,"

Energy Matters: The Physics Definitions of Energy and Work

Energy Matters: The Physics Definitions of Energy and Work: "Work and energy share the same unit and it's measured in the SI(International Standard) unit of joule(J) which is the product of Newton(unit for force) and meter"

How to benchmark data center energy costs

How to benchmark data center energy costs: "One such method of measuring energy efficiency, developed recently by the Uptime Institute, a data center research organization, is corporate average data center efficiency (CADE). This calculation multiplies the efficiency of an organization's technology by the efficiency of the physical facility."

8 Predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2009 | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com

8 Predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2009 | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com: "3. Cloud computing will remain one of the biggest new Internet developments. The cloud computing story, as compelling as it is today for many situations, will only get larger in 2009. While the some of the bloom may be lost off the rose as some of the complexities and risks surface in early pilot projects, the cloud computing industry as a whole will grow in leaps and bounds as organizations seek to cut costs, manage growth/shrinkage, and shorten time to market. Expect major new products from the big existing players such as Amazon and Force.com as well as new entries from big firms and startups alike."

(866) 265-7685 / 8662657685

(866) 265-7685 / 8662657685: "This number is associated with the number 201-210-3618 to call 866-265-7685. It's a message that they are trying to reach me and it's important for me to call this number. I'm thinking if they want to talk to me, they should give me a hint such as what company is calling or what they want before expecting me to call them.
Caller ID: Global Vantage
Caller: Global Vantage
Caller Type: Collection Agency"

Possible Cloud Monitoring Tools | IT Management and Cloud Blog

Possible Cloud Monitoring Tools | IT Management and Cloud Blog: "Nagios
Most prevalent open source monitoring product.
Hyperic
At this point they are leading the pack with the most work done with (Amazon, Rackspace, and Mosso).
Zenoss
Not many cloud stories yet. Very sound monitoring tool.
Zabbix
I have used this product before and it is a solid tool. I am not sure if it’s a good play in the clouds. However it is written in C and might be better suited for performance (ala clouds).
OpenNMS
I need to research.
Ganglia
Very prevalent in the grid space. Might make a great candidate for cloud monitoring.
Collectd
Rightscale uses it as their monitoring tool. They seem to be making all the right moves, who am I to argue.
Ntop
Written in C. Might be a good tool for the cloud.
Monit
Needs research
Gkrellm
Needs research"

Home Page - KITE Keynote Testing Enviroment

Home Page - KITE Keynote Testing Enviroment: "KITE tests your site from a variety of locations worldwide by collecting data about the specific site transactions you want to study"

OpenNebula :: start

OpenNebula :: start: "OpenNebula is an open source virtual infrastructure engine that enables the dynamic deployment and re-placement of virtual machines on a pool of physical resources. ONE (OpenNebula) extends the benefits of virtualization platforms from a single physical resource to a pool of resources, decoupling the server not only from the physical infrastructure but also from the physical location."

The Cloud Computing Ecosystem: The Top 100 Cloud Players | SILVERLIGHT DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL

The Cloud Computing Ecosystem: The Top 100 Cloud Players | SILVERLIGHT DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL: "Cloud computing is an opportunity for business to implement low cost, low power and high efficiency systems to deliver scalable infrastructure. It increases capacity and expands computing capabilities without heavy investment in infrastructure, training or software licensing."

NVIDIA's Ion Small Form-Factor PC Platform, Live From CES - HotHardware

NVIDIA's Ion Small Form-Factor PC Platform, Live From CES - HotHardware: "At the Consumer Electronics Show this past week, NVIDIA was demonstrating a new reference platform for an ultra small form-factor multimedia PC and we should underscore the word 'ultra'."

Study: Half of developers plan to work on SaaS in '09 | InfoWorld | News | 2009-01-12 | By Chris Kanaracus, IDG News Service

Study: Half of developers plan to work on SaaS in '09 | InfoWorld | News | 2009-01-12 | By Chris Kanaracus, IDG News Service: "More than half of all developers worldwide on average are expecting to work on SaaS (software as a service) applications within the next year, according to a new survey by Evans Data Corporation"

Finding distinction in 'infrastructure as a service' | The Wisdom of Clouds - CNET News

Finding distinction in 'infrastructure as a service' | The Wisdom of Clouds - CNET News

To briefly recap the cloud market for context, commercial cloud computing has traditionally been seen as consisting of three distinct offerings:


software as a service (SaaS): Complete application systems delivered over the Internet on some form of "on-demand" billing system. Examples include Salesforce.com, WebEx, and Workday.
platform as a service (PaaS): Development platforms and middleware systems hosted by the vendor, allowing developers to simply code and deploy without directly interacting with underlying infrastructure. Examples include Google AppEngine, Microsoft Azure, and Force.com.
infrastructure as a service (IaaS): Raw infrastructure, such as servers and storage, is provided from the vendor premises directly as an on-demand service. Examples include Amazon Web Services, GoGrid, and Flexiscale.

What Randy is arguing, however, is that there is a clear distinction between the service ecosystem approach of Amazon Web Services (which he calls an infrastructure Web service) and a more utilitarian infrastructure-focused cloud service such as the ones many of the hosting companies-turned-cloud providers have produced, including GoGrid, Flexiscale, and Rackspace CloudServers. He calls those companies providers of "cloud centers."

Sublinear-time-Survey-BEATCS.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Sublinear-time-Survey-BEATCS.pdf (application/pdf Object)

ElasticVapor :: Life in the Cloud: The United Federation of Cloud Providers

ElasticVapor :: Life in the Cloud: The United Federation of Cloud Providers: "A fundamental challenge in creating and managing a globally decentralized cloud computing environment is that of maintaining consistent connectivity between various untrusted components that are capable of self-organization while remaining fault tolerant."

Platform virtualization - top 25 providers (software, hardware, combined) | MyTestBox.com - web software reviews, news, tips & tricks

Platform virtualization - top 25 providers (software, hardware, combined) | MyTestBox.com - web software reviews, news, tips & tricks: "n the article about cloud computing/utility computing/grid computing we’ve presented the most important companies which offers cloud computing hosting."

Engineering Windows 7 : Windows 7 Energy Efficiency

Engineering Windows 7 : Windows 7 Energy Efficiency: "The base hardware platform is really dictated by the system manufacturer. The customer gets the ultimate choice when they buy a system—the customer can buy a system with ultra-efficient hardware components or can buy a system with components that favor performance over power consumption. There are desktop and mobile PCs in all kinds of form factors, with varying capabilities and power consumption levels. Some mobile PCs have a normal 3 or 6-cell battery, while others have an extended 9-cell battery or another external battery that can be added to the computer. The challenge for Windows is to be energy efficient across the wide range of hardware in the Windows ecosystem. Looking at a modern laptop, here is where the power goes:

Laptop power consumption."

Enter The Dragon: AMD Phenom II X4 940 - HotHardware

Enter The Dragon: AMD Phenom II X4 940 - HotHardware: "odel / Processor Frequency: AMD Phenom II Processor Model X4 940 / X4 920 / 3.0GHz, 2.8GHz
L1 Cache Sizes: 64K of L1 instruction and 64K of L1 data cache per core (512KB total L1 per processor)
L2 Cache Sizes: 512KB of L2 data cache per core (2MB total L2 per processor)
L3 Cache Size: 6MB (shared)
Memory Controller Type: Integrated 128-bit wide memory controller, capable of being configured for dual 64-bit channels for simultaneous read/writes
Memory Controller Frequency: Up to 1.8GHz with Dual Dynamic Power Management
Types of Memory: Support for unregistered DIMMs up to PC2 8500 (DDR2-1066MHz)
HyperTransport 3.0: One 16-bit/16-bit link @ up to 3600MHz full duplex
Total Processor Bandwidth: Up to 31.5 GB/s bandwidth
Packaging: Socket AM2+ 940-pin organic micro pin grid array (micro-PGA) (backward compatible with Socket AM2)
Fab location: AMD's Fab 36 wafer fabrication facilities in Dresden, Germany
Process Technology: 45nm (.045-micron) DSL Silicon on Insulator (SOI)
Approximate Transistor count: approx. ~758 million (65nm)
Approximate Die Size: 258 mm2 (45nm)
Nominal Voltage: .0875-1.5 Volts
Max Ambient Case Temp: 62 degress Celsius
Max TDP: 125 Watts
ACP: *to be announced after launch
Future Memory Controller Note: Future 45nm processors ve"

Frequently Asked Questions - Mininova

Frequently Asked Questions - Mininova: "Mininova is entirely written by us (the admins) in PHP. It doesn't use any template or other system, because they are all too slow. Mininova is running on 4 webservers, 4 database servers, 2 search servers, one NFS server, and one load balancer (plus 5 additional servers for the forum, blog and the ads).

We use LightTPD as webserver because with a lot of hits it's just faster than Apache (which we used to run). Mininova makes heavy use of XCache to cache compiled PHP scripts. XCache is also used to cache blocks of HTML which are generated using information from the database that doesn't change very often or which are requested very often. As DBMS we use MySQL because it's free and fast."

Facebook | The Facebook Blog

Facebook | The Facebook Blog: "Today, we reached another milestone: 150 million people around the world are now actively using Facebook and almost half of them are using Facebook every day."

IBM Completes ILOG Business Events Planning Acquisition | Business 2.0 Press

IBM Completes ILOG Business Events Planning Acquisition | Business 2.0 Press: "IBM has just completed its $340 million acquisition of ILOG Inc. ILOG is a Pairs based business rules engine maker. The systems provide business intelligence and allow executives to make better decisions based on events analysis. IBM was interested in taking over ILOG as IBM felt the merger would allow businesses to process and monitor more complex events with the ILOG systems. More companies are beginning to enter the events planning space, including Oracle and Streambase."

Multivariate normal distribution - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Multivariate normal distribution - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Multivariate normality tests

Multivariate normality tests check a given set of data for similarity to the multivariate normal distribution. The null hypothesis is that the data set is similar to the normal distribution, therefore a sufficiently small p-value indicates non-normal data. Multivariate normality tests include the Cox-Small test [3] and Smith and Jain's adaptation [4] of the Friedman-Rafsky test."

Maddie: A Dog

 
A no-flash shot of one of our three dogs... What an expression..

NoMoreClipboard.com Medical Professional Information - DAVID STEWART MD - Orthopedist

NoMoreClipboard.com Medical Professional Information - DAVID STEWART MD - Orthopedist: "DAVID STEWART MD
Orthopedist

Practice Information:
604 W Warner Rd
SUITE C-3
Chandler, AZ 85225-2906

Business Phone: (480) 899-4333"

Man who snatched wig will have toupee | Oddly Enough | Reuters

Man who snatched wig will have toupee | Oddly Enough | Reuters: "Man who snatched wig will have toupee"

Architects Rule! : Real-life Dilbert manager quotes

Architects Rule! : Real-life Dilbert manager quotes: "'Teamwork is a lot of people doing what I say.'"

Dispatches from the Culture Wars: The Bush Presidential Library

Dispatches from the Culture Wars: The Bush Presidential Library: "A friend sent me an amusing email with some details on the various rooms that will be available at the George W. Bush Presidential Library. I'll paste it below the fold.

The 'W' Presidential Library will include:

The Hurricane Katrina Room, which is still under construction and will remain so for at least a decade.

The Alberto Gonzales Room, where you won't be able to remember anything.

The Texas Air National Guard Room, where you won't even have to show up.

The Walter Reed Hospital Room, where they won't let you in.

The Guantanamo Bay Room, where they won't let you out.

The Weapons of Mass Destruction Room, which no one has been able to find.

The National Debt room which is huge and has no ceiling.

The 'Tax Cut' Room with entry only to the wealthy.

The 'Economy Room' which is in the toilet.

The Iraq War Room. After you complete your first tour, they'll make you go back for a second, third, fourth, and sometimes a fifth time.

The Dick Cheney Room, in a famous undisclosed location, complete with shotgun gallery.

The Environmental Conservation Room, still empty.

The Supreme Court's"

TG Daily - Solid-state disks hit half a terabyte

TG Daily - Solid-state disks hit half a terabyte: "Toshiba said it will showcase a 512 GB solid-state disk (SSD) drive at next month’s Consumer Electronics show (CES). The 2.5” drive is likely to be the highest-capacity SSD when shown at the tradeshow, but the device will not go into production until the second half of next year."

Top 12 Tech Embarrassments in 2008

Top 12 Tech Embarrassments in 2008: "“Now I believe the time is right for us to bring in a new leader — someone who will build on the important pillars we’ve put in place and who will take the reins on the critical decisions our company faces.”"

Facebook Growth Explodes, Site Reaches 140 Million Active Users - NYTimes.com

Facebook Growth Explodes, Site Reaches 140 Million Active Users - NYTimes.com: "'the Facebook engineering team has been tweaking its use of memcached, and says it can now handle 200,000 UDP requests per second. Facebook has detailed its refinements to memcached, which it hopes will be included in the official memcached repository. For now, their changes have been released to github.'"

Google App Engine for developers

Google App Engine for developers: "Purchase dedicated servers or virtualized slices. Estimate necessary CPU, memory, disk space, etc. at each tier.
Configure a web server for dynamic content. Install Python and its eggs, Apache HTTPd and extra modules such as modwsgi. Configure and tweak each. Open appropriate ports. Listen.
Setup a MySQL database server and choose the appropriate storage engine. Configure MySQL, add users, add permissions. Tweak and optimize.
Add an in-memory caching layer for frequently accessed dynamic content.
Monitor your uptime and resource utilization with Ganglia and/or other tools on each machine.
Serve static files such as JavaScript, CSS, and images from a specialized serving environment such as Amazon's Simple Storage Service.
Turn your static server into an origin server for a CDN with points of presence close to your website's users.
Connect each piece of the stack, keep its software updated to avoid security vulnerabilities, and hopefully respond to all website requests in less than a second.
Dedicate work hours and expertise to all the above. Hire outside assistance if needed.
Don't go broke trying."

ongoing · What Sun Should Do

ongoing · What Sun Should Do: "Cloud · Here are some things we don’t know yet about “The Cloud”: ¶
Will it operate at the level of virtual hardware, like Amazon’s AWS, or at Platform as a Service, like Google App engine (and, de facto, much of the PHP community)?
Will buyers accept a certain amount of lock-in, or will they insist on zero barriers to exit?
Will those who deploy enterprise applications be willing to let their data offsite and into the cloud? If so, what kinds of privacy guarantees will they require?
Will those who deploy enterprise applications want to build internal cloud-flavored infrastructure?"

ongoing · 2008 Disk Performance

ongoing · 2008 Disk Performance: "As for the random-access number... words fail me. I’ve never seen numbers like this on any disk-like storage device ever; nearly 8000 seeks/second. This is into getting into territory that’s competitive with memcached and friends."

Article for all Marketing folks

PsycNET - Option to Buy: "Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.By Kruger, Justin; Dunning, David
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol 77(6), Dec 1999, 1121-1134"

NewsFactor Network | The Tech Trends To Expect in 2009

NewsFactor Network | The Tech Trends To Expect in 2009: "How will tiny cell phones handle all those new tasks? The short answer is they won't. New tools called Internet assistants will help wireless devices send demanding computing tasks via the wireless Web to other computers or to servers -- off in what's known as 'the cloud.' 'Someone is going to design a personal assistant -- by that I mean a suite of services, customized just for you, that exists on a server farm,'"

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"