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."