A new research paper takes a look at how a common high-performance computing benchmark performs on a number of multicore, multisocket platforms, including Intel’s Clovertown, AMD’s Opteron, Sun’s Niagara2, and IBM’s Cell. Here’s a sneak peek: bandwidth-starved systems don’t do very well.
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eldavojohn writes to tell us that Tilera has released a Linux-based development kit for their 64-core system on a chip. “The Tile64 is based on a proprietary VLIW (very long instruction word) architecture, on which a MIPS-like RISC architecture is implemented in microcode. A hypervisor enables each core to run its own instance of Linux, or alternatively the whole chip can run Tilera’s 64-way SMP (symmetrical multiprocessing) Linux implementation. An “iMesh” switching interconnect, developed by Tilera’s founder, MIT professor and serial entrepreneur Dr. Anant Agarwal, is said to eliminate the centralized bus intersection that limited scalability in previous multicore designs.”
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While the AOL/Time Warner merger has gone down in the record books as one of the worst mergers ever, I still contend that it could have gone much better if stronger management had been in place. Most specifically, there were obvious synergies between aspects of Time Warner and AOL — but petty squabbles and turf wars kept most of those synergies from being realized. The most glaring and obvious of these was Time Warner Cable (or RoadRunner) and AOL. Both offered internet access, and it seemed perfectly reasonable to merge the two properties, and use RoadRunner to upgrade all those dialup users onto broadband, and then keep them engaged with all the Time Warner content. Of course, the Time Warner content people freaked out about content on the internet of course, so that would never have worked — but the failure to link up RoadRunner and AOL never made any sense.
In fact, the two services began aggressively competing with each other. Then, after three years, someone finally realized that maybe the two should work together and made an announcement saying so. Of course… an announcement without action is worthless. So, another year goes by and another exec trots out with an announcement that the two divisions will work closely again. And again… nothing. Give it almost another year… and yet another announcement. Sense a pattern? In the end, the two groups never actually did combine, and with today’s announcement that Time Warner is selling off the cable business entirely, it just puts an exclamation point on all these years of keeping the two businesses separate. Of course, in selling off Time Warner Cable, it will also likely lead to speculation that the company will sell off AOL (or merge it with Yahoo — remember that plan?) as well — though, as an entirely separate entity.
While I tend to be skeptical of mergers based on vague “synergies,” it’s still rather amazing that in all this time, no one at Time Warner ever got these two divisions together — and now the company may end up selling each off separately. In the end, this was a deal that only worked out for the investment bankers. Remember, they love to convince companies to consolidate one year and diversify the next — because they make money on both transactions.
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A recent federal court ruling does not portend the death of RIAA copyright infringement lawsuits targeting Kazaa users. In the first ruling of its kind, a judge says Kazaa users could be liable for copyright violations if RIAA investigators download music from a Kazaa user’s public share-folder.
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Canadian law professor Michael Geist gave a talk this week taking on five copyright myths trotted out to argue for stronger IP protection, tighter anticircumvention rules, and stiffer penalties. Nonsense, says Geist; what we need is more flexibility, not less.
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Engadget has had a chance to play around with Psystar’s Open Computer and has a few things to say about the controversial machine. “Okay, so we’ve been playing with the Psystar Open Computer for a few hours now, and we’ve formed some early impressions and put together a short video of it in action. We haven’t really tried to stress the system yet, but based on our other experiences with OSx86 machines, we’re expecting things to generally go smoothly. That said, there are some definite rough patches and issues, all mostly having to do with the fact that OS X isn’t really built for this hardware.”
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A US Congressional Representative has introduced a new bill that would make it illegal for US tech companies to assist any foreign country in attempting to censor the internet or in handing over data on users to the government except for “legitimate foreign law enforcement purposes.” This is targeted at companies such as Cisco, which has supplied some of the technology used in the Great Firewall of China, as well as Yahoo! which got into some hot water for supposedly handing over information to Chinese authorities on some critics of the Chinese government.
While the goal is certainly admirable, the implementation is troublesome. First, it’s putting liability on tech companies for something they may not have much knowledge about (how countries are going to use the tech or whether the info is needed for “legitimate foreign law enforcement purposes.”). Furthermore, where this is really hypocritical is that the law apparently does not apply to the US as well. While certainly not as bad as some other nations, the US has certainly requested data for questionable reasons, and has also been seen trying to censor parts of the internet at times. While I’m certainly not equating the efforts of US politicians to filter the internet with massive operations such as those seen in China, implementing this type of legislation does seem a bit hypocritical.
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As the school year winds down, the RIAA is sending out a flood of copyright infringement notifications to schools. The group says its business as usual, but campus IT workers tell Ars that the increased workload due to the notices is “daunting.”
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Electrical systems around the world are varied and mysterious. Learn which adapters you’ll need to pack to keep your iPod rocking from Bangkok to Bucharest in Wired.com’s How-To Wiki.
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1964: In the predawn hours of May Day, two professors at Dartmouth College run the first program in their new language, Basic.
Mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz had been trying to make computing more accessible to their undergraduate students. One problem was that available computing languages like Fortran and Algol were so complex that you really had to be a professional to use them.
So the two professors started writing easy-to-use programming languages in 1956. First came Dartmouth Simplified Code, or Darsimco. Next was the Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment, or Dope, which was too simple to be of much use. But Kemeny and Kurtz used what they learned to craft the Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, or Basic, starting in 1963.
The college’s General Electric GE-225 mainframe started running a Basic compiler at 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964. The new language was simple enough to use, and powerful enough to make it desirable.
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Hans Reiser couldn’t stop talking in court, but he’s much more taciturn now that he’s been convicted of murdering his wife.
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Every city has its urban eccentrics — those can’t-miss characters who seem to make full-time jobs out of being seen (and sometimes heard) around town.
From bare-chested marvels to perpetual protesters with crazy signs, these colorful people are being turned into unlikely internet celebrities by a new breed of local websites that use social networks, citizen reporting, mapping mashups and a healthy dose of humor to chronicle their subjects’ activities.
In Manhattan, the
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The Pro-IP Act, which creates more severe penalties for copyright infringement, has been unanimously approved by the House Judiciary Committee.
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theodp writes "I don’t want my GTV. Excerpts from a newly-published Google patent application for
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The suit of armor is a heavy draw, but a soulful performance brings Marvel Comics’ Golden Avenger to life in a soaring superhero flick.
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Lucas123 writes “The same Xerox lab that brought us Ethernet, the GUI and the mouse has demonstrated paper that can be reused after printed text automatically deletes itself from its surface in a day. Instead of trashing or recycling after one use, a single piece of paper can be reused up to 100 times. ‘The paper contains specially coded molecules that create a print after being exposed to ultraviolet light emitted from a thin bar in a printer. The ultraviolet bar itself is very small, so it can be used in mobile printers. The technology could also be useful for network printing.’”
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An MIT professor and his students have calculated the minimum energy usage and carbon footprint of Americans, effectively revealing how much energy is required by the current American way of life.
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The notoriously confrontational church launches a channel on the video-sharing site. Just don’t expect to comment on the clips.
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esocid writes “Researchers at HP Labs have solved a decades-old mystery by proving the existence of a fourth basic element in integrated circuits that could make it possible to develop computers that turn on and off like an electric light. The memristor — short for memory resistor — could make it possible to develop far more energy-efficient computing systems with memories that retain information even after the power is off, so there’s no wait for the system to boot up after turning the computer on. It may even be possible to create systems with some of the pattern-matching abilities of the human brain. Leon Chua, a distinguished faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley, initially theorized about and named the element in an academic paper published 37 years ago. Chua argued that the memristor was the fourth fundamental circuit element, along with the resistor, capacitor and inductor, and that it had properties that could not be duplicated by any combination of the other three elements.”
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The old “accepted wisdom” was that folks in Europe communicated via SMS text messaging, while folks in the US were mainly doing internet-based instant messaging. There were a variety of reasons for why things developed this way, but it was a generally accurate statement for a while. However, even early on, some of us began wondering what would happen as the two worlds started to merge. That is, as mobile phones became more powerful and acted more like handheld computers, wouldn’t users start to realize that instant messaging would save them a lot of money in terms of data costs. Especially with advanced phones like the iPhone, it seemed inevitable that “expensive” SMS would start to run into trouble. And, in fact, that appears to be happening. A new study in the UK (where SMS text messaging is huge) has shown that, as people start using instant messaging applications, their use of SMS text messaging drops significantly. The one exception, by the way, is with older users, who are comfortable enough with SMS and don’t seem as interested in using IM on their phones. Either way, this has to be a concern for mobile operators who have a tendency to assume that high-priced services will always remain high-priced and in high demand.
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Hugh Pickens writes “Nick Bostrom has an interesting interpretation on why the failure of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) for the past half-century is good news and why the discovery of life on Mars could foretell our doom. Bostrom postulates a ‘Great Filter,’ which can be thought of as a probability barrier and consists of one or more evolutionary transitions or steps that must be traversed at great odds in order for an Earth-like planet to produce a civilization capable of exploring distant solar systems.”
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A D.C. advocacy group called Women’s Voices, Women’s Vote stands accused of waging an illegal voter-suppression campaign, after voters in predominantly black districts in North Carolina began receiving automated phone calls implying that they hadn’t properly registered to vote in next Tuesday’s Democratic primary.
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General Motors’ vice chairman Bob Lutz says big cars and trucks aren’t going anywhere, but at least they’ll be electric.
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Several readers wrote to tell us about one of the next major projects to enter the Google-verse. We already have pretty views of the Earth and the Sky, the next target is apparently a 3D map of the oceans. “The tool — for now called Google Ocean, the sources say, though that name could change — is expected to be similar to other 3D online mapping applications. People will be able to see the underwater topography, called bathymetry; search for particular spots or attractions; and navigate through the digital environment by zooming and panning. (The tool, however, is not to be confused with the “Google Ocean” project by France-based Magic Instinct Software that uses Google Earth as a visualization tool for marine data.)”
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IT engineers with a bent for home improvement are taking their energy monitoring onto the Internet. One house Twitters about its energy usage while another broadcasts to its human overlords about what’s in the fridge.
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AlexGr notes an article by Jeff Gould where he says ” Sometimes I wonder whether Ubuntu is really an open source software company any more. Yes, yes, I realize Ubuntu is not a company at all but a free Linux distribution, GPL’d and open source by definition. But still, the Ubuntu distro is sponsored by a traditional for profit company. The answer that has recently emerged to this question is, “yes and no.” Yes, of course, because Ubuntu’s web site promises that the distro “will always be free of charge, including enterprise releases and security updates.” But Ubuntu the enterprise ecosystem — understood as the collection of desktops and servers running Ubuntu in a given organization — is not.”
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The big, burly teeth of an early branch on the human family tree turn out to have mostly nibbled on fruit, highlighting a lesson for biologists that the meaning of an adaptation isn’t always obvious.
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Instructions found online on how to kill oneself by extracting hydrogen sulphide out of bath salts are responsible for close to 50 suicide attempts in Japan over the last month. The police have asked ISPs to remove the information from the Internet, although the Internal Affairs Minister says that interfering with these web sites would restrict people’s freedom of expression.
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Tracy Mayor writes “Is a gig on an IT help desk really the career death it’s always assumed to be? Not always, this Computerworld writer found out, just don’t get comfy and stay too long. Added bonus: salary figures for various levels of help desk pros.”/i
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DARPA chose three companies for the second phase of its competition to design a drone that can stay aloft for five years. Watch video of the contest entry from Aurora, one of the finalists.
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Scientists have speculated on a new type of electronic circuit element, the “memristor,” for 37 years — but haven’t been able to create one until today.
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paleshadows writes “Pidgin, the premier multi-protocol instant messaging client, has been forked. This is the result of a heated, emotional, and very interesting debate over a controversial new feature: As of version 2.4, the ability to manually resize the text input area has been removed; instead, it automatically resizes depending on how much is typed. It turns out that this feature, along with the uncompromising unwillingness of the developers to provide an option to turn it off, annoys the bejesus of very many users. One comment made by a Professor that teaches “Collaboration in an Open Source World” argued that ‘It’s easy to see why open source developers could develop dogmas. [...] The most dangerous dogma is the one exhibited here: the God feature. “One technological solution can meet every possible user-desired variation of a feature.” [...] You [the developers] are ignoring the fan base with a dedication to your convictions that is alarmingly evident to even the most unobservant of followers, and as such, you are demonstrating that you no longer deserve to be in the position of servicing the needs of your user base.’” Does anyone besides me find this utterly ridiculous?
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Microsoft is working on a number of initiatives geared towards making it easier for senior citizens to use PCs. In the UK, it plans to roll out a SeniorPC similar to that in the US, and might even experiment with a few other ideas to offer cheaper machines to seniors.
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The Brookings Institute has called for the government to set up a National Innovation Foundation modeled after the National Science Foundation. The idea is to offer government grants to companies doing innovation. This is an interesting idea, but it raises a variety of questions — including the government’s role in funding innovation. There isn’t anything necessarily wrong with government funded innovation, as long as one realizes that it, by default, distorts the market in some manner. The NSF is really designed to help fund the sort of basic research that is much more difficult to get outside funding for — but which could have some commercial potential. When you start talking about the much more amorphous “innovation,” it’s going to be a lot more focused on commercial potential from the get go — which raises some questions about why the government needs to be involved at all. If the market is taking care of innovation, then is government funding necessary?
Along those lines, it also brings up the same old questions about how do you determine what innovation really is — and how do you measure it. The Freakonomics guys just asked a panel of folks how to measure innovation and their answers diverged wildly. The good news is that only one out of the five responses seemed to think patents should be a part of the measure (one other answer mentioned patents as a measure, before noting that using patents to measure innovation was “largely hokum.”) Even the one guy who does support using patents in some measures, notes the problems with doing so. Also, the research he quotes in favor of patents only shows that patents are valuable to patent holders (not something anyone disputes). That has little to do with whether or not they encourage or accurately measure innovation.
If we stick with the definition that innovation is the process of successfully bringing new offerings to market in a way that the market wants, then I think it’s not as important to “measure” innovation, as to create the right ecosystem for it. That would mean encouraging competition (which drives companies to keep out innovating each other) and take away unfair roadblocks to competition. If a National Innovation Foundation can figure out a way to do that, then it might be quite interesting.
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Web-based financial management service Mint.com will add investment tracking to its portfolio soon. It’s a promising service, but it’s still a few features shy of being a Quicken-killer.
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Michael J. Ross writes “For creating Web sites, developers are increasingly making use of content management systems (CMSs), any of which can provide the framework for a new site. But just as there are many similarities among all the leading CMSs, there are some significant differences, such as how easy they are to install, administer, and build upon, for creating new sites. If developer loyalty is any measure of the present and future success of a CMS, then Drupal should be considered a standout among other CMSs. For instance, its online documentation alone is often cited as a distinguishing advantage. But most developers would prefer learning Drupal from a book, such as Building Powerful and Robust Websites With Drupal 6, by David Mercer.” Keep reading below for the rest of Michael’s review.
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teh bigz writes “There’s been a lot of talk about integrating the GPU into the CPU, but David Kirk believes that the two will continue to co-exist. Bit-tech got to sit down with Nvidia’s Chief Scientist for an interview that discusses the changing roles of CPUs and GPUs, GPU computing (CUDA), Larrabee, and what he thinks about Intel’s and AMD’s futures. From the article: “What would happen if multi-core processors increase core counts further though, does David believe that this will give consumers enough power to deliver what most of them need and, as a result of that, would it erode away at Nvidia’s consumer installed base? “No, that’s ridiculous — it would be at least a thousand times too slow [for graphics],” he said. “Adding four more cores, for example, is not going anywhere near close to what is required.”"
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The IFPI and Childnet today announced the worldwide release of new guide for parents, teachers, and kids on Internet music. It’s backed by the UK, Singapore, and the EU, and it will be in 21 countries soon. Fortunately, it’s done quite well; Creative Commons is even discussed.
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The infamous and questionable JPEG patent held by Global Patent Holdings (GPH) and used to
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eldavojohn writes “The man credited with inventing the internet at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee, has made a statement on the 15th anniversary of the internet that the web is still ‘in its infancy’. He also made a pretty insightful comment about CERN’s releasing of the code for the internet into public domain: “If we had put a price on it like the University of Minnesota had done with Gopher then it would not have expanded into what it is now. We would have had some sort of market share alongside services like AOL and Compuserve, but we would not have flattened the world.”"
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Netcraft confirmed it… Slashdot was dying for several hours (along with SourceForge which share a corporate overlord and router). Some planned downtime from our provider apparently didn’t come back up quite as planned. Sorry for the inconvenience. On the upside, we’re moving to a new network and hardware soon, so the site should be much faster and more stable rsn.
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I Don’t Believe in Imaginary Property writes “We now know how the Whitehouse managed to lose about five million emails. It seems that they ‘upgraded’ their Lotus Notes system, which had an automatic retention and backup system, for Microsoft Exchange, which did not support the automatic system. So they changed it to a manual process, where aides would manually sort emails one by one into individual PST files, which they call a ‘journaling’ archive system. They’re still building a replacement for the retention system. Right when they had one finished, the White House CIO complained that it made Microsoft Exchange too slow, so they hired yet another contractor to build another one, causing a senior IT official to quit in protest. So they still haven’t completed the project after almost eight years, and rely on humans to sort millions of emails.”
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There’s a Business Week article making the rounds saying that it’s not Microsoft or Yahoo that’s a real threat to Google, but the rise of the mobile web, which will somehow shrink ad inventory and cause headaches for Google. It’s a nice theory, but it’s hard to square with reality. Increasing use of the mobile screen is hardly likely to decrease usage of a full computer screen. If anything, it will likely make desktop computing more useful in some cases. The article also makes a few other questionable statements. First, it points out that the mobile screen is smaller, so there’s less ad inventory, and then it points out that the growing acceptance of the mobile web is due to the web browser on the iPhone. That sounds good, but the points contradict each other. The success of the iPhone’s browser is due to the fact that it presents a full (not limited) web browsing experience — so it doesn’t really limit the inventory available to Google. Furthermore, even if the inventory was limited (which seems unlikely) that’s not necessarily a bad thing for Google. Google’s success has been based on making ads more relevant — not just more available. This was what resulted in so much confusion during Google’s recent earnings announcement. Google had made some changes to drive more relevant clickthroughs — and while that may lower actual clickthroughs, it increases revenue. So, even if inventory is limited, if Google is still the best at making ads relevant, it will do just fine.
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kylehase writes “The release of Wikiscanner last year brought much attention to white washing of controversial pages on the community generated encyclopedia. Apparently Wikipedia is very serious in fighting such behavior as they’ve temporarily blocked the US Department of Justice from editing pages for suspicious edits.”
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KDE 4.1 alpha 1 was released yesterday. The adoption of Qt 4.4 will bring some significant new features to the Plasma desktop shell, but the bumpy transition has made this release very fragile. Ars looks at alpha 1 and the impressive feature set that is being developed for the final 4.1 release, scheduled for July.
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Time Warner, the world’s biggest media company, reports a 36% decline in Q1 profits and says it will spin off the rest of its cable business. The owner of AOL and CNN nets 21 cents per share in the first three months of the year, down from 31 cents, on revenues that rose 2% to $11.42 billion.
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Microsoft’s next move in its takeover attempt of Yahoo is imminent — perhaps even today — the Wall Street Journal reports. Options are the usual suspects, it says: try to pack the Yahoo board or appeal directly to shareholders.
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An anonymous reader writes “A good friend of mine had her younger brother apparently commit suicide last week. He was a young, promising CS major who was close to being accepted into a very prestigious school. He was very into Linux as well as PHP/MySQL coding. He left absolutely nothing behind for the family as far as a death note or explanation, and there is some possibility that this was all somehow a tragic accident. The family is in a situation where proof of accidental death would change how this was viewed in terms of paying for parts of the funeral. More importantly, some members of the family are hoping to find something, anything, that might explain why this all went down. Since I’m the most computer-skilled person the family knows, they have asked me if I could help them try to find some information. My possible approaches are: his Linux laptop, his university, Gmail And Hotmail email accounts, and a second MySpace profile that apparently has been tagged as private. How ethical would it be to, say, try to crack his root password in a situation like this? I wouldn’t attempt to crack a man’s account for his wife because she thinks he is cheating on her, as his life is his own business. In death, would you have the same respect for a person’s private thoughts? Secondly, If I contacted places like Google, MSN, the university, and MySpace, what are the odds that they would give me access to any of his accounts? I have links to obituaries and such to prove that he is indeed gone. Would it be a matter of not giving it to me (maybe only to the family), or is this something that they would not do at all? Any opinions on if I should do this and if so, how I should go about it?”
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Remember Sanford “Spamford” Wallace? Back in the 90s, he was the face of the proud spammer. He was quoted widely and proclaimed himself the spam king (which he insisted was legal). That was great until the law caught up to him and he claimed he reformed. For a little while he went into the nightclub business, which didn’t work out. So, he jumped on the next big thing: spyware. A $4 million fine later, and he apparently moved on to spamming MySpace, setting up 11,000 fake profiles that redirected visitors to various marketing websites.
MySpace sued him for this and a judge has ruled in the company’s favor, in large part because Wallace pretty much ignored the case. At first he procrastinated and gave excuses, and then just stopped responding altogether. This isn’t the first time this has happened, either. With that whole spyware case a few years back, even Wallace’s lawyer admitted that Wallace had disappeared entirely. Sense a pattern? Wallace seems to jump on any sort of scheming online marketing scam, and when the law finally catches up to him, he runs and hides. Somehow, I doubt that MySpace will collect on any money the court awards it.
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