October 2009
26 posts
SemiAccurate: A look at the 100-core Tilera Gx.
Jim Jannard: RED EPIC-X and Scarlet updates. That’s some ballsy marketing.
What Would Don Draper Do?
The Register: IBM erects fedware for The Man 2.0.
The Register: Green Berets get wearable combat smartphones. Counterinsurgency: there’s an app for that.
Fudzilla: HD 5970 spotted in the wild. “It easily puts Ron Jeremy to...
DARPA Network Challenge. There’s an app for that.
tptacek: “Although deconstructionism forces us to concede that any “slant” in XKCD is merely a textual artifact, and all critical perspectives on the work are equally valid, it is nevertheless more equally valid to conclude that XKCD’s gender politics may be more self-serving to the author than a legitimate (pace...
Paul W. Frields: Fedora’s target audience. “Someone who (1) is voluntarily switching to Linux, (2) is familiar with computers, but is not necessarily a hacker or developer, (3) is likely to collaborate in some fashion when something’s wrong with Fedora, and (4) wants to use Fedora for general productivity, either using desktop applications or a Web browser.” Maybe this will...
James Hamilton: Report from the Stanford Clean Slate CTO Summit.
The InfiniScale IV switch chip has 36 ports at 32+32 Gbps each, totaling 288 differential pairs at 10 GHz and 1152+1152 Gbps of bandwidth. A hypothetical 96-port 10 Gbps Ethernet (XFI) switch chip would need only 192 differential pairs at 10.3 GHz and 960+960 Gbps of bandwidth. Either this is much...
The Register: Tilera pushes to 100 cores with mesh processor. [EXPLETIVE DELETED]
Engadget: T-Mobile officially unveils $99 Even More, $79 Even More Plus plans and equipment installment option. This isn’t as radical as some of the rumors, but it’s nice to see one carrier offering a non-sucker plan.
Brough Turner: Has AT&T Wireless data congestion been self-inflicted?
David P....
Louis Gerbarg: The loss of ZFS. →
you say you want a conversation
Daring Fireball: Zed’s Dead, Baby. Zed’s Dead. Apple dropped ZFS. I don’t think Oracle is the reason, given that DTrace is still in, but the NetApp lawsuit sounds logical. Dustin Sallings is continuing to maintain the OS X ZFS port.
Seth Finkelstein: Google and Bing see Twitter as “a vehicle for directing … to large audiences”.
The Register: Anti-filesharing...
Srikanth Kandula, Jitendra Padhye, Paramvir Bahl: Flyways To De-Congest Data Center Networks.
Michael Piatek, Harsha V. Madhyastha, John P. John, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Thomas Anderson: Pitfalls for ISP-friendly P2P design.
Ars Technica: FCC proposes network neutrality rules (and big exemptions). Hmm. A cynical reading would say that this actually legalizes application-specific throttling and...
Ars Technica: Zetta’s new cloud service: like a NAS, but for a whole city.
T. Moncaster, L. Krug, M. Menth, J. Araujo, S. Blake, R. Woundy: The Need for Congestion Exposure in the Internet.
Douglas Gourlay: On Merchant Silicon and Lawnmowing.
Unladen Swallow 2009Q3 release. Faster, but not yet smokin’ fast.
Randall Munroe: reddit’s new comment sorting system. Silly man,...
Steven Frank: “The iPhone/iPod Touch, being available for both Mac and Windows, has a single source of software in the app store. That Mac AND Windows thing is key. The app store is not just a software market for Mac users. This is why it blows the minds of indie Mac developers like myself. It’s because it follows the rules of the general software market, not just the Mac software...
AnandTech: Marvell’s ARMADA: Custom Designed ARM SoCs Break 1GHz. Hmm. This looks like a mixture of good stuff and weird stuff.
Bradley M. Kuhn: “Open Core” Is the New Shareware.
Celeste Lyn Paul: Closed Design or No Design? Something is better than nothing.
GigaOM: With N900, Nokia Still Not Close to The iPhone.
HotHardware: OCZ Z-Drive m84 PCI-Express SSD Review. TLDR:...
John Ousterhout, Parag Agrawal, David Erickson, Christos Kozyrakis, Jacob Leverich, David Mazières, Subhasish Mitra, Aravind Narayanan, Mendel Rosenblum, Stephen M. Rumble, Eric Stratmann, and Ryan Stutsman: The Case for RAMClouds: Scalable High-Performance Storage Entirely in DRAM. Buzzwords, check. Bandwagon-jumping, check. Twelve authors, check.
Jeff Darcy: Scaling Beyond Caches.
what you say is way too complicated
Fudzilla: Intel X25 Value drive spec revealed. Bah, more artificial market segmentation from Intel. Sounds like a great server boot drive, though.
B. Carpenter, S. Jiang: Emerging Service Provider Scenarios for IPv6 Deployment. IPv6 is going to get ugly, but at least the IETF is becoming more reality-based.
karma rocket
Con Kolivas: BFS CPU scheduler design and v0.304 stable release.
Rational Survivability: Amazon Web Services: Hype or Caveat Emptor, You Can’t Have it Both Ways.
Google Wave Cinema: Pulp Fiction. Now that’s what I call collaboration.
Dave Winer: “If anyone in the rssCloud community is marketing against PubSubHubBub, we will ask them to stop.” Given that PubSubHubBub...
Eric Anderson and Joseph Tucek: Efficiency Matters! Hadoop scales, but otherwise it’s a waste of money and power because each node is working so inefficiently.
Peter Desnoyers: Empirical Evaluation of NAND Flash Memory Performance. Actual endurance of flash may be 10x better than manufacturer specs. The “random write” test in this paper is misleading, because what we care about...
The new OCZ Indilinx firmware is out, but this is pretty kludgy: “1.4 has TRIM and will suit win7 and any OS with TRIM support. 1.41 has GC and will suit any OS with no TRIM support or raid arrays.”
John Gruber has uncovered some kind of supposed hypocrisy among iPhone owners who complain about Apple “fixing” “bugs” that allow jailbreaking. However,...
what's that smell?
Moinuddin K. Qureshi, John Karidis, Michele Franceschini, Vijayalakshmi Srinivasan, Luis Lastras, Bulent Abali: Enhancing Lifetime and Security of PCM-Based Main Memory with Start-Gap Wear Leveling.
Ulya R. Karpuzcu, Brian Greskamp, Josep Torrellas: The BubbleWrap Many-Core: Popping Cores for Sequential Acceleration. Burning out cores!? That’s so crazy it just might work.
Robert Watson:...
Engadget: Achtung, T-Mobile: if Project Dark is... →
Interesting. That N900 is calling to me.
istartedsomething: Microsoft adds StartCom free root certificate authority to Windows. Nice. Free certs for everyone.
IBM DB2 pureScale Technology Redefines Transaction Processing Economics. As we all know, SQL doesn’t scale.
Wired: Google’s Abandoned Library of Usenet. “The rusting shell of Google Groups is a reminder that Google is an advertising company — not a modern-day Library of Alexandria.”
C. Chung, A. Kasyanov, J. Livingood, N. Mody, B. Van Lieu: Example of an ISP Web Notification System. I don’t like anything that modifies Web pages, but I can’t think of a better system either....
P2P on the Flash Platform with RTMFP. Besides the obvious Octoshape/Ustream/Justin.tv killing, this sounds pretty sweet for multiplayer games or Wave-like realtime collaboration.
The Register: Parallels bares all with server hypervisor. For $500/server this will have to be pretty good.
GigaOM: EMC Compute Cloud Coming This Month. Mmm, gold-plated clouds.
GigaOM: IBM Plans to Fight Amazon on EC2 Turf.
Google PowerMeter’s first device partner: The Energy Detective. TED can only graph your power usage, but if you send the data to Google you can… graph your power usage. It’s not clear what the point is here.
LWN: Netgear’s open-source router. The comments are pretty negative; it looks like Netgear has good support but bad...
GigaOM: Is Networking Gear the Last Stand Against Commoditization in the Data Center? They can make a stand, but it won’t work.
Nathan Farrington, Erik Rubow, and Amin Vahdat: Data Center Switch Architecture in the Age of Merchant Silicon.
Amin Vahdat: David vs. Goliath, UCSD vs. Microsoft in Data Center Networks?
NETGEAR Announces WNR3500L Open Source Gigabit Router & Development...
Pingtest.net is a new companion to Speedtest.net that measures broadband latency and jitter.
Cliff Gerrish: Against Portability: Who Owns The Pen With Which You Write?
SemiAccurate: LSI to support SR-IOV hardware virtualization in storage controllers. I don’t think virtualizing DAS is a good idea, but maybe we can find some other use.
Fudzilla: Nvidia won’t do a DMI chipset. I never saw the point of one.
Banned (and NSFW) XFX advert - Havin’ a great day. Gotta love...
LWN: Log-structured file systems: There’s one in every SSD. The comments keep setting off my “someone is wrong on the Internet” alarm, but I know it’s a waste of time to correct anything.
Seth Finkelstein: Why (individual) Blogging Is Dead - Objective Measurement. Only after the bubble bursts can you tell how much was real and how much was bubble.