Richtig said Fred!

Seagate has just announced a hybrid hard drive that will have 256 megabytes of flash memory, so that files which are used often (such as the files required to boot windows) or files that are saved could be stored on the flash memory instead of having to restart the hard drive. This is especially good for laptop users since it could mean extended battery life. Now imagine the performance boost if these drive could find their way into desktops too, they would let PCs perform write operations using a much larger cache than those 8 megabytes typically found in today’s IDE or SATA hard disks. I’m already planning my future desktops with 1 GIG cache SATA drives at 10K RPM. It would be good if the drive controller on the HDD was smart enough as to perform defered writes when i’m not doing anything on the disk. As allways a hardware solution is not as flexible as say an operating system doing caching, but writing to a disk even when the OS handles it allways consumes system ressources no matter how you look at it. Hardware just performs better, allways.

Check out the PCMag.com article about Hybrid Drives.

Well I’m talking about Jack PC. The PC that fits in a Jack… Well just look at the picture, what you see is the whole PC. It is even powered with Power over Ethernet (PoE) so there is no need for a bulky AC/DC converter of any sort.
If you ever tought the Mac Mini was the smallest it could get, well it can get much smaller with Jack! Unless you reduce the number of connectors there is not many practical ways to make it smaller.

If you want to read more about it then check out ZDNet.co.uk’s Article on Jack PC.
Or visit Chip PC Technologies’ page about Jack PC.

According to HPCWire.com the Cell processor in the upcoming PS3 does indeed pack some very high performance computing capabilities. They compare it in multiple scientific applications where number crunching is all the processor does, and the results are impressive even compared to the current batch of 64 bit processors like the Athlon 64, the Itanium 2 and even the Cray X1E (that’s a supercomputer). Ok here’s a hint about the results, the Cell does not win all the benchmarks all the time, sometimes the Cray X1E is a bit better, but if you put the benchmarks in comparison to the pricing of these different processors, well the Cell wins them all. Haven’t I told you the PS3 was dirt cheap as a linux supercomputing workstation on May 16th. Here’s a single chart from the paper published by the members of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Computational Research Division. This chart compares Fast Fourrier Transformations in the different processors (FFTs are used in Digital Signal Processing very extensively, to convert MP3s for example), check the second column for actual Cell Performance:

You might want to read HPCWire.com’s article on the Cell Processor.
If you want to read Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Computational Research Division’s article on the The Potential of the Cell Processor for Scientific Computing (PDF)
If you want to learn more about Fast Fourrier Transforms (FFTs), visit Wikipedia.org.

Here’s an interesting update to my Wed 5 Apr post about AMD’s processor Roadmap .

QUAD CORE CPUs! I quote from the article on The Register “The company still plans to deliver a four-core chip in 2007[…]”. So that prediction was right on the spot and my guess is that 8 core CPUs are probably planned somewhere in 2009.

REVERSE MULTITHREADING: A french site named x86-secret.com has also published information about AMD’s future K10 processor in which they are researching reverse multithreading which would basically make a multiple core CPU act as a single core CPU so that applications that are not aware or multi threaded would still benefit from the multiple core!

The article confirming Quad Core CPUs can be read on The Register.
You can read x86-secret.com article on Reverse Multithreading (in french only)
The Reg Hardware has also an article on Reverse Multithreading

For all of you that are not afraid of PayPal. There is a service called Payloadz Express that allows to easily set up a Pay for Download service that works with PayPal too, it’s called Payloads Express. If you make less than 100$ in revenues per month the service has no monthly charges too (your file quota is limited to 20 megabytes though).

You can visit Payloadz Express if you want to learn more.

Is Microsoft finally moving forward with its Halloween project? Ahem, some of you might remember the infamous “halloween documents” back in 1998 that were leaked from Microsoft. In those documents Microsoft was laying out strategies for fighting Linux as well as everything under the sun that had an open source license. Now it appears that Microsoft’s strategies are intensifying because they delayed their “cash cow“, I mean Windows Vista, so the reasoning should be that if Microsoft is not making money then why should others do?…

So Microsoft is intensifying their fight by being both pro and against open source and Linux in particular.

Steve Ballmer goes on saying in an interview with Forbes: “Well, I think there are experts who claim Linux violates our intellectual property. I’m not going to comment. But to the degree that that’s the case, of course we owe it to our shareholders to have a strategy. And when there is something interesting to say, you’ll be the first to hear it”

And yet at the same time, Microsoft is claiming to be opening doors and sharing their Linux experience: “We’re opening the doors to what we do in the Linux labs,” and also “The most important opportunity is to get feedback.”

Microsoft is currently touring across Canada with their “Expand your Knowledge Tour 2006″, in which they claim to offer: “Gain insights into how Linux and OSS have developed, how they are tested, distributed and more.”

So what’s up with that? My guess is that Microsoft believes it will score more points when it explain why open source is not as efficient as Microsoft in general and they will also calm naysayers because they also have their Linux Lab so they will claim to have real-world experience on Linux too. Unfortunately their “Expand your Knowledge” tour features Barnaby Jeans and they describe him as: “Before joining Microsoft, Barnaby most recently worked as a Sales Engineer for Red Hat Canada helping to establish their Canadian sales force. Prior to that, he worked as a technical Sales Consultant at Oracle Canada focusing on enterprise architecture.” A question comes to me: “Who is Barnaby Jeans?” How is that man qualified to offer insights about the evolution of operating systems? He certainly does not qualify in my mind as the next David Cutler (the father of VMS and Windows NT) nor Linus Torvalds (the father of Linux) nor Ken Thompson (the father of UNIX and Plan 9). I think this man should be labeled with “False Authority Syndrome”, after all a salesman (sorry sales engineer), is qualified for, SALES! (Ouch the truth hurts!) Not operating system fundamentals and evolution…

Ok then, but what about this Fred’s experience ? Well, I must admit I have been running Linux since version 0.99.something, first as a hobbyist (when 386DX40 were hot), then later on as my web server (have been since 1997). I also have been holding a “Linux Certified Administrator” certification for a number of years. A ha! A Linux bigot! Well not quite, I have also been running Windows since version 3.0 (black and white icons, you remember?) and DOS since version 3.3, I have started installing Windows NT back when version 3.51 was pretty hot (actually its main feature was: “Does not crash like windows 3.1!”). I also hold an MCSE both on Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 (windows 2003 is also in the pipes). I have worked in large and small companies implementing NT4 domains, IIS3 web servers up to II6 Web Farms and large enterprise wide servers and mission-critical applications. In a nutshell companies pay me to make their network and servers perform. When I do my job right no one notices, except for those that visit the server room and see the walls of blinking lights…

You can read Wikipedia’s article on the “Halloween documents” here.
You can read the “Halloween documents” themselves here.
You can read the Forbes’ interview with Steve Ballmer here.
The article on ZDnet about Microsoft’s Linux Lab can be found here
You can read more on Microsoft’s open source propaganda (Port25) here.
You can read about the “Expand your Knowledge Tour 2006″ here.
There is an interview of Barnaby Jeans in the IT Manager’s Journal which can be read here.
Read the article on “False Authority Syndrome” here

A new company called Diligent claims to be achieving 25:1 compression ratios and apparently they have a backup software named Protectier that does it. How you may ask? It compresses streams of bytes and compares the result to all the other streams of bytes already received, only storing differential data (think of it as a lossless MPEG2 compression for any file format). Their claim is indeed spectacular, BUT you can’t try or demo it at home unfortunately as they only sell their solution to large enterprises, this must have to do with pricing I guess, and maybe just maybe it is because they don’t want too much independent reviews either…

Another thing to keep in mind is reliability, if you have a chunk of data, say an executable header that is repeated in MANY files across a whole system and that this chunk happens to be on a bad block on your tape, does it mean all your executable files are unrecoverable on that tape? OUCH!

Did I mention it is only availlable on Linux so far? Well it is not availlable on windows and my guess is that if they have such an incredible technology they might be bought or they might license it to either Symantec/Veritas or CA very soon…

You can read more about Diligent and Protectier in StorageMojo’s article here
You can read Diligent’s press release about Protectier (which does not say much) here

Try some Anonymous Surfing

Take a look at Peacefire

You can also visit OpenNet Initiative

There is also en entry on OpenNet Initiative’s Blog about the way Google uses censorship in Chinahere.

Or better yet install your own proxy server to help others bypass censorship, you can get it here.

Intel is the world’s first chipmaker to create a 45nm silicon. That is great, I hope they can also improve on their reliability, because all they seem to be able to do are faster, smaller and buggier processors these days.

The article on the new processors is here

Two stories that change from the ordinary news… 3D printing is coming to a house near you, in an *ahem* affordable form. The other news is that new Inkjet printers will start producing bones as well as cartilage and blood vessels…

Now imagine, in a hundred years: organ printing, the new craze ?… Need a new liver ? Let me print one for you…

You can read about “affordable” 3D home printing here
You can also read about the inkjet printer that produces living bone here