I wish all my friends and readers, a very happy and prosperous new year. I pray that all you wishes are fulfilled and may you always feel joyous. May 2008 be the year of enlightenment for all of us and we may learn lot of things this year.
Goodluck for the new year and have fun!!
If you are one of those bloggers who use Wordpress for your blogs, then this ones for you to update. Wordpress 2.3.2 was released yesterday with fixes to the ver. 2.3.1. This update is an extremely important one since it fixes some data leak bugs.
According to this ticket, your blogs posts can be exposed by a simple query fired before it is even published. The update is also useful as it suppresses some error messages that were being shown without much reason. Get the updated Wordpress 2.3.2 here. You can read about the ChangeLog here.
According to this patent filing, we can see that Apple wants something similar to Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) that is part of Windows. The patent was filed by Apple on Dec 13, 2007 and has the subject, "RUN-TIME CODE INJECTION TO PERFORM CHECKS". Apple wants to have code injection into any running application and make checks if the application is valid or not and if it has necessary rights to run on the specific hardware or software platform. Thus, this is a DRM thing that Apple wants to add to OSX.
DRM or Digital Rights Management is one way to govern data/applications and has been "talk of the town" for media files and content. If memory serves me right, Steve Jobs was last seen complaining against DRM to audio companies, but somehow he thinks that adding DRM to the OS is a good thing. Yes, it can be used for good things, when users are given the rights to manage the applications or data. But looking at the abstract, "an authorizing entity (e.g., an application owner or platform manufacturer)", it doesn't seem like the owner of the computer has much of the rights.
Vista has special checks of DRM as part of WGA and Microsoft uses it to check the validity of Windows users. WGA hasn't been able to prove the genuineness of the applications running maliciously on Windows and is only a waste of CPU cycles. Also it checks for genuine copy of Windows, but has been flagging some legal copies as pirated copies for sometime now.
Apple may or may not bring those ill-effects by implementing DRM in a different way, but in its very nature DRM is a hindrance to freedom. May be some people will claim DRM to be the price for freedom, but in my humble opinion, its only a way in which powerful people can show their might. Let's hope Apple doesn't bring it to OSX anytime soon!!
Wikia just launched a search engine in Beta (actually the founder said pre-alpha) yesterday. You can write an email and get an invite to Wikia Search. The announcement was made on the mailing list. Wikia had promised a search in 2007 and technically just 5 days are left for 2007 to end. So they have just met the deadline by an inch. Wikia Search is expected to publicly launch on January 7th, 2008.
Wikia is known for Wikipedia and founder Jimmy Wales said in December 2006 that he would be launching a web search engine as a competitor to Google. He had earlier said that Google's search engine shows too many incorrect results and in his words, "spam" results. This he wants to rectify with Wikia Search which will be using the Grub! web crawler technology. The following is from the WikiaSearch website about the future of Internet Search and Goals of Wikia Search:
Our Four Organizing Principles (TCQP) - the future of Internet Search must be based on:
Active areas of focus:
I somewhat agree that PageRank and Google's current search doesn't currently work best, but the new Blog search and News search are starting to change it for the good. Infact, Google Knol seems to be a response to Wikia Search from Google which will be relevant and more related to giving users data for the query rather than plain links.
Wikia has just recently launched OpenServing, which is free webhosting for Wikis. Its a useful service and I think Wikis have got quite popular for information sharing on collaborative projects that are done online. OpenServing and Wikia Search and so much like Knol and Blogger that it seems that Wikia and Google are on a head-on collision very soon.
Although somewhat controversial, I have found wikipedia to be a very useful tool. And I hope that Jimmy will be able to bring some competition to the search market. It will surely help improve the condition of the current web searching.
Update: Ironic, but just after I hit the submit on this post, I heard about IE8 passing the ACID2 Test. May be IE is finally following the standards... Opera doesn't need to worry, if IE8 is shown to EU
Last week when Opera filed the antitrust complaint with the EU, I wondered if Opera was going the same route as Netscape. We all know Netscape couldn't do much about the unbundling of Internet Explorer (IE) from Windows and Microsoft is still very adamant that it wants IE in Windows. Then, what's new with Opera's rants on IE ??
Opera's statement speaks something different than Netscape. Opera said, "We are filing this complaint on behalf of all consumers who are tired of having a monopolist make choices for them". Second, it asks the European Commission to require Microsoft to follow fundamental and open Web standards accepted by the Web-authoring communities. The complaint calls on Microsoft to adhere to its own public pronouncements to support these standards, instead of stifling them with its notorious "Embrace, Extend and Extinguish" strategy.
This means that Opera wants EU to tell Microsoft that they need to comply to the standards, so that everyone can see the same web. Currently, most web developers want to adhere to the standards, but due to IE having the largest market share, when something breaks due to IE, we have to care more about it than it breaking something else. Thus, Opera has rightly said that by breaking standards, IE is keeping its market share. People use IE because other browsers suck at displaying pages that are built for the only-IE.
To have a look at how broken IE actually is, look at this page from webdevout. The DOM & CSS state of IE is completely insane and I'm amazed how Microsoft has put up with it. Even with IE7 being released about 5 years after IE6, very little improved. CSS3 is rarely working and same is the condition with DOM Level3 and DOM Level 2 Styles. Here is a simplified comparison table:
| Standard | Avg Compliance for IE6 | Avg Compliance for IE7 | Avg Compliance for Firefox2 | Avg Compliance for Opera |
| HTML 4.01 | 82% | 82% | 93% | 87% |
| CSS 2.1 | 41% | 45% | 90% | 97% |
| DOM Events | 77% | 77% | 100% | 100% |
Other standards like SVG are far from being implemented in IE and requires a plugin, whereas Opera 9 shows SVG pretty nicely. You can also try another test, the ACID2 Test to check the standards compliance. Also, look here for historical screenshots on different browsers on the ACID2 Test.
Opera is truly a innovative browser company and I guess everyone agrees that its invented popular features like tabbed browsing, Speed Dial, integrated search bar etc. that have come to other browsers as well. It has also been among the first to adopt the standards. So they really have the moral capacity for complaining against IE.
Making it a rule that everyone has to follow the standards is not a righteous thing to do. It has been seen in the past that not all standards are perfect. One company can do better than what the standard has to offer, but when it hinders progress of another company or affects the majority of internet users and developers, I think it needs to be sorted out. And in this case, IE is not making any special progress over the standards with IE. I think Opera's done a good job by complaining on the standards front. Hope the bench from EU listens and helps improve the situation.
Lists are a human way to organize their lives. And so, Forbes (the guys who are known for their lists) have just put out another list for everyone to look at. And this time the list is about 25 most popular web celebrities. It is always interesting to look at lists, but this one is more interesting since it features a lot of tech guys and tech bloggers.
The Web Celeb 25
1. Perez Hilton (Mario Lavandeira)
2. Michael Arrington *
3. Mark Frauenfelder *
4. Seth Godin
5. Cory Doctorow *
6. Matt Drudge
7. Gina Trapani *
8. Mark Zuckerberg *
9. Harry Knowles
10. Robert Scoble *
11. Frank Warren
12. Om Malik *
13. Will Leitch
14. Jeff Jarvis
15. Kevin Rose *
16. Kathy Sierra *
17. Fake Steve Jobs (Dan Lyons) *
18. Markos Moulitsas
19. Xeni Jardin *
20. Ryan Block *
21. Glenn Reynolds
22. Pete Cashmore *
23. Steve Rubel
24. Heather Armstrong
25. Darren Rowse
You can read the list and some detail about the web celebrities on Forbes.com
If you look at the list, all the guys/gals I have put a * are bloggers or tech entrepreneurs. 13 out of 25 are writing about tech or own online tech related business. Although categorizing Mark Zuckerberg and Kevin Rose related to tech isn't absolutely correct, but they are programmers and tech guys. The list just goes to show that geeks are still the internet's largest reader base and tech news/info is the biggest content on the web.
Google seems to be concentrating quite a lot these days to improve search. All of last year and beginning of this year, Google has been doing something else other than working on its search. But now the limelight has come back to search. Video indexing using Video Sitemaps was announced yesterday and today Google is talking about how it has improved its news search.
Its more like Google Blogsearch, but it has more relevant search for news events. There is a new site operator like [site:sunnytalkstech.blogspot.com Programming], which will help you gets news from a specific site. Even if you have forgotten the exact news spouce, it can help you with an ajax'd search field, which will show you the matching terms on the incomplete keyword you have typed. All in all, the new news search is pretty well done and is pretty good for searching latest news. If you are searching news, then its better than using the normal Google homepage.
Another interesting development at Google is the new video sitemaps. Video sitemaps is an addition to the current "sitemap" protocol that is used by websites to inform search engines about the content hosted on the domain. Video sitemaps is Google's addition to the protocol and will be used by Google to index and get notified about videos. You can find the standard XML template example here. On that blog, one comment pointed out that "<video:whatever /> elements" should be used to the normal sitemap XML, which in my opinion is the right thing to do. Doesn't make much sense to create two sitemaps for people who dont have video-only content. I think this new sitemap for video is good for people who have video-only content and not for the general webmaster...
Google is "the" search engine and advanced news searching is a very good improvement along with Blogsearch, video indexing and a few new things Google is doing to give you more relevant results.
AMD will be launching the Phenom Black Edition processors just in time for Christmas and these unlocked beasts will be on the shelves for the overclockers sometime next week. After the retail success of the Athlon Black Edition processors, AMD has realized that it can sell these processors and make some bucks on these not-so-fast processors. The Phenom Black Edition Processors will have a clock speed of 2.3Ghz and it'll be interesting to see how much they can be overclocked.
With AMD already struggling to get enough speeds on the Phenom processors, it'll be interesting to see if they can be overclocked to great extent. And if these processors are overclocked, it'll be a good indication of how AMD's next-year Phenoms will perform. AMD already has talked a lot to its investors and people at the Wall Street and has promised it'll be doing good in 2008. All those promises will be on display if we can overclock and determine the performance of upcoming faster clocked Phenoms
Lets see how it goes with these Black Phenoms... and will they be an indicator of when AMD gets back from red to black!!
Today, Google has talked about a new way for people to share knowledge. Google will release a product shortly called "Knol" that will allow people with knowledge about a thing to share it with other people. The product is kind-of like wikipedia where people write pages and google will display it in the search results, so that this knowledge is shared through its search engine.
You would ask, what's new about it... if you wanted to share knowledge then there was always wikipedia or your own blog. But what Google wants to do with this new product is to highlight the authors. They want to bring the people who share the knowledge into the limelight and this would be an incentive for people to share knowledge.
Google also adds that, the author can display ads on the content and make some money. But it will be left upto the author as to what he/she wishes to do. Google will also not edit the articles and all the editorial authority will be with the author only.
I kind-of like this idea of Knol and should be pretty useful in getting relevant searches, which is rarely found these days. Google will rate the different articles on a topic and it'll be displayed in the search result higher than all the junk that's not related to the topic. I think Knol should be a very good product since it will help recognize authors as well as the searchers will be able to get better search content.
You can read the entire announcement at the Google Blog.
Update: Microsoft has just put the lid on the program saying that the program is full... This makes me wonder how many people want Vista/Office!!... Or is it just saving the privacy scare??
Some wise man once said, "No pain...No Gain". How about the pain of losing your privacy and gaining a free copy of Windows Vista ?? Yes, your privacy is worth only $350 in the market according to Microsoft. That's what Kevin from notebookreviews says is the offer from Microsoft.
You can go to the link: http://wfp.microsoft.com and signup for the Windows Feedback Program:
You can use this website to sign up for one or both parts of the program, but note the following restrictions:
The Windows Feedback Program will monitor the different things that you do and will report back to Microsoft about the stuff you do. In all goodness, Microsoft says that they will use your computer to monitor your behavior and that feedback will be useful to improve the software experience. Its kind-of spyware, but you agree to it before installing and get gifts for it in return. There will also be a periodic survey that you will be asked to do and the results of those will be used by I guess a few people in the market. comScore is going to be involved in this and we all know that they seem to do some user tracking and website data analysis for the paycheck.
You have to decide is your privacy worth selling... and if it is... is it worth of what, Microsoft's giving you??
In another story, theInq reports that Microsoft also filed 52 lawsuits in 22 countries against software companies who have sold pirated copies of Windows. Is there a relationship between the two ??
Like I previously mentioned here, the Office 2007 SP1 was released yesterday and came up on the Windows Update for Vista or Microsoft Update for XP today morning. Windows Update or Microsoft Update is the recommended way to get the update, but for those who want to deploy the Service Pack 1 across a lot of different computers, can download the executable file here. The file size is 218.3 MB and the MD5 Hash is: d4e2c2678f0a2b839cf4a317b80f2d1c
In the meantime, Microsoft also has released a public version of Service Pack 1 Release Candidate (SP1 RC) for Windows Vista. It is still not the final build and I advise people to try it on their own risk. There seem to be a few problems with the build and I've been testing it for sometime now, when Microsoft released it last month for the beta testers. But for the strong-hearted, you can download and crash from here.
Microsoft has just revamped its Download Center and it looks sleek and gorgeous. It is still in beta and you'll have to go through a signup page. But the interesting thing about the website is that its powered with Microsoft's upcoming technology called SilverLight. So, when you go visit the site, you are first asked to install SilverLight (See below)
SilverLight is touted as Microsoft's replacement for Flash, but still requires a lot of effort on Microsoft's part to make it cross-platform. Its speciality is video and animation and that is very well showcased on the new download center. The top banner on the page shows some nice animations and so does the search and menus for downloads. You can look below for the screenshot or experience after you get into the beta!!
What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG or 'wizywig') is probably the best thing to happen to desktop publishing or web authoring. WYSIWYG enables you to view your output while you are making the stuff. A nice paradigm to put your creative ideas to paper. Thanks to the GUI Builder in RAD tools like Visual Basic or WinForms or netBeans Matisse, this WYSIWYG paradigm is brought to the developer as well. But these GUI Builders only cover the part where you are designing the GUI. What about the part where you are designing the business logic, the real things that get done in the background ?
I was recently working on a project that would enable a client to publish his magazines based on what data is stored in the database. It was kind of a report generation software, but with lots of automated formatting based on the database content. Like if the article was about a horse, it had to be taken from the database and formatted in a specific way whereas if it was about the jockey, then it would have a different formatting. The client had fully imagined how the magazine would look like and how the pages would be formatted. But we as developers had to meet the challenge of trying to sketch what the client was imagining. We were trying to give the client what he was thinking... We were supposed to say, "What You Think Is What You Get" (WYTIWYG) !!
I'm sure as creative minds we have always faced this challenge of taking someone's imagination and putting it to life. When it's your own imagination its easy to execute but when you have to understand and convey someone else's imagination it really gets complicated. And software development is all about meeting this challenge.
UML 2.0 has 13 diagrams and each of them are used to covey that imagination, but how many times have you come to new project and even after looking at all the diagrams, never figured out how to go about it from there?? And when you have a quick deadline to meet, it gets even tougher.
But during the above mentioned project, I realized that WYTIWYG is more about marketing than it is about true development. The reason I say this is because quite a lot of times, if you have good convincing skills you can change the way your client is thinking. This implies that you can always make someone else think what you want them to think. I guess some intellectual said, "You can take the horse to water, but you can't make it drink"... I would dare to disagree and say that if you have the skills you can make the horse drink as well...
May be some day we'll have AI so strong that the computer will be partially able to understand what we are thinking. May be after it's understood our thinking, it can create what we are thinking. But until that's done, improve your convincing skills... most probably, it'll be more useful that all your programming skills...
If the developers of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) need to look for lessons on timely releases then they don't need to look far away from their desks. The developers of the Office 2007 team need to be lauded for their effort in releasing the SP1 ahead of schedule. And SP1 for Office 2007 will be released on 11th Dec, 2007.
Office 2007 was a completely revamped product and has a lot of new features including a complete change in the User-Interface (Ribbon) as well as the file formats (docx, pptx, xlsx...). Thus, it was expected that there would be a few bugs in the release. But like previous Office releases, this version was well received by the industry and the Office Suite is one product from Microsoft that has maintained its reputation of good releases.
The Office 2007 SP1 is an update based the user feedback and hence has lots of small hotfixes for compatibility. SP1 also brings a lot of improvements to the compatibility between the Office 2003 and Office 2007 file formats i.e. doc with docx. Few other improvements in SP1 include support for .Net Framework 3.5 and easy development with Visual Studio 2008. Some fixes to animated text in Powerpoint have also been added. Changes to DirectX overlay is another useful enhancement to make the Powerpoint slideshows a little slicker!!
When Yahoo Messenger 9 was released last month, I was a little disappointed. I had seen the previous videos about the special yahoo messenger for vista. Since another "normal" version of Yahoo Messenger was released before the Vista one, I thought Yahoo has forgotten about the Vista-special version of its messenger. But Yahoo today released a preview version of its Yahoo Messenger for Vista.
The Yahoo Messenger for Vista does not have all the features that are part of the normal yahoo messenger since its only a preview. The highly anticipated voice chat, video sharing and file sharing (using Microsoft's Silverlight) seems to be missing from this version, which was demo'd at the CES. Also, its taken Yahoo way too long to release even this half-baked version.
The Yahoo Messenger for Vista is actually meant to showcase the bling-bling using the Vista specific graphic capabilities as well as other Vista components like Sidebar. A lot of people have been complaining about the slow performance of his version. Long Zheng says that Vista SP1 might improve the performance of the WPF that this version uses.
You can read more about it at the Yahoo Messenger Blog.
Found this really interesting website, thanks to the complimentary LINQ from the Inq. You can go the MyHeritage Face Recognition website and upload a closeup photo of yours. It'll run some complex face recognition program and match your face to the faces of celebrities that are present in their database. After the search is complete, it creates a collage of celebrity faces that are your look-alikes!!
Its a flash based interface that they have built and it looks pretty slick. But you can't say the same about the accuracy of the face recognition. We all know that face recognition is a complex thing to do, but how about me looking like Winona Ryder or Halle Berry for accuracy!! :)) Even the 66% match with Jesse Bradford was flattering that anything else!
To test the accuracy I tried an image of I also tried an image of Salma Hayek and Elisha Cuthbert. The Salma Hayek face detection said, that Salma Hayek looks like Amisha Patel, the Indian actress - a fact I've been saying for sometime now!! And the Elisha Cuthbert detection is an awesome one... The picture I upload didn't quite look like Elish Cuthbert to me (but actually the photo is of hers) and the app found her!!
Other than the celeb face recognition there is also a genealogy on their website which is also pretty interesting.
Tell me who you look like and how accurately it seems to find you?? and which celeb do you look like??
Technorati, the popular blogger's tool for indexing and ranking blogs has just launched a new service called "Blogger Central". Blogger Central is kind of an aggregrator service and talks about top tags, rising links of the day and some popular posts in the blogosphere.
Blogger Central is Technorati's attempt to focus back on its target audience of bloggers. Technorati has been slowly loosing its limelight due to other services which are doing better work than it. For example, Google's BlogSearch indexed faster than Technorati a few weeks back and people began searching for blogs on Google's page rather than Technorati. Even the wordpress guys changed the Dashboard, to get links from Google's BlogSearch and not Technorati. This might have been a big blow to Technorati as Wordpress is the most popular blogging tool.
Blogger Central is also in some ways similar to Techmeme's Web 2.0 discussion. The rising links for the day can allow a user to read those posts and then look at the reactions to that blog post from technorati's index. Blogger Central also displays "Blog Posts About Blogging", another popular and interesting thing that bloggers seem to read these days. Other things like "Top Blogs" and "Top Favourited Blogs" which were already there with Technorati have been brought to this page as well.
We will see in the coming days if Technorati can get back to the limelight, that it once had. Technorati lost its way sometime back due to slow indexing, incomplete indexing and incorrect search results. Those problems seem to have been corrected in the last month and now Technorati works a lot better and accurately. Goodluck to Technorati on this one...
The much awaited and anticipated netBeans 6.0 has been released and can be downloaded from here. You may also want to look at the revamped website which seems to be having all the details about the changes, documentation and plugins updated to point to the release of the final netbeans 6.0 build.
If you have been following my coverage, about the different changes made through the different builds of netbeans 6.0, then you already know how much has improved and this final build is of excellent quality.
netBeans 6.0 is a huge released with an integration of host of products that have been brought together as part of the netBeans package. Below is the screenshot of the download page which has different builds for different needs.
Will test and write a few tutorials about the new tools in netBeans 6.0 later. So please check back and enjoy the tutorials!
This is actually an old piece of code. But since there is this big fuss about Google entering the Online File Storage market, I thought I'd remind a few people that you can already get your files on Google's servers (if that makes you happy).
There are already a lot of websites for online file sharing. Rapidshare, and a few others come to the mind, but people want to store files on Google's servers. Google has also said that it'll provide a GDrive service for online file storage pretty soon. For people who don't like to wait, there's been a software that's been storing files and whatever on your gmail account. With Gmail giving you more than 5GB space and anyone is allowed to signup for an account, Gmail can be used as a very useful tool for filesharing.
The original idea was given by Richard Jones, and has been available for 2 years now. Its called the Gmail Drive or GmailFS. Gmail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google Mail account, allowing you to use Gmail as a storage medium.
From the software's website:
GMail Drive creates a virtual filesystem on top of your Google Gmail account and enables you to save and retrieve files stored on your Gmail account directly from inside Windows Explorer. GMail Drive literally adds a new drive to your computer under the My Computer folder, where you can create new folders, copy and drag'n'drop files to.
There is a warning though that Google may change their code in the back-end and make this software somewhat useless. But until it works, you can have a free and fast online server to store your files. Download the software here and have your files on Google's servers!!
Everyone knows AT&T exclusively sold the iPhone and bet quite a lot of money on the iPhone. Infact, AT&T shares quite a large percentage of revenue earned from the iPhone users with Apple. So, you must come to think of Apple & AT&T being best friends...??
That's not quite the inside story. When AT&T sold the first iPhone bundled with its service exclusively, it meant that iPhone could be used only on AT&T networks. But you know, the hackers didn't want that to happen. They unlocked the iPhone and we know what happened after that. But one thing not many people understood is why Apple sold the iPhone from it's stores as well, when it was only meant to be running on AT&T's network. It should have been available only at AT&T's shops and not the iTunes activation. Atleast some gaurantee that you have taken the AT&T's plans!! Forget it though since that's history...
Apple releases the firmware slowly after everyone in the world has unlocked the iPhone and newer firmware is cracked even before Apple puts its on its servers. AT&T must be totally pissed off at these leaks and so, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson leaked the info that consumers could expect a new iPhone next year that offered HSDPA wireless broadband support. This means the 3G missing from iPhone currently would be available early next year... After this information leaked, obviously people wanting to buy iPhones will hold their horses and wait for the 3G one. That's how you take revenge on Apple!!
AT&T obviously has plans and other phones for its revenue, but for Apple the iPhone sales will surely slow down. PBS's Bob Cringely, also agrees to this view, but seems to suggest that Apple will bid on the 700Mhz spectrum that Google, Intel, Verizon and others are fighting for. We'll know that on Monday, but I'm quite certain Apple will stay away from the fight which has already got quite noisy!!
Just heard from Tech-Buzz, that the GTalk interface built inside Gmail has got Emoticons and Group Chat. There's a nice looking screenshot with the post. The emoticons have existed in GTalk, but it's been only Character-oriented and didn't have the icons.
This was a much needed addition to GTalk since every other popular IM has got emoticons with icons bulit into it. The new group chat is also interesting since IM also involves some group discussion at times. But like Thilak from tech-buzz mentions, only the web-interface gets the emoticons and not the GTalk client. I somehow like the GTalk thats built into the Gmail's interface and find it a very nifty IM that needs no installation. It's part of the Google web world, where the desktop is seconday and web-apps is Google's first child. So, I was excited to use the emoticons in the web-interface, but was sad that my account didn't have the emoticons. :(
Hope I get the emoticon icons in a few days and can share my facial expressions in the dull world of text IM!! I'm sure the GTalk client will get this feature pretty soon.
Found this interesting thing and thought it would be funny thing to share with friends before they leave for the weekend. Its just a piece of the all-famous Apple bashing Windows at apple's website.
On the top right of the Apple.com webpage, you'll see a search box. Its an AJAX-enabled search box, which means its kind-of like Spotlight, where results are shown as you type. Yeah, so what everyone (read==>Yahoo) have already done this. But the fun thing happens when you type the word -virus- into that box. It says,
"Windows... Why You'll Love The Mac. View the latest TV Ads".
We've all already seen the ads from Apple with the Windows bashing, but this one is a good easter egg!! For a screenshot of how it all looks, look below or try it yourselves at apple.com
True to the earlier reports about Intel's next chips having HT (Hyper-Threading) and integrated-GPU, some more details about Nehalem appeared on the web, courtesy of Japan's PC Watch.
The architecture diagrams mention about 2 threads per core, which was what I had heard from James Reinders earlier. The PCWatch page also has pictures of the updated Intel roadmaps. It also has features of all the different variations of Nehalem that Intel is going to release. The code names of these are Beckton (Oct-core MP), Gainestown (Quad-core DP), Bloomfield (Quad-core, EE-Desktop), Lynnfield (Mainstream Quad-core) and Havendale (Mainstream Dualcore)
If you can understand Japanese, then go here and read all about it or use a translator and try to figure out what it means!!
A blog reader pointed out these videos which he created with the Microsoft Developers who developed Windows Server 2008. The developers talk about the different features that their teams have implemented. I have been testing Windows Server 2008 for the past year or so and its been a fun experience using the software. The videos are informative about the new features in Windows Server 2008 and its fun to see the excitement of these developers in the videos.
The screams from the guy in red is funny!! :))
Meet Navjot Virk: She talks about improvements in performance that has been developed in Windows Server 2008. Replication using DFS-R...
Meet Jefferey Snover: He talks about PowerShell and how it helps admins automate tasks
Update: Mozilla will release a new version of Firefox v2.0.0.11 with the fix for this bug today...
A recent update from Firefox,(v.2.0.0.10) seems to have screwed some sites because of a bug in the Javascript implementation. The bug seems to have affected sites that use the Javascript method canvas.drawImage(). The bug report can be found at: Bugzilla@Mozilla – Bug 405584
The method is popularly used to represent vector images into HTML using Javascript and hence the extent in which the bug affects websites could be pretty huge. But just to show the speed of bug fixing from the developers, a fixed build is already available at mozilla FTP. You can download the newer build which has the fix from:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/2007-11-27-15-mozilla1.8/ (Windows) and
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/2007-11-27-14-mozilla1.8/ (Linux)
Firefox seems to auto-update these days and asks the user to restart firefox for installing the update. Hence, I'm expecting quite a few number of users who have got the bug in firefox. Google Maps is one website that seemed to use the method as well, but I guess they have found a nice workaround the bug.
The bug can be reproduced by going to the site: http://www.foxsaver.com/public/published.
The survey gives an idea about how the community of netBeans 6.0 users have responded to the development of netBeans 6.0. Initially the survey was meant to be for the NETCAT users only, but was later opened to everyone from the netBeans community. The results seem to be fairly acceptable to the community...
Of all the different parts of netBeans 6.0, The new Editor seems to have the largest number of showstoppers. But most users have responded positively to the work on the editor and seem to agree that improvements can be further done on the next release.
The Swing GUI Builder doesn't seem to have a lot of users from the community, but I know that quite a lot of new users as well as teams love this feature. Along with the Swing Application Framework, the GUI builder is an excellent feature from netBeans 6.0
As for Ruby/JRuby support in netBeans 6.0, I completely love the work the netBeans team has put on Ruby. A lot of Java developers think of Ruby as a competitor, but certainly not the netBeans team. One comment from the survey says that "Ruby is the flavor of the month scripting language". Just goes to show the normal Java developer's hostility.
There are other results from the survey on new Javascript Editor, Profiling and Consolidation & Installation. Read the full survey results here.
If you thought selling 1.6% stake of Facebook to Microsoft for $240 million (i.e valuation to $15 billion) or Mark Zuckerberg rejecting $1 billion from Yahoo was Facebook's biggest success story, then probably you are missing the point that success is never measured today, but reaped tomorrow.
In my opinion, Facebook's biggest success story to date is TechCrunch and other technology sites that can't stop talking about Facebook and what's happening with Facebook. And I specifically mention TechCrunch is because it is "the big" tech blog of today. TechCrunch is #3 at technorati, #1 at Techmeme and probably the biggest tech site read by non-techies. I have immense respect for Michael Arrington and I'm not saying that they are biased for Facebook. Its just that Facebook seems to have gathered so much momentum and respect from everyone around, that TechCrunch ought to cover it as much as possible. Just to give you a hint on how much of Facebook features on TechCrunch, write "Facebook" on the search posts field and see the results for yourself.
Facebook is a big social networking website and a fast growing one as well. But like every other fast growing business, it has to focus on a larger market to keep up its growth rate. Nearly everyone would agree that publicity plays a big role in reaching a larger audience. Facebook's publicity through TechCrunch's genuine posts easily catches the eye. Every word about Facebook somehow plays a role in the publicity of Facebook and this is one reason why Facebook will continue to grow in the future.
One popular marketing mantra, "What you show is what sells", is very true in Facebook's glory. Social networking websites are hangouts for friends and what better way to reach the hangout than taking a lift in your friend's car to this new hangout. TechCrunch in many ways is like a friend to its reader base. When the reader gets his daily dose of Facebook as the place to hangout, your next job is to go chill out at Facebook, just like your friend advised. Be it negative or positive comments, it definitely sparks a curiosity in the reader's mind. And this curiosity is what will drive Facebook to grow in the future.
So don't be shocked if you see a story about Facebook being valued at some $25 billion. It's just because we all love to talk about the big things in life and with that they only seem to get bigger!!
If you thought you had enough of the world moving online and everyone forgetting the desktop forever... THINK AGAIN. Google's promised its going to eventually have the OS and apps online and thats where your computer is going to be.
If Google Apps, Zoho weren't enough to convince you about the online office suite move, Sabeer Bhatia, the man behind creating "Hotmail" and selling it to Microsoft, has developed another web app. This time its to take your Office 2007 suite online and that too for free. The name as Microsoftish as it may sound is not a Microsoft product and is called "Live-Documents". Its still an invite-only process and you can go to www.live-documents.com to register yourself for an invitation.
If the statistics are correct Microsoft hasn't seen any decrease in its sales for the Office suite and people still haven't completely moved online for their work. So, I'm unsure of whether Sabeer Bhatia has thought enough on the success rate of this venture. May be he'll be pitching another one for a Microsoft sale with this one, but he'll also be tense, since he hasn't got much success in his ventures after Hotmail. Just for the record, if after using live-documents, you start liking the product, don't laud Microsoft about it. The product is actually developed by a Bangalore, India based company called Instacoll.
The good about this whole thing is that when you don't have Office 2007 installed and you want to edit the .docx file, you don't have to kill yourself for thinking everyone is up-to-date. You just have to find an internet connection and login. Open your .docx and have fun!! We'll find out more when it's out of the invitation beta!!
Found these exciting videos on YouTube about demo of the Overdrive, AMD's upcoming overclocking and performance monitoring utility. Overdrive brings the same technology of overclocking and performance enhancing using drivers, that have been in use by ATI and nVidia graphics cards.
Overdrive seems to be a very exciting application and will be released with the "Spider Platform", consisting of PhenomFX / Phenom (CPU), AMD 790FX/790X (Chipset) and the RV670 (GPU-graphics). The entire Spider Platform is expected to be released tomorrow (19th Nov, 2007), and hopefully will be available in quantities before the shopping season starts this year.
The videos have exciting presentation and editing, with nice before and after performance preview. Watch the videos and get excited for the release...
AMD OverDrive - Performance Tuning Utility
AMD OverDrive Utility - Before and After Demo
Microsoft has finished all of its work on the highly anticipated Visual Studio 2008 and will be Released-To-Manufacturing (RTM) on 19th Nov, 2007, which is tomorrow. Visual Studio 2008 is the most popular development platform for Windows and Microsoft has made this version specifically for development of Windows Vista. Visual Studio 2008 comes bundled with .NET framework 3.5 which I covered earlier. Visual Studio 2008 comes after 3 years and developers are excited for LINQ, XAML Visual Designer and few other new features that are part of the .NET Framework.
The MSDN Subscription Blog notes that it'll be available for download to MSDN subscribers very soon and I expect it to be sometime next week soon after the RTM. Earlier, on Nov 7th, Microsoft had announced that the Team System of Visual Studio 2008 will be shipped at the end of November. The Team System is the largest of the Visual Studio Suite and is specifically designed for Team Collaboration in mind.
Jeff Beehler, Team System Chief Of Staff, said: "We're very close to shipping Team System 2008 and expect to make it available by the end of this month. This will include all of the team editions (Development, Database, Test, Architect, Suite) as well as the Load Test Agent and of course Team Foundation Server."
Based on the results from DigiSales for 3Q'07, Samsung beats Dell to sell the highest number of LCDs worldwide. Dell has been on the top of the list from Q4 '01 and this is the first time that Dell has been moved from its top position in the last 6 years.
Dell was the leader in the transition from the CRT to LCD in computers and had enjoyed great success in marketing its LCDs not just to consumers but other OEMs as well. The re-emergence of stand-alone monitor brand Samsung as the worldwide leader in LCD monitor shipments shows that the market is again in a new upgrade cycle for displays alone.
This is another failure story that has been lingering Dell for the past couple of years in its PC business. HP has won the race in the sales for PC over Dell and now its bad news for its LCD business.
Update: Sun xVM Server gets a discussion from Jonathan Schwartz
A friend attending Oracle Open World told me about xVM, Sun's Virtualization platform. I have to say, I hadn't heard of it before, so I went on to look for some resources and this post is what I've found about xVM Server.
Sun has a new virtualization server based on Xen hypervisor. It currently supports virtualization of operating systems like Linux, Windows and Solaris. I have been using Xen with openSuSE which is bundled on the DVD of openSuSE 10.3 and I think its one of the better virtualization software available. So I asked what was different about Sun xVM and is it just plain packaging that Sun will be doing. Going to their website, I found that xVM server has a few scoring points to it.
1.) It brings Sun's very efficient and cool ZFS filesystem with the xVM Server.
2.) Sun will provide xVM for free but would provide support (at some cost) for the xVM server.
3.) DTrace and Self Healing (FMA) will be available with xVM
4.) Another Sun open-source, Crossbow for network virtualization will also be bundled with xVM
SunxVM server is opensource and is working through a few different communities. All of those can be found at http://www.openxvm.org . VmWare which is the market leader for virtualization products only has 9% of the market share. This just goes to show how much the virtualization market is scattered and everyone wants a pie of the market. Sun's product is openSource and is bundled with some nice tools and good administration GUI as well.
Prof. Ian Pratt of Cambridge who originally developed the Xen hypervisor, must be quite happy with the development that Xen has gone through. The success of xVM Server largely depends on how much the market believes in the value proposition that Sun has bundled with Xen!!
The Release Candidate (RC1) for Windows Vista's Service Pack 1 (SP1) has been released to beta testers today. The build for the SP1 is 6001.17042 and can be downloaded from Connect. I found an email from Microsoft about the release and is available to download, after you click on the invitation link.
A lot of people have been waiting for Service Pack 1 (SP1) for the adoption of Vista. For a lot of people service pack 1 means a lot since they feel Vista is not very stable and feature-rich at the moment. I personally think Vista is pretty stable and Windows Update has been doing a pretty good job. Vista SP1 does not bring any major feature like SP2 did for XP. Instead, SP1 is more about the fixing the compatibility issues and improving performance.
According to Microsoft, it has been released to "15,000 pre-selected testers". But it's not yet known when they are going to release the public version of SP1. All signs were towards a Dec, 2007 release, but now it seems it'll be only in Jan, 2008 that we are going to see the release. Also other tricks on Windows Update to get Vista SP1 as mentioned here, aren't the real SP1, since quite a lot of changes have occurred after that!!
netBeans.org has released the first Release Candidate to their servers. All the teams have said "Go" to the build 200711131200, which is the build for 13th Nov, 2007. Check the Go Status here.
Some ironing has been doing since they started working on the RC1. Some error windows have been hidden and a few P2 are yet to fixed and some errors yet to be found. Download the build and report some in-the-face bugs still present.
Download the RC1 release from here.
I was always skeptical about the Gphone. I thought the entire idea of Google making a phone seemed silly to me. Google being a software/web company making hardware seemed too big a step. There were obvious comparisons with the iPhone and I was one of the biggest critics of Gphone for my colleagues and friends.
But a few weeks back when I first saw Google's press release about the Android, I got a little more interested. But my doubts were still there... And on 12th Nov, when I downloaded the SDK and saw the presentation videos, I realized this is what programming on mobile phones will be in the near future. I try to present a developer perspective on why programming on Android will be successful. May be the handset manufacturers and operators would want to differ, but for the developers I think Google's done a great job.
1.) Free & Easy Access: Its "free" as in beer as well as "free" as in freedom. Operators and manufacturers will be able to customize and install for free. Thus, it'll be cheaper to build compared to say Windows Mobile, UIQ or Symbian. Also, Google/OHA intends to provide enough support for everyone which will be free or cheaper than anything else in the market.
2.) Promise of JavaME: If you downloaded the SDK, you know that its like JavaME and programmed on Eclipse. JavaME (earlier, J2ME) already has a huge developer base and the learning curve to develop applications for Android is going to be a small one. The porting of already developed application would be easy. You could add new functionality to old JavaME applications very easily.
3.) Good interfaces: The UI parts like Layouts, AdapterViews and using XML to design the UI, make Android what J2ME interfaces should always have been. Its more like J2MEPolish if you think of it as a developer. Something like Matisse (GUI Builder/ WYSIWYG Visual Designer) should have been done by Google for faster & easier GUI design... (I don't mean adding Swing, 'coz not every mobile device would be capable enough. Only a GUI builder).... 3D/2D with the openGL system is also easy to use. Its more like JSR239, so small learning curve again!
4.) Great apps: Being able to use Google's applications like Google maps, Gmail.... and WebKit (not Google's tech) within your application reduces a lot of effort for the developer and helps new innovative features. The use of the notification area across the platform is another exciting feature for developers. It feels like being able to use the system like Symbian development with Java...
5.) Linux based: Being Linux based is not new. Motorola among others already have a few Linux phones. But its worth mention because with Linux you know that there are fewer bugs as its been a few years that Linux is being used for mobiles. A lot of ironing as already been done, which means its stable than anything new Google would have developed.
6.) Hardware requirement: The hardware requirements with Android are not yet to be found. But the promise seems like it'll be available on most devices. If this turns out to be true then it means that our application is available to a larger audience. May be the Optional APIs like LBS (Location-based services), Media API, 3D and Low-level hardware access will be device specific, but other than that, it'll be probably common. For the developer it means you have to think less about which JSRs the device supports
7.) Eclipse & Developer love: Google's "Don't Do Evil" philosophy means that quite a lot of people love them including developers. Google's earlier tools like GWT, Google Gears are examples of excellent tools that developers love. The SDK is Eclipse and this means there are lot of developers who already know to use the IDE and platform.
8.) Publicity: As developers, the added advantage of developing for the Android is the publicity you may be able to get. Being the first apps to be built for Android, its obviously gonna catch the eye of a lot of other developers and consumers.
9.) Cash prize: Its part of publicity as well as getting rich. If money and fame are motivations for you as a developer, then Google has hit it right!
10.) Hype: Like they say, "Any kind of publicity is good publicity". Look at Apple's iPhone and you'll know that the hype created around it helped quite a lot of sales for the product. There so much hype around Android these days. Since Android/Gphones are already so much in the news, its pretty evident that
I know a lot of the reader's at this blog are Indians and this one is for all the Indians to make you feel proud. Tata Group, which is India's popular conglomerate own the fastest supercomputer in Asia and the 4th fastest in the world. The supercomputer called "Eka" (One) is located at the Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) in Pune, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons.
The rankings were announced yesterday at the Supercomputing Conference held at Reno, NV. The list can be found here in all its glory. Its is the first time that a supercomputer from India has figured in the top 10 list of supercomputers. Eka is built by HP and uses Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c, Xeon 53xx 3GHz, Infiniband. It reaches a max of 117.9 TFlops and Rpeak of 170TFlops. It moved from its earlier ranking of 179 to rank 4, and is quite a big achievement. It cost the Tata's $30 million to build. Tata's announcement can be found here about the entire thing.
I do not agree with Sunny's view of using GPUs for supercomputing. The cost of the hardware would come down considerably, but the cost of software would be a lot higher considering the productivity of programming the GPU. Let's see how this one turns out!
I have been a big fan of virtualization. Microsoft just yesterday announced that their Hyper-V server would be sold at $28 as an add-on to Windows Server 2008. This came as a surprise to me. Microsoft is entering into this market pretty late and with free alternatives from major players already existing, giving it free would have been the best strategy for widespread adoption. But may be Microsoft wouldn't be Microsoft if it started giving anything for free!!
VmWare which sells its flagship ESX-Server, also gives away free a smaller brother of ESX. They called it GSX and now its called VmWare Server. VmWare released just few hours ago, the VmWare Server 2.0 beta on their servers. This is downloadable for free and has lots of new features built into it.
New features and enhancements in the VMware Server Beta 1 release:
I have just downloaded and installed Ubuntu on it. Doesn't seem like its running on a VM and is pretty stable being in beta. I have yet to play and tweak a few things, but the first impression is pretty neat!! I'm going to install Vista and try quick switching between them... If you want to play with it as well, then you can download it from here. Leave comments about your experience ==>
Steve Jobs recently said at the launch of Leopard OSX, "And everyone gets the 'Ultimate' version", just to take a swing at the different versions of Vista. If that was not enough, Microsoft is prepared to give the world many more versions of its server operating system. Actually, when Windows Server 2008 will be released it'll come in 8 different flavors!!
Microsoft has figured it out that marketing different versions of the same thing is profitable. They understand that packaging stuff with different set of features makes people want more. Microsoft seems to understand that the entire culture of marketing now-a-days is about tempting the customer to buy the bigger box, more that what he actually requires!! ;-)
Windows Server 2008 is special because of its thin-hypervisor called Hyper-V, which enables virtualization out of the box! Windows Server 2008 will come in Standard, Enterprise and Datacenter versions with and without the Hyper-V. And each of these would come in 64-bit and 32-bit versions. CALs (Client-Access License) means the number of clients that are allowed to access the server.
| Version | Price | CALs |
| Standard (with Hyper-V) | $999 | 5 |
| Standard (without Hyper-V) | $971 | 5 |
| Enterprise (with Hyper-V) | $3999 | 25 |
| Enterprise (without Hyper-V) | $3971 | 25 |
| Datacenter (with Hyper-V) | $2999 | per processor |
| Datacenter (without Hyper-V) | $2971 | per processor |
| Web Server 2008 (without Hyper-V) | $469 | |
| Server 2008 for Itanuim (without Hyper-V) | $2999 | per processor |
The funny part of it is that "When Windows Server 2008 ships next February, those versions that have Hyper-V will include the beta bits for that, and those will be updated to the final version when that ships within 180 days". This means that you'll may for a beta product initially. When Microsoft releases the final product, which will be a standalone, you get the final as well...
Let's see how it all looks when Microsoft will release the product in all its glory in Feb 2008. I have heard good things about it from Sunny, who's been beta testing the Home Server and Server 2008 from it's early days. I seriously expected Vista to come with 32-bit and 64-bit versions on the same DVD, but that was not the case. Hope they have that for Windows Server atleast!
Its been tough time for AMD already, since Core2 Duo was launched. Intel then stuck two of these together and created Quad Cores. These Quad Cores have been selling like hot cakes, and Intel's making lots of profit. Intel today released its 45nm Peryn processors which are 
smaller in size and cheaper for Intel to manufacture. This means Intel can earn bigger margins on the same quad core processors. On the other hand, when AMD releases the Phenom its margins will go down because of the large size and competitive pricing as Sunny observed here...
The Intel Peryn is basically the same quad-core but built using a completing new process as well as substrate and gate transistors. Intel manufactures the Peryn using Hafnium-Based High-k Metal Gate Transistors, which seems to be reduce current leakages through gates. Infact, Intel's founder Gordon Moore called the technology "the biggest transistor advancements in 40 years". This technology would allow Intel to make faster processors in the short-term.
From Intel: (click here to read the press released)
New to the Intel line-up of server processors are 15 server dual-core and quad-core 45nm Hi-k Intel Xeon processors. The 12 new quad-core chips boast clock speeds ranging from 2GHz up to 3.20GHz, with front side bus speeds (FSB) up to 1600MHz, and cache sizes of 12MB. The three new dual-core chips feature clock speeds of up to 3.40GHz, an FSB of up to 1600MHz, and cache sizes of 6MB.
The 45nm Hi-k Intel Xeon processors are compatible with server platforms using the Intel® 5000 chipset family. In addition, Intel is launching three platform solutions to support 45nm processors, including:
The Intel® 5400 chipset-based platform (previously codenamed "Stoakley") that is optimized for high-bandwidth applications such as high-performance computing (HPC).
The Intel 5100 Memory Controller Hub chipset and Intel ICH-9R I/O controller (previously codenamed "Cranberry Lake"). These are cost-optimized solutions that support either one or two processors and also provide reduced power consumption using native DDR2 memory.
The Intel 3200 chipset-based platform (previously codenamed "Garlow") that is specifically designed for single-processor entry servers.
The word has spread like wild fire on the internet that the highly anticipated game, Crysis has been leaked on to the torrent sites. Crysis is probably "the game"
to be played this year and everyone have been sitting waiting for the game. And finally when there was only a week left, some notorious guys have leaked it off to the internet. This is really bad news for EA, since people who even had intentions to buy the original, won't be able to hold their patience anymore and download the game.
But I would suggest some caution to all the super-excited gamers, not to download any torrent with the alphabets C, R, Y, S, I, S. They should probably look at comments and also think if its the final version or some lame beta/alpha testers had received. And if EA has the final version, they should package it quickly, work night-out and send it to the shops by tomorrow. That would mean, the people who don't want to download 6GB, would go to the shops and get it first!!
Also, with the cracks not out yet, you never know who bundles the Trojan or Virus with the crack. Why do you as gamers expect the malicious crackers to crack his head without cracking your computer first!!?? So, don't rush mate.. Take your time and get the real package on the shelves... I mean who wouldn't want the manual for this all-time collectible ;-)
Update (18:00hrs GMT): Since, I talked about Dx10, the screenshots here are some food for thought comparing Dx10 Vs Dx9... I'm wondering if I like the Dx9 output??
Update (13th Nov): Indiatimes.com cleaned the stuff. The announcement is here
The ScanSafe Blog mentions that the popular Indian website, Indiatimes.com has pages that are installing malicious code into computers that are visiting its webpages.From the ScanSafe Blog:
The installed malware included a cocktail of downloader and dropper Trojans, assorted other malicious binaries, and large amounts of scripts, cookies, and other non-binaries. We ran some of the binaries through VirusTotal and looks like overall detection among signature-based antivirus vendors is low. Given the nature of the downloaded files, it appears the malware may be intended to create sites used to attack others or that there may be some malicious peer-to-peer or other filesharing/communication purpose.
There is no clear indication on which pages have been affected, but they say not every page is infected. The attack is basically done using some unknown vulnerability in windows. Microsoft has been asked to look into the report and is yet to give any reaction. Also, which browsers are affected have not been listed, but it seems like IE should be affected since some binaries are installed and activeX seems to be the common way to do it. But other scripts may also be working. ScanSafe advises all the users not to visit the webpage until a fix announcement is made by Indiatimes.com.
All this malicious activity is going unnoticed because a lot of antiviruses are unable to detect the signatures of the malicious code. Which means that many of you already have been infected if you visited Indiatimes.com recently.
I have always wondered how MPAA, RIAA and other foreign film industry watchdogs have tried to curb piracy. They haven't succeeded in the battle against piracy, but atleast they have tried to scare people. If not scare atleast they have sent some letters to the Bittorrent/P2P that have all the copyrighted movies/audios free for the entire world. The latest on the hit-list of the watchdogs is Demonoid.com, which is a popular Bittorrent tracker. Today, the hosting servers of Demonoid were taken down and a warning displayed to the users...
That made me ask the question, what is the Indian Film Industry doing to stop online piracy?? Haven't heard anyone talk about online piracy... May be some producers or actors have asked people not watch pirated movies or download stuff off the internet, but no legal action has been taken against these online piracy communities. There are many "desi" community sites that offer torrents and trackers for Bittorrent downloads and I don't think anyone from the Indian film industry even knows about it... I wonder if they've even heard of Bittorrent??
With so many movies being made, may be piracy helps some movies get an audience. But it doesn't help them make any money. I think some big studios that use modern technologies know about it, but I guess they are scared to send the legal notice to their audiences. After all, they'll get a bad name if they do it, right?? May be the studios feel that it's a publicity thing, which can be recovered from the high ticket prices at multiplexes these days...
Whatever it may be, I think piracy is a crime and some noise from the studios will help reduce piracy. Atleast, the weak hearted will get scared. As for the real pirates, they'll always find the "patli galli"...
Not so long ago, who would have thought that a desktop computer would be able to process "trillion floating point operations per second (TeraFlops or TFlops). Most people not up-to-date with technology would say its impossible for a normal desktop computer to do it, but it isn't anymore!! Really..and I'm not marketing for any company...
Today AMD announced the FireStream 9170, a General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit (GPGPU) running at 775Mhz and performs 497 GFlops. That's about 0.5 TFlops!! The FireStream is based on the RV670 chip and has 320 double-precision floating-point (FP) units. The RV670 will also be available in desktop variants for gamers and will be known as the HD 3850 and 3870 as mentioned by me here.
But it is still just 0.5TFlops... right?? Yes, but in about a few months time, AMD (actually ATI) will be releasing R680 which will have 2 of these chips working together. Add a few more clocks to the chip and we'll have a chip that can perform 1TFlops!! Aint that great??
Consider this: The world's fastest supercomputer i.e. IBM's BluGene/L scores 280.6 TFlops and costs a few billion dollars to build whereas one GPGPU will cost some thousand dollars. Do the math and you'll know its some million times cheaper with the GPGPU!! But the entire comparison I did is comparing apple to oranges. And the reason is because BlueGene/L uses general purpose CPUs which are easily programmed, whereas GPUs require special programming. I don't say that programming GPU is tough, it's just that we are habituated to program CPUs and hence we currently don't have the same type of tools that are used to program CPUs. But as the tools come up and mature GPGPUs are going to be the next milestone in supercomputing.
Intel also about a year back showed a 80 core processor do some networking to process as much as 1.81TFlops at 5.7Ghz... But its still got a lot more tweaking to do and the yield I think won't be very good at the moment!!
All of this means that in the very near future, by the use of GPGPUs, each one of us may be having a supercomputer built into our computers. But where is the work that these fast mean machines would be doing??
The netBeans 6.0 IDE which is under heavy development begins RC1 (Release Candidate). The nightly builds can be downloaded from here. This means that it is very close to release. I had previously covered the features from netBeans 6.0 and much of it has remained same through the development phase.
netBeans 6.0 added a lot of new features and when you add a lot of features, it generally means you have lot more bugs. Infact, netBeans has added so many features, that I dont think any other IDE could have dared to add these many changes in one version. netBeans 6.0 also has its share of bugs and we at the netcat team had some discussions on how many bugs were acceptable. From the netBeans 6.0 Quality Criteria:
Code Freeze (Entry) - FCS QC
All P1 bugs must be fixed (not waived)
All P2 bugs must be fixed or waived
All P2 bugs reported after cutoff date must be evaluated for showstopper status
All bugs must be evaluated before submitting for waive request
Based on the quality requirements, the netBeans 6.0 developers have already had a delay of 2 weeks during the beta 1 release. A lot of people who haven't had their favorite bug fixed want the date of release to be extended, but I think the netBeans developers have set a more realistic goal and I'm confident the final product released wont have any of the show-stoppers!!
Just a look at the Bugs Dashboard for people wanting to look at the different bugs:
The final version for netBeans 6.0 is supposed to be released on 3rd Dec, 2007 and if everything goes like planned then I'm all excited for this one.
RedHat just got itself into the openJDK community and this is apparently big news. Even Jonathan Schwartz, thinks its a momentum for Java!! I'm sure most of you remember the open letters that were written to Sun to make Java open source... OpenJDK was Sun's response to those letters. But all this is history... RedHat's promise has just taken its first step to contribute openly to Java...
But just integrating openJDK with its distribution is not going to help Java... not that Linux never had JRE (Java Runtime Environment). Every DVD distribution with had non-OSS software included jre or anyone could download it from Sun's website.
So what's RedHat going to do with an openJDK?? Firstly, it will be able to test compatibility with Sun's JDK 6 and make sure Java remains "Write Once Run Anywhere"... Only time will tell if it remains this way with the other JDKs
Secondly openJDK does not have classes that are Sun proprietary. RedHat will contribute open-source variants of these classes... I'm wondering how much time will it take to reinvent the wheel ;-)
Thirdly, it had to do it since it was one of those that pressurized Sun to open source Java. I'm wondering why it took RedHat so much time to join the openJDK community if it had it in mind since long!!
All those explanations do not make much sense to me... Sun was already doing very good with all the work in keeping Java version-compatible and language changes didn't have steep learning curves. Any answers from you guys why RedHat's joined openJDK??
Finally I think we will have DirectX 10 cards worth your money... DirectX 10 is widely publicized to be the best thing that happened to gaming since "PacMan". I really don't see many games on the shelf that use only Dx10. Nor did we want the cards!! Yet it's been months that ATI & Nvidia have been selling Dx10 cards with the 2xxx series and 8xxx series respectively.
Coming on 14th Nov (Apparently Children's Day in India), we have the next-gen Dx10 cards launched by ATI also known as the 3xxx series (RV670). The first cards will be called the 3850 & 3870. These cards aren't apparently any faster compared to previous Dx10 cards. But what's special about these cards is that it'll be cooler and taking less power compared to both the 8800 and the 2900.
When the 8800 and the 2900 were released, I didn't buy them because of the high power required by these cards. Even when not under heavy usage these cards easily suck in close to 200W power and close to 300W on load. That much power requirement is just plain insane and should have been banned by government agencies considering the Global Warming Issue..
The 3xxx series doesn't make the power requirement lower by much, but it still promises atleast 50W lower than the current cards. I hope gamers realize they are being overly selfish by buying these power sucking monsters and buy something less power hungry. We are going less power hungry in processors, but when do we expect such a trend with graphic cards?? [Fusion?? Larabee??]
Lately I have seen a lot of tech sites talk about the popularity of different sites based on information from ComScore. ComScore is an internet marketing research company and it uses surveyed computers to study online behavior.
This made me enquire into how ComScore was collecting data and how it was monitoring the sites. I also wondered about the sample size that ComScore uses to report to its clients. ComScore is popularly used by a few tech blogs like GigaOm, TechCrunch and hence I wondered if these tech sites have reliably tried to find out how ComScore accumulates its data.
ComScore states that it installs monitoring software on computers with user's consent and tracks their behavior. In return the users get security software, virus-scanning and even cash prizes and goodies. This is the good way of monitoring, but then it makes me wonder how many computers can have this software installed ?? :-0
In the past, ComScore have also used not-so-righteous ways for monitoring user behavior. They have used spyware from DollarRevenue and also had something embedded into iMesh for reporting. They even gave away proxy servers to the world, so that they can be monitored. College dorms, libraries and public internet cafes are popular places where the tracking/monitoring softwares could be installed... This means that obviously sites where college/young students visit like Facebook and Orkut would get higher pageviews.
I have used many different types of web-tracking softwares and was once part of a web tracking application project. During that I realized how impossible it was to create a meaningful and true picture of the net-surfer's behavior.
Cookies distributed through popular sites is one way to track users, but is an expensive affair. Google easily does it due to its rule over the web and nearly everyone using analytics or urchin gives Google all the data. I'm wondering when Google would start selling its tracking data and become an internet marketing research provider!!
