Sun sure is doing some really interesting things these days. First they release a chip with 8 cores, each capable of running 4 threads simultaneously. Now they have released the design of the chip under the GPLv2.
OpenSPARC
Leave a reply
Speculations on the future of science
Speculations on the future of science by Kevin Kelly
Science will continue to surprise us with what it discovers and creates; then it will astound us by devising new methods to surprises us. At the core of science’s self-modification is technology. New tools enable new structures of knowledge and new ways of discovery. The achievement of science is to know new things; the evolution of science is to know them in new ways. What evolves is less the body of what we know and more the nature of our knowing
Net Neutrality vs. Net Neutering
For some more discussion of net neutrality see Net Neutrality vs. Net Neutering.
Linux Journal’s new editor
So my favourite magazine, Linux Journal, has a new editor. Nicholas Petreley.
I have been a Linux Journal subscriber for 8+ years and I proudly have every issue on my bookshelf. I even paid for a subscription for my favourite computer store to help them gain knowledge about Linux and FOSS.
It used to be that the final page of Linux Journal had good information; news from the community, law advice etc. Now that Petreley has joined, the last page of my favourite magazine has uninformed rants that at best belong in a Slashdot comment on a KDE vs GNOME story.
I can only imagine what people new to the community will think when they pick up their first issue of Linux Journal and see that the writing style typified by Slashdot comments also makes it into the community’s print publication.
I will reserve my judgement on the article content for a couple of more issues since the articles that have been published so far were quite likely in the pipeline before Petreley got involved. However, I seriously doubt that Petreley’s biases will not bleed into the rest of the magazine.
On the plus side, the new larger, more graphical layout is quite visually appealing. To whatever extent Petreley was involved in the graphic design changes I compliment him and the rest of the Linux Journal team. Too bad the new layout does not make up for the loss in editorial quality.
Better networking with SCTP
Better networking with SCTP: A great article at IBM developer works on SCTP.
Interview with Van Jacobson
TCP/IP pioneer’s past is prologue from EETimes.
EET: And though packets declared victory over circuits, there seems to be renewed interest in giving IP as many circuit-like characteristics as possible.
Jacobson: I hope that the circuit obsession is transitional. Anytime you try to apply scheduling to a problem to give latency strict bounds, the advantages are not worth the cost of implementation. Strict guarantees gain you at best a 100-microsecond gain in networks, where the intrinsic jitter in the thermal conditions of the planet is 300 microseconds.
EET: So all the late-1990s studies of QoS involved people speaking different languages, coming from different perspectives.
Jacobson: QoS has been an area of immense frustration for me. We’re suffering death by 10,000 theses. It seems to be a requirement of thesis committees that a proposal must be sufficiently complicated for a paper to be accepted. Look at Infocom, look at IEEE papers; it seems as though there are 100,000 complex solutions to simple priority-based QoS problems.
The result is vastly increased noise in the signal-to-noise ratio. The working assumption is that QoS must be hard, or there wouldn’t be 50,000 papers on the subject. The telephony journals assume this as a starting point, while the IP folks feel that progress in QoS comes from going out and doing something.
AIGLX and Xgl
Accelerated X flame wars!—Maybe not in Free Software Magazine gives some background on X graphics and explains the similarities between AIGLX and Xgl.
Convergence (Saving the Net)
Saving the Net and network neutrality in general have become big topics lately. I have made several posts on the topic over the last few months (1, 2, 3). See Michael Geist‘s The Search for Neutrality for a bit of Canadian perspective.
With the above in mind, it was with great interest that I read this month’s installment of Geoff Huston‘s The ISP Column. The article is entitled Convergence?. I have copied a couple of choice quotes below. There is lots more good information in the article. Last month’s column, IPv6 – Extinction, Evolution or Revolution?, also offers some interesting perspectives on the future of IP service providers.
One emerging body of opinion is that the issue here is not finding the right layer for virtualization of the network, nor is it an exercise in finding just the right form of value to add to these networks, but in recognising the futility in such exercises in the first place.
By any accounts peer-to-peer file sharing has taken over the Internet, with estimates of between 45% to 70% of total internet traffic volumes being attributable to music and video sharing. This has turned the Internet into one of the more prodigious music and video distribution systems ever conceived. This shift in user behaviour has significant implications for the entertainment industry’s chosen distribution methods, and it is likely that the industry will ultimately come to terms with peer sharing technologies such as BitTorrent. The loser in all this is likely to be real time video delivery systems, so one reasonable conclusion is that real time content delivery, or Triple Play time, is over, BitTorrent has won over the user!
The modernization of X
For those who don’t know, there is a lot of good work happening on X these days. Especially interesting is Xgl, AIGLX and the composite extension. Since Xgl and AIGLX are two different ways to bring GL-accelerated effects to the standard Linux desktop, there has been much arguing over which is the better approach.
NVidia appears to believe that the AIGLX approach is a better long-term solution but there is no denying that the combination of Xgl and compiz produce better results at present.
Despite reading extensively on both of these projects, I don’t know enough about deep graphics issues to really make a good decision as to which is better. I’ll leave that to the X people. For now, I’m just really happy to see these features coming to my Linux desktop soon!
Check out this video from Novell to see just how cool this stuff is.
Xgl demo (58MB, XVid).
Computer science growing into a basic science
Computer science growing into a basic science
The talks demonstrated that research in computer science is moving beyond the study of a set of computing machinery. Just as mathematics and physics have matured into fundamental sciences, computer science, too, is graduating into one.