Checkout this interesting entry at the Creative Commons blog about the effect the current copyright system is having on documentaries. The short movie is worth watching.
Permission culture
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Too much coding…
Canadian copyright update
More bad copyright news in this article from the Globe and Mail.
Monitor Calibration
When reading a photo manipulation article in Linux Journal I found a reference to this monitor calibration link. The settings recommended on this site give my monitors a much more yellowish colour than they had previously. I’m not sure I like it but I figure they probably know better than I do.
Keyboards
Many computer users have fond memories of the old IBM keyboards that made the loud key click sound. Apparently, these people are still building them.
Intellectual Property a misnomer?
Richard Stallman the man behind the FSF and the GPL has written a short piece on why the term intellectual property should not be used. Personally, I think it shouldn’t be used just because when I see the acronym IP, I think network protocol, not intellectual property.
Halloween
Blog spam
The blog spammers have found me. I woke up to lots of comment approval requests this morning. Fortunately, due to Bob’s incident I had already turned on the comment approval feature. Since there is a link on his site back here I figured there was a good chance they would hit me soon.
It’s disgusting how these people will take advantage of others for their own gain.
Site search engines
Has anyone else noticed how bad the search features of most websites are? When trying to find the two RCU links in my last blog entry I first attempted to find them using the search features on the Linux Journal website. None of the returned results were what I wanted. So after trying a few queries I turned to Google. I did a search with “site:linuxjournal.com” appended to the same search terms I had tried with the Linux Journal search engine. Right there on the first page were links to both articles I was looking for.
Why do sites even bother having their own search?
Linux on a 512 CPU system
This still amazes me. A single Linux kernel image can be used for a 512 CPU machine. See SGI’s work here and the related SlashDot story. Sure you may have heard about Linux clusters with thousands of CPUs before. However, in most cases this was a cluster of machines with 1-4 processors each. The scalability requirements from the kernel side of things are very different when you are dealing with a few CPUs versus 512. You can find out more about the Altrix line at SGI‘s website.
Linux running the worlds fastest computer, wow!
What really fascinates me about this scalability work is the algorithms required. Making a system like this work efficiently isn’t about small optimizations it’s about having algorithms that can scale well.
One technique currently used in the Linux kernel is RCU. Linux journal has had couple of good articles on RCU which are available from their website.