Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Thursday, November 20, 2003

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Making a case for Efficient Supercomputing: "A supercomputer evokes images of "big iron" and speed; it is the Formula 1 racecar of computing. As we venture forth into the new millennium, however, I argue that efficiency, reliability, and availability will become the dominant issues by the end of this decade, not only for supercomputing, but also for computing in general."

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Print web pages to TextEdit: "One advantage of OS X is "Print to PDF" to render nice digital copies of such pages to file and read later. [...] With Panther, one can instead "select all" on the desired web page, then copy and paste (or select "New Window Containing Selection" under Services -> TextEdit) into TextEdit: this will preserve the style, color, etc. of the text -- as well as imbed (most) images and links (though background colors and multi-column pages are not preserved). Unlike PDFs, one can then easily edit the resulting file -- changing fonts or margins, editing out any unnecessary content (such as banner ads), etc. -- and still preserve the URLs within the file for future reference." [macosxhints]

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NASA Installs Linux Supercomputer: "NASA plans to study the ocean's future with the help of the world's first supercomputer of its kind to run on the Linux operating system. The new supercomputer -- an SGI AltixT 3000 single-system image supercomputer -- has been installed at the space agency's Ames Research Center in California." [Slashdot]

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Google as Domain Name System: "Jeremy Zawodny suggests Google is becoming a new DNS, and gets interesting comments. I agree: What I called the Google effect offers interesting opportunities for the Net community, and, if we're lucky, ultimately some big challenges for VeriSign." [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

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POWER5, UltraSPARC IV and Efficeon: Some thoughts on three new processors: "MPF 2003 was a while ago, and after it was over I started working on a wrap-up of the major announcements. The wrap-up quickly turned into a narrower look at only the three processors that interested me the most." [Ars Technica]

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The Scobleizer Weblog: "I was over on Kottke's feed and saw these pictures of a "rock, paper, scizzors" championship. I thought I'd seen every lame human activity there could be. I guess not."