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Supercomputing

Submission + - Cray's Comeback and the Future of Supercomputing

Submitted by
Greg Huang
Greg Huang writes: "In the 1970s and 80s, Cray was synonymous with supercomputing. But the company fell on hard times after getting bought by Silicon Graphics in 1996 and then merging with Tera Computer in 2000. What has happened to Cray since then? Xconomy has an in-depth profile of the "new Cray" as it makes its way back to the top of the supercomputing world, including its strategy for gaining customers and advancing its technology in the perpetual race to build the world's fastest, most powerful machine."
Intel

Submission + - Why do we have F2XM1? (blogspot.com)

Submitted by QuietObserver
QuietObserver writes: I was researching the Intel Floating Point instructions while working on a project, and I first came across F2XM1. I immediately wondered what the need was for an instruction that does 2 ^ x — 1 but has an input range of -1 to 1. I've tried researching the subject online, but all I've come up with is a reference from someone else who has the exact same question.


Quoted from http://jheriko-rtw.blogspot.com/2009/04/why-do-we-have-f2xm1.html?showComment=1249084660633#c6336764748095052620

F2XM1 is a floating point assembler instruction for Intel CPUs. It is one of several which seem to be there to allow the calculation of several of the common "higher" functions, like pow(x, y) or log(x). However, I am always confused why it subtracts one after finding the power of 2 and why its limited from -1 to 1, since it doesn't seem to help anything much at all...

If anyone has any comments or suggestions about what use F2XM1 might have, and why Intel's FPU architecture also lacks an instruction to perform 2^x without subtracting anything (I know of at least one other FPU instruction set that does, and has no input range limitations).
Idle

Submission + - Facebooking Judge Catches Lawyer in Lie (abajournal.com) 2

Submitted by
edadams
edadams writes: "A Galveston, Texas lawyer asked for a continuance because of the death of her father. But the judge she was asking knew the lawyer had earlier posted a string of status updates on Facebook, detailing her week of drinking, going out and partying."
The Internet

Submission + - OpenBitTorrent, a DMCA-Resistant Torrent Tracker (openbittorrent.com)

Submitted by
rm
rm writes: "There seemed to be no open, independent and stable BitTorrent trackers out there, so some hackers decided to create OpenBitTorrent, a free for anyone to use and (supposedly) a stable tracker. As a nice bonus, since the new tracker does not know or care what it is tracking, it is very likely to be completely immune to DMCA takedown requests: the authors make it very clear that they do not host or index for searching the content or any torrent files, do not keep logs of downloaders' IP addresses and can not block any files from being distributed using their tracker. Also, it looks like ThePirateBay has recently started to use OpenBitTorrent as a secondary tracker for all its torrents."
Programming

Open Source Languages Rumble At OSCON 197

Posted by kdawson from the fairest-of-them-all dept.
blackbearnh writes "Everybody knows what the best programming language is, it's whatever one you like the most. But is there a best language overall? Or even a best language for a given purpose? This question has been debated since the first time there were two languages to choose from. The argument is still going on, of course, but maybe a little light will be shed on the issue this week at OSCON. On Wednesday night at 7PM Pacific, representatives of the 5 major open source languages (perl, PHP, Python, Java and Ruby), as arbitrarily decided by O'Reilly, will meet to debate the merits of their various languages. If you're not going to be at OSCON, you can watch it live on a webcast and pose questions or comments to the participants. The representatives are: Python: Alex Martelli, Google; Ruby: Brian Ford, Engine Yard; PHP: Laura Thomson, Mozilla; Perl: Jim Brandt, Perl Foundation; Java: Rod Johnson, SpringSource."
Upgrades

New Binary Diffing Algorithm Announced By Google 192

Posted by timothy from the smartness-and-light dept.
bheer writes "Today Google's Open-Source Chromium project announced a new compression technique called Courgette geared towards distributing really small updates. Courgette achieves smaller diffs (about 9x in one example) than standard binary-diffing algorithms like bsdiff by disassembling the code and sending the assembler diffs over the wire. This, the Chromium devs say, will allow them to send smaller, more frequent updates, making users more secure. Since this will be released as open source, it should make distributing updates a lot easier for the open-source community."
Social Networks

Analyst, 15, Creates Storm After Trashing Twitter 381

Posted by CmdrTaco from the twitter-is-for-old-people dept.
Barence writes "A 15-year-old schoolboy has become an overnight sensation after writing a report on teenagers' media habits for analysts Morgan Stanley. Intern Matthew Robson was asked to write a report about his friends' use of technology during his work experience stint with the firm's media analysts. The report was so good the firm decided to publish it, and it generated 'five or six' times more interest than Morgan Stanley's regular reports. The schoolboy poured scorn on Twitter, claiming that teenagers 'realize that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless.' He also claimed games consoles are replacing mobile phones as the way to chat with friends."

Comment Re:Correctly? (Score 1) 895

by Paolone (#28604421) Attached to: Researcher Trolls MMO, Surprised When Players Hate Him

How is teleporting people in front of NPC bots designed to enforce a safe zone instead of beating someone up yourself "playing correctly?"

It is since the zone is not flagged as "non-teleport", like we used to do with '80s technology in MUDs. The guy is playing by the rules and he's on infringing the EULA/whatever they have (else he would have been banned).
Programming

IBM Releases Open Source Machine Learning Compiler 146

Posted by timothy from the what-you-meant-to-say-is dept.
sheepweevil writes "IBM just released Milepost GCC, 'the world's first open source machine learning compiler.' The compiler analyses the software and determines which code optimizations will be most effective during compilation using machine learning techniques. Experiments carried out with the compiler achieved an average 18% performance improvement. The compiler is expected to significantly reduce time-to-market of new software, because lengthy manual optimization can now be carried out by the compiler. A new code tuning website has been launched to coincide with the compiler release. The website features collaborative performance tuning and sharing of interesting optimization cases."
Education

HTML Tags For Academic Printing? 338

Posted by timothy from the gedankenexperiment-draws-cries-of-use-ps-or-pdf dept.
meketrefi writes "It's been quite a while since I got interested in the idea of using html (instead of .doc. or .odf) as a standard for saving documents — including the more official ones like academic papers. The problem is using HTML to create pages with a stable size that would deal with bibliographical references, page breaks, different printers, etc. Does anyone think it is possible to develop a decent tag like 'div,' but called 'page,' specially for this? Something that would make no use of CSS? Maybe something with attributes as follows: {page size="A4" borders="2.5cm,2.5cm,2cm,2cm" page_numbering="bottomleft,startfrom0"} — You get the idea... { /page} I guess you would not be able to tell when the page would be full, so the browser would have to be in charge of breaking the content into multiple pages when needed. Bibliographical references would probably need a special tag as well, positioned inside the tag ..." Is this such a crazy idea? What would you advise?
Censorship

China Delays "Green Dam" Internet Filter 86

Posted by kdawson from the step-too-far dept.
SailorSpork sends in a BBC report that "China is delaying a controversial plan requiring all new computers sold in the country to be equipped with an Internet filtering software, state media says. The filter, called Green Dam Youth Escort, was to have been required from Wednesday, but the ministry of industry said computer makers needed more time." The submitter adds: "Except of course for Sony, who as reported earlier lacked the moral fiber to hold off installing the spyware, which reportedly is ridden with security holes and uses stolen code. Sony actually managed to ship ahead of the schedule."
Image

Artist Wins £20,000 Grant To Study Women's Butts Screenshot-sm 202

Posted by samzenpus from the been-doing-a-lot-of-extra-credit-lately dept.
Sue Williams has been awarded a £20,000 grant by the Arts Council of Wales, to "explore cultural attitudes towards female buttocks." Sue plans to examine racial attitudes towards bottoms in Europe and Africa and create plaster casts of women's behinds to try to understand their place in contemporary culture. And here I've been studying the issue all these years for free like a sucker!
The Courts

Madoff Sentenced To 150 Years 602

Posted by kdawson from the bye-bye dept.
selven was one of several readers to send in the news that Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison. "Bernard Madoff's victims gasped and cheered when he was sentenced to 150 years in prison, but they walked away knowing little more about how he carried out the biggest robbery in Wall Street history. In one of the most dramatic courtroom conclusions to a corporate fraud case, the 71-year-old swindler was unemotional as he was berated by distraught investors during the 90-minute proceeding. Many former clients had hoped he would shed more light on his crime and explain why he victimized so many for so long. But he did not. Madoff called his crime 'an error of judgment' and his 'failure,' reiterating previous statements that he alone was responsible for the $65 billion investment fraud. His victims said they did not hear much new from Madoff in his five-minute statement. They also said they did not believe anything he said. As he handed down the maximum penalty allowed, US District Judge Denny Chin... [said], 'I simply do not get the sense that Mr. Madoff has done all that he could or told all that he knows.'"
Government

Submission + - New attempt at Internet censorship in Italy (ilcannocchiale.it) 3

Submitted by myrrdyn
myrrdyn writes: There is a new law proposed in Italian Senate to block online publication of information about past criminal trials. Main point of this proposal (link in Italian) is to ensure an "oblivion right" to those condemned for past crimes/misdemeanor, i.e. the right to have publication about past offenses removed from public view. What is troubling about this is that in current form (yet to be discussed) no exemption are contemplated, except for terrorism, life sentences and such. Under the hood of privacy concern there is a serious attempt to limit liberty of speech and liberty of press. Is not a small coincidence that the proposer (On. Carolina Lussana) has an husband (Mr. Galati, elected in the Deputy Chamber) who was condemned some years ago in criminal trials, and the two together are in the coalition lead by Silvio Berlusconi, who also faced (and is facing) trials related to judge corruptions and much more

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