Slashdot

It seems that after several decades of incubation, parallel computing is now ready to be the hot new area for entrepreneurs and investors who are losing interest in Web 2.0

Sameer Patel (http://www.zaptxt.com) writes "Hi Slashdot team, Sameer from ZapTXT here. (www.zaptxt.com) Writing to let you know that we just released ZapTXT support for Skype a few hours ago. If you are not familiar with us, ZapTXT allows you to combine and filter feed sets and receive alerts when your topics appear on any of your selected RSS-enabled website headlines. Alerts come to you via IM, email, SMS text or custom RSS feed. Users can either come to ZapTXT to create a task or use our browser bookmarklet to monitor a web page that they are visiting. ZapTXT can be used for monitoring topics on blogs and comments and a host of other services that offer RSS feeds such as Weather, Online Calendars, Wikis, Traffic, eBay Stores and Classifieds sites such as Craigslist. Here's a run down of what a user can do with ZapTXT -Combine feeds and monitor the set of feeds for keywords or phrases. ("Wii" on SlashDot, Engadget and CNetReviews) -Following conversations on blog posts — use ZapTXT with comments RSS feeds and receive notifications when new comments appear. -Auto discovery of feed from URL (for well formed feeds) -Share ZapTasks with colleagues or friends -Tag and Search Topic clouds for feed discovery -Publisher widget for blogs and sites that want to enable their users to opt-in to receive alerts on their content. We've uploaded a few screen shots to flickr including a screen grab of a Slashdot Alert: http://www.flickr.com/photos/12321539@N00/40758585 2/ Thanks very much and please let me know if you have any questions. We hope you use it too! Cheers, Sameer and Eduard"

sysrammer writes "Computerworld has an article on disk drive failures from the 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies in San Jose, showing, among other things, "no evidence that Fibre Channel (FC) drives are any more reliable than less expensive but slower performing Serial ATA (SATA) drives", and that "that temperature seems to have little effect on drive reliability" (it looks like they're talking about temps closer to the upper operational limit, not catastrophic a/c failures, etc.). FTA: "About 100,000 disks are covered by this data, some for an entire lifetime of five years. The data include drives with SCSI and FC, as well as SATA interfaces. The mean time to failure (MTTF) of those drives, as specified in their datasheets, ranges from 1,000,000 to 1,500,000 hours, suggesting a nominal annual failure rate of at most 0.88%. We find that in the field, annual disk replacement rates typically exceed 1%, with 2-4% common and up to 13% observed on some systems. This suggests that field replacement is a fairly different process than one might predict based on datasheet MTTF." The authors did not identify particular vendors vs. the drive stats...their goal "is not choosing the best and the worst vendors but to help them to improve drive design and testing". Another note is that the study shows disk replacement rates, not necessarily actual failure. The article is at... http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?com mand=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9012066&source=NLT _AM&nlid=1 ...and the Usenix site is here... http://www.usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder .html mp"

geetoo writes "In a recent article on Slashdot, Bill McColl introduced the concept of the supercruncher, a new form of massively parallel architecture aimed at applications that require the concurrent evaluation of huge program sets on live, real-time datastreams. Parallel Machines, the Silicon Valley stealth company that's developing supercrunchers, has posted a video on their website that outlines the technologies, applications and opportunities that are driving this new development."

An anonymous reader writes "O'Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference just ended yesterday in San Francisco. A little know VOIP open source project named Adhearsion grabbed the attention of attending developers, technologists and innovators. Adhearsion is "adhesion you can hear". Written in Ruby, it allows you to integrate your project with Asterisk. By hacking both Ruby's and Rails internals, the Adhearsion framework is on its way to do for Telephony what Rails has done for the web."