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Intel

Submission + - Why Intel and OLPC Parted Ways (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
runamock
runamock writes: "The New York Times has an article that sheds some light on why Intel left the OLPC board: 'A frail partnership between Intel and the One Laptop Per Child educational computing group was undone last month in part by an Intel saleswoman: She tried to persuade a Peruvian official to drop the country's commitment to buy a quarter-million of the organization's laptops in favor of Intel PCs. Intel and the group had a rocky relationship from the start in their short-lived effort to get inexpensive laptops into the hands of the world's poorest children. But the saleswoman's tactic was the final straw for Nicholas Negroponte..'"
Software

Submission + - Is parallel programming just too hard?

Submitted by pcause
pcause writes: There has been a lot of talk recently about the need for programmers to shift paradigms and begin building more parallel applications and systems. The need to do this and the hardware and systems to support it have been around for a while, but we haven't seen a lot of progress. The article says that gaming systems have made progress, but MMOGs are typically years late and I'll bet part of the problem is trying to be more parallel/distributed.

Since this discussion has been going on for over a decade with little progress in terms of widespread change, one has to ask is parallel programming just too difficult for most programmers? Are the tools inadequate or perhaps is it that it is very difficult to think about parallel systems. Maybe it is a fundamental human limit. Will we really see progress in the next 10 years that matches the progress of the silicon?

Comment Re:In the enterprise: Yes, but slowly (Score 1) 476

by AaronLuz (#13263701) Attached to: Will AJAX Threaten Windows Desktop?

Absolutely! Creating a "web service*" is much more productive than generating yet another flat file feed, interfacing with a proprietary messaging system, or spending time developing native RPC methods. The learning curve is very shallow, and most anything can use it.

I would venture to guess that most programmers work in heterogenous corporate environments where deployment costs and interfacing between vendor software takes up most of their time. Really. Would you rather deploy binaries to dozens of retail businesses in five states or just make a change to a web application?

I would say that enterprises, especially mid-size companies, are adopting web applications and web services faster rather than slower.

*SOAP, XML-RPC, HTML-JavaScript, JSON... Ahh, the wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. Sorta makes interoperability a little harder though. :-)

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