jfpoole - Slashdot User

Submission + - New iMac, Mac mini benchmarks

Submitted by jfpoole on Wednesday March 04, 2009 @04:12PM

jfpoole writes: Primate Labs has posted some preliminary benchmarks of the new iMacs and Mac minis. They found that processor speed is virtually unchanged between the older and newer models. Clearly these new Macs are minor updates rather than the major upgrades many Mac users were hoping for.

Collaborative Map-Reduce In the Browser 188

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday March 03, 2009 @04:50PM from the suercomputer-on-the-very-cheap dept.

igrigorik writes "The generality and simplicity of Google's Map-Reduce is what makes it such a powerful tool. However, what if instead of using proprietary protocols we could crowd-source the CPU power of millions of users online every day? Javascript is the most widely deployed language — every browser can run it — and we could use it to push the job to the client. Then, all we would need is a browser and an HTTP server to power our self-assembling supercomputer (proof of concept + code). Imagine if all it took to join a compute job was to open a URL."

Bookmark 1 Core, 2 Cores, 4 Cores, 8: How Much Difference Does It Make? (lowendmac.com)

by jfpoole on Tuesday April 10, 2007 @01:18PM

Comment Re:That depends... (Score 2, Informative) 505

by jfpoole on Sunday March 16, 2003 @10:56PM (#5526395) Attached to: MySQL A Threat to Bigwigs?

There's actually three pages of (somewhat unfounded) explanations as to why it can't be ported to MS SQL. Mostly bullshit about WACOM SQL being incompatible with Transact (which begs the question, why not just use Transact in the first place when MS' and Sybase' version are about 80% similar).

Depending on which Sybase database they're running, it might not be unfounded. There are a couple of Sybase database servers out there. One is Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE), which is based off the same codebase as Microsoft SQL Server. Another is Adaptive Server Anywhere (ASA, formerly SQL Anywhere, formerly Watcom SQL), which is a different codebase entirely. If the developers are talking about Watcom SQL, then I suspect they're running ASA, not ASE, in which case porting an application from ASA to SQL Server might be non-trivial (I've no idea, since I've never tried it).

There's also the fact that ASA is fairly cheap as far as database servers go, so there might not be much incentive to port these applications to MySQL.

(Disclosure: I'm a code monkey for Sybase.)

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