FYI: "drop_caches" only drops clean pages, so you need to run "sync" first if you want to properly flush your cache.

Looks like Yahoo! also fired their exclamation point? If only...

There are many hard problems here. Today's search engines get keywords and return websites that are sorted by relevance. Watson will need to figure out what the question (well, answer) is, and then retrieve a single precise question. This is really pushing computing to a new level.

Beating Kasparov was nice, but this is much more difficult.

I bet you didn't know that you're incredibly wrong. Any Israeli citizen can vote, regardless of religion. There are currently 14 Muslim members in the Israeli parliament. Muslims study freely in Israeli universities and work in Israeli companies. The same is obviously not true for Jews in most Muslim countries.

Run? We need to explore! I see the words "ancient" and "Antartica", and I think awesome chair weapon to fight off the Goa'uld. Of course, the ZPM is probably depleted...

The problem isn't ext4 - it's an ext4 flag that gives you better data reliability in case of a power failure. If you're willing to risk it (or have a good UPS), you can change the flag and get all that performance back.

I also have to say that for a site that does so much benchmarking, phoronix is incredibly unprofessional. How about error bars on those bar graphs? Are caches cleared before each benchmark? Etc.

KVM does not need to do para-virtualization, but it can do para-virtualized I/O to get better performance (see virtio).

I believe he meant that the hypervisor itself is a forked version of Linux. Sure, you can run any guest OS you want on both Xen and KVM.

Correction: Red Hat aquired Qumranet, the inventors of KVM (link), so Red Hat is abandoning Xen in favor of KVM as well.

Mod mistake undo

Yea but properly use them? Today, the OS uses the cores in a pretty stupid way, and you end up with data structures being shared by cores, and so you need to lock them (expensive) and copy data between cores (expensive).

Once the operating systems handle them well, and application programmers are more aware of these issues, things will be much better in multi-core-land.

Does the Istanbul have Extended Page Table support like Nehalem does? This is supposed to give a big performance boost to virtual machines, though I haven't seen any hard numbers. Any info?

So?

Not quite there yet, but I saw a nice Israeli UAV on Futureweapons. You launch by hand, can select a location to "hover" over, and then press "return home". It flies back on its own, points itself in the direction of the wind, and glides down.

Or maybe you're just posting a negative review because you work for the competition? :-)