I was curious to try and see Ridge A in Google Earth. GE didn't seem to know it. The images of Antarctica are for the most part really low rez. But, there are some interesting anomalies in GE. Firstly, there is a big white "frying pan" over the south pole, secondly, if I go to 90,90 (north pole) GE seems to have floating point problems. -90,90 seems to work. I get a kaleidoscope of blue vectors when I scroll in or out. Thirdly, if I try to go "to here", (Antarctica) from Cupertino, CA it says "We could not understand your search." Bummer.

I had never heard of last.fm. I checked out their site briefly. Why don't sites clearly say how they work instead of making someone work their way through a lame FAQ?

Anyway, here is a quote from their Terms of Use agreement.

"It is important for you to refer to these Terms of Use from time to time to make sure that you are aware of any additions, revisions, or modifications that we may have made to these Terms of Use. Your continued use of the Website constitutes your acceptance of the new Terms of Use."

Is this a common practice. One has to agree to something that can change and you are obligated to adhere to these changes, too? How can this be legal?

There also spell out later their claim to intellectual property rights. Including "database rights." Is that a real right or are they just making that up?

They also state "You are responsible for... restricting access to your computer so that others may not access any password-protected portion of the Website or other Properties using your name..."

Yuck. Yuck. Yuck. Is this really worth their service?

The brief description in the article sounds suspicious and incompetent.
1. A common killer in parallelization is false sharing. That is, threads on two processors fight over a cache-line even though they are accessing independent variables. A cache-line is typically bigger than an individual variable. The approach of using adjacent elements of an array for parallelism sounds naive. One needs to pad the array.

2. Updating a shared variable, especially a non-scaler, in an inner loop is naive. One should reference local scalers in inner loops when parallelizing. Just once, should the thread update the shared variable. Don't reference non-scalers or shared variables in an inner loop. Don't lock in the inner loop, either, if you can avoid it.

If it is not an inner loop then the locking is probably not a big issue any way.

3. Java, really, Java?