AMD is introducing parallelism into its chips. It bought ATI (leading graphics chip company) last year so this is probably a consequence - although almost everyone is now on the parallel bandwagon, which was set in motion by IBM (I believe - someone correct me if I’m wrong). The reason we’re all parallel nowadays is that Moore’s Law is broken and parallel processing is the new way to claim big increases in chip power.
BUT making parallel processing efficient is not such a simple task. It’s not so difficult for processing graphics and for some mathematical tasks, but beyond that, it’s tricky. There’s talk of chips with tens, even hundreds of processors on the silicon. Fine if they’re not idle, but methinks many of them will be.
Markets Stats Are Stacked Against Linux
It’s just the truth and it hides the truth. I’m reasonably convinced that a good deal more than 50 percent of the world’s servers run Linux - but no-one is counting. IDC, the bean counter of the analyst world, put Linux at 15% of all operating system revenues for 2006. Problem is that revenue counting does not equate to units. On the vast majority of Linux servers the price of the OS was nothing. The advent of virtualized resource spaces will obfuscate reality even more. On the server, Linux is not just dominant, it has become the standard.
The Idiot Filter
A group of Open Source developers, led by the intrepid Gabriel Ortiz, a sysadmin from Albuquerque, are devoting their valuable time to help humanity and develop an “Idiot Filter” that will prevent irritating posters from posting garbage to web site (according to CNNMoney). The filter will, hopefully, be released by next year.
Here’s the MO. If a lamebrain wants to post a moronic comment to HaveMacWillBlog and the filter is installed, it says something along the lines of :
“Jeez dumbass, this comment is gibberish. Have another go.”
When said lamebrain responds by putting in something equally meaningless it says:
“OK, S**t-for-brains, that’s garbage too. Last chance - and no cuss words this time.”
If our specimen super-idiot still can’t muster anything intelligible, the filter says:
“I’m sorry but you’re too stupid to be allowed to post to this site. Why don’t you just click on one of the ads and head off somewhere else.”
OK. I admit it. I made the dialog up, but the project is real.
We’re done here.
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