Archive for August, 2007...
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Ted Samson writes “In their latest round of energy-efficiency tests between AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon, independent testing firm Neal Nelson and Associates find AMD still holds an edge, but it’s certainly not cut-and-dried. Nelson put similarly equipped servers through another gauntlet of tests, swapping in different amounts of memory and varying transaction loads. In the end, he found that the more memory he installed on the servers, the better the Opteron performed compared to the Xeon. Additionally, at maximum throughput, the Intel system fared better, power-efficiency-wise, by 5.0 to 5.5 percent for calculation intensive workloads. For disk I/O intensive workloads, AMD delivered better power efficiency by 18.4 to 18.6 percent. And in idle states — that is, when servers were waiting for their next work load — AMD consistently creamed Intel.”
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TheGreatGraySkwid writes “With an ironic lack of forward thinking, the Science Fiction Writers of America (or, more specifically, their Vice President Andrew Burt) have issued scattershot DMCA takedown notices against numerous items on the document-sharing site Scribd, many of which were not infringing on SFWA copyrights in any way. It appears that a simple keyword search for prominent science fiction names (like ‘Asimov’ and ‘Silverburg’) was used to determine which documents were to be singled out. Included in the documents was Cory Doctorow’s ‘Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom,’ which was released under the Creative Commons license and is freely available at any number of places. Doctorow is up in arms over at BoingBoing, with several other Science Fiction notables speaking up in the comments.”
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Last weekend the dark horde of nerddom descended on Seattle, entering the heart of the ‘Emerald City’ to gorge itself on the music, culture, and humor of gaming. The Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) once again brought together fans of the influential webcomic for a festival that, without even trying, seems to be taking the place of old E3. Though they were expecting around 30,000 people, the word was that by early Sunday they’d already gone through some 40,000 badges. There were DSes everywhere, concerts at night, a packed exhibit hall, and benchmark comic strips created by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins adorned almost every wall. Despite all the people and the noise, somehow the event had a community feel to it that was hard to understand … and even harder to describe. I’ll try, though, along with impressions from games on the show floor and the incredible music of folks like Jonathan Coulton and the Minibosses. Read on, and All Hail Ball.
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An anonymous reader writes “SCO is asking the court to enter a final judgment on the Unix ownership issues so that it can seek an immediate appeal. The logic for this, according to Groklaw Editor Pamela Jones, is that SCO would rather appeal right away so it can try all its claims at IBM, should it successfully appeal the judge’s order. ‘Otherwise, SCO has to wait until Novell goes through trial to a verdict and then appeal, and while it is in the appeal process, IBM would go forward in its now much smaller version, based on the August 10th ruling … The trial starts, though, in less than a month and it will last less than a week, so none of this makes any sense if you look at a calendar. I think, therefore, it must be about FUD, so it sounds like SCO is on the move again.’ The text of the request is available online. “
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shas3n writes “In an interesting and innovative way Bangalore city, India, has come up with a way to monitor road traffic congestion by monitoring the density of mobile phones. This can give users quantitative and directional information of traffic flow without significant additional infrastructure investments. The congestion data is already available online.”
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