Last week, Phil sent me an email about Sun Microsystem’s new T2000 series of servers, based on their Niagara core. Basically, this is a 4, 6, or 8 core system, each of which can execute up to four threads in parallel. It’s supposed to be great for highly threaded, low FPU applications – like web serving and database serving.
As part of their promotion, they’re doing this cool Try before you Buy thing.
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Last year I wrote about some of the work that Seth Nickell was showing off regarding Luminocity, a GL acclerated fun fest of X. Well, times are moving along, and now it appears we’ve got a spat on our hands between Xgl from Novell, and AIGLX from Fedora/RedHat. The gist is that Fedora/RedHat thinks that Novell didn’t do it in enough of a community fashion and has taken to bashing Xgl with claims like “it’s too revolutionary” and the like.
Recently I’ve been getting lots of hits for my MythTV on Ubuntu Athlon64 writeup. I’m talking several hundred a day. This generates a decent amount of traffic over my little cable modem line. Realizing that I now had a product people wanted, I was off to try and “monetize” that. Where do I go? But to Google Adsense!
Google Adsense is frighteningly easy to get working. I was serving ads literally five minutes after I signed up.
Here’s a prime example of what happens when programmers write error messages:
This is an error that was repeated several times for different files when I was copying over some newly ripped CDs from my laptop to my MythTV box. Unfortunately, there are several things wrong with this error dialog that make it useless: I can’t see the complete filename, nor can I expand the box to make the complete filename visible.
If you’re running MythTV on an Athlon 64 platform, you’ve probably noticed that the CPU throttles itself down when transcoding and cutting commercials despite the fact that your processor may show as being 100% utilized. This results in much slower transcoding than one would normally expect, but saves a small amount of power.
However, if you record a lot of stuff, or even a moderate amount of stuff in HD, this property and increased delay can be quite annoying.
Another issue that I’ve been dealing with is spending too much time reading email and blogs, so I’ve decided to reduce those issues. To that end, I’m unsubscribing from a lot of mailing lists and putting lots of blogs on their two weeks notice. If I don’t notice that they’re gone for a few weeks, they stay gone.
Combined with throwing all of my email from last year in a DMZ, I hope this reduces the amount of time I need end up killing with useless email and blogs.
Welcome to my first entry of the 2006 fiscal blogging year (which mere mortals know as the 2006 calendar year). If you’re an astute reader, you may remember that I did a similar entry to this two years ago. In that entry I lamented about being fat and not finishing the bible. Fast forward to 2006, I still haven’t finished the bible, but I’m not as fat, although I need to loose the excess weight I’ve gained over the last few weeks in Texas and Minnesota.
After trying a new motherboard and all that jazz to get my HDTV tuner card working properly I decided to try a new operating system. The thing that prompted this was the notice that some people thought it might be a buffer related issue that was causing some of the reception problems with the card. I also noticed that my system was consistently above 2000 context switches a second even when idle.
During the cold war many “citizens” of totalitarian states were required to carry identification papers and show them on demand to authorities. This action was oestensibly done to check for criminals, but in reality the rulers of these nations had something more insidious in mind. They accurately released that making the citizenry live in fear of the police was a wonderful way to keep everyone under control.
Fast forward to 2005 and America is heading in the same direction.
After much frustration I’ve decided that no matter how many bells and whistles the MSI K8N-Neo4 Platinum has, it still can’t make up for the fact that I get some crazy bad electormagnetic interference when the system is under heavy load. At first I thought it was just going to be on the pcHDTV HD-3000 card, but today during the Steelers game, while I was watching the game while it was recording and had commercial flagging running and the MPEG file just started to crap out.