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June 2005 - Posts

Ars Technica: 2005 buyer's guide is out!

http://arstechnica.com/guides/buyer/system-guide-200506.ars What is interesting is that the budget box solution is now based on AMD64 939 and PCI-Express. Hmmm... maybe it's just me, but I would prefer a more conservative solution based on the omnipresent Read More...
Posted Wednesday, June 29, 2005 10:15 AM by AdiOltean | 2 Comments
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Nanoholes: more capacity for harddisks

The quest for more storage density continues... Fujitsu researches suceeded to develop a similar technology that would increase harddisks capacity to around 1 Tb per square inch. This seems to be similar with a previous research project on which I blogged Read More...
Posted Wednesday, June 29, 2005 10:05 AM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments
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Atlas: Seamless AJAX programming

Scott Guthrie has a great blog entry on several platform enhancements, code-name Atlas, that will address AJAX-style programming. At the same time, Charles Fitzgerald presented the Atlas technologies. Microsoft will release a technology preview of Atlas Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 28, 2005 1:24 PM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments
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Puzzle: two cubes

You are given two white cubes. You are asked to draw a digit (from 0..9) on every square of these cubes, such that you will be able to represent evert day in a month using these cubes in certain position. For example, "13" would require that a face on Read More...
Posted Monday, June 27, 2005 5:24 PM by AdiOltean | 4 Comments
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Nuclear fusion to be probed in France?

ITER is one the largest physics experiments ever attempted. In short, it should be the first research fusion reactor that actually will succeed to produce power. ITER attempts to operate in the 500 MW (thermal) range, which is around the output of a small Read More...
Posted Monday, June 27, 2005 2:16 PM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments

Puzzle: How do you get out of the prison (Part II)

The previous puzzle was solved correctly in the comments. So I thought to present with another prison-style puzzle: A warden meets with 23 new prisoners when they arrive. He tells them, "You may meet today and plan a strategy. But after today, you will Read More...
Posted Friday, June 24, 2005 11:09 PM by AdiOltean | 7 Comments
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When CoCreateInstance returns 0x80080005 (CO_E_SERVER_EXEC_FAILURE)

A sneaky error The following post summarizes my personal experience with a subtle COM error. CO_E_SERVER_EXEC_FAILURE (0x80080005) is an error which can be randomly returned by CoCreateInstance() if you are using an out-of-process COM server. As far as Read More...
Posted Friday, June 24, 2005 7:29 PM by AdiOltean | 3 Comments

XBOX 360 Graphics Demystified

Beyond3D has a very detailed article about Xenos, the GPU provided by ATI in XBox 360... http://www.beyond3d.com/articles/xenos/ Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 16, 2005 6:20 PM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments

Playing with transportable snapshots

Transportable shadow copies are another practical consequence of a new paradigm - the data is stored in the (SAN) cloud. The data availability is not anymore tied to your machine. This simple fact has far reaching consequences. One consequence is the Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 16, 2005 2:31 PM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments

Hackers meet Microsoft

Blue Hat summit seems to be a new type of events going on. It's a rare event when you start something from scratch and you get comments like: "I didn't know if we were going to end up with this massively adversarial experience or if this was going to Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 16, 2005 2:24 PM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments
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In search for a geeky toy...

At first, I wanted to buy one to surprise my friends, but then I changed my mind and just posted the link on my blog... Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 16, 2005 2:35 AM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments
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Microchip could be used in World Cup soccer balls

You might ask what's next? FIFA will consider using an electronic microchip inside soccer balls at the 2006 World Cup finals if the technology proves successful. The microchip, intended to confirm whether or not a ball has crossed the goal line, will Read More...
Posted Wednesday, June 15, 2005 8:40 PM by AdiOltean | 3 Comments
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An interview with Daniela Florescu

Unless you live under a rock, you already know XQuery as one of the newest and coolest standards in the XML world. Hey - it's in SQL Server 2005 too - in fact, Dennis just started blogging about it! Being one of the original XQuery designers, and one Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 14, 2005 1:19 AM by AdiOltean | 5 Comments

Welcome Max

Max Feingold just started a blog! In the past, I knew him as one of the good COM experts around. Incidentally, one of my previous posts describes an intricate COM+ setup issue on which Max helped me to see the light... :-) Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 14, 2005 1:09 AM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments
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Puzzle: what is the next card?

This is a very nice puzzle that kept me awake for a long time... :-) John and Dianne, two journalists (and experienced bridge players), are captured by some foreign government. The guardian says that he can free them, if they win the following game. First, Read More...
Posted Monday, June 13, 2005 5:56 PM by AdiOltean | 16 Comments
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Searching for the next bubble burst

It looks like the new burst is set to happen in the real-estate market. Or, at least, this is the conclusion of two physicists at UCLA in their article . We analyze the quarterly average sale prices of new houses sold in the USA as a whole, in the northeast, Read More...
Posted Monday, June 13, 2005 2:36 PM by AdiOltean | 6 Comments
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Ageia's PhysX: Hype or Revolution?

There is more and more excitement building up on an upcoming physics hardware acceleration engine . If this thing succeeds, it's going to be big. Anyone remembers 3dfx that revolutionized the game industry with their cards? But, anyway, I just read three Read More...
Posted Sunday, June 12, 2005 2:00 AM by AdiOltean | 2 Comments

Storage is still hot

IDC says: while the rate of growth is slowing down (to only 6%), it is still the eight consecutive quarter of continuous growth. "Storage spending is clearly trending upward as organizations strive to stay ahead of their information storage demands,” Read More...
Posted Friday, June 10, 2005 2:11 PM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments
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A harddisk with 1 terabit per square inch?

This is funny. I just blogged about the new perpendicular storage technology (which is estimated to give 230 gigabits per square inch - which is about 29 GB per sq.in.). Well, how about about a harddisk that stores four times more than that? Physicists Read More...
Posted Wednesday, June 08, 2005 7:19 PM by AdiOltean | 2 Comments
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Seagate adopts perpendicular recording technology for harddisks

Another storm in the harddisk industry is coming. Hitachi announced its commitment a few months ago. And now, Seagate quickly follows... The new products are expected to ship starting this summer. Seagate is preparing to convert between 70 percent and Read More...
Posted Wednesday, June 08, 2005 6:54 PM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments
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Seattle - the most unwired city of America?

According to Intel , Seattle is now the most unwired city: Seattle is now the most unwired city in America, according to Intel Corporation's third annual “Most Unwired Cities” survey released today. In a rapidly changing wireless landscape, Seattle narrowly Read More...
Posted Wednesday, June 08, 2005 12:03 AM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments
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Windows Server Update Services released for download

The ultimate solution for hassle-free patching of Windows, SQL Server, Exchange and others is finally here. http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/updateservices/default.mspx If you are curious to see how Windows Server Update Services stacks up Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 07, 2005 6:39 PM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments
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.NET versus J2EE - New case studies and benchmarks

New benchmark results comparing .NET 2.0 vs .NET 1.1 and J2EE platforms are now available. 1) Comparing XML Performance XMLMark (a benchmark created by Sun Microsystems) was used by Microsoft to compare the performance of XML operations between .NET 2.0 Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 07, 2005 4:22 PM by AdiOltean | 3 Comments
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Managing Solaris with MOM

Hmm... interesting demo presented today at TechEd . A quote from http://www.e2ksecurity.com/ : VS2005 delivers System Definition Model (SDM) info; SDM will be consumable by MOM and SMS in "System Center wave 2" coming in future. Bill Anderson from mgmt Read More...
Posted Monday, June 06, 2005 7:56 PM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments
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New toys in the start.com playground

According to Dare , start.com just got more interesting. Here is my new home page: http://start.com/myw3b Read More...
Posted Monday, June 06, 2005 7:33 PM by AdiOltean | 4 Comments
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Using RAM instead of a harddisk?

At Computex, Gigabyte presented a RAM-based harddisk that offers more than 60x the performance of a regular harddisk. From the article on PCWorld: Giga-byte's IRam is a PC add-in card with four DDR DRAM (double data rate dynamic RAM memory) slots that's Read More...
Posted Monday, June 06, 2005 12:49 AM by AdiOltean | 8 Comments
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Blog basics: Learn how to keep an online journal

Wow - I just noticed this article on the front www.microsoft.com page! Although this is not a new article - it was published two months ago. Read More...
Posted Sunday, June 05, 2005 6:30 PM by AdiOltean | 2 Comments
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The WS-* world is changing

I just finished reading a shocking post from Richard Monson-Haefel, where he blatantly states that JAX-RPC is a bad technology. It's not everyday when you see this type of messages from the same person that wrote a well-respected book on the same subject... Read More...
Posted Sunday, June 05, 2005 12:06 AM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments
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Apple on x86 - ripple effects?

I recently read a top story on AnandTech about comparing Mac OS X versus Linux. It looks like most of the time they were getting reasonably comparable performance, (although Opteron configurations were apparently standing out as the best in several cases). Read More...
Posted Saturday, June 04, 2005 3:23 PM by AdiOltean | 5 Comments
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Retrospective: What Have We Learned from the PDP-11

I put in the post title the original name of this fascinating article written by Gordon Bell. My favourite quote: We had a basic understanding of Moore’s Law, but unfortunately when we examined the implications for the future, the results were too radical Read More...
Posted Friday, June 03, 2005 2:44 PM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments
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The various aspects of Open Source

A funny thing that I just realized is that the term "open source" is generally used to denote several types of software. Without actually defining what "open source" means, I am thinking to several categories: 1) Hobby projects . These are projects started Read More...
Posted Friday, June 03, 2005 11:25 AM by AdiOltean | 26 Comments
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Is Fibre Channel doomed?

Or at least this is what Bob Metcalfe says in an interview . Given the increasing competition between FC and iSCSI, it is not a surprise from the author of Ethernet to see such headlines. Here is a quote: "Fibre Channel's doomed," he said in a recent Read More...
Posted Friday, June 03, 2005 12:21 AM by AdiOltean | 3 Comments

History: old computers...

Did you know that the three-digit IBM models ( IBM 701 , for example) were based on vaccum tubes and four-digit ones (like the IBM 1401 ) were based on transistors? And there is a lot more at http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/index.html ... Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 02, 2005 9:09 PM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments
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The Art of Viktor Antonov

This type of art that leaves me in complete amazement. A fantastic place, an atmosphere close to what us, eastern-europeans were so used to. Viktor (who spent his childhood in Sofia, Bulgaria) is the art director/conceptual designer at Valve. His influence Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 02, 2005 2:16 AM by AdiOltean | 3 Comments

Interesting way to squeeze permalinks

Argh... looks like I am rediscovering the wheel. In the past I used services like http://tinyurl.com but it looks that I don't need it for my permalinks. At least on a Community Server powered blog, I can simple write: http://blogs.msdn.com/423926.aspx Read More...
Posted Wednesday, June 01, 2005 4:44 PM by AdiOltean | 6 Comments
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Article: Too much homework can be counterproductive

You might think that it is almost impossible to "measure" how much homework is needed. Surprisingly, this is not that hard to figure out - a indirect method is to compare various teaching methods in several countries, and then putting them side by side Read More...
Posted Wednesday, June 01, 2005 1:58 PM by AdiOltean | 3 Comments
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