AMD: Will More CPU Cores Always Mean Better Performance?
The company that helped inaugurate the multicore era of CPUs has begun studying the question, will more cores always yield better processing? Or is there a point where the law of diminishing returns takes over? A new tool for developers to take advantage of available resources could help find the answers, and perhaps make 16 cores truly feel more powerful than eight cores.
Two years ago, at the onset of the multicore era, testers examining how simple tasks took advantage of the first CPUs with two on-board logic cores discovered less of a performance boost than they might have expected. For the earliest tests, some were shocked to discover a few tasks actually slowed down under a dual-core scheme.
41% of Facebook Users Give Personal Data to Green Plastic Frog
In a revealing test of where the true insecurities may lie in the realm of social online networking, security software company Sophos today revealed it set up a kind of sting operation on Facebook. It created a fake identity around a green plastic frog it named "Freddi Staur," and had Freddi invite 200 real Facebook users to be its friend.
"It's extremely alarming how easy it was to get users to accept Freddi," stated Sophos security analyst Ron O'Brien this morning. Of those Freddi invited, O'Brien reported, 87 responded positively, and 82 gave personal identification data to Freddi's account when asked.
Tech Preview of Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Available Today
It's a phrase that's starting to become a part of the typical Microsoft user vernacular: "Just wait until Service Pack 1." When Exchange Server 2007 was released last year, there were a number of key feature implementations that had to wait until a future release. That wait may be nearing its end, as Microsoft is giving Exchange admins a taste of at least some of what they've been asking for since last year, with the pending release of a technology preview of Exchange Server SP1.
While installing a preview release of a full-scale enterprise communications environment sounds like playing with fire, many admins already have virtual network environments already configured from having already tested ES 2007's initial release. There, admins may have set up virtual users in a non-existent domain (for instance, with the non-Internet-translatable ".local" top-level domain), and DNS within a virtual server to resolve those addresses.
Videos Purchased from Google to Self-Destruct Wednesday
In a move that may have some wondering whether the proverbial left hand knows what the other left hand is doing, Google issued a notice to its Google Video customers last week informing them that it is discontinuing its video sales business on Wednesday. But that wasn't all: The notice explicitly says that videos purchased or rented, and then downloaded to customers' PCs will no longer be viewable on or after August 15.
In other words, if you were to use this page to search for a video within a specific price range today, regardless of what you pay for it, due to DRM restrictions it will not play after Wednesday.
Open XML Still Likely to Be Certified
Last Friday's news that Microsoft's Office Open XML failed to pass a letter ballot for recommendation by the Executive Board of INCITS to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) without comments, was interpreted yet again by press sources as an outright failure of the standard, and the end of the road for global acceptance. But a check of comments posted by voting members, and a re-read of what rules the INCITS group has posted, says otherwise.
The test which OOXML failed last week was whether it could be recommended by the Board without any concerns being raised by members, regardless of whether they approve or disapprove. BetaNews has been told conflicting accounts of how the rules of INCITS actually work.
Court to Award Broadcom $39.3 Million in Qualcomm Dispute
The long-term effects of last week's scathing redress of Qualcomm's conduct by a federal court judge, have yet to be fathomed. In the short term, Qualcomm will probably have to pay rival Broadcom $39.3 million in damages and costs, which is not the treble damages it had been seeking, though it is double.
This tentative award comes late Friday as a result of a jury trial in US District Court in Santa Ana last May, which awarded Broadcom $19.64 million plus costs. There, the jury found Qualcomm guilty of nine counts of infringement on three Broadcom patents under dispute. The jury award entitled Judge James Selna to as much as triple that amount if he found Qualcomm acted with malice.
Not Enough INCITS Voters Recommend Microsoft OOXML to ISO
With the ballot having closed among members of Technical Committee V1 of the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) advisory board over whether to recommend Microsoft's Office Open XML format to the International Standards Organization as a standard, although more members voted aye than nay, an abstention by the IEEE forced the committee not to recommend it without comments.
The 8-7-1 vote deals a setback to Microsoft's hopes to be able to fast-track OOXML's approval by the ISO without being encumbrance. Due to the Committee's unorthodox rules, a 9-7 vote would have meant passage. But the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers' abstention actually dealt a more serious blow than if it had voted no, by kicking in a provision whereby a two-thirds majority of the remaining votes would have been required for the measure to pass: meaning, the vote would have to have been 10-5-1.
Judge: Novell, Not SCO, Owns UNIX Copyrights
As the technology law blog Groklaw broke late this afternoon, Utah District Court Judge Dale Kimball has handed Novell a partial, but still sizable, chunk of victory in its very, very long-running dispute brought on by SCO Group: Even after an asset purchase agreement between Novell and the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO's predecessor company), it is Novell that owns the copyrights to the UNIX operating system and to UnixWare.
The ruling effectively dismisses two of SCO's claims against Novell in full, along with substantive parts of two other claims, leaving its remaining premises for its multitude of complaints hanging by a tangle of questionable procedural threads, which may not hold up for very long.
Fujitsu's 'Nanohole' Tech Could Triple Hard Drive Capacity
Last November, we reported on Fujitsu's efforts to overcome a curious problem with the physics of hard disk drives: storing magnetic data at densities that are smaller than the grains of the underlying ferromagnetic medium should physically allow. The company's solution involved a combination of lasers to locate precise locations on the drive, and also to pre-heat data spots to make them more conducive to holding data at precise locations.
But all that assumes that the precise locations in question...already exist. Yesterday, we learned from Fujitsu how they intend to accomplish that, and we also got a peek at some areal density goals.
MySQL to Distribute Commercial Source Code for Paying Customers Only
A move on Wednesday by the manufacturers of the open source MySQL database to shut off access to the source code of its commercial edition MySQL Enterprise Server, has led to a new round of debate in the open source community over whether the group is gradually abandoning its commitment to free software.
"Our intention is for MySQL Community Server to be very good, and for MySQL Enterprise Server to provide further value on top of that," stated MySQL AB's vice president for community relations, Kaj Arno, in a blog post on Wednesday.
The Petaflop Race is On: NSF Contract Goes to IBM and NCSA
There are a multitude of teams racing to build the world's fastest supercomputer, probably by 2011. Yesterday, the US government's star contract for a DARPA computer, complete with $208 million in funding from the National Science Foundation, went to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Local TV newscasts all over America (judging from their Web sites) ran with the story that IBM was awarded the US government contract to build "the world's fastest supercomputer" at the NCSA site (where, incidentally, the first Mosaic Web browsers were developed).
'Tabula Rasa' Beta Test Event Friday: Lord British Goes Into Hiding
It means "clean slate" in Latin, and it stands for so much in the life and work of one Richard Garriott. He is the creator of easily the most successful and pacesetting series in the history of computer games, Ultima, and is still known to his many loyal fans over the past quarter-century as Lord British. Now, after almost a decade of work, Garriott's team is ready to premiere Tabula Rasa, a networked role-playing adventure of tremendous proportions that promises to wipe the floor with World of Warcraft...or at least try.
Tomorrow from 9:00 - 11:00 pm Eastern Time, Garriott - in his newly-cast role of "General British" - will be hiding out someplace in NCsoft's expansive Tabula Rasa universe. Yes, it's hide-and-seek, but it should give beta testers incentive to explore pockets and crannies of this world they may never have seen otherwise.
Google Discovers Comments, But Commenters Can't Yet Discover Google
Tuesday's unveiling by Google of another beta feature for its Google News service has sparked a new round of ethical discussions whose tone harks back to the 1950s and '60s, when TV broadcasters debated the ethics and phraseology of the FCC's Fairness Doctrine. One of the purposes of that document was to compel broadcasters to offer free air time to parties seeking to rebut viewpoints or challenges made against them by their programs.
The initial round of Google News' comments will be limited in such a way as to give only the parties mentioned in an article whose headline is posted on Google News, an opportunity to respond using Google's space.
Analyst: After the MP3 Reversal, the IP Valuation Landscape Changes
It was perhaps the biggest "Undo" ever done on Microsoft's behalf: Monday's dramatic reversal of a $1.53 billion judgment against it in a critical patent infringement case involving the use of MP3 technologies in Windows Media Player. There were hundreds of MP3 licensees on Fraunhofer Labs' list that Alcatel-Lucent might have pursued next, including Apple and Creative, had the largest such fine in US history been demonstrated to be collected by the French telecommunications firm.
The case isn't over, but the prospects for Alcatel-Lucent salvaging some fragment of its success, either through a lower court ruling or on appeal, appear dim. But after a precedent-setting ruling that may make it more difficult for companies everywhere to capitalize on their intellectual property portfolios, what happens to the rest of the technology industry? Is there still value in IP, or will investors begin shifting their focus toward companies that produce products rather than ideas? Has an "asset light" business structure suddenly become unattractive?
Sun's New UltraSPARC T2 Has 64 Threads
Sun Microsystems' new UltraSPARC T2 processor, announced yesterday, promises to break new ground in CPU parallelism not only by offering eight cores per chip, but eight threads per core. But will this necessarily mean 64 times the processor power? The answer depends on how you define "thread."
For at least the past half-decade, Sun Microsystems has known that the key to performance improvement in the "post-megahertz" era of microprocessors is to discover how to implement parallelism without dedicating a whole processor core to each thread.
BetaNews, your source for breaking tech news, reviews, and in-depth reporting since 1998.
© 1998-2025 BetaNews, Inc. All Rights Reserved. About Us - Privacy Policy - Cookie Policy - Sitemap.