http://www.netbeans.org/community/releases/61/ I just did upgrade from RC1 to final today. Starting up seems faster than previous versions ( no more excuses from Eclipse users/lovers ) Menu response improved in mac os x 10.5 (leopard) I was little worried about that the importing projects did not show up when I start Netbeans 6.1 first time. BUT it already imported for me. Good. Maybe before I did upgrade from 6.1 RC1. Overall I will never getting tired of using Netbeans 6.1 final.

MySQL closes $10 million deal | The Open Road - The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay - CNET Blogs

5 IT skills that won't boost your salary

Technology advances force companies to evolve as certain areas of expertise wane in importance

By Denise Dubie, IDG News Service

April 18, 2008

Technical skills may never die, but areas of expertise wane in importance as technology advances force companies to evolve and IT staff to forsake yesterday's craft in favor of tomorrow's must-have talent.

"There is less need for system-side knowledge. In the past, IT folks had to understand a lot about memory, drivers, and address locations, and what used which interrupt, but nowadays that stuff is plug-and-chug even on many Unix systems," says Brian Jones, manager of network engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University's Tech Communications Network Services unit in Blacksburg. "I feel like all the skills I have picked up along the way are valuable and help shape my thinking and troubleshooting abilities. I don't know how to value or devalue these skills; it's like they have taken on new value now."

Industry watchers would be hard pressed to name specific IT skills as entirely dead or completely useless, but some skills are well on their way to being considered a thing of the past -- as reflected by the declining pay associated with them. As hot skills like virtualization rise to the top of company must-have lists, high-tech talents in certain operating systems and specific vendor products fall to the bottom. Here are five high-tech skills that don't demand the pay they once did.

Plain old HTML As companies embrace Web 2.0 technologies such AJAX, demand for skills in HTML programming are taking a backseat. According to Foote Partners, pay for skills in technologies such as AKAX and XML increased by 12.5 percent in the last six months of 2007, while IT managers say they don't see a demand for technology predecessors such as HTML. "I'm not seeing requirements for general Web 1.0 skills -- HTML programming skills," says Debbie Joy, lead solution architect for CSC in Phoenix.

Legacy programming languages Skills in programming languages such as Cobol,  Fortran, PowerBuilder, and more don't rate like they once did.

"Certainly the Cobol people that had a resurgence with the Y2K bug aren't in demand," says John Estes, vice president of strategic alliances of Robert Half Technology, an IT staffing consultancy. "Certain other applications such as Delphi and PowerBuilder, [which were] very big in the '90s, are no longer in demand." 

IT work-force and compensation research conducted by Foote Partners revealed that Cobol, PowerBuilder and Jini noncertified skills were among the lowest-paying skills in the second half of 2007. David Foote, CEO and chief research officer at Foote Partners, says the research shows not that such skills aren't in use today but that companies aren't willing to pay for them. "There is still a lot of C and Cobol around, though these skills are worth very little paywise," Foote says.

NetWare Operating system know-how continues to be in top demand among hiring managers, but expertise in Novell's network operating system NetWare isn't keeping up with other technologies in the same area. "Networking software such as NetWare isn't near what it was in the '90s," Estes says. And Foote adds, "Windows Server and Linux skills have replaced, or are replacing, NetWare skills" in terms of demand.

Non-IP network IP and Internet skills usurped non-IP network expertise and know-how in technologies such as IBM's System Network Architecture (SNA) continue to rank among the lowest-paying skills. "For networking, IP skills have replaced SNA skills," Foote says. According to Foote Partners' research, SNA skills accounted for just 2 percent of base pay in the fourth quarter of 2007, while security skills made up 17 percent of base pay.

"Mainframe computing skills, including network components such as SNA, are no longer required in a server-based IP networking environment," says Martin Webb, manager of data network operations, Ministry of Labour and Citizens' Services, Province of British Columbia. 

PC tech support The Computer Technology Trade Association (CompTIA) reports that hardware skills and knowledge, including expertise with printers and PCs, are on the decline in terms of demand. CompTIA surveyed 3,578 IT hiring managers to learn which skills would grow in importance over time and the industry organization found: "The skill area expected to decline the most in importance is hardware."

Foote Partners' research separately showed an 11.1 percent decline in pay over the last six months of 2007 for ITIL skills, which are often put in place to streamline IT service management and help desk efforts. 

"The 'move, add, and changes' PC tech function isn't quite what is used to be," Robert Half Technology's Estes says.

Network World is an InfoWorld affiliate.

The Java is Faster than C++ and C++ Sucks Unbiased Benchmark

Introduction

I was sick of hearing people say Java was slow, when I know it's pretty fast, so I took the benchmark code for C++ and Java from the now outdated Great Computer Language Shootout and ran the tests myself.

I used G++ (GCC) 3.3.1 20030930 (with glibc 2.3.2-98) for the C++, with the -O2 flag (for both i386 and i686). I compiled the Java code normally with the Sun Java 1.4.2_01 compiler, and ran it with the Sun 1.4.2_01 JVM. I ran the tests on Red Hat Linux 9 / Fedora Test1 with the 2.4.20-20.9 kernel on a T30 laptop. The laptop has a Pentium 4 mobile chip, 512MB of memory, a sort of slow disk.

The results I got were that Java is significantly faster than optimized C++ in many cases.

The results I got show that no one should ever run the client JVM when given the choice. (Everyone has the choice. To run the server VM, see instructions in the Using the Server JVM section below.)

I will post here anyone else's results as long as they use Java 1.4.2 or higher and any version of GCC that produces faster or equivalent code than the 3.3.1 I used. I encourage you to download the source and/or the binaries and perform the tests yourself, with your favorite compiler and on your favorite platform. See the Notes section below for details.

Data and Results

• Data table and graph
• Console run log
• Source:
  • C++ code
  • Java code
• Binaries
  • C++ binaries (Linux)
    • Intel 386 (Basic Pentium or lower)
    • Intel 686 (Optimized for P6-class - Pentium Pro/II, Celeron 266-533MHz, original Athlon, higher)
  • Java class files
• Download all source code and binaries: .bz2, (69KB) .zip (189KB)

Notes

JVM startup time was included in these results. That means even with JVM startup time, Java is still faster than C++ in many of these tests.

Some of the C++ tests would not compile. I've never been very good at decoding GCC's error messages, so if I couldn't fix a test with a trivial modification, I didn't include it in my benchmarks.

I modified one of the tests, the string concatenation test for Java. The test was creating a new StringBuffer in each iteration of the loop, which was just silly. I updated the code to use a single StringBuffer and appending to it inside the loop. (The updated tests at the original shootout use this new method.) Java lost this benchmark even with the modifications, so if you want to accuse me of biasing the results, you're going to have to try harder.

Several versions of some of the C++ tests (like matrix) were present in the original shootout source. I used the versions without numbers in them, like matrix.g++ instead of matrix.g++2. I don't know which of these were used in the original benchmarks, but from my quick experimenting, the numberless ones generally ran faster than their numbered counterparts. (Looking at them again, matrix.g++3 runs faster than the matrix.g++ that I use. However, it still runs slower than the Java version, so I don't plan to modify the graph/data unless someone asks me to, since getting that graph in the first place was sort of a pain.)

I've been told that the C++ code for the Method Call benchmark returns by value while the Java code returns by reference, and that modifying the C++ code to pass a pointer makes that benchmark faster. However, even with the modification, the C++ version still runs slower than the Java version.

I ran the tests many times before running the "official" recorded set of tests, so there was plenty of time for both Java and the C++ tests to "warm up" (both the Java and C++ tests got faster after I ran them a few times).

I've been told that these tests are invalid because they were run with GCC. I have seen both benchmarks that show GCC producing faster code than Visual Studio's VC++ compiler, and benchmarks showing the opposite. If I update the benchmarks with another compiler added, it will be the Intel C++ Compiler, which I'm pretty sure produces faster code than VC++.

I've been accused of biasing the results by using the -O2 option for GCC, supposedly because -O2 optimizes for space, thus slowing down the benchmark. This is not what -O2 does. According to the GCC -O documentation:

-O2: Optimize even more. GCC performs nearly all supported optimizations that do not involve a space-speed tradeoff. The compiler does not perform loop unrolling or function inlining when you specify -O2. As compared to -O, this option increases both compilation time and the performance of the generated code.

On the other hand, -O3 performs space-speed tradeoffs, and -O performs fewer optimizations. Thus, for these tests, I think -O2 was the best choice.

I don't have an automated means of building and benchmarking these things (and the scripts that came with the original shootout didn't run for me). I really do want you to test it on your own machine, but it's going to take some work, I guess. I compiled the C++ code with:

g++ [test].cpp -O2 -march=i386 -o [test]-386

g++ [test].cpp -O2 -march=i686 -o [test]-686

I compiled the Java code with:

javac [test].java

To see how I ran the binaries, see the run log. You can download the source code I used in .bz2, .zip format.

Using the Server JVM

Every form of Sun's Java runtime comes with both the "client VM" and the "server VM." Unfortunately, Java applications and applets run by default in the client VM. The Server VM is much faster than the Client VM, but it has the downside of taking around 10% longer to start up, and it uses more memory.

There are two ways to run Java applications with the server VM:

1. When launching a Java application from the command line, use java -server [arguments...] instead of java [arguments...]. For example, use java -server -jar beanshell.jar.
2. Modify the jvm.cfg file in your Java installation. (It's a text file, so you can use Notepad or Emacs to edit it.) This is located in C:\Program Files\Java\j2reXXX\lib\i386\ on Windows, /usr/java/j2reXXX/lib/i386/ on Linux. You will see two lines:

   -client KNOWN
   -server KNOWN

   You should change them to:

   -server KNOWN
   -client KNOWN

   This change will cause the server VM to be run for all applications, unless they are run with the -client argument.

Contact

I can be contacted at keith@kano.net.

Links / Responses

• Java vs. C benchmark - the benchmark is in Microsoft Word format
• FreeTTS performance case study - at Sun Research
• Linux Number Crunching - used 1.4.1 VM, got very different results than I did, maybe due to floating point optimizations added in 1.4.2
• SNAP matrix benchmark - Java vs. C++ for matrix multiplication
• Nine-Language Performance Round-Up - math and file I/O performance among nine languages
• Performance comparison C++, C# and Java - similar results as mine, mostly
• Java vs. C - for bubble sort, IBM's 1.3.0 client JVM comes out on top over GCC with full optimizations
• Runtime Vs Static Compilation - Performance Comparison - even old versions of Java can run fast
• Comparing C++ performance with Java - these are my benchmarks, except more hand-optimized and compiler-optimized (Java wins about half of them)
• Java Pulling Ahead? - "finds that Java performance on numerical code is comparable to that of C++, with hints that Java's relative performance is continuing to improve"
• Benchmark C++ vs JAVA - ran my benchmarks and added GCJ and Java 5.0 results
• C++ vs Java - David K. McCombs doesn't like my measurement of CPU time and some of the benchmark's C++ code
• 'The Java Faster than C++' Benchmark Revisited - someone doesn't like my benchmarks
• Performance Comparison of Java/.NET Runtimes - lots of VM's compared
• The Java (not really) Faster than C++ Benchmark - another benchmark with hand-optimized C++ code and different gcc flags
• Java Performance Urban Legends by Brian Goetz, discusses garbage collection vs. manual allocation & deallocation
• New - March 2008 - Yet Another Java vs. C++ Shootout - hand-optimized - 64-bit - GCC 4.2.2 vs Java 6

A poem from Rokky05:

Full nonsense did not see not when rapid program on Java, as server so client.


Yes you what, boys, Java-machine

together with the famous fitter

garbage is written on what ... at least

on C, possibly even with the use of classes, and this already

C++ (on what to be yet written her not on asme certainly),

But as C can work quick than itself????


About the author of this article:

All that a fool does,

all he does not so !!!!!


Not article, and some delirium! Request

to the author of this article:



Write what firm do you work on and who?

Such feeling, that you see a computer only then when you write the articles!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

I've been starting using Netbeans 6.0 for my research project for a while but I did not try 6.1 yet until today. Since my Mondays is scheduled for Sun internship, I decided to try 6.1 RC1 today.

• Upgrade? or not
• I was expecting the installation procedure that would upgrade the current system but it does installing another Netbeans in Netbean folder (FYI, MAC OSX, intel Dual Core).
• I believe the Netbeans team decide to do like this because SAFETY! SAFETY! SAFETY!. I found that alot of relief that my current project coexist in old and new Netbeans systems. Thus I could try out the new systems with confidence. => Good but I hope I could have a choice (control) for installing and upgrading. Some people might prefer since it doesn't take more space in their hard drive.
• Import
• I was really happy the new Netbeans 6.1 RC 1 recognized I do have 6.0 and asked me whether I want to import from the old netbeans.
• I was able to transit seamlessly and safely.
• Registration
• I  may not be wrong about this but I did not recall this was when I installed 6.0 long time ago.
• This leads the user for further good information but the website of discount book offer was broken link somehow ( I hope it will be fixed soon )
• Performance
• Startup is much faster than 6.0
• Run & Compilation process also seems faster.

I will go ahead to try 6.1 RC 1 for my research today and post my experience later today.

DNA for Dollars: Featuring 23andMe, Kleiner Perkins, MDV, and more 23andMe's personal genome service helps you unlock the secrets of your DNA. Come find out how this Google and Genentech-funded company is raising hopes and fears in the world of healthcare. Additional panelists include KPCB, MDV, Navigenics, and Veracyte Event Date: Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 6:00pm

Click here to register now! Please sign in before registering if you are already a member of VLAB Tell a Friend

6:00pm - 7:00pm - Networking and Hors D'oeuvres

7:00pm - 8:30pm - Panel Discussion and Q/A

Location:

Stanford Business School

Moderator

Bambi Francisco, CEO & founder, Vator

Speaker

Linda Avey, Co-Founder, 23andMe

Panelists

Bonnie Anderson, CEO, Veracyte

Rowan Chapman, Partner, Mohr Davidow Ventures

Mari Baker, CEO, Navigenics

Risa Stack, Partner, KPCB

Event Description:

With the advent of the Human Genome Project came the birth of a new term and lifestyle: personalized medicine, which promises to provide better care by analyzing the genetic basis of a disease and tailoring the treatment to the individual. As the science of genomics continues to improve, the implications could rock the medical world -- and the ethical one. But when does personal become too personal? This event will feature 23andMe, a start-up funded by google. Does this portend to 'Googling our genes?'. Find out at the VLAB April 15th event. Co-Founded by Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki, 23andMe is one of Wired magazine's top 10 startups worth watching in 2008. 23andMe is revolutionizing personalized medicine through a web-based service that helps you read and understand your DNA, shed new light on your distant ancestors, your close family and most of all, yourself.

Bios:

Bambi Francisco, CEO and founder, Vator

Bambi Francisco is CEO and founder of Vator, a social media company focused on emerging technology companies. She is a former syndicated columnist and correspondent for Dow Jones MarketWatch. She covered Internet trends and investments across the public and private sectors. She started her career at MarketWatch in 1999, as Internet editor and morning business anchor for KPIX, a CBS affiliate. At the time, MarketWatch was owned by CBS.

In 2001, Bambi was named to the "blue-chip" financial reporting all-star team by The Journal of Financial Reporters, the leading organization for the business news industry. Adweek named her one of the top ten most influential journalists on the Web.

Linda Avey, Co-Founder, 23andMe

Linda has over 20 years of sales and business development experience in the biopharmaceutical industry in San Francisco, Boston, San Diego, and Washington, D.C. Prior to starting 23andMe, she developed translational research collaborations with academic and pharmaceutical partners for Affymetrix and Perlegen Sciences. Linda also spent time at Spotfire helping scientists understand the power of data visualization and at Applied Biosystems during the early days of the human genome project. The advent of high density genome-wide scanning technologies brought huge potential for significant discoveries. However, the lack of sufficient funding to enable adequate studies prompted Linda to think of a new research model. These ideas led to the formation of 23andMe. Her primary interest is the acceleration of personalized medicine, using genetic profiles to target the right drug to the right person at the correct dose. Linda graduated from Augustana College with a B.A. in biology.

Bonnie Anderson, CEO, Veracyte

Bonnie Anderson, Chief Executive Officer of Veracyte, Inc. is the former Vice President, Translational Solutions Business Center, for Beckman Coulter. Previously, she served as Vice President-Director of Beckman Coulter's former Immunomics Operations and Director of Strategic Planning and Marketing at Beckman Coulter's Miami, FL site. Ms. Anderson has also been Product Manager for American Labor in Largo, FL, Technical Sales Representative for Dia Tech in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, and Supervisor of Henatology and Apheresis Laboratory for Memorial Hospital in Johnstown, PA. She earned a BS degree in medical technology with a minor in chemistry from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She serves as a member of the Founding Board of Directors for Women in Biotechnology and as an Industry Liaison for the Federation of Clinical Immunology Societies.

Rowan Chapman, Partner, Mohr Davidow Ventures

Rowan Chapman joined MDV in 2001. Through her relationships with industry and academic leaders advancing the fields of personalized medicine, drug discovery technology and regenerative medicine she both sources new life sciences investments and works to develop and grow MDV life sciences companies including Artemis Health, Pacific Biosciences, Adamas Pharmaceuticals and ParAllele BioScience (acquired by Affymetrix). Rowan is also a member of the Personalized Medicine Coalition.

Prior to joining MDV she held the position of director of business development at Rosetta Inpharmatics (acquired by Merck) where she established collaborative partnerships with organizations in the pharmaceutical, agricultural and biotech fields as well as among various research institutions. Previously, Rowan held the position of marketing manager at Incyte Genomics.

Rowan holds a Ph.D. in cellular and molecular biology from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge University, United Kingdom, where she also earned a bachelor's degree with first class honors in Biochemistry. She served postdoctoral fellowships at the University of California, San Francisco, as well as at the MRC-Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge.

 

Mari Baker, President and CEO, Navigenics Ms. Baker was most recently an executive-in-residence at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which she joined in 2006. Prior to that, she was president of BabyCenter, LLC, a Johnson & Johnson company. Under her leadership, BabyCenter became the world's leading Web site for new and expectant parents, winning numerous online health awards and expanding significantly offline and internationally.

Prior to her tenure with BabyCenter and Johnson & Johnson, she was a senior vice president at Intuit, Inc., which she joined in 1989 as product manager for Quicken. Ms. Baker led the growth of Quicken into the No. 1 personal finance product in the world, along with international expansion and the launch of Quicken.com. Ms. Baker also held executive or product management positions at Now Software, Migent Software and E.F. Hutton.

Ms. Baker earned degrees in economics and sociology from Stanford University. She served on the board of trustees of Stanford University from 1996 to 2003, including oversight of the Stanford Medical Center, and continues to serve as a trustee emeritus. She currently serves on the board of directors of the Cozi Group and is a member of the Young Presidents' Organization.

Risa Stack, Partner, KPCB Risa Stack joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 2003. Risa specializes in the development of life science companies. She was the founding CEO and is currently a board member of several companies including CardioDx, Nodality, and an incubation in the personalized medicine area. She is a board observer at Codon Devices, Xdx, Orexigen (OREX), Tethys, and Pacific Biosciences.

Prior to joining KPCB, Risa was a Principal at J.P. Morgan Partners in the life science practice for 6 years. While at J.P. Morgan Partners she sponsored a series of investments including Acurian, AlgoRx (now Anesiva), Connetics, Diatide, Ilex Oncology, Illumina, Praecis Pharmaceuticals and Triangle Pharmaceuticals.

Risa received her B.S. in Genetics and Development with distinction from the University of Illinois and her Ph.D. in Immunology from the University of Chicago. She was also a member of the second class of Kauffman Fellows.

Risa was named as one of the 100 Most Influential Women in Business by the San Francisco Business Times in 2004.

Sun eyes energy-efficient servers

Improvements planned for power management; datacenter suggestions also aired

By Paul Krill

April 10, 2008

With energy efficiency and environmental issues of growing concern, Sun is preparing to tune its servers to be more environmentally friendly by introducing power management capabilities.

Speaking about the future of the datacenter at the Sun Labs Open House event in Menlo Park, Calif., Subodh Bapat, of the Sun eco responsibility office, talked about energy-efficient improvements planned for Sun servers as well as steps Sun and others are taking to make their datacenters more environmentally friendly.

Sun plans to introduce the notion of power-managed states, in which future servers will respond to a user's internal energy policies. For example, a 1 kilowatt server might be tuned to run at only 500 watts, and the server figures out how to run under that constraint, Bapat said.

"Today, our servers don't do that. They burn as much power as they possibly can," he said.

Power management also will be offered for memory components, chips, disk drives, and fans via intelligent firmware that will calibrate power. There will be states like idle and sleep states.

"We're basically going to allow customers to express policies," ranging from run as fast as possible and get the job done in as little time as is needed to take longer but burn fewer watts, said Bapat.

Datacenters, Bapat said, are undergoing substantial growth right now after what had been a down period. "About five years ago, you could buy datacenter space for really pennies on the dollar. Today, datacenters are premium real estate," said Bapat.

But there are issues with heat generation and whether local electric utilities can supply enough power for these datacenters. The centers are being configured such that they have hot and cold regions abutting each other. "That's not a very efficient way to operate a data center," because power needs to be supplied everywhere," Bapat said.

Sun at its Santa Clara, Calif. facilities organized server racks into enclosed pods into a central aisle; hot air is then pumped directly into the air conditioning unit. Containment of hot and cold aisles is among the moves that can be made.

Other suggestions include running datacenters at off-peak hours for activities such as batch jobs and even siphoning off the cheaper nighttime megawatts during the night to freeze water. During the day, air conditioning use is cut by running the hot air off the ice.

Another example cited was having ambient air run through a network of pipes. The air comes out at 65 degrees. "People are doing that to essentially get free cooling and put that in the datacenter," Bapat said.

Bapat also cited another unusual example. A university with a datacenter and a sewage treatment plant was expending 2 to 4 megawatts of power to cool down water that had heated up to 98 degrees in the data center and another 2 megawatts to heat up water to 98 degrees at the sewage treatment plant. This was an ideal temperature at which algae can break down sewage. So, the user site just coupled the two, funneling the heated water from the datacenter over to the sewage treatment plant, said Bapat

Tech companies win small victory in H-1B push

Posted by Anne Broache

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has given high-tech companies a piece of good news: foreign graduates of American universities won't necessarily be forced to go home before companies have a chance to hire them on temporary work visas.

The new rule announced late Friday will allow recent graduates with science, technology, engineering, or mathematics degrees to stay in the country for 29 months, instead of the previous 12 months, if they're participating in an off-campus on-the-job training program related to their field of study.

The "stopgap measure" appears to be directly related to persistent complaints by high-tech companies like Microsoft, Google, and Oracle that the annual cap of H-1B temporary visas will be exhausted before they can even lodge applications for this year's crop of graduates. To be eligible for an H-1B, which can be renewed for up to six years, one must hold at least a bachelor's degree in one's area of specialty, but most graduates won't have diploma in hand until May or June, which visa-hungry companies fear is too late.

The extension represents a small victory for the companies in the grand scheme of things, but it could give companies a better chance of being able to secure visas before a foreigner's student status expires--especially if Congress opts to raise the H-1B quota, as some members have already proposed.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services began accepting H-1B petitions on April 1 but has not yet announced how many it has received. If the number of petitions filed during the first five days exceeds the baseline allotment of 65,000 visas, plus 20,000 more for students with advanced degrees from U.S. universities, then USCIS plans to select its applications through a random "lottery" that's, not surprisingly, despised by companies vying for the visas.

The "interim" rule applies only to students who are currently enrolled in the 12-month Optional Practical Training (OPT) program, as it's known, with a company that uses Homeland Security's voluntary E-Verify system to check its employees' eligibility to work in the United States.

Microsoft chief lobbyist Jack Krumholtz applauded Homeland Security's action on Monday, saying it "allows U.S. companies to recruit, hire, and retain the best graduating science, technology, engineering and math students trained at the top U.S. universities," he said in a statement.

"In the past, these students were often unable to remain in the United States for more than a year after completing their degrees because they could not obtain the necessary work visa in spite of being offered gainful employment in highly innovative companies due to the extreme shortage of H-1B visas," he added.

Robert Hoffman, Oracle's chief lobbyist, said the move was important but represented a "band-aid on a much larger crisis." Now Congress needs to boost the number of H-1B visas and make it easier for "the best and brightest" temporary workers to obtain permanent green cards, he said in a statement. (Hoffman is also co-chairman of Compete America, a group composed mostly of Silicon Valley companies that lobbies for more liberal immigration policies.)

American programmers who oppose expanding the H-1B system on the grounds that it displaces qualified Americans and depresses their wages were none too pleased with the new step.

"Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff says flooding in more foreign workers 'is a way to bolster the U.S. economy,'" Kim Berry, who heads a vocal group called Programmers Guild, said in an e-mail message about the new rules. "Well, slavery and relaxation (of) child labor laws might 'bolster' the economy too."

Homeland Security said it plans to take comments on the new rule for 60 days, which suggests it could be modified at some point.

Sun aims lasers to boost computer performance

Sun has received a contract from DARPA to work on technology that would allow chips to communicate by laser instead of electricity, thereby boosting performance

By Agam Shah, IDG News Service

March 24, 2008

In an attempt to improve computer performance, Sun is working on technology to let chips communicate using lasers instead of electricity, in what would be a break from conventional computer design.

The company on Monday received a $44 million contract from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to boost computational performance by using lasers for chips to communicate over silicon optics and to reduce power consumption by placing chips close to each other, Sun said.

Usually, chips are soldered and physically unattached, but with the research, Sun is trying to connect the chips densely in a grid, said Ron Ho, a distinguished engineer at Sun. At close proximity, lasers provide better bandwidth for chips to communicate, which can boost overall system performance. The performance increase could be at up to terabits per second, Ho said.

The research will densely pack hundreds of cores in what Sun calls a "macrochip." This research's findings could help data centers reduce power consumption and provide more efficient computational cycles for supercomputers in the high-performance computing space. It could help push supercomputing capabilities in areas like weather research and oil exploration.

The grid placement of chips and lower power requirement of optical networking should also reduce operational and manufacturing costs for supercomputers, Ho said.

Sun won't bring out supercomputers or servers based on the research soon, though the technology will start appearing in servers in about three to four years, Ho said.

Many companies are involved in silicon nanophotonics research, which enables high-bandwidth communication networks between chips with thousands of cores to enable computational and power efficiency. Research has been going on for years, but little attention has been given to bringing down power consumption and ownership costs, Ho said. Sun is trying to push research in the area, Ho said.

IBM is looking to replace wires on a chip with pulses of light on tiny optical fibers for quicker and more power-efficient data transfers between cores on a chip. The technology transfers data up to a distance of a few centimeters about 100 times faster than wires and consumes one-tenth as much power. NEC is also working on technology to enable optical data transmission between chips. DARPA is also looking to fund further research efforts in the space.

Sun's research partners for the project include silicon photonics companies like Kotura and Luxtera, and universities including Stanford University and the University of California at San Diego.

Multicore boom needs new developer skills

As parallel computing becomes more commonplace, the next generation of developers will need new skill sets in order to get the most out of multicore chips

By Chris Kanaracus, IDG News Service

March 20, 2008

More than charity lies behind Microsoft and Intel's announcement this week that they will donate $20 million to a pair of U.S. colleges in the hope of spurring advances in parallel, or multicore, programming research, as a Microsoft research scientist readily acknowledged.

"There is a worldwide shortage of people experienced in parallel computing experience, for sure," said Dan Reed, director of scalable and multicore computing at Microsoft. "One of the collateral reasons is to raise awareness in the academic community, because that's where the next generation of developers will come from."

While for years, ever-higher clock speeds almost guaranteed that application code would run faster and faster, the rules are different for the multicore processors of today.

The difference has been compared to a sports car and a school bus. While the first is capable of blazing speed, the other moves more slowly but can move far more people at once.

The problem is, simply adding more cores to a computer's CPU doesn't increase the speed or power of conventional application code, as a recent Forrester Research report notes.

"To gain performance from quad-core processors and prepare for the denser multicore CPUs that will follow, application developers need to write code that can automatically fork multiple simultaneous threads of execution (multithreading) as well as manage thread assignments, synchronize parallel work, and manage shared data to prevent concurrency issues associated with multithreaded code," the authors wrote.

In other words, complex work is required to fill all those seats on the bus.

And the quad-core processors common today will soon give way to radically more advanced designs, Forrester notes. "Expect x86 servers with as many as 64 processor cores in 2009 and desktops with that many by 2012."

The situation has had chip makers and major software vendors making broad-based efforts to raise awareness of both the promise and challenges of programming for multiple cores.

TopCoder, a software development company that invites its membership to work on various aspects of a project through competitions, just began a series of special contests, along with chipmaker AMD, that focuses on multithreading.

Mike Lydon, TopCoder's CTO, said multicore programming remains the province of an elite few. "What we've seen from the skill set perspective is, it varies quite a bit," he said. "As you would expect, the high-end developers are familiar with threading. After that, it drops off pretty quickly."

"It's surprising to me because multithreading programming isn't new," he added. Indeed, one instructional article available on a Microsoft's MSDN Web site dates to 1993.

"I think it stems primarily from the collegiate level," Lydon said. "I've heard very little about colleges teaching multithreaded programming, but I would think and hope that it's changing very quickly."

However, Forrester's report suggests the urgency isn't being felt across the board. It notes that major operating systems and most middleware products are already prepared for multithreaded operation and for "near term" multicore processors, and that corporate development shops may look to ISVs to solve the problem through development tools and platforms that can better handle multicore-related tasks.

But Microsoft's Reed believes that multithreading over time will become "part of the skill set of every professional software developer."

In the meantime, most of the parallel computing resources available now don't necessarily hide the complexity of coding for multiple threads. "Development pros have options today, but most of them are low-level language extensions and libraries," Forrester said.

For example, in February AMD open-sourced more than 3,200 software routines under a project called Framewave, which it said will help coders build multithreaded applications for x86-type processors.

"Libraries can't provide a complete answer, but we see these as iterative steps," said Margaret Lewis, director of commercial solutions and software strategy at AMD. "There's things that you can do today as you're waiting for those [more advanced] tools that can increase the multi-threadedness of your applications," she said.

There are some higher-level products already on the market, such as the platform sold by RapidMind, which takes single-threaded C++ code and then, through an abstraction layer, "parallelizes" it across a number of cores.

However, it would be "fairly idealistic" to think that better tools alone will be enough, Lydon argued. "When you actually get into the points in code where you're going to leverage performance by spawning multiple threads, it takes a human mind to see where the benefits could take place."

Microsoft and Yahoo met to discuss merger: report

1 hour, 15 minutes ago

Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) and Yahoo Inc (YHOO.O) met on Monday to discuss Microsoft's takeover offer for the Internet company, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The meeting was said to be the first since Microsoft made its unsolicited offer for Yahoo, worth nearly $42 billion, on January 31. Yahoo rejected the offer as inadequate last month.

The Journal said the meeting wasn't a negotiation and that no bankers were present.

The session was intended to allow Microsoft to present its vision of a combined company, and Yahoo executives mostly listened, the Journal quoted one of the sources as saying.

Microsoft and Yahoo spokesmen declined to comment.

(Reporting by Eric Auchard in San Francisco, Daisuke Wakabayashi in Seattle, and Yinka Adegoke, editing by Jacqueline Wong)

March 13, 2008 6:00 PM PDT

Intel Centrino 2 chips coming in two waves

Posted by Brooke Crothers

Intel will roll out its first wave of mainstream 45-nanometer "Montevina" Centrino 2 mobile processors by June then follow this up in September with additional chips including the first quad-core mobile processor.

HP's HDX gaming laptop would be a candidate for the mobile quad-core chip

(Credit: HP, Intel)

Montevina--which Intel recently branded Centrino 2--will offer the option of integrated Wi-Fi and WiMax wireless technologies. The platform will also have a new Cantiga chipset with better integrated graphics, among other features.

Though some Montevina processor specifics are out there already, scheduling and other details have now been confirmed by sources close to Intel. In short, schedules posted on the site Vr-Zone, among other sites, are currently the most accurate, according to sources. (Note: Intel's plans can change depending on market- and technology-related factors.)

It is also now clear that the first quad-core mobile processor, the Core 2 Extreme QX9300, will likely launch in September at a clock speed of 2.53GHz and be priced at just over $1,000. This chip will also boast a massive 12MB cache and have a Thermal Design Power (TDP or thermal envelope) of 45 watts, rivaling desktop quad-core processors.

"The notebook market has taken on a lot of the characteristics of the desktop market," said Dean McCarron, founder and Principal of Mercury Research. So it's important to have a quad-core offering in the mobile space now, he said. The processor will likely appear in "transportables." Large, luggable laptops that are used by gamers.

The first wave of Centrino 2 chips, due by June, will be mainstream models, including the T9600 and P8600, running at 2.8GHz and 2.4GHz respectively. A high-end upgrade to the current Core 2 Extreme X9000, the X9100, is also expected. This is expected to run at 3.06MHz with a 44W thermal envelope. Pricing will range from $209 for the P8400 (2.26GHz) to $530 for the T9600 to $851 for the X9100.

The 8000 series will have a 3MB cache, while the 9000, 6MB.

The September installment of processors will be centered on low-power models such as the SL9400 and SU9400, running at 1.86GHz and 1.4GHz with a TDP of 17W and 10W respectively. One processor, the SU3300, will have a TDP of 5.5W. This is a class of processors that will appear in ultra-light, ultra-thin notebooks such as Apple's MacBook Air and Lenovo's ThinkPad X300.

Some of the low-power processors will have chip packaging similar to the Core 2 Duo chip used in the MacBook Air but offer even lower thermal envelopes. The MacBook Air processor tops out at 1.8GHz with a TDP of 20 watts.

Low-power Celeron dual-core processors will also make a debut.

1. Support Vector Machine on Java implementation / Webserver (Web 2.0) 2. High Performance Computing by SunStudio (C++) 3. Cancer classification - PCA, SVM 4. Protein Folding Problem - Information Theory based SVM method

March 13, 2008

Million-Dollar Science Prize Awarded

By BRENDA GOODMAN

New York Times

The $1.6 million 2008 Templeton Prize, the richest award made to an individual by a philanthropic organization, was given Wednesday to Michael Heller, 72, a Polish Roman Catholic priest, cosmologist, and philosopher who has spent his life asking, and perhaps more impressively, answering, questions like “Does the universe need to have a cause?”

The John Templeton Foundation, which awards grants to encourage scientific discovery on the “big questions” in science and philosophy, commended Professor Heller, who is from Poland, for his extensive writings that have “evoked new and important consideration of some of humankind’s most profound concepts.”

Much of Professor Heller’s career has been dedicated to reconciling the known scientific world with the unknowable dimensions of God.

In doing so, he has argued against a “God of the gaps” strategy for relating science and religion, a view that uses God to explain what science cannot.

Professor Heller said he believes, for example, that the religious objection to teaching evolution “is one of the greatest misunderstandings” because it “introduces a contradiction or opposition between God and chance.”

In a telephone interview, Professor Heller explained his affinity for the two fields: “I always wanted to do the most important things, and what can be more important than science and religion? Science gives us knowledge, and religion gives us meaning. Both are prerequisites of the decent existence.”

Professor Heller said he planned to use his prize to create a center for the study of science and theology at the Pontifical Academy of Theology, in Krakow, Poland, where he is a faculty member.

Professor Heller was born in 1936 in Tarnow, Poland, one of five children in a deeply religious family devoted to intellectual interests. His mother, a schoolteacher, and his father, a mechanical and electrical engineer, fled to Russia in 1939 before the Nazi occupation.

On returning to Poland years later, where Communist authorities sought to oppress intellectuals and priests, Professor Heller found shelter for his work in the Catholic Church. He was ordained at 23, but spent just one year ministering to a parish before he felt compelled to return to academia.

“It was one of the most difficult years of my life,” Professor Heller said. “This confrontation of this highly idealistic approach to life with everyday life is very painful.”

“When I was asked to attend to a dying person,” he said, “I was not prepared for life myself, so I had a difficult time to prepare someone to pass away. When you are confronted with such an immediate fact, you never think about the high goals of your life.”

The prize will be officially awarded in London by Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, in a private ceremony on May 7 at Buckingham Palace.

Sun announced that they are developing a Java Virtual Machine for Apple's iPhone with the newly released Software Development Kit (SDK).
"We're going to make sure that the JVM offers the Java applications as much access to the native functionality of the iPhone as possible," he said.

The specific version of Java will be based on the Java Micro Edition (ME) and will open the iPhone to a large library of existing Java applications. Sun's announcement comes after reviewing the iPhone SDK since its release just on Thursday. Sun expects to release this version of Java "some time after June".

Sun maintains a sample library of Java ME games and applications. This list includes EA Sims Bowling, Scrabble, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Libris eBook reader, and more.

Sun adds its name to a list of other developers who have already announced support for the iPhone. Others include Gameloft, Omnigroup, Freeverse, SixApart, reQall, EA, and Epocrates.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/03/07/sun-iphone-java_1.html