http://www.newsoxy.com/headlines/mysql_workbench_offers_new_visual_database_tools/article10796.htm

A lot of scientists and engineers face the limitation of tools like Matlab and Mathematica.
So slow but has a great advantage of easy to formulate the mathematical theory and easy to plot.

When I first introduced several colleagues the advantages of Java languages. They responses always like this ... I know but I could not afford to learn another big language like Java. And the biggest problem is not easy to formulate the mathematical idea into Java code and I don't know where to start graphical plots of my results.

Here is the remedy for those.

Most of scientific and mathematics will be covered by these libraries
1. Jscience
2. JFormula

Graphical plots (almost easy as Matlab/Mathematica)
1. JFreeChart
2. JGraph

Special research supports (Bioinformatics, Machine Learning)
1. biojava
2. weka

All other answers can be found in Java.net

Goodbye, Matlab / Mathematica ~

The Engadget Mobile Interview: Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun

by Ryan Block, posted May 2nd 2008 at 2:09PM

We recently got a chance to sit down with Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, who definitely ranks among the geekier and more sincere CEOs we've had the privilege to meet. We discussed the long-missing JavaFX Mobile platform Sun promised a while back, as well as Java on the iPhone, and doing battle with Microsoft as an open source software vendor. Read on! Thanks so much for meeting with us. Hey, you bet. So I'm curious, what kind of phone do you carry? As of yesterday, an iPhone. Really? So you just got one? Yesterday! Well I guess that's as good as any place to start with as any. What's up with porting Java to the iPhone? It's still going on. So you guys are still working on it? Absolutely, why would we not? Well, I dunno, I heard that there was some difficulties making that-- Well I think the only difficulty will be what Apple presents through its EULA. But I think that I think EULA is a bit of an oxymoron to me. They're end users, they have the freedom to choose what they'd like to do, so I think we are going to leave it up to users to decide how they want to use the technology. Certainly Google with Gmail, Yahoo with Yahoo Go, you know, there are just tens of thousands for applications are already built to the Java platform. If consumers want to run them on their devices of whatever their choosing its up to them. So you haven't seen any real roadblocks in porting Java to the iPhone? No technical roadblocks. There is certainly some challenges in Apple's SDK licensing agreement. But again, you know, it's a big market, there's lots of opportunity, so we'll see. Look, I tend to swap phones two times a month just because Java runs on so many of them. I'm always looking at the latest Nokia gadget, the latest Blackberry gadget, the latest Apple gadget. Apple did a beautiful job. It's a very nice phone. In terms of Java on mobile platforms, a couple years back you guys picked up SavaJe and shortly thereafter announced the JavaFX Mobile platform, but we really haven't heard anything about that since... Well I invite you to attend the JavaOne conference where we will be unveiling exactly what that looks like now. Because we have obviously made a huge amount of progress. And look, we are going to be delivering an open source phone. That doesn't happen overnight, but when it does happen I think it will fundamentally change the economics of the marketplace and create new opportunities for developers. Right now we estimate we have about a 1.5 to 2 billion Java runtimes on phones out there so we are on the majority of all phones, certainly the huge majority of the new phones (Apple is probably the one exception). And that creates lots of opportunities for developers -- that's our core constituency and I think we can just continue to build innovations that they care about. But what they ultimately care about, the one innovation that they all care about is volume. So the fact that they can run an app on a billion phones means that they have a billion times the market opportunity than if they just run on one that has four million devices. So then, in a word you guys have not given up on Apple. By no means. We have redoubled the focus and activity, but again, this is not simple stuff. It takes all companies a long time -- these are in many ways more complex than servers. As we build them we have to be pretty careful about user experience, power management, productivity, network connectivity, radios, modems, security, authentication -- all kinds of things that you aren't necessarily as focused on when you build a piece of network infrastructure that runs behind a firewall. So how has Google entrance with Android into the market affected your plans and motions with JavaFX Mobile? You should come to JavaOne -- not to be evasive -- but you'll see what we are doing with Google and I think if anything it's amplified the importance of Java, amplified the importance of having cross-platform portability, but I think most of all it's amplified the importance of innovation on devices. I was just with a reporter who was telling me about the free software he uses to do all his audio transcription and by definition the most important innovations in front of consumers and developers will be free. And we think the same is going to be true for phones. It already is for many users of the world because they sign a bound two year contract whenever they get their device. But one of the significant, if not most significant cost element in a phone is how much the software platform costs. So if we can take that down to zero, that means instead of having three billion phones in the world maybe we can have five billion phones in the world. And that's exactly what we want to have happen because again as we make a phone platform more ubiquitous and more prolific, the bigger the infrastructure opportunity that arises behind it. Is there any driving force or impetus for you guys to become a part of one of the Linux or open source mobile phone standards groups like LIPS, or OHA, or one of those? You know, consortiums don't produce phones. Companies produce phones and companies produce products so we'll certainly -- look, the Java community by definition is a open source community. It's the world's largest open source community if you think about it in the sense that every day we distribute 15 million GPL software artifacts into the marketplace, called Java runtime environments. Every month we ship about fifty million GPL software artifacts. We are certainly going to work with the consortia that have volume and mass to make sure that we can identify standards. Probably the most important for developers though isn't what are the driver APIs you use, it's going to be what are the developer APIs you use. What are the things that a developer who wants to deliver a service on a phone want to think about. The construction of the phone itself there is a much smaller group of companies. Most of which are frankly hardware companies and what we want to go do is to focus on the developer platform which gives them the broadest access to the broadest market. So it sounds like from where you guys stand, obviously you are very enterprise focused-- Well, we're very developer focused. But from the sound of things, it's really more that you guys believe in the democratization of mobile platforms whereas what we are seeing in the market -- especially in the consumer market -- is people becoming less concerned about access to cheaper open mobile platforms and even more concerned about a better end-to-end user experience. Do you think that these two interests can coexist? First of all we are very focused on the democratization of network access. Now second and apart from that, I think that if you want to captivate a consumer audience you have to build an engaging user experience. A simple example for the consumers we really care about who are for example, MySQL users is the product must be freely available, downloadable, installable and up and running within fifteen minutes. Why? Because if it takes seven hours of configuration you are not going to get any users. The same applies to a mobile platform which is: you'd would like to be able to get it turned on and get it up and running. And that's why companies like Blackberry, Nokia and Apple have done better than their counterparts who may not have been as easy to interact with. I think that the price of that product and the user experience of the product and the innovation of that product are not necessarily related in any way. But I can tell you that the intersection of all of those will produce the most popular products in the world. By definition free is a more accessible price than six hundred dollars. A beautiful six hundred dollar phone will almost by definition ship in lower volume than a slightly uglier but functional text phone for no dollars. I think if you look at the proliferation of gadgets in the world, the proliferation of devices, the world is filled with way way more simple phones than they are WiFi enabled devices that allow you to look at maps. So aside from the mobile platforms, where do you see your relationship with Microsoft going? Obviously you guys are very well integrated with the Linux community and now obviously the MySQL community, and there has been a lot of comments and accusations in the past couple of years from Sun, and especially coming from Linus Torvalds and the open source community about Microsoft patent trolling and stuff like that. Where do you see the future of that relationship? How do they relate with the rest of the industry, in your opinion? They are both a competitor and a partner. They are a competitor in the sense that last month or so we registered our 100 millionth OpenOffice user and I think that's an extraordinary success, one of the most extraordinary successes the open source community has ever seen. I'm not sure that Microsoft likes the fact that OpenOffice is as successful as it is and that it is so effective in driving a discussion around open document formats, but and so we have no interest in encumbering competition and no interest in doing anything other than innovation and as you pointed out driving the democratization of access to the network. Simultaneously as we deliver our virtualization platforms we need to be able to run Windows. Customers who want to run virtualized infrastructure want the ability to run Solaris and ZFS underneath Windows so they get all the advantages of ZFS without necessarily having to deal with Windows. And that is going to take place because we work with and interoperate with Microsoft, so they're a partner there. But all that said, we create intellectual property, we certainly patent that intellectual property, but we also are not an offensive litigator with that intellectual property. We use those patents to defend others. We have done so many things behind the scenes to undo patents that are used against the free software community -- just that we tend not to talk about it. Unlike Microsoft and others, we actually view the success of the free software as a good thing, we are enormously pro-GPL, enormously pro free software, enormously pro the Mozilla license, the BSD license. Our view, is that we want to be known as the world's largest contributor and commercial supporter of free and open source software precisely for what you said, because it enables the democratization of the network -- that creates more opportunity for us. That's probably a political philosophy for which Microsoft does not subscribe -- but that's okay because its an open and competitive market and may the best technology ultimately win. But as I said before I think its going to be an intersection of price and user experience that defines success. I had this interesting discussion with [Mozilla Chairman] Mitchell Baker a while back around the downloading of Firefox. She was talking about how imperative it was that they get the download to below five megabytes and I said, "That's interesting. What's with five megabytes? Why does it really matter?" And she said, "For us that's where we see a real knee in the curve of people willing to say, 'Yes' quickly and just get it, so we want to get it down to that." And I said, "That's interesting, because for us the OpenOffice download, which I think is now around 70 or 80 megabytes, we've seen no real cessation of demand or change as that has gone up or down." And she said "I don't save my users five hundred dollars." And that was an interesting point, which is as the world moves to free they are maybe willing to maybe pay for free in the form of time or contributions or community and I think that is definitively a model we see flowering around the world. And that is a model we are going to drive very aggressively around Solaris and ZFS and MySQL, and Java and Glassfish and OpenOffice. Thanks so much for your time!

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.

• 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.

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.