Here is an interesting podcast or you can read a related article the author Jaron Lanier doesn't think much of wikipedia - his bio is on wikipedia.

To put it in a nutshell this colourful podcast raises some really good reasons why a collection of differing points of view can be far more useful than a single source. I found this more interesting than the recent wikipedia vs britannica debate.

[ T: Wikipedia ]

A new piece of hardware appeared on a local street light pole.

It looks to be part of google's plan to setup free WiFi. I went looking for a google wifi faq but couldn't find one, but I did find this blog. The first questions that come to mind is will it be better than DSL or cable, what bandwidth is available both up and down. What are the economics of this for google and for the city. Will people throw away their mobile phones and use skype devices while in silicon valley?

[ T: WiFi ]

Well I don't speak for AMD, Intel or Sun for that matter but I have some comments regarding the questions here.

I'm sure it possible to make a lower electrical power Ultrasparc with less cores or slower clock or make a higher compute power version with even more cores  or faster clock, If you wanted to model or make one yourself the chip design tools and specs to do it are here.

While The  UltraSparc T1 has 8 cores and 4 threads per core giving 32 hardware threads  and no other commercially available chip comes close to it. It is more important to think of the whole system it will used in like I blogged before here, So once you see the final product you can see the reasons why the other choices were made.

If your interested in the AMD space we've used the same design criteria, and as Marc Andreessen discussed here (the numbers are here) its the most cost efficient solution.

[ T: OpenSolaris AMD Intel Linux Solaris ]

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I just got a Dr Dobbs Update email, The first article that caught my eye was Thoughts on Language Design by Guy Steele. In a nutshell a programming language dictate how we think about problems and how we solve them. Most programming today is built around the single thread of control with binary choices if-then-else etc.  The article raises some good ideas around rethinking this programming model.

My vote for a completely different model would be this.

My definition of a good magazine is one where I read half or more of the articles. Being in the IT industry I receive a dozen or so IT magazines a month. From time to time they all contain something worth reading but mostly they are just fluffy marketing. Only a few are consistently good, Queue is one of the good ones. I just finished reading the September issue. They have a very good collection of articles around multiprocessors, including one from our own Richard. If you subscribe to queue this month's edition is excellent - read it now! If you don't it looks like the website lags by one issue so the September 2005 issue should be online in about 3 weeks - read it then.

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A topic that comes up quite often on news sites is the upcoming GPL v3 license, the GPL v2 has been around for 10+ years. While this should be discussed I haven't seen an article that puts it into context. When we look at the opensource software projects that are having a big impact many of them don't use the GPL - firefox, apache, php for example or dual license like mysql. Why did these projects create there own license in the first place? Most of these projects have updated their licenses in past few years why? Is there a trend? Is there really only five or six different positions on licensing or do we really need the forty or so OSI licenses? Are for profit organizations heading in one direction and not for profit organizations in another? Why do some dual license? How does all of this fit into the IT landscape of developers, ISVs, resellers, consultants and users?

I've read many articles but haven't had any of these questioned answered.

Technorati Tag: GPL

NetHack was my introduction to open source. I came across this afew days ago, like many "movements" if you have to ask you don't understand.

With a bit of luck this blog will become something that others find useful. My main interests are ERP systems, I've spent almost all of my career working with Oracle Applications mostly on Sun hardware.  I would say I've seen more of this "world" that most people, having worked as a Developer, Programmer, System Administrator, done Implementations and Upgrades, worked on benchmarks with Customers and Industry Benchmarks, worked in a Sun/Oracle lab, and with a joint support organization and now in a Solaris Performance and Availability group