Blog archives for May, 2004

Intel buys Russian chip developer

Direct from Mosnews is the story about Intel buying out Elbrus and UniPro, heavy hardware/software R&D companies with roughly 630 employees total. Elbrus was making SPARC-compatible microprocessors while UniPro is more of an outsourcing services provider working in California and Japan. Nothing about the purchase on Intel’s official Web siute, Intel.ru spins the news differently, saying that after Elbrus and UniPro purchase Intel will double the number of researchers it employs in .ru land.

b2Evolution, bBlog, Blosxom, Expression Engine, Movable Type, Pivot, pMachine, Serendipity, .Text, TextPattern, WordPress review

The question of the best blogging system out there arises quite often, especially after new licensing scheme, introduced by MovableType. Here’s a rather detailed breakdown of currently popular blogging and content management systems. Out of 11 software packages 10 run on any server with variations of Perl/PHP and MySQL/PostgresSQL, and one requires Windows and .NET Framework. 4 are licensed under GPL, 3 are under BSD. Mark Pilgrim explains why licensing is suddenly important.

Military draft for computer experts and linguists

Seattle P-I claims Pentagon is short on people with computer knowledge and linguistic skills and is considering a military draft with little faith that the act will actually pass the Capitol Hill.

Congress, which would have to authorize a draft, has shown no interest in taking such a step. Kathleen Long, a spokeswoman for Sen. Carl Levin, the senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said a draft has little support among lawmakers.

Learning Assembly in component framework age

How many times have you heard the statement “Yeah, this program (written in J2EE or .NET) is slow, but that means you need better hardware”, and after you bought the best hardware out there (save the bestest), you found out the program is still slow, the algorithms are still taking ungodly amount of time to return values, the interface still suffers from delays and generally the speed of execution increased maybe by 10% while you just doubled the hardware platform?

Randall Hyde tells why learning ASM is still a good idea. Hyde is the author of the famous Art of Assembly Language Programming (freely available on the Web for so many years). To quote the article he wrote for OReilly:

With every new application, the programmer writes the software slower than it ought to run, on whatever current CPU they’re using, believing that future CPU performance boosts will solve their problems. Of course, by the time the CPUs are fast enough to execute their software, the programmer has “enhanced” the software, and is now depending on yet another future version of the CPU. The cycle repeats almost endlessly, with CPU performance never really catching up with the demands of the software, until finally, the software’s life comes to an end and the programmer begins the cycle anew with a different application.

How Russian music licensing works

Brits are at it again with the description of Russian download service AllOfMP3. Once again, the journalist makes a mistake of calling service illegal (comes from Russia, right, so what can be legal about that?) without doing a bit of research on what’s actually happening. The term is compulsory licensing, and Russia borrowed it from good ole United States.

Here’s my letter to the author for those interested in deeper inner workings of music licensing in Russia:

In your article The Russians are coming in Guardian Unlimited you mentioned the music on the label’s site is not licensed by labels and a loophole in the legislation allows the music service to exist by selling the digital music over the Internet.

In fact, though, the music is licensed from the labels, but under the different scheme than you’re used to in the US or UK. Russia employs the concept of compulsory copyrights, where the copyrights belong to the artist or music label, but there’s a requirement that they license it to anyone who asks for it. I refer you to Lawrence Lessig’s book The Future of Ideas for description of such concept, which originated in the United States and was applied first to the sheet music.

It is a provision, not a loophole, in Russian legislature. It allows anyone to enter a music market on non-preferential basis with one condition - royalties must be paid. There’s a minimal royalty stipulated in legislature, you can negotiate above it (although, why would you?) or below it (if you can get a label to agree to smaller payout). Russian Society for Multimedia and Digital Networks is the agency responsible for collecting royalty fees and distributing them to the labels and private musicians.

Real-time performance and .NET suitability

Memi asks about using .NET for real-time apps. Naturally, that depends on what kind of application you’re writing and what is meant by real-time. Without direct way to access CPU interrupts, dealing with direct memory access (even though it’s not really direct, but you know what I mean, shuffling the data between the registers, level 1 and level 2 caches and RAM chips) and assigning interrupt priority you’re not given a lot of comfort to deal with real-time. It’s more like being asked to play soccer, but then being told that you can only do this in a tuxedo you’re not allowed to smirch, blind-folded and in a wheel chair.

Also, some things are not working exactly as advertised for the app to be considered a truly real-time. Let’s take System.Windows.Forms.Timer, for example. The description of the class and the ability to pass the number of the milliseconds to the timer looks pretty good, although with gigahertz CPUs you should be able to control microseconds, which you do, if you step down to superfun Assembly stuff (oh, but Assembly ties you to Intel x86 and hardware-dependent, but wait a minute - so does .NET Framework). But after you’re sort of satisfied with the behavior, you google additionally and come up with this nice MSDN article on timers.

Several quotes from there:

Even though you can technically set the Interval property as low as one millisecond, you should be aware that the .NET Framework documentation states that this property is only accurate to approximately 55 milliseconds.

It doesn’t mention that, actually (I just did a search in .NET Framework documentation for 55, found a lot of other places where the number was used, but nothing specific to the Timer behavior, maybe the wrong set of docs), but still, here you have to re-define your understanding of real-time once again. And earlier before the author of the article actually tells you that System.Windows.Forms.Timer is probably the least appropriate candidate for real timing (the rest of the guys aren’t superb either):

If you’re looking for a metronome, you’ve come to the wrong place. The timer events raised by this timer class are synchronous with respect to the rest of the code in your Windows Forms app. This means that application code that is executing will never be preempted by an instance of this timer class (assuming you don’t call Application.DoEvents).

I suspect things might be done differently for the XP Embedded world, where things like interrupt priorities and microsecond timers might be important for some device manufacturers out there.

Free Gmail invites

Another Gmail invite became available today for Mother’s Day. Since my Mom will probably not appreciate it much (to begin with, she doesn’t have a PC), another friend of mine today became the happy user @gmail.com.

Walt Mossberg on Gmail

And speaking of Walt Mossberg, he doesn’t like the idea of personal Gmail messages being parsed by Google ad engine. A pretty simple alternative:

The company should offer Gmail accounts without the ads, and without the scanning, for a modest annual fee. That would put the choice where Google has always placed it: in the hands of its users.

The most powerful man in technology journalism

Walt MossbergThe Wired magazine takes a look at Walt Mossberg, technology columnist for Wall Street Journal Personal Technology section. The magazine quotes some of the technology advances and fixes, for which we should be thankful to Walt Mossberg:

RealNetworks overhauled its RealJukebox player. Intuit revamped TurboTax. Mossberg even forced Microsoft to scrap Smart Tags, which would have hijacked millions of Web sites by inserting unwanted links to advertisers’ sites. Few reviewers have held so much power to shape an industry’s successes and failures.

There must a pony in here somewhere

There must be a pony in here somewhereSlashdot posted my review of There Must a Pony in Here Somewhere. It’s been a while since I read it, and the review stayed in editorial queue for several months since Business, Business/Technology stuff is not really the priority there, giving way to programming and technical books. But it was a good book, I liked it somewhat, and it had interesting facts, although too much personality expose about people like Senior VPs and what not, made it look like an ego trip. The review is here.

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