Jason Stamper's Blog: March 2007 Archives

The wonder of Moore's Law
March 16, 2007

Yesterday I had an interesting chat with Sun’s James Gosling, who many of you will no doubt know is best known as the father of Java. As programmers go he’s among a handful of famous and clearly quite brilliant software developers, as well known as people like Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson and Doug McIlroy (creators of Unix); Bill Joy (author of Berkeley Unix and TCP/IP); and Tim Berners-Lee, who invented you-know-what. Keep an eye out for my interview with Gosling coming soon on www.cbronline.com.

Anyway I was asking him to what extent Moore’s Law has worked in Java’s favour, because any scalability challenges that it may have had when first created back in 1991 are unlikely to be much of a problem today, given the low cost and high power technology that good old Gordon Moore and his Law have furnished us with by 2007.

Discussing this, Gosling noted that Sony’s PlayStation 3 is more powerful than many of the supercomputers that were around 10 years ago, delivering 1.8 Teraflops of floating point performance, for under £450.

Putting that in perspective, the very slowest machine on the Top 500 Supercomputers list delivers 2.7 Teraflops from 800 processors, while the fastest in the world -- the famous IBM Blue Gene with over 131,000 processors -- manages 280.6 Teraflops. Which really is a lot of flops. And if you want to know why Moore’s Law has been so helpful, consider that back in 1993, the fastest supercomputer, costing many millions of dollars, could manage only 59 Gigaflops. You couldn’t even play a game on that these days.

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Posted by Jason Stamper on 05:57 PM | Comments (0)

Could Beyonce be advertising Vista?
March 06, 2007

Did anybody notice thie picture of Beyonce last week that saw her wearing a necklace that spelled 'UPGRADE' in large gold letters? To what lengths will Microsoft go to get people to buy into Vista?

Seriously though maybe there would be mileage in it for Microsoft: remember when Linford Christie wore those Puma contact lenses at the Atlanta 1996 Olympics? I think Microsoft should pay Britney Spears to have the word UPGRADE shaved into her nether regions: there's some really prime advertising real-estate going begging down there.

Picture source: ThisisLondon.co.uk

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Posted by Jason Stamper on 10:18 AM | Comments (1)

On losing my podcast virginity
March 01, 2007

I had been waiting for the right MP3 recorder to come along, hoping that when I finally lost my podcast virginity it would be with someone special. Someone who cares. Well I finally did it – I met the microphone equivalent of Mrs Right and my first ever CBR podcast is now live over here.

The topic is Agile Development and how you scale it up in the enterprise. A clever chap from Telelogic answers my questions. Have a listen and let me know if my voice starts to grate on you before you get to the end.

But now that I’ve lost my podcast virginity I want to do it again and again, as often as possible. Watch this space. Or should that be listen to this space?

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Posted by Jason Stamper on 02:19 PM | Comments (0)