Jon Stokes from ArsTechnica has a good article on Intel’s recently announced Terascale 80-core processor.

When you have so much processing power available, how do you make best use of it? One way is to treat it as a virtual server room, and run virtual machines on each core. For example, a heavily trafficed website, which is traditionally spread across multiple web & database servers, could be hosted completely on a single piece of silicon, with corresponding cost and power savings (especially power).

Then there’s the problem of how to keep such a fast chip adequately supplied with data, to ensure it doesn’t spend too much idle time waiting for new packets to arrive. There are some hints that Intel may be about to announce on-chip optical support.

I doubt we’ll see this technology on the desktop any time soon (though you never know), but in an era where datacentres are routinely sucking up megawatts of power, it’s useful to have a potential glimpse of a future where the entire room may be reduced to a single server cabinet.

(Let’s ignore storage, for now…)

Good news! All the free utilities from SysInternals.com are now available as a single convenient download here:

    Download SysInternals Suite [7.2 MB]

As you may or may not know, SysInternals was a website run by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell. Founded in 1996, it was the place to go for useful Windows utilities that did “hard” things – registry snooping, file monitoring, Rootkit detecters, etc.

For most IT professionals, utilities like Process Explorer, RegMon and FileMon have long been indispensable parts of their computer toolkit. (I have particular interest in the latter, since it performs a similar function to my own SnoopDos utility from 1989).

A few months ago, SysInternals was bought by Microsoft; Mark and Bryce are now working for Bill. One of the immediate changes was that all the utilities are now hosted on Microsoft’s website. A less visible change is that tools no longer come with source code. This is a huge blow to those of us who use the SysInternals tools as reference examples for a wide variety of programming techniques – for example, how to create virtual device drivers that can be installed without a reboot (greatly simplifying the installation process). Luckily, you can still find copies of the original source archives if you know where to look, though I expect that won’t last long.

The SysInternals tools are also exemplars of efficient coding, with executables sizes typically in the 100-500K range. In a world of ever-more-bloated programs, it’s nice to know that there are still people out there who care about such things.

It remains to be seen whether the ethos behind the SysInternals tools will change significantly as a result of the Microsoft takeover. I hope not, but the first worrying signs are already apparent. The removal of Linux versions of some tools is also a shame (though not a surprise).

In the meantime though, I salute Mark and Bryce for 10 years of supreme contribution to the Windows community. If you haven’t already downloaded the SysInternals Suite, do it now!

Here’s a beautifully done Flash animation. No further info necessary…

(Update: The old link broke, probably due to bandwidth overload; the one listed above is now working again.)

Following my continuing fascination with online mapping, a friend pointed me towards AsciiMaps.com – it has to be seen to be believed!

Thanks Con!

Here’s an interesting article about Interactive fiction, i.e. the old-style text-based adventure games popular in the 80’s and 90’s. If you remember playing any Infocom titles, you’ll find this a good read.

Thanks to Conor for this interesting interview with Bill Yeager, the author of the first network router.

(Surprise, surprise … Cisco didn’t write it all themselves.)

Not everything needs to be about bits and bytes. I recently came across a guy called Julian Beever who does absolutely incredible pavement drawings. Here’s a sample (used without permission … sorry):

You can see some more examples of his work here…

Okay, so this is a bit lazy – someone pointed me towards Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing as a good documentary on the origins of computer networking, but I don’t have time to watch it just now. Bookmarking such things is a little hit & miss, so I’m recording it here instead…

Update: The link no longer seems to be operational; it was originally referenced from here.

http://ondras.praha12.net/sql/demo/ has a demo of a SQL Designer written purely in Javascript (or, more likely, AJAX – Asynchronous Javascript And XML). Whatever, it’s very impressive!