Author: geoff

More Java cores than you know what to do with

After publishing a skeptical and rather petulant piece about Azul last October, El Reg decided to give Azul’s CMO, Shahin Khan, his own soapbox this week. He certainly waxed lyrical “If you could count CPUs the same way that you count memory, some problems would simply become uninteresting and others would transform in a qualitative way. And completely new possibilities would emerge. […] No need to plan capacity for each individual application. Let all of your users share a huge compute pool and plan capacity across many applications.”

Well, maybe. Remember that Azul is planning to ship up to 1,200 cores in a single rack, but these core will be specialized Java™ engines. Now I’d love to see Java take over the world and remove the need for any other kind of operating environment, but for the next few years, while we’re waiting for this brave new world, systems like Azul’s are going to have to coexist with mundane Solaris and Linux boxes. In other words, it’s a co-processor, an “applications accelerator”. And ever since the days of “intelligent Ethernet cards” (anyone remember the 3C505?) I’ve observed that such co-processors are doomed to be overtaken by general-purpose processors. The only obvious exception is in the area of graphics. Not only are the specialized processors not that much faster than their general-purpose brethren; the cost and complexity of the software needed to manage the co-processor usually eats up all of the savings. In the case of the 3C505, I remember that the host driver to manage the on-board TCP/IP stack was roughly as complex as a TCP/IP stack!

Don’t get me wrong – I think that multiple core are absolutely the way to go. Various companies – Sun, IBM, even Intel – are realizing that the best way forward is to simplify their pipelines to reduce the size and complexity of their cores so that they can stuff more cores on a chip. Designing around Java byte-codes rather than RISC ops doesn’t save all that much.

Will Azul prove me wrong? I’m not holding my breath….

Carrier on Flew

I’ve just come across a lengthy post on the Internet Infidels DB by Richard Carrier, which goes into considerable detail about the Antony Flew debate.
Key quotes:
“It bothers me that Flew has not […] even bothered looking for critiques of Schroeder, much less considered them. He told me so–just as he told me he has not kept up on current science, even of biogenesis, much less cosmology.”
“[Flew] thinks that life started with a DNA molecule (that is false–no biologist today believes that), and that the smallest possible replicating DNA molecule is so complex that it could not have arisen by chance (that is also false–or at most remains unproven–even assuming life did begin with a DNA molecule).”
“It is still unclear to me why or how Flew’s imagined Deity thus accomplished the origin of life if it was (essentially) physically impossible, without supernaturally interfering in the natural order of the universe (since Flew insists he does not believe his Deity does that). This is one of several contradictions in Flew’s overall position that bothers me. Flew’s conclusion makes more sense as resulting from a fine-tuning argument, not an impossibility-of-life argument, yet he tells me the fine-tuning argument isn’t what impressed him. I can’t make sense of this.”.
Carrier’s other comments are extremely interesting, and will have me re-reading some of Flew’s earlier work. (As for probabilities and protobiont sequences, see Ian Musgrave’s excellent tutorial.)
[UPDATE] Richard Carrier has now updated his piece on SecWeb about Flew’s “conversion”.
“Antony Flew has retracted one of his recent assertions. In a letter to me dated 29 December 2004, Flew concedes: ‘I now realize that I have made a fool of myself by believing that there were no presentable theories of the development of inanimate matter up to the first living creature capable of reproduction.’“
Flew inaccurately blames Dawkins for this. According to Carrier, he goes further: “Flew also makes another admission: ‘I have been mistaught by Gerald Schroeder.’ He says ‘it was precisely because he appeared to be so well qualified as a physicist (which I am not) that I was never inclined to question what he said about physics.’“
Sad, but c’est la vie. If Flew does indeed feel that “I am just too old at the age of nearly 82 to initiate and conduct a major and super radical controversy about the conceivability of the putative concept of God as a spirit,“, perhaps it would have been wiser if he had resisted the temptation to publicise his recent series of statements and retractions.
In the circumstances, Carrier’s conclusion, though harsh, seems to be justified: “Flew has thus abandoned the very standards of inquiry that led the rest of us to atheism. It would seem the only way to God is to jettison responsible scholarship. […] Theists would do well to drop the example of Flew. Because his willfully sloppy scholarship can only help to make belief look ridiculous.”

Charity cards

It’s that time of the Christmas/Hannukah/Solstice/New Year season when we go through all of the cards that we’ve received: updating addresses, reading individual or round robin letters, noting people to be added to the list or those who have not responded for a few years. If you ignore the commercial material, about half our cards are from people in the US, with most of the rest from the UK; there are also a few from Australia and Europe. And as I read through the cards, one thing struck me. More than two-thirds of the cards from the UK and Europe were “charity” cards, purchased to support organizations such as Unicef, Save the Children, Shelter, Scope, Oxfam, React, and so on; even Cats Protection got a look-in. Only a couple of the US cards were of this kind. It seemed like an odd cultural difference.

2004 – the Questions

Here are the questions to which these were the answers:

  • Why did my wife cause our Scandinavian vacation to be cancelled?
  • How did my mother’s surgeon describe the tumour on her colon?
  • How did my daughter announce that she was expecting her first child?
  • What eyesore did we finally get rid of from the basement this December?
  • What was my visit to Seattle at Easter notable for?
  • What was “The Project”?
  • What was the paradox in distributed computing that had me scratching my head all year?
  • What was the best new music of 2004?
  • What changed my life in 2004?
  • How am I spending my Christmas?
  • What’s my answer to Jim Waldo’s challenge: “Is there a notion of object which is independent of the language in which one is programming?”
  • What was the greatest fun I had with my blog all year?

It's going to be an odd election in Iraq….

As River reports, “technically, we don’t know the candidates. We know the principal heads of the lists but we don’t know who exactly will be running. It really is confusing. They aren’t making the lists public because they are afraid the candidates will be assassinated”

An election in which the voters don’t know who the candidates are? That sounds weird enough. But then there are the voter registration cards:

[O]n all the voting cards, the gender of the voter, regardless of sex, is labeled “male”. […] Why is the sex on the card anyway? […] Some are saying that many of the more religiously inclined families won’t want their womenfolk voting so it might be permissible for the head of the family to take the women’s ID and her ballot and do the voting for her. Another theory is that this ‘mistake’ will make things easier for people making fake IDs to vote in place of females.

Apparently there’s a brisk trade in voting cards: the going rate is around $400. But at least River’s family has received voting cards. In many places, election officials are refusing to carry out voter registration because of death threats.

Looking for the plus-three-sigma customer

A reference in Marion’s blog sent me off to a fascinating piece by James Governor: Why Sun Software Licensing is Like a Hermann Miller Chair. He starts with the counter-intuitive fact that some customers are reported as saying that our flat-rate pricing for JES is “confusing”. Governor makes the point that the confusion comes not the pricing model but from its unfamiliarity. He cites Malcom Gladwell, who argues in his new book, Blink, “that it’s a mistake to rely on the first impressions of customers who are inherently biased against the unfamiliar” and that “focus groups hold back, rather than encourage innovation.”

Like Governor and Gladwell, I’m skeptical about the use of focus groups in the early stages of developing radical product and business concepts; I see more use for them in refining and evolving well-defined products. Rather than focus groups, I prefer the “voice of the customer” approach: standardized, semi-scripted interviews with an opportunity for open-ended responses. In addition to supporting the usual statistical analysis, VoC encourages what I call “the plus-three-sigma customers” to speak their minds. These are the folks who are out ahead of all the other customers – and usually ahead of us too! They’re the ones who aren’t confused by the unfamiliar, and who tend to be impatient with groupthink. To return to Governor’s piece, they’re the folks who would grab that ugly Aeron chair and and see at once how to build their workspace around it. They’re our natural collaborators in exploiting innovative and contrarian technologies.

Sleeping with the enemy (metaphorically, I hasten to add)

Regular readers will know that I often pick up blog-worthy items from Andrew Sullivan. Why do I read him? I mean, he’s a pompous right-wing blow-hard… but he did turn against Bush in the recent election, he’s done the right thing on Abu Ghraib while others have ignored it, and… oh, I don’t know, maybe it’s that gay chic thing, you know? “Queer Eye for the Political Guy”…. And then Terry nails him with a directness that jerks me out of my composure.

It starts with Sully’s “QUOTE FOR THE DAY: ‘I’d much rather be doing this than figthing [sic] a war,’ – helicopter pilot Lt. Cmdr. William Whitsitt, helping the survivors of the south Asian tsunami. Earth to Whitsitt: you’re a soldier.

This earns Sully a swift rebuke from Terry: “having been to a war, and having helped people, I’d rather be doing the latter than the former. If Sullivan wants to question why… I’ll be more than willing to hand him a rifle, a flack vest, and a Basic Load, and take him for a couple of long walks in Falluja.”

Apparently Sully caught a ton of flak for this piece, and he had the good grace to include a couple of responses on the front page and the feedback section. Sully bleats pitifully that his “point is that the military is primarily about fighting and winning wars” – but does that mean that a soldier has to prefer killing to helping?! Does Sully want a soldiery composed of amoral robots with no compassion or humanity?

(Why did that last point remind me of Rumsfeld? Anyway, from now on Sully has to earn my readership.)

The Return of the King

I’ve been laid low for the last 48 hours with flu, but curiously that hasn’t meant that I’ve been stuck in bed. In fact I’ve found myself sleeping for 4 hours getting up for 2 or 3, and so on. I’ve tried reading, but that doesn’t work, so I’ve mostly been watching the bonus features on the The Return of the King (Extended Edition) DVD. I’d watched the film itself on Thursday, with some friends, and now I find that dipping into the various documentaries is exactly the right speed for my fevered brain at 4 in the morning. Among the high points:

  • Home of the Horse Lords, about the horses in the film – their selection and training, and the extraordinary actor-horse relationships that developed. The dedication of the equestrian extras. The breathtaking work of the stunt rider who doubled for Gandalf on Shadowfax. Stunning.
  • In the sequence about the world-wide premieres of RotK (towards the end of The End of All Things), the Norwegian event was unexpectedly special. It was held in a sports arena, with a huge screen, and before the film was shown 200 volunteers reenacted the key scenes from the first two films.
  • The Abandoned concept material about a version of the battle at the Black Gate in which Aragorn would battle Sauron. WHAT?! How could they even think of betraying such a key element of Tolkien’s vision by rendering immaterial evil as concrete? Fortunately, sanity was restored.
  • The documentary material on Cameron Duncan, a teenage New Zealand film-maker who succumbed to cancer while LotR was being filmed. Peter Jackson introduces a tenuous connection with the film (to do with the closing song), but he didn’t need to do that. After pulling off such a stupendous achievement, he’s entitled to put anything he wants in the DVD extras.
  • Odd things, like the fact that the scene with Sam and Frodo on the stairs (when Frodo sends Sam away) was shot in two sessions a full year apart.

So that’s how I’m spending my time. Well, that and watching Tottenham’s 5-2 win over Everton.

Happier New Year

Over the last 12 hours a flu-like bug has attacked, so while Merry goes out to celebrate with some old friends (as I insisted), I’m sitting here with a temperature of 101.5F and delirium-style tremens. Oh well, mustn’t grumble…. Happy New Year, everyone.