Hi-Tech Squad

Multicore Is Bad News For Supercomputers

gary — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:43:06 +0000

With no other way to improve the performance of processors further, chip makers have staked their future on putting more and more processor cores on the same chip. Engineers at Sandia National Laboratories, in New Mexico, have simulated future high-performance computers containing the 8-core, 16‑core, and 32-core microprocessors that chip makers say are the future of the industry. The results are distressing. Because of limited memory bandwidth and memory-management schemes that are poorly suited to sup

Linus Torvalds’ old company acquired and gone

gary — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:30:28 +0000

Transmeta, once a sparkling startup that set out to beat Intel and AMD in mobile computing, announced that it will be acquired by Novafora. The company’s most famous employee, Linux inventor Linux Torvalds, kept the buzz and rumor mill about the company throughout its stealth phase alive and guaranteed a flashy technology announcement in early 2000

New Virtualization News Blog

gary — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 12:32:25 +0000

Hi-Tech Squad have launched a sister site Virtualization News to cover the stories that make the news in the virtualization technology market.

It covers solutions like VMware, VirtualBox, Xen, KVM and others across the full range of operating systems including Windows, Linux, OS X and Unix.

We hope you like it!

15 reasons Macs are still better than Windows PCs

gary — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 20:23:27 +0000

Does Microsoft have the upper hand over OS X. Here’s 15 reasons why it doesn’t.

1. Reliable sleep mode.
2. Extremely fast boot times.
3. Apple uses good quality parts.
4. Less blinking lights.
5. OS X + Windows is better than just Windows.
6. Easier to troubleshoot Macs.
7. A culture of good quality community software.
8. More useful apps out of the box.
9. Neat and contained system settings.
10. Apple doesn’t load the system up with rubbish.
11. Tonnes of small reasons make Mac OS X better including every version of OS X has sophisticated screenshot capability built in.
12. Still no need for additional security software.
13. Apple seems largely to be lameness free.
14. Power of the Linux command line with Photoshop CS4
15. File sharing is much easier.

Azure is Windows Cloud or is it?

gary — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 07:15:50 +0000

Microsoft has launched Windows Azure, the previously unofficially named “Windows Cloud” OS. It is a cloud services operating system that acts as the development, Web hosting and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform.

Being a bear of very little brains, I had to lookup the meaning of the word Azure one of the meaning is the blue color of the clear sky which I guess is what Microsoft are thinking, but did you also know that:

In heraldry, azure is the tincture with the colour blue, and belongs to the class of tinctures called “colours”. In engraving, it is sometimes depicted as a region of horizontal lines or else marked with either az. or b. as an abbreviation. Blue means loyalty and truth.
“Azure” is a 1937 song composed by Duke Ellington, with lyrics written by Irving Mills.
Azure is a blue color on the HSV color wheel at 210 degrees. It is the hue that is halfway between blue and cyan. Its complementary color is orange.
Azure, subtitled Ideas for the Jewish Nation, is the journal of the Shalem Center, an academic institute in Jerusalem. The magazine is published quarterly in English and in Hebrew; the Hebrew edition is Israel’s leading journal of public thought.
The Azure is an under-construction 31-story modernist residential tower located at McKinnon and Wolf Streets in the International Center neighborhood of Oak Lawn, Dallas, Texas (USA).

But could it be that Microsoft Azure is really a Jazz song sung by a bunch of fellows from Jerusalem on top of a tall building on a clear day?

Excerpt from Learning FreeNAS: Configuring storage in FreeNAS

gary — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 09:42:28 +0000

Linux.com has published an excerpt from the book of Hi-Tech Squad’s Gary Sims. The excerpt is called “Configuring storage in FreeNAS”… Here is an excerpt from the excerpt!!!

The essence of the FreeNAS server is to provide storage that is easily accessible from the network. To this end, it is important to understand how FreeNAS handles hard disks and how they can be configured and used to provide the best and most reliable storage for your network.

Android is now available as open source

gary — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 09:24:50 +0000

It was going to happen and now with the first Android phone coming to market, Google has made the source code to Android available as open source. Developers can now do much more than create applications that will run on Android. They can help improve the operating system overall by submitting potential new features, bug fixes, or other ideas.

Android is the first free, open source, and fully customizable mobile platform. Android offers a full stack: an operating system, middleware, and key mobile applications. It also contains a rich set of APIs that allows third-party developers to develop great applications.

About Android’s operating system:

Based on Linux 2.6.25 for ARM.
A set of kernel enhancements are provided to support Android. The patches include alarm, ashmem, binder, power management, low memory killer, kernel degugger, and logger.
FAT32 file system is supported.
Support for TCP/IP (TCP, UDP, etc).
The platform will run on almost on any ARM based Linux kernel environment.
The platform requires a minimum of 128 MB of RAM and 256 MB of Flash memory.
802.11 b/g Wi-Fi
Standard USB interface, including USB 2.0

Read more here: Welcome (Android Open Source Project)

PC-BSD 7.0.1 available; get NTFS write support

gary — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 05:35:09 +0000

The PC-BSD team have been busy and after much hard work and testing they are to announce the availability of PC-BSD 7.0.1, i.e. the first upgrade in the 7 series, with FreeBSD 7.0 under the hood.

Version 7.0.1 contains a number of bugfixes and improvements. Some of the changes are:

KDE 4.1.2
AMD64 version
NTFS write support
Adobe Flash 9 support (Linux -flashplugin9)
Better WIFI support
Updates to the System Updater

PC-BSD is a free operating system with ease of use in mind. Like any modern system, you can listen to your favorite music, watch your movies, work with office documents and install your favorite applications with a setup wizard at a click.

Read more here: PC-BSD - PC-BSD 7.0.1 available

EU Ministerial Conference Discusses Looming IPv4 Shortage

gary — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:28:20 +0000

The looming shortage of IPv4 addresses, and the need to start using IPv6 addresses, is a frequent topic these days, and it was addressed this week at an EU ministerial conference in Nice, France, a conference organised as part of the French presidency of the EU.

The conference was told there needs to be an orderly transition to IPv6 with a recent policy paper from the European Commission suggesting that by 2010, at least 25 per cent of internet addresses in Europe should be updated to IPv6.

The EurActiv article on which the above information was sourced is available from www.euractiv.com/en/infosociety/eu-warns-digital-gap-ip-numbers-dry/article-176127.

The website for the “Internet of the Future” Ministerial Conference is available here.

New Mac Tablet, well almost, installing OS X on the Gigabyte M912X

gary — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 07:17:09 +0000

Could this be what a new Mac with touch screen could be like? A YouTube user has managed to successfully load OS X on a Gigabyte M912X.

The Gigabyte M912 series of computers have the same basic specs as many netbooks, including a 1.6GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM, and an 8.9 inch display. But there are two things that set the M912 apart from most other netbooks. First, it has a touchscreen display that can be folded down on top of the keyboard for using the PC in tablet mode. And second, the higher end models feature high resolution 1280 x 768 pixel displays which are much crisper than the 1024 x 600 pixel screens that you usually find on netbooks.

Many thanks to Liliputing. You can read more here: Mac Tablet: Installing OS X on the Gigabyte M912X