Saturday 11 April 2009

concurrency

Just read an interesting post about processors, which ones are better. The scary thing is someone had written "if you have a task to run on a single core, when you run it on a dual core it will complete twice as fast, FACT" well despite the fact this person has written FACT at the end it is totally untrue. Not only can the task not finish twice as fast, it may not complete any faster than a single core machine. This got me thinking, if this is a common misconception even in well regarded tech circles then maybe this explains why very little progress ( at least from what I've seen ) has been made into purposely writing programs to run on multiple cores. Presumably threads of operation are assigned to a particular processor already, this would help to load balance a system and yes vastly improve multithreading i.e. when we use several applications at the same time, however the programs themselves are not written for multiple cores, as far as I am aware. I might write an article about this at some point in the future, just as soon as I have more than a simple netbook to write with. Having said that, this netbook is fantastic, it still manages over 6 hours ( did 7.5 when it was new and running windows not linux ) of continuous use, building apps in netbeans whilst listening to music online e.t.c. very impressive. It's the Samsung NC10 if anyone is interested. Having said that I am seriously looking forward to what netbook offerings come off the back of nVidias ION, now that is a serious pico-ITX board. Whilst researching this I read an article stating that pico-ITX is currently the smallest ITX form factor after the nanao and micro, but I could have sworn the clever guys at VIA had announced a mobile-ITX form factor which was as small as a motorola V3 phone, could be wrong though so I'll have another look. Whilst on the subject of concurrency, does anyone have any metrics for using activeMQ topics as the broadcast bus in a distributed node concurrent system, the system I am looking into doesn't require so much speed to use a shared access memory model type design so I was curious about anyone elses finidings doing things this way.

Friday 10 April 2009

interesting thought

just watching the tv and an advert popped up. "dettol kills 99.9% of bacteria" seems good, but I was thinking if dettol kills 99.9% of bacteria doesn't that mean dettol prevents your body from getting the opportunity to create 99.9% of antibodies for said bacteria. the old saying holds true, "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger". Obviously within reason.

Tuesday 7 April 2009

got bored

I got bored so messed up my blog, don't really like it but hey I am in a bad place right now...only kidding :)

insurance are skum

I was burgled on the 4th of January, and to this day I am still having to ask my useless insurance company Marks and Spencer ( M&S ) for items. What on Earth do I pay them for when they take this long. I found out today that vouchers that have been given in order to pay for certain electrical items can only be used in a single store and can't be used online. No self respecting IT worker buys computer hardware from PC World or Currys, they are over priced and usually outdated. The only machines that come close to suiting my needs are web only offers, oh and by the way they only come close to serving me when I add an extra £50 of my hard earned savings into the mix. iVal the people responsible for aquiring items and sorting out compensation have so far not once called me about the electrical items, not a single time in their process have they been pro active. Credit where credit is due though the staff are nice when you speak to them on the phone, however I am beginning to feel they just tell you what you want to hear to get rid of you as several times messages weren't carried across. This whole fiasco makes me angry, now is not the time to be getting stressed out with all this stuff. To make matters just that little bit worse than they already are, I read an article in the paper that said even the police know who is behind our robbery and others in the area but are unable to prosecute as they haven't located where the goods are stashed. I've never wanted to crush someones larynx with my boot more than I do right now.
 
Stack Overflow profile for Richard Johnson at Stack Overflow, Q&A for professional and enthusiast programmers