Dave links to a google search for Microsoft CLR and suggests that we

read these articles about Microsoft's CLR, and think and read between the lines. I hadn't understood how pervasive the CLR was going to be. My surprise is not based on anything new, MS has been talking about the CLR since last summer, I just wasn't fully tuning in.

The most pertinent articles appear to be:

Introducing ADO+: Data Access Services for the Microsoft .NET Framework -- MSDN Magazine, November 2000

The Microsoft.NET Strategy: Risky, Brilliant, or Both?

Handling Language Interoperability with the Microsoft .NET Framework

The following is a bit OT but interesting nevertheless: The BYTEmark and C-versus-Java

Andrea's Weblog

I think it would be a good idea to think about ways to conserve energy and about renewable energy sources - instead of sacrificing National Parks for being able to keep oil cheap.

Amen! I calculated my ecological footprint and it came out to just over 50% of a typical American's footprint. Still way too much B-(

There's an Overclocking discussion going on in a local cad.chat newsgroup I set up as a forum for those with an interest in my Computer Arcjitectire and Design class. It appears that overclocked processors may harbour subtle errors when calculating SETI@home results: Team Ars Technica Lamb Chop - Statistics and Benchmarking

Unsettling news...
The 3.03 benchmarks started to trickle in and a few results were obviously in question because they contained extra spikes or the values were ridiculous. About this time along came Roelof and the fun started - not content with my slow old ways he cobbled together some code to check the result.sah far more thoroughly than a mere eyeballing could achieve. Boy! Did the results ever give us a shock. Many of them produced on highly-overclocked processors contained errors. If you overclock there's a good chance you fall into this category. Many of you OC to the point where it locks and then reduce it a few MHz believing it to be now 'stable'. The debate about whether overclocking and its ramifications was acceptable in a scientific enterprise suddenly loomed up. It seemed that although machines completed the benchmark in seemingly reasonable times the results showed that errors aplenty had been generated in the result.sah file! So actually reaching 100% completion of a WU is not a satisfactory measure of your systems reliability. You cannot be sure that your machine is producing kosher results just because it completes WU's at a close to average time! Just because you can play games, burn CD's and run the SETI client concurrently does not give any guarantee your system is error free.

Of course, this means that if you get dodgy results for SETI then you're likely to have dodgy results for other things. It might not matter so much when playing games but it may (will!) be a big deal for other applications. Thought provoking...

EVHEAD!: Essay - And Then There Was One

Wednesday, January 31, 2001

It's probably become obvious to the careful observer that all is not well in the Land of Pyra. Rather than wait for the public speculation and debate, I'm going to say what exactly is going on (from my perspective -- not speaking for anyone else on the team or as an official Pyra/Blogger representative). I'm sure the public speculation and debate will happen anyway, but I don't plan to take much part in it. I have other things to do.

It's a shame that the Pyra team split up. Although not a Blogger user, it would seem to be a nice weblogging tool.

The Tech Report - Intel's Pentium 4 processor

THE PENTIUM 4 IS THE FIRST truly new processor design from Intel since the Pentium Pro debuted at under 200MHz. Believe it or not, the Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, Xeon, and Celeron processors were all based on the same P6 microarchitecture. Intel added some goodies like MMX, SSE, and integrated cache over the years, and they changed the way the processors were made, but they were all the same basic design.

The P4 is based on Intel's radical new NetBurst microarchitecture, and it's a different animal altogether. To best understand why I'm calling the P4 design radical, we could use a car analogy.

But I hate car analogies, so let's not.

The Register: Microsoft outsources some DNS servers to Linux - or so it seems.

Talking of Akamai I remembered a condition placed on students that worked as interns for the company - if they dropped out of university the wouldn't be offered a full-time job. As usual Google came up trumps: Class Struggle: MIT Students, Lured To New Tech Firms, Get Caught in a Bind --- They Work for Professors Who May Also Oversee Their Academic Careers --- Homework as `Nondisclosure'

Since its founding, Akamai has aggressively used its MIT connections. Of the firm's 104 employees, 20 were students in the last semester, including 16 who were undergraduates or enrolled in a joint bachelor's-master's degree program. Ten more students have been hired to work for the summer.

"This company exists because of students," says Paul Sagan, the company's president. MIT, plus its faculty and students, now have about 40% of the company's shares.

But to maintain good ties with the school, Akamai has had to negotiate some tricky policy positions.

For one, the company voices a strong stance against students dropping out. Early on, Mr. Sagan says, some students approached him about going full time. "I told them that if they drop out of college before completing their undergraduate degree because they want to work full time at Akamai, we won't offer them a full-time job," says Mr. Sagan.