The Register | Windows on a database - sliced and diced by BeOS vets

After we wrote about Microsoft's plans to put a database into each copy of Windows as the native file store back in January, we were delighted to hear from two system architects for whom this news was really old hat.

You see, it's been done before. Benoit Schillings was one of Be Inc's first employees, and authored the original user space database server. This was later superseded by a more conventional approach: BFS, a fast, 64bit journaled file system written by Dominic Giampaolo, which had many database-like properties.

Between them they have more practical experience in making such an ambitious scheme work on a PC than anyone else. So last month we reunited Benoit and Dominic at Menlo Park's Applewood Pizza for reminiscences about Be, and some low-down on file systems and databases...

The Register | Xbox: 'Microsoft has its teeth kicked in'

Leave it to EA's ever-controversial president John Riccitiello to put the boot. According to El Ricco, by way of Blooomberg, "Microsoft has had its teeth kicked in, in both Europe and Japan". Ouch. This may help explain why EA has been quietly shuffling all of their European Xbox releases further back into the summer for the last few weeks...

I have used several quotations in the past on my (dormant) Radio website from the motivational quotes of the day site but AFAIK have complied with their conditions of use by citing them as the original source.

I was therefore somewhat surprised today to get an e-mail from one of the 'authors' of a one line quote asking that I take it off the Radio weblog page. I have no problem with someone asking me to do that and I have 'deleted' it from that day's page. The reason for the request was that they expected to get paid for every use of the quote.

I guess I can't argue with that but it's a strange old world when one-line quotations become commodities. It got me think about quotations. Are they only of interest if they have originated from a 'celebrity' of some sort? Can you only be motivated by someone famous? Hmmm!

via The Register -

Visit Apple's Advanced Computing Group web page at http://developer.apple.com/hardware/ve/acgresearch.html and scroll to the bottom. You will find a link to (an admittedly dated as it lists a 500 Mhz G4 as the fastest available) white paper from NASA evaluating the G4 for scientific computation against Cray, Alpha, MIPS, and P3 based systems in terms of flops per dollar and concluded that the G4 offers "bang for the buck" advantages in factors of between 5 and 8 over Alpha and P3 systems.

Here's that link: Research from the Advanced Computation Group

An Evaluation of PowerMac G4 Systems for FORTRAN-based Scientific Computing with Application to Computational Fluid Dynamics Simulation

by Craig A. Hunter, NASA Langley Research Center

http://math.wm.edu/~cahunter/NASA_G4_Study.pdf

Very interesting reading. Shame I've already written my exam questions ;-)

The Chronicle: Microsoft Gives Researchers and Students Access to Code for Web-Services Platform

The Microsoft Corporation is attempting to win the minds of academic researchers and college-aged programmers by offering universities more than a million lines of source code from the company's much-vaunted .NET programming platform for Web services.

It may be much-vaunted, but I would suggest - as others did in the article - that more than a million lines of code is pretty indigestible. I also wonder just what it would do in terms of contaminating students when they go looking for work with Microsoft's competitors. Microsoft's track record suggests that they'd resort to litigation to protect their IPR. Most universities and professors I guess will be reluctant to place themselves in such a vulnerable position.

O'Reilly Network: An Architectural Tour of Rotor

The Microsoft Shared Source CLI Implementation (aka "Rotor") is a source code distribution that includes fully functional implementations of both the ECMA-334 C# language standard and the ECMA-335 Common Language Infrastructure standard. These standards together represent a substantial subset of what is available in the Microsoft .NET Framework. The source code will build and run under Windows XP or FreeBSD 4.5, and the distribution contains numerous additional goodies, including a JScript compiler written entirely in C#, an IL assembler, a disassembler, a debugger, tools for examining metadata, and other samples and utilities. To complement this article, we've also published "Get Your Rotor Running", which takes you through the steps of installing, building and running Rotor.