By Miguel Diaz 23 Dec 2003
Hi, my name is Miguel and I’m a Buffyholic. But that’s beside the point. According the Hollywood Reporter, Alyson Hannigan is going to be playing Sally in “When Harry Met Sally” on stage in London. While I am rather disturbed at the thought of Luke Perry portraying Harry, I would spend large sums of money just to watch Alyson rehearse that orgasm-faking scene over and over again.
By Miguel Diaz 23 Dec 2003
Well, it’s that time of year again. The halls around my office are quiet…almost too quiet. Me and about four or five other recent hires are holding down the fort while the ancient ones spend the last of their five week vacation allotments to get away during the holidays.
<p>Not that there’s anyplace I’m particularly drawn to visit this time of year, but I’d definitely like to have some time to chill. While <a href="http://www.ibm.com"><span class="caps">IBM</span></a> executives finally got their heads out of their asses and decided to give us 0-5 year employees three weeks vacation starting next year I still can’t help but feel like I’m getting jobbed.</p>
<p>The really sad thing is that I should be feeling lucky about this. The United States is the only industrialized country that does not mandate (by law) a minimum amount of paid vacation per year so the corporations could really screw us if they wanted to. By contrast the <a href="http://europa.eu.int/">European Union</a> mandates at least 4 weeks paid vacation to all employees, with several countries increasing that minimum to 6 weeks.</p>
<p>Granted, my interest in this is purely out of self-preservation (I’ll save my altruism for my animal rights rants), but I’d be hard pressed not to vote for someone who ran with a minimum paid leave law on their <a href="http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/8622">platform</a> (unless it was Bush). While looking into this I found lots of <a href="http://www.cepr.net/give_me_a_break.htm">information and comparison charts</a> that really make you want to take a few extra sick days next year.</p> By Miguel Diaz 17 Dec 2003
So, last month a Michigan State grad student participating in the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search found the 40th Mersenne Prime number. Now, I’m sure this has some major mathematical significance to someone on the order of Andrew Wiles, but I’m not him so let’s talk about the distributed computing aspect of it all.
<p>Now, I’ve been interested in distributed computing for quite a while and have lent a few cycles to <a href="http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/">some</a> <a href="http://www.distributed.net/">intriguing</a> <a href="http://www.mersenne.org/">projects</a>. Around <a href="http://www.ibm.com">here</a> the <a href="http://www-1.ibm.com/grid/">concept</a> (or a derivitive/evolution anyway) is getting to be rather large. What I find to be kind of a let down though is that using over 200,000 machines* the <span class="caps">GIMPS</span> network (w/ 9 Teraflops) wouldn’t break into the <a href="http://www.top500.org/dlist/2003/11/">top 10</a> in supercomputers. I would think that the software and/or methodology could be improved in order to acheive that.</p>
<p>I think this is significant because projects like these are an ideal place for ideas to blossom into de facto standards before corporate giants catch hold of them and turn them into proprietary abominations. Once the technology is assimilated by corporate America, there is much less we can do (from the outside anyway) to influence its evolution.</p>
<p>All that being said, obviously this voluntary-distributed computing idea does make for a wonderfully cost-effective method of getting supercomputer-caliber calculation power without begging Dad for a raise in your allowance.</p>
<p>*I realize that the computers aren’t dedicated solely to running the distributed client (in many cases running at rather low priority), and the 200,000 probably represents a large number of zombie users (like myself), but without accurate numbers I think the point is still valid.</p> By Miguel Diaz 16 Dec 2003
Well, it seems EMC has decided to go and purchase VMWare. The move makes sense for EMC since they need to start playing in the virtualization realm in order to remain viable in the future and acquisitions are definitely more cost effective than in house development; especially when you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. But this one hurts because VMWare is such a wonderful product and EMC has a history of fucking things up.
<p>Of course then there are the conspiracy theorists who have noted that the <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2003/apr03/04-28EMCpr.asp">partnership</a><br />between <span class=”caps”>EMC</span> and <a href=”http://www.microsoft.com”>Micro$oft</a> has been growing recently and, being as <span class=”caps”>VMW</span>are is far and away the most comprehensive (and probably the only viable) virtualization solution for <a href=”http://www.linux.org”>Linux</a> on the desktop (either as host or guest OS), this could be a discreet attempt by Microsoft to undermine Linux’s viability. Not that I really agree with them, but conspiracy theories are always fun.</p>
<p><span class="caps">FWIW</span>, <span class="caps">VMW</span>are was scheduled to <span class="caps">IPO</span> in 2004 and I really think accepting this offer was something of a cowardly move on their executives’ part because they would have done very well in the market with virtualization being such a hot topic these days. But you all know that saying about the “hand in the bush” or something; I guess it’s hard for anyone to say no to $650M.</p> By Miguel Diaz 30 Nov 2003
yeah…so the best part about my thanksgiving visit with my Father and his clan would be that it is over…he’s always been a pain in the ass to deal with and this was no exception…sigh…at least we managed to discuss many of the issues with his wife before they left…would have been nice if he would have participated in the conversation a bit (hell, just stay around and listen…don’t even talk)…oh well, back to sleep…
By Miguel Diaz 28 Oct 2003
So I’m apparently in the midst of one of my rather infrequent MSSM nostalgia kicks and somehow ended up here (wherever “here” really is). Definitely notice a lot of names on here that haven’t crossed my mind in years (as I’m sure mine hasn’t crossed theirs).
<p>…Kicking Anders since 1995…</p>