No genius held back?

I agree with the nominal goals of the No Child Left Behind Act (badly organized official site here; slightly more accessible Wikipedia article here):

• Teachers should be highly qualified

• Teaching methods should be wisely chosen

• Student progress should be tested

Unfortunately it appears that the Act isn't really achieving all of these goals, and that in pursuit of these goals, other important purposes of the public education system are being neglected.

This isn't the place for a full overview of the Act and its consequences, but I would like to plug an important article that … Read more

When Google Earth isn't good enough...

The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have reported that the U.S. government plans to offer military-grade remote-sensing data to police agencies. (Those links may require registration or disappear entirely; sorry.)

Unlike some, I'm not going to leap to any conclusions about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. I think that depends on how these data are used. If the observations are reported accurately and not taken out of context, well, they're just facts. Morality lies in how facts are used, not in the mere knowledge of them.

Over time, the U.… Read more

AMD's gift to software developers

On Monday, AMD released a proposal for "Lightweight Profiling" instructions (or LWP; download here), describing a new way for software developers to gather information on software while it runs.

I've only had a few minutes to check out the document, but it looks pretty interesting. Existing performance analysis tools, like Intel's VTune and AMD's CodeAnalyst, generally create significant overhead when gathering performance information. They usually need code that runs in supervisor mode, for example, and they're just for developer use--they aren't meant to be used in production systems.

LWP lets applications gather their … Read more

Wake up! Time to buy!

In 1982, I was serving in the US Air Force in Germany. My parents had come over to Europe on vacation, so I took some leave and joined them for a while. We spent some time in London, and one afternoon I went to see a movie that had recently opened: Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner."

I had been eagerly anticipating the movie based on Scott's direction of "Alien" and Harrison Ford's performances as Han Solo and Indiana Jones.

In London, I had the chance to see a 70mm print of the movie in … Read more

Virtualization--threat or menace?

VMware is in the news these days for two related reasons.

First, VMware Fusion for Mac OS X recently went on sale. Fusion enables Mac users to run Windows and other operating systems simultaneously with their regular Mac applications, which pretty much solves the old problem of… Read more

If you thought software patents were bad...

Okay, this is going to get controversial. Just bear with me.

The Siggraph conference is basically defined by the intersection of art and technology. The ideal Siggraph attendee is both an artist and a technologist, though lots of us are only one or the other (personally, I can't even draw flies).

At Siggraph this year, the well-known patent expert… Read more

Free copies of Vista and XP from your uncle

I downloaded a copy of Windows Vista off the Internet last night. And since the same site had XP, I got that too.

I figured it was okay, since I was doing research for the blog here.

It was all very convenient. The server where I found them has a lot of bandwidth, so the files (4.5GB and 1.8GB respectively) downloaded quickly. These are pre-installed disk images, so there's no trouble with activation.

The greatest irony is that the group providing them for download has configured them for maximum security-- so once you have them running, you … Read more

Pondering the future of virtual worlds

On Wednesday at Siggraph, I attended an interesting panel (details here) on the subject of "The Potential of End-User-Programmable Worlds."

In addition to the two organizers, the panelists included Paul Hemp of Harvard Business Review, Asi Lang of Linden Labs (the company that runs Second Life), and Vernor Vinge. Vinge is a faculty alumnus of San Diego State University, but better known as the author of "9 or 10 science-fiction novels," as he says. (I asked about that uncertainty; he said it's more about the definition of a novel than his ability to remember what he's written.)

You may have seen some of the recent news about Second Life. Last week, Linden Labs shut down… Read more

How many processors are in your PC?

These days, most new PCs have dual-core central processors (CPU). That's one chip with two complete microprocessors on it, both sharing one path to memory and peripherals.

If you have a high-end gaming PC or a workstation, you might have one or two processor chips with four cores each. An eight-core PC is a very powerful machine--in real terms, up to eight times faster than the best desktop PCs you could get in 2004. For many years, PC performance doubled roughly every 18 months; multicore technology has produced annual doubling for three years now.

But that's not really … Read more