Day: November 24, 2002

Werner Vogels is benchmarking .NET and others with Scimark.  The numbers below are approximate gigaflops.  Take note at the Rotor column.

Memory Model	Java (IBM 1.3)	C# .Net 1.1	C	J#	C#-Rotor
small	155	194	327	128	7
large	92	105	145	105	7

OSNews covers the announcement:

Intel released its version 7.0 compiler suite for Linux and Windows, for the x86 and Itanium1/2 architectures. Optimizations include support for SSE2 in the Pentium 4 CPU and software pipelining in the Itanium1/2 CPUs. Inter-procedural optimization (IPO) and profile-guided optimization (PGO) can provide greater application performance. Intel Compilers support multi-threaded code development and optimization through the Auto-Parallelism feature and OpenMP 2.0 support. Intel claims that the new version of their compilers are now much more compatible with Linux code (including the GCC C++ ABI) and that they also outperform GCC 3.2 by 30% at the produced executables. There is a 30-day evaluation version for everyone to try out.

Windows and Linux versions are available.  The full version is $399 and can be purchased at their online store.

Juha over at Universal Rule also has two excellent blog entries on books and writing.

Getting feedback on your writing:

Having immediate feedback on your writing (and your thoughts) encourages you to keep on writing. The feedback also helps in the creative process. In micropublishing like weblogs you don’t have to publish a polished text, you can start with half-ready ideas and get feedback where to go from there. The weblog community is not individual writers fighting for the place on the printed page.

Reviewing books:

During the last four years I have reviewed about 60 books in the Tietoyhteys magazine, where I have been editing the book review column. Most of the reviews have been written by me, although I have been fortunate to find a couple of colleagues interested in reviewing books. Writing a book review is never a straightforward task, but it can be very rewarding. Writing a review forces you to ask: Did I understand what the writer intended to say? Often you find that you didn’t.

This is how Graham Glass writes a book.  He makes it sound so easy, tho he’s had a bit of experience.

I know I shouldn’t be excited, but I’ve got 5 moderator points at Slashdot… I feel like a weak geeky god.  They’re burning a hole in my pocket.

If you need to know exactly what tools you need to build development snapshots of MySQL, Jeremy Zawodny has the answer.

Sam Gentile read Ingo Rammer’s book this morning.  I have the opposite problem.  I need to do less reading and more coding.