Mailund on the Internet

Yesterday I was at an interesting talk at the computer science department: Virtualization will be the Operating System of the Cloud, Steffen Grarup, VMWare

Virtualization is a neat approach to cloud computing.  You bundle up your application with the OS and whatever else it needs and pack it in a VMWare virtual machine, and then it can run on any machine on the cloud.  Well, any Intel or AMD machine, I guess, I don't know what else, but of course there are some hardware limits.  The cool thing is that the dependencies on the software on the computers "out there" - that you have very little control over - is virtually gone.

I expect there to be a lot of devils in the details - like what happens if your code depends on e.g. SSE instruction sets that are not available on all processors, or what happens if your code thinks it has two or four cores and optimises its thread usage for that, but the real hardware has fewer - but a neat idea it is.

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Story here: Discovery Raises New Doubts About Dinosaur-bird Links

Researchers at Oregon State University have made a fundamental new discovery about how birds breathe and have a lung capacity that allows for flight – and the finding means it's unlikely that birds descended from any known theropod dinosaurs.

The conclusions add to other evolving evidence that may finally force many paleontologists to reconsider their long-held belief that modern birds are the direct descendants of ancient, meat-eating dinosaurs, OSU researchers say.

Sadly I know too little to really follow the arguments, so I am not sure how strong they are, but it is interesting nonetheless.

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