Teraflops chip points to future

A chip with 80 processing cores and capable of more than a trillion calculations per second (teraflops) has been unveiled by Intel.

The Teraflops chip is not a commercial release but could point the way to more powerful processors, said the firm.

The chip achieves performance on a piece of silicon no bigger than a fingernail that 11 years ago required a machine with 10,000 chips inside it.

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Then Han began his presentation. His fingertips splayed, he placed them on the cobalt blue 36-inch-wide display before him and traced playful, wavy lines that were projected onto a giant screen at his back. He conjured up a lava lamp and sculpted floating blobs that changed color and shape based on how hard he pressed. ("Google should have something like this in their lobby," he joked.) With the crowd beginning to stir, he called up some vacation photos, manipulating them on the monitor as if they were actual prints on a tabletop. He expanded and shrank each image by pulling his two index fingers apart or bringing them together. A few oohs and aahs bubbled up from the floor.

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I knew about a number of EAI solutions out there which were direct competitors of BizTalk but this one came as a surprise. There is EAI "solution" available from the company called CastIron by the name iA3000 x. Its a ready hardware/software solution for doing precisely EAI. Lets hear directly from the vendor and compare it with BizTalk:

* Pre-built connectivity to salesforce.com
* Supports all standard and custom salesforce.com objects
* Performance optimized for salesforce.com
* AppExchange certified
* Pre-configured Accelerator for SAP to salesforce.com integration
* Support for enterprise and partner WSDLs
* Support multiple salesforce.com logins
* Built-in session management to persist logins to salesforce.com
* Monthly subscription pricing
* Bi-directional Integration
* 24 x 7 production support
* No restrictions on number of users for configuring/monitoring
* Graphical data transformation
* Content-based data routing
* Lights-out management and error notifications
* Guaranteed delivery of transactions
* Web-based monitoring of integrations
* Secured management and data communication
* Real-time and batch integration
* Unlimited enterprise application connectivity
* Redundant hot-swappable components
* Dual CPUs for enhanced performance
* High throughput projects Integration Capabilities XML Standards
* XML Schema, XSLT, XPath Internet Standards Support
* HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, Secure FTP, POP3, SMTP, MIME Middleware
* Websphere MQ (formerly MQSeries), Websphere MQ JMS, Web Services (WS-I Basic Profile 1.0), SOAP 1.1 Application Connectivity
* Pre-built salesforce.com connectivity (AppExchange certified)
* ERP including Lawson, Oracle, JD Edwards, SAP, Great Plains, PeopleSoft, NETSUITE, QAD, etc.
* CRM including Siebel, Salesforce.com, Clarify, Remedy, Right Now, etc.
* All major databases including Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, Sybase, Informix
* PLM including Matrix One, Agile
* Project Mgmt systems including CA Clarity (NIKU)
* Legacy applications using Flat-files, Web Services, etc.
* And many more…

Almost all of the above is already supported by BizTalk and a lot more probably because this  is  a  smaller  product and  BizTalk, after its evolution, has grown into a much larger one. Now to compare the two:

• BizTalk is not a boxed solution, its just software
• BizTalk is very expensive and is more than EAI
• BizTalk takes more horsepower than this solution but its java based
• It is supposed to be simple and very user friendly which BizTalk is as well though not necessarily as simple. It has a single web-based UI for administrating everything. BizTalk too has a single administration console
  
• It has a integrated development environment for solutions. BizTalk uses Visual Studio and due to the shear breadth of options, its a little more distributed.
• Does not have long-running transactions as well as human-intervention support.
• In web services supports only WS-I Basic profile whereas BizTalk supports the whole stack and in coming time will support every Microsoft protocol through WCF adapters.
• In workflow only supports sequential whereas BizTalk has both sequential and parallel support.
  

Microsoft has confirmed that the U.S. government agency best known for eavesdropping on telephone calls had a hand in the development of the Windows Vista operating system.

The National Security Agency stepped in to help Microsoft develop a configuration of its next-generation operating system that would meet U.S. Department of Defense requirements, NSA spokesman Ken White said Tuesday.

This is not the first time the secretive agency has been brought in to consult with private industry on operating system security, White said, but it is the first time the NSA has worked with a vendor prior to the release of an operating system.

Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,128483-pg,1/article.html

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The first female paying space tourist, Anousheh Ansari, has landed on the Kazakh steppe after a journey back from the International Space Station (ISS).

The Soyuz capsule also carried fellow US astronaut Jeff Williams and Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov. It landed in the 56-mile (90km) predicted zone....

Ms Ansari was given a bunch of red roses by an official as well as a kiss from her husband, Hamid.

All three astronauts were carried on reclining chairs to waiting helicopters. From Kustanai, Kazakhstan, they were to fly to a training centre outside Moscow....

The 40-year-old Iranian-born US businesswoman smiled weakly as she exited the Russian capsule....

However, the first female Muslim space tourist insisted that "this 10 days has been magnificent for me".

She is thought to have paid at least $20m (£10.6m) for a holiday in space which she said she "hoped to do again soon"...

Ms Ansari becomes the fourth tourist to visit the ISS after Dennis Tito, Mark Shuttleworth and Greg Olsen.

Her Soyuz craft was launched to the ISS from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, on Monday 18 September.

Ahead of her lift-off, Ms Ansari said she was an ambassador for attracting private investment into space programmes. Her family sponsored the X-Prize, which honoured the first private vehicle to make it into space.

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