Software Trenches

The unauthorized history of Coca-Cola

Mike Adams from NewsTarget.com put together the unauthorized history of Coca-Cola:

Coca-cola was originally promoted as a drink "offering the virtues of coca without the vices of alcohol." Until 1903, a typical serving contained 60mg of cocaine. Today, it still contains an extract of coca leaves. The Coca-Cola Company imports eight tons of coca leaf from South America each year -- a substance that, if carried into the country by any regular citizen, would result in their arrest and incarceration for "drug trafficking..."

Personal Supercomputing from NVIDIA

I recently saw a comparison of GPU vs CPU power. While most of us kept the focus on improvements in CPUs from Intel, AMD and IBM, the power of Graphic Processing Units has risen tremendously and in certain areas GPUs are many times more powerful — the scientists started to use this power not just for video games.

The recent announcement from NVIDIA introduces GPUs as an inexpensive way to build massively-parallel computing architectures: http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_43499.html.

For example, the Tesla S870 GPU Computing Server with four GPUs and 128 thread processors per GPU provides over 2 teraflops (4 x 500 gigaflops) of raw processing power. Compare that to the Xeon clusters from Intel delivering "only" 340 gigaflops for approximately the same price.

Get Perpendicular

Very funny introduction to perpendicular magnetic recording from Hitachi: Get Perpendicular.

By 2009, Hitachi predicts that 345 Gbits/sq. in. would result in a 2 TB, 3.5-inch desktop drive; a 400 GB, 2.5-inch notebook drive or a 200 GB 1.8-inch drive.