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Optimus Cloud™ Technology is a unique implementation of server-less, peer-to-peer, grid-based, cloud-ready service runtime that coordinates service components according to user-defined SLAs. Optimus Cloud™ is built for highly distributed heterogeneous environments and delivers none-trivial Qualities-of-Service. With its self-organizing and fault-tolerance capabilities Optimus Cloud™ improves price for performance, flexibility, time-to-market, robustness, application level elasticity, on demand scalability, capacity utilization and asset utilization.

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Optimus Cloud™ enables Service Developers to collaborate capabilities and services from distributed heterogeneous sources, assemble and easily mashup capabilities into new innovations. Capabilities can be legacy in house investments, third party cloud services, SOA based Services, APIs, Packaged applications etc. Optimus Cloud™ Delivers services innovation faster, reduces barriers to entry and risks dramatically lowering investments.

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Geir Magnusson from 10gen presented a talk titled Cloud Data Persistence or ‘We’re in a database reneaissance - pay attention” today at QCon London 2009. The main message of his talk was that “physical limitations of today’s technology combined with the computational complexity of conventional relational databases are driving databases into new exciting spaces”, or to put it simpler the database landscape is changing and we should keep our eyes on that.

A week or two ago at WordCamp Denver, I gave a presentation about some plans to create more opportunities for people to contribute to the WordPress open source project. The icon design contest was such a success that it seems clear we need to come up with ways for non-developers to contribute their talents and skills to WordPress. Since the launch of 2.7, we’ve been working out what kinds of contribution opportunities would make sense, and we’ve come up with a handful.

This (long) weekend, many WordPress users and developers (including half the core team) will be in Austin, TX for South by Southwest. Matt Mullenweg, Ryan Boren, Mark Jaquith and I will all be there, so say hello if you’re there, too. In the spirit of all this WordPress community connecting, I’ll be posting here every day during SxSW with information about the new contribution opportunities we’re creating. Each post will cover one or more of the following:

• Development (of course)
• QA
• Documentation
• Ideas and Opinions
• User Experience
• Graphic Design
• Accessibility
• Usability Testing
• WordPress.tv
• Community Organizing

Since the first thing people think of when they think of contributing to WordPress is PHP development, we’ll start there.

The code (which is poetry) is the meat of the application, so it makes sense that the most opportunities to contribute will continue to fall in this area. Trac is always filled with tickets that need patches, patches that need testing, and issues that need some creative developer thinking/collaboration to find the right solution to a problem that has us going in circles.

If you are proficient in PHP, consider looking through the tickets (especially the ones marked “bug,” since they should get higher priority) and writing a patch for one of them. If you’ve got more advanced skills, consider writing a patch for one of the more complex tickets, or offering corrections to a patch submitted by someone else (if needed). If you don’t trust your coding skills but know your way around the application files, look for tickets tagged has-patch and test the patches in as many browsers as you can, posting your results afterward in the ticket thread.

If you find a bug in the course of your daily use of WordPress, report it. First, check Trac to see if the issue already has a ticket. You could also scan the archives of the wp-testers list to see if people have been talking about the bug, or email the list yourself to see if anyone has any information on the problem. If these actions don’t bear fruit, start a new ticket in Trac (you’ll need to create a login to do this). Be as detailed as you can about the issue, and don’t forget to make the proper selections from the metadata dropdown menus. Just in case anyone is unsure of how to make these selections…

Use the severity field with caution. Most bugs will be of normal severity. Marking a bug as high severity will not necessarily speed up development, and if it turns out that you’ve marked a bug’s severity incorrectly it may even slow down development.

Priority will usually be normal. Leave it to the more senior developers to change the status to a higher priority, as they are familiar with all the tickets and Trac and will be better able to assess the priority in relation to other tickets.

Ticket type. This is one of most misused fields, with many people marking tickets as defects that should not be. To address this, here’s a reminder of the ticket types and their intended uses. Your choices are: defect (bug), enhancement, feature request, and task (blessed).

• Defect (bug). Something is broken. You know how the feature is supposed to work (if you’re unsure, check the Codex or ask in the dev channel), but something has gone awry that needs to be fixed.
• Enhancement. Something is awkward or slow and could be designed or coded better without overhauling the function or screen design. Please don’t mark something as a defect (bug) if it is really an enhancement.
• Feature request. If there’s something that could be improved that would require significant restructuring of code or screen design, it should be marked as feature request rather than enhancement. Please note: this is not really the place to request features that are not currently in WordPress. Please continue to use the Ideas forum to suggest new features. The core developers will add new feature requests to Trac as they review the Ideas forum with each release cycle.
• Task (blessed). This type indicates approval from the core development team. Only core developers should use this selection. If you mark something as Task (blessed) yourself, you will have bad karma.

Bug Hunts*! If you have checked the Codex page for bug hunts lately, you’ll notice it’s been awhile since there was one. No more! Official bug hunts, sprints for finding and fixing bugs, will be brought back on a regular basis. The first one will be announced soon, possibly next week, to try and tackle the bug tickets related to widgets. (No need to wait, though, there are hundreds of open tickets in the 2.8 milestone just waiting for a kind developer to pay them some attention.)

As always, contributing developers can communicate with each other and with the core team in the #wordpress-dev IRC channel at irc.freenode.net, on the wp-hackers list, and in the ticket threads on Trac. Regular developer chats in IRC will be returning to Wednesdays at noon (Pacific time) starting next week.

[* - I used to love the bug hunt challenge in Space Cadet 3D Pinball back in the days of Windows 95]

Over the last several decades computer architects have been phenomenally successful turning the transistor bounty provided by Moore's Law into chips with ever increasing single-threaded performance. During many of these successful years, however, many researchers paid scant attention to multiprocessor work. Now as vendors turn to multicore chips, researchers are reacting with more papers on multi-threaded systems. While this is good, we are concerned that further work on single-thread performance will be squashed.

To help understand future high-level trade-offs, we develop a corollary to Amdahl's Law for multicore chips [Hill & Marty, IEEE Computer 2008]. It models fixed chip resources for alternative designs that use symmetric cores, asymmetric cores, or dynamic techniques that allow cores to work together on sequential execution. Our results encourage multicore designers to view performance of the entire chip rather than focus on core efficiencies. Moreover, we observe that obtaining optimal multicore performance requires further research BOTH in extracting more parallelism and making sequential cores faster.

This talk is based on an HPCA 2008 keynote address.

Speaker: Mark D. Hill
Mark D. Hill (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~markhill) is professor in both the computer sciences department and the electrical and computer engineering department at the University of Wisconsin--Madison, where he also co-leads the Wisconsin Multifacet (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/multifacet/) project with David Wood. His research interests include parallel computer system design, memory system design, computer simulation, and recently transactional memory. He earned a PhD from University of California, Berkeley. He is an ACM Fellow and a Fellow of the IEEE.

Authors:
Kevin Lim
Parthasarathy Ranganathan
Jichuan Chang
Chandrakant Patel
Trevor Mudge
Steven Reinhardt

This International Symposium on Computer Architecture paper seeks to understand and design next-generation servers for emerging "warehouse-computing" environments. We make two key contributions. First, we put together a detailed evaluation infrastructure including a new benchmark suite for warehouse-computing workloads, and detailed performance, cost, and power models, to quantitatively characterize bottlenecks. Second, we study a new solution that incorporates volume non-server-class components in novel packaging solutions, with memory sharing and flash-based disk caching. Our results show that this approach has promise, with a 2X improvement on average in performance-per-dollar for our benchmark suite.

我留意到企鹅中国在豆瓣上热火朝天的互动时（09年元月），距离企鹅中国的员工初始（07年底）在豆瓣上的活动，已经有一年的历史了。

作为一个爱书人，企鹅出版社如雷贯耳，自己手上也有十来本企鹅经典原版小说，却从未想过这憨态可掬的小家伙会入驻中国。我是从自己的豆瓣友邻推荐中看到企鹅中国的某次试读活动，欣然前往打听。从豆瓣上了解到这一喜讯（其实人家已经入驻中国三年多了），并且能直接与企鹅中国的员工在豆瓣上互动，很开心。

简单回顾一下企鹅中国的小组话题，你能看到，“企鹅”（出版社员工）与“鹅毛”（企鹅书迷的代称）在豆瓣上的交流，大致经历了三个过程：

去了北极的“企鹅”

小组里最早的数十篇话题讨论，均是“企鹅”一个人独舞，编译了很多逸趣横生的企鹅出版社的故事（很精彩），但这样纯粹的展示方式，没有吸引来太多企鹅爱好者，嗯，仿佛企鹅去了北极。

各路企鹅大迁徙

自从“企鹅”们拾起了 “企鹅原版书试读本” 这柄神器后，一经试用，好家伙，帝企鹅、王企鹅、阿德里企鹅、南极企鹅、小白鳍企鹅、白鳍企鹅、黄眼企鹅、加拉帕戈斯企鹅、麦哲伦企鹅、秘鲁企鹅、巴布亚企鹅、史氏角企鹅、角企鹅、响弦角企鹅、马可罗尼角企鹅和直冠角企鹅……一时间，从豆瓣各个角落踉跄杀来，企鹅小组恍惚下了一场“鹅毛”大雪。原先落寂的几只“企鹅”，一下有了资源分配权，开始了四脚朝天的忙活。

圈地和定居

在豆瓣上拓荒的“企鹅”们视野辽阔，很快开辟了另外几大州的殖民地，于是乎，新浪博客，百度空间，搜狐博客，MSN Space，都飘扬着企鹅中国的殖民小旗帜。但“企鹅”有限的人力，分身乏术，他们居然想到一招妙手：分封领地。

在豆瓣上的招贤榜很快就被四大高手领取，难能可贵的是，“企鹅”的态度开明，允许领主依照自己的喜好，来按主题经营自己的领地，于是乎，企鹅百度空间成了科幻类企鹅读物的聚集地，企鹅MSN Space汇集了诗歌女性文学及儿童文学，企鹅搜狐博客全是惊悚、侦探类企鹅读物，企鹅新浪博客有企鹅的周边报道……

与此同时，短时间聚集的高人气，经过磨合交流，喧嚣散去，核心人群逐渐稳定下来，在他们与企鹅员工的努力下，试读活动进行得有板有眼，“鹅毛”的称谓也真正深入到小组的各位成员心中。

结语：“鹅毛”下的蛋

“企鹅”在豆瓣上的不屑努力获得了丰厚的回报，“企鹅”周围凝聚了一群忠实的“鹅毛”，他们在豆瓣上的互动也有了更深入的发展（延伸阅读）：

首届鹅毛聚会落幕

企鹅中国千字100稿酬找鹅毛译者

鹅毛与电视台的第一次亲密接触

2月份雅虎统计推出了一个新功能：访客网购兴趣，估计是基于用户的淘宝用户行为做的分析，数据好像不是每天更新，近期刚更新过。

本网站最适合用户人群：

类型             购买比例    相对平均差异

车载MP3/视听	2.68%	92.8%

数码相机其他配件	2.33%	84.9%

笔记本电脑	3.26%	69.8%

数码摄像机	1.12%	62.3%

GPS配件/车载通讯	7.31%	61.4%

品牌家饰	0.70%	55.6%

GPS	2.07%	54.5%

看来适宜推荐各种IT新设备；
相对其他网站平均的差异 = 是以与平均水平相比/平均水平

最不适宜在本网站投放的10中商品广告：

职业套装/学生校服/工作制服	0.72%	-41.0%

运动装外套	0.51%	-42.0%

热水器/浴霸	0.26%	-42.2%

围巾/丝巾/披肩	0.26%	-42.2%

运动裤/裙	0.27%	-42.6%

胶卷相机	0.27%	-43.8%

女装羽绒服	0.27%	-43.8%

装潢二手/闲置专区	0.27%	-44.9%

文胸套装	0.26%	-46.9%

运动套装	0.34%	-50.7%

装饰画/无框画	0.26%	-52.7%