Thursday, January 13, 2005

Linux Weekly News 2004 Timeline [Slashdot:] 4:12:38 PM      Google It!.

Searching with Images instead of Words [Slashdot:] 1:01:39 PM      Google It!.

elearnspace. Eportfolios [Edubloggers Links Feed] 12:06:23 PM      Google It!.

Facultyware: an Online Resource on Universal Design for Instruction. This article from Campus Technology is about the Facultyware project at the U of Connecticut (http://www.facultyware.uconn.edu/netscape.htm). " With increasing numbers of students with 'hidden disabilities' (e.g., learning disabilities) and other diverse learning needs accessing higher education, institutions are challenged to assure access to programs and courses while maintaining academic and technical standards. Universal Design for Instruction (UDI) offers an innovative means to promote academic access for a broad range of diverse learners. UDI represents a paradigm shift from a retroactive accommodation model of access to a proactive inclusive approach that anticipates and values human diversity." Sample learning objects are available for view (http://www.facultyware.uconn.edu/cfm_pages/instructional_products.cfm).The UDI model is a one that instructional designers and online instructors will want to study. JH [EduResources Weblog--Higher Education Resources Online] 10:38:39 AM      Google It!.

College Degree Still Pays, but It's Leveling Off. The big payoff in wages from a college education is losing its steam, calling into question the emphasis the White House has placed on a bachelor's degree. By By LOUIS UCHITELLE. [NYT > Education] 8:30:02 AM      Google It!.

Apple Releases Mac Mini [Slashdot:] 2.9 lbs with CD/DVD & 40G  just the little box -- back to basics -- BL 8:20:11 AM      Google It!.

Google is going "mini" too, according to this News.Com article. "The blue box, which plugs into a corporate intranet and searches up to 50,000 documents, will go on sale Thursday at Google.com for about $5,000." [Scripting News] 8:10:58 AM      Google It!.

VM-enabled polycore computing. Patrick Logan points to a fascinating opinion piece in the Register by Shahin Khan of Azul Systems. Patrick quotes this bit: A major shift is coming. Over the next few years, your ordinary applications will be able to tap into systems with, say, 7,000 CPUs, 50 tera bytes of memory, and 20 peta bytes of storage. In 2005, Azul Systems will ship compute pools with as many as 1,200 CPUs per a single standard rack (1.2 kilo cores! - I like the sound of that!) What would change about application design if you could do this? Well, think back to what applications were like when you had just 128K of memory in your PC and a 512KB hard drive. The difference between the capabilities and flexibility of applications in those days and now is the level of improvement that we are talking about. [Register: Get ready to buy chips by the kilo] The prospect of polycore computing suggests, to Patrick, that it's time to revisit programming systems designed for large-scale parallelism: A single Erlang node on a single CPU today can comfortably get into the tens of thousands of dynamic processes. What would your system look like running hundreds of thousands or a million dynamic processes and lot of activity is spent collaborating with other systems also running at that scale? See "Apache vs. Yaws" (Yaws is an Erlang-based web server)... Yaws is still functioning at over 80,000 parallel connections. ... [Jon's Radio] 8:08:40 AM      Google It!.