Is Parallelism the New New Thing? 174
astwon sends us to a blog post by parallel computing pioneer Bill McColl speculating that, with the cooling of Web 2.0, parallelism may be a hot new area for entrepreneurs and investors. (Take with requisite salt grains as he is the founder of a Silicon Valley company in this area.) McColl suggests a few other upcoming "new things," such as Saas as an appliance and massive memory systems. Worth a read.
About time (Score:5, Funny)
Re:ACtually (Score:4, Funny)
Paul Otellini ?
I didn't know you posted on slashdot !
So what's up man ? Can I buy you a beer ?
Re:About time (Score:0, Funny)
I remember back in the late 90's writing some kernel modules for Linux, I was astounded by how easy it was. Even though my CPU at the time only had a single core, the power of Linux allowed it to execute more then one code stream at a time. When attempting the same thing on a closed source, properietary operating system, things were much more difficult. This is yet another reason for people to support open source software - it is through the contributions of the general public that Linux has grown so vastly superior to every other mainstream operating system in this regard, and just about every other.
Microsoft are literally shitting themselves about Linux, and articles like this really drive it home.
Please no (Score:3, Funny)
Coming soon: professional object-oriented XML-based AJAX-powered scalable five-nines high-availability multi-tier enterprise turnkey business solutions that convert visitors into customers, optimize cash flows, discover business logic and opportunities, and create synergy between their stupidity and their bank accounts - parallelized.
Re:Didn't we have this debate last week? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:About time (Score:5, Funny)
Do not mock the shorts of Torvalds, for they are mighty indeed!
Always Was, Always WIll Be (Score:3, Funny)
Parallelism has had broad applicability in graphics. It's definitely useful. But I doubt it's going to obsolete what we can do sequentially.
Re:1% of programmers (Score:3, Funny)
Conveniently, the DailyWTF steps in [thedailywtf.com] to provide some anecdotal evidence:
In fact, I've encountered quite a few programmers (whom I don't hire, so don't blame me) who don't understand anything past variable assignment and flow control. I also know that the people who do hire programmers routinely ask the most basic questions about iteration and weed out quite a few candidates that way.Incidentally, I didn't mean to denigrate web developers, who come in great, good, adequate and DailyWTF, just as everyone else in IT does. But I'd be surprised if including them in "developers" didn't further drive down the percentage with experience in parallelization.