Monthly Archives: February 2009

Melbournes Hottest Day On Record (Updated x 2)

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Wow, what a day, according to the Melbourne Uni graph of the temperatures reported by the Bureau of Met we broke the record of 45.6C set in 1939 on Black Friday by almost another degree, peaking at 46.4C (so far). At least there is a cool change on the way and thankfully no lives lost in the fires (so far).

Melbourne Temperature graph at 17:18 on 9th Feb 2009

Max to now: 46.4°C @ 15:04 | Min to now: 24.0°C @ 6:55

If you think that’s bad Avalon got to 47.9C before then!

Update: The cool change just arrived – the new graph above shows a drop of 15C in 10 minutes!

Update 2: There are now unconfirmed reports of casualties from the CFA, according to a CFA officer on ABC 774. They are trying to verify those reports. The cool change has caused them problems and loss of properties.

More cores, less speed

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An interesting set of simulations at Sandia of multi-core systems have been reported:

A team of researchers simulated key algorithms for deriving knowledge from large data sets. The simulations show a significant increase in speed going from two to four multicores, but an insignificant increase from four to eight multicores. Exceeding eight multicores causes a decrease in speed. Sixteen multicores perform barely as well as two, and after that, a steep decline is registered as more cores are added.

The reason for this is fairly well known, but it’s nice to see numbers put to the effect..

The problem is the lack of memory bandwidth as well as contention between processors over the memory bus available to each processor.

The original Sandia press release has more information.

Taxing Questions for Liechtenstein

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I was listening to the BBC From Our Own Correspondent Podcast which had a great piece by John Sweeney about murky going ons in Liechtenstein. Part of it made me think that they’ve been going to the same school as Microsoft:

The next morning we heard that there was a banking seminar at the university on openness. This being Liechtenstein, the openness meeting was closed, at least to us.

John also has a wicked sense of humour..

Imagine my disappointment on discovering that Liechtenstein was, in fact, the most boring place on earth. I’m used to boredom – I work for the BBC, for heaven’s sake – but Liechtenstein was as dull as ditchwater, no duller. They bank behind closed doors. They create fuzzy trusts behind close doors. They make false teeth. And then they go to bed. The person who most looked like a ruthless killer was Howard, and he was the BBC producer.

Well worth a listen.. 😉