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This item was filled under [ Tech ]

Facebook shifting to ARM based servers dumping x86

This item was filled under [ Tech ]

There have been rumors of a major player moving their data centers from x86 based PCs to the ARM architecture. It looks like the first big player to jump in to the market is going to be none other than Facebook.

If the rumors are true, Facebook will be putting ARM based servers in their upcoming Oregon data center, dumping x86 in a nearby river. In an environmentally friendly fashion, it is Oregon after all. In any case, there won’t be any x86 parts needed at the privacy specialists.

What ARM chip are they going to be using? This is where the game of connect the dots begins, and all the rumors point to Smooth-Stone, an Austin, Tx chip design startup. A few more rumors link the boards to SuperMicro, but that link is a bit more tenuous. In any case, it won’t be long before all the details are revealed.

It looks like ARM has grown up enough in raw CPU power to hit the proverbial ‘fast enough’ point for a single Facebook thread. Now it becomes a question of wattage vs threads. An Intel/AMD x86 CPU runs more threads but consumes more watts. The wattage per thread appears to have come down on the side of ARM, at least for Facebooks PHP-ish code.

The thought of this will scare Intel silly, not only did they lose a contract potentially for tens of thousands of Xeons a month because of power, but they didn’t win it with Atom. In fact, they lost it to the one rival that they don’t have a direct answer to, the ARM ISA.

If Facebook’s experiment pans out, it may change how things are done in the data center, and collapse prices. Actually, since Facebook is moving to ARM, it isn’t an experiment, so you can substitute all of the forward looking statements with more definitive ones. Things have changed in the data center, you just haven’t seen the results yet.

Source : SemiAccurate

Extract the portion of audio from youtube videos

This item was filled under [ Tech ]

 With dirpy.com you can extract the specific part of audio from Youtube videos.  Its is really simple to use. I used to use vixy.net  and audiotomp3.com. But this is much better than the two. 

Vanish – Self destruct your messages in Emails, Blogs, Social Networking sites

This item was filled under [ Tech ]

I came across a technology developed by University of Washington about ‘Self Destructing Messages’. Its a small ‘system’ which can be used in Gmail, Hotmail, Facebook  to create a self destructing message that expires in a timelimit.  There is also a firefox 3.x plugin for the same. I am trying to install and try it out to see how exactly it works.

Here is a screenshot of the same.

Vanish

Steps to install the system:

Step 1:  Download and install the Vanish Source from here.

Step2: Build the source.

Step 3: Install Firefox Plugin (xpi) or build the plugin yourself.

Step 4: Restart your PC.

Step 5: compose mail from going to Firefox -> Tools -> Vanish -> Create Vanish Messasge.

You have just created a Self Dstructing Message. You can configure the plugin to suit the time for self destruction.

You can find additional details of the Vanish Project here and here, including the configuration and installation.

Happy Vanishing!!!

Note: Use it with caution. This is just a prototype.

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Using REGular EXPressions

This item was filled under [ Programming ]

For those of you, who get confused with using REGular EXPressions in any programming language, here is a good website for a reference.

This site provides a basic understanding of using regular expressions in general and I think this is a will be a good start for novice programmers.

EDIT : here is another tutorial in perl with an inroduction to special pattern matching.

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Password reset problem with GoDaddy

This item was filled under [ General ]

As a result mysql database is lost and I have to upload eveything again. Anyways, you will see some posts very soon.

Please check back again.