A Step in my Ministry

This simple image portrays my view of religion:



Also, I'm beginning to offer my services as a wedding minister. If you are interested, let me know and we can talk about whether you feel I can support you in this life event.

AMD’s best is still to come

I'll say this: I like Tom Yager's work.

I typically toss the Infoworlds that I get into my pile of When I Have The Time reading material, but, as of late, I've been keying into his "Ahead of the Curve" column.

Here's the online version. I found a lot more of his writing as well and I'm happy for that.

The point of this column, though, snapped my head up straight a bit. I've been comfortably numb regarding acceptance of Intel as the de facto standard processor, mostly because I didn't want the headache of dealing with potential compatibility issues on something as fundamental as the CPU. Tom's points are intriguing, though, and I'm certainly curious to discover more of what AMD has to offer.

The first thing that I came across with, though, was a strong desire for his opinions on specific hardware platforms would be. In other words, which hardware vendor is taking the best advantage of AMDs offering now and, hopefully, in the future.

Case in point, I've settled very comfortably on Thinkpads for mobility. You'd be hard pressed to convince me otherwise. But I don't think Lenovo offers any AMD solutions. Who does and are the alternatives strong enough across the board to make me wanna switch?

Anyone have any suggestions?

Cool software: Appistry

According to the second half of Cringely's Pulpit, there's software available that helps efficiently distribute processing across numerous processors while maintaining a (near?) linear increase in performance all the while appearing as a single process. Like Google distributed processing, but for Everyman.

I like the idea of it. I have yet to research into the cost/benefits of this particular solution, but how nice would that be to be able to spread the load of various IT processes across a bank of servers ad infinitum?

Ideally, this'd be a shrinkwrap product and I'd be able to apply it as widely as SETI@Home. There are so many unused cycles "out there" or simply on my company's desktops alone. I love the idea of scavenging all the processing power.