I want no monuments

If you, like me, have ever wondered if this multicore kind of hype was worth the money, after watching this video you will definitely find the answer.

To sum up: if a processor running at full power is giving you 100% of itself, it happens that running at half the power it still gives you an 80%. So, by combining two processors and running them at half power, we consume as much electricity as one processor at full power but we gain 160%.

But the most interesting thing is the heterogeneous processor: one processor made of few “big” cores (like the one we use today) and a bunch of tiny little cores (like a dozen of 486). It would be able to perform well and consume “normally” with old-style apps (long, single thread computations) and to perform well and consume less with new-style apps (short, parallel computations).

My personal goal now is to start thinking “parallel”. How could I do that while working on the server side?

I’ve never been so busy as I am during these ending months!

Apart from the daily job (I’ll blog about it the next few days), last weekend I took part at the local Linux Installation Party.

Thanks to Cascina Rocca Franca (a very nice public place in Turin, made to help people meet and hold courses about almost everything) we set up our notebooks, desktops, empty CD/DVD piles, cables and so on to give help to some tens of newbies and questionings.
You know, the more I do things like this (presentations, LIPs, linux/java/etc day) the more I like them. I can’t explain my feelings when some unknown person says me “thank you”. If you can get the opportunity to do something similar, do that! Your ego will greatly enjoy it!

Anyway, Sunday was time for “Fa la cosa giusta” (”Do the right thing”, in english). Again, a great time. I’ve spent about 3 hours walking around, speaking with representatives from various associations and companies.
It was all around the ethical and environmental side of life: thinking twice when buying something, ignoring the cool adv girls. Ethical, social and environment friendly turism, finance, banking, washing, eating, dressing… and energy, of course.
Indeed, an energy provider was the most interesting part of the fair.
La220 is an italian energy provider with various fares: one of them (the “green” one) claims to come completely from renewable resources, solar in particular. Such claim is certified by Legambiente, the most important environmentalist association in Italy.
I think in two months at most they will become my energy provider.

And for the next weeks? Uh, a crowd of students and Javapolis, at Antwerp, together with Filippo, Guido, Luca and Bruno.

Fastweb is dead. Long live to Fastweb. And let’s all welcome KPNQwest :)

I just hope this to have been the last time I’ve changed ISP.

I’ll be soon back on blogging: I have some news about how it is going on here in Turin. Something interesting, imho.

Just to mention a few: the past java day and linux day (great days!) and the forthcoming Linux Installation Party and Falacosagiusta.org (that’s italian: it means “do the right thing”) that is a critical consumption fair.

See you soon!