Inside Microsoft’s New F# Language

"Rumors of a new .NET language have been circulating around the cyber-grapevine for the last year or so, but have picked up speed as of late. The fire was fed by Mary Jo Foley's (columnist, Microsoft Watch) recent news story Add F# To the Alphabet Soup. Strangely enough, there hasn't been a peep from Microsoft. The only published information I can find is hosted on the Microsoft Research (MR) site. So, I donned my thinking cap, and proceeded with reckless abandon. Here begins the tale…" Read the article at ExtremeTech.

Is Free Software Always a Good Thing?

According to the Free Software Foundation, free software includes "the freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits... Access to the source code is a precondition for this." While I agree that the principles of the FSF are noble, I also feel that there is an unspoken assumption - an assumption that pods of hobby developers across the world can coordinate on the same scale that directed companies with a budget can. Where free software has an important place in computing, so does closed-source commercial software.

TPC-C Benchmark Heats Up, Windows Back on Top

HP hoisted its Superdome-Itanium-Windows combination to the top of the premier OLTP scalability benchmark on Tuesday, about a month after originally gaining the top spot and little more than a week after IBM displaced the combo with a system based on its own AIX/RISC/DB2 stack. Also, Microsoft gained ground on its database rivals in 2002, despite a decline in sales for the market as a whole, according to research published Wednesday by Gartner Dataquest.

Performance Inspector for Linux

Performance Inspector puts your finger on the pulse of your C/C++ and Java code, helping you nail down performance bottlenecks and problems with Linux kernel interaction. The suite of tools includes sample-based profiling, monitoring at the thread level, and more

SGI Altix 3000 Breaks Speed Record

SGI today announced that its SGI Altix 3000 servers and superclusters deliver world-record performance on the next-generation Intel Itanium 2 processor (Intel code name Madison). Preliminary results of 64-bit application tests reveal that "the SGI Altix 3000 family running on Madison will once again provide record-shattering performance, price/performance and scalability in a standard Linux OS environment".