http://www.michaelsball.com/wordpress Notes from the Empire Fri, 27 Jun 2008 03:46:30 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I've had several email questions about what I'm doing now. Not very much. I've retired and moved to Southern Oregon. We bought a house in Talent, Oregon, and moved the first week in June. My time since I retired has been spent in finding the house, moving, and exploring my new territory. I've ... http://www.michaelsball.com/wordpress/2008/06/where-i-am-now Tomorrow will be my last day at Microsoft. I am retiring. As yet, I have no intention of looking for another job. I do have a lot of material saved up that I will be adding to this blog over the next few weeks. If anyone is interested in my ... http://www.michaelsball.com/wordpress/2008/01/leaving-the-empire I went to an interesting talk today. Dave Patterson from Berkeley was talking about the near-term future and many-core chips. He's talking about hundreds of cores on a chip, with perhaps a couple of heavy-duty processors to handle the serial parts of the code. They have an interesting wiki that ... http://www.michaelsball.com/wordpress/2006/11/many-cores-are-coming MicroSoft sent the Developer Division software architects to a meeting in the Napa Valley. I've described the resort in a personal blog entry. This entry is to talk about the professional aspects. Sun used to send the senior technical people on technical conferences, and they ranged from great to deadly. This ... http://www.michaelsball.com/wordpress/2006/10/an-architects-meeting I’m now well established at MicroSoft, and felt like starting up a professional blog again. I’ve moved some posts from my blog at Sun to provide some context. Some people like to call MicroSoft the “Evil Empire”. Actually, it’s no more evil than any other large company, but it is most ... http://www.michaelsball.com/wordpress/2006/10/hello-again This is my last day at Sun, and it’s with truly mixed feelings that I say goodbye. It’s been a great 13 years. This blog never got going as well as I hoped. We got busy putting together new plans and a proposal for the future HPCS project, and though there ... http://www.michaelsball.com/wordpress/2006/07/goodbye I accidently posted this on the wrong blog, but it applies here too, so I’m just leaving it. Those forced to read it both places, please forgive! I’m reading an interesting book by Don Knuth, Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About. A lot of it has nothing to do with ... http://www.michaelsball.com/wordpress/2006/02/abstraction-levels Sorry there isn’t much going up here, but we are all busily preparing for a huge presentation to Darpa. This is where we tell them all of the wonderful things we’ve done, and the wonderful plans we’ve made. Then we hope that they want us to do more of them.Anyway, ... http://www.michaelsball.com/wordpress/2006/02/abstract-thought I just read a great article in the latest issue of “Computer”. Good Ideas, through the Looking Glass, by Niklaus Wirth. It’s a discussion of ideas that looked good at the time, but haven’t made it in the long run. A warning: this article requires an IEEE membership to view. ... http://www.michaelsball.com/wordpress/2006/02/good-ideas-bad-ideas I showed a couple of slides from a PGAS conference below, but today I just got a real treat. It’s a dvd with videos of the conference plus some very interesting animations. This is an animation of a simulation of a hummingbird implemented using UPC (Unified Parallel C), a PGAS ... http://www.michaelsball.com/wordpress/2006/01/hummingbird-simulation-using-upc