Basketball Blogging and other thoughts...

by billhilf on March 05, 2007 06:48pm

Four random bits…

1.  Multicore.  I think we as an industry over complicate the value of multicore and programming in this environment (although I enjoy Clay’s blog about this subject).  I think this presentation by Bruce Dawson and Chuck Walbourn from Microsoft Games Technologies Group explains how two popular Xbox 360 games take advantage of the three cores in the 360.  Makes it a little easier to translate how developers can (and will) take advantage of the multicore servers and desktops in the future:

Now imagine the gaming on an 80-core chip ;)

And since we’re on games, I’m *very* excited about DirectX 10, now in Windows Vista.  You need this nvidia card to really exploit it right now, but others will be out soon and some great games will be out soon which will make DirectX 10 really shine, such as Crysis.  Read this interview to go deep with the people behind DirectX 10.

2.  Our Windows Home Server guys, by using drive extender technology, claim the ‘death of the drive letter’.  Yeah yeah it sounds like RAID but having seen this first hand, it will make drive swapping extremely easy.  I will certainly use it.

3.  I always get a kick out of reading Mark Cuban’s blog.  If you don’t know Mark Cuban, he owns the Dallas Mavericks and is, in general, a very outspoken entrepreneur.  I don’t always agree with him, particularly on many tech issues, but I love when he gets passionate about his own team.  Read his defense of one of his star players, Dirk Nowitzki, here.  What I think is great about this blog is just how absolutely honest and real Mark’s voice is when he blogs.  You may not be a basketball fan, but I doubt you’ll need to be to get the point of this blog – no holds barred.  Pretty rare in today’s blog-on-anything world - and certainly rare for major league sports team owners.  Recently, Hank just brought a similar game to Port25.  Kudos.

4.  Lastly, I get asked sometimes about ‘hey Bill, so what’s new in Vista?’  I would recommend two things – first, high level key features are all here; second, is a great technical overview of  the new things in the Vista kernel by Marc Russinovich, which I think is one of the best walk-throughs I’ve seen online (Part I, Part II, and Part III coming).  Note, this is just the kernel, not all things in Vista of course.

On the road in March, maybe blogs of substance forthcoming.

-Bill