Brian Roy’s Blog

Multi-Core CPUs and Application Development

Thursday, March 22nd, 2007 | Hardware | Comments

We are all excited about multi-core CPUs. If you happen to work in a data center the reductions in power consumption and consequently heat generation are very exciting.

For those of us who develop applications the performance gains have been interesting but not really earth shattering.

But have you stopped to think about how parallelism will affect the way we develop applications?

Here is a link to an abstract (and a download of a full length video) from the University of Waterloo in Canada which touches on parallelism and multi-threading, why it is important in multi-core desktops and perhaps most importantly, how a company is attempting to make creating multi-threaded C++ applications easy to create.

http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/media/Riding%20The%20Multi-core%20Revolution.html

Why VoIP isn’t a big deal… and why VoIP IS a big deal…

Monday, March 19th, 2007 | VoIP | Comments

Microsoft unvieled a SMB (small-medium business) phone system…

Microsoft Unveils Small-Business Phone System Software Designed for Ease of Use: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/070319/clm074.html?.v=62

This is a fantastic illustration of why VoIP is not - and IS - a big deal.

› Continue reading

The irony Verizon vs. Vonage

Thursday, March 15th, 2007 | VoIP | Comments

File under irony.

It turns out the primary patents that Vonage infringed have to do with methods for routing calls to the PSTN (publicly switched telephone network). Now that is irony…

› Continue reading

AZ Byte Night - Impressions

Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Comments

I spent last night at the Camelback Inn in Scottsdale celebrating the contributions of Arizona technology companies to philanthropic endeavors. It was a great event… with a keynote by Steve Ballmer of Microsoft…  
› Continue reading

AZ Tech Council Byte Night

Tuesday, March 13th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Comments

Well, I'm heading to the AZ Tech Council's Byte Night this evening. Steve Ballmer is the keynote and I'll be anxiously awaiting his "victory lap" as Microsoft begins their domination of corporate voice communications…  
› Continue reading