Dennis Ritchie, a father of modern computing, died on October 8th, aged 70EVERY time you tap an iSomething, you are touching a little piece of Steve Jobs. His singular vision shaped the products Apple has conjured up, especially over the last 14 years, after Jobs returned to the helm of the company he had founded. Jobs's death in October resembled the passing of a major religious figure. But all of his technological miracles, along with a billion others sold by Apple's competitors, would be merely pretty receptacles were it not for Dennis Ritchie. It is to him that they owe their digital souls...

In conventional java programming, you will never need address or location of a java object from memory. When you discuss about this in forums, the first question raised is why do you need to know the address of a java object? Its a valid question. But always, we reserve the right to experiment. Nothing is wrong in exploring uncharted areas.I thought of experimenting using a little known class from sun package. Unsafe is a class that belongs to sun.misc package. For some of you the package might be new. You need not worry about it. If you have sun’s JDK then you have this class already.W...

Jim Gray, a man who has contributed greatly to technology over the past 40 years, is credited with saying that memory is the new disk and disk is the new tape. With the proliferation of "real-time" web applications and systems that require massive scalability, how are hardware and software relating to this meme? Tim Bray, in his discussions about grid computing before it became such a hot topic, pointed out how advances in hardware around RAM and networking were allowing for the creation of RAM clusters that were faster than disk clusters. [M]emory is several orders of magnitude faster than d...

Flash is a necessary waystation as we travel to a single in-memory storage architecture. That's the view from a Fujitsu chief technology officer's office.Dr Joseph Reger, CTO at Fujitsu Technology Solutions, is that office-holder, and – according to him – flash is beset with problems that will become unsolvable. He says we are seeing increases in flash density at the expense of our ability to read and write data. Each shrink in process geometry, from 3X to 2X and onto 1X, shortens flash's endurance, and each increase in cell bit level, from 2-bit to 3-bit multi-level cell (MLC), ...

memcpy() copies the bytes of data between memory blocks. If the block of memory overlaps, the function might not work properly. Use memmove() to deal with overlapping memory blocks. memmove() is very much like memcpy() but very flexible as it handles overlapping of memory blocks. example : char msg[50] = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"; char temp[50]; main() { strcpy(temp, msg); printf("Original Msg = %s\n",temp); memcpy(temp+4, temp+16, 10); printf("After memcpy without overlap = %s\n",temp); strcpy(temp , msg); memcpy(temp+6, temp+4, 1...