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Is Hyperchip Hype?
Peter Galbraith writes "There was an interview on CBC (here in Canada) last evening about
Hyperchip, a Montreal-based
company that are working on a new type of router that would scale up 1000 times in traffic (so wouldn't be obsolete in less than a year) and would pass packets to their destination in a few hops instead of a dozen or more. Any experts out there think it's hype? Or real?"
The explanation on Hyperchip's "technology" page is pretty thin, but considering they just raised $70 million, I hope they've given more convincing details to their investors.
Slump in Technology Spending Pushes Sun Deeply Into the Red
By CHRIS GAITHER
SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 18 -- Sun Microsystems Inc. (news/quote), which makes data-serving computers and networking software, reported a steep quarterly loss today as it continued to struggle with frugal corporate spending on technology.
Sun, based in Palo Alto, Calif., said it had lost $431 million, or 13 cents a share, in its second fiscal quarter, ended Dec. 30. The loss edged past Wall Street analysts' estimates, but widened from the first quarter and stood in stark contrast to the profit of $423 million, or 13 cents, reported in the period the previous year.
Sun said it had made progress during the quarter. It said orders stabilized, it worked off $200 million in inventory, and introduced servers and the first stages of Sun One, its Web services initiative that will compete with Microsoft (news/quote)'s
Hurt by its exposure to dot-coms, financial services companies and telecommunications providers, Sun said it was working to win more customers in more stable markets like health care, education and government.
"We're just doing the best that we can in a difficult environment," Mr. Lehman said.
"I think they've put together enough of the ingredients to do it," she said. "What could sideswipe them is if the economy doesn't give them any sort of help whatsoever, but that would sideswipe a lot of companies."
Shares of Sun fell 25 cents yesterday, to close at $12.12.
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company
Let's have a close look at the costs involved when running a Linux system.
An important factor in Linux' cost is its maintenance. Linux requires a *lot* of maintenance, work doable only by the relatively few high-paid Linux administrators that put themselves - of course willingly - at a great place in the market. Linux seems to be needing maintenance continuously, to keep it from breaking down.
Add to this the cost of loss of data. Linux' native file system, EXT2FS, is known to lose data like a firehose spouts water when the file system isn't unmounted properly. Other unix file systems are much more tolerant towards unexpected crashes. An example is the FreeBSD file system, which with soft updates enabled, performance-wise blows EXT2FS out of the water, and doesn't have the negative drawback of extreme data loss in case of a system breakdown.
According to Linux advocates, an alternative to EXT2FS would be ReiserFS. Unfortunately, ReiserFS is still in beta stage. This means it is not intended for production use (although according to many Linux advocates this shouldn't be a problem, which makes me wonder how (little) valuable they find your data).
The other proposed 'solution', EXT3FS, is nothing more than an ugly hack to put journaling into the file system. All the drawbacks of the ancient EXT2FS file system remain in EXT3FS, for the sake of 'forward- and backward compatibility'. This is interesting, considering that the DOS heritage in the Windows 9x/ME series was considered a very bad thing by the Linux community, even though it provided what could be called one of the best examples of compatibility, ever. When it's about Linux, compatibility constraints don't seem to be that much of a problem for Linux advocates.
Back to Linux' cost. Factor in also the fact that crashes happen much more often on Linux than on other unices. On other unices, crashes usually are caused by external sources like power outages. Crashes in Linux are a regular thing, and nobody seems to know what causes them, internally. Linux advocates try to hide this fact by denying crashes ever happen. Instead, they have frequent "hardware problems".
The steep learning curve compared to about any other operating system out there is a major factor in Linux' cost. The system is a mix of features from all kinds of unices, but not one of them is implemented right. A Linux user has to live with badly coded tools which have low performance, mangle data seemingly at random and are not in line with their specification. On top of that a lot of them spit out the most childish and unprofessional messages, indicating that they were created by 14-year olds with too much time, no talent and a bad attitude.
I could go on and on and on, but the conclusion is clear. Linux is not an option for any one who seeks a professional OS with high performance, scalability, stability, adherence to standards, etc.
fp..but havent we seen too many of these great new breaktrhus
first post. i am so proud of myself.
A few days ago, montreal based scientists announced biologically modified spider silk, today we find 70 million dollars invested in this project...
Montreal on the rise. This city is awesome.
first post!!!
This would have been better suited for the Gnome thread; but its offtopic, nonetheless..
But still, sun is far from fucked - The aftermarket Sun Enterprise systems are selling like hotcakes from 3rd parties - This is bad for sun, but not -all- bad. You buy that 5500? You need support for it. If you get support from Sun, you get to pay an additional premium since you didnt buy it from them or a sun VAR.
Sales of the USIII line are now above the USII line. Sun expects to be in the black by the end of 2q.
Hit Bill Bradfords great site for more details: sunhelp.org
Too bad.
Here's some nice pics of Alyson Hannigan to cheer you up.
I prefer beer, then sleeping with my sister. Hell with the nursing students!!
How did you get your sister to sleep with you?
Moderation is good. It keeps the trolls and crapflooders out of sight. If there wasn't moderation, all the sensible discussion would drown in crap.
Moderation is a necessary evil just because of people like you. If you stopped trolling, crapflooding and spewing offtopic discussion there wouldn't be need for it.
I got 16, which is actually better than I expected.
Was she cute? Did she have a boyfriend there at the bar?
ipv6 is my vpn
Eye le cave! LINUX SUX!
I am her boyfriend and the router is actually my penis. You see, my penis has the unique ability to direct all TCP/IP and UDP traffic extremely fast. It also scales to 1000 times (as I have an erection). We noticed this incredibly behavior when I hooked up our ethernet cord to the jack on my penis. Man was that broadband heaven!