Slashdot Mirror
Buying Computing by the Computon
theodp writes "Seeking to emulate the pricing models utilities use to charge customers for kilowatt-hours of electricity based on the ebb and flow of power demand, HP Researchers have come up with a new unit-of-computing metric, the Computon, which is not to be confused with the 'Power Unit' and 'Service Unit' pricing metrics from Sun and IBM. California, here we come!"
i get ten rods to a hogshead, and thats the way i likes it!
Get yer Computons here! Only 3 for a farthing! Get 'em while their hot!
Trolling is a art,
That's all I have to say...
Meaning Indicatators of Processor Speed? Sounds like a Marketspeak. Must we take serious everything that comes out in a press release?
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Can the computon handle?
I like to own them!!!
so basicly what HP is saying is that depending on how hard I work the servers will effect some monthly payment I make to them.
so, does this lower the cost of service contracts becasue companies that push their servers harder require more service than those who have low or moderate useage?
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Also not to be confused with a ton of computers.
I thought that was a measurement of the weight I've put on since starting to work in IT.
Sounds like a measure of how much bloatware I've got running on my computer....
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
i wonder how many computons it'll take to actually determine the number of computons all of your different users have consumed. :-D it sounds like a complicated process and it sounds as if it is geared towards systems that are used by large numbers of people...
NIH (Not Invented Here) reported an outbreak of a new virus, now running rampant in the IT industry. Researchers are quoted as saying "We thought we stamped that out, but we are going to have to setup the quarantines again, since now HP has caught it".
Install an cluster and get all the "Computons" you want without a goofy licensing scheme.
Trolling is a art,
Here is the official conversion:
1.6 energon cubes = 1 computon
Can the first post be redundant...
Researchers at Hewlett-Packard Co. are developing a new pricing approach for the outsourced capacity-on-demand computing services the company offers. But several IT managers said they're worried that the plan is too complex.
Under HP's scheme, prices would vary based on factors such as the overall demand placed on servers, storage devices and other IT resources, said Bernardo Huberman, an HP fellow and director of the systems research center at the company's HP Labs unit.
He added that a new unit-of-computing metric, which is being called a "computon" inside HP, would be akin to the pricing models that utilities use to charge customers for kilowatt-hours of electricity based on the ebb and flow of power demand.
Huberman acknowledged that the computon effort is complicated. For instance, HP will have to account for variables such as how well its data centers perform and the amount of computing resources that customers require, he said. HP also needs to figure out a way to build in pricing provisions to cover the possibility that companies will use more or less of a specific IT resource, like CPU cycles, than they have contracted for on a monthly basis.
Analysts said new IT pricing approaches are needed to support the emerging utility-based computing capabilities being offered by HP and rivals such as IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc. Those two companies said they also have pricing updates in the works.
But the computon concept, which is due for initial testing within HP early next year, did not wow IT executives interviewed last week.
"It sounds too complicated to me," said Malcolm Fields, CIO at HON Industries Inc., a maker of office furniture and fireplaces in Muscatine, Iowa.
"The last thing that we need is another complicated licensing scheme," Fields said. "What we need is a quick and easy way to buy more computing power, and I need to be able to buy it in very small, inexpensive increments."
"I'm not sure I would like it at all, and I don't think it would fly," said Tim Cronin, manager of IT at Nobel Biocare USA Inc., a Yorba Linda, Calif.-based maker of dental implants. "How in the world would you calculate all the variables?"
HP probably will be able to "come up with some matrix that will look very impressive," Cronin added. But he also questioned whether IT managers would be able to measure their computon usage and whether the plan would provide cost benefits to users.
Evolutionary Step
Some analysts were more positive about HP's plan, describing it as an evolutionary step in the development of utility-based computing.
"We will eventually get to a point where [IT vendors] charge for usage in real time," said Thornton May, a futurist in Biddeford, Maine, and a Computerworld columnist. "If you want electricity on a hot day, you pay more. If you want bandwidth on a busy pipe-traffic day, you pay more."
Efforts by IT services vendors like HP, IBM and Sun to develop new methods of pricing for utility-based computing "are well placed," said Howard Rubin, executive vice president at Meta Group Inc. in Stamford, Conn.
But Rubin said the task won't be an easy one. "When true physics aren't involved, it's hard to come up with something meaningful, auditable and defensible for pricing," he noted.
In addition, Rubin said that he doesn't think rival vendors will work together to develop a standard capacity-on-demand pricing metric.
A spokesman for IBM said it's now offering mainframe Linux hosting customers a "service unit" pricing approach. The pricing is based partly on the cost of the hardware being run by IBM, as well as its IT labor costs. It runs on a free operating system for homosexuals, by homosexuals, competing head to head (pun intended) with Apple's OSX. IBM also factors in the average amount of hourly mainframe CPU capacity used over a 24-hour period and then tracks monthly utilization rates to come up with the service unit cost, the spokesman said.
In April, Sun introduced a pricing
The MEEDO is how long it takes for me to do something.
This post is .30 MEEDOs. You owe me 10,000 dollars.
(I only need to sell one.)
Now they are trying to position themselves as a "services" company. That's just pathetic.
"computron" has been used since at least the mid-1980s, when I first heard it used by an MIT graduate.
/kom'pyoo-tron`/ /n./ 1. A notional unit of
From Jargon File (4.0.0/24 July 1996) [jargon]:
computron
computing power combining instruction speed and storage capacity,
dimensioned roughly in instructions-per-second times
megabytes-of-main-store times megabytes-of-mass-storage. "That
machine can't run GNU Emacs, it doesn't have enough computrons!"
This usage is usually found in metaphors that treat computing power
as a fungible commodity good, like a crop yield or diesel
horsepower. See {bitty box}, {Get a real computer!},
{toy}, {crank}. 2. A mythical subatomic particle that bears
the unit quantity of computation or information, in much the same
way that an electron bears one unit of electric charge (see also
{bogon}). An elaborate pseudo-scientific theory of computrons
has been developed based on the physical fact that the molecules in
a solid object move more rapidly as it is heated. It is argued
that an object melts because the molecules have lost their
information about where they are supposed to be (that is, they have
emitted computrons). This explains why computers get so hot and
require air conditioning; they use up computrons. Conversely, it
should be possible to cool down an object by placing it in the path
of a computron beam. It is believed that this may also explain why
machines that work at the factory fail in the computer room: the
computrons there have been all used up by the other hardware.
(This theory probably owes something to the "Warlock" stories
by Larry Niven, the best known being "What Good is a Glass
Dagger?", in which magic is fueled by an exhaustible natural
resource called `mana'.)
What'll be interesting is when consumer-conglomerates pop up (akin to SETI@home or Folding@home or spamkillers@home) to sell excess processing cycles from home computers... There's many more of us around than there are resources at HP...
-T
Since large amounts of traffic on the Internet are porn, unit-of-computing metric should be base on amount of porn clips encoded and decoded for given time.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
I would make EUR 10,995,116,278 if I cracked RC572. Thats USD 12,988,154,415!
They left out the "R", no wonder everyone was confused.
The rolling california blackouts are the perfect case for the advocacy of Utility Regulation (like the new 'computer utilities envisioned by HP/IBM/Sun etc).
The power companies, colluding with the marketers themeselves, PURPOSEFULLY manipulated the energy market in california to raise prices. the rolling blackouts were the 'shot across the bow' of regulation-advocates; "we'll shut your damn power off it you dont pay" extortion.
Why is this on-topic? because someday, in the future, computing-as-utility will become as necessary as electricity is today... want to get a job? have to have computing-ability. Want to pay your bills? have to have computing-ability. want to get a loan? have to have computing-ability. want to vote? have to have computing-ability.. without accepting that WHEN THIS HAPPENS, that regulation of the industry in the public interest becomes necessary... unless you want the future-monied-kings to shut down your house/town/state.
What's wrong with the good old flop? Or even simply instructions (of BogoMIP fame) or cycles? When you're dealing with the volume that grids (which is what this story is really about) will produce, you don't need a precise metric. And thanks to the Halting Problem, you'll be forced to buy the "computons" in even lots or risk losing computation time while transactions wait to clear.
The important thing here is that HP is putting forward the idea of computation as a commodity. I just wish some researchers could have published a journal article instead of letting the marketing dept. get their greasy paws all over it.
Finally, a real excuse to get these slackers to write some optimized code.
Just think of the issues this can raise with optimization. Realizing that some junior programmer just cost you 50,000 computons because he didn't initialize a variable.
Maybe this is what we need to get people to start thinking like this again. For the love of god, anything to get some cleaner code.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
"Computon" sounds like the name of a robot from a cheesy 1980s kids' TV series.
"Beware! I am the mighty Computon!"
How long will it be before the definition of a computon needs to change?
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
Rearrange "computons" and what do you get?
UN COMPOST
Stop messing with our heads!
Best Windows Freeware
Does that ever sound like something Professor Frink would invent or what?
Come on, this is news? It's just a reworking of the timeshare model from the '70s (and '80s, and '90s, and...). Pay for what you use, pay as you go... call it what you want, this is not new, or news.
paying for support depending on how much data you process? Doesnt sound like much fun.
We have HP customers who process a lot of data, but never call HP even though they have a support contract. Problems go through us first, and we usually solve them, as in we've never had to kick anything but a hardware failure to HP.
So now the amount of processing they do determines their support bill? This is great news for us, since we've been pushing our NT (2K/XP) based replacement pretty hard.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Due to the fact that it is based on the kilogram, the bang-for-your-buck value of the Computon is steadily getting worse.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
doesn't purchase computing services from both HP and Sun.
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
Computing on demand is destined for failure. The only way it will fly is for it to be forced down our throats, which is pretty hard to fathom considering the cheapness of off-the-shelf computing resources.
Today, you can pick up a cheap server for $500. You want to double your capacity, spend another $500. As long as those machines meet your needs, there is no need to put out more money. Say they last 3 years -- $1000/5 = $200 per year. I haven't seen prices for computing on demand, but it pretty much _has_ to be more expensive due to the "on demand" system overhead and complexity. Not to mention that the vendor providing the computing resources has a huge overhead expense just keeping the latest hardware (and server space) available for use at a moment's notice. How does that company increase available bandwidth or processor resources if several companies need their services at once?
The only thing I can see on-demand being a good thing is if your computing needs are very high for a short time and then go back to normal levels. However, companies already have complete packages like this available for purchase (eg. distributed download sites, P2P computation clients).
It seems like it's a direct copy of the IBM's On-Demand initiative with a new word to distinguish it. However, if consumers associate it with HP and not IBM, then I guess it doesn't matter who came up with it first because HP won.
How does this relate to wanting more cycles on any given day? They either are or aren't available. I suppose if you're sharing cycles with someone else then you could try and outbid them for the limited cycles that are there, but I think that's a dumb idea. Currently IBM gives you a server that can handle up to Z work but only charges you for X, where X is the amount you actually use and Z is large enough that you can handle significant spikes.
I'm afraid I'm a bit biased, though.
"HP also needs to figure out a way to build in pricing provisions to cover the possibility that companies will use more or less of a specific IT resource, like CPU cycles, than they have contracted for on a monthly basis."
I believe the cell phone companies already figured this one out: rollover minutes!
They should have pre-purchased a few computons for their server....cause it seems to have run out.....(/.ed)
For the time wasted here, i call it the slashdoton!
I feel like the proffesor from the simpsons!
Everybody has a purpose in life, maybe mine is to lurk in slashdot.
"We will eventually get to a point where [IT vendors] charge for usage in real time," said Thornton May, a futurist in Biddeford, Maine
If you're going to be a futurist, Thornton May seems like the perfect name to have. I just don't see this guy doing construction...
...remind me of This
nt
A spokesman for IBM said it's now offering mainframe Linux hosting customers a "service unit" pricing approach. The pricing is based partly on the cost of the hardware being run by IBM, as well as its IT labor costs. It runs on a free operating system for homosexuals, by homosexuals, competing head to head (pun intended) with Apple's OSX.
gives a whole new meaning to RTFA!
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
I wonder if you get charged for the specific number of computrons needed to process your bill.
09
Skills
20 years experience with Unix
Able to turn back computon meters- saving you millions!
Works well in large groups...
IANAE, but if the market cost of entrance is low enough, as it presumably would be with computation, then monopolies cannot form. If I need more computation than I had, I can go out and buy a desktop (and make a Beowulf cluster, of course). If the price of computation was high enough, I can invest in a desktop simply for the purpose of selling its computation. Contrast this with electricity and generators.
This is how computer time was purchased on mainframes. I think they also had something akin to a smart terminal, now called a browser.
Hey, and I've heard of a new feature on telephones now. It allows you to avoid those annoying call-waiting interruptions. Instead it delivers a busy signal to interrupting caller to signal the phone is in use. Only $2.95 per month!
-=- Many seek good nights and lose good days.
This sounds like an office joke that got out of hand. It's the nerds messin with the Marketdroids. One of them took it seriously and dropped the press release bomb.
"I'm just here to regulate funkyness." - James Gandolfini, as Winston in The Mexican
Why didn't they just go with bogoMIPs?
There is no need for the word "computon". Somebody at the University of Maryland Computer Vision Lab (probably Jim Williams), already coined the term 'crunchon' sometime around 1982.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
How about a poon-tron?
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Just like kwhs, but with teraflops. $100 per TFHR would be a good price. For smaller computers, you can charge by the gigaflop hour, That would be $0.12 per GFHR.
I don't care how they charge their customers, but the way I figure it, if they can get the same thing elsewhere cheaper they will.
Now, for them to make me a customer, they would have to let me track the visitors to my site (without their knowledge of course) and bill them for the "computon" usage; after all, why should I pay for it if they're the ones using it?
It should be like when you go to a buffet (excluding all you can eat), you eat whatever you want and you are charged according to how much you "taxed" the buffet.
As I see, different things might interfer with wattage consumption like processor speed and processor kind... Obviously AMD user will probably pay more with this system... But there interesting thing, OS will mostly determine de wattage cost ! As I see on my thermal program, running over Windows 98 it, generate 10F more than Linux server in graphical mode and 15F Over Windows XP ! It seem that HP, will definitvely find a way to incrase server cost !
A better business would simplify this and eat the costs for unusual situations.
Enron, Worldcom, HealthSouth to name a few.
Help fight continental drift.
Someone please let them know they're 56 days late for their April Fools RFC.
Your thermal program is broken in linux, professor science.
Try getting a real wattage meter to see how much power is being drawn, and be amazed to find there is no difference.
/hummmm, how to get by the lameness filter? //Oh, yea...add no cap'ed text
/me hides in shame
COMPUTON TRANSFORM!!!!!
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Back in the days of yore, when the world was in black and white and strange, man-eating beasts wandered the earth, I used to use a timesharing DECSystem 20. My interface to the beast was either a VT-50 or, on good days, a VT-52, and every month the Department of Mathematical Physics would receive a bill for my usage, in terms of CPU time and "pages".
Yea verily there was much cheering as we broke the surly bonds of DEC and acquired BBC Micros and, later on, IBM PCs. And the world did acquire color, and the man-eating beasts did retreat to places like Kazahkstan.
And as computers and software did reach saturation point in the richer market places, the marketers did cast around for money-making strategies, and lo, they did remember the DEC-20.
I expect to be paying for color vision sometime in the future. And bearskins and bone knives soon thereafter. And as for the man-eating beasts, I'm getting too old for this..
Methuselah
--
668: Neighbour of the Beast
If Computron and Optiumus Prime team up, can the finally beat Megatron and the Decepticons????
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Seeking to emulate the pricing models utilities use to charge customers for kilowatt-hours of electricity based on the ebb and flow of power demand
/.'ers...
A question for my fellow
When I read things like this, I feel very, very unhappy. I have a PC that does what I want, when I want it, and I don't pay any additional fees to use its capabilities. I don't pay more if I actually fill my HDD vs leaving it nearly empty. I don't pay more if I leave my CPU 99.9% idle compared to running three distributed clients just to keep every single cycle busy doing "real" work.
I feel similarly about the software I use. I have an OS and a few apps, and I don't pay more when I actually use them compared with leaving them sitting uselessly on the disk. I don't pay for each image I Photoshop, I don't pay for each program invoked by the OS, I don't even pay every time I decide to surf the web.
Even media files, I don't pay-per-view. If I queue up a bunch of Vorbis files, I don't pay every time I listen. Nor do I pay for watching a DVD I own.
Yet, companies keep trying to move their business models to "buy once, pay forever". I can see the obvious benefits to the company, but it has NO benefit to the consumers.
So to get to my actual question... Does anyone see even the faintest bit of logic behind these companies moving toward pay-per-use schemes? Not logic like "we'll make more money if we get enough suckers", obviously, but some real sensible reason why people might prefer to abandon any concept of "owning" the things they use daily, rather than paying continuously for "access" to them?
... yes, but in California, all computrons must pass state EMF emissions tests, and because of contamination with "e-vile bits" that have leaked into the grounding rods, a Superfund Cleanup effort has to be funded with more state bonds to the tune of 87 billion dollars. Grey Davis claims that the state was ripped off by middleman bit traders after deregulation passed, and was forced by contracts to purchase overly expensive bits. The Green Party has issued a press release saying that the evile bits are DOUBLY evile, because they were created with "brown" power, not green. The Libertarian party has issued a statement saying "who cares, let the bit bucket market decide who pays what". The Democratic party has issued a statement saying that cronies of the current administration established shell companies in offshore havens in order to not pay "their fair share" of the cleanup. The Republican party has issued a release calling everyone a "cyberterrorist" and has established "computer camps" at guantanamo bay where recalcitrant anti e-vile bit protesters go to break large bits into smaller bits with hammers. The Reform party has said that all the evile bits have apparently crossed over the border illegally, and Pat Buchanan has said we all must "breed more americans before it's too late". The Constitution party has said "toldyaso, it's the debble" and advised that all evile bits be blasted with 12 gauges. The EFF has fled to an armored compound in maryland where combining hacked GPS receivers and supertrooper stage lasers manned by union stagehands, they have issued a decree to "You want some of this? Come and get us, ****wads!"
So all in all, looks like another bad idea by those dastardly multinational heartless corporations.
Technogeek website slash-n-burninator website is exploding with posts decrying that "it's all SCOs fault, or microsoft, and we don't care who gets nuked"
Mozilla.org has issued an emergency decree that henceforth, all bits will be named firebits, until next week, when they will be called phonexiabits.
Gentoo supporters are dropping like flies as they try to compile programs that are contaminated with evile bits, and vow to never speak the word california again.
*BSD users have moved to canada en massee, the largest IT refugee movement in world history, where they have issued a release saying " eh, it's colder up here, eh, but we don't care mon, look what's legal here now".
France, Germany, China and Russia have stopped all trade with california, and the UN has put california on the "sandbox" list of contaminated areas. Unfortunately, drudgereport has broken with a scoop that in reality, all the contaminated batches of evile bits got sent to california on Cosco container ships, with joint funding from the various "axis of dastards" nations. They are also issuing a demand via the UN that all computron evil bits be measured using the metric system "or else".
In the mideast, it's the same ole crap, and no one cares really.
Time warner AOL msnbc fox cnn abc and the RIAA and MPAA have declared that they have checked and there are "no" contaminated bits anyplace in their websites, but 85 million zaZZaers dispute this, as all files that have been traded since the begining of the crisis all say $%^&**((*%^&%%&&^*^* YOU!!, and have been apparently been done by the trio of madonna, yoko ono, and william shatner.
It's GENERAL MAYHEM AND PANDEMONIUM!
In economic news, sales of manual adding machines and typewriters were brisk today.....
www.computon.ru belongs to, well... IN SOVIET RUSSIA computon measures YOU!
=)
Intriguingly that was the first link returned when I googled the proposed term.
This is the kind of scheme AT&T originally wanted to use to provide it's customers with computing power. Actually, that's why they developed multics (kind of). And of course, UNIX killed it. Just like cheap servers kill this kind of 'IT-on-demand' stuff.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
It seems so complicated and vaguely defined that I'd rather call it Imperial.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Yet another thing that corporations can charge (read: rape) us for.
... corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."
Don't misunderstand my anti-corporate leanings: we need them for jobs. But they should be OUR servants, NOT the other way around.
Obligatory Quote:
"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country.
- Abraham Lincoln
So if the computon is modeled after electric power delivery, will there be such measurements as real, reactive, and apparent computational load? Just a smart-ass question from an electrical engineer...
--zawada
In Soviet Russia, the Beowulf cluster imagines you!
computon: not to be confused with Computron the Transformer, formed when the Technobots merged together.
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
Now that you can buy your computing by the ton, everything is by the ton!
i.e. 1 ton of cooling for the server room is 12,000 btu of cooling.
while (1) {
}
Antiquated competence won't be a job skill forever.
IANAE, but if the market cost of entrance is low enough, as it presumably would be with computation, then monopolies cannot form.
Unless somebody corners the market for twenty years, correct?
Will I retire or break 10K?
the primary reason for coming up with these bogus units is that it makes it more difficult to compare performance with vanilla x86 machines.
If these bogus units catch on commercially, AMD will just stop using P4 equivalent MHz ratings as model numbers and will start using something based on computons.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Man, I nearly peed myself...
Secure multi-mediation is the future of all webbing...
With a name like that, people in Spanish speaking countries are going to be laughing non-stop for years.
The servers themselves may be cheap. However the hosting space, power, cooling, required network bandwidth, and support services add up pretty quickly. Most companies pay their IT departments to do these things; these costs get folded into runrate and only the cost of the servers and software are seen.
If you outsource all of that work and pay a "computing utility" to perform all of these jobs then it starts making sense. A company could provide this service to many companies, which makes managing the variations in load from month to month a little easier. If there are seasonal variations across all businesses (like quarter end closing) then you can charge a lot more during th e busy times to cut back on demand.
HP didn't invent this idea by a longshot. While at MIT doing an undergrad EECS degree, we bandied about the idea of computrons (a metric of computational power, roughly equivalent to an abstracted number of instructions on a standard machine, but definitely not a direct measure of CPU cycles) and it wasn't new then, back in the early 80s.
Further, one has been able to purchase time on supercomputers at varying rates since there have been supercomputer centers (again, early 80s?) where the rates depended on time of day, requested priority, etc. While I have no direct knowledge, one can readily assume the same was true even with batch processing mainframes: pay more and your job gets put closer to the top of the stack.
So, what's new then? HP wants to factor in more variables in their pricing structure. This is a big deal?
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
After all... would *you* want to submit a "lightweight process" that will be measured by the compuTON?
Okay, bad joke. I only hope this gets modded down as repetitive. Someone else must have come up with this by now.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
Let me see:t Reader
GNOME
KDE
Mozilla
OpenOffice.org
Acroba
a ton of software that Redhat installed that I will never use...
I should install Windows XP on here as well, then maybe I'd take a world record for computons.
I wonder if HP apply a Computon rating to their printer cartridges, or would the value be too low to measure?
California never deregulated and the computers I own and run free software on want nothing to do with you or your regulations. There are two legitimate reasons for power monopolies, public easments and grid stability. No similar public interest exists for computing. A half assed deregulation sets up market manipulation more than either a regulated monopoly or a free market. That's more like what you'd have if you let HP set up regulations. People are going to be lining up to use HP's new service like they did not line up to use Fax machines at Fed-ex. As long as I'm not spamming people or engaged is other anti-social behavior, I'd like you to keep away from my systems. They are free, I own them, and you can fuck off.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Having sold their core business of testing and measurements, HP has been soul searching for a new relevant buisness model. This one is perfect! They can put to work all the Compaq computers they are not selling and they get to invent a new unit of measure. Excellent! It's just like the good old days when IBM and others rented time on their big iron. Such a new model. Others were sceptical of the complexity of the approach. One HP programmer who wished to remain anonymous said, "I don't know if we can add that much precision to the uptime program, it's going to be hard. Think about it, the average machine is uses 00.001 percent of it's capacity. Do we like charge nothing for 0 and 10,000 for 00.001? I've never seen it hit 00.002%."
In other news, an Armarni clad woman was seen touring an ice machine company. When shown a sales map, which indicated few purchases between Alaska and Fin du Mond land, she was heard mumbling something about what a perfect market that would make. "Eskimos love ice, they've got like dozens of word for snow," she crooned to herself as she slipped out the back door, "I'll bet we could get the government involved in this, just like they were in ATT's business, Happy Day!"
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I just spent 45 minutes fruitlessly searching on Google for a paper written by an economist 5 or 6 years ago, in which he demonstrated that the overhead incurred by phone companies to meter and bill calls by the minute exceeds the actual cost of the service. His conclusion was that a flat rate for everybody would be more profitable for the telcos and would cost the public less overall. I often wonder about the value of all these schemes to make sure the right number of beans are in the right piles.
THis could be a good thing. It's put pressure on software developers to make the stuff run faster, right? haha..
The basis seems to be that computing power in all architectures/cpu means the same thing to everybody.
.. compromises will have to be made .. and I think in the end nobody's going to be happy. Instead of computons .. lets talk about performance in each categorical benchmark (as SPEC does). That way, a FFT application can seek out CPU's that help it .. rather than getting stuck with paying more for a generalized CPU.
But is this true?
For example, let's say this computon is matched to a virtual/real "reference cpu". Then, can that processor do a FFT in one instruction? If so then a computon is very valuable to say DSP applications. But how does a computon match to say doing vector math or navier stokes? In that case a computon wouldnt be a rip off to the buyer (given that some maybe cheaper cpu's are better optimized for vector math). So the question becomes, which cpu instructions are valuable? Or, what mathematics/algorithms are valuable? Will a generalized computon's value be the same for all industries? I think not
Basically it goes back to that whole kilogram evaporation shit posted yesterday (or was it early today?).
Also, I'd like to point out that the rolling blackouts were not enacted by Enron or other power providers; they were the work of Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), the still-highly-regulated utilities provider for most of California.
Power companies are not capricious monsters; they they're just another company, trying to sell a product for a profit. They have no interest in "shutting down your house/town/state"--quite the opposite, they want to sell to your house/town/state. They don't make any money if they can't sell their product.
I for one would welcome deregulating the entire power industry in California. That would introduce competition, which would inevitably result in my power being cheaper and more reliable.
Calculon's going to be jealous about this one.
Basicly a Speak and Spell-like device with
a read LED display that looked like a computer.
That industry is totally dead. Computation became too cheap to meter.
This new scheme sounds like another micropayment idea. Like most micropayment ideas, it suffers from the problem that all the enthusiasm is from the people who want to collect the payments, not the people who want to make them. That's why micropayments aren't happening, even though the technology has been commercially available for five years. (Anyone remember CyberCoin?)
For that matter, remember "application service providers"?
This is a "we need a new revenue model that lets us get more money out of our customer base" idea. That only works when you have a monopoly.
next they will redefine Pi as a whole number to 'ease' the mathmatical overhead in computing all these tough numbers :)
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
"He added that HP is also weighing the idea of sharing the computon formula with customers so they can use it to calculate internal chargebacks for IT services. "
... aeh... ... aeh ... how much "computons" i'm using to compute the "computon-formula" which is use to compute ...?
"computon-formula" to "compute"
the "computon-formula" to compute
too bad i'm really bad at math or else i would probably understand this.
I'll pay for my computing in Zorkmids, thank you very much!
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
computon(noun- cahmp-u-ton): Unit of measurement for computational power. Originally used by HP/Compaq as marketingspeak to further confuse the masses about the power of systems, and completely disable comparisons to other systems. See simpleton