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Transmeta Details Continue to Unravel
KrisJon writes "Redherring has some info on Transmeta's pending announcement of its product line." It comments about Torvald's keynote today (and it says he won't spill the beans, but that The Transmeta Website should update and actually contain content tonight). Update by RM: as of 9 p.m. EST there was new content on Transmeta's Web site. Not much, but more than it had before. Read the HTML for the secret message.
This change is only for the worst, everyone. We all thought that the Crusoe would be our salvation, that Transmeta and Linus would invent something that would destroy Microsoft and all that is non-open source. In short, we looked to Transmeta for our salvation. But we will not find it. Why? It is as simple as it is shocking: The transmeta homepage once carried an announcement that it was y2k compliant.
That announcement is no longer there!
Let the mourning begin.
-Denor
Well, "Crusoe Debian Dreamcast Cinnabon" is an anagram of "Concessionaire adumbrate and NBC". The "concessionaire" is cleraly Linus, "adumbrate" is a reference to the number-crunching power of the Crusoe processor, but where does NBC fit in?
Well, let's see, NBC is owned by General Electric, which is a major competitor of Sega, who make the Dreamcast. Jack Welch, the CEO of GE is a known associate of Warren Buffet, who is thought to be a big fan of the Cinnabom [tm] breakfast roll.
It seems to me that the logo must be part of a secret code between Welch, Buffet and Stallman (probably all members of the Illuminati), to put the wind up Sega, and remind them not to stop putting Satanic symbols in the Sonic games.
fnord fnord fnord, etc.
jsm
If I were inventing a new chip that is supposed to revolutionize the industry, I certainly wouldn't pin my hopes on getting Microsoft to port its operating systems onto it for a bunch of reasons:
1) Their operating systems provide subpar performance and never really made some of the easier chip-technology leaps that have already happened. They're having enough trouble porting their wares to Intel's Itanium chips, which are less revolutionary than what Transmeta is alegedly making.
2) Try as they might otherwise, they are still joined to Intel, and if I had a new wonderful process to protect, I wouldn't wave it anywhere near Intel.
3) Ultimately, it would be up to MS to decide whether and how well to support the new chip.
4) It doesn't look like this chip will even be competing on the normal pc part of the spectrum, which makes sense if Allen is hoping to keep his paper billions from crashing about his ears.
Hiring Linus makes perfect sense, because if they want a non-MS operating system to run on this chip, their best bet is Linux, and if they're therefore betting hard on Linux, it is in their best interest to make sure the maintainer of its kernel is secure in that position. They also get the bonus of getting to develop their own modified kernel in house while subtly steering the public kernel in a direction most favorable to the sudden incorporation of their modifications when the chip is finally unveiled.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
i love it.. the concept of vaporware in reverse. By waiting until they actually have something definite to speak up, everyone tries to theorize about what you could be doing, analyses your every action, gives you as much free publicity as you could possibly need. And that way, since you aren't the one giving out the "information", the information can be incredibly innaccurate without any kind of backlash against you. Also you avoid the "vaporware backlash" inevitable if you spend _any_ amount of time actually making the product worth shipping instead of just shipping whatever you have on the date you gave earlier.
:)
Apple has been attempting this for years with their "we do not comment on unannounced products" policy, but never have they done it so successfully as Transmeta has here.
although take a warning from apple's experience: This kind of thing _can_ backfire. Look, for instance, at the ibook; through apple's silence, the mac rumors sites constantly talked about the ibook even when there was nothing to report, whipped up everyone into such a frenzy over the upcoming P1/consumer portable/ibook/ebook that apple was basically forced eventually to release the ibook despite the fact that it would appear they weren't quite _ready_. In fact, apple was frequently accused by relatively respectable people and news outlets of engaging in "vaporware" with the ibook-- despite the fact they had never really admitted the ibook existed, just a vague mention in Steve Job's speech the previous year they'd like to create a "consumer portable".. (if they had had time to _get_ ready, clearly they would have chosen colors other than blue and orange..
Anyway, i am looking forward to the transmeta Crusoe chip, built using 100% Technology Stolen from Alien Spacecraft.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I finally figured out Linus's connection! According to the secret message, come January we will "have access to all of the real details". In other words, the information is going to become open. But then, if you turn to the processor's name, Crusoe, you'll quickly realize as I did that it's just an anagram for SOURCE. Transmeta's processor is going to be OPEN SOURCE!
Hallelujah!
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Ok, let's take it a bit more seriously.
We already know that they have a patent on a microprocessor which should be able to run other processor instructions.
+
Crusoe = out of order sourCe.
Ok, here it is: It's a multiprocessor that, given any instruction set, figures out ways to parallelize the code as much as possible by performing instructions out of order.
[doc brown voice] "...The only problem with a Slashdot effect is that you never know when one's going to strike!"[/doc brown voice]
[marty mcfly voice] "We do now! January 19th, 2000! 12:00am! http://www.transmeta.com!" [/marty mcfly voice]
"Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"
Some years ago I worked with a Systems Engineering Laboratories SEL 32. This was a very high-end minicomputer, in the form of a six-foot hunk of 19-inch rack, chock full of circuitry. Just under 1 Megabuck.
The computer itself was made of wire-wrapped socket boards stuffed full of standard chips, then tied together by a big backplane and some ribbon cables. It had downloadable firmware. Part of the standard documentation was the complete set of diagrams for the circuitry and complete listings of the firmware. You could get the listings of the OS if you wanted them.
So it was an totally open-source machine, at least to the customers. You could hack the OS, or use it as a base to write your own system. you could change the firmware. You could even rewire the beast itself.
Our hardware maintainence man was ex of SEL's own customer engineering (i.e. onsite-repair) department. He had a few tales to tell.
It seems that a bit over half their production was delivered to designated loading docks at apparently abandoned warehouses, and was gone the next day. The bills were paid. And they never had to go fix 'em. (Or almost...)
One time he DID have to go fix one. And they flew him there in an airplane with blacked-out windows, which did quite a few manouvers during several hours of flight. Then they took him from the plane to the building in a tent tunnel.
It seems the computer was very popular with the No Such Agency, for doing cryptography. They could fix it themselves, using generic parts. They could hack on it to add stuff they didn't want out of their sight and into the industry. And they could be sure that did exactly what they thought it did.
Or at least they could usually fix it. Which is why my collegue ended up in spookland for an afternoon.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way