Unfortunately, superconducting grid-capable cables are produced at the rate of 100Km per year (Source: American Superconductor Inc.) and a national grid would take millions of killometers (and thousands of tons of silver and other rare metals), not to mention the supercooling system. Won't happen in the next 25 years.
About time for the global warming mitigation political lovefest to get around to practicalities, like making an alternative energy system actually work. This article is thus seminal in moving the discussion towards reality.
Your federally-subsidized wind power generator may well "turn the meter back" and thus lowering your electric bill. But the electric company wants nothing to do with the spiky, voltage-sagging excess power home wind turbines put out. Thus, your excess power does not go on the grid and is wasted. The costs to clean up the wind power are in excess of $50,000 per site, an economic non-starter.
So, in 2010 GM delivers Volt, the electric-gas hybrid that charges off a 110/208 volt home circuit. The load-leveling idea is that you plug the car in when you get home and the car is recharged during the grid's low-load overnight hours. But wait, your state has not allowed the electric company to lower overnight electric rates, and you don't have a new multi-rate electric meter. That means you come home at 5pm and plug in your electric-gulping car during the peak load hours, causing the electric company to power up standby generators that cost ratepayers up to $4,000 per megawatt hour (Source: Texas grid, June 2008). What a fiasco.
Meanwhile, individual states like California are cleverly out-sourcing pollution; forcing power companies to build new electric plants and their pollution out of state. But NIMB detractors of transmission lines (aluminum helmets on!) keep that power from getting to the growing economic areas that need the power.
In short, we are screwed by a total lack of foresight, common sense, and grid Balkanization. Without a much better grid, and better/cheaper ways to hook up eco-power, we are economically doomed. Any idea what electricity rationing (e.g., blackouts) would do to your lifestyle?
This product will appeal to hard-core gamers who can afford a new motherboard when the product comes to market next year. It only makes economic sense to harness a couple of recent graphics cards: a new mobo costs more than a decent midrange graphics card. So, if you have say a last generation 8800 GTX and you want to add a 260GT, the Lucid solution would work.
I saw the product tonight at Intel Developer Forum. Looks like it actually works, and the execs in the booth said production silicon arrived yesterday.
The Communications Act of 1934 (see above) reserves the electromagnetic spectrum for the People. NASA has no legislative authority to control communications in space, as Russia, China, Japan, and any other sovereign states operating in space will insist.
What are they thinking? Sounds like NASA is truly out of missions.
Rule #1 -- everything you do on the Internet is discoverable.
Most people forget that rule most of the time, to their eventual detriment. On July 3rd, a judge ordered Google to hand over log records containing user-identifiable data on every YouTube video ever downloaded. Did you ever think your YouTube habits would become publicly available? Read Rule #1 above. 'Nuf said.
Assumption: we are using company money and the end result does not have to pass a 15% return on capital threshold. In other words, this is for play.
Use Microsoft's Windows Home Server to manage this Just a Bunch Of Disks. WHS is designed to make use of a random collection of (old) hard drives in what I can best describe as software RAID. I have 1.6 TB on 5 drives which backs up every PC in the house nightly. Also duplicates key personal files in public folders.
So, for the fun part of this hypothetical exercise, I would throw some of the 100 drives into WHS servers rather than network attached storage. IMHO.
iPhone 2.0: Apple will do in two years what took five years with iPod. That is, build a multi-billion dollar, global, sustainable, profitable business from scratch.
Apple listened to developers and enterprise customers in nailing the iPhone feature list. No objections or gripes here.
The 3G iPhone pricing is very un-Apple in being very attractive and without an obvious price premium. In fact, it is priced for mass-market consumption right now. That means there will be millions out there a year from now. And the ecosystem/market will flock to this high-profile platform, in turn creating even more pull.
The stock is down today about 4%. Why Jim Cramer is saying "sell on the news" is beyond me. AAPL is going to be a lot bigger and more profitable a year from now.
There is no technology risk here, so sit back and watch one of the great technology markets of a lifetime unfold.
Why spend all the money on a.MIL botnet run by the government?
Using the guise of the second amendment to the consititution to "promote a well organized militia", I submit that it is every citizen's duty make their PC(s) available as bots to the military.
Hell, I bet we could have millions of them out there in factories, homes, bunkers waiting for some commie, I mean, terrorist to try and take over the old red, white, and blue.
Apple has to realize if they want to compete, they need to open up a bit to their larger buyers.
Last quarter, Apple got more than 50% of the market growth in the U.S. They are clobbering everybody else in market share gains (to about 6%).
Apple can win at minimal cost (e.g., without hiring an enterprise sales force) just by encouraging IT to let Macs into the enterprise. Some will take this opportunity -- as the article points out -- and other won't. Apple doesn't need 90% of the Fortune 500 as enterprise customers to double its market share.
Microsoft's XP crash analysis early in this decade concluded that PCs always left on tended to crash unexpectedly. Dump analysis showed strange values in key OS variables, and cosmic rays (or other bit-blasting particles) were among the likely sources. The conclusion was so clear that Microsoft floated the idea (see URL above) that Vista-generation PCs should use Error-Correcting Code (ECC) memory to detect and fix multi-bit errors -- in consumer PCs. [Note that servers and business workstations have used ECC memory for decades].
Having seen corrupted data in my own copy of Microsoft Money and other applications that I have left open for weeks, I am prepared to accept cosmic rays as well as Microsoft bugs as potential sources. Finally, why would Intel invest R&D capital in a cosmic ray detector if it had no likely or practical use for Intel's consumer and business customers?
Huawei got caught five years ago using misappropriated Cisco IOS software in Huawei routers.
I fail to see how routers labelled "Cisco" with stolen software represents "competition". Cisco's loyal customers, should they buy these crap products, will not improve their impressions of Cisco as they go through the hassles of non-support for counterfeit products. Cisco's name gets sullied. Cisco loses revenue.
This is not competition, but intellectual property theft, plain and simple.
As a seller of retail products, Microsoft has to clear the shelves of all those Vista boxes in order to restock the shelves this month with Vista SP1. So, in one sense, it's the usual clearance of last season's merchandise.
Longer term, Microsoft has brought the retail price closer to the OEM imputed price. That will make us home-builders happier and is likely to stimulate the legal license markets in developing nations (where piracy is a multi-billion dollar problem for Microsoft).
Last, the lower Vista prices are a way of lessening the blow that's coming in June, and which a lot us are dreading: the day Windows XP disappears from the shelves...
The IT department savings doing support and maintenance of open source instead of using binaries may well be a false economy.
Linux (and some open Unix variants) are the only operating systems with source code availability. IBM z/OS, AIX, HP-UX, Sun Solaris, and Microsoft Windows are all closed, black-box binaries with no source code.
In almost all IT shops with open source operating systems, it is child's play to modify an OS routine and compile it to run innocuously on an IT-managed server. Who is looking for modified OS code on a random web server? This ability to rather freely hide nefarious code is what gives nightmares to IT auditors -- and to the outside auditors and regulators who must under Sarbanes-Oxley certify the IT processes behind financial reporting.
Unfortunately, the visible in-house IT savings in avoiding a support contract with, say, Red Hat, are outweighed in the long run by the costs of fraud and increased audits and controls. But you'll see few IT executives standing up to do something about the problems of open-source-enabled fraud.
1. Skulltrail beats the pants off of any other desktop in rendering and encoding. It is a monster.
2. Skulltrail lets you multitask at levels far beyond what has been available. No, it is not the best price/performer at running a game. But if you want to record a TV show and rip a DVD to iTunes while simultaneously getting decent frames rates while playing Crysis, then Skulltrail does that too.
3. Eventually, the ECC in Skulltrail will fix a memory error that normal DDR2/DDR3 desktops would miss. That's why important business applications that require accurate computing use ECC. The implication is Skulltrail can be left on 24x7 without fear a cosmic ray will blow a bit away in some OS table. Yes, the cost in electricity will be measurable, but the analogy is that Hummer buyers can't complain about gas prices.
4. Software, including games, will move towards quad-cores as these chips reach the mass-market price points over the next two years. That uses more of the capacity, but for typical users, Skulltrail is overkill.
5. Vista Ultimate is actually perky on a Skulltrail. No flame, please. But it's true. Vista will throw little tasks onto eight cores with alacrity, and as a result, things get done more quickly due to multi-tasking at the OS level. I can't prove this with benchmarks, but perception is reality
Skulltrail will not appeal to everybody, and for sure, it won't fit everybody's pocketbook. For cutting edge, multi-tasking computing, it has a lot of horsepower. That's a fact.
It's not clear to me why Tom's Hardware is so bent out of shape about the Skulltrail board they received. Intel got the boards out two or three weeks ago; that's about two months before retail shipments, and allows for plenty of time for the monthly PC press (yes, they are still around) to get to print at launch. Would the press rather review products after they ship? No, they want to lead the market. Is the BIOS still a beta? Yes. But a working BIOS. Is the system noisy? Yes, but it's drawing north of 600 watts and doing a prodigious amount of work. Skulltrail is not a living room box, OK?
If you have intense computing jobs or a server-like workload with lots of batch jobs where completion time is less important than throughput, then I think you should seriously look at Skulltrail. That would mean lots of programmers, engineers, and scientists as well as media developers. Most consumers will not benefit from Skulltrail's capacity nor afford it.
What a great idea. I cannot wait to see the data Microsoft uses to drive their EPS (Employee Productivity Service)!
What are the metabolic differences in human beings in front of computer screens showing:
- Java or C# code with an uninitialized pointer on line 336
- Porn
- The last 2 minutes of an eBay auction
- An e-mail from the CEO forecasting layoffs
- A memo from the pointy-headed boss about a project you have to do that will add nothing to the sum of human knowledge
- Sixty minutes after a department meeting with free pizza
- The stock market ticker this week, or...
- Your cube neighbor fighting on the phone with her spouse about the divorce
- Realizing that your presentation for tomorrow's meeting was not saved before the computer crashed
How Microsoft ties all of the above together into a useful management tool will be an indicator of how far we will be on the True road to 1984. I am not hopeful.
Yes, but the New York Times article about the suit stated "Among the officials who have pushed for a federal investigation into Intel are Senator Charles E. Schumer and Representative Kirsten Gillibrand, both New York Democrats. A.M.D. has pledged to open a $3 billion factory in upstate New York that will employ 1,200 people."
So Schumer has an interest in protecting/promoting that AMD fab and its jobs in NY, whether California-based Intel deserves the investigation or not.
Even the New York Times makes it easy to follow the political trail of crumbs. Cuomo's press release http://www.oag.state.ny.us/press/2008/jan/jan10a_08.html says he is looking for "violation of New York and federal antitrust laws". He's the attorney general of New York. What is he doing looking into federal antitrust violations? Could it be that Cuomo wants to stir up dirt for NY senator Chuck Schumer to use in senate hearings or as a bludgeon against the Federal trade Commission, which has found no reason to pursue this case. Meanwhile, AMD's federal antitrust lawsuit is moving along. http://breakfree.amd.com/en-us/anti_documents.aspx That lawsuit would seem to cover the same ground Cuomo is going after.
At the risk if being off-topic, can anyone explain how Intel is culpable for any of the numerous missteps AMD has made dating back to the acquisition of ATI in 2006?
A very large computer company switched from home-grown and packaged applications to SAP in the late 1990s. Soon after, the bean-counters and MBAs decided that the COBOL programmers who used to maintain the old applications were"redundant", and most were let go. The very next year, the company embarked on a large acquisition and needed to merge the systems of two Fortune 500-sized companies together fast.
Turns out those redundant COBOL programmers actually had the business processes of the company in their heads and notebooks. There were not enough business analysts to get the business transformation done fast enough to satisfy the ogres on Wall Street. Queen Carly lost her head.
Moral of the story: in the business world, many programmers know a lot more than they are given credit for buy their (pointy-headed) leaders. Getting business process changes rapidly and accurately is not reliably done in C or C++.
That's why IBM is working so hard to get its customer's applications into Java under SOA, even while the IBM company needs thousands of computer scientists to develop those tools.
There is no doubt that investment banks need some honest-to-goodness computer scientists. However, that same bank (or manufacturer or even software developers like Google) also needs legions of middle-grade programmers. Many of those programmers would be better suited to the organization if they knew or cared more about the business processes that are being computerized.
Seems to this grey-haired, ex-programmer/analyst/architect/CTO that an under-discussed problem is trying to fit all programmers through a single computer science curriculum. Payroll programmers do not need to know about floating point algorithms. Scientists do not need to know how to build a web server (but they will use one). And Microsoft's Vista engineers don't need to know much about calculating payroll taxes. So where does that leave us?
Our economy needs several -- at least five would be a start for a debate -- flavors of programmers. But it sure looks like we have basically one-size-fits-all when it comes to training programmers at the university level. I fail to see how we can prepare for the society of tomorrow with such sub-optimal training, umm, education curriculum.
For years, Microsoft has been shipping stick-on labels with the product serial number on it. Look at the back/bottom of your desktop or laptop. The sticker is supposed to be hard to counterfeit and an indicator that you have "genuine Microsoft" installed. So the OEM has to counterfeit the label on your doomed box, or else deliver a box with no label.
However, buyers of an OEM copy of Vista from, say, an online store may find the install results in an unsuccessful validation. I did. Try calling Microsoft with an OEM product code and asking for support will get you to four different countries in less than 15 minutes. If you have a validation problem with a (legitimate) OEM copy of Vista, I recommend trolling the MS knowledge base. That's your only recourse as a do-it-yourself system builder.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, superconducting grid-capable cables are produced at the rate of 100Km per year (Source: American Superconductor Inc.) and a national grid would take millions of killometers (and thousands of tons of silver and other rare metals), not to mention the supercooling system. Won't happen in the next 25 years.
Your federally-subsidized wind power generator may well "turn the meter back" and thus lowering your electric bill. But the electric company wants nothing to do with the spiky, voltage-sagging excess power home wind turbines put out. Thus, your excess power does not go on the grid and is wasted. The costs to clean up the wind power are in excess of $50,000 per site, an economic non-starter.
So, in 2010 GM delivers Volt, the electric-gas hybrid that charges off a 110/208 volt home circuit. The load-leveling idea is that you plug the car in when you get home and the car is recharged during the grid's low-load overnight hours. But wait, your state has not allowed the electric company to lower overnight electric rates, and you don't have a new multi-rate electric meter. That means you come home at 5pm and plug in your electric-gulping car during the peak load hours, causing the electric company to power up standby generators that cost ratepayers up to $4,000 per megawatt hour (Source: Texas grid, June 2008). What a fiasco.
Meanwhile, individual states like California are cleverly out-sourcing pollution; forcing power companies to build new electric plants and their pollution out of state. But NIMB detractors of transmission lines (aluminum helmets on!) keep that power from getting to the growing economic areas that need the power.
In short, we are screwed by a total lack of foresight, common sense, and grid Balkanization. Without a much better grid, and better/cheaper ways to hook up eco-power, we are economically doomed. Any idea what electricity rationing (e.g., blackouts) would do to your lifestyle?
There is only one solution: nationalize the grid!
I saw the product tonight at Intel Developer Forum. Looks like it actually works, and the execs in the booth said production silicon arrived yesterday.
The Communications Act of 1934 (see above) reserves the electromagnetic spectrum for the People. NASA has no legislative authority to control communications in space, as Russia, China, Japan, and any other sovereign states operating in space will insist.
What are they thinking? Sounds like NASA is truly out of missions.
Most people forget that rule most of the time, to their eventual detriment. On July 3rd, a judge ordered Google to hand over log records containing user-identifiable data on every YouTube video ever downloaded. Did you ever think your YouTube habits would become publicly available? Read Rule #1 above. 'Nuf said.
Use Microsoft's Windows Home Server to manage this Just a Bunch Of Disks. WHS is designed to make use of a random collection of (old) hard drives in what I can best describe as software RAID. I have 1.6 TB on 5 drives which backs up every PC in the house nightly. Also duplicates key personal files in public folders.
So, for the fun part of this hypothetical exercise, I would throw some of the 100 drives into WHS servers rather than network attached storage. IMHO.
Apple listened to developers and enterprise customers in nailing the iPhone feature list. No objections or gripes here.
The 3G iPhone pricing is very un-Apple in being very attractive and without an obvious price premium. In fact, it is priced for mass-market consumption right now. That means there will be millions out there a year from now. And the ecosystem/market will flock to this high-profile platform, in turn creating even more pull.
The stock is down today about 4%. Why Jim Cramer is saying "sell on the news" is beyond me. AAPL is going to be a lot bigger and more profitable a year from now.
There is no technology risk here, so sit back and watch one of the great technology markets of a lifetime unfold.
Using the guise of the second amendment to the consititution to "promote a well organized militia", I submit that it is every citizen's duty make their PC(s) available as bots to the military.
Hell, I bet we could have millions of them out there in factories, homes, bunkers waiting for some commie, I mean, terrorist to try and take over the old red, white, and blue.
Last quarter, Apple got more than 50% of the market growth in the U.S. They are clobbering everybody else in market share gains (to about 6%).
Apple can win at minimal cost (e.g., without hiring an enterprise sales force) just by encouraging IT to let Macs into the enterprise. Some will take this opportunity -- as the article points out -- and other won't. Apple doesn't need 90% of the Fortune 500 as enterprise customers to double its market share.
Microsoft's XP crash analysis early in this decade concluded that PCs always left on tended to crash unexpectedly. Dump analysis showed strange values in key OS variables, and cosmic rays (or other bit-blasting particles) were among the likely sources. The conclusion was so clear that Microsoft floated the idea (see URL above) that Vista-generation PCs should use Error-Correcting Code (ECC) memory to detect and fix multi-bit errors -- in consumer PCs. [Note that servers and business workstations have used ECC memory for decades].
Having seen corrupted data in my own copy of Microsoft Money and other applications that I have left open for weeks, I am prepared to accept cosmic rays as well as Microsoft bugs as potential sources. Finally, why would Intel invest R&D capital in a cosmic ray detector if it had no likely or practical use for Intel's consumer and business customers?
Huawei got caught five years ago using misappropriated Cisco IOS software in Huawei routers.
I fail to see how routers labelled "Cisco" with stolen software represents "competition". Cisco's loyal customers, should they buy these crap products, will not improve their impressions of Cisco as they go through the hassles of non-support for counterfeit products. Cisco's name gets sullied. Cisco loses revenue.
This is not competition, but intellectual property theft, plain and simple.
Longer term, Microsoft has brought the retail price closer to the OEM imputed price. That will make us home-builders happier and is likely to stimulate the legal license markets in developing nations (where piracy is a multi-billion dollar problem for Microsoft).
Last, the lower Vista prices are a way of lessening the blow that's coming in June, and which a lot us are dreading: the day Windows XP disappears from the shelves...
Linux (and some open Unix variants) are the only operating systems with source code availability. IBM z/OS, AIX, HP-UX, Sun Solaris, and Microsoft Windows are all closed, black-box binaries with no source code.
In almost all IT shops with open source operating systems, it is child's play to modify an OS routine and compile it to run innocuously on an IT-managed server. Who is looking for modified OS code on a random web server? This ability to rather freely hide nefarious code is what gives nightmares to IT auditors -- and to the outside auditors and regulators who must under Sarbanes-Oxley certify the IT processes behind financial reporting.
Unfortunately, the visible in-house IT savings in avoiding a support contract with, say, Red Hat, are outweighed in the long run by the costs of fraud and increased audits and controls. But you'll see few IT executives standing up to do something about the problems of open-source-enabled fraud.
2. Skulltrail lets you multitask at levels far beyond what has been available. No, it is not the best price/performer at running a game. But if you want to record a TV show and rip a DVD to iTunes while simultaneously getting decent frames rates while playing Crysis, then Skulltrail does that too.
3. Eventually, the ECC in Skulltrail will fix a memory error that normal DDR2/DDR3 desktops would miss. That's why important business applications that require accurate computing use ECC. The implication is Skulltrail can be left on 24x7 without fear a cosmic ray will blow a bit away in some OS table. Yes, the cost in electricity will be measurable, but the analogy is that Hummer buyers can't complain about gas prices.
4. Software, including games, will move towards quad-cores as these chips reach the mass-market price points over the next two years. That uses more of the capacity, but for typical users, Skulltrail is overkill.
5. Vista Ultimate is actually perky on a Skulltrail. No flame, please. But it's true. Vista will throw little tasks onto eight cores with alacrity, and as a result, things get done more quickly due to multi-tasking at the OS level. I can't prove this with benchmarks, but perception is reality
Skulltrail will not appeal to everybody, and for sure, it won't fit everybody's pocketbook. For cutting edge, multi-tasking computing, it has a lot of horsepower. That's a fact.
It's not clear to me why Tom's Hardware is so bent out of shape about the Skulltrail board they received. Intel got the boards out two or three weeks ago; that's about two months before retail shipments, and allows for plenty of time for the monthly PC press (yes, they are still around) to get to print at launch. Would the press rather review products after they ship? No, they want to lead the market. Is the BIOS still a beta? Yes. But a working BIOS. Is the system noisy? Yes, but it's drawing north of 600 watts and doing a prodigious amount of work. Skulltrail is not a living room box, OK?
If you have intense computing jobs or a server-like workload with lots of batch jobs where completion time is less important than throughput, then I think you should seriously look at Skulltrail. That would mean lots of programmers, engineers, and scientists as well as media developers. Most consumers will not benefit from Skulltrail's capacity nor afford it.
What are the metabolic differences in human beings in front of computer screens showing:
- Java or C# code with an uninitialized pointer on line 336
- Porn
- The last 2 minutes of an eBay auction
- An e-mail from the CEO forecasting layoffs
- A memo from the pointy-headed boss about a project you have to do that will add nothing to the sum of human knowledge
- Sixty minutes after a department meeting with free pizza
- The stock market ticker this week, or ...
- Your cube neighbor fighting on the phone with her spouse about the divorce
- Realizing that your presentation for tomorrow's meeting was not saved before the computer crashed
How Microsoft ties all of the above together into a useful management tool will be an indicator of how far we will be on the True road to 1984. I am not hopeful.
Yes, but the New York Times article about the suit stated "Among the officials who have pushed for a federal investigation into Intel are Senator Charles E. Schumer and Representative Kirsten Gillibrand, both New York Democrats. A.M.D. has pledged to open a $3 billion factory in upstate New York that will employ 1,200 people."
So Schumer has an interest in protecting/promoting that AMD fab and its jobs in NY, whether California-based Intel deserves the investigation or not.
At the risk if being off-topic, can anyone explain how Intel is culpable for any of the numerous missteps AMD has made dating back to the acquisition of ATI in 2006?
Turns out those redundant COBOL programmers actually had the business processes of the company in their heads and notebooks. There were not enough business analysts to get the business transformation done fast enough to satisfy the ogres on Wall Street. Queen Carly lost her head.
Moral of the story: in the business world, many programmers know a lot more than they are given credit for buy their (pointy-headed) leaders. Getting business process changes rapidly and accurately is not reliably done in C or C++.
That's why IBM is working so hard to get its customer's applications into Java under SOA, even while the IBM company needs thousands of computer scientists to develop those tools.
Seems to this grey-haired, ex-programmer/analyst/architect/CTO that an under-discussed problem is trying to fit all programmers through a single computer science curriculum. Payroll programmers do not need to know about floating point algorithms. Scientists do not need to know how to build a web server (but they will use one). And Microsoft's Vista engineers don't need to know much about calculating payroll taxes. So where does that leave us?
Our economy needs several -- at least five would be a start for a debate -- flavors of programmers. But it sure looks like we have basically one-size-fits-all when it comes to training programmers at the university level. I fail to see how we can prepare for the society of tomorrow with such sub-optimal training, umm, education curriculum.
For years, Microsoft has been shipping stick-on labels with the product serial number on it. Look at the back/bottom of your desktop or laptop. The sticker is supposed to be hard to counterfeit and an indicator that you have "genuine Microsoft" installed. So the OEM has to counterfeit the label on your doomed box, or else deliver a box with no label. However, buyers of an OEM copy of Vista from, say, an online store may find the install results in an unsuccessful validation. I did. Try calling Microsoft with an OEM product code and asking for support will get you to four different countries in less than 15 minutes. If you have a validation problem with a (legitimate) OEM copy of Vista, I recommend trolling the MS knowledge base. That's your only recourse as a do-it-yourself system builder.