What the world really needs is a true force of education in dangerous countries, a project that spans over 2 or 3 generations. The US is in Afghanistan and Iraq, why don't they set up schools to teach the current generation of kids there not to hate, and why terrorism is bad?
And, maybe a few schools in the US should teach those that will be
determining US foreign policy in the future, how not to take the side of
murderous thugs and supply them with money and weapons to help further our economic
interests. You know guys like, The Shaw of Iran, Noriega, Bin Laden,
Saddam Hussein, and some others have all been on the payroll or in-bed
with our Government. Funny, how in the US this seems to be a big secret. In many foreign countries everyone knows where the guns and money come from.
It is exactly what I said. OS software is not constrained by marketing decsions.
Let me make it simple for you sonny
In a tradtional sales marketing model, there is a cost associated with every improvement or bug fix. The decsion to pay this cost is normally determined by marketing people. There are countelss obscure bugs/features requests that only effect certian types of users. These are almost never addressed becasue the cost to fix/add them is not justified by the sized of the "sub user base". Marketing 101 actually.
With OS software if there is a small feature you want you can add it (or pay someone to do it for you).
Microsoft is so market driven it makes me laugh. They seem to only release patches when the
complaint buzz gets high enough. As I understand it, some of the
vulnerabilities in IE have been known for almost a year. Glad to see
security is such a priority.
This incident, by the way, is why open source will continue to gain
ground. There are no marketing nitwits working as gatekeepers.
Whoops, pushed the submit button to quick.
The highlighted sentence should read:
Do not trust your vision to someone that needs you to explain it to them.
What you may not realize
is that in a traditional business model, the software development expense
is about 20-25%. The rest is sales, marketing, administration, etc. So, the
cost of starting a company is generally 4-5 times more than the cost of
your core team. Add in the 2X modifier because start-ups always need twice
the amount they think and you are looking at about ten times the cost of
software development. Plus, you need to have one of the core team
intimately involved with the initial sales effort. Do not trust your
vision to
someone that needs you to explained to them. This is often hard for
programmers to do, but it is essential when starting up.
Now, OSS models change this equations. because most software (unless you
are doing a lot of custom stuff) has to be number one or two to survive. So
companies spend a lot of money on marketing and discount the software to
try and "tip" the market to a point of increasing return for there product. Open software does not require this expense and in a way almost guarantees
that your software will begin to build a critical mass (if it does not you
are barking up the wrong tree)
Mozix, bproc, or any other software thing is only as
good as the underlying network. Why do you think
people in the HPC buisness spend over $1500 per node
on networking in a real cluster.
Adapting problems to fast processors and a
slow LAN is HARD problem. As processors get faster
the problem gets HARDER.
There are only certain problems that work well on LAN clusters. Those that have a lot of independent jobs (like BLAST) and those that require a small amount of communication like rendering.
Read ClusterWorld
and you can figure this out yourself.
What most people have forgotten is that truth is a slippery fish. The SCO stock price, I believe, is due to the the fact that they can make a claim about Unix intellectual property. It is the leverage of this claim that drives the price up, not the truth in it. I doubt, any large investor has bet the farm on SCO, but rather see it as long shot that just might pay off if SCO gets purchased.
Clearly investors are not blind to SCO's situation. They are a sinking ship and are trying to rescue themselves anyway they can. Indeed, I believe from the beginning, their strategy was to try and convince IBM that buying SCO was the cheapest solution. I say this because these type of investors are not interested in a long drawn out court battle. It will take ten years to sort all this out, which is far to long for the typical large investor.
Furthermore, evidence to the buy me so I do not hurt you tactic can be found in overtures that have made towards Goggle. Simply put, Goggle is looking at $10+ billion dollar IPO which could be severely harmed by a lingering intellectual property lawsuit from SCO. So what does SCO hope Google will do? Why buy them with some pre-IPO shares and end all the legal problems. Guess who makes out incredibly well the day of the IPO by selling their shares?
Other than picking a fight with IBM, they have done nothing but post press release and send letters to create FUD in the market. So what to do? Get back to work, ignore SCO. Do what go us here in the first place -- write code, solve problems, use Linux, and plan world domination
Recently my neighborhood was offered this service
(PPL)
I had just signed up for a cable modem as we are too far out for DSL. I am not
sure if anyone bought it though. I found it odd that they were charging
for this since it was a "trial" and people were pretty sceptical.
Of couse this is Pennsylvania, where we are all supposed to have already.
What you need to understand is that when SCO sues somebody it is an invitation to buy them. Google with it's potential IPO is a good choice. The could do a stock swap and SCO would make out like bandits in an IPO. I assume they are wanting Google to say, "We can make this go away and buy you with X number of shares as we do not want to sour our IPO with a lawsuit." Actually a brilliant move, if it would work.
I suspect Google like IBM will not cave to this type of extortion.
So if Dr. Geoffery Sommer goes to his physician and the physician finds he has 8 weeks to live, he should keep it a secret because Geoffery and his family may panic.
It is nice to know we have such people looking out for us. But it does not matter because their is an asteroid headed our way. By the way, that is why all the aliens left, but they did not tell us that either.
Class action law suites are about law firms
making money and almost never return anything substantial to the "class". I must have been
in 10 classes over the last ten years and
none of them provided any meaningful settlement
to the class (IMO). The law frms on the other hand
made a killing.
There is link to a web site in the hard problems
rockdead
that is really funny. At the bottom I chose death (Sorry, but I really like the Allman Brothers) and then I chose to reject Jesus (but I did like Jesus Christ Superstar), then I ened up at one of hell's best web pages. They even have recordings from hell! It is somewhere under Finland.
I think I'll go listen to the live version of Wip'en Post.
Simple economics. With no Microsoft OS the Alpha
is a niche CPU. (i.e. less than a 500K are probably sold a year, more like 100K). When IA64 hits the street, Compaq will dump Alpha because they will save a
tremdous amount of money with one 64 bit CPU (IA64)which will cost them less to buy than
to make an Alpha. Why do you think HP teamed with Intel? (same reason, PA RISC is in the same boat as Alpha).
Yes it is fast and great, but the cost of designing and fabing a CPU is in the billions so
you have to charge say $2000+ for a cpu to recover your costs (or sell a lot of CPUs).
So who is left X86, SPARC, Power, who will go next?
FPGA computing is real and it has been shown
to work for some problems. Take a look at TimeLogic. These guys have implemented search algorithms used
in the human genome project on FPGAs.
Now let's look the difference between "works"
and "price to performance". In the case of TimeLogic
they have produced a "stand-alone appliance that end-users do not program (i.e. users do not program the FPGAs.) I beleive the reasons for this is that
this programming abstraction (remember this) is not easy to master (i.e. it is not a mainstream
programming language.) Nor is the "edit, complie, run cycle" easily reporduced on a desk top. (This time is perhaps the single most limiting factor in software production). So FPGA computing works, but is expensive to implement and program. It does not support cost effective general programing practices that are used today.(i.e. unless you are building specific purpose machine and can justify the software development costs based on a real market, the cost of programming for every day production environments is too expensive)
Which brings me to the main point. The issue is
SOFTWARE. It is easy to build a Beowulf with
1000 processors and call it a supercomputer. It is hard (expensive) to write good software for this system. It is easy to string together a bunch of FPGAs and call it a supercomputer. It is hard (expensive) to write software for these things and it is harder (expensive squared) to write parallel software for these things.
In general, there is a huge (I mean really huge) investment in the supercomputer world in programming abstratcions that use FORTRAN (and to some extent C) Side Note:Before all you "FORTRAN is dead language boneheads" start hitting the reply button, remember that there are more than a few 100,000+
line FORTRAN programs that determine everything from airplane wings, to weather, to new drugs, that are not going to go away because you think XML is great way to go. Indeed, the cost of reprogramming these applications is almost an economic impossibility!
So where were we, ah yes, the software thing. My point is that until FPGA systems can take standard supercomputing FORTRAN or C applications and run them "out of the box" and thereby allow the tens of thousands of people who understand this type of programming to use FPGAs easily, they will remain application specific computers (albeit fast) and not realy a mainstream programmable computing devices. This is not to say in the future the FPGA computing will not dominiate (maybe it will), but there is a lot of work to be done on the software side before this will happen.
BTW: I sent the Starbridge guys some simple FORTRAN benchmarks a while ago. I did not receive a response.
Slashdot Mirror
And, maybe a few schools in the US should teach those that will be determining US foreign policy in the future, how not to take the side of murderous thugs and supply them with money and weapons to help further our economic interests. You know guys like, The Shaw of Iran, Noriega, Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and some others have all been on the payroll or in-bed with our Government. Funny, how in the US this seems to be a big secret. In many foreign countries everyone knows where the guns and money come from.
Let me make it simple for you sonny
In a tradtional sales marketing model, there is a cost associated with every improvement or bug fix. The decsion to pay this cost is normally determined by marketing people. There are countelss obscure bugs/features requests that only effect certian types of users. These are almost never addressed becasue the cost to fix/add them is not justified by the sized of the "sub user base". Marketing 101 actually.
With OS software if there is a small feature you want you can add it (or pay someone to do it for you).
This incident, by the way, is why open source will continue to gain ground. There are no marketing nitwits working as gatekeepers.
Whoops, pushed the submit button to quick. The highlighted sentence should read: Do not trust your vision to someone that needs you to explain it to them.
Now, OSS models change this equations. because most software (unless you are doing a lot of custom stuff) has to be number one or two to survive. So companies spend a lot of money on marketing and discount the software to try and "tip" the market to a point of increasing return for there product. Open software does not require this expense and in a way almost guarantees that your software will begin to build a critical mass (if it does not you are barking up the wrong tree)
Mozix, bproc, or any other software thing is only as good as the underlying network. Why do you think people in the HPC buisness spend over $1500 per node on networking in a real cluster.
Adapting problems to fast processors and a slow LAN is HARD problem. As processors get faster the problem gets HARDER.
Read ClusterWorld and you can figure this out yourself.
Clearly investors are not blind to SCO's situation. They are a sinking ship and are trying to rescue themselves anyway they can. Indeed, I believe from the beginning, their strategy was to try and convince IBM that buying SCO was the cheapest solution. I say this because these type of investors are not interested in a long drawn out court battle. It will take ten years to sort all this out, which is far to long for the typical large investor.
Furthermore, evidence to the buy me so I do not hurt you tactic can be found in overtures that have made towards Goggle. Simply put, Goggle is looking at $10+ billion dollar IPO which could be severely harmed by a lingering intellectual property lawsuit from SCO. So what does SCO hope Google will do? Why buy them with some pre-IPO shares and end all the legal problems. Guess who makes out incredibly well the day of the IPO by selling their shares?
Other than picking a fight with IBM, they have done nothing but post press release and send letters to create FUD in the market. So what to do? Get back to work, ignore SCO. Do what go us here in the first place -- write code, solve problems, use Linux, and plan world domination
Think about it.
Of couse this is Pennsylvania, where we are all supposed to have already.
I suspect Google like IBM will not cave to this type of extortion.
So when there is no evidence and only FUD you tell your clients to "go slow", but when there is real evidence of a problem you keep you mouth shut.
Get your clean weblogs here!
100% guarenteed to pass the sinful site test.
So if Dr. Geoffery Sommer goes to his physician and the physician finds he has 8 weeks to live, he should keep it a secret because Geoffery and his family may panic.
It is nice to know we have such people looking out for us. But it does not matter because their
is an asteroid headed our way. By the way, that is why all the aliens left, but they did not tell us that either.
Class action law suites are about law firms making money and almost never return anything substantial to the "class". I must have been in 10 classes over the last ten years and none of them provided any meaningful settlement to the class (IMO). The law frms on the other hand made a killing.
There is link to a web site in the hard problems rockdead that is really funny. At the bottom I chose death (Sorry, but I really like the Allman Brothers) and then I chose to reject Jesus (but I did like Jesus Christ Superstar), then I ened up at one of hell's best web pages. They even have recordings from hell! It is somewhere under Finland.
I think I'll go listen to the live version of Wip'en Post.
Seems there was a report about a low flying drone shot down in Afganastan...
Yes it is fast and great, but the cost of designing and fabing a CPU is in the billions so you have to charge say $2000+ for a cpu to recover your costs (or sell a lot of CPUs).
So who is left X86, SPARC, Power, who will go next?
Some reality is in order here.
FPGA computing is real and it has been shown to work for some problems. Take a look at TimeLogic. These guys have implemented search algorithms used in the human genome project on FPGAs.
Now let's look the difference between "works" and "price to performance". In the case of TimeLogic they have produced a "stand-alone appliance that end-users do not program (i.e. users do not program the FPGAs.) I beleive the reasons for this is that this programming abstraction (remember this) is not easy to master (i.e. it is not a mainstream programming language.) Nor is the "edit, complie, run cycle" easily reporduced on a desk top. (This time is perhaps the single most limiting factor in software production). So FPGA computing works, but is expensive to implement and program. It does not support cost effective general programing practices that are used today.(i.e. unless you are building specific purpose machine and can justify the software development costs based on a real market, the cost of programming for every day production environments is too expensive)
Which brings me to the main point. The issue is SOFTWARE. It is easy to build a Beowulf with 1000 processors and call it a supercomputer. It is hard (expensive) to write good software for this system. It is easy to string together a bunch of FPGAs and call it a supercomputer. It is hard (expensive) to write software for these things and it is harder (expensive squared) to write parallel software for these things.
In general, there is a huge (I mean really huge) investment in the supercomputer world in programming abstratcions that use FORTRAN (and to some extent C) Side Note:Before all you "FORTRAN is dead language boneheads" start hitting the reply button, remember that there are more than a few 100,000+ line FORTRAN programs that determine everything from airplane wings, to weather, to new drugs, that are not going to go away because you think XML is great way to go. Indeed, the cost of reprogramming these applications is almost an economic impossibility!
So where were we, ah yes, the software thing. My point is that until FPGA systems can take standard supercomputing FORTRAN or C applications and run them "out of the box" and thereby allow the tens of thousands of people who understand this type of programming to use FPGAs easily, they will remain application specific computers (albeit fast) and not realy a mainstream programmable computing devices. This is not to say in the future the FPGA computing will not dominiate (maybe it will), but there is a lot of work to be done on the software side before this will happen.
BTW: I sent the Starbridge guys some simple FORTRAN benchmarks a while ago. I did not receive a response.
Finally, remember this:
The general always eats the specific.
Any one remember a company called Symbolics?
But dumping free versions of products to destroy the competition and any competitive innovation is OK?
We have nothing to fear as long as M$ keeps making such assinine statements like this