The technical details of this article are close to zero, if you look closely. It gives no performance numbers nor does it have any specifics. It sounds plausible, but I would be very cautious in believing this, unless I had seen some real results published, such as from the ISSCC or something. I mean, you look at what the RAM manufacturers show at these conferences, die photos, highly specific performance numbers, process details, etc. And contrast it with the fluff in this article.
It certainly looks like a great promise, and what they say is true - trench capacitor DRAM technology is an unholy mess for processing, but you have to be a little skeptical in this industry, if there is nothing but a press release to believe.
There's a freely available C-based app called Jitterbug which does bug tracking for Samba, but it would work fine for what you describe - it has a web based interface, and good email support.
I like it.It's a monolithic C program, so it's both difficult to customize, and also easy to compile and install.
I use Google, it works so well it's creepy. I have tried Ask Jeeves a number of times, and each time I am amazed at how completely useless it is. It gives answers that are so bad it is insulting. It's almost like it is laughing at you for being suckered into wasting your time formulating a query, and increasing their bottom line at the same time.
Did the idiots who hiked the stock price on this company so high ever try it themselves, or were they sold by the stupid TV ad's for the company.
You should take a look at MetaHTML (www.metahtml.com), which is a sort of macro like programming designed to emit HTML (it was developed before XML was invented). It was developed by Brian Fox and myself when we had a company called Universal Access (ua.com). MetaHTML is superior in some ways to XSL, because it is more a general purpose programming language, yet it's evaluator does a lot of the work of parsing XML syntax expressions. We used to use it to do many XML-ish things, such a generate the MetaHTML documentation automatically from a structured representation in the database.
MetaHTML has also been under GNU public license since about 1996.
I would chalk it up to Xerox beaureaucracy. From a desire to make as much money as possible, I guess it makes a lot more sense to wait until an invention becomes popular, and then name your price. But it would be interesting to hear what Xerox did when they first saw the Grafitti system.
I was a summer intern at PARC in 1990 and 1991.I saw David Goldberg give a demo of Unistroke. This was around the time the first crop of failed "pen computers" was getting launched.
I thought it was pretty cool. The "aha" for me was that the characters were all a single stroke so you didn't have to lift the pen (hence 'unistroke'). That may seem obvious to everyone now, but it didn't seem to have been thought of before.
When grafitti came out, I thought "hey, did they license Unistroke?". I guess they didn't.
Since there is a complete and total lack of any technical details about the technology, there is no way to verify any of their claims.
But the tip off to me is that the technical details of power usage they do give are totally bullshit. They don't understand how power consumption works - it requires an easily calculated amount of power to drive the *io pins*, and the data rates, they are talking about, even if they used only 100 millivolt (!) IO signaling levels, instead of 3V, it would still require at least 6 watts to just drive the I/O pins at 6 Gbit/sec.
If they use 1 v signalling levels, it would require 600 watts (1/2 C V^2, y'know).
So, if their EE calculations are that divorced from reality on just the I/O, I think it is safe to say the rest is a complete hoax.
I worked at Xerox for a while, some years back, and I remember when they made a similar deal with Microsoft, that time it was for the license to "Microsoft At Work", which was supposed to be some sort of windows related embdedded OS for office devices.
Xerox paid Microsoft $1 million, and then proceeded to get the shaft when Microsoft pulled the plug on the whole thing a year later. Oh yes, as a consolation prize, Xerox got the source code for the discontinued project - a a pile of buggy unfinished and poorly written code.
I wonder if Microsoft will do the same thing again this time.
It's all because people have been programming in C. If there were a real programming language instead of glorified assembly language, then IP address structures would be properly abstracted. In fact, the BSD sockets API sort of abstracted the address structures, but a recompile won't work because everyone is sloppy about using 32 bit ints all over the place.
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The technical details of this article are close to zero, if you look closely. It gives no
performance numbers nor does it have any specifics. It sounds plausible, but I would be very cautious in believing this, unless I
had seen some real results published, such as from the ISSCC or something. I mean, you look at what the
RAM manufacturers show at these conferences, die photos, highly specific performance numbers, process details, etc. And contrast it with the
fluff in this article.
It certainly looks like a great promise, and
what they say is true - trench capacitor DRAM
technology is an unholy mess for processing,
but you have to be a little skeptical in this
industry, if there is nothing but
a press release to believe.
There's a freely available C-based app called
Jitterbug which does bug tracking for Samba,
but it would work fine for what you describe -
it has a web based interface, and good email
support.
I like it.It's a monolithic C program, so
it's both difficult to customize, and also
easy to compile and install.
I use Google, it works so well it's creepy.
I have tried Ask Jeeves a number of times, and each time I am amazed at how completely useless
it is. It gives answers that are so bad it is insulting. It's almost like it is laughing at
you for being suckered into wasting your
time formulating a query, and increasing their bottom line at the same time.
Did the idiots who hiked the stock price on this
company so high ever try it themselves, or were
they sold by the stupid TV ad's for the company.
You should take a look at MetaHTML (www.metahtml.com), which is a sort of macro
like programming designed to emit HTML (it
was developed before XML was invented). It
was developed by Brian Fox and myself when
we had a company called Universal Access (ua.com). MetaHTML
is superior in some ways to XSL, because it is
more a general purpose programming language, yet
it's evaluator does a lot of the work of parsing
XML syntax expressions. We used to use it
to do many XML-ish things, such a generate the
MetaHTML documentation automatically from a
structured representation in the database.
MetaHTML has also been under GNU public license since about 1996.
I would chalk it up to Xerox beaureaucracy.
From a desire to make as much money as possible,
I guess it makes a lot more sense to wait until
an invention becomes popular, and then name your price. But it would be interesting to hear what
Xerox did when they first saw the Grafitti system.
I was a summer intern at PARC in 1990 and 1991.I saw David Goldberg give a demo of Unistroke. This was around the time the first crop of failed "pen computers" was getting launched.
I thought it was pretty cool. The "aha" for me was that the characters were all a single stroke so you didn't have to lift the pen (hence 'unistroke'). That may
seem obvious to everyone now, but it didn't seem
to have been thought of before.
When grafitti came out, I thought "hey, did they license Unistroke?". I guess they didn't.
Since there is a complete and total lack of any technical details about the technology,
there is no way to verify any of their claims.
But the tip off to me is that the technical details of power usage
they do give are totally bullshit. They don't
understand how power consumption works - it
requires an easily calculated amount of power to
drive the *io pins*, and the data rates, they are talking about, even if they used only 100 millivolt (!) IO signaling levels, instead of 3V, it would still require at least 6 watts to
just drive the I/O pins at 6 Gbit/sec.
If they use 1 v signalling levels, it would require 600 watts (1/2 C V^2, y'know).
So, if their EE calculations are that divorced
from reality on just the I/O, I think it is safe
to say the rest is a complete hoax.
would still require about
I worked at Xerox for a while, some years back, and I remember when they made a similar deal with
Microsoft, that time it was for the license to
"Microsoft At Work", which was supposed to be some
sort of windows related embdedded OS for office devices.
Xerox paid Microsoft $1 million, and then proceeded to get the shaft when Microsoft pulled the plug on the whole thing a year later. Oh yes, as a consolation
prize, Xerox got the source code for the
discontinued project - a
a pile of buggy unfinished and poorly written code.
I wonder if Microsoft will do the same thing again this time.
It's all because people have been programming
in C. If there were a real programming language
instead of glorified assembly language, then
IP address structures would be properly
abstracted.
In fact, the BSD sockets API sort of abstracted
the address structures, but a recompile won't
work because everyone is sloppy about using
32 bit ints all over the place.