The newest generation of WinCE devices do succeed at one thing: Microsoft is no longer a handheld laughingstock. The devices are enough of a step beyond the earlier generation of CE to restore some credibility to Microsoft - I think that was their major objective. I've used CE somewhat (and I have a Jornada 540 on the way from HP as a premium from a promotion they had on their network switches) - and CE devices have some good points. From a software standpoint, there is some commonality between desktop Windows and CE, so that the developers have a head start. From a user perspective, the interfaces are just similar enough as to not be a major problem. However, here's the biggest differences:
Palm has smaller devices, much better battery life, a large and robust developer community, and far more applications. The prices are cheaper, and the Palm OS devices (Handspring and TRG included) are pretty flexible - Palm sticks to the basics and the licencees concentrate on cost and expandability. Palm OS systems also integrate much better with non-Windows operating systems.
WinCE has bigger screens in all versions, a variety of form factors, a shorter development learning curve for Windows programmers, arguably better networking capability and Internet functionality, and more developed basic applications - even if Pocket Word is the equivalent of WordPad, that's still far better than the built-in Memo app on Palm OS. And Palm has no (standard) ability to handle any kind of spreadsheet or presentations.
The name difference does mean something. The Palm is a true PDA that has relatively little built-in functionality but what it has, it's really good at. Palm also is extremely extensible. Microsoft has concentrated on putting as much functionality as possible into their platform, and they've succeeded - they even have managed to be compatible with all the memory leaks in desktop Windows! Microsoft is the master of cramming ten pounds of shite into a five-pound bag, and CE/PocketPC is a wonderful example of it.
The devices will sell a lot better than the older ones did, but the likeliest effect of PocketPC will be to grow the overall market rather than to erode Palm's market share. This could change, of course, depending on what Palm does next.
You're dead right on the Rambus pricing issue - it costs way too much. Part of that is the royalty factor, but it's more (right now) caused by low yields on Rambus parts and a very small amount of makers. There's no flood of RDRAM on the market to drive prices down the way there is with SDRAM. If yields were equivalent to SDRAM and more people were making the parts, the prices would be a lot more competitive, but still somewhat pricier because of the royalty issue.
As far as USB/Firewire goes, though - it isn't royalties that have slowed Firewire acceptance. Intel had included USB in every chipset since the LX several years ago - in fact, USB support was in silicon before any OS had support for it. That's why it was on motherboards - It's part of the chipset whether or not you want it, so you might as well build the ports. Firewire royalties are tiny (below $1/port), and it's split between Apple and the other patent holders (I believe TI and Canon are in the group, too). Firewire would have been adopted quicker had Intel followed through with their earlier plans to include it in newer chipsets.
The other thing that sped acceptance of USB versus Firewire is that USB 1.0 was ready a (relative) long time ago, and Firewire is only a couple of years old. The DV cameras that really take advantage of Firewire have just begun to be priced approriately for the casual camcorder buyer. Sony and Apple build the ports onto virtually all their systems, and are selling them as fast as they can build them.
Also a Good Thing for USB - since the CPU controls the bus and it's a simple protocol, it's well-suited for cheap, simple peripherals like modems, digital still cameras, low-end scanners, audio devices, etc. Firewire aims a lot higher.
When Rambus was being designed, EDO RAM was the current standard, and Rambus is competitive in a head-to-head with EDO - with latencies in the same class or faster but much better transfer speeds. SDRAM was intended as a stopgap measure to provide a memory technology that could keep up with the faster Pentium/Pentium II systems during the wait for Rambus to make it to market. But a few things happened to screw it all up:
SDRAM took off as a standard, and other chipset makers adopted it - and extended it to PC100 and PC133 from the original PC66.
CPU speeds accelerated faster than anyone planned (a year ago, 600 MHz was state of the art!)
Rambus was late to market, as were the systems designed to use it. This gave SDRAM more of an opportunity to become entrenched.
Rambus has proven to be difficult to manufacture to this point, with horrible yields.
And finally, SDRAM turned out to be a lot more scalable than anyone anticipated at the beginning.
If Intel had expected DDR PC133 SDRAM, Rambus might never have made it out of the starting blocks in the first place. But given the lead time on their chipset and CPU design cycles, they had to make a call based on what the trend appeared to be - and they bet on the wrong one. The 810 chipset is a lot more important to Intel right now than they had expected it to be, and the 815 wasn't even planned - they also were hoping to retire BX by now. Some of their supply problems of late have been driven by this misforecast. When the dust settles, I expect to see Rambus slowly squeezed out of the mainstream and Intel to quietly write off their investment. It seemed like a good idea at the time...
I love overclocking. It's a way of getting that little bit of extra control and tweaking that says "Any monkey can assemble a PC. But mine is better!" Plus, it's fun to do the work, relatively harmless, and a nice way to get better acquainted with the hardware.
My best overclocking results: I bought an Athlon 600, and with a liberal application of thermal grease, a soldering iron, and a really swank fan, got a 750 out of it, stable as a rock. For about an extra $10 (the difference in price between a really good heatsink/fan and a cruddy one) and some time, I got a chip that (at the time) cost about $300 more.
But my favorite all-time overclocking hack was upgrading my old PowerBook 3400c from 240 MHz to 270. That surgery was nasty - but not as bad as putting a bigger hard drive in my iBook...
Yet again. Densities may not increase forever, but when you can cram 40+ GB on a single platter, just add a couple of platters and make the drive a little thicker. Anyone remember full-height 3.5" drives? Maybe they'll make a brief comeback once density plateaus.
I'm much more concerned about two other relevant factors:
1: The I/O bottleneck inherent to IDE and SCSI interfaces. All this horsepower, and all this storage, and we can't transfer it fast enough.
2: In case nobody's noticed, tape drive technology has gotten faster, but it has not kept up anywhere near hard drives from a capacity standpoint. In a network server setting, this can be a real problem! The data sizes and drive sizes are growing, tape speeds have increased somewhat, but the network speeds are still mostly at 100 Mbps or slower, and the backup window times are shrinking quickly. That's a bigger problem. We need faster interfaces and bigger tapes - or cheaper jukeboxes.
I wrote this letter this morning, and submitted it to a couple of newspapers up here in Boston. I don't think that Microsoft needs to be broken up into bits, and if they don't see the benefits of opening their source, I don't think we should be forcing it on them - eventually the marketplace probably will. But they still are dominant, and they use that in an unfair fashion. The letter below is just me taking a whack at how to level the playing field enough to let everyone else back in the game - if we did this and companies still failed to get any traction against Microsoft it'd be their own danged fault. We're not in a post-Microsoft era yet, nor are we likely to be no matter what the outcome of the suit. There's just too much MS out there, and there's really no reason to get rid of it all for most people. Punishments I'd like to see would be on the order of a flogging for every BSOD-causing bug.
Well, the hammer has fallen on Microsoft in an utter anticlimax. On the one hand, Microsoft has used their size, wealth, and clout to squeeze as much competition as possible out of their path, but on the other hand they have built genuinely useful products (flaws and all), and are a key part of the high-tech economy. How do we solve the issues at hand and reconcile these two divergent views of Microsoft? I'd like to put forth my proposal for a remedy here.
First of all, Microsoft should not be broken up. That would simply create a host of smaller companies which would dominate in smaller market segments. Nor should they be fined - that would just enrich the government further and not even put a dent into Microsoft's cash flow.
My solution, however, would deal with this in a more effective fashion.
First, Microsoft would be required to provide full applications support for all competitive platforms (anything with approximately 3% of the total market or more). This would include Macintosh and Linux. Microsoft offers partial support for Macintosh today, with a version of Office that lacks web development or database support. They would be required to move the missing pieces of Office as well. Additionally, they would be required to port to Linux and any OS that met those criteria, with full feature parity and simultaneous releases for all platforms. This would ensure continued support for Microsoft's competition, and give users the freedom to use any platform they wanted. It also would probably increase Microsoft's overall application sales.
Second, require Microsoft to open up all the core API's (programming interfaces) of Windows and Office, and to publicly publish all file formats to their applications. Microsoft would have to publish the information before they, themselves could take advantage of it. This will put developers of applications and add-ins on equal footing with Microsoft without favoring anyone.
Third, allow Microsoft to embed Internet functionality in the operating system (but with the same openness requirement as above). Make Internet Explorer a separate program, though. Move it to the applications group at Microsoft. The same with Windows Media Player (which is trying today to kill off RealNetworks' Real Player and Apple's QuickTime).
Fourth, appoint a judge to oversee this with the authority to intervene at any time, rather than making them wait until a suit is filed. During the three years this case has run, Microsoft succeeded in killing off Netscape, and that was a good deal of the reason the suit was brought in the first place. Don't let it happen again.
If implemented, this would have the effect of giving Microsoft's competition a fair playing field with which they could then succeed or fail on even terms. It will also give Microsoft an opportunity to remain dominant - but force them to play fair in order to do so.
In fact, just a couple of days ago, this/. article discusses how Intervideo expects to release a binary-only DVD player, but it's been vaporware so far. I'll believe it when I see it. The hardware-based standalone players are generally based on a handful of chipsets and custom non-any kind of Unix RTOS.
The bad news: last year, the Computer Museum merged with the Museum of Science and moved out of Museum Wharf. The Children's Museum, I believe, has since expanded to take over the space.
The good news: I haven't been to the Museum of Science since the move, but I believe quite a few of the Computer Museum exhibits are now up and running in their new home. So it's a nice twofer when you go there. It's right on the Green Line. And the MoS is, I think, one of the better ones of it's kind in the country.
(not to mention the great parties Ingram used to throw there during Macworld back before they split for NYC)
Special Boston museum bonus: the penguins at the New England Aquarium. Go see them. For some strange reason, none of them really resemble Tux that much...
And there's a Franklin Covey store pretty close to the Castle (in the Prudential Center mall), where you can get all sorts of goodies and software for your Palm if the urge strikes you.
Finally, besides the excellent Redbones mentioned in the previous post, the Castle is also fairly close to Boston's Chinatown, where there is good eatin' to be had.
At this point thinking about the Iridium fiasco just makes my head hurt. The only remaining hope I have about these satellites is that they announce the de-orbiting schedule so that Geekcruises can charter a boat to watch 'em light up. Now that would be truly cool.
Iridium was an unmitigated disaster, and only the first of many "personal communications" satellites that will come whizzing down over the next few years. Globalstar and Teledesic are next.
As I understand it, there is still 256k cache on-board (saving money in the design process), but half of it is disabled to differentiate it from the Coppermine PIII processors, where it's all enabled. Doing it that way would be cheaper than having a completely different fab, I'd think.
Performance-wise, the average Joe who buys a Celery-based system isn't going to overclock, and the overclockers are a small, but devoted group that will find a way to crank the processors up anyway. The multiplier locks on processors don't really stop overclockers, but they do help stop people from remarking the chips since there's no easy way to tamper.
On the overclocking front, interestingly enough, Athlons are actually pretty overclock-friendly, and the Golden Fingers cards that simplify the process are pretty inexpensive. I run my K7-600 at 750 and it was quick and easy.
Basically, the new Celerys are a pre-emptive strike against the AMD Spitfire CPU's, which replace the K6-2 processor family but use an Athlon core and bus. I think AMD will continue making inroads into the Celery target market, though - the box companies have been burned too many times by Intel of late to put all their eggs in one basket. Dell is the last Intel-only holdout and we'll see how long that lasts.
Depending on pricing, these new Celerys could be a pretty good bargain for the "enthusiast". I may check out the possibility of slapping one in to replace the PII-350 I have in my old Mandrake box at home.
- -Josh Turiel
Re:yes, dual power supplies in G4's Re:That's a re
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Rack An iMac
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· Score: 2
I hadn't heard anything about dual power being available - if they're doing at least that much then it's a start (though instant switchover isn't anywhere near as useful as hot plug).
I agree with you that Apple hardware is generally well-engineered compared to the typical generic x86 machine, but they don't compare to the Suns or to "high-end" x86 servers like the top-end Compaq Proliants. Lack of hot plug power and external RAID only dooms them there. I know there's some good RAID cabinets available from Micronet and other vendors for the Mac, but I still firmly believe that 3 PCI slots (even if they're 64-bit) does not a server make. Part of the reason is that I assume Fibre Channel instead of FireWire for a SAN (Fibre Channel has a big head start and presently supports faster speeds), and that'll take up a slot, any legacy SCSI devices you run will take up a slot, and gigabit Ethernet will take up the third slot. And if (as I usually do) you want separate RAID for the system disks than from the data drives, then you're full. I know Second Wave makes expansion chassis, but it's a kluge compared to just engineering the slots in.
PowerExpress would have been a good platform to ultimately build MacOS X servers on, but it was killed). Preserving the Apple Network Servers, which _had_ all those features (hot-pluggable everything, plenty of slots, and dual processors) would have been even better. Slots aren't nearly as important in a rackmount (and I'm not complaining about the hacked iMac lacking them), but they do matter in a conventional server - and Apple doesn't have enough of them. USB and FireWire are great for a general purpose computer's peripherals, but not for a server (though FireWire eventually will be useful once the speed hits 800 MBits). Built-in 10/100 is good, too, but if you want to load balance or use Fast EtherChannel to trunk it'll cost you a slot.
Heck, I love Macs as much as the next guy (Lord knows I've got enough of 'em, and I'm replying to you from my iBook), and I think MacOS X is the shite, but I just don't think Apple has what it takes to play anything other than workgroup server ball. It's a pity, because the new OS is industrial-strength.
- -Josh Turiel
That's a reasonably cool hack
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Rack An iMac
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· Score: 4
The iMac isn't a bad computer b straight computer terms for the money (the original model can be had for around $600-$700 or so), and with WebStar and Filemaker they make solid, stable low-volume web servers that are _very_ easy to set up and maintain, even for the non-wizard. An iMac (at least the original version) is basically a highly modified laptop logic board that has been wedged into a monitor - the chipset and I/O are all on one small board and then the CPU, RAM, and Mac ROM are on a daughtercard, which is also how Apple typically designs their laptops. The drives are standard IDE.
Filemaker is a slick database for basic we functionality, and it has a built-in XML-based set of command functionality that you can insert directly into your code. There are some really nice wizards for the novice, too. Filemaker does not traditionally handle heavy loads well, and the MacOS has plenty of issues of it's own in a multitasking world, but for lower-volume websites the combination will give you pretty good bang for the buck with relatively low admin overhead.
What's interesting here, of course, is the case hack. At his costs, an iMac makes a decent rackmount system, though Apple has had an inability on their own to handle the server market - they have never quite "gotten it". Apple had, briefly, a terrific AIX-based series of "Apple Network Servers" that had Apple design, hot-pluggable everything, were CHRP multiprocessor 604e-based (they couldn't even run the MacOS on their own), and MacOS-based applications for managing the server and utilities with a Mac look and feel running under AIX. They were pricey, but very competitive with IBM's own AIX boxes and with the Sun and SGI boxes that usually get sold into the printing and publishing market. However, these came around late in Apple's dark days, and were unceremoniously "Steved" along with Newton and their never released PowerExpress 6-slot G3 Mac as a cost-cutting measure.
Since then, Apple's been particularly weak in the server space (even more than usual) - throwing OS X Server on a 3 slot G3 or G4 with only one power supply and calling it a server don't make it one. An iMac-class rack server would be a nice little seller (especially if redundant power and or disk could be hacked into it), but a project like that wouldn't make Apple a ton of profit so it won't happen. Hopefully an enterprising third party will be able to make something of it.
And I had one on order from Circuit City, too. This'll be interesting - a whole lot of people have ordered them from Circuit City and put deposits down - and now when/if they arrive theoretically they are no longer modifiable.
Well, if we all cancel our orders then suddenly there will be a huge inventory of these things piled up in Circuit City's stores, and Netpliance'll have some issues to deal with there...
I think I'll look and see what happens when the order arrives - maybe the box has a production date. If that's the case and it's a new, supposedly unmodifiable one then I'll just refuse it, given that it's not the unit I ordered. This whole thing has serious amusement potential.
What Netpliance should have done is considered moving upscale a little bit. Imagine almost that exact same unit shipped with a small hard drive, an Ethernet jack instead of a modem, and a P233MMX for $200-$250 or so as an Internet terminal for business. To heck with PC's, I'd buy a coupe of dozen for my company at that price. If $50-$75 more could get a TFT screen instead (remember, it's only a 10.4" screen and those are relatively cheap) it would still be a no-brainer. The ISP service is fine, but it's brilliant hardware packaging and design.
If your job function requires any significant interaction with other employees, it's not going to work. Video conferencing and e-mail can help, but isn't a substitute. If you're strictly a code jockey or tester you might be able to work effectively from home, but even then you'll need the occasional trip in from the office. I work for an insurance company, and here's how we handle things as a rule:
We have two 3/4 time claims analysts working out of home (they are both trained workers who left to have children). We set them up with ISDN Centrex for network access, regular Centrex for telephone and fax, and periodically they will come in to go over paperwork or meet with people in their department. They each work approximately 30 hours per week. It was a win for us because we kept office space open (it's especially tight in our claims department), and we kept two trained workers who otherwise would be lost entirely. Both live within commuting distance, though.
We also have four marketing reps who are in the office an average of one day per week and either work from home or the road the rest of the time. We accomodate them through dial-up from their laptops. We also handle our five claims adjusters (who are scattered all over the state) the same way. The adjusters rarely come in - they work mainly by PC, fax, and mail.
In IS, we will occasionally have people work from home, but not on an extended basis. I have a mainframe wizard/DBA working under me that I will have work from home sometimes when he's in a deep coding mode because he's demonstrated he's very productive that way without distractions. Other programmers in the department get nothing done out of the office and therefore don't have this option. We decide it on a case-by-case basis.
Basically, I think most companies don't hire with the objective of having people work from home full-time, since there is a group element that helps much of the time in a development environment (and most others). Telecommuting as I see it is more of an option that companies use to resolve situations that would otherwise result in losing a trained, high-skill worker, and even then sometimes not. Unless your work is the kind of work that is solitary by nature (like being a field claims adjuster, for instance - though that example doesn't fully apply here), don't expect a telecommuting gig. You probably are going to have to fish where the fish are.
An option could be having a home where you really want to _live_, but renting (or sharing) an apartment where you want to work, with commuting on the weekends. Though that can get old awful fast.
For those wondering "how could it be?", here's a simple rule of Real Economics:
Equity DOES NOT necessarily mean capital!
Equity is what you use to buy other companies and raise cash from investors. Capital is what you use to pay the bills, ship the goods, and do all the mundane things like that (pay your employees, for instance). As long as these dot coms are all losing money, they will be dealing with dwindling supplies of capital. If the market is no longer interested in the company's future, there will be nobody to exchange equity for capital. Your stock can be worth a fortune on the Street, but if people won't buy the stocks or securities you issue, you'll run out of capital. Period.
The other side of this is that equity in the dot com world is like a shark. If it stops moving, it dies. Companies need to keep making aquisitions and keep selling equity to expand in order to maintain investor interest. So far, there hasn't been a whole lot of interest in profits, but that will invariably change - and probably soon. Companies that are low on cash don't necessarily have to make money today, but soon - real soon. Because otherwise the dogs'll stop eating the dogfood, and that's what these companies will become. Don't use Amazon as an example - it's not so much that they are trying to become a huge Net company, the're tring to become a huge compoany, period. That creates a somewhat different mentality.
Peapod will probably be the first of these companies to go down. Their strategy was for many years to use a proprietary Windows & modem-based system to place orders that would be fulfilled by local partner grocery stores (Stop & Shop here in Boston) using Peapod vans and employees. They finally went to the Net, but all the supermarkets are moving off on their own and leaving Peapod behind. They had just planned a debt offering that was abruptly cancelled last week when their CEO quit, and now they only have a couple of monts' worth of working capital, despite their stock value. They're toast. Someone will buy them for pennies on the dollar, and then only for what's left of the brand name.
That particular case is a little bit near and dear to my heart, since I used to work for an ad agency that did supermarket flyers. And we thought about going on the Net with our customers about four-plus years ago, when Peapod was still using modems and no other web businesses were on the drawing board. This was in the days when people still believed that an immediate profit was needed to prove value. So we wimped out. As it turns out, we could have started it, lost money, sold it, and been dot com millionaires by now. Bitter? Me? Naaahhhh....
I had a chance to go to the ALS in 1998 - it's a good, well-run event. If Donnie thinks joining up with them is the best way to handle things, that's fine by me. Unfortunately, I can't go - the reason I was able to go to ALS '98 was because they had it coincide with Interop that year, and I can't realistically get my company to send me to Atlanta twice in a month. Like it or not, if I have to pick one, it's got to be Interop.
I understand why Linux Expo is going away, though. I was the president for several years of a large user group (BNUG, a networking user group in Boston), and we used to regularly plan trade shows in order to raise our operating funds for the year. It also filled a gap for a while after the original NetWorld pulled out of Boston and combined with Interop. The trade show was incredibly difficult to manage and coordinate, since all the planners were volunteers with full-time jobs in addition to their duties with the group. A lot of details would get dropped through the cracks, nobody had time to make sure the cash flow was there, and promoting it in the days before everybody was on the Internet was a mess.
Our largest event was a summertime trade show/dinner cruise we called "LAN Ahoy". We'd use a big harbor cruise ship and hold an all-day trade show on board, followed by a keynote in an adjacent hotel (while that happened, we'd frantically clear out the trade show gear and load the dinner tables), and then we'd do a 4-hour dinner cruise with about 250 people. The trade show was free, the cruise we charged a little below our cost for.
It was a lot of fun, but the logistics of coordinating a trade show are incredibly difficult. The last time we did it we nearly lost our shirts, even though we filled most of the booth space and sold the dinner tickets, because of the cash flow problems. We had to threaten several vendors with a public shaming in the end to get our last checks (I won't say who they were, but they're _very_ big companies). LAN Ahoy was a nightmare to plan, and it was puny compared to the Expo. I'm amazed and impressed that they kept it going so long and so well.
Iridium was a huge mistake from almost day one. Cellular technology already had become pervasive, and there are other satellite-based communications systems readily available (albeit just as pricey as iridium was). Essentially, Iridium was designed to fill a market need that really didn't exist (people working in remote places not served by existing cellular), at a price that only a few users could afford.
Unfortunately for Motorola and their partners, the Iridium team had fully drunk of the kool-aid and didn't see their market evaporate even before they were operational. Besides that, Iridium phones suffered from serious technical limitations, and the network that they designed didn't factor in data becoming the killer app for wireless. By 1995 or so it was clear that the Iridium market as envisioned did not exist.
If they could have gone back to the drawing board, it might have been possible to redesign Iridium into something viable, but there was too much financial pressure to get into production, pretty much mainly due to all the money Motorola sunk into the venture. As it was, they scaled back from 77 satellites to 66 due to financial issues.
Sadly, by the time it was in deployment, the marketplace had saturated virtually all the populated earth with cellular technology at a fraction of the cost. The exclusive market for Iridium was pretty much the two Poles and a few desolate places like the Sahara. Ships have alternate means of satellite communications.
Oh well. They'd be really pretty to watch when they come down... Maybe the Geek Cruises people could throw an "Iridium cruise"?
My friend Rob and I went to Circuit City up in Nashua, NH this afternoon to buy a couple. They were sold out. In fact, every Circuit City within an hour's drive of Nashua was sold out of them - most had been sold in the last day, as far as the sales rep knew! We went onto a backorder list, with 8 more people ahead of us.
So now we have proof that the/. effect applies to meatspace, too. This is probably the first time that a consumer electronics chain has been slashdotted...
Imagine the faces back at headquarters when they see the weekend sales figures. They'll be so excited, waiting for all the new ISP subscriptions that they'll expect to be getting - I feel kind of sorry for them.
It's been pretty much established at this point that $800 is roughly the maximum price that the market will bear for the top-of-the-line processor from a given manufacturer in the general computing market. This has the effect of driving down prices on the rest of the processor speeds in the family.
A 1GHz CPU, by itself, is nearly useless for most purposes given the massive I/O bottlenecks we have to deal with. The fastest system buses out there are the CuMine 133 MHz FSB, and the Athlon/Alpha 200 MHz bus (that's really a 100 MHz bus). Memory is a huge constraining factor at these speeds, too, and the ATA-66 drives can just barely keep pace with those needs. When the FSB runs at 400 MHz, with RAM speeds to match, and everyone uses 66 MHz, 64-bit PCI and 4x AGP, then the rest of the system can keep pace. What a 1 GHz processor does in today's platforms is basically run benchmarks faster. There's not going to be a huge impact. To really get into equipment that supports that kind of I/O, you're talking about mainframes and super high-end workstations, not PC's anymore. And the costs rise accordingly.
The impact will be in the downward price pressure across the board - 600 MHz processors will be under $200 soon. Being able to get a lot of bang for a lot less buck is more compelling, I think.
And for the Beowulf trolls out there - for the money it'll cost for a single 1 GHz processor-based PC you'll be able to run a pair of 600's in a cluster, or buy a SMP board with a couple of 650 MHz CuMine's. Now that's cool!
The next big domain battle is going to be over "whazzzaaaappp!!!".com, anyhow. Look for a big lawsuit between Annheuser-Busch and all the folks who set up variations on the whazzzaaaappp name in multiple languages.
(but imagine the ads!)
- -Josh Turiel
Well, how can I top that?
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Middle Media
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· Score: 4
Someone's obviously mastered ASCII painting, and has an agenda it seems to boot...
As far as Jon's article, though, he has a good point. The e-companies are discovering that the key to success is to take the best of the old models and marry them to the new. Remember Amazon, and their intent to be a "virtual company", with no inventories? They gave up on that and have been burning cash to build warehouses and shipping facilities, allowing them to control the process better. The e-tailers who are now branching into catalogs have discovered that to rely on on-line only is to leave money on the table.
The place for e-only commerce is in a small, specialty marketplace that is so focused as to make the Internet the only practical, affordable way to reach your target audience. Thinkgeek and Copyleft are two good examples of specialty businesses that probably couldn't succeed in a traditional catalog or retail world, because the overhead costs would be far too high to justify the limited audience. The classic examples like the hot sauce company that went online and had sales that took off (I forget the company, but this was some time ago) and the Copylefts of the world are the best ones for a purely e-commerce based approach.
In reality, Amazon needs warehouses and customer service reps, the New York Times needs (and can make money from) online newsfeeds, and MicroWarehouse needs to have online ordering from their catalog (the closest postal equivalent to spam I've seen) in order to maximize their revenues. Smart companies like Ingram Micro make it easier for companies to do business in this hybrid world with fulfilment services and private-label direct shipping. Shippers like FedEx and UPS are more valuable too in this new economic model because in many cases they will be the only actual contact the customer has.
In the end, the Internet is changing the way business is done, but the smart companies use the best of the old and combine it with the new to make more money. Money is a Good Thing, especially when you're making it...
- -Josh Turiel
Once in a blue moon, the System works
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Victory in Holland
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· Score: 4
This vote is proof positive that, once in a rare while, in spite of ourselves, people can be trusted to look at an issue and do the Right Thing.
The problem here has boiled down to a question of who to trust with the decisions about what you and/or your children see when using the Internet. Obviously, the best solution would to be to have real, enforcable ratings for web content, but given the distributed and ever-changing nature of the web, that's impossible. So in lieu of ratings, will you trust some anonymous company with a possible agenda of their own to make decisions through their filter as to what you can and can not see on the Internet? Not even factoring in that filters just don't work very well and are child's play to defeat, the answer seems obvious to me. Since filters don't work very well, and ratings are impractical, then your ability to view content should remain free. Whenever we err, we should always err on the side of freedom, choice, and individual responsibility. We owe ourselves that much.
On a related note, at my company I am often asked by my co-workers if they should put filtering software on their computers to protect their kids. My response to them has been this: "You can go ahead and buy filtering software, and there are quite a few options to choose from that are well-supported commercially. But keep in mind that your kids probably know more about the inner workings of your PC than you do, and it's likelier that you'll be blocked than your children will. Your kids probably already know how to beat all the filters out there - you need to address the issue by talking to your kids, tell them what you don't want them doing, and check things like the browser history (I'll show them how to use these if they ask), cookie files, and cache to keep a watch over them and their habits. If they don't do the right thing as you see it, take away their access."
Most children, I think, will satisfy their initial curiosity and move on. Maybe I'm a hopeless optimist, but there's so many useful things to do on the Net and on a PC that I think that most kids will find better uses of their time.
Linux itself isn't a commercial product. If everything collapses tomorrow, the kernel will still be there, the GNU software will still be there, and an awful lot of stuff that has been either GPL'd or Open Sourced over the last couple of years will still be there.
But think about what the commercialization of Linux has brought us. We have games being ported by more than one company because there are people buying Linux for the desktop. There's major commercial software being ported. Virtually every major brand-name add-in card (video, sound, whatever!) is getting a Linux driver, and in many cases the driver is Open Source, too!
All these riches are not being bestowed upon us because the companies like the way we dress, the way we talk, or because of the Politics Of Linux. They're in it for the money, and they see Linux as a revenue generator, whether now or down the road a ways. All these development resources that have been turned over to us come with a price, friends. The bargain we strike in excahnge for the goodies is the implicit agreement that We, The People, will build Linux into a commercially viable operating system that Joe Schmoe can buy in a store, take home, and install. That's where the development resources are going.
It doesn't matter if you were running Slackware in 1995 and remember hand-installing applications fondly. It doesn't matter if you prefer the "pure" days when you used Linux because it was Free, and Cool. It doesn't even matter how you pronounce it (I've been using it since way back when, and I still pronounce it "Lie-nux",). It's still being pushed in this new direction regardless of what we think or want. How else are you going to get to World Domination?
Keep this in mind whan you speculate as to a Linux without all the commercial backing. The developers will still build things the way you say - but there'll be a heck of a lot fewer of 'em.
I prefer trying to make it the OS for the average luser.
Nope. Although it would trigger some gains for Linux, there's a lot more multinationals that are run from the US than the other way around. Companies that standardize on Windows would keep on using it - they wouldn't migrate, they'd smuggle first.
I think that the truly giant companies really don't give a damn what the EU thinks, they'll use their OS of choice anyway. That pressure alone make banning Windows 2000 unworkable.
Smaller and Euro-centric companies might well continue running their existing versions of Windows, or a few might turn to Apple or Linux, or something else - but not many of them.
Remember, the _average_ company could care less about Open Source, Linux, Free Software, or any of that - they just want decent supported software that they can easily find software for, users who know it, and the ability to interoperate easily with other companies. Linux may be technically superior, but it doesn't yet fill all those needed roles for the average shop and I doubt it's ready to start.
I think the more likely result is that Europe becomes a computing backwater.
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The newest generation of WinCE devices do succeed at one thing: Microsoft is no longer a handheld laughingstock. The devices are enough of a step beyond the earlier generation of CE to restore some credibility to Microsoft - I think that was their major objective. I've used CE somewhat (and I have a Jornada 540 on the way from HP as a premium from a promotion they had on their network switches) - and CE devices have some good points. From a software standpoint, there is some commonality between desktop Windows and CE, so that the developers have a head start. From a user perspective, the interfaces are just similar enough as to not be a major problem. However, here's the biggest differences:
Palm has smaller devices, much better battery life, a large and robust developer community, and far more applications. The prices are cheaper, and the Palm OS devices (Handspring and TRG included) are pretty flexible - Palm sticks to the basics and the licencees concentrate on cost and expandability. Palm OS systems also integrate much better with non-Windows operating systems.
WinCE has bigger screens in all versions, a variety of form factors, a shorter development learning curve for Windows programmers, arguably better networking capability and Internet functionality, and more developed basic applications - even if Pocket Word is the equivalent of WordPad, that's still far better than the built-in Memo app on Palm OS. And Palm has no (standard) ability to handle any kind of spreadsheet or presentations.
The name difference does mean something. The Palm is a true PDA that has relatively little built-in functionality but what it has, it's really good at. Palm also is extremely extensible. Microsoft has concentrated on putting as much functionality as possible into their platform, and they've succeeded - they even have managed to be compatible with all the memory leaks in desktop Windows! Microsoft is the master of cramming ten pounds of shite into a five-pound bag, and CE/PocketPC is a wonderful example of it.
The devices will sell a lot better than the older ones did, but the likeliest effect of PocketPC will be to grow the overall market rather than to erode Palm's market share. This could change, of course, depending on what Palm does next.
- -Josh Turiel
You're dead right on the Rambus pricing issue - it costs way too much. Part of that is the royalty factor, but it's more (right now) caused by low yields on Rambus parts and a very small amount of makers. There's no flood of RDRAM on the market to drive prices down the way there is with SDRAM. If yields were equivalent to SDRAM and more people were making the parts, the prices would be a lot more competitive, but still somewhat pricier because of the royalty issue.
As far as USB/Firewire goes, though - it isn't royalties that have slowed Firewire acceptance. Intel had included USB in every chipset since the LX several years ago - in fact, USB support was in silicon before any OS had support for it. That's why it was on motherboards - It's part of the chipset whether or not you want it, so you might as well build the ports. Firewire royalties are tiny (below $1/port), and it's split between Apple and the other patent holders (I believe TI and Canon are in the group, too). Firewire would have been adopted quicker had Intel followed through with their earlier plans to include it in newer chipsets.
The other thing that sped acceptance of USB versus Firewire is that USB 1.0 was ready a (relative) long time ago, and Firewire is only a couple of years old. The DV cameras that really take advantage of Firewire have just begun to be priced approriately for the casual camcorder buyer. Sony and Apple build the ports onto virtually all their systems, and are selling them as fast as they can build them.
Also a Good Thing for USB - since the CPU controls the bus and it's a simple protocol, it's well-suited for cheap, simple peripherals like modems, digital still cameras, low-end scanners, audio devices, etc. Firewire aims a lot higher.
- -Josh Turiel
When Rambus was being designed, EDO RAM was the current standard, and Rambus is competitive in a head-to-head with EDO - with latencies in the same class or faster but much better transfer speeds. SDRAM was intended as a stopgap measure to provide a memory technology that could keep up with the faster Pentium/Pentium II systems during the wait for Rambus to make it to market. But a few things happened to screw it all up:
SDRAM took off as a standard, and other chipset makers adopted it - and extended it to PC100 and PC133 from the original PC66.
CPU speeds accelerated faster than anyone planned (a year ago, 600 MHz was state of the art!)
Rambus was late to market, as were the systems designed to use it. This gave SDRAM more of an opportunity to become entrenched.
Rambus has proven to be difficult to manufacture to this point, with horrible yields.
And finally, SDRAM turned out to be a lot more scalable than anyone anticipated at the beginning.
If Intel had expected DDR PC133 SDRAM, Rambus might never have made it out of the starting blocks in the first place. But given the lead time on their chipset and CPU design cycles, they had to make a call based on what the trend appeared to be - and they bet on the wrong one. The 810 chipset is a lot more important to Intel right now than they had expected it to be, and the 815 wasn't even planned - they also were hoping to retire BX by now. Some of their supply problems of late have been driven by this misforecast. When the dust settles, I expect to see Rambus slowly squeezed out of the mainstream and Intel to quietly write off their investment. It seemed like a good idea at the time...
- -Josh Turiel
I love overclocking. It's a way of getting that little bit of extra control and tweaking that says "Any monkey can assemble a PC. But mine is better!" Plus, it's fun to do the work, relatively harmless, and a nice way to get better acquainted with the hardware.
My best overclocking results: I bought an Athlon 600, and with a liberal application of thermal grease, a soldering iron, and a really swank fan, got a 750 out of it, stable as a rock. For about an extra $10 (the difference in price between a really good heatsink/fan and a cruddy one) and some time, I got a chip that (at the time) cost about $300 more.
But my favorite all-time overclocking hack was upgrading my old PowerBook 3400c from 240 MHz to 270. That surgery was nasty - but not as bad as putting a bigger hard drive in my iBook...
- -Josh Turiel
Yet again. Densities may not increase forever, but when you can cram 40+ GB on a single platter, just add a couple of platters and make the drive a little thicker. Anyone remember full-height 3.5" drives? Maybe they'll make a brief comeback once density plateaus.
I'm much more concerned about two other relevant factors:
1: The I/O bottleneck inherent to IDE and SCSI interfaces. All this horsepower, and all this storage, and we can't transfer it fast enough.
2: In case nobody's noticed, tape drive technology has gotten faster, but it has not kept up anywhere near hard drives from a capacity standpoint. In a network server setting, this can be a real problem! The data sizes and drive sizes are growing, tape speeds have increased somewhat, but the network speeds are still mostly at 100 Mbps or slower, and the backup window times are shrinking quickly. That's a bigger problem. We need faster interfaces and bigger tapes - or cheaper jukeboxes.
- -Josh Turiel
- -Josh Turiel
In fact, just a couple of days ago, this /. article discusses how Intervideo expects to release a binary-only DVD player, but it's been vaporware so far. I'll believe it when I see it. The hardware-based standalone players are generally based on a handful of chipsets and custom non-any kind of Unix RTOS.
- -Josh Turiel
The bad news: last year, the Computer Museum merged with the Museum of Science and moved out of Museum Wharf. The Children's Museum, I believe, has since expanded to take over the space.
The good news: I haven't been to the Museum of Science since the move, but I believe quite a few of the Computer Museum exhibits are now up and running in their new home. So it's a nice twofer when you go there. It's right on the Green Line. And the MoS is, I think, one of the better ones of it's kind in the country.
(not to mention the great parties Ingram used to throw there during Macworld back before they split for NYC)
Special Boston museum bonus: the penguins at the New England Aquarium. Go see them. For some strange reason, none of them really resemble Tux that much...
And there's a Franklin Covey store pretty close to the Castle (in the Prudential Center mall), where you can get all sorts of goodies and software for your Palm if the urge strikes you.
Finally, besides the excellent Redbones mentioned in the previous post, the Castle is also fairly close to Boston's Chinatown, where there is good eatin' to be had.
- -Josh Turiel
At this point thinking about the Iridium fiasco just makes my head hurt. The only remaining hope I have about these satellites is that they announce the de-orbiting schedule so that Geekcruises can charter a boat to watch 'em light up. Now that would be truly cool.
Iridium was an unmitigated disaster, and only the first of many "personal communications" satellites that will come whizzing down over the next few years. Globalstar and Teledesic are next.
That said, it was a very good piece by Bruce.
- -Josh Turiel
As I understand it, there is still 256k cache on-board (saving money in the design process), but half of it is disabled to differentiate it from the Coppermine PIII processors, where it's all enabled. Doing it that way would be cheaper than having a completely different fab, I'd think.
Performance-wise, the average Joe who buys a Celery-based system isn't going to overclock, and the overclockers are a small, but devoted group that will find a way to crank the processors up anyway. The multiplier locks on processors don't really stop overclockers, but they do help stop people from remarking the chips since there's no easy way to tamper.
On the overclocking front, interestingly enough, Athlons are actually pretty overclock-friendly, and the Golden Fingers cards that simplify the process are pretty inexpensive. I run my K7-600 at 750 and it was quick and easy.
Basically, the new Celerys are a pre-emptive strike against the AMD Spitfire CPU's, which replace the K6-2 processor family but use an Athlon core and bus. I think AMD will continue making inroads into the Celery target market, though - the box companies have been burned too many times by Intel of late to put all their eggs in one basket. Dell is the last Intel-only holdout and we'll see how long that lasts.
Depending on pricing, these new Celerys could be a pretty good bargain for the "enthusiast". I may check out the possibility of slapping one in to replace the PII-350 I have in my old Mandrake box at home.
- -Josh Turiel
I hadn't heard anything about dual power being available - if they're doing at least that much then it's a start (though instant switchover isn't anywhere near as useful as hot plug).
I agree with you that Apple hardware is generally well-engineered compared to the typical generic x86 machine, but they don't compare to the Suns or to "high-end" x86 servers like the top-end Compaq Proliants. Lack of hot plug power and external RAID only dooms them there. I know there's some good RAID cabinets available from Micronet and other vendors for the Mac, but I still firmly believe that 3 PCI slots (even if they're 64-bit) does not a server make. Part of the reason is that I assume Fibre Channel instead of FireWire for a SAN (Fibre Channel has a big head start and presently supports faster speeds), and that'll take up a slot, any legacy SCSI devices you run will take up a slot, and gigabit Ethernet will take up the third slot. And if (as I usually do) you want separate RAID for the system disks than from the data drives, then you're full. I know Second Wave makes expansion chassis, but it's a kluge compared to just engineering the slots in.
PowerExpress would have been a good platform to ultimately build MacOS X servers on, but it was killed). Preserving the Apple Network Servers, which _had_ all those features (hot-pluggable everything, plenty of slots, and dual processors) would have been even better. Slots aren't nearly as important in a rackmount (and I'm not complaining about the hacked iMac lacking them), but they do matter in a conventional server - and Apple doesn't have enough of them. USB and FireWire are great for a general purpose computer's peripherals, but not for a server (though FireWire eventually will be useful once the speed hits 800 MBits). Built-in 10/100 is good, too, but if you want to load balance or use Fast EtherChannel to trunk it'll cost you a slot.
Heck, I love Macs as much as the next guy (Lord knows I've got enough of 'em, and I'm replying to you from my iBook), and I think MacOS X is the shite, but I just don't think Apple has what it takes to play anything other than workgroup server ball. It's a pity, because the new OS is industrial-strength.
- -Josh Turiel
The iMac isn't a bad computer b straight computer terms for the money (the original model can be had for around $600-$700 or so), and with WebStar and Filemaker they make solid, stable low-volume web servers that are _very_ easy to set up and maintain, even for the non-wizard. An iMac (at least the original version) is basically a highly modified laptop logic board that has been wedged into a monitor - the chipset and I/O are all on one small board and then the CPU, RAM, and Mac ROM are on a daughtercard, which is also how Apple typically designs their laptops. The drives are standard IDE.
Filemaker is a slick database for basic we functionality, and it has a built-in XML-based set of command functionality that you can insert directly into your code. There are some really nice wizards for the novice, too. Filemaker does not traditionally handle heavy loads well, and the MacOS has plenty of issues of it's own in a multitasking world, but for lower-volume websites the combination will give you pretty good bang for the buck with relatively low admin overhead.
What's interesting here, of course, is the case hack. At his costs, an iMac makes a decent rackmount system, though Apple has had an inability on their own to handle the server market - they have never quite "gotten it". Apple had, briefly, a terrific AIX-based series of "Apple Network Servers" that had Apple design, hot-pluggable everything, were CHRP multiprocessor 604e-based (they couldn't even run the MacOS on their own), and MacOS-based applications for managing the server and utilities with a Mac look and feel running under AIX. They were pricey, but very competitive with IBM's own AIX boxes and with the Sun and SGI boxes that usually get sold into the printing and publishing market. However, these came around late in Apple's dark days, and were unceremoniously "Steved" along with Newton and their never released PowerExpress 6-slot G3 Mac as a cost-cutting measure.
Since then, Apple's been particularly weak in the server space (even more than usual) - throwing OS X Server on a 3 slot G3 or G4 with only one power supply and calling it a server don't make it one. An iMac-class rack server would be a nice little seller (especially if redundant power and or disk could be hacked into it), but a project like that wouldn't make Apple a ton of profit so it won't happen. Hopefully an enterprising third party will be able to make something of it.
- -Josh Turiel
And I had one on order from Circuit City, too. This'll be interesting - a whole lot of people have ordered them from Circuit City and put deposits down - and now when/if they arrive theoretically they are no longer modifiable.
Well, if we all cancel our orders then suddenly there will be a huge inventory of these things piled up in Circuit City's stores, and Netpliance'll have some issues to deal with there...
I think I'll look and see what happens when the order arrives - maybe the box has a production date. If that's the case and it's a new, supposedly unmodifiable one then I'll just refuse it, given that it's not the unit I ordered. This whole thing has serious amusement potential.
What Netpliance should have done is considered moving upscale a little bit. Imagine almost that exact same unit shipped with a small hard drive, an Ethernet jack instead of a modem, and a P233MMX for $200-$250 or so as an Internet terminal for business. To heck with PC's, I'd buy a coupe of dozen for my company at that price. If $50-$75 more could get a TFT screen instead (remember, it's only a 10.4" screen and those are relatively cheap) it would still be a no-brainer. The ISP service is fine, but it's brilliant hardware packaging and design.
- -Josh Turiel
If your job function requires any significant interaction with other employees, it's not going to work. Video conferencing and e-mail can help, but isn't a substitute. If you're strictly a code jockey or tester you might be able to work effectively from home, but even then you'll need the occasional trip in from the office. I work for an insurance company, and here's how we handle things as a rule:
We have two 3/4 time claims analysts working out of home (they are both trained workers who left to have children). We set them up with ISDN Centrex for network access, regular Centrex for telephone and fax, and periodically they will come in to go over paperwork or meet with people in their department. They each work approximately 30 hours per week. It was a win for us because we kept office space open (it's especially tight in our claims department), and we kept two trained workers who otherwise would be lost entirely. Both live within commuting distance, though.
We also have four marketing reps who are in the office an average of one day per week and either work from home or the road the rest of the time. We accomodate them through dial-up from their laptops. We also handle our five claims adjusters (who are scattered all over the state) the same way. The adjusters rarely come in - they work mainly by PC, fax, and mail.
In IS, we will occasionally have people work from home, but not on an extended basis. I have a mainframe wizard/DBA working under me that I will have work from home sometimes when he's in a deep coding mode because he's demonstrated he's very productive that way without distractions. Other programmers in the department get nothing done out of the office and therefore don't have this option. We decide it on a case-by-case basis.
Basically, I think most companies don't hire with the objective of having people work from home full-time, since there is a group element that helps much of the time in a development environment (and most others). Telecommuting as I see it is more of an option that companies use to resolve situations that would otherwise result in losing a trained, high-skill worker, and even then sometimes not. Unless your work is the kind of work that is solitary by nature (like being a field claims adjuster, for instance - though that example doesn't fully apply here), don't expect a telecommuting gig. You probably are going to have to fish where the fish are.
An option could be having a home where you really want to _live_, but renting (or sharing) an apartment where you want to work, with commuting on the weekends. Though that can get old awful fast.
- -Josh Turiel
For those wondering "how could it be?", here's a simple rule of Real Economics:
Equity DOES NOT necessarily mean capital!
Equity is what you use to buy other companies and raise cash from investors. Capital is what you use to pay the bills, ship the goods, and do all the mundane things like that (pay your employees, for instance). As long as these dot coms are all losing money, they will be dealing with dwindling supplies of capital. If the market is no longer interested in the company's future, there will be nobody to exchange equity for capital. Your stock can be worth a fortune on the Street, but if people won't buy the stocks or securities you issue, you'll run out of capital. Period.
The other side of this is that equity in the dot com world is like a shark. If it stops moving, it dies. Companies need to keep making aquisitions and keep selling equity to expand in order to maintain investor interest. So far, there hasn't been a whole lot of interest in profits, but that will invariably change - and probably soon. Companies that are low on cash don't necessarily have to make money today, but soon - real soon. Because otherwise the dogs'll stop eating the dogfood, and that's what these companies will become. Don't use Amazon as an example - it's not so much that they are trying to become a huge Net company, the're tring to become a huge compoany, period. That creates a somewhat different mentality.
Peapod will probably be the first of these companies to go down. Their strategy was for many years to use a proprietary Windows & modem-based system to place orders that would be fulfilled by local partner grocery stores (Stop & Shop here in Boston) using Peapod vans and employees. They finally went to the Net, but all the supermarkets are moving off on their own and leaving Peapod behind. They had just planned a debt offering that was abruptly cancelled last week when their CEO quit, and now they only have a couple of monts' worth of working capital, despite their stock value. They're toast. Someone will buy them for pennies on the dollar, and then only for what's left of the brand name.
That particular case is a little bit near and dear to my heart, since I used to work for an ad agency that did supermarket flyers. And we thought about going on the Net with our customers about four-plus years ago, when Peapod was still using modems and no other web businesses were on the drawing board. This was in the days when people still believed that an immediate profit was needed to prove value. So we wimped out. As it turns out, we could have started it, lost money, sold it, and been dot com millionaires by now. Bitter? Me? Naaahhhh....
- -Josh Turiel
I had a chance to go to the ALS in 1998 - it's a good, well-run event. If Donnie thinks joining up with them is the best way to handle things, that's fine by me. Unfortunately, I can't go - the reason I was able to go to ALS '98 was because they had it coincide with Interop that year, and I can't realistically get my company to send me to Atlanta twice in a month. Like it or not, if I have to pick one, it's got to be Interop.
I understand why Linux Expo is going away, though. I was the president for several years of a large user group (BNUG, a networking user group in Boston), and we used to regularly plan trade shows in order to raise our operating funds for the year. It also filled a gap for a while after the original NetWorld pulled out of Boston and combined with Interop. The trade show was incredibly difficult to manage and coordinate, since all the planners were volunteers with full-time jobs in addition to their duties with the group. A lot of details would get dropped through the cracks, nobody had time to make sure the cash flow was there, and promoting it in the days before everybody was on the Internet was a mess.
Our largest event was a summertime trade show/dinner cruise we called "LAN Ahoy". We'd use a big harbor cruise ship and hold an all-day trade show on board, followed by a keynote in an adjacent hotel (while that happened, we'd frantically clear out the trade show gear and load the dinner tables), and then we'd do a 4-hour dinner cruise with about 250 people. The trade show was free, the cruise we charged a little below our cost for.
It was a lot of fun, but the logistics of coordinating a trade show are incredibly difficult. The last time we did it we nearly lost our shirts, even though we filled most of the booth space and sold the dinner tickets, because of the cash flow problems. We had to threaten several vendors with a public shaming in the end to get our last checks (I won't say who they were, but they're _very_ big companies). LAN Ahoy was a nightmare to plan, and it was puny compared to the Expo. I'm amazed and impressed that they kept it going so long and so well.
- -Josh Turiel
Iridium was a huge mistake from almost day one. Cellular technology already had become pervasive, and there are other satellite-based communications systems readily available (albeit just as pricey as iridium was). Essentially, Iridium was designed to fill a market need that really didn't exist (people working in remote places not served by existing cellular), at a price that only a few users could afford.
Unfortunately for Motorola and their partners, the Iridium team had fully drunk of the kool-aid and didn't see their market evaporate even before they were operational. Besides that, Iridium phones suffered from serious technical limitations, and the network that they designed didn't factor in data becoming the killer app for wireless. By 1995 or so it was clear that the Iridium market as envisioned did not exist.
If they could have gone back to the drawing board, it might have been possible to redesign Iridium into something viable, but there was too much financial pressure to get into production, pretty much mainly due to all the money Motorola sunk into the venture. As it was, they scaled back from 77 satellites to 66 due to financial issues.
Sadly, by the time it was in deployment, the marketplace had saturated virtually all the populated earth with cellular technology at a fraction of the cost. The exclusive market for Iridium was pretty much the two Poles and a few desolate places like the Sahara. Ships have alternate means of satellite communications.
Oh well. They'd be really pretty to watch when they come down... Maybe the Geek Cruises people could throw an "Iridium cruise"?
- -Josh Turiel
My friend Rob and I went to Circuit City up in Nashua, NH this afternoon to buy a couple. They were sold out. In fact, every Circuit City within an hour's drive of Nashua was sold out of them - most had been sold in the last day, as far as the sales rep knew! We went onto a backorder list, with 8 more people ahead of us.
/. effect applies to meatspace, too. This is probably the first time that a consumer electronics chain has been slashdotted...
So now we have proof that the
Imagine the faces back at headquarters when they see the weekend sales figures. They'll be so excited, waiting for all the new ISP subscriptions that they'll expect to be getting - I feel kind of sorry for them.
- -Josh Turiel
It's been pretty much established at this point that $800 is roughly the maximum price that the market will bear for the top-of-the-line processor from a given manufacturer in the general computing market. This has the effect of driving down prices on the rest of the processor speeds in the family.
A 1GHz CPU, by itself, is nearly useless for most purposes given the massive I/O bottlenecks we have to deal with. The fastest system buses out there are the CuMine 133 MHz FSB, and the Athlon/Alpha 200 MHz bus (that's really a 100 MHz bus). Memory is a huge constraining factor at these speeds, too, and the ATA-66 drives can just barely keep pace with those needs. When the FSB runs at 400 MHz, with RAM speeds to match, and everyone uses 66 MHz, 64-bit PCI and 4x AGP, then the rest of the system can keep pace. What a 1 GHz processor does in today's platforms is basically run benchmarks faster. There's not going to be a huge impact. To really get into equipment that supports that kind of I/O, you're talking about mainframes and super high-end workstations, not PC's anymore. And the costs rise accordingly.
The impact will be in the downward price pressure across the board - 600 MHz processors will be under $200 soon. Being able to get a lot of bang for a lot less buck is more compelling, I think.
And for the Beowulf trolls out there - for the money it'll cost for a single 1 GHz processor-based PC you'll be able to run a pair of 600's in a cluster, or buy a SMP board with a couple of 650 MHz CuMine's. Now that's cool!
- -Josh Turiel
The next big domain battle is going to be over "whazzzaaaappp!!!".com, anyhow. Look for a big lawsuit between Annheuser-Busch and all the folks who set up variations on the whazzzaaaappp name in multiple languages.
(but imagine the ads!)
- -Josh Turiel
Someone's obviously mastered ASCII painting, and has an agenda it seems to boot...
As far as Jon's article, though, he has a good point. The e-companies are discovering that the key to success is to take the best of the old models and marry them to the new. Remember Amazon, and their intent to be a "virtual company", with no inventories? They gave up on that and have been burning cash to build warehouses and shipping facilities, allowing them to control the process better. The e-tailers who are now branching into catalogs have discovered that to rely on on-line only is to leave money on the table.
The place for e-only commerce is in a small, specialty marketplace that is so focused as to make the Internet the only practical, affordable way to reach your target audience. Thinkgeek and Copyleft are two good examples of specialty businesses that probably couldn't succeed in a traditional catalog or retail world, because the overhead costs would be far too high to justify the limited audience. The classic examples like the hot sauce company that went online and had sales that took off (I forget the company, but this was some time ago) and the Copylefts of the world are the best ones for a purely e-commerce based approach.
In reality, Amazon needs warehouses and customer service reps, the New York Times needs (and can make money from) online newsfeeds, and MicroWarehouse needs to have online ordering from their catalog (the closest postal equivalent to spam I've seen) in order to maximize their revenues. Smart companies like Ingram Micro make it easier for companies to do business in this hybrid world with fulfilment services and private-label direct shipping. Shippers like FedEx and UPS are more valuable too in this new economic model because in many cases they will be the only actual contact the customer has.
In the end, the Internet is changing the way business is done, but the smart companies use the best of the old and combine it with the new to make more money. Money is a Good Thing, especially when you're making it...
- -Josh Turiel
This vote is proof positive that, once in a rare while, in spite of ourselves, people can be trusted to look at an issue and do the Right Thing.
The problem here has boiled down to a question of who to trust with the decisions about what you and/or your children see when using the Internet. Obviously, the best solution would to be to have real, enforcable ratings for web content, but given the distributed and ever-changing nature of the web, that's impossible. So in lieu of ratings, will you trust some anonymous company with a possible agenda of their own to make decisions through their filter as to what you can and can not see on the Internet? Not even factoring in that filters just don't work very well and are child's play to defeat, the answer seems obvious to me. Since filters don't work very well, and ratings are impractical, then your ability to view content should remain free. Whenever we err, we should always err on the side of freedom, choice, and individual responsibility. We owe ourselves that much.
On a related note, at my company I am often asked by my co-workers if they should put filtering software on their computers to protect their kids. My response to them has been this: "You can go ahead and buy filtering software, and there are quite a few options to choose from that are well-supported commercially. But keep in mind that your kids probably know more about the inner workings of your PC than you do, and it's likelier that you'll be blocked than your children will. Your kids probably already know how to beat all the filters out there - you need to address the issue by talking to your kids, tell them what you don't want them doing, and check things like the browser history (I'll show them how to use these if they ask), cookie files, and cache to keep a watch over them and their habits. If they don't do the right thing as you see it, take away their access."
Most children, I think, will satisfy their initial curiosity and move on. Maybe I'm a hopeless optimist, but there's so many useful things to do on the Net and on a PC that I think that most kids will find better uses of their time.
- -Josh Turiel
Linux itself isn't a commercial product. If everything collapses tomorrow, the kernel will still be there, the GNU software will still be there, and an awful lot of stuff that has been either GPL'd or Open Sourced over the last couple of years will still be there.
But think about what the commercialization of Linux has brought us. We have games being ported by more than one company because there are people buying Linux for the desktop. There's major commercial software being ported. Virtually every major brand-name add-in card (video, sound, whatever!) is getting a Linux driver, and in many cases the driver is Open Source, too!
All these riches are not being bestowed upon us because the companies like the way we dress, the way we talk, or because of the Politics Of Linux. They're in it for the money, and they see Linux as a revenue generator, whether now or down the road a ways. All these development resources that have been turned over to us come with a price, friends. The bargain we strike in excahnge for the goodies is the implicit agreement that We, The People, will build Linux into a commercially viable operating system that Joe Schmoe can buy in a store, take home, and install. That's where the development resources are going.
It doesn't matter if you were running Slackware in 1995 and remember hand-installing applications fondly. It doesn't matter if you prefer the "pure" days when you used Linux because it was Free, and Cool. It doesn't even matter how you pronounce it (I've been using it since way back when, and I still pronounce it "Lie-nux",). It's still being pushed in this new direction regardless of what we think or want. How else are you going to get to World Domination?
Keep this in mind whan you speculate as to a Linux without all the commercial backing. The developers will still build things the way you say - but there'll be a heck of a lot fewer of 'em.
I prefer trying to make it the OS for the average luser.
- -Josh Turiel
After all, Intel builds the chips that are used in the vast majority of Linux systems, and the Linux systems are obviously insecure.
Oh yeah, they're used in all the Windows systems too. Never mind.
How stupid can they get?
- -Josh Turiel
Nope. Although it would trigger some gains for Linux, there's a lot more multinationals that are run from the US than the other way around. Companies that standardize on Windows would keep on using it - they wouldn't migrate, they'd smuggle first.
I think that the truly giant companies really don't give a damn what the EU thinks, they'll use their OS of choice anyway. That pressure alone make banning Windows 2000 unworkable.
Smaller and Euro-centric companies might well continue running their existing versions of Windows, or a few might turn to Apple or Linux, or something else - but not many of them.
Remember, the _average_ company could care less about Open Source, Linux, Free Software, or any of that - they just want decent supported software that they can easily find software for, users who know it, and the ability to interoperate easily with other companies. Linux may be technically superior, but it doesn't yet fill all those needed roles for the average shop and I doubt it's ready to start.
I think the more likely result is that Europe becomes a computing backwater.
- -Josh Turiel