Forrester are the same goofbals that claim
Sun Erases Doubts About Its Viability
by becoming another SCO-like pawn in Microsoft's linux war. It's an expensive subscription so it's easier&cheaper to read Cnet's spin on the forrester report instead, which claims "These moves remove doubts about Sun's viability by bolstering Solaris".
Their logic seems to be windows IP will bolster Solaris!?! Wow.
Betcha microsoft or some exec who gets a bonus paid for that report.
Sure there are; but many of the US robotic projects are focused on
military
applications because that's where the money is in the states.
For example, this DARPA initiative on
Dynamic Mobility "--biologically inspired appendages to demonstrate multifunctional, dynamic, energy efficient and autonomous locomotion to enable revolutionary mobility capabilities such as running over multiple terrains, climbing (trees, cliffs, cave walls), jumping and leaping, and manipulating the world with an appendage in tasks such as grasping and digging.
"
This is in contrast to Japan where I think more of the money is in consumer products. Not surprising to see the different focus in robotics.
Thanks for the links. I was going to mention the same thing, but didn't find the article as fast as you.
As the parent pointed out (mod him up), Google's GFS is better than a large raid system in many ways. While a RAID system tolerates the failures of individual disks (which then need to be replaced), Google's GFS _expects_ the failure of most components, including CPUs, memorys, disks, systems, etc -- and in google's case nothing has to be replaced.
Their system is so fault tollerant, Cringly writes: "Now here is the part that sticks in my mind: the fault tolerant nature of the cluster is such that if a machine fails, the other machines simply take over its functions. As a result, whenever a server fails at Google, THEY DO NOTHING. They don't replace the broken machine. They don't remove the broken machine. They don't even turn it off. In an army of drones, it isn't worth the cost of labor to locate and replace the bad machines. Hundreds, maybe thousands of machines lie dead, uncounted among the 10,000 plus.
"
This is far cooler than any RAID from a fault-tollerance point of view.
(apparently since then google went to rack-based systems so it probably detects dead ones so they can replace them easily)
I'm curious what the cost in disk-space of a hotmail account was back when hotmail launched. I wouldn't be surprised if it's comparable to what Google's offering now.
Darn < sign made that second paragraph uninteligible. Should have read
What amazes me are the services that offer <100MB storage. I'm acting as a mini-isp to friends, and with a $50/month dedicated server we're renting, $10/month gets us 10GB of email+web storage.
I've seen Fry's have 200GB drives on sale for $79 before; and I'm sure if you're buying them in units of 10,000 they're even cheaper than that.
What amazes me are the services that offer
I'm acting as a mini-isp to friends, and with a $50/month dedicated server we're renting, $10/month gets us 10GB of email+web storage.
Hard drive capacity has gone up a lot since the time of HotMail - I'm amazed no free email service started offering reasonable disk space earlier.
IMHO his biggest accomplishment was educating Fred Terman - Terman then went on to largely build Silicon Valley by convincing his students Bill and Dave to start HP, and getting Shockley and others to move companies like Varian, Shockley Transistor, Synnex, etc into the stanford business park.
Perhaps not that accurate, but quite inspirational.
Parent wrote: "Anyhow, I think the scrap metal alone is worth more than 1300 pounds!"
Well, considering the it's probably mostly steel, and that Baosteel Group"has purchased 50,000 tons of the scrap steel from "Ground Zero," the ruins of the September 11 terrorist attack, at no more than US$120 each ton"
I guess the scrap metal for the 580 ton thingy should be worth $50-$100 K.
Parent wrote:
"Vibration, however, isn't the biggest hurdle to over come. Since it's likely the media will not be stored in a vacuum, this system will have to compensate for dust and other particles in a much more robust way than the current laser based systems.
"
This article from the Atlantic Monthly has a recommended workaround for the problems of an electron beam for this kind of storage system not being well-behaved outside a vacuum.
More serious is the objection that this scheme would involve putting the film inside a vacuum chamber, for electron beams behave normally only in such a rarefied environment. This difficulty could be avoided by allowing the electron beam to play on one side of a partition, and by pressing the film against the other side, if this partition were such as to allow the electrons to go through perpendicular to its surface, and to prevent them from spreading out sideways. Such partitions, in crude form, could certainly be constructed, and they will hardly hold up the general development.
Too bad the author didn't survive to see this technology work. Guess he was a bit before his time.
This means more that that. It means the backbone of internet operations will legally be able to communicate with the edge of the internet (people's home PC's) because the royalty is paid up.
Linux clients won't be able to talk to the Sun backbone and Linux servers won't be able to talk to the Windows clients.
Microsoft and Sun decided to carve up the pie among the two of them, leaving IBM/Linux out.
Intel isn't in this for "Art for Art's sake". They don't mind if AMD makes processors as 1337 as the old Alpha chip, so long as people spend most of their money on Intel.
It may be a dupe, but there has been a lot more coverage in the major press, so we do have more information today vs. yesterday.
For example:
Interviews where they explicitly say that they wouldn't have done the deal except that it puts pressor on IBM.
That "Where we use their intellectual property, there will be a royalty stream. Where they use ours, there will be a royalty stream back."
that Forrester
somehow thinks this is good for Sun - I bet he thinks the SCO/MSFT partnership's good for SCO too.
It's sad to see Sun turn into just another SCO. Can I get a "+1 Sad" mod?
Parent wrote: "It is interesting how he predicted certain parts of innovations but not others. For example,... but his memex device was supposed to have a whole library on microfilm "
Well, he described his microfilm as being either...
Existing totals could then be read by photocell, and the new total entered by an electron beam.
(Considering they had no LED lasers, this is as close a description to a CD Rom I can think of -- a beam to write and a photocell to read.)
... or...
The whole record on the card may be made by magnetic dots on a steel sheet if desired, instead of dots to be observed optically, following the
Must we always transform to mechanical movements in order to proceed from one electrical phenomenon to another? It is a suggestive thought, but it hardly warrants prediction without losing touch with reality and immediateness.
... and the prediction of the electronic calculator...
Adding is only one operation. To perform arithmetical computation involves also subtraction, multiplication, and division...The advanced arithmetical machines of the future will be electrical in nature, and they will perform at 100 times present speeds, or more.
(Electrical calculators will run 100 times or more the speed of the 1940's mechanical ones almost deserves a funny mod.) But he's definately the most visionary scientist I've ever heard of. Without even knowing about a transistor, he identified most of the important electronic technologies that we use today.
Seeing the great success of his other preditions (calculators, internet, etc) I think this _is_ the future of digital photography.
Also, there's a direct link between Vannevar Bush and HP!
Fred Terman (well described as the Father of Silicon Valley) , the Stanford prof who inspired Hewlett and Packard to start a company in Silicon Valley, was himself a student of Vannvar Bush.
This connection makes it wonderfully poetic to see this invention coming from HP.
Vannevar Bush wrote an excellent article called
As we May Think
in 1945 predicting this invention.
<i>The camera hound of the future wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut. It takes pictures 3 millimeters square, later to be projected or enlarged, which after all involves only a factor of 10 beyond present practice. The lens is of universal focus, down to any distance accommodated by the unaided eye, simply because it is of short focal length. There is a built-in photocell on the walnut such as we now have on at least one camera, which automatically adjusts exposure for a wide range of illumination. There is film in the walnut for a hundred exposures, and the spring for operating its shutter and shifting its film is wound once for all when the film clip is inserted. It produces its result in full color. It may well be stereoscopic, and record with two spaced glass eyes, for striking improvements in stereoscopic technique are just around the corner. </i>
Interestingly, in the same article, he predicted the CD Rom, the Internet, Wikipedia, Color Photography -- well before the first dry cameras or the first computers.
How about the article itself?
on
Why PHBs Fear Linux
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
With all the talk about acronyms being modded up, let's not lose sight of the fact that this was one of the most intresting (from the perspective of open-source-in-the-real-world) articles I've ever read.
I think he pretty identified the primary reason Linux has been slow to catch on in mainstream business.
It's all fun having a bunch of geeks get together and talk about how great Howard Dean is and how c00| Linux is; but we're still very nieve when it comes to educating the decision makers in the world. I'd love to seem some discussion about how to get Linux written up in more business textbooks. I would have thought the RHAT IPO and IBM would have helped this; but wow that article showed that misconsceptions still abound.
Parent wrote: "I expect Solaris10-patent/Linux lawsuits to follow. With the MSFT involvement, I think Sun's the next SCO."
I would hope not; but this seems like an interesting fear. Seems Sun is the last Unix vendor left whose strategy is based on a very large R&D investment in a proprietary Unix; and it is in both their interest and Microsoft's for Sun to protect this investment.
"The reason Sun doesn't open it is because it would immediately be abused, forked and made trivial by the existing monopolistic folks. "
Really? Then why don't you see the existing monopolistic folks bastardizing Python, or Perl, or gcc, or the Linux kernel, or sendmail, or apache, or mysql?
I'm not trying to flame you, I'm genuinely curious what makes Java different in that regard.
Slashdot Mirror
Their logic seems to be windows IP will bolster Solaris!?! Wow.
Betcha microsoft or some exec who gets a bonus paid for that report.
Which is why you should use an encrypted home directory.
Sure it wouldn't be cheaper to just outsource to China or India, than use robots?
For example, this DARPA initiative on Dynamic Mobility "--biologically inspired appendages to demonstrate multifunctional, dynamic, energy efficient and autonomous locomotion to enable revolutionary mobility capabilities such as running over multiple terrains, climbing (trees, cliffs, cave walls), jumping and leaping, and manipulating the world with an appendage in tasks such as grasping and digging. "
This is in contrast to Japan where I think more of the money is in consumer products. Not surprising to see the different focus in robotics.
As the parent pointed out (mod him up), Google's GFS is better than a large raid system in many ways. While a RAID system tolerates the failures of individual disks (which then need to be replaced), Google's GFS _expects_ the failure of most components, including CPUs, memorys, disks, systems, etc -- and in google's case nothing has to be replaced.
Their system is so fault tollerant, Cringly writes: "Now here is the part that sticks in my mind: the fault tolerant nature of the cluster is such that if a machine fails, the other machines simply take over its functions. As a result, whenever a server fails at Google, THEY DO NOTHING. They don't replace the broken machine. They don't remove the broken machine. They don't even turn it off. In an army of drones, it isn't worth the cost of labor to locate and replace the bad machines. Hundreds, maybe thousands of machines lie dead, uncounted among the 10,000 plus. "
This is far cooler than any RAID from a fault-tollerance point of view.
(apparently since then google went to rack-based systems so it probably detects dead ones so they can replace them easily)
I'm curious what the cost in disk-space of a hotmail account was back when hotmail launched. I wouldn't be surprised if it's comparable to what Google's offering now.
What amazes me are the services that offer <100MB storage. I'm acting as a mini-isp to friends, and with a $50/month dedicated server we're renting, $10/month gets us 10GB of email+web storage.
What amazes me are the services that offer I'm acting as a mini-isp to friends, and with a $50/month dedicated server we're renting, $10/month gets us 10GB of email+web storage.
Hard drive capacity has gone up a lot since the time of HotMail - I'm amazed no free email service started offering reasonable disk space earlier.
Perhaps not that accurate, but quite inspirational.
Well, considering the it's probably mostly steel, and that Baosteel Group "has purchased 50,000 tons of the scrap steel from "Ground Zero," the ruins of the September 11 terrorist attack, at no more than US$120 each ton"
I guess the scrap metal for the 580 ton thingy should be worth $50-$100 K.
Wonder if we can /. the counter.
This article from the Atlantic Monthly has a recommended workaround for the problems of an electron beam for this kind of storage system not being well-behaved outside a vacuum.
Too bad the author didn't survive to see this technology work. Guess he was a bit before his time.Pretty cool foresight.
Linux clients won't be able to talk to the Sun backbone and Linux servers won't be able to talk to the Windows clients.
Microsoft and Sun decided to carve up the pie among the two of them, leaving IBM/Linux out.
Intel isn't in this for "Art for Art's sake". They don't mind if AMD makes processors as 1337 as the old Alpha chip, so long as people spend most of their money on Intel.
For example:
Interviews where they explicitly say that they wouldn't have done the deal except that it puts pressor on IBM.
That "Where we use their intellectual property, there will be a royalty stream. Where they use ours, there will be a royalty stream back."
that Forrester somehow thinks this is good for Sun - I bet he thinks the SCO/MSFT partnership's good for SCO too. It's sad to see Sun turn into just another SCO. Can I get a "+1 Sad" mod?
Well, he described his microfilm as being either...
(Considering they had no LED lasers, this is as close a description to a CD Rom I can think of -- a beam to write and a photocell to read.) ... or ...
which describes the hard drive well.Seeing the great success of his other preditions (calculators, internet, etc) I think this _is_ the future of digital photography.
This connection makes it wonderfully poetic to see this invention coming from HP.
Interestingly, in the same article, he predicted the CD Rom, the Internet, Wikipedia, Color Photography -- well before the first dry cameras or the first computers.
I think he pretty identified the primary reason Linux has been slow to catch on in mainstream business.
It's all fun having a bunch of geeks get together and talk about how great Howard Dean is and how c00| Linux is; but we're still very nieve when it comes to educating the decision makers in the world. I'd love to seem some discussion about how to get Linux written up in more business textbooks. I would have thought the RHAT IPO and IBM would have helped this; but wow that article showed that misconsceptions still abound.
I would hope not; but this seems like an interesting fear. Seems Sun is the last Unix vendor left whose strategy is based on a very large R&D investment in a proprietary Unix; and it is in both their interest and Microsoft's for Sun to protect this investment.
Not good for software-patent sanity, open source, etc.
That's a cool mineral.
Really? Then why don't you see the existing monopolistic folks bastardizing Python, or Perl, or gcc, or the Linux kernel, or sendmail, or apache, or mysql?
I'm not trying to flame you, I'm genuinely curious what makes Java different in that regard.