Right now, the killer application is basic e-mail. That is the #1 application for which most people use their computers.
What cripples Linux is that major Internet-Service Providers (ISPs) like AOL do not provide a Linux client through which you can dialup a connection to AOL. Hence, the average consumer will reject a Linux desktop because she simply cannot get e-mail.
It's really that simple. Once all the ISPs provide a dialup client on Linux, then Linux will make a major dent into the desktop market. It is really that simple.
Unfortunately, we have a chicken-egg problem. ISPs will not provide Linux dialup clients because few consumers buy Linux desktops. As well, few consumers buy Linux desktops because they cannot obtain a Linux dialup client for their popular ISPs. And so goes the loop...
Sun's option to purchase shares of SCO is just another sign of Sun's desperation. To understand how desperate Sun might be, we need merely look at the competition.
What kind of competition does Sun have? Consider IBM's p690 and HP's Superdome. Both are in a neck-to-neck race to be #1 on the internationally recognized TPC-C benchmark by the Transaction Processing Council. Both of their scores is about 750,000. Please read "IBM touts own chips over Itanium". By contrast, Sun's best score is about 250,000 (from the TPC website).
As for SPEC performance, the p690 and the Superdome again crush Sun's best machine.
The only thing left for Sun is to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD). Sun is hinting that it will soon slit IBM's jugular vein by hinting that Sun may purchase SCO. After all, SCO claims control over IBM's UNIX patents. Sun is trying to create the fear that future IBM customers may be in expensive legal trouble if they run AIX or Linux because Sun-controlled SCO has terminated its UNIX licensing agreement with IBM.
Do you hear "it"? The bell is tolling. It tolls ominously for Sun.
The SPEC score of 1097 for the 1.45 GHz Power4 applies to only 1 of the 2 cores in the Power4. So, it is fair to linearly extrapolate from 1.45 GHz to 2.0 GHz to estimate floating-point performance. The resulting estimate is about 1500 for a 2.0 GHz PPC 970. This number does not factor into account the Altivec unit as the current compilers do not use it for SPEC2000FP.
The floating-point benchmark (SPEC2000FP) is different from the integer benchmark (SPEC2000INT). Floating-point code tends to scale much closer to linearity than integer code. So, when you increase the clock frequency by 20%, you approximately increase the floating-point performance by 20%. It is a good 1st-order approximation.
The G5 by Apple is really a workstation but has been mis-labeled a "PC". The floating-point performance of the G5 crushes any workstation by Sun. In fact, the heart of the G5 is a Power4 server-based microprocessor. At "SPEC", you can easily find the performance of a Power4 @ 1.45 GHz. Its SPEC2000 rating for floating point is 1097. When you scale that to the 2.0 GHz processor in the G5, you conclude that it has a SPEC score of about 1500.
Apple has just created a new market for itself among the hardcore engineers who use workstations for numerical simulations like HSPICE, etc. Steve Jobs lucked out -- again.
By the way, the bell tolls. It tolls ominously for Sun Microsystems.
That China is anywhere near the USA in critical space technology ought to scare
most people. We're not dealing with equivalent nations. One nation, the USA,
is a bastion of democracy and human rights. The government actively enforces
civil and criminal laws that safeguard our civil rights. The other nation, China,
is a bastion of fascism and savage barbarism. Chinese soldiers routinely
torture and kill Tibetan nuns. Chinese doctors routinely harvest organs
from victims who are still alive. Please read "
Kill and cull: China rejects doctor's testimony". Indeed, the Chinese
penchant for deceit and hypocrisy are directly responsible for spreading
sudden-acute-respiratory syndrome (SARS) to the rest of the world. If the Chinese
had not covered up the SARS epidemic, then we might have stopped the infection
before it spread to its Canadian victims.
There's no equivalence. We Americans should try to continue "winning" the space
race against the Chinese.
Unfortunately, there are apologists for China. They are really slick. Please read
"Us (US) versus
Them". The apologists talk about a nation as though it is a person. They
present China and the USA as two people. Then, the apologists try to evoke the use
of social etiquette between two people. "We should welcome them to the [space
technology] club with open arms." is equivalent to "Billy is getting better at baseball. Let's
invite Billy to join our game."
Yet, China is not a person. It is a brutal dictatorship, and we should never
be lulled into using person-to-person social etiquette to deal with a brutal
dictatorship. We should do everything that we can to defeat China both in outer space
and inner space.
Note that most of the apologists for China are culturally Chinese. Many of them proceed to becoming
spies for China. Please read " Two
Men Arrested for Planning to Smuggle High-Tech Encryption Devices to China". The majority
of people who steal American military/space technology to give to Beijing are Chinese
from Taiwan (source: Wall Street Journal). There is no parallel
for this kind of bizarre behavior.
By contrast, when the Soviet Union was a brutal empires, Russian
immigrants who fled to the USA were grateful to us Americans. The vast majority
of the Russian immigrants wanted us Americans to defeat the Soviet Union. The
Russians viewed the USA as the superior nation with values that should be spread
to the rest of the world.
The ethnic Chinese view the USA as being equivalent to China. According to the
ethnic Chinese, the USA and China should have the same military/space technology --
"just to be fair".
Before anyone says that Japan is "ahead" of the USA again, let me quell any doubts about the superiority of American computer technology. The technology to build a HPC (high-performance computing) computer is identical to the technology to build a commercial computer. American companies have been increasingly focused on building commercial computers because that is where the profits are -- especially after the end of the cold war.
The NEC Earth Simulator is really just a different optimization point in the computer-design space. Huge amounts of bandwidth to memory and specialized vector-processing units tied to the processor core. The VLSI technology that NEC used to build these system is readily employed by Intel and IBM. So, if the latter companies wanted to build the world's fastest HPC computer, they could.
The 21st century is not PaxAsia. It is PaxAmericana. The hordes of immigrants flooding into this country to get the hell out of Asia should have been a big hint.
The new Apple PC is far more than just a PC. It is a workstation in its own right and outperforms the workstations built by Sun. The new Apple PC is both (much) faster and (much) cheaper than a Sun workstation.
Just look at the specs of the new Apple PC. 1.6 GHz and only $1999. It also does UNIX and Linux.
Steve Jobs lucked out -- again. There will a surge of demand for this machine from engineers, moving beyond the traditional Apple core users (i. e. educational institutions, graphic artists, etc.). Apple will supplant both Sun and HP as the new workstation company of Silicon Valley.
By the way, the bell tolls. It tolls ominously for Sun.
We need to clearly separate (1) our support for Linux and open-source
programs and (2) our distaste for stealing intellectual property.
SCO has clearly found damning evidence that some code in Linux
has been stolen. We must support SCO's efforts in obtaining proper
royalties (not monopolistic royalties) for the intellectual
property that SCO owns.
After the pro-Linux folks read the article,
"Huawei
admits to a little copying", most of them support Cisco and
condemn the Chinese who deliberately stole intellectual property (IP)
from Cisco. The Chinese culprit literally copied the computer
code verbatim from the Cisco diskette.
So, if we condemn the Chinese in the aforementioned article, we
must condemn whoever stole SCO's Unix IP.
Does supporting SCO mean that we put a stake into the heart of Linux?
Of course, not. The courts have repeatedly ruled that companies are
permitted to build clean-room clones. AMD's Athlon is a good
example.
We merely delete the stolen code from Linux and write compatible
code to replace. We can get some Ph.D. student from Carnegie Mellon
University to write the code. It really is not difficult.
Then, we trace the stolen code back to the person who stole it, and
we send her to prison. We then strengthen the open-source development
process by establishing a certification process by which we certify
every piece of open-source code, guaranteeing that it is original
IP. The open-source development process right now is broken because
it is just too easy for someone to use stolen code and to submit it
as original IP. No one is really checking the code's authenticity.
Poor Linus is just too overloaded as the sole proprietor of Linux.
What is all the fuss? IBM will be fined. A rogue programmer goes
to prison. Linux? Well, it will survive and prosper.
The corporate cultures of Oracle and PeopleSoft couldn't be
farther apart, according to some former employees. Oracle
is a haven for aggressive personalities who thrive on
intense competition. To motivate the sales staff, managers
have posted an individual's progress in achieving his or her
sales goals on the wall during quarterly meetings. The
competitive atmosphere leads to routine reorganizations.
By contrast, PeopleSoft, founded by a Cornell University
graduate, Dave Duffield, projects a Hewlett Packard-like
image of being more collegial. The sales staff often relies
on customer recommedations to complete a deal. To some
extent, this was necessary because the applications market
had already been well established by Oracle and SAP by the
time PeopleSoft emerged.
Instead of looking at this acquisition from a purely rational, coldly analytical perspective, we should and must begin to look at the quality of the lives of the employees. I would prefer to work for an organization like PeopleSoft. It is an organization that cares.
Oracle is cut from the same cloth as Sun, Siebel, and Cisco. Brutal, cut-throat, survival of the fittest. Increasingly, with the influx of H-1B's and "free" trade, American companies are becoming the ruthless of ogres of the early part of the 20th century. Most of my American colleagues do not want an America where employees are savaged. We gladly accept a small reduction of economic expansion in exchange for a kindler and gentler American workplace and society.
It is this kindler and gentler America that has drawn tens of millions of immigrants to this country.
We shareholders should oppose this hostile takeover and send Larry Ellison back to the Orient that he so admires.
The article by "The Economist"
is best understood in the context of
another important news article: "Sun
beefs up low-end servers" by C|Net. Below is the
key quote from the latter article.
Hardwarewise, Sun's low-end servers are virtually identical
to the sort of thing the Dells of the world sell. The systems,
in fact, come from the same contract manufacturers in Asia,
McNealy noted.
Linux on x86 or Itanium is an excellent value proposition for the
customer but is a horrible value proposition for Sun Microsystems.
It neither designs nor builds the x86 servers. A sweatshop in Taiwan
designs and builds them. The sweatshop then badges the server as
"Sun" or "Dell" and ships it to Sun Microsystems or Dell, respectively.
Little profits can be had. After all, Linux itself is free.
The only way to succeed in this model of business is to bring
your company's cost structure down. Dell has been highly successful
in running a bare-bones operation. Dell has the lowest-cost structure
in the computer systems industry. Tiny amount of R & D.
By contrast, Sun has a high-cost structure. Sun will reap no profits
from selling Linux atop x86 or Itanium. Sun cannot price its x86 servers below those of
Dell; doing so would be financial suicide.
This is the primary motivation for selling Solaris on x86. Solaris
generates some profits. Even better, Solaris will lock the customer into
Sun's service and support for even more profits. Solaris will also
favor Sun's software products just like Windows favors Microsoft's
software product.
In the long run, Sun is deadmeat. The fact that its UltraSPARC is horribly slow,
in comparison to the Itanium or Pentium 4 is just another nail in the
coffin of Sun. What will happen to Sun's customers for Sun's high end
servers when those customers verify that Oracle applications run faster on Linux atop x86 than
the same applications on Solaris atop UltraSPARC-powered servers?
We should not kid ourselves here. The primary reason that the
Koreans use the ID number to identify everyone in Korea is to
quickly and efficiently force non-Koreans out of the country.
Please read "Once
shunned, Chinese in Korea courted again".
Even to this day, the Koreans have a racist attitude against
non-Koreans. Most damning
is the discriminatory laws that the Koreans have used against non-Koreans.
The government of Korea gives preferential treatment
to ethnic Koreans seeking Korean citizenship, and if you cannot prove
that you are ethnically Korean, then you must obtain a personal
guarantee from a high-ranking government official. Even more shocking,
for more than 50 years, non-Koreans were prohibited from owning
businesses. The Koreans "successfully" drove out most of the
Chinese, reducing their number from 150,000 to 20,000.
The Itanium system does 660,000 transactions per minute on the TPC-C benchmark. The UltraSPARC system does 67,000 transactions per minute. So, yes, the Itanium is about 1 order of magnitude faster than the UltraSPARC. The results can be found at the "Transaction Processing Council".
The Sun system uses the UltraSPARC II. Since Sun has refused to disclose the TPC-C score for the UltraSPARC III, we can only conclude that the UltraSPARC III does approximately as well as the UltraSPARC II.
According to "SPEC", the Itanium 2 trounces the UltraSPARC III in performance and beats it by a wide margin. According to the "Transaction Processing Council", the Itanium 2 beats the UltraSPARC III by a wide margin on the most important commercial benchmark: TPC-C. An Itanium-powered server has close to the world record: 660,000 transactions per minute.
The problem that Intel is experiencing is not unique. Within the last 5 years, Sun Microsystems has been experiencing significant problems with its own processors. Please read "Sun suffers UltraSparc II cache crash headache".
In terms of reliability, the Itanium II is no worse than the UltraSPARC series of chips. Both Itanium and UltraSPARC face the daunting task of debugging 100+ million transistors. Ensuring that the fabricated chip is bug free is virtually impossible. So, both companies have substantial errata sheets.
The reason that Intel chips "appear" to be more error prone than other companies' chips is that Intel chips are extremely popular. So, people tend to pay far more attention to flaws in Intel chips than they do to flaws in other comapanies' chips. However, since so many people pay attention to the flaws in Intel chips, they are likely to have less bugs than other chips. The economies of scale that, say, the Pentium 4 enjoys means that if the Pentium 4 does have a bug, then it will likely be found by someone among the gazillion users. Then, Intel will fix the problem. Economies of scale help to lower the cost of a product but also help to lower the number of bugs.
In any event, the performance of the Itanium II is at least 1 order of magnitude greater than the UltraSPARC III and (soon) IV. That performance difference is due to serious architectural mistakes in the UltraSPARC family of processors.
Korea: Culprit behind DRAM Price Fixing
on
DRAM Price Fixing
·
· Score: 1
The Korean government and, in general, Korean society is the culprit
behind the price fixing. The Korean government has long subsidized
the electronics businesses of Samsung, Hyundai, and LG Semicon. Using
these subsidies, the Korean companies sold their DRAM memory chips at
a loss and drove non-Korean businesses out of the market. The Koreans
own 50% of the market for DRAM chips. Once the competitors
are gone, the Koreans start raising prices on the memory chips.
Please read "Koreans
Hit U.S. Hynix Decision". The egregiousness of the Korean government's
subsidies is so severe that the Americans and the Europeans are slapping
huge tariffs on Hynix DRAM memory chips.
Furthermoe, the Koreans also viciously attempt to prevent non-Koreans from
buying Korean businesses. Please read "Micron/Hynix
Deal Dead".
The irony about the xenophobic Korean duplicity is that we Westerners
actually
subsidize the Koreans to destroy our own industries. Back in 1997,
the Korean government subsidizing Korean firms to destroy Western
competitors nearly bankrupted the Korean treasury. The kindhearted
but naive Americans actually supported the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) to give $19 billion to the Korean
government to tie it over until the end of the 1997 Asian financial
crisis.
What we Westerners should have done was to refuse to give any financial
aid to Korea. The Korean government would have then defaulted on
its financial obligations. This default would have indirectly
bankrupted many Korean companies. Then, companies like IBM, GM,
Ford, Micron, etc. could have easily gone into Korea and forcibly
bought companies like Samsung, Hyundai, Kia, etc.
Indeed, the kindness and compassion of Americans -- and
Westerners, in general -- far exceeds that of the Koreans
and their ilk. The health care system of the USA has
produced medicines that are being used to treat Chinese afflicted with an illness
fostered/created by other Chinese. Read "Sales of.S. Company's Drug Rise as Chinese Try It Against SARS". Do you see an irony here?
Getting back to the original point, read "No
No Need to Be Jealous of Korea: the American Way" and
"Adoption Rate by Americans of Koreans: Some Stats".
That the Koreans supposedly surpass us Americans in broadband usage
is not an indication of how Koreans are better than us. We
often label the Koreans and Chinese as smarter and harder working
than the Americans. However, we need to look at the whole picture.
We Americans have more kindness and compassion than the Koreans.
A concrete, impossible-to-refute example is the fact that
more than 50% of Korean orphans are adopted by Westerners. Most
of them are Americans. Koreans simply do not care about orphans. The cruelty in Korean society is really amazing.
The only possible justification for concern about the broadband
issue in the USA is that the Canadians are ahead of us Americans
in broadband usage. Comparing Canadians and Americans is fair.
Both group are, after all, Westerners. Canadians have the same
degree of kindness and compassion that Americans have.
Read the article
"Conspiracy?" further
down in this discussion forum. Someone
posed the question of whether the Chinese
attempted to weaponize a common coronavirus. Another
person observed that a group of Chinese are trying
to patent the SARS virus in Hong Kong.
Did the Chinese deliberately create a deadly virus and then attempt to financially benefit off of it by patenting the virus?
Americans have adopted more than 100,000 South Korean orphans.
The website for the
"State Department",
notes that Americans adopt about 2000 South Korean orphans per year.
The kindness and compassion of Westerners is far greater than that
shown by the Internet-connected Koreans toward Korean orphans. The
current rate of adoption of such orphans declined after 1990. This
decline is due to the fact that the Koreans (in Internet-connected
South Korea) tried to slow down the rate of adoptions. They, and
especially the Korean government, were extremely embarrassed by media
coverage of the indisputable
fact that the Americans show more love and compassion for
Korean orphans than the Internet-connected Koreans themselves.
The Koreans simply do not care about orphans.
There is no need to be jealous of South Korea. The New York Times article is likely accurate in describing the degree to which the Internet has become entrenched in South Korean society. The article, however, also hints that the Internet is starting to create social problems. The young generation of South Koreans are becoming addicted to the Internet and are forgoing human contact in favor of Internet access.
There is one important thing that the Times article does not mention. Namely, the majority of the Koreans prefer to get the hell out of Internet-connected South Korea and into America. Look at the huge Korean immigrant communities in the USA. The USA must have something that is missing in Korea.
What is the missing element? It is kindness and compassion. The Internet simply cannot create kindness and compassion. The USA has an advantage in this area because we foster it in our youngsters by sending them to the boy scouts, the girl scouts, etc. We encourage volunteerism. Heck, we've got the Peace Corps.
The Korean boy spends an extra 5 hours per day on the Internet, isolated from the rest of humanity. The American boy spends an extra 5 hours on volunteerism, on dealing with flesh-n-blood human beings, etc. The Koreans laugh and snicker at how "stupid" that American boy is in high school. They laugh at how "low" his mathematics score is. Yet, that American boy knows how to build a nation of compassion, into which tens of thousands want to emigrate. Few, if any Americans, want to emigrate to Korea.
To quantify the level of cruelty in Korea, we note that more than 50% of Korean orphans in Korean orphanages are adopted by Westerners. Most of those Westerners who adopt Korean orphans are Americans. Us "stupid" Americans. Those "smart" Koreans just do not care about orphans.
Sure. We Americans do need to build our technology. We need to work on increasing the scientific and mathematical talent of our youngsters. However, let's remember to maintain our strengths. One of them is kindness and compassion, which we actively foster.
To really understand how powerful the PowerPC 970 is, we should build two software emulators that run on the PowerPC 970. The first is an emulator for the Intel x86. The second is an emulator for the SPARC instruction set architecture. The emulator should do binary recompilation on the fly.
The performance of the PowerPC 970 suggests that the x86 emulator would be equivalent to the Pentium 4 running at 2 GHz. The SPARC emulator would be equivalent to the UltraSPARC IV running at 1.5 GHz.
The business of Sun Microsystems has 2.5 important components that
its competitors might value. First, Sun has Java. Companies like
HP, IBM, etc. want to place Java under the control of a standards
committee so that no single company controls Java.
The second component is the high-end server business. The servers
are reasonably designed and could give any company like Dell,
which does not have a significant server presence, an instant
entry into the market. Sun's high-end servers do not have good
performance, but that that has nothing to do with its server
design. The problem has been the UltraSPARC III, IV, and
eventually V.
The 0.5th component is the perpetual license to the SCO
Unix source code. The only company which would benefit from
possession of this license is IBM.
Sun has other components of its business, but they are essentially
worthless. First and foremost is the UltraSPARC development team.
It basically destroyed the UltraSPARC's future by designing a
processor that ranks among the worst in performance for the last 5
years. Further, the disk storage business is going nowhere.
What is likely to happen is the following. Dell and IBM make
a joint bid for Sun. Once they own the company, they will spin off
the worthless parts of the business, or, like HP, they will simply
fire the nonessential people.
Then, Dell and IBM will partition Sun's business units. Dell will acquire Sun's server business and will make
some minor modifications to the processor boards in the highend
servers in order to replace the UltraSPARC chips with Itanium 2's.
IBM will acquire the Sun's Java business and will immediately place
Java under the control of a standard's committee. Further, IBM
will acquire Sun's perpetual license to the SCO Unix source code.
None of these useful components of Sun's business has any value to
Apple. So, Apple would not be a buyer.
Internet Thwarted Chinese Coverup of SARS
on
SARS and the Internet
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The epidemic of sudden acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) highlights
a key characteristic of Chinese culture. If you have a problem,
do not discuss it. If you have a serious problem, aggressively
hide it. This Chinese attempt to cover up an epidemic has caused it
to spread to all corners of the world.
Western technology has successfully fought the Chinese cover up.
The Internet and the blinding speed with which it transmits information
has effectively thwarted all attempts by the Chinese to cover up
their problem. In fact, here is a sampling of the information about
SARS that is readily available from the Internet.
15 years ago, if an epidemic like SARS had erupted, I would have had a much
harder time in finding information describing its origin and its symptoms.
Now, thanks to the Internet, I know that the Chinese in Southern China
"helped" to develop this disease by sleeping with farm animals. The virus
crossed the species barrier from, probably, a pig into humans. The
Chinese then covered up the problem and, thus, helped to spread it to
the rest of the world. According to the latest reports, the SARS
virus will now become a permanent part of this world.
The unemployment rate for the overall economy is
about 6%. The unemployment rate for engineers is around 7%. The unemployment rate in Silicon Valley is around 8%.
So, yes, the engineering grunts are having a hard time. Read "Will code for food" by C|Net. The CEO of Google and the CIO of FedEx are living incredibly well on their million-dollar salaries, but the grunt American engineer is not doing well at all. There's mortgage payments, clothes for the kids, insurance bills, etc. The high-tech sector of the overall American economy is going through its worst recession in almost 3 decades.
The grunt workers, who bore the brunt of the layoffs, at the bottom of the company hierarchy are likely to have a far different perspective of the bust than the million-dollar-salaried CEO of Google and the million-dollar-salaried CIO of FedEX. The bust can come and go, yet the CEO and the CIO shall live well.
By contrast, the grunt workers, of whom most are Americans, will need to scramble for the next job. In this climate, the next job does not appear for more than a year. When a potential job does arise, the grunt worker will need to fend off droves of H-1B workers.
But then all that big-bang innovation will make up for the months of unemployment....
Slashdot Mirror
What cripples Linux is that major Internet-Service Providers (ISPs) like AOL do not provide a Linux client through which you can dialup a connection to AOL. Hence, the average consumer will reject a Linux desktop because she simply cannot get e-mail.
It's really that simple. Once all the ISPs provide a dialup client on Linux, then Linux will make a major dent into the desktop market. It is really that simple.
Unfortunately, we have a chicken-egg problem. ISPs will not provide Linux dialup clients because few consumers buy Linux desktops. As well, few consumers buy Linux desktops because they cannot obtain a Linux dialup client for their popular ISPs. And so goes the loop ...
What kind of competition does Sun have? Consider IBM's p690 and HP's Superdome. Both are in a neck-to-neck race to be #1 on the internationally recognized TPC-C benchmark by the Transaction Processing Council. Both of their scores is about 750,000. Please read "IBM touts own chips over Itanium". By contrast, Sun's best score is about 250,000 (from the TPC website).
As for SPEC performance, the p690 and the Superdome again crush Sun's best machine.
The only thing left for Sun is to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD). Sun is hinting that it will soon slit IBM's jugular vein by hinting that Sun may purchase SCO. After all, SCO claims control over IBM's UNIX patents. Sun is trying to create the fear that future IBM customers may be in expensive legal trouble if they run AIX or Linux because Sun-controlled SCO has terminated its UNIX licensing agreement with IBM.
Do you hear "it"? The bell is tolling. It tolls ominously for Sun.
The SPEC score of 1097 for the 1.45 GHz Power4 applies to only 1 of the 2 cores in the Power4. So, it is fair to linearly extrapolate from 1.45 GHz to 2.0 GHz to estimate floating-point performance. The resulting estimate is about 1500 for a 2.0 GHz PPC 970. This number does not factor into account the Altivec unit as the current compilers do not use it for SPEC2000FP.
The floating-point benchmark (SPEC2000FP) is different from the integer benchmark (SPEC2000INT). Floating-point code tends to scale much closer to linearity than integer code. So, when you increase the clock frequency by 20%, you approximately increase the floating-point performance by 20%. It is a good 1st-order approximation.
Apple has just created a new market for itself among the hardcore engineers who use workstations for numerical simulations like HSPICE, etc. Steve Jobs lucked out -- again.
By the way, the bell tolls. It tolls ominously for Sun Microsystems.
There's no equivalence. We Americans should try to continue "winning" the space race against the Chinese.
Unfortunately, there are apologists for China. They are really slick. Please read "Us (US) versus Them". The apologists talk about a nation as though it is a person. They present China and the USA as two people. Then, the apologists try to evoke the use of social etiquette between two people. "We should welcome them to the [space technology] club with open arms." is equivalent to "Billy is getting better at baseball. Let's invite Billy to join our game."
Yet, China is not a person. It is a brutal dictatorship, and we should never be lulled into using person-to-person social etiquette to deal with a brutal dictatorship. We should do everything that we can to defeat China both in outer space and inner space.
Note that most of the apologists for China are culturally Chinese. Many of them proceed to becoming spies for China. Please read " Two Men Arrested for Planning to Smuggle High-Tech Encryption Devices to China". The majority of people who steal American military/space technology to give to Beijing are Chinese from Taiwan (source: Wall Street Journal). There is no parallel for this kind of bizarre behavior.
By contrast, when the Soviet Union was a brutal empires, Russian immigrants who fled to the USA were grateful to us Americans. The vast majority of the Russian immigrants wanted us Americans to defeat the Soviet Union. The Russians viewed the USA as the superior nation with values that should be spread to the rest of the world.
The ethnic Chinese view the USA as being equivalent to China. According to the ethnic Chinese, the USA and China should have the same military/space technology -- "just to be fair".
The NEC Earth Simulator is really just a different optimization point in the computer-design space. Huge amounts of bandwidth to memory and specialized vector-processing units tied to the processor core. The VLSI technology that NEC used to build these system is readily employed by Intel and IBM. So, if the latter companies wanted to build the world's fastest HPC computer, they could.
The 21st century is not PaxAsia. It is PaxAmericana. The hordes of immigrants flooding into this country to get the hell out of Asia should have been a big hint.
The new Apple PC is far more than just a PC. It is a workstation in its own right and outperforms the workstations built by Sun. The new Apple PC is both (much) faster and (much) cheaper than a Sun workstation.
Just look at the specs of the new Apple PC. 1.6 GHz and only $1999. It also does UNIX and Linux. Steve Jobs lucked out -- again. There will a surge of demand for this machine from engineers, moving beyond the traditional Apple core users (i. e. educational institutions, graphic artists, etc.). Apple will supplant both Sun and HP as the new workstation company of Silicon Valley.
By the way, the bell tolls. It tolls ominously for Sun.
After the pro-Linux folks read the article, "Huawei admits to a little copying", most of them support Cisco and condemn the Chinese who deliberately stole intellectual property (IP) from Cisco. The Chinese culprit literally copied the computer code verbatim from the Cisco diskette. So, if we condemn the Chinese in the aforementioned article, we must condemn whoever stole SCO's Unix IP.
Does supporting SCO mean that we put a stake into the heart of Linux? Of course, not. The courts have repeatedly ruled that companies are permitted to build clean-room clones. AMD's Athlon is a good example.
We merely delete the stolen code from Linux and write compatible code to replace. We can get some Ph.D. student from Carnegie Mellon University to write the code. It really is not difficult.
Then, we trace the stolen code back to the person who stole it, and we send her to prison. We then strengthen the open-source development process by establishing a certification process by which we certify every piece of open-source code, guaranteeing that it is original IP. The open-source development process right now is broken because it is just too easy for someone to use stolen code and to submit it as original IP. No one is really checking the code's authenticity. Poor Linus is just too overloaded as the sole proprietor of Linux.
What is all the fuss? IBM will be fined. A rogue programmer goes to prison. Linux? Well, it will survive and prosper.
Instead of looking at this acquisition from a purely rational, coldly analytical perspective, we should and must begin to look at the quality of the lives of the employees. I would prefer to work for an organization like PeopleSoft. It is an organization that cares.
Oracle is cut from the same cloth as Sun, Siebel, and Cisco. Brutal, cut-throat, survival of the fittest. Increasingly, with the influx of H-1B's and "free" trade, American companies are becoming the ruthless of ogres of the early part of the 20th century. Most of my American colleagues do not want an America where employees are savaged. We gladly accept a small reduction of economic expansion in exchange for a kindler and gentler American workplace and society.
It is this kindler and gentler America that has drawn tens of millions of immigrants to this country.
We shareholders should oppose this hostile takeover and send Larry Ellison back to the Orient that he so admires.
Linux on x86 or Itanium is an excellent value proposition for the customer but is a horrible value proposition for Sun Microsystems. It neither designs nor builds the x86 servers. A sweatshop in Taiwan designs and builds them. The sweatshop then badges the server as "Sun" or "Dell" and ships it to Sun Microsystems or Dell, respectively. Little profits can be had. After all, Linux itself is free.
The only way to succeed in this model of business is to bring your company's cost structure down. Dell has been highly successful in running a bare-bones operation. Dell has the lowest-cost structure in the computer systems industry. Tiny amount of R & D.
By contrast, Sun has a high-cost structure. Sun will reap no profits from selling Linux atop x86 or Itanium. Sun cannot price its x86 servers below those of Dell; doing so would be financial suicide.
This is the primary motivation for selling Solaris on x86. Solaris generates some profits. Even better, Solaris will lock the customer into Sun's service and support for even more profits. Solaris will also favor Sun's software products just like Windows favors Microsoft's software product.
In the long run, Sun is deadmeat. The fact that its UltraSPARC is horribly slow, in comparison to the Itanium or Pentium 4 is just another nail in the coffin of Sun. What will happen to Sun's customers for Sun's high end servers when those customers verify that Oracle applications run faster on Linux atop x86 than the same applications on Solaris atop UltraSPARC-powered servers?
Please read "Once shunned, Chinese in Korea courted again". Even to this day, the Koreans have a racist attitude against non-Koreans. Most damning is the discriminatory laws that the Koreans have used against non-Koreans. The government of Korea gives preferential treatment to ethnic Koreans seeking Korean citizenship, and if you cannot prove that you are ethnically Korean, then you must obtain a personal guarantee from a high-ranking government official. Even more shocking, for more than 50 years, non-Koreans were prohibited from owning businesses. The Koreans "successfully" drove out most of the Chinese, reducing their number from 150,000 to 20,000.
The Sun system uses the UltraSPARC II. Since Sun has refused to disclose the TPC-C score for the UltraSPARC III, we can only conclude that the UltraSPARC III does approximately as well as the UltraSPARC II.
According to "SPEC", the Itanium 2 trounces the UltraSPARC III in performance and beats it by a wide margin. According to the "Transaction Processing Council", the Itanium 2 beats the UltraSPARC III by a wide margin on the most important commercial benchmark: TPC-C. An Itanium-powered server has close to the world record: 660,000 transactions per minute.
In terms of reliability, the Itanium II is no worse than the UltraSPARC series of chips. Both Itanium and UltraSPARC face the daunting task of debugging 100+ million transistors. Ensuring that the fabricated chip is bug free is virtually impossible. So, both companies have substantial errata sheets.
The reason that Intel chips "appear" to be more error prone than other companies' chips is that Intel chips are extremely popular. So, people tend to pay far more attention to flaws in Intel chips than they do to flaws in other comapanies' chips. However, since so many people pay attention to the flaws in Intel chips, they are likely to have less bugs than other chips. The economies of scale that, say, the Pentium 4 enjoys means that if the Pentium 4 does have a bug, then it will likely be found by someone among the gazillion users. Then, Intel will fix the problem. Economies of scale help to lower the cost of a product but also help to lower the number of bugs.
In any event, the performance of the Itanium II is at least 1 order of magnitude greater than the UltraSPARC III and (soon) IV. That performance difference is due to serious architectural mistakes in the UltraSPARC family of processors.
Furthermoe, the Koreans also viciously attempt to prevent non-Koreans from buying Korean businesses. Please read "Micron/Hynix Deal Dead".
The irony about the xenophobic Korean duplicity is that we Westerners actually subsidize the Koreans to destroy our own industries. Back in 1997, the Korean government subsidizing Korean firms to destroy Western competitors nearly bankrupted the Korean treasury. The kindhearted but naive Americans actually supported the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to give $19 billion to the Korean government to tie it over until the end of the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
What we Westerners should have done was to refuse to give any financial aid to Korea. The Korean government would have then defaulted on its financial obligations. This default would have indirectly bankrupted many Korean companies. Then, companies like IBM, GM, Ford, Micron, etc. could have easily gone into Korea and forcibly bought companies like Samsung, Hyundai, Kia, etc.
Getting back to the original point, read "No No Need to Be Jealous of Korea: the American Way" and "Adoption Rate by Americans of Koreans: Some Stats". That the Koreans supposedly surpass us Americans in broadband usage is not an indication of how Koreans are better than us. We often label the Koreans and Chinese as smarter and harder working than the Americans. However, we need to look at the whole picture. We Americans have more kindness and compassion than the Koreans. A concrete, impossible-to-refute example is the fact that more than 50% of Korean orphans are adopted by Westerners. Most of them are Americans. Koreans simply do not care about orphans. The cruelty in Korean society is really amazing.
The only possible justification for concern about the broadband issue in the USA is that the Canadians are ahead of us Americans in broadband usage. Comparing Canadians and Americans is fair. Both group are, after all, Westerners. Canadians have the same degree of kindness and compassion that Americans have.
Did the Chinese deliberately create a deadly virus and then attempt to financially benefit off of it by patenting the virus?
Americans have adopted more than 100,000 South Korean orphans.
The website for the "State Department", notes that Americans adopt about 2000 South Korean orphans per year.
The kindness and compassion of Westerners is far greater than that shown by the Internet-connected Koreans toward Korean orphans. The current rate of adoption of such orphans declined after 1990. This decline is due to the fact that the Koreans (in Internet-connected South Korea) tried to slow down the rate of adoptions. They, and especially the Korean government, were extremely embarrassed by media coverage of the indisputable fact that the Americans show more love and compassion for Korean orphans than the Internet-connected Koreans themselves. The Koreans simply do not care about orphans.
There is one important thing that the Times article does not mention. Namely, the majority of the Koreans prefer to get the hell out of Internet-connected South Korea and into America. Look at the huge Korean immigrant communities in the USA. The USA must have something that is missing in Korea.
What is the missing element? It is kindness and compassion. The Internet simply cannot create kindness and compassion. The USA has an advantage in this area because we foster it in our youngsters by sending them to the boy scouts, the girl scouts, etc. We encourage volunteerism. Heck, we've got the Peace Corps.
The Korean boy spends an extra 5 hours per day on the Internet, isolated from the rest of humanity. The American boy spends an extra 5 hours on volunteerism, on dealing with flesh-n-blood human beings, etc. The Koreans laugh and snicker at how "stupid" that American boy is in high school. They laugh at how "low" his mathematics score is. Yet, that American boy knows how to build a nation of compassion, into which tens of thousands want to emigrate. Few, if any Americans, want to emigrate to Korea.
To quantify the level of cruelty in Korea, we note that more than 50% of Korean orphans in Korean orphanages are adopted by Westerners. Most of those Westerners who adopt Korean orphans are Americans. Us "stupid" Americans. Those "smart" Koreans just do not care about orphans.
Sure. We Americans do need to build our technology. We need to work on increasing the scientific and mathematical talent of our youngsters. However, let's remember to maintain our strengths. One of them is kindness and compassion, which we actively foster.
The performance of the PowerPC 970 suggests that the x86 emulator would be equivalent to the Pentium 4 running at 2 GHz. The SPARC emulator would be equivalent to the UltraSPARC IV running at 1.5 GHz.
The second component is the high-end server business. The servers are reasonably designed and could give any company like Dell, which does not have a significant server presence, an instant entry into the market. Sun's high-end servers do not have good performance, but that that has nothing to do with its server design. The problem has been the UltraSPARC III, IV, and eventually V.
The 0.5th component is the perpetual license to the SCO Unix source code. The only company which would benefit from possession of this license is IBM.
Sun has other components of its business, but they are essentially worthless. First and foremost is the UltraSPARC development team. It basically destroyed the UltraSPARC's future by designing a processor that ranks among the worst in performance for the last 5 years. Further, the disk storage business is going nowhere.
What is likely to happen is the following. Dell and IBM make a joint bid for Sun. Once they own the company, they will spin off the worthless parts of the business, or, like HP, they will simply fire the nonessential people.
Then, Dell and IBM will partition Sun's business units. Dell will acquire Sun's server business and will make some minor modifications to the processor boards in the highend servers in order to replace the UltraSPARC chips with Itanium 2's. IBM will acquire the Sun's Java business and will immediately place Java under the control of a standard's committee. Further, IBM will acquire Sun's perpetual license to the SCO Unix source code.
None of these useful components of Sun's business has any value to Apple. So, Apple would not be a buyer.
Western technology has successfully fought the Chinese cover up. The Internet and the blinding speed with which it transmits information has effectively thwarted all attempts by the Chinese to cover up their problem. In fact, here is a sampling of the information about SARS that is readily available from the Internet.
"How the 'global village' faced SARS"
"Experts Expect SARS to Continue Spreading"
"More SARS Cases Are Reported; Virus Found to Persist in Patients"
"China and SARS"
15 years ago, if an epidemic like SARS had erupted, I would have had a much harder time in finding information describing its origin and its symptoms. Now, thanks to the Internet, I know that the Chinese in Southern China "helped" to develop this disease by sleeping with farm animals. The virus crossed the species barrier from, probably, a pig into humans. The Chinese then covered up the problem and, thus, helped to spread it to the rest of the world. According to the latest reports, the SARS virus will now become a permanent part of this world.
So, yes, the engineering grunts are having a hard time. Read "Will code for food" by C|Net. The CEO of Google and the CIO of FedEx are living incredibly well on their million-dollar salaries, but the grunt American engineer is not doing well at all. There's mortgage payments, clothes for the kids, insurance bills, etc. The high-tech sector of the overall American economy is going through its worst recession in almost 3 decades.
No. We don't need any more H-1B workers.
By contrast, the grunt workers, of whom most are Americans, will need to scramble for the next job. In this climate, the next job does not appear for more than a year. When a potential job does arise, the grunt worker will need to fend off droves of H-1B workers.
But then all that big-bang innovation will make up for the months of unemployment ....