As much as I would rather not admit it, Sharepoint isn't all that bad. We use it internally in my group as an alternative to a Livelink-based solution. For us, Sharepoint was free (due to our MS-oriented shop,) and I've heard that it is now included in Windows Server 2003. We're a Windows and MS Office house so we have the servers anyway. The Livelink solution is managed by our corporate IT group and we have to pay extra to set it up for our needs and then pay an allocation to our IT group to use it on a regular basis. We have local control and ownership over our W2K and W2003 servers. I realize not everyone has these kinds of economics but that's the hand we were dealt.
If you already have the MS Office infrastructure, Sharepoint integrates pretty well. MS Office documents in Sharepoint document libraries open in your IE browser and the Sharepoint tools for comments and discussions within documents integrate pretty nicely. You get the option to use a simple change management model.
Sharepoint lets you subscribe to just about any content in the Sharepoint web, giving you email notifications when things change. So for example, you save your draft design document (as a Word document) into a Sharepoint document library and send a request for review to a group of people, subscribe to the document, and when your reviewers make comments in your document, you know about it immediately. Works well.
There is a workflow capability, but you have to set it up in Frontpage. I didn't find this terribly useful or user friendly, but then again, what workflow system is?
All in all, it's at least worth taking a loot at. Granted, it's not free as in beer, and it helps to already be stuck with some MS infrastructure, and it helps to have some FP experience.
To state the obvious, in a perfect world I would be working in an OSS shop and would have experience with something like Zope and could tout it's benefits to you. But that's not the world I work in.
One other non OSS product you might want to look at is Documentum. I've used this product as well, and if it weren't for some stupid PHB-like reasons, we might be using it instead of Sharepoint. It does the document management thing pretty well, has document management, revision control and workflows. I'd judge it to be more robust than Sharepoint in these areas.
Finally, just to preserve some OSS credibility and not sound like a total MS tool, I'm working on a port one of our applications that currently runs on OpenVMS and HP-UX to Linux to take advantage of the lower TCO and in response to customer requests for a non-proprietary platform solutions.
Should I get the 32 bit brain implant now, or spend the big bucks and get the 64 bit implant?
How big a cooling fan will I need to attach to the side of my head?
You make a good point, I agree with you on this issue.
However, when you think about it, is there any difference in a semiconductor between a logic flaw and a bad physical design? They're both instantiations of the photolith masks by the time the chips are actually being made. Granted - in the end, the P4 math error could be fixed in software, while the overlooked thermal diode in the deisgn has no real fix other than a measure of care.
The 10-Q I used was for the period ending June 29, 2003, so yeah, the numbers might be off. memory products revenue going from $211M to $560M is a huge quarterly jump, and might account for their profitable bottom line more so than processors. Still $800K in lost revenue for an hour of fab downtime is huge, you can't make it up; it's not so easy crank up the factory to make more chips to cover for the loss when you're running at capacity. In reality, AMD has outsourcing agreemtns that could ehlp mitigate this, but even foundries have finite capacity that might not be available when you need it.
And you're right about the fixed costs. Operations budgets for fabs are tiny when compared to the capital costs to build the plant in the first place. In classic fab economics you only have a fixed amount of time to recover your capital investment before a fab is obsolete. If all goes well, you recover the capital investment before you have to replace the fab to keep up with your competition. Typically this cycle is 3 to 6 years, depending on the market in which you are competing.
Well, seeing as people mention it I'm sure it has been known to happen.
Are we talking Bigfoot sightings?
Might be a problem, but without anything to back this claim up, it looks like a troll to me.
Re:this isn't exactly correct....
on
AMD Back in the Black
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· Score: 5, Informative
Neither statement is exactly correct. The economics of semiconductor manufacturing are pretty complex. You typically have a certain set of variables to work with. You can invest in line yield, process quality, new processes, automation, capacity, marketing, new device design, retooling, and any number of other areas. You can build cheaper, less complex fabs, build in locations with cheaper labor rates or lower startup costs. You can outsource some or all your manufacturing to a foundry who can make your designs for a contracted price.
AMD has an approach that says they will "build smarter" than their competition. Their flagship fabs (Fab 30 in Dresden, for example) are highly automated with very tight process control, ensuring the right work gets done at the right time. The focus is on equipment utilization; reduction of tool idle time. Further, they focus on minimizing the number of non-product wafers in the line, which take tool time but don't directly produce any chips that can be sold. The management of all this is done through software.
They also have to focus on fab uptime... since they don't necessarily have the back up manufacturing capability to allow them to recover if their fab is down. For example, AMD makes about two-thirds their revenue from processor sales according to a recent 10-Q filing. Most recent quarter for which there is data (for the period ending 12/28/2003) shows $1,205M in quarterly revenue. You can estimate around $800M in revenue from their processor lines. Fab 30 make nearly all their processors. If Fab 30 were to go down for one hour, that's one hour in the 730 hours in a quarter that they can't make chips. If they have demand that is greater than or equal to capacity, and they're running at full capacity, they would loose roughly $1M due to potential finished goods that could not be made. A cost of $1M per hour of fab down time is pretty typical in the market where AMD competes and for fabs that compare to Fab 30.
A single tool going down is a problem. The entire fab going down is a huge problem. Things that can bring an entire fab down include utilities (electricity, water, gasses, etc.) contamination of facility-wide services like vacuum line, DI water, and various gasses, labor strikes, natural disasters, fires, and plant-wide software.
When you rely on software to manage your manufacturing to the degree that AMD and other high-end semiconductor manufacturers do, you tend to pay a lot of attention to the software.
Invite your cute friend over and surprise him with a threesome. Spend the money on "atmosphere"... some lingerie, candles, toys, drinks, food... all intended to create an evening he'll remember forever.
So-called "lights out" wafer fab operations are certainly goals for most high volume semiconductor manufacturing companies. Automated materials handling systems account for a significant component of the costs of modern 300mm fabs going up now. Current technologies for handling and movement of wafers include
SMIF and FOUP (front opening unified pod) with FOUP technology dominating in 300mm fabs. The orchestration of wafer movement from tool to tool with process recipe management, advanced process control, tool maintenance and general fab operations is incredibly complicated. You have tools from different vendors that may not communicate well with each other, metrology tools that have buckets and buckets of data to manage, and incredibly low tolerance for all aspects of the manufacturing process. The fact is that full lights out manufacturing has rarely been achieved to date.
Those sites that are able to approach lights out manufacturing are typically running stable, high yield processes and products that don't require much in the way of continuous improvements. Think DRAMS.
Who do you think is making a portion of the newest Athlon processors some of us are drooling over? I'll give you a hint, a number of them say "Made in East Fishkill, NY" inside.
An IBMer also told me they are doing a lot of work with Operton-based SUSE servers.
Another business reason - IBM has a huge global services organization that competes in Systems Integration with a number of players. I've worked with them/competed with them in some business deals. I can see this as a huge benefit for their services group. They are already pushing Linux servers in their services offerings. If they are successful at proving Linux desktops for business through their own internal experience, it puts them in a stronger position when competing for SI business. They will walk the walk, so to speak.
They can position lower cost HW, OS and apps for both the servers and desktops, lowering their overall price when compared to someone offering a HP-UX, Solaris, or Windows-based SI package. Well done, IBM.
Of course, a portion of the money saved in the HW, OS and apps can go into paying for more IBM consultants on site to keep everything running in the outsourced data center.
Slashdot Mirror
Record a movie, get up to a year in prison.
This sends AWESOM-O into CPU overload, as it does not compute.
If you already have the MS Office infrastructure, Sharepoint integrates pretty well. MS Office documents in Sharepoint document libraries open in your IE browser and the Sharepoint tools for comments and discussions within documents integrate pretty nicely. You get the option to use a simple change management model.
Sharepoint lets you subscribe to just about any content in the Sharepoint web, giving you email notifications when things change. So for example, you save your draft design document (as a Word document) into a Sharepoint document library and send a request for review to a group of people, subscribe to the document, and when your reviewers make comments in your document, you know about it immediately. Works well.
There is a workflow capability, but you have to set it up in Frontpage. I didn't find this terribly useful or user friendly, but then again, what workflow system is?
All in all, it's at least worth taking a loot at. Granted, it's not free as in beer, and it helps to already be stuck with some MS infrastructure, and it helps to have some FP experience.
To state the obvious, in a perfect world I would be working in an OSS shop and would have experience with something like Zope and could tout it's benefits to you. But that's not the world I work in.
One other non OSS product you might want to look at is Documentum. I've used this product as well, and if it weren't for some stupid PHB-like reasons, we might be using it instead of Sharepoint. It does the document management thing pretty well, has document management, revision control and workflows. I'd judge it to be more robust than Sharepoint in these areas.
Finally, just to preserve some OSS credibility and not sound like a total MS tool, I'm working on a port one of our applications that currently runs on OpenVMS and HP-UX to Linux to take advantage of the lower TCO and in response to customer requests for a non-proprietary platform solutions.
Windows Services for Unix
bash, from Unix Tools for Windows
Should I get the 32 bit brain implant now, or spend the big bucks and get the 64 bit implant? How big a cooling fan will I need to attach to the side of my head?
However, when you think about it, is there any difference in a semiconductor between a logic flaw and a bad physical design? They're both instantiations of the photolith masks by the time the chips are actually being made. Granted - in the end, the P4 math error could be fixed in software, while the overlooked thermal diode in the deisgn has no real fix other than a measure of care.
And you're right about the fixed costs. Operations budgets for fabs are tiny when compared to the capital costs to build the plant in the first place. In classic fab economics you only have a fixed amount of time to recover your capital investment before a fab is obsolete. If all goes well, you recover the capital investment before you have to replace the fab to keep up with your competition. Typically this cycle is 3 to 6 years, depending on the market in which you are competing.
Thermal diodes in Athlons, math errors in Pentiums. Beyond those two items, you might want to substantiate this claim.
Are we talking Bigfoot sightings?
Might be a problem, but without anything to back this claim up, it looks like a troll to me.
AMD has an approach that says they will "build smarter" than their competition. Their flagship fabs (Fab 30 in Dresden, for example) are highly automated with very tight process control, ensuring the right work gets done at the right time. The focus is on equipment utilization; reduction of tool idle time. Further, they focus on minimizing the number of non-product wafers in the line, which take tool time but don't directly produce any chips that can be sold. The management of all this is done through software.
They also have to focus on fab uptime ... since they don't necessarily have the back up manufacturing capability to allow them to recover if their fab is down. For example, AMD makes about two-thirds their revenue from processor sales according to a recent 10-Q filing. Most recent quarter for which there is data (for the period ending 12/28/2003) shows $1,205M in quarterly revenue. You can estimate around $800M in revenue from their processor lines. Fab 30 make nearly all their processors. If Fab 30 were to go down for one hour, that's one hour in the 730 hours in a quarter that they can't make chips. If they have demand that is greater than or equal to capacity, and they're running at full capacity, they would loose roughly $1M due to potential finished goods that could not be made. A cost of $1M per hour of fab down time is pretty typical in the market where AMD competes and for fabs that compare to Fab 30.
A single tool going down is a problem. The entire fab going down is a huge problem. Things that can bring an entire fab down include utilities (electricity, water, gasses, etc.) contamination of facility-wide services like vacuum line, DI water, and various gasses, labor strikes, natural disasters, fires, and plant-wide software.
When you rely on software to manage your manufacturing to the degree that AMD and other high-end semiconductor manufacturers do, you tend to pay a lot of attention to the software.
Invite your cute friend over and surprise him with a threesome. Spend the money on "atmosphere" ... some lingerie, candles, toys, drinks, food ... all intended to create an evening he'll remember forever.
Those sites that are able to approach lights out manufacturing are typically running stable, high yield processes and products that don't require much in the way of continuous improvements. Think DRAMS.
But Websphere on Linux? Hmmm ... lemme think about that.
An IBMer also told me they are doing a lot of work with Operton-based SUSE servers.
They can position lower cost HW, OS and apps for both the servers and desktops, lowering their overall price when compared to someone offering a HP-UX, Solaris, or Windows-based SI package. Well done, IBM.
Of course, a portion of the money saved in the HW, OS and apps can go into paying for more IBM consultants on site to keep everything running in the outsourced data center.