When Doom 4 was announced, I looked at the id Software job postings. Several of the jobs are for mobile game development, including iPhone. It seems many game makers are hopping on the mobile market. Whether that market really takes off remains to be seen.
A long time ago, I was reading a nutrition book, and it mentioned that a person could get a one's daily requirement for selenium from breathing the air near a photocopier or laser printer. One man's poison is another man's micronutrient.
I bought one of the D-50 players when they first came out in 1984. It has a really low serial number. It was $300, which was less than many of the non-portable units at that time. It does not run on batteries, so I used it plugged in at home, and on my desk at work. I still have the D-50, and it still runs.
"The SoC emerged as a design concept as early as 2002." Guess that stuff we've been doing for over a decade ago wasn't SoC work then.
You're right, that statement is uninformed fluff. Back in 1999, I remember going to a design conference, and SoC was THE big topic of the conference. SoC as a term predated that conference by a number of years. In many ways SoC is a lot like the term AJAX. It is a combination of technologies that are already in use, but now there is a marketing buzzword to identify that combination.
I think these IBM articles are driven from the marketing department for promotion. Even when the author is some academic person, they probably have some ties into a marketing department to give some technical merit to the marketing hype. Unfortunately, there isn't much depth to those articles.
Is there any reason hardware design has such a high standard compared to software?
Part of the reason is that hardware design by nature is less flexible than software to change, particularly as more hardware goes inside chips. The up front cost of a System-on-Chip can easily be more than 1 million dollars, and the cost of re-spinning a chip to fix a design flaw can be almost as high. And the month or two of time lost waiting for the re-spin also has a time-to-market cost. The high cost justifies the high standard.
I can't recall the last time I heard about a major hardware flaw.
Most hardware bugs are detected in the bring-up phases of a project; and by the time a company commits the money to hardware production, they have a fairly high confidence that the hardware is solid. Most major hardware bugs don't make it to production, so people don't hear about those failures. Hardware bugs that do make it to production go unnoticed, are covered up through software workarounds, or they get a lot of bad press (like the infamous Intel FDIV bug, or more recently the Xbox 360 instability problems).
Companies can afford to put out beta versions and patches of software, so a lot more software bugs are visible outside a company. There is still a cost of having software bugs, particular in critical systems and high volume applications, but fundamentally you can patch software. Patching hardware is possible only if you are lucky enough to have an accessible place to change the hardware behavior, or enough time and money to re-spin. For big complex hardware, designers attempt to put in some programmability to hopefully work around potential bugs, but it takes a lot of foresight to predict where things might go wrong.
With field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) the hardware does look more like software since you can compile and reload a design into the FPGA chip. I have seen hardware designer be less stringent about FPGA designs because of the increased flexibility. With FPGAs there is a power and cost tradeoff since they are more general purpose. For an equivalent design, an FPGA eats much more power than an equivalent SoC, and FPGAs are typically much more expensive in volume than SoCs. So FPGAs are not a viable solution for things like PDAs, cell phones, and MP3 players where SoC's are prevalent.
The concept of software/hardware codesign is not a new one. I would say that every project I have worked on for the past 20 years has been a software/hardware codesign project, regardless of whether it was an SoC or some other hardware system. In every case, I have seen the software start running shortly after the new hardware is powered up. Fast software boot is a validation that you did the design correctly, but it should not be viewed as an amazing feat. It should be an expected outcome that was planned for. Those who design in "silos" are doing it the wrong way from the start and are asking for problems.
Within the last 5 years or so, there has been a lot of hype about System-on-Chip (SoC) development. There have been lots of SoC articles, and many companies trying to sell tools to develop SoC's. But when I read through most of the hype, I find nothing all that revolutionary about the tools and methods. Chip fabrication has reached the point where one can integrate a lot of functionality on a chip, but the design methodologies for successful designs are still basically the same as the past non-integrated designs. Mistakes are less forgiving in an SoC since rework is very difficult or impossible, so the design verification requirements need to be thorough. Most design successes that I have seen have been more dependent on the thoroughness of the design team than the tools used. The best tools in the world will not save you from the blunders of bad designers.
I'm another alumni of Tulane engineering, and I just heard this news today also. I got a degree in Electrical Engineering, one of the eliminated programs. I have plenty of work experience, so the degree from Tulane doesn't carry as much weight for me, but I really sympathize with your situation of just recently getting a degree in a now defunct program.
What really infuriates me is that they did not spread the pain; they focused on engineering with great prejudice. The decision makers were probably not engineering majors. Most engineers are doing engineering or running companies, not running universities. Of all the programs being eliminated, only two are non-engineering (consumer marketing and sports science). The EE department has over 100 years of history, and was one of the first programs at Tulane. I remember seeing some antique equipment in the labs from the late 1800's. They are throwing away over 100 years of legacy, and killing my roots with the university. What university would kill off the entire computer science and computer engineering programs when computers are now so prevalent?
With only two remaining disciplines, biomedical and chemical, the overall program will not be attractive to new freshmen. Many freshman are not sure which discipline to pursue, and without much choice they are likely to prefer other schools. And those who fund research are also going to prefer schools with strong multi-disciplined programs. It is a downward spiral.
When I was about 8, I remember hearing Switched on Bach in someone's car. The sound of the Moog synthesizer intrigued me, and after that point I tried to find recordings and information about synthesizers. In my teens, I started tinkering with electronics kits to make various oscillator circuits, and I continued to collect synthesizer related material. I went into electrical engineering in college and have since made a career out of electronics.
Just last year, I bought a Moog Theremin, which included an instructional DVD with an introduction by Bob Moog. It was nice to see one of my childhood heroes on the DVD. Some kids are inspired by people like football players, baseball player, or firemen; my inspiration was Bob Moog.
I remember seeing the demo model of the Amiga 1000 in a local "mom and pop" computer store before the production shipment. I was blown away. It was so much more advanced than any other home computer at that time, both graphically and OS (AmigaDos). I got on the waiting list for months, and I payed full list price, I believe about $1300. I needed the new high density floppies (1.2 MB) and payed $49.95 for a box of 10 floppies!! For a laugh, I still have that box with the price tag still on it. And I still have the Amiga 1000 sitting in a box somewhere. Later I added a 2 MB memory expansion which was another $450. Ah, the bad old day, which seemed so good 20 years ago.
Addison is the first city in Texas to offer municipal wireless covering the whole city. It was hung up for a while because SBC and other traditional carriers were lobbying the state government to outlaw municipal wireless, but that lobbying effort did not succeed.
The service starts in July, and will be $16.95 per month, no extra charges. It is available to anyone who lives, works, or passes through the city. Bandwidth is claimed to be around 1Mbps. So it's not free, but it is reasonable. It seems like a sensible way to pay for the installation and maintenance.
I'm in the DFW area also, but I'm not in a Verizon service area (darn). I just switched to SBC DSL last week away from Comcast. I had the Comcast service since 1999, and it was good when it was working. My problem wasn't with the speed, it was with the uptime. Comcast was down quite often, and the final straw was a couple weeks ago when it was down for almost a week, and they were very slow to fix it. Then they initially refused to give me billing credit for the downtime since they claimed that "there were no outages in your area", even though a technician was standing in my house and could see the problem was on their end. On a later phone call, Comcast eventually did say they would give credit, but it shouldn't have to be such a pain.
Uptime is more important to me than the raw speed. Hopefully SBC DSL will have a better quality of service than Comcast. DSL is also cheaper and they include dial-up access for travelling or backup. Comcast charged quite a bit extra for the dial-up add-on.
Before the national do-not-call list was created, Texas had their own no-call list. I wonder how this ruling affects the Texas list. To be on the list, one has to pay about $5 to cover a 5 year period. When the national list was created, Texas did not transfer their list data to the national list because of privacy reasons, so the Texas list is seperately enforced.
What I didn't previously mention was that the old Sun boxes were purchased at the same time as our old Linux boxes in 2000. The Linux boxes are about 20% faster for our simulation and timing verification, and they were about one tenth the cost of the Sun. Now we are buying the 3GHz dual CPU Xeon box, which we expect to go much faster, but we haven't installed it yet.
And I forgot to mention... when EDA vendors come to visit to show you their latest software, they bring a laptop running Linux, and they give you a demo right then and there. In the past, they could just show you some slides, and then they would have to convince you to load a trial copy of their software on your Sun server. One often doesn't have the time and resources to bother installing every new version of software from every vendor that visits. The flexibility of the Linux solution is unmatched by Sun.
Where I work, we just sold several Sun servers at a fraction of what we bought them for, and we used some of that money to buy a dual Xeon box for running Linux. We run Electonic Design Automation (EDA) applications, and we find that they run faster on Linux, and transitioning our design environments to Linux has been fairly painless. The system uptimes are comparable, and the total cost of ownership is lower with Linux. The faster runtime on Linux also lets us get more out of the EDA software licenses that we purchase. About 4 years ago, Microsoft tried to push its way into the EDA market, but that flopped because most of the existing applications ran on UNIX-type OSes, so the transition was too difficult. Now EDA vendors are flocking to Linux at the expense of Sun.
I love this phrase from Microsoft's description of the vulnerability.
The protocol itself is derived from the Open Software Foundation (OSF) RPC protocol, but with the addition of some Microsoft-specific extensions.
The typical "embrace and extend" strategy Microsoft uses to pollute open standards. Looks like they included some buffer-overrun extensions.
Microsoft will send the BSA stormtroopers round to make you prove that you're not running hooky Windows installs.
This statement is absolutely true. My company bought a bunch Dell servers without any OS so that we could run FreeBSD and Linux. Shortly afterwards, Microsoft came visiting to do an audit. Obviously, Microsoft has some visibility into the machines that Dell ships. In the end, Microsoft found that we had more Windows licenses than we had machines running Windows, probably because we had bought some machines with Windows and had replaced Windows with FreeBSD or Linux. Microsoft's philosophy is "guilty until proven innocent". It cost my company time and money to have our IT department round up all the information just to satisfy Microsoft.
How hot is it? One of the things I hate about halogens is their waste heat.... I've been hoping for something like this for smallscale studio photography.
At 5 Watts, it's just a little warm. It has a wall transformer, but it only gets slightly warm. I haven't tried it for photography, but it seems like this particular lamp would not have the light quality needed. The light color is somewhat unnatural, something between flourescent and sodium vapor. One might be able to rig up their own custom LED light with better color control that meets photographic needs.
Last I looked into white LEDs there was still a color problem. The light comes out just a bit too blue. At the time, it was impossible to get a truer white in a single 'bulb'.
I bought an LED desk lamp that has an array of about 100 LEDs. To get around the bluish color problem, about a third of the LEDs are orange to make the light warmer colored. Unfortunately it is still not quite like incandescents or flourescents. The light from the lamp still makes skin tones look sickly bluish gray. It's very bright for only using 5 Watts. I believe that flourescent lights are still more efficient, but there is a certain coolness factor of having an LED lamp.
I always heard the E10000 was actually a Cray product.
I believe that the origin of the E10000 was from a company called Floating Point Systems. They were working with Sun to develop a SPARC based parallel processing computer. If I remember correctly, Cray bought FPS, and later SGI bought Cray. Since the FPS machine was SPARC based, and since SGI wasn't interested in SPARC, they sold it to Sun.
So in a roundabout way, the E10000 came from Cray, but I think it was mostly from the original Floating Point Systems engineers.
In the 1970's and 1980's, Cray and other supercomputer companies fit in the niche of "fastest computing at any cost". The design cycles were long for the specialized hardware that pushed the boundaries of the available technology. Companies and government agencies were willing to pay the high price since there was enough processing speed difference between the supercomputers and the "vanilla" computers.
By the early 1990's, the "attack of the killer microprocessors" came. The PC class processors were still weak, but the higher dollar RISC processors used in workstations, like Sun, were reaching performance levels close to what the supercomputers were able to deliver. Since they were based on higher volume and more standardized processors, the price/performance of the RISC workstations started eating into the mainframe and supercomputer market. Many of the supercomputer companies died off, and some started to incorporate RISC processors into their designs. By the mid 1990's I believe that Tera and Cray were the last remaining old-school supercomputer companies left. The rest either died or were absorbed into other companies.
Today, the investment required to produce the fastest processor chips is so high that it requires large unit volumes to pay for the cost of development and production. The PC class processors, with their high volumes, are putting pressure on the old style workstation market, where each company makes their own processor (SPARC/Sun, PA-RISC/HP, Alpha/DEC). We see Sun struggling as the PC's eat their market. Even some large scale supercomputers are based on the PC processors. The majority of the computer spectrum from low to high end is based on the same families of processors (Intel, AMD, PowerPC).
So that brings us to Cray/Tera. Cray seems to go against the economics of scale that drive the rest of the computing industry. What keeps them running is a small niche that the government is willing to keep funded. It is similar to the funding of exotic bombers and fighter jets. We probably won't see Cray grow much larger than they currently are. They be kept running since they form a critical part of the national security, at least that is what the government believes.
The day buymusic.com started, I tried to check it out. I was running Windows 2000 with IE5 and the latest Windows Media Player, and I could not get any of the music clips or videos to play. In a way, I'm glad the samples had problems because I would have been pissed if I had spent money there. I haven't been back since then, and I probably won't go back.
Slashdot Mirror
When Doom 4 was announced, I looked at the id Software job postings. Several of the jobs are for mobile game development, including iPhone. It seems many game makers are hopping on the mobile market. Whether that market really takes off remains to be seen.
A long time ago, I was reading a nutrition book, and it mentioned that a person could get a one's daily requirement for selenium from breathing the air near a photocopier or laser printer. One man's poison is another man's micronutrient.
I bought one of the D-50 players when they first came out in 1984. It has a really low serial number. It was $300, which was less than many of the non-portable units at that time. It does not run on batteries, so I used it plugged in at home, and on my desk at work. I still have the D-50, and it still runs.
"The SoC emerged as a design concept as early as 2002."
Guess that stuff we've been doing for over a decade ago wasn't SoC work then.
You're right, that statement is uninformed fluff. Back in 1999, I remember going to a design conference, and SoC was THE big topic of the conference. SoC as a term predated that conference by a number of years. In many ways SoC is a lot like the term AJAX. It is a combination of technologies that are already in use, but now there is a marketing buzzword to identify that combination.
I think these IBM articles are driven from the marketing department for promotion. Even when the author is some academic person, they probably have some ties into a marketing department to give some technical merit to the marketing hype. Unfortunately, there isn't much depth to those articles.
Is there any reason hardware design has such a high standard compared to software?
Part of the reason is that hardware design by nature is less flexible than software to change, particularly as more hardware goes inside chips. The up front cost of a System-on-Chip can easily be more than 1 million dollars, and the cost of re-spinning a chip to fix a design flaw can be almost as high. And the month or two of time lost waiting for the re-spin also has a time-to-market cost. The high cost justifies the high standard.
I can't recall the last time I heard about a major hardware flaw.
Most hardware bugs are detected in the bring-up phases of a project; and by the time a company commits the money to hardware production, they have a fairly high confidence that the hardware is solid. Most major hardware bugs don't make it to production, so people don't hear about those failures. Hardware bugs that do make it to production go unnoticed, are covered up through software workarounds, or they get a lot of bad press (like the infamous Intel FDIV bug, or more recently the Xbox 360 instability problems).
Companies can afford to put out beta versions and patches of software, so a lot more software bugs are visible outside a company. There is still a cost of having software bugs, particular in critical systems and high volume applications, but fundamentally you can patch software. Patching hardware is possible only if you are lucky enough to have an accessible place to change the hardware behavior, or enough time and money to re-spin. For big complex hardware, designers attempt to put in some programmability to hopefully work around potential bugs, but it takes a lot of foresight to predict where things might go wrong.
With field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) the hardware does look more like software since you can compile and reload a design into the FPGA chip. I have seen hardware designer be less stringent about FPGA designs because of the increased flexibility. With FPGAs there is a power and cost tradeoff since they are more general purpose. For an equivalent design, an FPGA eats much more power than an equivalent SoC, and FPGAs are typically much more expensive in volume than SoCs. So FPGAs are not a viable solution for things like PDAs, cell phones, and MP3 players where SoC's are prevalent.
The concept of software/hardware codesign is not a new one. I would say that every project I have worked on for the past 20 years has been a software/hardware codesign project, regardless of whether it was an SoC or some other hardware system. In every case, I have seen the software start running shortly after the new hardware is powered up. Fast software boot is a validation that you did the design correctly, but it should not be viewed as an amazing feat. It should be an expected outcome that was planned for. Those who design in "silos" are doing it the wrong way from the start and are asking for problems.
Within the last 5 years or so, there has been a lot of hype about System-on-Chip (SoC) development. There have been lots of SoC articles, and many companies trying to sell tools to develop SoC's. But when I read through most of the hype, I find nothing all that revolutionary about the tools and methods. Chip fabrication has reached the point where one can integrate a lot of functionality on a chip, but the design methodologies for successful designs are still basically the same as the past non-integrated designs. Mistakes are less forgiving in an SoC since rework is very difficult or impossible, so the design verification requirements need to be thorough. Most design successes that I have seen have been more dependent on the thoroughness of the design team than the tools used. The best tools in the world will not save you from the blunders of bad designers.
I'm another alumni of Tulane engineering, and I just heard this news today also. I got a degree in Electrical Engineering, one of the eliminated programs. I have plenty of work experience, so the degree from Tulane doesn't carry as much weight for me, but I really sympathize with your situation of just recently getting a degree in a now defunct program.
What really infuriates me is that they did not spread the pain; they focused on engineering with great prejudice. The decision makers were probably not engineering majors. Most engineers are doing engineering or running companies, not running universities. Of all the programs being eliminated, only two are non-engineering (consumer marketing and sports science). The EE department has over 100 years of history, and was one of the first programs at Tulane. I remember seeing some antique equipment in the labs from the late 1800's. They are throwing away over 100 years of legacy, and killing my roots with the university. What university would kill off the entire computer science and computer engineering programs when computers are now so prevalent?
With only two remaining disciplines, biomedical and chemical, the overall program will not be attractive to new freshmen. Many freshman are not sure which discipline to pursue, and without much choice they are likely to prefer other schools. And those who fund research are also going to prefer schools with strong multi-disciplined programs. It is a downward spiral.
It reminds me of Pom Pom from Homestar Runner
.When I was about 8, I remember hearing Switched on Bach in someone's car. The sound of the Moog synthesizer intrigued me, and after that point I tried to find recordings and information about synthesizers. In my teens, I started tinkering with electronics kits to make various oscillator circuits, and I continued to collect synthesizer related material. I went into electrical engineering in college and have since made a career out of electronics.
Just last year, I bought a Moog Theremin, which included an instructional DVD with an introduction by Bob Moog. It was nice to see one of my childhood heroes on the DVD. Some kids are inspired by people like football players, baseball player, or firemen; my inspiration was Bob Moog.
I remember seeing the demo model of the Amiga 1000 in a local "mom and pop" computer store before the production shipment. I was blown away. It was so much more advanced than any other home computer at that time, both graphically and OS (AmigaDos). I got on the waiting list for months, and I payed full list price, I believe about $1300. I needed the new high density floppies (1.2 MB) and payed $49.95 for a box of 10 floppies!! For a laugh, I still have that box with the price tag still on it. And I still have the Amiga 1000 sitting in a box somewhere. Later I added a 2 MB memory expansion which was another $450. Ah, the bad old day, which seemed so good 20 years ago.
Addison is the first city in Texas to offer municipal wireless covering the whole city. It was hung up for a while because SBC and other traditional carriers were lobbying the state government to outlaw municipal wireless, but that lobbying effort did not succeed.
The service starts in July, and will be $16.95 per month, no extra charges. It is available to anyone who lives, works, or passes through the city. Bandwidth is claimed to be around 1Mbps. So it's not free, but it is reasonable. It seems like a sensible way to pay for the installation and maintenance.
I'm in the DFW area also, but I'm not in a Verizon service area (darn). I just switched to SBC DSL last week away from Comcast. I had the Comcast service since 1999, and it was good when it was working. My problem wasn't with the speed, it was with the uptime. Comcast was down quite often, and the final straw was a couple weeks ago when it was down for almost a week, and they were very slow to fix it. Then they initially refused to give me billing credit for the downtime since they claimed that "there were no outages in your area", even though a technician was standing in my house and could see the problem was on their end. On a later phone call, Comcast eventually did say they would give credit, but it shouldn't have to be such a pain. Uptime is more important to me than the raw speed. Hopefully SBC DSL will have a better quality of service than Comcast. DSL is also cheaper and they include dial-up access for travelling or backup. Comcast charged quite a bit extra for the dial-up add-on.
Before the national do-not-call list was created, Texas had their own no-call list. I wonder how this ruling affects the Texas list. To be on the list, one has to pay about $5 to cover a 5 year period. When the national list was created, Texas did not transfer their list data to the national list because of privacy reasons, so the Texas list is seperately enforced.
What I didn't previously mention was that the old Sun boxes were purchased at the same time as our old Linux boxes in 2000. The Linux boxes are about 20% faster for our simulation and timing verification, and they were about one tenth the cost of the Sun. Now we are buying the 3GHz dual CPU Xeon box, which we expect to go much faster, but we haven't installed it yet.
And I forgot to mention... when EDA vendors come to visit to show you their latest software, they bring a laptop running Linux, and they give you a demo right then and there. In the past, they could just show you some slides, and then they would have to convince you to load a trial copy of their software on your Sun server. One often doesn't have the time and resources to bother installing every new version of software from every vendor that visits. The flexibility of the Linux solution is unmatched by Sun.
Where I work, we just sold several Sun servers at a fraction of what we bought them for, and we used some of that money to buy a dual Xeon box for running Linux. We run Electonic Design Automation (EDA) applications, and we find that they run faster on Linux, and transitioning our design environments to Linux has been fairly painless. The system uptimes are comparable, and the total cost of ownership is lower with Linux. The faster runtime on Linux also lets us get more out of the EDA software licenses that we purchase. About 4 years ago, Microsoft tried to push its way into the EDA market, but that flopped because most of the existing applications ran on UNIX-type OSes, so the transition was too difficult. Now EDA vendors are flocking to Linux at the expense of Sun.
I love this phrase from Microsoft's description of the vulnerability. The protocol itself is derived from the Open Software Foundation (OSF) RPC protocol, but with the addition of some Microsoft-specific extensions. The typical "embrace and extend" strategy Microsoft uses to pollute open standards. Looks like they included some buffer-overrun extensions.
Microsoft will send the BSA stormtroopers round to make you prove that you're not running hooky Windows installs.
This statement is absolutely true. My company bought a bunch Dell servers without any OS so that we could run FreeBSD and Linux. Shortly afterwards, Microsoft came visiting to do an audit. Obviously, Microsoft has some visibility into the machines that Dell ships. In the end, Microsoft found that we had more Windows licenses than we had machines running Windows, probably because we had bought some machines with Windows and had replaced Windows with FreeBSD or Linux. Microsoft's philosophy is "guilty until proven innocent". It cost my company time and money to have our IT department round up all the information just to satisfy Microsoft.
eBay was where I bought mine in an auction. The list price is around $50 without shipping, and I got it for about $30 plus $10 shipping.
How hot is it? One of the things I hate about halogens is their waste heat. ... I've been hoping for something like this for smallscale studio photography.
At 5 Watts, it's just a little warm. It has a wall transformer, but it only gets slightly warm. I haven't tried it for photography, but it seems like this particular lamp would not have the light quality needed. The light color is somewhat unnatural, something between flourescent and sodium vapor. One might be able to rig up their own custom LED light with better color control that meets photographic needs.
Last I looked into white LEDs there was still a color problem. The light comes out just a bit too blue. At the time, it was impossible to get a truer white in a single 'bulb'.
I bought an LED desk lamp that has an array of about 100 LEDs. To get around the bluish color problem, about a third of the LEDs are orange to make the light warmer colored. Unfortunately it is still not quite like incandescents or flourescents. The light from the lamp still makes skin tones look sickly bluish gray. It's very bright for only using 5 Watts. I believe that flourescent lights are still more efficient, but there is a certain coolness factor of having an LED lamp.
If anyone is interested, here is a link to the PDF of the GALAXe LED desk lamp
A much better detailed explanation than mine below. I have been rendered "redundant". :)
I always heard the E10000 was actually a Cray product.
I believe that the origin of the E10000 was from a company called Floating Point Systems. They were working with Sun to develop a SPARC based parallel processing computer. If I remember correctly, Cray bought FPS, and later SGI bought Cray. Since the FPS machine was SPARC based, and since SGI wasn't interested in SPARC, they sold it to Sun.
So in a roundabout way, the E10000 came from Cray, but I think it was mostly from the original Floating Point Systems engineers.
In the 1970's and 1980's, Cray and other supercomputer companies fit in the niche of "fastest computing at any cost". The design cycles were long for the specialized hardware that pushed the boundaries of the available technology. Companies and government agencies were willing to pay the high price since there was enough processing speed difference between the supercomputers and the "vanilla" computers.
By the early 1990's, the "attack of the killer microprocessors" came. The PC class processors were still weak, but the higher dollar RISC processors used in workstations, like Sun, were reaching performance levels close to what the supercomputers were able to deliver. Since they were based on higher volume and more standardized processors, the price/performance of the RISC workstations started eating into the mainframe and supercomputer market. Many of the supercomputer companies died off, and some started to incorporate RISC processors into their designs. By the mid 1990's I believe that Tera and Cray were the last remaining old-school supercomputer companies left. The rest either died or were absorbed into other companies.
Today, the investment required to produce the fastest processor chips is so high that it requires large unit volumes to pay for the cost of development and production. The PC class processors, with their high volumes, are putting pressure on the old style workstation market, where each company makes their own processor (SPARC/Sun, PA-RISC/HP, Alpha/DEC). We see Sun struggling as the PC's eat their market. Even some large scale supercomputers are based on the PC processors. The majority of the computer spectrum from low to high end is based on the same families of processors (Intel, AMD, PowerPC).
So that brings us to Cray/Tera. Cray seems to go against the economics of scale that drive the rest of the computing industry. What keeps them running is a small niche that the government is willing to keep funded. It is similar to the funding of exotic bombers and fighter jets. We probably won't see Cray grow much larger than they currently are. They be kept running since they form a critical part of the national security, at least that is what the government believes.
The day buymusic.com started, I tried to check it out. I was running Windows 2000 with IE5 and the latest Windows Media Player, and I could not get any of the music clips or videos to play. In a way, I'm glad the samples had problems because I would have been pissed if I had spent money there. I haven't been back since then, and I probably won't go back.