All the 'gigabytes' and 'probability' numbers Gartner puts in their reports are there to give the reports a sense of legitimacy. They make their money off of people in suits at big corporations who spend big bucks on outside consulting. The suits love to have meetings with Powerpoint slides with lots of figures, and they get a lot of those figures from consultants. The public figures Gartner reports are just a summary of a more detailed report that corporations can purchase to fatten their presentations and corporate strategies.
The 10 year figures probably don't mean much since they are long forgotten by the time one could validate the prediction. Much like weather forecasts, the predictions shift over time as the real date approaches, and those predictions tend to get more accurate as the time to the prediction shrinks.
What I'd love to see is a port-mortem on the predictions from all these consultant companies like Gartner. I wonder if someone keeps a record of predictions that Gartner made ten or more years ago and compares them to what really happened. My suspicion is that most of their long term predictions are junk, but they produce the figures since corporations want to pay for those figures.
It's not surprising that the SGI machine runs STREAM well. Back in the mid-1990's, John McCalpin, who worked for SGI at that time, was a regular contributor to comp.sys.super, and he would frequently brag about the superiority of SGI running STREAM. McCalpin is one of the primary advocates for STREAM. You can optimize a computer architecture to run a particular benchmark well. The question is whether the SGI machine runs a wider variety of real-world problems well.
Why not just use electricity
on
Solar Surgery
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It is interesting to use concentrated sunlight for surgery, but electricity is still a more reliable way to generate light. I would imagine that some high intensity incandescent lights could be concentrated similar to sunlight, and woundn't be dependent on weather and the earth's rotation.
Where this technology might be useful is in remote areas where electricity is not available. But where electricity is plentiful, this technology seems more like a novelty, like "Sun Tea".
Itanium IS compatible with the old x86 instruction
on
AMD's 64-Bit Chip
·
· Score: 1
The current 64-bit offering from Intel, Itanium, is an entirely new chip that has no backwards compatibility with it's x86 line of chips
The current Itanium chips are compatible with the x86 instruction set. Intel even applied for patents on the compatibility technology, reported on Slashdot quite a while ago. It's real hardware, not emulation. The compatible portion of the chip is known as the "Intel Value Engine", acknowledging the "value" of being able to run x86 code.
The catch is that it is just compatible with the 32-bit x86 instruction set, and it isn't going to be faster than a top-of-the-line x86 processor. The x86 instructions in Itanium are not enhanced to 64 bits like in the AMD chip. If you want top speed on Itanium you have to go to the IA-64 instructions.
Another catch is that the OS has to support the ability to map a process to run in the x86 hardware mode, and the OS has to communicate with the x86 processes. Some OSes running on Itanium won't bother supporting that mode.
With the AMD chip you get native x86 compatibility, 64-bit data wrangling, and it runs competitively with other x86 chips. Sounds like a good story, giving an evolutionary path for legacy applications. Will AMD deliver? Will Intel bring out Yamhill to snuff AMD? Stay tuned.
Keep in mind that a DLP allows you to show live events so there may also be more revenue opportunities if you get creative. I would imagine that content distributors would be interested in experimenting with sporting event or concert broadcasts
It's already happening at the Magnolia Theater in Dallas. Check out their calendar. They are showing a basketball game and horse race live in high definition. The Magnolia is an independent theater that is definitely thinking "outside of the box". Hopefully they will be successful.
The only exception is the few independent/art houses. These folks are gonna be the last to get digital equipment, and the films that they show are gonna be the last available for digital distribution.
In Dallas, The Magnolia Theater currently has DLP according to the DLP web site . The Magnolia is an independent/art theater. Many independent "film" creators are using digital video now since the editing and processing costs are lower. Most end up transferring digital video to film for distribution, but having digital theaters opens up the possibility of distribution without the expense of celluloid. This works out well for low budget independent film makers.
Digital projection opens up other possibilities too, like projecting live events. For example, The Magnolia is showing a high definition broadcasts of the Visa Triple Crown and a Dallas Mavericks basketball game according to their calendar.
The startup company that I work for ordered over 100 machines from Dell without any software loaded since we were putting Linux and our own UNIX variant on them. Shortly after receiving the machines, Microsoft was knocking on our door wanting to do an 'audit'. They wanted proof of every license for every copy of their software we had running. Our poor IT guys had to waste thier time collecting all the information.
In the end, Microsoft found that we had more licenses than copies of running Microsoft software. It's very annoying that Microsoft assumes we are guilty until proven innocent and harrasses our small startup company, wasting our scarce time and money. It was probably cheaper to comply with their audit than to fight them in a legal battle.
Re:The terabit market flopped, so go faster!
on
Is Hyperchip Hype?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's not the bandwidth, it's the services. Besides, who can afford to provision 65,000 OC-192s?
Of course 65,000 OC-192's is an architectural scalability limit. It makes great marketing material.
The terabit router market reminds me of the supercomputer market in the late 1980's. There were a bunch of startups working with bleeding-edge technology to make the fastest machines for a handful of customers who could afford it. Many of the startups died as the actual machines came to market. There were only so many customers that could afford and would use such machines at that time.
One of the main things that differentiated the supercomputer survivors from the casualties was the ability to provide a total hardware, software, and support solution to the customers. For the terabit router market, look for the companies delivering the full solution to the customers. Like you said, it's the services. From what I know of Hyperchip, they started with a chip idea for a scalable fabric, and until recently they didn't have much software and services capability.
Also watch for the companies with the least hype. It seems that many of the terabit router companies that have died or are dying have been full of promises that they couldn't deliver. Caspian was one of those hyped companies, and they aren't doing well recently. The smart companies will keep quiet until they have something real, so the company that delivers the best terabit router might be one most people have not heard of.
The LightReading link that you gave is a good place to check out what people in the optical networking industry have to say. The noise level can be high on the message boards (not unlike Slashdot), but there are some individuals that have great insight into the terabit router market. One such inidividual goes by the message board name of "skeptic".
Within the last few months, Wired magazine ran an article about Japan, and in that article was a picture of an official "Hello Kitty" vibrator. Apparently, Sanrio (owner of the "Hello Kitty" franchise) allows such things. They do require that nothing be sharp or potentially injurious, so you won't see any "Hello Kitty" knives or box cutters.
We now return you to the current on-topic discussion....
In the last couple years, HP's philosophy has been to concentrate on a few areas. It was the reason that they spun off their test and measurement division as Agilent Technologies. HP currently wants to concentrate on computers and the internet. I guess the calculators did not fit into their vision of a computer and internet world.
Personally, I think they should have given the calculator division to Agilent when it was spun off. It seems to line up with Agilent's mission of making specialized electronic devices.
Re:Fascinating, but not practical, here's why:
on
Ternary Computing
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The major part of creating efficient communications protocols is determining the probability of a bit error.
You have made some very good points, and the bit error problem is one of the big ones. When you go to ternary logic levels, you reduce the noise margin, so you have to slow down the clock and/or spread out the logic (more space) which offsets the gains you might get from ternary logic.
I once saw a point-to-point ternary logic data bus design that looked very clever on paper. It allowed simultaneous transfer of data in two directions on the same wires. Both ends of the bus were allowed to drive 0 or 1, and both ends watched the ternary logic level on the bus. If the middle state, "M", was observed, then the other end must be driving the opposite logic level.
This looks like a big win since the same wires can carry twice as much traffic than a normal binary bus, but the reality of noise margin made the bus impractical. The noise from the dynamic voltage swing between 0 and 1 made it difficult to reliably discriminate the smaller 0/M or M/1 voltages at high clock rates. The clock rate had to be slowed to less than half the speed of a binary bus which made the ternary bus lose its apparent advantage.
I won't even get into the headaches that ternary logic design would cause. It makes my binary brain hurt.
I thought HP had committed itself to ditching the PA-RISC and moving to Itanic, err, Itanium.
Yes, that is still the story as far as I know. It was the intended direction years ago, but IA-64 (Itanium) has taken longer to develop than originally expected (way longer), and the customer base hasn't shift to IA-64 yet. Until the customers start paying $$ for IA-64, HP will continue to make revenue from their existing PA-RISC customers.
The bottom line is that customers don't really care what the underlying processors is. Customers care that their legacy applications continue to run on new machines, that they run with good performance, and that they run reliably. The processor type is just a piece of the total compute environment. HP's motivation is to move to a higher volume microprocessor (IA-64). The current PA-RISC processor volumes are relatively low, and they have to factor in all the R&D expense that goes into a low volume processor. The more complex the processors get, the more R&D expense goes into the design of the chips and into the fabs to build them.
I'm still curious what the effect of AMD's Sledgehammer will be for customers. For those customers using IA-32, Sledgehammer (64bit enhanced IA-32) takes less porting effort than IA-64. I have yet to see any reports of a deployed IA-64 application in the real world. Everything so far has been lab results and marketing blubs.
... you find people broadly divided into two groups... The groups are capability and capacity.
Interesting categorizations. I definitely could fit a lot of people into those two categories, and have worked people who are excellent in one or both of those categories. Unfortunately, there are also people who have neither capability nor capacity, or they have capability and/or capacity, but it is highly misdirectly.
I once had a boss who had an incredibly high capacity. He could admirably juggle tons of workload, but much of that capacity was misdirected on feeding the bureaucracy of a big company. The productive work of the group suffered. Capable engineers particularly suffered, and many left the group and the company.
In the case of the "quirky" engineer in the article, he had misdirected capability. Maybe a manager could direct his energy toward the job, but in some cases the job itself is mismatched. Perhaps the "quirky" engineer in the story would work well in the FSF with Stallman doing Mayan calendar elisp code.
My co-worker uses it for a light beacon. It is propped up by the window, and one can see the beacon from the parking lot. They certainly put bright LEDs in the cue cat.
Ever since the mid 1980's, I have claimed that Microsoft's operating systems have basically been toys. I still haven't changed that opinion. They are good at providing a way for games to boot and access the hardware. For applications beyond games, the productivity and stability of Microsoft's products are measurably poor relative to more serious OS's. Even for business applications, Microsoft products feel like toys. Just watch some of the "suits" playing with Powerpoint sometime. I work in a mixed MS and *NIX environment, and all the serious software and hardware development is done on some flavor of *NIX.
With the Xbox, I see a shift back to a real toy paradigm for Microsoft. It will be interesting to see how much Xbox canibalizes the market which buys PC's mainly for a few application types, like gaming. The majority of users out there don't see computers as development tool. They see computers as an appliance that allows them to do email, web browsing, word processing, and games. I don't think that the majority of end users really care what OS is running. The choice of OS is mostly based on what the majority of people are using so that everyone can speak a common user language ("click on this, now click on that, now click on this"). A full fledged MS OS is more than most people need for daily computer fiddling. Most users would rather not be clicking through hardware profile and registry settings.
If a major shift occurs toward an Xbox model for end-users, there won't be much demand for used copies of old MS OS's, except for maybe "classic gaming". Are people selling old copies of MSDOS 5.0 anymore? Most people upgrade now because each new MS OS is perceived to be less crappy than the previous one. Since Xbox is a more controlled environment, and potentially more stable, will there be much motivation to upgrade?
One possible vision is that one would have an Xbox for playing games, checking on email, looking at multimedia web sites, etc. (appliance stuff); and if one wants to do more serious development, one would have a PC with possibly a MS OS or Linux or something else. There will definitely be a niche of "just click on it" multimedia developers that continue to use their MS OS and MacOS based computers. The more serious infrastructure developers will continue to migrate to more productive OS's.
If the Xbox does start to canibalize Microsoft's revenue stream from selling OS's for PC's, I wonder what they might cripple in the Xbox to keep people continuously buying and upgrading PC's.
Slashdot Mirror
All the 'gigabytes' and 'probability' numbers Gartner puts in their reports are there to give the reports a sense of legitimacy. They make their money off of people in suits at big corporations who spend big bucks on outside consulting. The suits love to have meetings with Powerpoint slides with lots of figures, and they get a lot of those figures from consultants. The public figures Gartner reports are just a summary of a more detailed report that corporations can purchase to fatten their presentations and corporate strategies.
The 10 year figures probably don't mean much since they are long forgotten by the time one could validate the prediction. Much like weather forecasts, the predictions shift over time as the real date approaches, and those predictions tend to get more accurate as the time to the prediction shrinks.
What I'd love to see is a port-mortem on the predictions from all these consultant companies like Gartner. I wonder if someone keeps a record of predictions that Gartner made ten or more years ago and compares them to what really happened. My suspicion is that most of their long term predictions are junk, but they produce the figures since corporations want to pay for those figures.
It's not surprising that the SGI machine runs STREAM well. Back in the mid-1990's, John McCalpin, who worked for SGI at that time, was a regular contributor to comp.sys.super, and he would frequently brag about the superiority of SGI running STREAM. McCalpin is one of the primary advocates for STREAM. You can optimize a computer architecture to run a particular benchmark well. The question is whether the SGI machine runs a wider variety of real-world problems well.
It is interesting to use concentrated sunlight for surgery, but electricity is still a more reliable way to generate light. I would imagine that some high intensity incandescent lights could be concentrated similar to sunlight, and woundn't be dependent on weather and the earth's rotation.
Where this technology might be useful is in remote areas where electricity is not available. But where electricity is plentiful, this technology seems more like a novelty, like "Sun Tea".
The current 64-bit offering from Intel, Itanium, is an entirely new chip that has no backwards compatibility with it's x86 line of chips
The current Itanium chips are compatible with the x86 instruction set. Intel even applied for patents on the compatibility technology, reported on Slashdot quite a while ago. It's real hardware, not emulation. The compatible portion of the chip is known as the "Intel Value Engine", acknowledging the "value" of being able to run x86 code.
The catch is that it is just compatible with the 32-bit x86 instruction set, and it isn't going to be faster than a top-of-the-line x86 processor. The x86 instructions in Itanium are not enhanced to 64 bits like in the AMD chip. If you want top speed on Itanium you have to go to the IA-64 instructions.
Another catch is that the OS has to support the ability to map a process to run in the x86 hardware mode, and the OS has to communicate with the x86 processes. Some OSes running on Itanium won't bother supporting that mode.
With the AMD chip you get native x86 compatibility, 64-bit data wrangling, and it runs competitively with other x86 chips. Sounds like a good story, giving an evolutionary path for legacy applications. Will AMD deliver? Will Intel bring out Yamhill to snuff AMD? Stay tuned.
Keep in mind that a DLP allows you to show live events so there may also be more revenue opportunities if you get creative. I would imagine that content distributors would be interested in experimenting with sporting event or concert broadcasts
It's already happening at the Magnolia Theater in Dallas. Check out their calendar. They are showing a basketball game and horse race live in high definition. The Magnolia is an independent theater that is definitely thinking "outside of the box". Hopefully they will be successful.
The only exception is the few independent/art houses. These folks are gonna be the last to get digital equipment, and the films that they show are gonna be the last available for digital distribution.
In Dallas, The Magnolia Theater currently has DLP according to the DLP web site . The Magnolia is an independent/art theater. Many independent "film" creators are using digital video now since the editing and processing costs are lower. Most end up transferring digital video to film for distribution, but having digital theaters opens up the possibility of distribution without the expense of celluloid. This works out well for low budget independent film makers.
Digital projection opens up other possibilities too, like projecting live events. For example, The Magnolia is showing a high definition broadcasts of the Visa Triple Crown and a Dallas Mavericks basketball game according to their calendar.
The startup company that I work for ordered over 100 machines from Dell without any software loaded since we were putting Linux and our own UNIX variant on them. Shortly after receiving the machines, Microsoft was knocking on our door wanting to do an 'audit'. They wanted proof of every license for every copy of their software we had running. Our poor IT guys had to waste thier time collecting all the information.
In the end, Microsoft found that we had more licenses than copies of running Microsoft software. It's very annoying that Microsoft assumes we are guilty until proven innocent and harrasses our small startup company, wasting our scarce time and money. It was probably cheaper to comply with their audit than to fight them in a legal battle.
It's not the bandwidth, it's the services. Besides, who can afford to provision 65,000 OC-192s?
Of course 65,000 OC-192's is an architectural scalability limit. It makes great marketing material.
The terabit router market reminds me of the supercomputer market in the late 1980's. There were a bunch of startups working with bleeding-edge technology to make the fastest machines for a handful of customers who could afford it. Many of the startups died as the actual machines came to market. There were only so many customers that could afford and would use such machines at that time.
One of the main things that differentiated the supercomputer survivors from the casualties was the ability to provide a total hardware, software, and support solution to the customers. For the terabit router market, look for the companies delivering the full solution to the customers. Like you said, it's the services. From what I know of Hyperchip, they started with a chip idea for a scalable fabric, and until recently they didn't have much software and services capability.
Also watch for the companies with the least hype. It seems that many of the terabit router companies that have died or are dying have been full of promises that they couldn't deliver. Caspian was one of those hyped companies, and they aren't doing well recently. The smart companies will keep quiet until they have something real, so the company that delivers the best terabit router might be one most people have not heard of.
The LightReading link that you gave is a good place to check out what people in the optical networking industry have to say. The noise level can be high on the message boards (not unlike Slashdot), but there are some individuals that have great insight into the terabit router market. One such inidividual goes by the message board name of "skeptic".
Within the last few months, Wired magazine ran an article about Japan, and in that article was a picture of an official "Hello Kitty" vibrator. Apparently, Sanrio (owner of the "Hello Kitty" franchise) allows such things. They do require that nothing be sharp or potentially injurious, so you won't see any "Hello Kitty" knives or box cutters.
We now return you to the current on-topic discussion....
In the last couple years, HP's philosophy has been to concentrate on a few areas. It was the reason that they spun off their test and measurement division as Agilent Technologies. HP currently wants to concentrate on computers and the internet. I guess the calculators did not fit into their vision of a computer and internet world.
Personally, I think they should have given the calculator division to Agilent when it was spun off. It seems to line up with Agilent's mission of making specialized electronic devices.
The major part of creating efficient communications protocols is determining the probability of a bit error.
You have made some very good points, and the bit error problem is one of the big ones. When you go to ternary logic levels, you reduce the noise margin, so you have to slow down the clock and/or spread out the logic (more space) which offsets the gains you might get from ternary logic.
I once saw a point-to-point ternary logic data bus design that looked very clever on paper. It allowed simultaneous transfer of data in two directions on the same wires. Both ends of the bus were allowed to drive 0 or 1, and both ends watched the ternary logic level on the bus. If the middle state, "M", was observed, then the other end must be driving the opposite logic level.
This looks like a big win since the same wires can carry twice as much traffic than a normal binary bus, but the reality of noise margin made the bus impractical. The noise from the dynamic voltage swing between 0 and 1 made it difficult to reliably discriminate the smaller 0/M or M/1 voltages at high clock rates. The clock rate had to be slowed to less than half the speed of a binary bus which made the ternary bus lose its apparent advantage.
I won't even get into the headaches that ternary logic design would cause. It makes my binary brain hurt.
I thought HP had committed itself to ditching the PA-RISC and moving to Itanic, err, Itanium.
Yes, that is still the story as far as I know. It was the intended direction years ago, but IA-64 (Itanium) has taken longer to develop than originally expected (way longer), and the customer base hasn't shift to IA-64 yet. Until the customers start paying $$ for IA-64, HP will continue to make revenue from their existing PA-RISC customers.
The bottom line is that customers don't really care what the underlying processors is. Customers care that their legacy applications continue to run on new machines, that they run with good performance, and that they run reliably. The processor type is just a piece of the total compute environment. HP's motivation is to move to a higher volume microprocessor (IA-64). The current PA-RISC processor volumes are relatively low, and they have to factor in all the R&D expense that goes into a low volume processor. The more complex the processors get, the more R&D expense goes into the design of the chips and into the fabs to build them.
I'm still curious what the effect of AMD's Sledgehammer will be for customers. For those customers using IA-32, Sledgehammer (64bit enhanced IA-32) takes less porting effort than IA-64. I have yet to see any reports of a deployed IA-64 application in the real world. Everything so far has been lab results and marketing blubs.
Interesting categorizations. I definitely could fit a lot of people into those two categories, and have worked people who are excellent in one or both of those categories. Unfortunately, there are also people who have neither capability nor capacity, or they have capability and/or capacity, but it is highly misdirectly.
I once had a boss who had an incredibly high capacity. He could admirably juggle tons of workload, but much of that capacity was misdirected on feeding the bureaucracy of a big company. The productive work of the group suffered. Capable engineers particularly suffered, and many left the group and the company.
In the case of the "quirky" engineer in the article, he had misdirected capability. Maybe a manager could direct his energy toward the job, but in some cases the job itself is mismatched. Perhaps the "quirky" engineer in the story would work well in the FSF with Stallman doing Mayan calendar elisp code.
My co-worker uses it for a light beacon. It is propped up by the window, and one can see the beacon from the parking lot. They certainly put bright LEDs in the cue cat.
Ever since the mid 1980's, I have claimed that Microsoft's operating systems have basically been toys. I still haven't changed that opinion. They are good at providing a way for games to boot and access the hardware. For applications beyond games, the productivity and stability of Microsoft's products are measurably poor relative to more serious OS's. Even for business applications, Microsoft products feel like toys. Just watch some of the "suits" playing with Powerpoint sometime. I work in a mixed MS and *NIX environment, and all the serious software and hardware development is done on some flavor of *NIX.
With the Xbox, I see a shift back to a real toy paradigm for Microsoft. It will be interesting to see how much Xbox canibalizes the market which buys PC's mainly for a few application types, like gaming. The majority of users out there don't see computers as development tool. They see computers as an appliance that allows them to do email, web browsing, word processing, and games. I don't think that the majority of end users really care what OS is running. The choice of OS is mostly based on what the majority of people are using so that everyone can speak a common user language ("click on this, now click on that, now click on this"). A full fledged MS OS is more than most people need for daily computer fiddling. Most users would rather not be clicking through hardware profile and registry settings.
If a major shift occurs toward an Xbox model for end-users, there won't be much demand for used copies of old MS OS's, except for maybe "classic gaming". Are people selling old copies of MSDOS 5.0 anymore? Most people upgrade now because each new MS OS is perceived to be less crappy than the previous one. Since Xbox is a more controlled environment, and potentially more stable, will there be much motivation to upgrade?
One possible vision is that one would have an Xbox for playing games, checking on email, looking at multimedia web sites, etc. (appliance stuff); and if one wants to do more serious development, one would have a PC with possibly a MS OS or Linux or something else. There will definitely be a niche of "just click on it" multimedia developers that continue to use their MS OS and MacOS based computers. The more serious infrastructure developers will continue to migrate to more productive OS's.
If the Xbox does start to canibalize Microsoft's revenue stream from selling OS's for PC's, I wonder what they might cripple in the Xbox to keep people continuously buying and upgrading PC's.