Hydro Power is the one that should be investigated more
Hydro power, like that long the Colorado river has its own set of problems. It interrupts fish migration most of all. It also changes the flow of rivers which causes more (or less) silt in given areas, and may (over time) significantly reduce the ability of the dam to produce power. Changes to river flows also cause problems in temperature.
There is also a bunch of research into the fact that the large resovoirs of hydro power plants actually cause earthquakes. We are displacing so much material and adding so much weight in a place it hasn't been before that we are (ever so slightly) altering the shape of the earth's crust.
I don't know of a perfect power source, but I don't think developed nations will be adding significant amounts of hydro power. There are too many issues.
First off, you don't want power output to rely too heavily on weather conditions. I want my electricity to be stable. Not that what we have now is stable either...
There are actually reasonable solutions to this. First, you can store the energy. There are already wind turbines in California that split water at night into hydrogen and oxygen and then convert that back to energy (using a fuel cell) during the day. Expensive as all get-out (in terms of capital cost, not variable cost); but it works.
Since one of the best regions for sustained winds is in the Dakotas (North Central USA, for those Americans who don't know their geography), it could be converted to hydrogen and then piped somewhere (most likely Chicago) for conversion to power. The challenge with this method is that Hydrogen (being such a small molecule) donsn't like to stay in pipelines. It may be better to steam reform carbon dioxide into Methane and then put the methane into our existing pipeline infrastructure.
In other words, stability isn't a problem, as you can use other methods. While it does decrease efficiency (going back and forth between electricity and chemical storage of energy is wasteful!) it STILL has less of an environmental impact than oil.
Also, It is "Project Janus" at Sun, so it is also not the trademark name.
Anyway, either one could run afoul of another trademark if they actually marketed the end product that way. There is a relevant Registered Trademark I can find is 2750637. Notice IC009, which is generally "scientific stuff" (or see here for the real definitions)
Word Mark JANUS Goods and Services IC 009. US 021 023 026 036 038. G & S: Computer software using artificial intelligence for identifying and correcting Year 2000 problems in database files. FIRST USE: 20021028. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20021028 Mark Drawing Code (1) TYPED DRAWING Serial Number 75493600 Filing Date May 21, 1998 Current Filing Basis 1A Original Filing Basis 1B Published for Opposition April 16, 2002 Registration Number 2750637 Registration Date August 12, 2003 Owner (REGISTRANT) RICOMM Systems, INC. CORPORATION NEW JERSEY 108 E. Centre Boulevard Marlton NEW JERSEY 08053 Attorney of Record Norman E. Lehrer Type of Mark TRADEMARK Register PRINCIPAL Live/Dead Indicator LIVE
PowerPC is actually derived from POWER; it is NOT a subset. Things from POWER2 would not run unchanged on PowerPC - I experienced that in a transition from an RS/6000 R30 (if my memory isn't failing) to an RS/6000 J40, and it required some rework.
To quote IBM's
POWER history, there are differences:
"For instance, PowerPC is open-endian, supporting both big-endian and little-endian memory models, where POWER had been big-endian. The original PowerPC design also focused on floating-point performance and multiprocessing capabilities. Still, it did and still does include most of the POWER instructions. Many applications work on both, perhaps with a recompile to make the transition."
If we want a "global economy," that necessarily means evening everything out, and losing our advantage.
But the question is in HOW it evens out. Does it even out by bringing down the average living standard in the US, or by bringing (significantly) up the standard everywhere else? He states that there is no guarantee that such trade has a net advantage to the USA; by similar logic, there is no reason that the process of outsourcing has to drag down the average living standard in the US.
This is a fascinating article, but like most economics, leaves some holes to consider. The problem here is that the measurement of 'cost' we have today from accounting and economics is not capable of measuring secondary items or intangibles. There are also challenges to properly measuring 'options' on different possibilities.
Outsourcing is a trend that will balance out as wages and exchange rates change. As business schools and management begin to understand exactly what the costs are, the true value of outsourcing will become clear.
In short, No. I've read my history and understand both the technical and the business reasons why the technology world moves in certain ways. Apparently, I just distilled history a bit more than you might appreciate.
GPU were NEVER a threat to cpus.
Note that I didn't say Graphics Processors [I use that term since I was corrected by the second reply to my first post] were a threat to CPUs. I said they were a threat to Intel's business. I fully agree that a Graphics Processor isn't designed for a single pipeline execution model using double precision or integer arithmetic - so replacing a CPU with a Graphics Processor is foolhardy. However, if you take the CPU and make it a commodity rather than the key hardware feature, the margin goes away - and so does Intel's profit.
ExtremeTech has some history where they specifically mention (near the bottom of that page) that 'there was also some concern by Intel and Microsoft that the graphics chips were becoming the central feature of the PC architecture, shifting the focus from the CPU and the operating system.' I apologize that I can't get a more specific reference for you - the development of AGP is ancient history on the Internet; there aren't any juicy blogs to point to, and my hard copy items from that time have long since been recycled.
This is a CLASSIC example of politics alive and well in technology. Sony bought Columbia records to make the CD successful after losing out on Betamax. For a more recent example directly in the comptuer industry, look at the give and take between Intel and Rambus on DRDRAM. The best technology does NOT necessarily win, and the companies involved are NOT always doing things for consumer benefit or technology reasons.
"There will be a fundamental reshaping of the market, which can only come from the bottom up, i.e. from the free software community and from small companies".
"The two most important strategies we must adopt are to encourage and adhere to open standards, which undermine big IP oriented business' ability to monopolise and dominate the marketplace.
I think John misses the point over what makes some companies dominate and why open source won't help small business.
John doesn't have the same defintion of domination and the definition of "fundamental reshaping" as everyone else. Open source software has been VERY successful in the building blocks of software. GNU/Linux as an operating system; Eclipse as an IDE, MySQL as a database.
However, there are niche applications where the open source investment will be slow, painful, and probably not pan out. If you think open source will unseat AutoCAD, don't hold your breath. It may happen, but it won't be this decade. And Adobe Photoshop STILL dominates in image processing, even though GIMP is rather useful.
Domination (especially due to IP) is also a relative term. Microsoft can be seen to dominate the OS and "office" market today; those are prime targets of OS software. But IBM has a huge IP portfolio - is one of the large companies 'appear[ing] to support open source' and yet has a lot less to lose (on a relative scale to Microsoft). Even if IBM's software group (DB2, Lotus Notes, et al.) took it in the teeth from open source, is that going to have a (negative) impact on IBM Global Services? Will it not be the same dominating behemoth it is today?
The "fundamental reshaping" of the market will come when technology becomes pervasive, reliable, and easy enough to use that the Fortune 500 doesn't NEED to call IBM Global Services any more. Until then, someone has to put everything together, and open source reducing the procurement cost isn't going to change that. Solve the reliability and ease of use problems for small business and you WILL win in the marketplace - whether or not you're open source.
The amount of silicon on an average GPU overtook the amount of silicon on the average CPU some time ago.
And another post:
How can the price range be so slow when the processing power is claimed to be so many times faster than Intel chips?
First, silicon area doesn't necessarily mean performance. The whole reason that IBM, AMD and Intel are building multi-core chips is that so much of the area in a moden microprocessor is spent in workarounds for different structural hazards rather than in real work. The GPUs are huge because they are parallel mathematical computation engines. On a FLOP per sq. mm basis, they are a LOT more efficient than a single core CPU could hope to be.
As WIAKywbfatw points out, GPUs became more powerful than CPUs (on a FLOP basis) a decade or more ago. This was the whole reason Intel created the AGP port - to prevent the GPU from becoming the center of the the computer (it was a huge threat to their business).
Today, silicon is more and more about customization... on a FLOP basis, the chips in HD digital TVs have nearly the performance of the latest P4 - but at MUCH less cost... because they are less flexible (a LOT less flexible). Their design is to optimize single precision floating point performance... You can't use that CPU power for a long-running simulation ("scientific computing") - only for graphics; where single precision is still orders of magnitude more precise than the monitor can display.
The power adapters... have the part number 02K6549, the agency said.
The computers were sold between January 1999 and August 2000
Note that IBM shipped a revised product under the SAME part number after August 2000... if you think you qualify, make sure to look at the details - it has to have HOLLOW pins look here to be part of the recall.
With all these codecs on board i'd imagine it's a lot more than for regular DVD, and seeing the Chinese manufacturers attitude towards this they'll just go right ahead with their own patent-free platform.
In fact, the linked article in the original post shows the Achilles heel of such a strategy: "For one thing, a homegrown format like EVD would become useless if few movies are released for it."
Sony BOUGHT Columbia pictures/records in order to ensure the success of the CD (after it "lost" with the Betamax) Success is about CONTENT, and if the actions by Blu-Ray (and HD-DVD) are supported by the content owners, and others are not; expect Blu-Ray (and or HD-DVD) to be succcessful at the expense of the "competing" solutions
Specifically it was NOT addressed to clients (note Sam doens't call them customers anymore).
It was a letter on the IBM Intranet addressed to the 300,000+ IBMers (for reference, I am one. I've read the letter. Of course, I do NOT speak for IBM). The letter does not mention specifics, but IBM develops a TON of software for use internally. These applications have to be tested with SP2 before they release SP2 internally.
This is completely routine, and has been done on many patches before this one. It is IBM being cautious and testing a new component with the thousands of other pieces of software that keep IBM moving. I for one, am glad our IT staff takes the time to do this.
Think about the latest worm going around taking your nice new 3200Mhz processor to an effective 100mhz by blowing all the fuses and crippling it.
I'm guessing that won't happen. Chances
are this feature was designed to work around problems in a high end server. Trying to keep a mainframe at 99.999% uptime requires the ability to adapt to hardware failure. Thus, this would be a part of the hardware, and the software would only know about it enough to send the message to your IBM support person to come fix the mainframe.
I would guess though, because of the high R&D costs involved, this will only ever see its way into high-end servers.
Consider other technologies that once seemed too expeisive for lower end systems. The pSeries (AIX machines based on POWER5) now have logical partitioning, once reserved for the zSeries (mainframes). I would expect this to be in mainframes for a chip generation (or two, worst case). Then expect to see it in iSeries and pSeries, followed by other IBM devices.
The article I linked was talking about the backbone. I only provided the "FTTH" clarification to help those without the magical-telecom decoder ring since the article references it as a potential driver of higher bandwidth requirements (and the application that would likely "dry up" the dark fiber... someday:)
While we're on the distinction, the connections to the home/premises will probably be done with passive optical networking (PON) which isn't a place where there is any entrenched supplier (so my reference to Nortel in my first post was in relation to the backbone)
Note the linked article refers to "FTTH" - Fiber to the Home. Which isn't really much different than "FTTP" - Fiber to the Premises, other than it's limited to home and not business (hence the recent change to analysts using FTTP).
Unfortunately, it's not like a light switch. It's more like saying the house is wired for electricity, but you don't own any lamps. A LOT of capital equipment in the form of Routers and Optical Switches will need to be purchased to make the "dark" fiber into usable fiber.
Watch the results of Nortel, in particular, as it has a strong North America optical presence.
Slashdot Mirror
Research proves you wrong
Hydro power, like that long the Colorado river has its own set of problems. It interrupts fish migration most of all. It also changes the flow of rivers which causes more (or less) silt in given areas, and may (over time) significantly reduce the ability of the dam to produce power. Changes to river flows also cause problems in temperature.
There is also a bunch of research into the fact that the large resovoirs of hydro power plants actually cause earthquakes. We are displacing so much material and adding so much weight in a place it hasn't been before that we are (ever so slightly) altering the shape of the earth's crust.
I don't know of a perfect power source, but I don't think developed nations will be adding significant amounts of hydro power. There are too many issues.
There are actually reasonable solutions to this. First, you can store the energy. There are already wind turbines in California that split water at night into hydrogen and oxygen and then convert that back to energy (using a fuel cell) during the day. Expensive as all get-out (in terms of capital cost, not variable cost); but it works.
Since one of the best regions for sustained winds is in the Dakotas (North Central USA, for those Americans who don't know their geography), it could be converted to hydrogen and then piped somewhere (most likely Chicago) for conversion to power. The challenge with this method is that Hydrogen (being such a small molecule) donsn't like to stay in pipelines. It may be better to steam reform carbon dioxide into Methane and then put the methane into our existing pipeline infrastructure.
In other words, stability isn't a problem, as you can use other methods. While it does decrease efficiency (going back and forth between electricity and chemical storage of energy is wasteful!) it STILL has less of an environmental impact than oil.
At least give the SCO crowd a fair shake. You know you shouldn't use dates over 2038 - UnixWare's localtime() can't count that high.
Code name, yes. It is not a Microsoft Trademark
Also, It is "Project Janus" at Sun, so it is also not the trademark name.
Anyway, either one could run afoul of another trademark if they actually marketed the end product that way. There is a relevant Registered Trademark I can find is 2750637. Notice IC009, which is generally "scientific stuff" (or see here for the real definitions)
To quote IBM's POWER history, there are differences: "For instance, PowerPC is open-endian, supporting both big-endian and little-endian memory models, where POWER had been big-endian. The original PowerPC design also focused on floating-point performance and multiprocessing capabilities. Still, it did and still does include most of the POWER instructions. Many applications work on both, perhaps with a recompile to make the transition."
But the question is in HOW it evens out. Does it even out by bringing down the average living standard in the US, or by bringing (significantly) up the standard everywhere else? He states that there is no guarantee that such trade has a net advantage to the USA; by similar logic, there is no reason that the process of outsourcing has to drag down the average living standard in the US.
This is a fascinating article, but like most economics, leaves some holes to consider. The problem here is that the measurement of 'cost' we have today from accounting and economics is not capable of measuring secondary items or intangibles. There are also challenges to properly measuring 'options' on different possibilities.
Outsourcing is a trend that will balance out as wages and exchange rates change. As business schools and management begin to understand exactly what the costs are, the true value of outsourcing will become clear.
There is also historical info on this being licensed to Sharman Networks.
GPU were NEVER a threat to cpus.
Note that I didn't say Graphics Processors [I use that term since I was corrected by the second reply to my first post] were a threat to CPUs. I said they were a threat to Intel's business. I fully agree that a Graphics Processor isn't designed for a single pipeline execution model using double precision or integer arithmetic - so replacing a CPU with a Graphics Processor is foolhardy. However, if you take the CPU and make it a commodity rather than the key hardware feature, the margin goes away - and so does Intel's profit.
ExtremeTech has some history where they specifically mention (near the bottom of that page) that 'there was also some concern by Intel and Microsoft that the graphics chips were becoming the central feature of the PC architecture, shifting the focus from the CPU and the operating system.' I apologize that I can't get a more specific reference for you - the development of AGP is ancient history on the Internet; there aren't any juicy blogs to point to, and my hard copy items from that time have long since been recycled.
This is a CLASSIC example of politics alive and well in technology. Sony bought Columbia records to make the CD successful after losing out on Betamax. For a more recent example directly in the comptuer industry, look at the give and take between Intel and Rambus on DRDRAM. The best technology does NOT necessarily win, and the companies involved are NOT always doing things for consumer benefit or technology reasons.
"The two most important strategies we must adopt are to encourage and adhere to open standards, which undermine big IP oriented business' ability to monopolise and dominate the marketplace.
I think John misses the point over what makes some companies dominate and why open source won't help small business.
John doesn't have the same defintion of domination and the definition of "fundamental reshaping" as everyone else. Open source software has been VERY successful in the building blocks of software. GNU/Linux as an operating system; Eclipse as an IDE, MySQL as a database.
However, there are niche applications where the open source investment will be slow, painful, and probably not pan out. If you think open source will unseat AutoCAD, don't hold your breath. It may happen, but it won't be this decade. And Adobe Photoshop STILL dominates in image processing, even though GIMP is rather useful.
Domination (especially due to IP) is also a relative term. Microsoft can be seen to dominate the OS and "office" market today; those are prime targets of OS software. But IBM has a huge IP portfolio - is one of the large companies 'appear[ing] to support open source' and yet has a lot less to lose (on a relative scale to Microsoft). Even if IBM's software group (DB2, Lotus Notes, et al.) took it in the teeth from open source, is that going to have a (negative) impact on IBM Global Services? Will it not be the same dominating behemoth it is today?
The "fundamental reshaping" of the market will come when technology becomes pervasive, reliable, and easy enough to use that the Fortune 500 doesn't NEED to call IBM Global Services any more. Until then, someone has to put everything together, and open source reducing the procurement cost isn't going to change that. Solve the reliability and ease of use problems for small business and you WILL win in the marketplace - whether or not you're open source.
40GFlops IS real-world performance. GPUs are specialized devices. See my earlier post here
And another post:
How can the price range be so slow when the processing power is claimed to be so many times faster than Intel chips?
First, silicon area doesn't necessarily mean performance. The whole reason that IBM, AMD and Intel are building multi-core chips is that so much of the area in a moden microprocessor is spent in workarounds for different structural hazards rather than in real work. The GPUs are huge because they are parallel mathematical computation engines. On a FLOP per sq. mm basis, they are a LOT more efficient than a single core CPU could hope to be.
As WIAKywbfatw points out, GPUs became more powerful than CPUs (on a FLOP basis) a decade or more ago. This was the whole reason Intel created the AGP port - to prevent the GPU from becoming the center of the the computer (it was a huge threat to their business).
Today, silicon is more and more about customization... on a FLOP basis, the chips in HD digital TVs have nearly the performance of the latest P4 - but at MUCH less cost... because they are less flexible (a LOT less flexible). Their design is to optimize single precision floating point performance... You can't use that CPU power for a long-running simulation ("scientific computing") - only for graphics; where single precision is still orders of magnitude more precise than the monitor can display.
The computers were sold between January 1999 and August 2000
Note that IBM shipped a revised product under the SAME part number after August 2000... if you think you qualify, make sure to look at the details - it has to have HOLLOW pins look here to be part of the recall.
I fully agree with you that China will likely TRY to go forward with its own standard. They have repeatedly shown a desire to do that, if only for the advantage of local suppliers. (reference WLAN and TD-SCDMA). However, Intel and others forced China to back down on WAPI (WiFi). As China enters the WTO it will increasingly find it difficult to to make such moves.
In fact, the linked article in the original post shows the Achilles heel of such a strategy: "For one thing, a homegrown format like EVD would become useless if few movies are released for it."
Sony BOUGHT Columbia pictures/records in order to ensure the success of the CD (after it "lost" with the Betamax) Success is about CONTENT, and if the actions by Blu-Ray (and HD-DVD) are supported by the content owners, and others are not; expect Blu-Ray (and or HD-DVD) to be succcessful at the expense of the "competing" solutions
Specifically it was NOT addressed to clients (note Sam doens't call them customers anymore).
It was a letter on the IBM Intranet addressed to the 300,000+ IBMers (for reference, I am one. I've read the letter. Of course, I do NOT speak for IBM). The letter does not mention specifics, but IBM develops a TON of software for use internally. These applications have to be tested with SP2 before they release SP2 internally.
This is completely routine, and has been done on many patches before this one. It is IBM being cautious and testing a new component with the thousands of other pieces of software that keep IBM moving. I for one, am glad our IT staff takes the time to do this.
I'm guessing that won't happen. Chances are this feature was designed to work around problems in a high end server. Trying to keep a mainframe at 99.999% uptime requires the ability to adapt to hardware failure. Thus, this would be a part of the hardware, and the software would only know about it enough to send the message to your IBM support person to come fix the mainframe.
I would guess though, because of the high R&D costs involved, this will only ever see its way into high-end servers.
Consider other technologies that once seemed too expeisive for lower end systems. The pSeries (AIX machines based on POWER5) now have logical partitioning, once reserved for the zSeries (mainframes). I would expect this to be in mainframes for a chip generation (or two, worst case). Then expect to see it in iSeries and pSeries, followed by other IBM devices.
While we're on the distinction, the connections to the home/premises will probably be done with passive optical networking (PON) which isn't a place where there is any entrenched supplier (so my reference to Nortel in my first post was in relation to the backbone)
Note the linked article refers to "FTTH" - Fiber to the Home. Which isn't really much different than "FTTP" - Fiber to the Premises, other than it's limited to home and not business (hence the recent change to analysts using FTTP).
Unfortunately, it's not like a light switch. It's more like saying the house is wired for electricity, but you don't own any lamps. A LOT of capital equipment in the form of Routers and Optical Switches will need to be purchased to make the "dark" fiber into usable fiber.
Watch the results of Nortel, in particular, as it has a strong North America optical presence.