"For traditional barcodes you need to be a foot away from it at most," said Dr Mohan.
We scan bar codes from 5 feet away regularly in our DC. All of the cartons and locations and upc's, you don't have to be that close, not sure why Dr. Mohan would make such an incorrect statement like that.
to implement a proper neural network on a von neumann type architecture, it's like trying to fit a square into a circle.
A feedforward neural network can be executed just fine on a von neumann architecture. At some point, we will be able to exceed human brain capacity (ignoring recurrence for now) on von neumann, it's just a matter of time.
However, can a recurrent network be properly simulated on a von neumann architecture? Not sure. The problem in that case is that multiple things are happening simultaneously that are not independent. I guess if you had enough computing power, you could have a time slice so small that things that were supposed to be simultaneous were so close to being simultaneous that you would only notice the difference after billions of years. Maybe.
The tax information is a non-issue. Companies have been dealing with this for a looong time. In addition, companies everywhere must bear the cost of regulations and so private solutions (like Vertex) exist. This is much better than having the govt. provide the solution because private companies can be more efficient and change easier/quicker with time.
The real issue is whether e-tailers should pay sales tax. Are they getting the benefit of any of the services of that municipality where the goods are delivered? They benefit from the maintenance of the roads used to to deliver the goods, but the delivery companies certainly pay their fair share of taxes for that.
A little of both, but for different reasons. I agree that they are not going to shut down the hardware operations just like that, but not because that's what they wanted to get out of this purchase. I think it's more out of necessity: probably would have been tough to complete the software only deal with IBM trying to buy the whole thing.
So now they have an unprofitable hardware division that also happens to be in a pond that is getting smaller every day due to Intel. But if they just shut everything down then IBM or HP swoops in and controls the customers and potentially software and services that can get sold into those shops. So they do what they have to do to make money on the hardware: cut expensive development that simply is't going to have a return (new processors), and provide the customers with enough hardware to keep them happy as they slowly transition to Oracle Intel servers over the next 5 to 10 years.
Correction:
"It hit 3.8 GHz in late 2004, on a 90nm process. 4.5 years later, on 45nm, we still don't have any current processor design which clocks that fast"
2007 Power6 ships at 4.7ghz
2008 Power6 ships at 5.0ghz
Oracle wanted the 1% - Java, Solaris and customer base
They are going to find a way to make money with the hardware because you can't just get rid of it without seriously pissing off customers that also might/already purchase Oracle DB or applications. But you can bet they are going to be smart about the process.
But you can't cherry pick the most expensive (and highest margin) servers because there isn't enough volume to pay for the chip r&d and production. Gross margin for companies like Oracle and Microsoft (80%) is about double IBM and Sun (40%) server businesses.
If you get rid of processor business (which most need to do) to make sure you don't have to pay for all of that r&d (and possibly fabs) then you have a much harder time differentiating yourself from the competition. Additionally Intel is making procs that continue to move up the ladder beyond just departmental servers.
90% of annual revenues does not equal 90% of value to Oracle. Hardware is a competitive low margin business, software is high margin. Oracle is a software company, why lose focus and expend energy in a low margin business? They will probably chop anything unprofitable (e.g. Intel won the war, to compete in chips you need serious volume) and milk the install base for some time.
I don't think Itanium being pushed out is a sign of anything other than that Intel would probably like to just kill Itanium and put all resources in x86 as they are creating very impressive procs lately.
I agree with you, I was anxiously waiting for his explanation but pretty disappointed. One of the things I've been thinking is that maybe consciousness is what allows our emotions to be effective. If we are conscious of ourselves as an entity in this world, it seems to give our emotions a focus ("me") to operate on.
There is a lot I like about Oracle, but one thing that just bugged the heck out of me was how poor the optimizer was. I was used to the as400 database (they kind of call it DB2 but not sure how related it is to DB2 on the other platforms) and the as400 optimizer seemed to be pretty damn smart. I was surprised I had to invest so much time with hints or restructuring the sql to get good performance with Oracle in some situations. But, I did like the performance when it wasn't confused and I really liked the read consistency and multi-versioning stuff.
WanderingHermit, just in case you are wondering, that was actually a joke. You had a nice post, which just needed to be offset with some smart-ass response.
I've coded entire video editing systems in less than 20 minutes, and they were way more functional than anything from Adobe. I've also created full featured sound studio software in about 7 lines of code. You must not be very technical.
I also don't use coupons at the grocery store, or buy 1 get 1 free from Domino's, and especially I don't ever use my frequent flyer miles that I accrued using my visa because it's immoral.
Intel wins, but Power will take longer to die than Sparc because IBM has larger overall market share (unix, mainframe, etc.) to spread the cost of Power over the long haul. Mainframe isn't using Power yet, but it will.
Way to put your money where your mouth is. "Software or services" dollars are pretty much weasel dollars, aren't they?
The goal isn't to "put their money where their mouth is", the goal is to provide an incentive to switch to IBM hardware at a time when more companies would consider it due to the unknown future regarding Sun hardware. The reason it's "weasal" dollars is because hardware is down and they don't want to show a bigger drop in hardware, so the money is given away from the services part of the business where profits are high and thus the financial statement still looks good at the end of the quarter.
This is not a cheap trick, just normal competition. The term "friendly" should not be considered when thinking of any of these companies or transactions, it's all about money.
Something to note about those benchmarks, if you look at the response time for the transactions the T2 was around.5 and the Power system was around.1 (if I remember correctly).
The benchmarks I've seen show the Power system scaling much better than the T2 and pretty much anything else out there (including Itanium and other Intel products). As you get to 16, 32 or 64 procs the Power systems continue to shine, the others not so much.
If the benchmarks for T2 are accurate (I question that response time difference), then it certainly performs well at that level, but it's a problem that it doesn't scale like Power.
Slashdot Mirror
"For traditional barcodes you need to be a foot away from it at most," said Dr Mohan.
We scan bar codes from 5 feet away regularly in our DC. All of the cartons and locations and upc's, you don't have to be that close, not sure why Dr. Mohan would make such an incorrect statement like that.
to implement a proper neural network on a von neumann type architecture, it's like trying to fit a square into a circle.
A feedforward neural network can be executed just fine on a von neumann architecture. At some point, we will be able to exceed human brain capacity (ignoring recurrence for now) on von neumann, it's just a matter of time.
However, can a recurrent network be properly simulated on a von neumann architecture? Not sure. The problem in that case is that multiple things are happening simultaneously that are not independent. I guess if you had enough computing power, you could have a time slice so small that things that were supposed to be simultaneous were so close to being simultaneous that you would only notice the difference after billions of years. Maybe.
In the next version the name PostgreSQL is going to be changed to the easier to say XquLck#7SQL
The tax information is a non-issue. Companies have been dealing with this for a looong time. In addition, companies everywhere must bear the cost of regulations and so private solutions (like Vertex) exist. This is much better than having the govt. provide the solution because private companies can be more efficient and change easier/quicker with time. The real issue is whether e-tailers should pay sales tax. Are they getting the benefit of any of the services of that municipality where the goods are delivered? They benefit from the maintenance of the roads used to to deliver the goods, but the delivery companies certainly pay their fair share of taxes for that.
Except that solutions have already existed for decades: Vertex
Most companies use Vertex for this. I've used them in sell to consumer systems since early 90's.
A little of both, but for different reasons. I agree that they are not going to shut down the hardware operations just like that, but not because that's what they wanted to get out of this purchase. I think it's more out of necessity: probably would have been tough to complete the software only deal with IBM trying to buy the whole thing.
So now they have an unprofitable hardware division that also happens to be in a pond that is getting smaller every day due to Intel. But if they just shut everything down then IBM or HP swoops in and controls the customers and potentially software and services that can get sold into those shops. So they do what they have to do to make money on the hardware: cut expensive development that simply is't going to have a return (new processors), and provide the customers with enough hardware to keep them happy as they slowly transition to Oracle Intel servers over the next 5 to 10 years.
You mean Symmetric Multithreading, the thing first invented by IBM in 1968? It's computers, everything was invented in the 60's.
Correction:
"It hit 3.8 GHz in late 2004, on a 90nm process. 4.5 years later, on 45nm, we still don't have any current processor design which clocks that fast"
2007 Power6 ships at 4.7ghz
2008 Power6 ships at 5.0ghz
Oracle wanted the 1% - Java, Solaris and customer base
They are going to find a way to make money with the hardware because you can't just get rid of it without seriously pissing off customers that also might/already purchase Oracle DB or applications. But you can bet they are going to be smart about the process.
But you can't cherry pick the most expensive (and highest margin) servers because there isn't enough volume to pay for the chip r&d and production. Gross margin for companies like Oracle and Microsoft (80%) is about double IBM and Sun (40%) server businesses.
If you get rid of processor business (which most need to do) to make sure you don't have to pay for all of that r&d (and possibly fabs) then you have a much harder time differentiating yourself from the competition. Additionally Intel is making procs that continue to move up the ladder beyond just departmental servers.
90% of annual revenues does not equal 90% of value to Oracle. Hardware is a competitive low margin business, software is high margin. Oracle is a software company, why lose focus and expend energy in a low margin business? They will probably chop anything unprofitable (e.g. Intel won the war, to compete in chips you need serious volume) and milk the install base for some time.
I don't think Itanium being pushed out is a sign of anything other than that Intel would probably like to just kill Itanium and put all resources in x86 as they are creating very impressive procs lately.
I agree with you, I was anxiously waiting for his explanation but pretty disappointed. One of the things I've been thinking is that maybe consciousness is what allows our emotions to be effective. If we are conscious of ourselves as an entity in this world, it seems to give our emotions a focus ("me") to operate on.
There is a lot I like about Oracle, but one thing that just bugged the heck out of me was how poor the optimizer was. I was used to the as400 database (they kind of call it DB2 but not sure how related it is to DB2 on the other platforms) and the as400 optimizer seemed to be pretty damn smart. I was surprised I had to invest so much time with hints or restructuring the sql to get good performance with Oracle in some situations. But, I did like the performance when it wasn't confused and I really liked the read consistency and multi-versioning stuff.
WanderingHermit, just in case you are wondering, that was actually a joke. You had a nice post, which just needed to be offset with some smart-ass response.
If you need the features just add them yourself.
I've coded entire video editing systems in less than 20 minutes, and they were way more functional than anything from Adobe. I've also created full featured sound studio software in about 7 lines of code. You must not be very technical.
is interesting, but I have read many other posts in this thread that seem good too.
It's tough to know who to mod up when I can only think about having to pay for my kids braces this year which is going to set me back about $5,000....
IBM is only 35% bigger than Oracle+Sun
Oracle 2008 Revenue: 22B
Sun 2008 Revenue: 13B
Combined=35B
IBM 2008 Revenue: 103B
That's 294% bigger than Oracle+Sun
For public transportation, the other variable cost is the money lost during a mugging. Not everyone pays this cost, but it can add up.
I also don't use coupons at the grocery store, or buy 1 get 1 free from Domino's, and especially I don't ever use my frequent flyer miles that I accrued using my visa because it's immoral.
Intel wins, but Power will take longer to die than Sparc because IBM has larger overall market share (unix, mainframe, etc.) to spread the cost of Power over the long haul. Mainframe isn't using Power yet, but it will.
Way to put your money where your mouth is. "Software or services" dollars are pretty much weasel dollars, aren't they?
The goal isn't to "put their money where their mouth is", the goal is to provide an incentive to switch to IBM hardware at a time when more companies would consider it due to the unknown future regarding Sun hardware. The reason it's "weasal" dollars is because hardware is down and they don't want to show a bigger drop in hardware, so the money is given away from the services part of the business where profits are high and thus the financial statement still looks good at the end of the quarter.
This is not a cheap trick, just normal competition. The term "friendly" should not be considered when thinking of any of these companies or transactions, it's all about money.
Something to note about those benchmarks, if you look at the response time for the transactions the T2 was around .5 and the Power system was around .1 (if I remember correctly).
The benchmarks I've seen show the Power system scaling much better than the T2 and pretty much anything else out there (including Itanium and other Intel products). As you get to 16, 32 or 64 procs the Power systems continue to shine, the others not so much.
If the benchmarks for T2 are accurate (I question that response time difference), then it certainly performs well at that level, but it's a problem that it doesn't scale like Power.