Systems software technology and business
Lovins observes that power inputs in many industrial processes go into a bottleneck that makes power conservation hard if you start at the wrong end. The power goes into a long pipeline of process that emerges on the other end with some useful (in theory) work. If you start on the power input end, then [...]
Data centers show up around minute 24.
We’re starting to see a confluence between IT and energy that will change both industries. A windmill power data center is an interesting data point. At some time, we’re going to want to control the energy generation from the data center – for example, to run big batch jobs when the wind is blowing or [...]
I have a blog post up at fsmlabs.com about our TimeKeeper software for time synchronization. TimeKeeper is currently aimed at financial trading markets, but we also hope to market it to electric power distribution and transmission engineers who have a similar need for precise time synchronization within substations and for instrumentation. There are also applications [...]
The goal of modern processor chip design has changed from optimizing various speed/price/heat tradeoffs for applications to finding excuses for dumping more transistors into the device. Heard an interesting talk from Krisztián Flautner of ARM at the ACISC conference and I have to admit that it’s not entirely the fault of the chip designers – [...]
It’s sad that after all this time, one can look at any random article on parallel programming and find some variation of:
for i = 1 … n
create thread i
do something
end for
as if that was the only [...]
software patent
This article from Ars Technica discusses a talk over the summer by Merrill Lynch’s chief technology architect, Jeffrey Birnbaum on “stateless cloud computing” – most concretely on distributed file systems.
Birnbaum believes that one of the key foundational elements of a stateless computing environment is a networked storage system that enables ubiquitous availability of software. The [...]
George Gilder had an article in Wired on data centers as clouds. My instinct is to dismiss anything Gilder writes because of his track record of wacky ideas (e.g. feminism is destroying civilization and supply side economics makes sense). But, in this article, Gilder reports on some smart people. The sheer massive use [...]
AT&T considers reading all the packets that cross its lines. Quite an interesting proposal. Tim Wu’s take
The prospect of AT&T, already accused of spying on our telephone calls, now scanning every e-mail and download for outlawed content is way too totalitarian for my tastes. But the bizarre twist is that the proposal is such [...]