Amory Lovins on smart engineering
Data centers show up around minute 24.
Systems software technology and business
Data centers show up around minute 24.
In some cases, dominant technology companies have used open-source projects as pawns. Google, for example, has needled Microsoft by providing financial support to the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, which oversees of the development of Firefox. I.B.M. has been a major backer of Linux, helping to raise it as a competitor to Microsoft’s Windows and other proprietary [...]
Imagine that you release software under a license that is primarily concerned with making sure that modifiable source code is available to all and that no restrictions should ever be placed on derived works. Now imagine that someone takes a huge body of code like this and starts marking interfaces as limited to specific uses [...]
The ALMA team has released ACS 8.0 on Red Hat 4.4, downgrading the Linux version from the foreseen 5.2 version. This choice, with the consequent back-porting of the code to the older OS version, had to be taken because of major problems encountered by the Control and Correlator teams in porting RTAI real time code [...]
A couple of fascinating posts on Shenzen small manufacturing.
Significantly, they do not just produce copycat phones. They make original design phones as well, as documented in this PDF (it is in Chinese, but the pictures are cool; the collage above is ganked from the PDF). These original phones integrate wacky features like 7.1 stereo sound, [...]
The company I work for now really does not care about IP. I design low-cost consumer products that get shipped offshore to be produced. The big deal is time-to-market and being first. After something is successful and commoditized, it will be copied and driven to the lowest possible cost. Thus, there is no longer a [...]
I dropped my subscription to the IEEE “Digital Library” because I found that if I strayed from a very narrow range of areas, the IEEE wanted ridiculous fees for access to papers. For example, despite a subscription to the digital library, I was not entitled to papers in power engineering. Now I find that the [...]
If anything, Wind River’s inability to breakout, despite a once Microsoft-like position of dominance, is a by-product of their failure to meaningfully go “up the stack” and away from their historical focus on the silicon layer as a primary differentiation point.
In other words, if Wind River had enabled the next generation of Cisco and Apple [...]
IBM dropped its offer to acquire Sun for $7billion. Sun has now a series of projects for which it has large costs, but no clear method of making money. What did Sun gain from open sourcing Solaris, from giving away Java, from embracing Linux, and so on? Irving Wladawsky-Berger (whose blog is worth reading) or [...]