In surveying current processor architectures, we can easily find an example of almost any style or theme that you might be interested in. The line between RISC, originally a Reduced Instruction Set and CISC, a Complex Instruction Set Computer, has been blurred in the last ten years. While Instruction Set Architectures (ISA) have been stable until recent developments, the battle now is between very fast single processors and slower wide parallel processors.
This battle has now been joined by the technology battle that intensifies as circuit dimensions shrink, and the power/heat battle as clock speeds race for the 10 GHz crown. That particular winner may provide both home entertainment and heating in the near future. Read about future challenges for processor designers in New Paths in Processor Architecture.
Currently, Internet fires (Spam, Viruses, Worms and DDoS) are being fought by reactive software and actions, and proactive efforts in new software designs that will prevent current firestarter techniques from working. Between the incomplete coverage of reactive techniques and the long lead time of proactive techniques lies a huge gap of vulnerability that we handle on a mostly ad hoc basis. We need to do better.
This article covers some basic steps we can take now. It also identifies more advanced steps to close the holes that Internet rats crawl through. Read Firefighting On The Internet to see the big picture, what we can learn from real firefighters, and find out what simple steps you could take to put out any local fires.
The basis for this new world will be the combination of Open Source software and Open Standards - which I call the "Open Software Environment (OSE)." This combination has already created multiple open implementations for Digital Libraries, which I wrote about in my November 2002 column for Byte.com.
The impact of technology convergence is at its earliest stages, just visible if you know where to look. This is a much broader convergence than the move of voice, data and video into an all digital mode. This convergence will affect all industries and the public because they all use computers.
Key among the many technologies that drive the IT industry are semiconductors. This is the base technology that enables all of the other parts of the technology business. Whenever semiconductor technology hits a speed bump, all of IT bounces. Products based on semi technology are migrating into all aspects of life, mostly to our benefit. Other basic technologies are optical for communications and MEMS for micro sized electronic actuators and sensors.
For the last few years it looked like semi technology was seeing the end of our ability to advance to finer resolutions which means more devices in a given space and lower power (and cost) per device. There were serious problems in Lithography caused by the inability to optically project finer masks onto the photosensitive resist to define the patterns on the chips.
What "Waves of Change" is about is the coming convergence of a set of technologies that will first enable, then force another transition in our lives. This is often referred to as a 'sea change', a transition to a new environment that is not reversible. Once the sea change is past, nothing short of global catastrophe will reverse the process.
The Internet is one such sea change and yet we have only seen the initial impacts of the Web. What enabled the web was the convergence of a maturing high speed digital communications network with the maturing of high performance digital computers and graphics.
These two technologies were catalyzed by the desire of some physicists to be able to examine physics data remotely. From this a new method of communications, the web server and browser, was born. Joined at the hip was an older technology - email. These technologies have already transformed the world.
Back in 2002, I wrote about the drive manifacturers dropping their warranties to one year, which reflected the price competition at that time. [Link] Now, with fewer drive makers, warranties have once again become a selling point. Read about new drive reliability options for home and small business, and the basics of offsite backup in Disk Drives and Backup.
Every company or person who writes software has a series of releases that have a common set of code names, but these codes have no official definition. Based on my experiences, here are some definitions to help you understand what the various codes really mean.
Have you read George Orwell's "1984"? In this classic work, he explores the implications of a government which has the ability to watch each and every citizen and 'correct' them in real time. There is no way to break this to you gently - you are already being watched. Read about it in the Privacy Page.
Real Reasons is Part I of a two part article addressing the problems that need to be solved in order to introduce a unix class (SCO, Linux, BSD, Darwin, OS X) system in a Microsoft Shop. Many of the problems are hidden in people's experience and assumptions. Part I identifies where and what these are. Read Part I in the Analysis and Commentary section.
If you evaluate this unprecedented attack aginst Linux as a publicity exercise, well it has to be called a resounding success. It's short term value for SCO's business is questionable, and it's impact on SCO's popularity has been very negative. I find it difficult but not impossible to believe that SCO's executive suite could not or did not see much of this coming.
So if they saw the downside to their actions, there must have been some positive outcome(s) that were compelling enough to risk the near universal opposition to the lawsuit. What could those positive outcomes have been? Read more in "SCO vs Linux: What Happens Next?."
The future is always uncertain, more so now than usually for the US. The current and future effects of shipping jobs overseas will haunt us as we try to restructure jobs and save companies.
Meanwhile, individuals and families suffer the effects of this problem while having little control over their environment. Part II of this article ends with a list of steps people can take to meet the future with confidence. It's called "Planning: One Step at a Time." Prescription - Take these steps, one each weekend for relief from the stress of uncertain economies.
Read Part I first, then Part II.
Part I listing the problems is in place. Part II, discussing consequences and alternatives, will be soon. Here is an excerpt from the Overview.
"If you haven't noticed that the news is full of stories about companies laying off (firing) thousands of workers while they ship jobs overseas, you must have spent the last year on Mars. The employment picture for high tech is particularly bad, but we are not the only class of employees whose jobs and income are vanishing. In general, the service sector of large companies and much of manufacturing is vulnerable too."
Electronic Voting Vulnerable
The story you are about to read is in this writer's view the biggest political scandal in American history, if not global history. And it is being broken today here in New Zealand.
This story cuts to the bone the machinery of democracy in America today. Democracy is the only protection we have against despotic and arbitrary government, and this story is deeply disturbing.
Your life has been computerized. Every store with a discount card tracks your purchases and sells that information to advertisers. To force people to use them, the stores raise prices all over and 'discount' them back to almost where they started. Shopping without using a card gets harder and more expensive every year. Now the government wants to create a master file on all Americans, citizens and others, to fight terrorism.
Microsoft plans to be your software supplier, your only software supplier. Here are their plans, the evidence and what you can do about it.
Microsoft wants and plans to be the sole supplier of software to everyone. They want it all, and are proceeding on plan to lure you into a dependency where there will be no financially feasible escape. Once you check into dot net, you won't check out.
The full story is complex and hard to summarize. My article has links to a site with most of the information, but my focus is not on the past, but on what MS has planned for the future. If you don't read anything else on this site, read this to protect your options to remain in control in the future.
Great job IDE disk drive manufacturers! Rather than compete on quality, all have gone the route of 'Cheaper is better'. As of October 1, 2002, all new IDE drives except a few special (read expensive) ones will carry only a one year guarantee instead of the traditional three years.
Despite my misgivings about the merger, HPC has managed to meet expectations financially in its early days after the merger. Achieving this in the current recession speaks well of the new executives as a well planned consolidation. Credit is due for competent execution of a complex plan.
How about the long term? That outlook is not so rosy. Some problems HPC faces over the next few years apply to more than HPC, yet HPC faces the broadest range of problems.
The house that Gates built has termites. Termites are insidious little bugs. The damage isn't visible until a whole wall collapses, and then it is too late. You can't see termites unless you take a good look at the foundation to see if there are trails leading into the structure.
This section will show various design studies I have done as part of preliminary project planning and evaluation. I'll give background information first, and link to the design study. In the study proper, I'll add comments for clarification or later reconsideration.
Background:
Back in the communications dark ages, Ma Bell was still a Monopoly and a 1200 bps modem cost $500. Bulletin boards with 10 MB of storage and two lines were typical and my long distance sometimes cost more than my food.
Back then, in March of 1985, I was invited to join an experimental conferencing named BIX (Byte Information Exchange). I signed up on the Ides of March, rapidly became a moderator and spent many hours online. In 1991 I was promoted to Exchange Editor (EE) for the Programmers Exchange. The Internet and other outside forces stressed the group, but things went well until 1996, when a power struggle arose. BIX went on until 2001 but never recovered from the 1996 problems.
This is not the place to talk about what happened to the BIX community, though much remains to be said about the forces that led to its demise. In the fall of 2000, a small group of Bixen were discussing how to build a better conferencing system as a survival strategy for the BIX community. I undertook a design study named RCCS for Real Community Conferencing System.
RCCS was based on what I had seen as a moderator and EE, and was designed to deal with some of the causes of BIX's demise. It was also designed for hardware efficiency, something that gets little attention these days. The critics lambasted the hardware orientation and failed to comment on any other aspects, missing my purpose completely.
A lot of activity has happened behind the scenes of BillsWrite because I have been preparing for a number of upgrades, which will be the basis for a bunch of new things to come. I'm not ready to announce the new stuff, but I thought it was time to update my earler systems overview. It's all in Personal Experiences: Part II.
I woke up this morning remembering two World Series games I watched 52 years apart and how our world has changed in that time. See "A Quiet Revolution," my view of what differences computers have made. At the very least, without computers I would have had to get a real job. :-}
Just recently I realized that my local computer installation had gotten somewhat complex. I have a long background working with different operating systems (OS) and as a result, I don't have much difficulty working with different systems. Yesterday I realized that even my usual multi OS environment had gotten complex.
Let's make that very complex. As I write, I have two OS/2 systems, two FreeBSD 4.9 systems, one Windows NT, and one Suse 9.0 online on my local 100 Mbs network. In addition to that complex, I have an idle system that will run FreeBSD 5.2, another set of spare parts that will run RedHat 8.0 and OpenFiler in an experiment, and a planned OpenBSD 3.4 that will be a firewall.
How did I get to six operating systems, and why would I use that many? Read about my journey through 22 years of the personal computer industry, starting with my first system in 1981. It's all in Personal Experiences: Part I.
Despite the near ubiquity of computers, paper still plays a critical part in business and our lives. The paperless society has been expected since the 1980s, but technology isn't even close to replacing this essential tool of our civilization.
Along with the good of paper comes the problems of too much paper, organization and storage of same, and critically, finding the one needed sheet of paper in a room full of four drawer file cabinets. Fire hazard and insurance raise costs, IRS and business requirements just make it harder to dispose.
In many cases, converting paper to digital images or to digital text files is a good solution. Which piles of paper can and should be converted is a decision each business and individual must make for themselves.
If this option seems like a way to cut the paper mountain in your house or business down to size, then read on in Convert Paper to Digital Files.
I've had the mixed pleasure of working in this industry since shortly after computers started using transistors instead of tubes. Ever since IBM announced the 360 series in April of 1964, I've been a student of the technology, the industry and the products. I've worked for several different computer companies and a few non-IT companies. Some of those names may bring back memories - CDC, Univac, Memorex, Computer Science, and lesser known companies, most already merged or gone