At the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Intel's new slogan, "Leap Ahead," has shown its true meaning: The once-indomitable chipmaker wants a time machine that will let it leap ahead to 2007. After all, 2006 is shaping up to be quite an ugly year for the company, as it faces serious challenges on technological, financial, legal, and strategic fronts.
Despite the company's patent hassles, BlackBerry's peerless handsets and ardent fan base will see it through.
Today virtualization is primarily associated with carving one physical computer into multiple independent virtual systems. Virtualization is also providing a mechanism for helping shops that, overnight, watched their 1U rack boxes bloom into four-way servers, enabling them to carve up server resources into units of one or two CPUs each so they can be managed in a familiar way.
You needn't be a DBA to understand that all knowledge in a company or organization lives in, or at least passes through, a database manager. The DBMS sees all, knows all, and at any point in time, is the most authoritative source not only for data, but also for the right-now state of flying transactions and distributed processes. Considering the DBMS is so well-placed to participate in the real-time enterprise, shouldn't we ask it to do more than sit behind some opaque middleware and suck in and spit out SQL data?
You needn't be a DBA to understand that all knowledge in a company or organization lives in, or at least passes through, a database manager. The DBMS sees all, knows all, and at any point in time, is the most authoritative source not only for data, but also for the right-now state of flying transactions and distributed processes. Considering the DBMS is so well-placed to participate in the real-time enterprise, shouldn't we ask it to do more than sit behind some opaque middleware and suck in and spit out SQL data?
By now, we should be enjoying a true commodity market in which the pricing trends of x86 CPUs track those of other PC components and semiconductors. Today, we're celebrating the $US500 PC, even though economic forces should have that price closer to $200. With chip manufacturing capacity and yields being as high as they are, all but the most advanced x86 processors should be readily affordable. They should be as cheap as light bulbs. Well, designer store light bulbs.
If nowhere else in the world, in Dresden, Germany, all signs point to AMD. Literally. As you drive along the main drag, you see the exit for Prague, the exit for Berlin, and the exit for AMD. It's fitting, given that AMD carved out a village-size hunk of countryside for its campus - home to the skilled hands that produce every AMD64 CPU sold worldwide.
When Microsoft rolled out one client-focused feature after another at Professional Developers Conference 2005, I nodded and said, "Good on ya." I could have sneered because it's taken Redmond so long to notice that keyboards and mice don't drive themselves.
American Express has judged that I am liable for a US$243 online purchase that I didn't make. Thus began an unwelcome lesson in convenience-centered authentication, the security of e-commerce, and the hot potato of accountability.
Thanks to the backward, "all software owns the entire system" design of the x86 CPU architecture, PC client and server virtualization is one of the most challenging tasks facing system software developers. Even at their best, the benefits of x86 virtualization solutions from VMware and Microsoft are limited to reliability, convenience, and manageability. But virtualization's promise as a pathway to consolidation and the way to turn aggregated compute cycles into a provisionable distributed resource remains just that. Don't blame VMware and Microsoft. There's only so much virtualization one can do in software.
During a discussion with a source close to the AMD v Intel antitrust lawsuit, I heard something that really grabbed my attention. AMD, he said, isn't suing Intel because Intel is a monopoly; it's suing Intel for abusing its monopoly powers to maintain its control of the market. I knew that a distinction of that kind existed, though I'm no lawyer. Still, I had never heard it put so succinctly.
I dreamed that Microsoft put me in charge of development for its 64-bit enterprise server applications, the Exchange and SQL Server, and so on, all of which travel collectively as Windows Server System. I was asked to find out why some elements of WSS won't run on 64-bit Windows, even though Opteron and 64-bit Xeon run 32-bit apps unmodified. "That doesn't make sense," I said to myself as I sized up my expansive corner office.
As regulatory audits loom, wise executives have long ago abandoned the "save everything" approach to regulatory compliance, which is akin to stuffing receipts into a shoebox while hoping the IRS will go knocking elsewhere.
Too often, the details that vendors present as important buying criteria are window dressing of little importance to most business and enterprise buyers. I'm addressing PC and PowerPC servers in particular, as they make up the bulk of my lab's current research resources.
A variety of open source projects allow developers to experiment with virtual hardware configurations.