SteveJ-restore-test

Three pieces in the trade press showing how things are unfolding. Om Malik points out that Intel and Microsoft fortunes are closely intertwined. Jean-Louis Gassée suggests that "Personal Computing" (on those pesky Personal Computers) is downsizing and changing. Joe Wilcox analyses Microsoft latest results and contrasts a little with Whatever the state of play is, Steve Ballmer has been at the helm of Microsoft for a decade. These are his results. He's taken an effective monopoly with a guaranteed cash-flow and a mountain of cash and turned it into "not the coolest place to work". Will Microsoft go out with a Whimper, not a Bang? A fierce Open Source advocate friend now "Just doesn't care" about Microsoft. Is apathy the marker for a company's decline? "Why Intel Will Be a Mobile Loser" by Om Malik Atom would be competitive until 2011. Too bad Intel sold its StrongARM technology to Marvell. "Very Personal Computing" - Edited...

I found myself writing, during a commentary on the evolution of SSD's in servers , that  large-slow-memory like Seymour Cray used (not cache), would affect the design of Operating Systems. The new scheduling paradigm: Allocate a thread to a core, let it run until it finishes and waits for (network) input, or it needs to read/write to the network. This leads into how Seymour Cray dealt with Multi-Processing, he used multi-level CPU's: There were Application processors, many bits, many complex features like Floating Point and other fancy stuff, but had no kernel mode features or access to protected regions of hardware or memory, and Peripheral Processors (PP's), really a single very simple, very high-speed processor, multiplexed to look like 10 small, slower processors that performed all kernel functions and controlled the operation of the Application Processors (AP's) Not only did this organisation result in very fast systems (Cray's designs were the fastest in t...

The other night I was talking to my non-Geek friend about computers and he formulated what I thought was A Good Question : When will they stop changing?? This was in reaction to me talking about my experience in suggesting a Network Appliance, a high-end Enterprise Storage device, as shared storage for a website used by a small research group. It comes with a 5 year warranty, which leads to the obvious question: will it be useful, relevant or 'what we usually do' in 5 years? I think most of the elements in current systems are here to stay, at least for the evolution of Silicon/Magnetic recording. We are staring at 'the final countdown', i.e. hitting physical limits of these technologies, not necessarily their design limits. Engineers can be very clever. The server market has already fractioned into "budget", "value" and "premium" species. The desktop/laptop market continues to redefine itself - and more 'other' devices arise. The 10...

Max Wideman , PMI Distinguished Contributor and Person of the Year and Canadian author of several Project Management books plus a slew of published papers, not only responded to, and published , some comments and conversations of between us, he then edited up some more emails into a Guest Article of his site. Many thanks to you Max for all your fine work and for seeing something useful in what I penned.