SteveJ-restore-test

Two new things appeared in my world recently: A friend showed me Google 'Jump Desktop' , connecting his iPad to his Desktop. [Apple have their own 'Remote Desktop' product which I haven't researched. Not sure if it works over the wider Internet as well.] Joe Wilcox's piece (Jan-2011) on Apple dumping desktops sometime (soon) as they become less relevant. Wilcox wonders what will happen to "Power Users" if Apple move on Desktops, as they've moved on from the rack-mount X-serve line. Customers needing servers now have the choice of a Mac Mini Server or a "Mac Pro" (tower). Can Apple afford to cut-adrift and ignore the needs of good folk who rely on their product for their business/livelihood, some of whom may have used Macs for 20+ years?? Would seem a Bad Idea to alienate such core and influential users. Clearly Apple look to the future, and like the floppy drive they expunged long ago in favour of Optical drives (now also obsolete), Des...

This started with an aside in " Crypto ", Stephen Levy (2000), about Rivest's first attempt at creating an RSA Crypto chip failing because whilst the design worked perfectly on the simulator, it didn't work when fabricated. [p134] Alderman blames the failure on their overreliance on Carver Mead's publications... Carver Mead and Lynn Conway at CalTech revolutionised VLSI design and production around 1980, publishing "Introduction to VLSI System Design" and providing access to fabrication lines for students and academics. This has been widely written about: e.g. in "The Power of Modularity" , a short piece on the birth of the microchip from Longview Institute, and a 2007 Computerworld piece on the importance of Mead and Conway's work. David A. Patterson wrote of a further, related, effect in Scientific American , September 1995, p63, "Microprocessors in 2020" Every 18 months microprocessors double in speed. Within 25 years, one...

Related posts: Everything Old is New Again: Cray's CPU design A Good Question: When will Computer Design 'stabilise'? Senior Google staffers wrote The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines, which I thought showed break-through thinking. The importance of this piece is it wasn't theoretical, but a report of What Works in practice, particularly at 'scale'. Anything that Google, one of the star performers of the Internet Revolution, does differently is worthy of close examination.  What do they know that the rest of us don't get? While the book is an extra-ordinary blueprint, I couldn't but help asking a few questions: Why do they stick with generic-design 1RU servers when they buy enough for custom designs? How could 19-inch racks, designed for mechanical telephone exchanges a century ago, still be a good, let alone best, packaging choice when you build Wharehouse sized datacentres? Telecommunications sites use...