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Category: technology

General technology, not anything in particular

  • There’s something rotten in the state of online video streaming, and the data is starting to emerge

    There’s something rotten in the state of online video streaming, and the data is starting to emerge

    Will follow-up with a commentary at some point in the coming weeks. We’re now seeing the rotten fruits of the lack of Network Neutrality.

    Stacey Higginbotham's avatarGigaom

    If you’ve been having trouble with your Netflix streams lately, or maybe like David Rafael, director of engineering for a network security company in Texas, you’re struggling with what appears to be throttled bandwidth on Amazon Web Services, you’re not alone.

    It’s an issue I’ve been reporting on for weeks to try to discover the reasons behind what appears to be an extreme drop on broadband throughput for select U.S. internet service providers during prime time. It’s an issue that is complicated and shrouded in secrecy, but as consumer complaints show, it’s becoming increasingly important to the way video is delivered over the internet.

    The problem is peering, or how the networks owned and operated by your ISP connect with networks owned and operated by content providers such as Amazon or Netflix as well as transit providers and content deliver networks. Peering disputes have been occurring for…

    View original post 2,207 more words

  • Follow-Up – EETimes on SanDisk UltraDIMMs

    Image representing IBM as depicted in CrunchBase
    Image via CrunchBase

    http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1320775

    “The eXFlash DIMM is an option for IBM‘s System x3850 and x3950 X6 servers providing up to 12.8 TB of flash capacity. (Although just as this story was being written, IBM announced it was selling its x86 server business to Lenovo for $2.3 billion).”

    Sadly it seems the party is over before it even got started in the sales and shipping of UltraDIMM equipped IBM x86 servers. If Lenovo snatches up this product line, I’m sure all the customers will still be perfectly happy but I worry about that level of innovation and product testing that led to the introduction of UltraDIMM may be slowed.

    I’m not criticizing Lenovo for this, they have done a fine job taking over the laptops and desktop brand from IBM.  The motivation to keep on creating new, early samples of very risky and untried technologies seems to be more IBM’s interest in maintaining it’s technological lead in the data center. I don’t know how Lenovo figures into that equation. How much will Lenovo sell in the way of rackmount servers like the X6 line? And just recently there’s been rumblings that IBM wants to sell off it’s long history of doing semi-conductor manufacturing as well.

    It’s almost too much to think R&D would be given up by IBM in semi-conductors. Outside of Bell Labs, IBM’s fundamental work in this field brought things like silicon on insulator, copper interconnects and myriad other firsts to ever smaller, finer design rules. While Intel followed it’s own process R&D agenda, IBM went its own way too always trying to find advantage it’s in inventions. Albeit that blistering pace of patent filings means they will likely never see all the benefits of that Research and Development. At best IBM can only hope to enforce it’s patents in a Nathan Myhrvold like way, filing law suits on all infringers, protecting it’s intellectual property. That’s going to be a sad day for all of us who marveled at what they demoed, prototyped and manufactured. So long IBM, hello IBM Global Services.

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  • M00Cs! and the Academy where the hype meets the roadway

    Crowd in Willis Street, Wellington, awaiting t...
    Crowd in Willis Street, Wellington, awaiting the results of the 1931 general election, 1931 (Photo credit: National Library NZ on The Commons)

    http://campustechnology.com/articles/2014/01/27/inside-the-first-year-data-from-mitx-and-harvardx.aspx – Campus Technology

    “While 50 percent of MOOC registrants dropped off within a week or two of enrolling, attrition rates decreased substantially after that window.”

    So with a 50% attrition rate everyone has to keep in mind those overwhelmingly large enrollment are not representative of the typical definition of the word “student”. They are shopping. They are consumers who once they find something is not to their taste whisk away to the next most interesting thing. Hard to say what impact this has on people “waiting in line” if there’s a cap on total enrollees. Typically though the unlimited enrollment seems to be the norm for this style of teaching as well as unlimited in ‘length of time’. You can enroll/register after the course has completed. That however throws off the measurements of dropping out as the registration occurs outside the time of the class actively being conducted. So there’s still a lot of questions that need to be answered. More experiments designed to factor out the idiosyncracies of these open fora online.

    There is an interesting Q&A interview after the opening summary in this article talking with one of the primary researchers on MOOCs, Andrew Ho, from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. It’s hard to gauge “success” or to get accurate demographic information to help analyze the behavior of some MOOC enrollees. The second year of the experiments will hopefully yield better results, something like conclusions should be made after the second round. But Ho emphasizes we need more data from a wider sampling than just Harvard and MIT, that will confirm or help guide further research in the large scale, Massive Online Open Course (MOOC). As the cliché goes, the jury is still out on the value add of offering real college courses in the MOOC format.

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  • IBM Goes Modular And Flashy With X6 Systems – Timothy Prickett Morgan

    The memory channel storage modules were developed by SanDisk in conjunction with Diablo Technologies, and are called UltraDIMM by SanDisk. The modules put flash memory created by SanDisk (which has a flash partnership with Toshiba) that has a SATA interface on a memory stick. Diablo has created a chipset that converts the SATA protocol to the DDR3 main memory protocol, and SanDisk has created a driver for a server BIOS that makes it look like a normal disk storage device to the system and its operating system. (Enterprise Tech – Timothy Prickett Morgan)
    Image representing Diablo Technologies as depi...
    Image by None via CrunchBase

    Big news, big news coming to a server near you. A new form factor Flash Memory product has been secretly developed and is being sampled by folks out East in the High Frequency Stock Trading market (the top of the food chain in IT needs for latency speed of transactions). Timothy Prickett Morgan (formerly of The Register) has included details from IBM‘s big annoouncement of its Intel based X6 series servers. This new form factor is the result of a memory controller made by Diablo Technologies. SanDisk has engineered the actual final product that ties the memory into the Diablo designed memory controller. However this product is not available on the open market and has been going through sampling and testing with possible high end end users and customers who have need for such a large, high speed product in a DDR DRAM memory module. Sizes, and speeds are pretty large all around. The base modules come in 200GB or 400GB form factors and fit a typical DDR-3 DIMM module. IBM and SanDisk have done a number of special tweaks on the software/firmware to pull the most I/O with the lowest latency out of these modules when installed on an X6 server. The first-gen X6 will have roughly 12 DIMM slots available with some DRAM and Ultra-DIMMs populating those slots. However things get REALLY interesting when the second-gen X6 hits the market. IBM will be doubling the amount of DIMM slots to 24 and will be upping the core count available on the 4U top of the line x6 server. When that product hits the market the Ultra-DIMM will be able to populate the majority of the DIMM slots and really start to tear it up I think when it comes to I/O and analytics processing. SanDisk is the exclusive supplier, manufacturer and engineering outfit for this product for IBM with no indication yet of when/if they would ever sell it to another OEM server manufacturer.

    Given the promise this technology has and that an outfit like Diablo Technologies is vaugely reminiscent of an upstart like SandForce who equally upset the Flash Memory market about 6 years ago, we’re likely to see a new trend. SATA SSDs are still slowly creeping into the consumer market, PCIe Flash memory products are being adopted by the top end consumer market (Apple’s laptops and the newest desktops). Now we’ve got yet another Flash memory product that could potentiall sweep the market the Ultra-DIMM. It will however take some time and some competing technology to help push this along (SandForce was the only game in town early on and early adopters help subsidize the late adopters with higher prices). Given how pared back and stripped down DIMM slots are generally in the consumer market it may be a while before we see any manufacturers attempt to push Ultra-DIMM as a consumer product. Same goes for the module sizes as they are shipped today. Example: the iMac 27″, Apple has gone from being easily upgraded (back in the Silver Tower, G4 CPU days) to nearly not upgradeable (MacBook Air) and the amount of space needed in their cases to allow for addition or customization through an Ultra-DIMM add-on would be severly constrained. It might be something that could be added as a premium option for the newest Mac Pro towers. And even then that’s very hopeful and wishful thinking on my part. But who knows how quickly this new form factor and memory controller design will infiltrate the computer market? It is seemingly a better moustrap in the sense of the boost one sees in performance on a more similar, more commoditized Intel infrastructure. Wait and see what happens.

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  • Leaked Intel roadmap’ promises… er, gear that could die after 7 months [Chris Mellor for theregister.com]

    Image representing Intel as depicted in CrunchBase
    Image via CrunchBase

     

    Chris Mellor – The Register http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/09/intel_ssd_roadmappery/

     

    Chris does a quick write-up of a leaked SSD roadmap from Intel. Seems like we’re now in a performance plateau on the consumer/business end of the scale for SATA based SSD drives. I haven’t seen an uptick in Read/Write performance in a long time. Back in the heady days of OCZ/Crucial/SanDisk releasing new drives with new memory controllers on a roughly 6 month schedule, speeds slowly marched up the scale until we were seeing 200MB-Read/150MB-Write (equalling some of the fastest magnetic hard drives at the time). Then yowza, we blew right past that performance figure to 250MB/sec-275MB/sec-and higher. Intel vs. Samsung for the top speed champions at this point. SandForce was helping people enter the market at acceptable performance levels (250/200). Prices were not really edging downward, but speeds kept going up, up, up.

     

    Now we’re in the PCIe era, with everyone building their own custom design for a particular platform, make and model. Apple’s using their own design PCIe SSDs for their laptops and soon for the Mac Pro desktop workstations. One or two other manufacturers are adpating m2 sized Memory devices as PCIe add-in cards for different ultra-lightweight designs. But there’s no wave of the equivalent aftermarket, 3rd party SSDs we saw when SATA drives were king. So now we’re left with a very respectable, and still somewhat under-utilized SATA SSD market with speeds in the 500/Less than 500 Read/Write speed range. Until PCIe starts to converge, consolidate and come up with a common form factor (card size, pin out, edge connector) we’ll be seeing a long slow commoditization of SATA SSD drives with the lucky few spinning their own PCIe products. Hopefully there will be an upset and someone will form up a group to support PCIe SSD mezzanine or expansion slot EVERYWHERE. When that time comes, we’ll get the second wave of SSD performance I think we all are looking for.

     

     

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  • OCZ sells out to Toshiba (it’s been good to know yuh’)

    OCZ Technology
    OCZ Technology (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/03/toshiba_buys_ocz/

    Seems like it was only two years ago when OCZ bought out memory controller and intellectual property (IP) holder Indilinx for it’s own branded SSD products. At the time everyone was buying SandForce memory controllers to keep up with the Joneses. Speed-wise and performance-wise SandForce was king. But with so many competitors about using the same memory controller there was no way to make a profit with a commodity technology. The thought was generally performance isn’t always the prime directive regarding SSDs. Going forward, price would be much more important. Anyone owning their own Intellectual Property wouldn’t have to pay license fees to companies like SandForce to stay in the business. So OCZ being on a wild profitable tear, bought out Indilinx a designer of NAND/Flash memory controllers. The die was cast and OCZ was in the drivers seat, creating the the Consumer market for high performance lower cost SSD drives. Market value went up and up, whispers were reported of a possible buy out of OCZ from larger hard drive manufacturers. The price of $1Billion was also mentioned in connection with this.

    Two years later, much has changed. There’s been some amount of shift in the market from 2.5″ SATA drives to smaller and more custome designs. Apple jumped from SATA to PCIe with its MacBook Air just this past Fall 2013. The m2 form factor is really well liked in the tablet and lightweight laptop sector. So who knew OCZ was losing it’s glamor to such a degree that they would sell? And not just at the level of 10x cheaper than their hightest profile price from 2 years ago. No, not 10x, but more likely 100x cheaper that what they would have asked for 2 years ago. Two whole orders of magnitude less, very roughly, exactly 35Million dollars along with a large number of negotiated guarantees to keep the support/warranty system in place and not tarnish the OCZ brand (for now). This story is told over and over again to entrpreneurs and magnate wannabees. Sell, sell, sell. No harm in that. But just make sure you’re selling too early rather than too late.

  • Sebastian Thrun and Udacity

    Sebastian Thrun
    Sebastian Thrun (Photo credit: novas0x2a)

    Sebastian Thrun and Udacity

    MOOCs may not be the future of higher education. But they will be the future of Corporate Training. You can bet money on that. In fact money IS being bet on that right now. Udacity has gone from attempting to create a higher ed paradigm shifting option to a more conventional platform for conducting training for employees of corporations willing to pay money to host on their platform.

    Now that’s a change we can all believe in, as trainers and traveling, itinerant consultants can sit at their home base and run the sessions synchronously or asynchronously as time allows or demands change. Yes, hands on training may be the best but the best training is the one you actually can provion, pay for and get people to attend. Otherwise, it’s all an exercise in human potential waiting to be tapped, but at times more often opportunities lost outright. Just in Time training? Hardly, how about cost-effective training provided in a plentiful manner? Absolutely yes.

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  • Anandtech – New LSI series of Flash Memory Controllers

    English: FPU LSI R3010
    English: FPU LSI R3010 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    May the SandForce be with you

    Nice writeup from Anandtech regarding the press release from LSI about it’s new 3rd generation flash memory controllers. The 3000 series takes over from the 2200 and 1200 series that preceded it as the era of SSDs was just beginning to dawn (remember those heady days of 32GB SSD drives?). Like the Frontier days of old, things are starting to consolidate and find an equilibrium of price vs. performance. Commidity pricing rules the day, but SSDs much less PCIe Flash interfaces are just creeping into the high end of the market of Apple laptops and soon Apple desktops (apologies to the iMac which has already adopted the PCIe interface for its flash drives, but the Mac Pro is still waiting in the wings).

    Things continue to improve in terms of future-proofing the interfaces. From SATA to PCIe there was little done to force a migration to one or the other interface as each market had its own peculiarities. SSDs were for the price conscious consumer level market, and PCIe was pretty much only for the enterprise. You had pick and choose your controller very wisely in order to maximize the return on a new device design. LSI did some heavy lifting according to Anandtech by refactoring, redesigning the whole controller thus allowing a manufacturer to buy one controller and use it either way as a SATA SSD controller or as an PCIe flash memory controller. Speeds of each interface indicate this is true at the theoretical throughput end of the scale. LSI reports the PCIe throughput it not too far off the theoretical MAX, (~1.45GB/sec range). Not bad for a chip that can also be use as an SSD controller at 500MB/sec throughput as well. This is going to make designers and hopefully consumers happy as well.

    On a more technical note as written about in earlier articles mentioning the great Peak Flash memory density/price limit, LSI is fully aware of the memory architectures and the faillure rates, error rates they accumulate over time.

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  • Delia Derbyshire – BBC Radiophonic Workshop – Dr. Who Theme

    This image is of a screencap from the document...
    This image is of a screencap from the documentary Doctor Who: Origins, it is intended for use in the article “Delia Derbyshire” to visually aid and provide critical commentary in describing the subject of the article. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    Delia Derbyshire – BBC Radiophonic Workshop – Dr. Who Theme

    It’s 50 years since the first episode of Dr. Who aired on the BBC. How will you celebrate? I’m reading this wonder tract from The Register.com (British Tech website) and marveling both at the detail and expertise that went into original recordings made by Derbyshire and the subsequent writing that tells the history of it. Amazing story-telling and amazing work all in one.

    In the pre-computer, pre-synthesizer, pre-sampler era everything had to be done using razor blades and 1/4-1/2″ audio tape. There were no midi timing signals or timecode, there were only the splices and the china marker on the back side to tell where things go. And in addition to that there was the composition and creation of the sounds that first needed to be captured to tape. Whether it was test tone generators or found sound, it all was fodder for the final mix. And since none of these items actually were not accurate they needed to be further processed into something like scalar notes. This was the alchemy and magic that went into recording of the original Dr. Who theme.

    This article is rather long, but totally worth it as it goes into the greatest detail to date of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and Delia Derbyshire got the Dr. Who theme recorded and on air back in Nov. 1963.

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  • Every new iPhone tool deserves another

    The Self-Repair Manifesto from ifixit.com &quo...

    Every new iPhone tool deserves another

    I note from iFixit.com tear downs in the recent past that an Apple iPhone can sometimes require lots of heating and softening of adhesive. iPhone 5s while it requires a tool, at least shows some sign of requiring less heating/melting of adhesive. The tool I’ve linked to is a special tool to pull the front and back halves apart on the iPhone 5s.

    It’s called the iSclack… 2 suction cups mounted onto a pair of special clamp-like pliers. Once the cups are attached, you just apply pressure and try to pop open the case. Note, you’ll also need to invest in the specialty penta-lobe screw driver that Apple choses to use on its iDevices to prevent casual opening of the cases by anyone other than a certified Apple maintenance person. Aside from the use of penta-lobe screws, I think iPhone 5s is probably not a bad phone to get. And more because of the lack of excess adhesive making the whole thing more water tight but harder to repair.

    The use of adhesive forced iFixit to come up with a special heating device, that would lay on the perimeter of the iPhone after it was heated up in a microwave. That one is called iOpener. So things are improving as the iOpener is not absolutely necessary for iPhone 5s. Let’s hope it continues to improve that way.

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