A sample apple grown around Shenandoah Valley, Va. (Photo credit: Boston Public Library)
Since last year, Apple’s been hard at work building out their own CDN and now those efforts are paying off. Recently, Apple’s CDN has gone live in the U.S. and Europe and the company is now delivering some of their own content, directly to consumers. In addition, Apple has interconnect deals in place with multiple ISPs, including Comcast and others, and has paid to get direct access to their networks.
Given some of my experiences attempting to watch the Live Stream from Apple’s combined iPhone, Watch event, I wanted to address CDN. Content Distribution Networks are designed to speed the flow of many types of files from Data Centers or Video head ends for Live Events. So I note, I started this article back on August 1st when this original announcement went out. And now it’s doubly poignant as the video stream difficulties at the start of the show (1PM EDT) kind of ruined it for me and for a few others. They lost me in that scant few first 10 minutes and they never recovered. I did connect later but that was after the Apple Watch presentation was half done. Oh well, you get what you pay for. I paid nothing for the Live Event stream from Apple and got nothing in return.
Back during the Steve Jobs era, one of the biggest supporters of Akamais and its content delivery network was Apple Inc. And this was not just for streaming of the Keynote Speeches and MacWorld (before they withdrew from that event) but also the World Developers Conference (WWDC). At the time enjoyed great access to free streams and great performance levels for free. But Apple cut way back on that simulcasts and rivals like Eventbrite began to eat in to Akamai’s lower end. Since then the huge data center providers began to build out their own data centers worldwide. And in so doing, a kind of internal monopoly of content distribution went into effect. Google was first to really scale up in a massive way then scale out, to make sure all those GMail accounts ran faster and better in spite of the huge mail spools on each account member. Eventually the second wave of social media outlets joined in (with Facebook leading a revolution in Open Stack and Open Hardware specs) and created their own version of content delivery as well.
Now Apple has attempted to scale up and scale out to keep people tightly bound to brand. iCloud really is a thing, but more than that now the real heavy lifting is going on once and for all time. Peering arrangements (anathema to the open Internet) would be signed and deals made to scratch each other’s backs by sharing the load/burden of carrying not just your own internal traffic, but those of others too. And depending on the ISP you could really get gouged by those negotiations. But no matter Apple soldiered on and now they’re ready to really let all the prep work be put to good use. Hopefully the marketing will be sufficient to express the satisfaction and end user experience at all levels, iTunes, iApps, iCloud data storage and everything else would experience the boosts in speed. If Apple can hold its own against both Facebook and Gmail in this regard, they future’s so bright they’re gonna need shades.
Really good linkage to a review site for batteries, chargers, and led flashlights. Well worth the data and comparisons. And a great example of how to go about doing a review site.
To the millions of readers who have visited and supported me and the site over the past 17+ years, I owe you my deepest gratitude. You all enabled me to spend over half of my life learning more than I ever could have in any other position. The education I’ve received doing this job and the ability to serve you all with it is the most amazing gift anyone could ever ask for. You enabled me to get the education of a lifetime and I will never be able to repay you for that. Thank you. http://www.anandtech.com/show/8456/the-road-ahead
Dear Anand,
It was a sad day for me to see both the published print version of Byte magazine and subsequent to that Byte.com slowly disappear. I turned to other news sites over time Tom’s Hardware being one example and Anandtech being a another. Over time you guys filled that gap left behind by the likes of Jerry Pournelle, Tom Halfhill and Jon Udell. Kudos to you and the team doing real writing about not just consumer tech, data center stuff and cutting edge tech like UltraDIMMs and converged DIMM/Flash technologies like that. You guys rock and will keep rocking. It’s been a great ride and you all are doing good work. Good Luck and have fun, no matter what you do.
Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA – Statue of founder William Marsh Rice with Lovett Hall in background. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Tour said: “Our technology is the only one that satisfies every market requirement, both from a production and a performance standpoint, for nonvolatile memory. It can be manufactured at room temperature, has an extremely low forming voltage, high on-off ratio, low power consumption, nine-bit capacity per cell, exceptional switching speeds and excellent cycling endurance.”
Rice University is continuing research on it’s ReRAM (resistive RAM) and has come up with some new ways to manufacture it. That’s the key to adopting any new discovery first done in a lab environment. You have to keep tweaking it to find out the best way to manufacture it at scale and at a reduced cost. So in the four years since the original announcement was made, now it’s possible to manufacture the Rice U ReRAM. And at the end of the article there’s a note that some people are already buying up licenses for the technology. Hopefully that’s not just for patent trolling protection insurance, no. Instead, I’m hoping some small Fabless chip design house takes this up and tries out some batches of this and qualifies it for manufacture at a large scale contract manufacturer of silicon chips. When that happens, then we’ll have the kind of momentum required to make ReRAM a real shipping product. And with any like Rice U. will continue work on improving the basic science behind the product so it more companies will find it attractive and lucrative. Keep your eye on ReRAM.
As research is being done on incremental improvements in Lithium Ion batteries, some occasional discoveries are being made. In this instance, the anode is being switched to pure lithium with a coating to protect the very reactive metal surface. The problem with using pure lithium is the growth of micro crystalline “dendrites”, kind of like stalagmites/stalactites in caves, along the whole surface. As the the dendrites build up, the anode loses it’s efficiency and that battery slowly loses it’s ability to charge all the way. This research has shown how to coat a pure lithium anode with a later of carbon nanotubes to help act as a permeable layer between the the electrolytic liquid in the battery and the pure lithium anode.
In past articles on Carpetbomberz.com we’ve seen announcements of other possible battery technologies like Zinc-Air, Lithium-Air and possible use of carbon nanotubes as a anode material. This announcement is promising in that it’s added costs might be somewhat smaller versus a wholesale change in battery chemistry. Similarly the article points out how much lighter elemental Lithium is versus the current anode materials (Carbon and Silicon). If the process of coating the anode is sufficiently inexpensive and can be done on a industrial production line, you will see this get adopted. But with most experiments like these, scaling up and lowering costs is the hardest thing to do. Hopefully this is one that will make it into shipping products and see the light of day.
Ya’ know, there’s a whole world of contract manufacturers out there and the NSA lets them all bid on these. They do not do all this work on their own in house, they like CIA have front companies that go around seeding the ideas, bids, RFPs that eventually lead to these devices. It’s a cottage industry of sorts of small COMMs outfits making small runs of very sophisticated devices. All in the name of National Security.
English: Michael S. Malone is a U.S. author, a former editor of Forbes magazine and host of a talk show on PBS. Español: Michael S. Malone es un escritor y guionista estadounidense. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Just when you think you understand the trio (as I thought I did up until my final interview with Grove) you learn something new that turns everything upside-down. The Intel Trinity must be considered one of the most successful teams in business history, yet it seems to violate all the laws of successful teams.
Agreed, this is a topic near and dear to my heart as I’ve collectively read a number of the stories published over the years from the Tech Press. From Tracy Kidder‘s, Soul of a New Machine, to Fred Brook’s The Miracle Man Month, Steven Levy’s Insanely Great. The story of Xerox PARC as told in Dealer’s of Lightning, the Arpanet Project as told in Where Wizards Stay Up Late. And moving somewhat along those lines, Stewart Brand’s The Media Lab and Howard Rheingold’s Virtual Reality. All of these are studies at some level of organizational theory in the high technology field.
And one thing you find commonly is there’s one charismatic individual that joins up at some point (early or late doesn’t matter) who then brings in a flood of followers and talent that is the kick in the pants that really gets momentum going. The problem is with a startup company say like Intel or its predecessor, Fairchild Semiconductor, there’s more than one charismatic individual. And keeping that organization stitched together even just loosely is probably the biggest challenge of all. So I’ll be curious to read this book Michael Malone and see how it compares to the other books in my anthology of organization theory in high tech. Should be a good, worthwhile read.
Unless its broadcast OTA, I’ll never see it. And that’s fine by me as the HD quality I get OTA exceeds the overly compressed digital cable most friends I have pay extra to receive. So I’ll be sitting out this bit of weirdness and pop-culture recursiveness.
FreeSync, and nVidia G-sync both are attempting to get better 3D rendering out of today’s graphics cards no matter what part of the market they are aimed at. But like other “features” introduced by graphics card manufacturers there’s a drive now to set a standard common to the manufacturers of cards and hopefully too, the manufacturers of display panels.
Adaptive-Sync is the grail for which AMD is searching, promoting and lobbying for going forward. It’s not too manufacturer specific and is just open enough to be adopted by most folks. The benefits are there too, as the article states Tom’s Hardware has tried out nVidia’s G-sync and it works. Which is reassuring given that sometimes these “features” don’t always appear as big revolutionaries strides in engineering so much as marketing talking points.
AMD has been successful so far in pushing adoption by the folks who make RAMDACs and video scaler circuits for the display manufacturers. That’s the real heavy lifting in driving the standard. And with some slight delays you may see the display panel manufacturers adopt this ActiveSync standard within the next year.
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 