Comments for Observations from Uppsala

Comment on Dekker’s Algorithm Does not Work, as Expected by auto trader cars uk

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Comment on A Few Electrons too Many by Jakob

Jakob — Fri, 10 May 2013 06:44:44 +0000

OK. Mains power via transformer. There are such options in the product lines I researched for this article, typically transformed down to 12 V.

Comment on A Few Electrons too Many by Hassi

Hassi — Thu, 09 May 2013 23:16:19 +0000

Just one quick thought…

“What about attaching it to mains power? ”

I can see one or two issues with connecting a water tap directly to mains power; none of which have happy endings.

Comment on Everything in the Cloud? by Jakob

Jakob — Thu, 09 May 2013 18:52:51 +0000

Thanks for the observations! That single version is something I am grappling with… I just cannot see it work well for customers who need to freeze tooling at a certain known version to use for the duration of their twenty-years contract to maintain some avionics system. It might well work for sales people and other internal ephemeral functions, but when certification and absolute stability comes into play, it becomes a disfeature. Would be nice, but I do not think it can be done for serious customers.

Comment on Joel Spolsky: You cannot program parallel in C, period by mireseinspirate.ro

mireseinspirate.ro — Tue, 07 May 2013 14:53:05 +0000

I like what you guys tend to be up too. This type of
clever work and exposure! Keep up the good works guys I’ve added you guys to blogroll.

Comment on Everything in the Cloud? by Sven Hålling

Sven Hålling — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 17:01:36 +0000

Having been delivering software as cloud based services in many different constellations (even before this so hyped denomination existed) I have to say that it is really in every way I can think of a superior way of providing software, compared to shipping disks or downloads for customers to install and operate themselves.
* Only one version to support, instead of worrying about every customer having a special version, or not keeping up with upgrades.
* No need to worry about problems caused by the customers’ specific IT environment or mistakes when installing.
* Saves loads of costs not having to test against various IT enviromnents, and different upgrade paths.
* No need to worry about piracy. Or less need anyway…
* Much easier and faster to troubleshoot a problem for a customer.
* Much easier for customers to buy, as lower threshold to get onboard. Especially for things like CRM and other marketing & sales tools, where the marketing guys can buy and get going without speaking to the IT department…

Sure there are issues with safeguarding data etc that need to be worked on. But the feeling of security when data is on internal servers is in many cases is in many cases an illusion, as most companies cant afford to have the same level of professionalism in the IT department as say Salesforce (although I do have to say that I believe Salesforce is way overpriced…).

Comment on Everything in the Cloud? by deadbit

deadbit — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 16:07:13 +0000

Check this online course about transistors.
There is a very interesting simulation section where the computing circuitry is simulated down to individual charge carriers.
https://www.coursera.org/course/mosfet

Comment on Everything in the Cloud? by lonelybyte

lonelybyte — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 11:28:39 +0000

The most interested in your data seems to be governments and competitors. Against governments the only protection is strong cryptography while against competitors is good pay and quality products.
On the long term key expertise will be lost if critical services are externalized. Once the companies get you as customer they will raise the service price ( drug dealer tactics ).
This cloud hype is bullshit. It will not be cheaper than doityourself solutions. You will not pay for your own IT guy but for some other supposedly smarter and more expensive guys.
This cloud solution makes sense only for small to very small companies that do not plan to grow.

Comment on Everything in the Cloud? by Jakob

Jakob — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 05:25:49 +0000

I intentionally did not concern myself with ownership of IP… that is a very important concern, but a separate concern. In particular, how to safeguard customer data in your cloud and how to prevent it from leaking.

Comment on Everything in the Cloud? by lonelybyte

lonelybyte — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 07:38:15 +0000

No word on legal issues: who owns what?
What is the break even point?
Any new service is like a start-up: it needs to become profitable eventually or die.
Even defining the problem costs money. Solving it more so.
Problems will never end. There will always be something.
P.S.
Remember Spanair

Comment on Wind River Blog and Movie: Demo of Simics Debugging by prabhu

prabhu — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 17:36:20 +0000

I wonder if there is a working model of the setup.
Many questions!! I wonder if we could have a mail chain started.

Comment on Wind River Blog and Movie: Demo of Simics Debugging by Jakob

Jakob — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 19:08:33 +0000

Indeed we could do that. And in a sense Simics does that already, except that the design is optimized more for debugging and testing than for runtime use. The use of a HV underneath Simics itself vs a conventional OS does not really matter, as the Simics system is completely enclosed in itself. It would neither be hindered, nor helped, by running on top of a hypervisor.

Comment on Wind River Blog and Movie: Demo of Simics Debugging by prabhu

prabhu — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 06:09:50 +0000

My concern is if Simics (if run on a HV) will end up running on a VM (by extension OS) itself.
It would be great if I could attach a picture of what I had in mind.

Instead of HV creating a virtual copy of the physical machine, it could allow Simics to virtualize a platform of choice. And we could have a cross platform connectivity on the same host machine. I see that Simics can do this (multi-platform connectivity) on its own (ARM and PPC demo in the video).

Comment on Wind River Blog and Movie: Demo of Simics Debugging by Jakob

Jakob — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 19:53:49 +0000

Running Simics on top of a Hypervisor would not be much different from running it on top of a regular OS. The crucial difference between a virtual platform (VP) like Simics and a typical Hypervisor or PC-virtual machine manager (VMM) is that the VP simulates an arbitrary platform quite precisely (such as ARM, MIPS, PPC, or 8051) on top of an arbitrary PC. While a HV or VMM instead provides a subdivision of the physical machine or a virtual copy of the physical machine – they cannot do ARM on x86, or even a special variant of an x86 on top of another x86. Their efficiency comes from making the guest and host as similar as possible. The power of Simics comes from making the host irrelevant to the guest/target system.

Comment on Wind River Blog and Movie: Demo of Simics Debugging by prabhu

prabhu — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 14:46:33 +0000

Did not really know where to post this thought. Just putting it out there.

I was just checking the blog by Chris Ault : http://blogs.windriver.com/multi-core/2011/09/exciting-times-virtually.html

I was just wondering whether a hypervisor can control/host Simics instance the way it can host a Virtual Machine – since Simics is also a virtual platform. That Simics instance may have any system virtualized on top.

Comment on Off-Topic: Moving Bad Piggies Save Games by cheapmeat

cheapmeat — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 22:45:22 +0000

You are such a pig for letting us know this.
Now do you know of an editor for the progress.dat saved file so the levels will be unlocked faster?

Comment on Does ISA Matter for Performance? by Per_i_Vbg

Per_i_Vbg — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 11:53:26 +0000

I would like to see some results from ARM and MIPS (the best from China) on SPEC2000 or SPEC2006. If you want to have ARM as a server you know what I mean?

Comment on Does ISA Matter for Performance? by Per_i_Vbg

Per_i_Vbg — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 11:39:39 +0000

@molecule_computing Intel is superb on cache speed and memory controllers. AMD is much slower on cache. Maybe they can improve Bulldozer core. ARM and MIPS (China is putting much money on MIPS now) both have a long way to go even if the CPU's are not bad.

Comment on David Ungar: It is Good to be Wrong by Jakob

Jakob — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 09:54:06 +0000

Thank you. It is always good to get an acknowledgement that you have understood something right.

Comment on David Ungar: It is Good to be Wrong by David Ungar

David Ungar — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 22:19:48 +0000

Just found your posting on my talk. Wanted to let you know that I think you did a great job of both summarizing and interpreting it, and that I agree with your thoughts. Thank you.