carey_jim

Will Intel's New Processor Be a Game-Changer?

I thought someone might object to my point that government based (university) research is better at making scientific discoveries than free enterprise. (I was taunting the anti 'socialist' crowd for a response.)

So I'll respond to my own post.

It is true that various research departments of large corporations, such as Bell Labs, IBM, Sun and many others have contributed in a major way to theoretical research. Also, many of their employees function as quasi-independent professors of computer science and other sciences.

It is also true that many major universities are beginning to look more like corporations (Harvard, Yale, U.C. Berkeley, etc.)

But I still think I'm right. Bell Labs was, in fact, shut down because it was thought to be, by its parent corporation, too costly even though it produced more innovations than most research universities.

Xerox produced the operating system (based on SmallTalk) that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were accused of stealing to make the first Apple windows system. But the Xerox corporation itself wasn't able to make use of the work of its own research department and so the American judicial system decided against Xerox and for Apple.

What I'm pointing out is that these large research departments are independent of corporate culture and function more as scientific research centers.

When profit motives get in the way we get the situation that we find it the pharmaceutical industry and the food industry and it isn't pretty.

Only the government is capable of getting the profit motive out of scientific research. Even though many corporations can't understand what their research departments are doing and too dumb to take advantage of it anyway, we can't rely on incompetence to insure objectivity.

Let free enterprise develop these ideas but let there be places where people can pursue knowledge for freely too, without bosses telling them where to look and without the need to worry about what the marketing department will say.

Will Intel's New Processor Be a Game-Changer?

JerseyMike, as you know Apple's 'next OS revision' is just a few bells and whistles added on top of their objective C based FreeBSD Unix engine.

This combination makes Apple into a real competitor for Microsoft (but marketing will have to do the heavy lifting, as usual) except for the fact the objective C, their proprietary programming language is not a mainstream language.

Objective C is a great object oriented programming language and many think it is better than C++ or C# (Microsoft's proprietary language) but it isn't taught in major universities and is not known by many programmers. (Here is a case where simple 'crowd behavior' trumps the underlying value of a programming language.)

It's a very good thing that Apple has made this marriage with Unix but this new development to handle several processors is just a first step. The only impact will be to possibly prod customers to demand more and better multi-processor and multi-process support.

But it isn't really revolutionary to be able to switch between several processors, each with its own section of dedicated RAM. Especially if each CPU handles only one program.

I don't think Seeking Alpha is the place to go into technical details ((I have a background in both hardware and software design) so just let me say that this is a neglected area of computer research, and major advances could bring a huge increase in computing power using only hardware that is available today.

I also have to say that it seems obvious from past history that this kind of research is the kind of thing that governments and universities do best.

Private industry, for example, had no hand in developing the Internet or the programming languages commonly in use today, such as C++, SQL, etc. just as it has had no hand in developing the basic scientific and mathematical knowledge used by businesses to build the technological world around us.

The role of businesses (Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs ................) is to transform this basic research into practical and useful technology.

But 'socialismcantwork' is sure to step in here and give me negative points for saying it (although he never gives any arguments to prove his point.)


On Apr 08 09:14 PM JerseyMike wrote:

> Apple's next OS revision due out this summer - Snow Leopard - is
> specifically designed to work with multiple processors (they call
> the technology "grand central").
>
> But, as others have pointed out, the real growth in the PC sector
> in last year has been in low powered netbooks and not in high end
> desktops or servers. Thus, I would imagine that the number of Intel
> Atom processors sold probably far exceeds the number of i7 processors
> sold during the same period.

Will Intel's New Processor Be a Game-Changer?

The real problem is that the big three operating systems can't take advantage of the power of hardware that has been available for years.

For ten or twenty years it has been possible, for example, to place hundreds of vanilla brand CPU's together in one box with mountains of RAM dedicated to each CPU, but no existing operating systems are able to use this kind of parallel computing arrangement.

Certainly not Apple's Big Cat OS or Microsoft's Fat Couch OS. The versions of Unix known collectively as Linux can't either.

It would be relatively simple to develop an OS that could handle two hundred and fifty CPU's, each CPU capable of running an application with its own dedicated RAM. But putting such capacity on top of Big Cat OS or Fat Couch OS would be virtually impossible.

No one has given much time, to my knowledge, of writing such as operating system because they know it is impossible to lure people away from Apple and Microsoft.

It isn't about hardware. Ultimately, it's about tearing people away from big screen virtual reality and other forms of narcissistic navel gazing, and bringing them back to the hard reality of creating software and new programming languages to more effectively use the hardware that is already there.

After all, the jellyware called the human brain has been shown to be capable of discovering quantum mechanics, relativity theory and the science of heredity. But what do most people use this jellyware for?

The question almost answers itself.

Let us hope there are unknown computer software Einsteins, Heisenbergs and Watson and Cricks using their jellyware to develop the operating systems of the future.

Which is not, of course, to say that Intel has not produced a great new product. It is to say that almost nobody knows what to do with it.

Preview from Europe: Another Rollercoaster Day on the Markets

In capitalist countries, which are convinced that governments are evil, government run banks are called BAD banks and in communist countries, which are convinced that capitalism is evil, free markets are called BLACK.

Silver lining or our economic woes: We could call state run banks, BLACK banks, and communist free markets, BAD markets. This would have a huge effect on the world economy because names are important. If we had mostly black banks we could solve their problems with huge white downs and all bad markets would be improved by chasing out bad money with good.

Don't laugh, Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson proposed the idea two hundred years ago. It might work.

White Mondays and good markets would be guaranteed by the economic law of reversal.

Market Lunacy Provides Opportunity - Cramer's Lightning Round (7/17/08)

You should also publish a record of how well Jim's stock picks do, over various time periods of course, including his short picks.

When appropriate, total return should be published too.

After all, Jim is certainly getting better or worse over time. Which is it?