PeterB

Why I'm Buying Micron- Part II

Puzzled:- "Thursday after the close Micron reported May quarter EPS of $(0.36), above our $(0.53) and the Street’s $(0.43) estimate "

I will trade you $0.36 for your choice of $0.53 or $0.43 as many times as you like.

High Frequency Trading Is a Zero-Sum Game: Impact on Intel, AMD

April 1st was nearly four weeks ago. So can one seriously think to program an FPGA to do NASDAQ's trading operations faster than a CPU? Naw, there is no way this makes sense. Yes, the I/O is a bottleneck for any computing system (just watch the disk drive light when you load or save a big spreadsheet), but it is not going to get better for an FPGA. Having more memory on the CPU itself is a better way to improve performance. I have been designing ICs for 46 years, and have programmed computers and FPGAs in passing.

Some Things Change Everything: Amazon's Cloud Computing

I am intrigued by the ideas about technological revolutions, but I think there is another between the 4th and 5th, the explosion of semiconductor technology (especially the IC) between 1960 and perhaps 1985, now in a near-mature stage, perhaps topping out in the next decade. This also fits in with several lincages in the revolutions, so that the steam engine and the railways depended on the results of the first industrial revolution, and leading to heavy machinery and electricity, thence the automobile. The IC made possible the information technology age, and low-cost telecommunications (yes, the earliest computers ran on vacuum tubes and magnetic cores, I know, I used some of them).
As to the main point of the article, in some ways cloud computing is like my early computer usage, where one fed in one's deck of punched cards (or a paper tape) to a central machine, and got back the results later as a printout, but with vastly improved input and output channels.
I wonder if Amazon has the book...