The first articles of my renewed freelance career are up at InfoWorld. In fairness, the bulk of the work for these was done while I was on staff, but it’s nice to see them published, especially since my friend and collaborator Brian Chee spent such an incredible amount of time working on the testing procedures and programming. We’re proud of the results, and look forward to continuing the testing regimen with new products in the near future.
The project was a review of universal threat managers (UTMs) appropriate for branch-office deployment. UTMs are like firewalls on steroids, responding to and protecting against a much wider variety of threats than can be handled by the classic firewall.
OK, so I’ll admit that being able to work in Honolulu is a very cool thing. I’ve been working on reviews and project with Brian Chee, director of the Advanced Network Computing Lab (ANCL) for nearly a decade and I remain in awe of his technical abilities. The fact that he’s also a great friend makes working out here even more productive than normal technology field trips.
On this trip, we’re working on firewalls. When I was here in March, we were finishing the work for the InfoWorld Pimp Your Datacenter article. We took some of the photos and had Brian narrate them into a couple of slide presentations. Here’s the presentation on the air-conditioning installation — I’ll have the electrical installation show up soon.
It’s been a while since I’ve sat in a computer lab well into the night. We’re deep into a big test, things are working as we’d hoped, and very talented engineers are looking deep into data packets in an attempt to coax expensive hardware into doing as its told. My role in all this is peripheral; I take notes, ask questions, and nod thoughtfully at appropriate times. I’m a reasonably knowledgeable guy when it comes to computers and networks, but the folks in the lab tonight are playing well over my head.
I walked outside a little while ago and remembered one of the facts of late-night work: the air feels different in the early morning. Years ago, when I worked the third shift at a steel pipe mill, I enjoyed going out to inspect rail cars at 3:00 AM. No matter how hot the day had been (and Birmingham, Alabama in July can be very hot, indeed), the early-morning air was soft and gently warm against the skin. Walking out in the orange-yellow glow of the sodium lights, I walked through velvet-soft air to the rail cars stacked high with lengths of seamless steel pipe. There’s an excitement to working when most of the world is asleep, and it almost makes working through the night worthwhile.
There’s a considerable difference between the view tonight and the view way back then. The Honolulu skyline is mottled light and dark with offices and apartments occupied and bright, or empty and dark. Thirty years ago, most offices left the lights on all night long; in places like New York City, it was as though no one ever slept. That’s not to say that Honolulu is dark tonight — the light is still well above the baby turtle confusion level, and the city has an energetic hum, but it’s obvious that people have started thinking about turning off lights when the room is empty. It’s a small thing in the overall scheme of things, but it shows that office managers and homeowners are thinking about energy and efficiency at least as much as the high-profile eco-celebrities who are always private-jetting off to lecture the less fortunate on the evils of consumption.
I’m typing this on ecto, and like most of the Mac software I’ve tried, it works. That may seem like damning with faint praise, but after more than a year of wrestling with Vista operational software is a blessing. The nifty design of the Mac hardware, while nice, is not a compelling issue for me. Software that works when I want it to work is. I’m sure I’ll be disappointed down the line, but for now I’m a happy camper. We’ll see if the feeling holds when I come back to the lab in the morning.
Intel has announced that a research unit has delivered an 80-core processor with performance at the teraflop level. While they insist they have no plans to bring this precise processor to market, the technology demonstrated is astounding. Let me quote from the Intel press release:
The first time Teraflops performance was achieved was in 1996, on the ASCI Red Supercomputer built by Intel for the Sandia National Laboratory. That computer took up more than 2,000 square feet, was powered by nearly 10,000 Pentium® Pro processors, and consumed over 500 kilowatts of electricity. Intel’s research chip achieves this same performance on a multi-core chip.
Also remarkable is that this 80-core research chip achieves a Teraflops of performance while consuming only 62 watts – less than many single-core processors today.
Let’s stop to think for just a moment about the sort of applications this class of processor makes possible. Mobile speech recognition–not just simple auto-dial commands but genuine speaker-selective recognition–becomes possible. I know people who need adaptive systems–they’re almost literally dying for this performance level. Intelligent adaptation in medial instrumentation takes on a whole new meaning with this much power, as does intelligent navigation for all sorts of transportation systems.
With massive memory and solid-state storage, the ability to solve problems and capture ideas from any location becomes incredible. Add WiMax networking, and you really do approach the time science fiction writers have discussed: when a person can ask essentially any question from any location and get an immediate answer.
The nature of many tasks will change. I get all frothing at the mouth when I talk about education, so I’ll leave that for someone else. My own profession will continue to evolve because the mere presentation of information won’t be special any more. (Frankly, it’s less and less special even today.) Journalists will have to add their own value in the form of telling a compelling story, vouching for the accuracy of statements, and winnowing wheat from chaff on an ongoing basis. I’m excited by the possibilities, but then I think that many current models of publishing have outlived their usefulness already.
Let me know what you think–is teraflop computing in a laptop-capable package a big deal, or will we just make way for an operating system that presents open files painted on lionfish as they swim through the data reef? I wish it were easier for me to swear that this last won’t happen…
I like using a dual-screen setup on my desk. With my laptop and a 21″ monitor, I can be happy looking out at the electronic universe I inhabit. Of course I want more–my buddy Dave has a three-monitor setup, but I try not to let it come between us–but two monitors are wonderful. There’s the inevitable letdown when I have to go somewhere else to work, but that’s life–or it was until now. News of a dual-screen notebook comes via Crave, andI think I need one. I’m not really sure why I need one, or precisely how I’d use it (though I’m fairly sure it would be a nightmare in the economy class of any airline I can think of), but it’s definitely an object of techno-lust.
My buddy Brian is as serious about looking at new toys as I, and he gets some great ones. I’ve spent a fair amount of time lusting after the Lenovo tablet computer he totes around, but I’ve never been able to justify paying the difference between a standard laptop and a tablet with similar specs. Now, Popular Mechanics has named the Toshiba Portege R400 its Gadget of the Week, and it looks like a very cool machine. The R400 incorporates a number of the hardware gadgets (like the Personal Information Assistant) that Microsoft discussed over a year ago, but have been slow to make their way onto shipping hardware.
I’ve been doing more and more with OneNote, and it makes good use of the handwriting capabilities of a tablet, but towards the bottom of the Popular Mechanics blog entry you run smack into the major problem of the R400: it’s danged expensive. I know myself, I tend not to buy the stripped-down model of anything, and paying three large for a laptop when you can get very capable portable computers for well under two grand just doesn’t seem right.
While I’m waiting for the price to come down, I’m going to try out some of the USB writing tablets available to plug into my current laptop. I’ll let you know how that goes…
