Podcasts about Amdahl

My Worst Investment Ever Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 17, 2022 25:45

Lars Magnus Ericsson was working for the Swedish government that made telegraph equipment in the 1870s when he started a little telegraph repair shop in 1976. That was the same year the telephone was invented. After fixing other people's telegraphs and then telephones he started a company making his own telephone equipment. He started making his own equipment and by the 1890s was shipping gear to the UK. As the roaring 20s came, they sold stock to buy other companies and expanded quickly. Early mobile devices used radios to connect mobile phones to wired phone networks and following projects like ALOHANET in the 1970s they expanded to digitize communications, allowing for sending early forms of text messages, the way people might have sent those telegraphs when old Lars was still alive and kicking. At the time, the Swedish state-owned Televerket Radio was dabbling in this space and partnered with Ericsson to take first those messages then as email became a thing, email, to people wirelessly using the 400 to 450 MHz range in Europe and 900 MHz in the US. That standard went to the OSI and became a 1G wireless packet switching network we call Mobitex. Mike Lazaridis was born in Istanbul and moved to Canada in 1966 when he was five, attending the University of Waterloo in 1979. He dropped out of school to take a contract with General Motors to build a networked computer display in 1984. He took out a loan from his parents, got a grant from the Canadian government, and recruited another electrical engineering student, Doug Fregin from the University of Windsor, who designed the first circuit boards. to join him starting a company they called Research in Motion. Mike Barnstijn joined them and they were off to do research. After a few years doing research projects, they managed to build up a dozen employees and a million in revenues. They became the first Mobitex provider in America and by 1991 shipped the first Mobitex device. They brought in James Balsillie as co-CEO, to handle corporate finance and business development in 1992, a partnership between co-CEOs that would prove fruitful for 20 years. Some of those work-for-hire projects they'd done involved reading bar codes so they started with point-of-sale, enabling mobile payments and by 1993 shipped RIMGate, a gateway for Mobitex. Then a Mobitex point-of-sale terminal and finally with the establishment of the PCMCIA standard, a PCMCIP Mobitex modem they called Freedom. Two-way paging had already become a thing and they were ready to venture out of PoS systems. So in 1995, they took a $5 million investment to develop the RIM 900 OEM radio modem. They also developed a pager they called the Inter@ctive Pager 900 that was capable of two-way messaging the next year. Then they went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange in 1997. The next year, they sold a licensing deal to IBM for the 900 for $10M dollars. That IBM mark of approval is always a sign that a company is ready to play in an enterprise market. And enterprises increasingly wanted to keep executives just a quick two-way page away. But everyone knew there was a technology convergence on the way. They worked with Ericsson to further the technology and over the next few years competed with SkyTel in the interactive pager market. Enter The Blackberry They knew there was something new coming. Just as the founders know something is coming in Quantum Computing and run a fund for that now. They hired a marketing firm called Lexicon Branding to come up with a name and after they saw the keys on the now-iconic keyboard, the marketing firm suggested BlackBerry. They'd done the research and development and they thought they had a product that was special. So they released the first BlackBerry 850 in Munich in 1999. But those were still using radio networks and more specifically the DataTAC network. The age of mobility was imminent, although we didn't call it that yet. Handspring and Palm each went public in 2000. In 2000, Research In Motion brought its first cellular phone product in the BlackBerry 957, with push email and internet capability. But then came the dot com bubble. Some thought the Internet might have been a fad and in fact might disappear. But instead the world was actually ready for that mobile convergence. Part of that was developing a great operating system for the time when they released the BlackBerry OS the year before. And in 2000 the BlackBerry was named Product of the Year by InfoWorld. The new devices took the market by storm and shattered the previous personal information manager market, with shares of that Palm company dropping by over 90% and Palm OS being setup as it's own corporation within a couple of years. People were increasingly glued to their email. While the BlackBerry could do web browsing and faxing over the internet, it was really the integrated email access, phone, and text messaging platform that companies like General Magic had been working on as far back as the early 1990s. The Rise of the BlackBerry The BlackBerry was finally the breakthrough mobile product everyone had been expecting and waiting for. Enterprise-level security, integration with business email like Microsoft's Exchange Server, a QWERTY keyboard that most had grown accustomed to, the option to use a stylus, and a simple menu made the product an instant smash success. And by instant we mean after five years of research and development and a massive financial investment. The Palm owned the PDA market. But the VII cost $599 and the BlackBerry cost $399 at the time (which was far less than the $675 Inter@ctive Pager had cost in the 1990s). The Palm also let us know when we had new messages using the emerging concept of push notifications. 2000 had seen the second version of the BlackBerry OS and their AOL Mobile Communicator had helped them spread the message that the wealthy could have access to their data any time. But by 2001 other carriers were signing on to support devices and BlackBerry was selling bigger and bigger contracts. 5,000 devices, 50,000 devices, 100,000 devices. And a company called Kasten Chase stepped in to develop a secure wireless interface to the Defense Messaging System in the US, which opened up another potential two million people in the defense industry They expanded the service to cover more and more geographies in 2001 and revenues doubled, jumping to 164,000 subscribers by the end of the year. That's when they added wireless downloads so could access all those MIME attachments in email and display them. Finally, reading PDFs on a phone with the help of GoAmerica Communications! And somehow they won a patent for the idea that a single email address could be used on both a mobile device and a desktop. I guess the patent office didn't understand why IMAP was invented by Mark Crispin at Stanford in the 80s, or why Exchange allowed multiple devices access to the same mailbox. They kept inking contracts with other companies. AT&T added the BlackBerry in 2002 in the era of GSM. The 5810 was the first truly convergent BlackBerry that offered email and a phone in one device with seamless SMS communications. It shipped in the US and the 5820 in Europe and Cingular Wireless jumped on board in the US and Deutsche Telekom in Germany, as well as Vivendi in France, Telecom Italia in Italy, etc. The devices had inched back up to around $500 with service fees ranging from $40 to $100 plus pretty limited data plans. The Tree came out that year but while it was cool and provided a familiar interface to the legions of Palm users, it was clunky and had less options for securing communications. The NSA signed on and by the end of the year they were a truly global operation, raking in revenues of nearly $300 million. The Buying Torndado They added web-based application in 2003, as well as network printing. They moved to a Java-based interface and added the 6500 series, adding a walkie-talkie function. But that 6200 series at around $200 turned out to be huge. This is when they went into that thing a lot of companies do - they started suing companies like Good and Handspring for infringing on patents they probably never should have been awarded. They eventually lost the cases and paid out tens of millions of dollars in damages. More importantly they took their eyes off innovating, a common mistake in the history of computing companies. Yet there were innovations. They released Blackberry Enterprise Server in 2004 then bolted on connectors to Exchange, Lotus Domino, and allowed for interfacing with XML-based APIs in popular enterprise toolchains of the day. They also later added support for GroupWise. That was one of the last solutions that worked with symmetric key cryptography I can remember using and initially required the devices be cradled to get the necessary keys to secure communications, which then worked over Triple-DES, common at the time. One thing we never liked was that messages did end up living at Research in Motion, even if encrypted at the time. This is one aspect that future types of push communications would resolve. And Microsoft Exchange's ActiveSync. By 2005 there were CVEs filed for BlackBerry Enterprise Server, racking up 17 in the six years that product shipped up to 5.0 in 2010 before becoming BES 10 and much later Blackberry Enterprise Mobility Management, a cross-platform mobile device management solution. Those BES 4 and 5 support contracts, or T-Support, could cost hundreds of dollars per incident. Microsoft had Windows Mobile clients out that integrated pretty seamlessly with Exchange. But people loved their Blackberries. Other device manufacturers experimented with different modes of interactivity. Microsoft made APIs for pens and keyboards that flipped open. BlackBerry added a trackball in 2006, that was always kind of clunky. Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola, and others were experimenting with new ways to navigate devices, but people were used to menus and even styluses. And they seemed to prefer a look and feel that seemed like what they used for the menuing control systems on HVAC controls, video games, and even the iPod. The Eye Of The Storm A new paradigm was on the way. Apple's iPhone was released in 2007 and Google's Android OS in 2008. By then the BlackBerry Pearl was shipping and it was clear which devices were better. No one saw the two biggest threats coming. Apple was a consumer company. They were slow to add ActiveSync policies, which many thought would be the corporate answer to mobile management as group policies in Active Directory had become for desktops. Apple and Google were slow to take the market, as BlackBerry continued to dominate the smartphone industry well into 2010, especially once then-president Barack Obama strong-armed the NSA into allowing him to use a special version of the BlackBerry 8830 World Edition for official communiques. Other world leaders followed suit, as did the leaders of global companies that had previously been luddites when it came to constantly being online. Even Eric Schmidt, then chairman of google loved his Crackberry in 2013, 5 years after the arrival of Android. Looking back, we can see a steady rise in iPhone sales up to the iPhone 4, released in 2010. Many still said they loved the keyboard on their BlackBerries. Organizations had built BES into their networks and had policies dating back to NIST STIGs. Research in Motion owned the enterprise and held over half the US market and a fifth of the global market. That peaked in 2011. BlackBerry put mobility on the map. But companies like AirWatch, founded in 2003 and MobileIron, founded in 2007, had risen to take a cross-platform approach to the device management aspect of mobile devices. We call them Unified Endpoint Protection products today and companies could suddenly support BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and iPhones from a single console. Over 50 million Blackberries were being sold a year and the stock was soaring at over $230 a share. Today, they hold no market share and their stock performance shows it. Even though they've pivoted to more of a device management company, given their decades of experience working with some of the biggest and most secure companies and governments in the world. The Fall Of The BlackBerry The iPhone was beautiful. It had amazing graphics and a full touch screen. It was the very symbol of innovation. The rising tide of the App Store also made it a developers playground (no pun intended). It was more expensive than the Blackberry, but while they didn't cater to the enterprise, they wedged their way in there with first executives and then anyone. Initially because of ActiveSync, which had come along in 1996 mostly to support Windows Mobile, but by Exchange Server 2003 SP 2 could do almost anything Outlook could do - provided software developers like Apple could make the clients work. So by 2011, Exchange clients could automatically locate a server based on an email address (or more to the point based on DNS records for the domain) and work just as webmail, which was open in almost every IIS implementation that worked with Exchange. And Office365 was released in 2011, paving the way to move from on-prem Exchange to what we now call “the cloud.” And Google Mail had been around for 7 years by then and people were putting it on the BlackBerry as well, blending home and office accounts on the same devices at times. In fact, Google licensed Exchange ActiveSync, or EAS in 2009 so support for Gmail was showing up on a variety of devices. BlackBerry had everything companies wanted. But people slowly moved to that new iPhone. Or Androids when decent models of phones started shipping with the OS on them. BlackBerry stuck by that keyboard, even though it was clear that people wanted full touchscreens. The BlackBerry Bold came out in 2009. BlackBerry had not just doubled down with the keyboard instead of full touchscreen, but they tripled down on it. They had released the Storm in 2008 and then the Storm in 2009 but they just had a different kind of customer. Albeit one that was slowly starting to retire. This is the hard thing about being in the buying tornado. We're so busy transacting that we can't think ahead to staying in the eye that we don't see how the world is changing outside of it. As we saw with companies like Amdahl and Control Data, when we only focus on big customers and ignore the mass market we leave room for entrants in our industries who have more mass appeal. Since the rise of the independent software market following the IBM anti-trust cases, app developers have been a bellwether of successful platforms. And the iPhone revenue split was appealing to say the least. Sales fell off fast. By 2012, the BlackBerry represented less than 6 percent of smartphones sold and by the start of 2013 that number dropped in half, falling to less than 1 percent in 2014. That's when the White House tested replacements for the Blackberry. There was a small bump in sales when they finally released a product that had competitive specs to the iPhone, but it was shortly lived. The Crackberry craze was officially over. BlackBerry shot into the mainstream and brought the smartphone with them. They made the devices secure and work seamlessly in corporate environments and for those who could pay money to run BES or BIS. They proved the market and then got stuck in the Innovator's Dilemna. They became all about features that big customers wanted and needed. And so they missed the personal part of personal computing. Apple, as they did with the PC and then graphical user interfaces saw a successful technology and made people salivate over it. They saw how Windows had built a better sandbox for developers and built the best app delivery mechanism the world has seen to date. Google followed suit and managed to take a much larger piece of the market with more competitive pricing. There is so much we didn't discuss, like the short-lived Playbook tablet from BlackBerry. Or the Priv. Because for the most part, they a device management solution today. The founders are long gone, investing in the next wave of technology: Quantum Computing. The new face of BlackBerry is chasing device management, following adjacencies into security and dabbling in IoT for healthcare and finance. Big ticket types of buys that include red teaming to automotive management to XDR. Maybe their future is in the convergence of post-quantum security, or maybe we'll see their $5.5B market cap get tasty enough for one of those billionaires who really, really, really wants their chicklet keyboard back. Who knows but part of the fun of this is it's a living history.

america ceo university canada europe google uk apple internet freedom france germany canadian research italy sales microsoft iphone barack obama white house tree product ceos os pc android stanford windows swedish ibm outlook motion exchange enterprise organizations bis playbook inter munich istanbul att app store iot innovators sms ipods palm gmail windsor waterloo nsa nokia pos java general motors blackberry hvac apis motorola 10m vii pdfs priv pda quantum computing dns 5b rim ericsson oem bes mime xml albeit osi mhz eas pager deutsche telekom gsm blackberries vivendi qwerty active directory xdr iis 1g android os toronto stock exchange imap windows mobile cves world edition exchange server general magic dilemna infoworld telecom italia palm os research in motion crackberry t support amdahl airwatch mike lazaridis blackberry bold activesync blackberry pearl groupwise

Elliot Amdahl

Hoogie's Garage

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 9, 2022 36:51

Had a great talk with Elliot. Give it as listen and see what he is all doing this year. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

amdahl

Rick Gilbert – Most Likely Nobody Will Buy Your Book

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 24, 2022 28:20

BIO: Rick is an author of several books and performs one-man shows, bringing alive the stories in his books. STORY: Rick spent $22,000 to produce his first audiobook and made just $500 in sales. LEARNING: Accept that there's most likely nobody who will buy your book. Figure out how to get your product to the market. “The chances of you doing your memoir and anybody cares about it are almost zero.”Rick Gilbert Guest profilehttps://www.facebook.com/LeterRipProductions (Rick Gilbert) is the retired founder of https://www.powerspeaking.com/ (PowerSpeaking, Inc), one of Silicon Valley's most successful communication and training companies. Before founding PSI in 1985, Rick was a psychologist and held management positions at HP and Amdahl. Rick is an author of several books and performs One-Man shows, bringing alive the stories in his books. His latest book is an audiobook, https://www.rickgilbert.net/ricks-book/ (Sharing Our Stories), featuring interviews with 65 people, including Gloria Steinem, Daniel Ellsberg, Chris Brubeck, Anna Eshoo, and Don Garlits. Worst investment everIt took Rick about a year and a half to put his audiobook together. Because he didn't understand the technology of audiobooks, he hired people, including lots of editors, to help him with it. Rick ended up spending $22,000 on that book. Over six months, Rick sold 50 copies, only selling at $10 each. So for his $22,000 investment, he made 500 bucks. Lessons learnedIf you still want to write your book, accept that there's most likely nobody who will buy it. Andrew's takeawaysYou may have a great idea, but it remains a hobby, interest, and passion if you haven't figured out a way to get it to the market. You've got to figure out how to get it to the market to sell that idea. Start bringing your product to the market now. Write a chapter, share it, see what happens, and you'll grab the marketplace before you make the entire investment. Actionable adviceDo your homework so that you're aware of what you're getting yourself into. No.1 goal for the next 12 monthsRick's goal for the next 12 months is to stop worrying about the future and live in the moment. [spp-transcript] Connect with Rick Gilberthttps://www.facebook.com/LeterRipProductions (Facebook) https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDuxw9TIoik26MB3ZUm4Fvg (YouTube) https://www.rickgilbert.net/?fbclid=IwAR27HnkKJxJFV68HE5WSTxw_RSCQh9rDjz4G53FJVw28XrF5nXG6SM0W2X4 (Website) https://www.rickgilbert.net/ricks-book/ (Book) Andrew's bookshttps://amzn.to/3qrfHjX (How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market) https://amzn.to/2PDApAo (My Worst Investment Ever) https://amzn.to/3v6ip1Y (9 Valuation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them) https://amzn.to/3emBO8M (Transform Your Business with Dr.Deming's 14 Points) Andrew's online programshttps://valuationmasterclass.com/ (Valuation Master Class) https://academy.astotz.com/courses/how-to-start-building-your-wealth-investing-in-the-stock-market (How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market) https://academy.astotz.com/courses/finance-made-ridiculously-simple (Finance Made Ridiculously Simple) https://academy.astotz.com/courses/gp (Become a Great Presenter and Increase Your Influence) https://academy.astotz.com/courses/transformyourbusiness (Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming's 14 Points) Connect with Andrew Stotz:https://www.astotz.com/ (astotz.com) https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewstotz/ (LinkedIn) https://www.facebook.com/andrewstotzpage (Facebook) https://www.instagram.com/andstotz/ (Instagram) https://twitter.com/Andrew_Stotz (Twitter) https://www.youtube.com/c/andrewstotzpage (YouTube) https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/my-worst-investment-ever-podcast/id1416554991?mt=2 (My Worst Investment Ever Podcast) Further reading mentionedMichael Gerber (October 1988), https://amzn.to/3xCGf9g (The E Myth: Why Most Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It). Eric Ries...

work write silicon valley figure stock market hp one man psi transform your business gloria steinem eric ries deming daniel ellsberg avoid them increase your influence sharing our stories andrew stotz amdahl

Top Tips with Jim Irving

The Selling Well

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 5, 2022 55:57

Jim Irving started his career selling office equipment door to door in Scotland, where soon after his career rapidly developed into senior selling and sales leadership roles, then ultimately to senior executive positions at major multinationals (including becoming the UK MD of Information Builders – a leading US-based enterprise software company). Jim now runs his own consulting business helping start-ups to improve their B2B strategy and selling results. He has advised and helped many start-ups to better execute and grow their businesses. Jim has spent over 43 years in B2B selling with a number of industry-leading technology organizations including Amdahl, Sequent, Silicon Graphics, and Information Builders. Join us as we discuss Jim's journey in professional sales as well as different tips he has for you that can help you out in your professional career. Highlights The fundamentals of B2B selling How he moved from the corporate world to training, coaching, and mentoring The best practices for sales he swears by What discovery is and its importance What does it take to get a sales qualified lead What his recent clients have to say after undergoing his training and mentoring The key to the whole discovery process Episode Resources Connect with Mark Cox https://www.inthefunnel.com/ https://ca.linkedin.com/in/markandrewcox https://www.facebook.com/inthefunnel Connect with Jim Irving https://b2bsellingguidebook.com/index.html https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimirving

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From Theory to the C-Suite: The Impact of a Saybrook Degree with Dr. Rick Gilbert (Alumnus 1977)

UNBOUND: Saybrook Insights with President Nathan Long

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 1, 2022 41:19

Podcast Reboot: Season 1, Episode 1(To learn more about our university, visit us at www.saybrook.edu. )Today's episode is also our inaugural episode for our podcast reboot and was recorded one year ago during the height of our 50th-anniversary proceedings. We feature alumnus Dr. Frederick or Rick Gilbert (1977). Rick and I had the pleasure of meeting early in my presidency, becoming fast friends. He has led a rich and amazing life, much of it informed by his Ph.D. work at Saybrook University. Carmen and I dig into his history, the secret of his many successes, and his overall joi de vivre. This colorful interview in which I am joined by Carmen Bowen is a must-listen: Rick's inspiring and beautiful articulation of his life's work was truly a joy to witness. A little bit more about Rick: He is the founder of PowerSpeaking, Inc., a speech communication training company in Redwood City. With its highly skilled trainers and facilitators, PSI delivers over 300 programs a year nationally and around the world. Before starting his own company, Rick held quality improvement and communications management positions with Hewlett Packard and Amdahl corporations in Silicon Valley.Rick's coaching of over 200 senior-level executives led to the creation of the award-winning training program: Speaking Up: Presenting to Executives. His best-selling book, “Speaking Up: Surviving Executive Presentations” was published by Berrett-Koehler and can be found on Amazon. We've also included a link in the episode notes along with his newest audiobook Sharing Our Stories: Tales of Resilience and Renewal. Rick holds a PhD in humanistic psychology from Saybrook University.Read More About Rick BelowOrder his Book on Executive Presentations: Speaking Up: Surviving Executive PresentationsOrder his Audio Book: Sharing Our Stories: Tales of Resilience and RenewalRick's Website

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590 Solving The Big Human Problems with Pamela Roussos @ Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship

thinkfuture with kalaboukis

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 24, 2022 50:09

Pamela serves as Senior Advisor to Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship. She began working with social entrepreneurs twelve years ago as a mentor for Miller Center's programs while she continued her career as a software executive. Prior to joining the Center eight years ago, she worked with and for early-stage software companies as a business and marketing strategy leader, helping founders create, refine, and execute their business strategy and go-to-market plans. She has over 25 years of experience growing teams and delivering products for both large and start-up software companies, working in various managerial capacities such as business unit manager, vice president of marketing, COO, and CEO. Some of the companies Pamela has worked with include: Amdahl, Pure Software, Rational Software, Consera, Zend, and AppFirst. Pamela currently serves on the board of Innovation Works, whose focus is building sustainable neighborhood economies in Baltimore. Pamela also serves as board chair for LivelyHoods, an organization that creates jobs for youth and women in slums across Kenya. To connect with Pamela you can do so via her LinkedIn or Twitter. https://www.millersocent.org/ https://www.iwbmore.org/ https://www.livelyhoods.org/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/pamelaroussos/ https://twitter.com/PamelaRoussos A good place to get inspiration on figuring out the big problems you want to tackle is by looking at the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). There you will find 17 interlocking goals that are a blueprint to achieve a just and sustainable world for all. Under each goal, you'll find targets and indicators to be achieved by 2030. What big, hairy problem do you want to put your time and talent towards achieving? https://sdgs.un.org/goals Once you have a direction you'll find there are overarching organizations in many of the issue areas, for example GOGLA, the global association for off-grid solar energy Global Distributors Collective for last-mile distributors The Water Network, a knowledge-sharing platform for water professionals Clean Cooking Alliance, a global network of partners to make clean cooking accessible https://www.gogla.org/ https://globaldistributorscollective.org/ https://thewaternetwork.com/ https://cleancooking.org/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thinkfuture/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/thinkfuture/support

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The Nancy Tribute Trilogy

PodAskew Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 27, 2021 185:43

1 year later.... Rico & C.J. decided to put out a special episode to honor Nancy by combining the 2 bonus episodes we put out right when she passed and after her memorial; newly included in this Trilogy is Nancy's appearance on an episode of the Princeton Cannabis Review podcast, entitled "Shopping at the Dispensary with Nancy Jane".The Princeton Cannabis Review podcast is created & hosted by Bibiana Princeton and she considered Nancy a close friend...Promo for, and founding member of, OddPods Media Network

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Building Distributed Cognition into Your Business with Sam Ramji

Screaming in the Cloud

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 9, 2021 39:56

About SamA 25-year veteran of the Silicon Valley and Seattle technology scenes, Sam Ramji led Kubernetes and DevOps product management for Google Cloud, founded the Cloud Foundry foundation, has helped build two multi-billion dollar markets (API Management at Apigee and Enterprise Service Bus at BEA Systems) and redefined Microsoft's open source and Linux strategy from “extinguish” to “embrace”.He is nerdy about open source, platform economics, middleware, and cloud computing with emphasis on developer experience and enterprise software. He is an advisor to multiple companies including Dell Technologies, Accenture, Observable, Fletch, Orbit, OSS Capital, and the Linux Foundation.Sam received his B.S. in Cognitive Science from UC San Diego, the home of transdisciplinary innovation, in 1994 and is still excited about artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology.Links: DataStax: https://www.datastax.com Sam Ramji Twitter: https://twitter.com/sramji Open||Source||Data: https://www.datastax.com/resources/podcast/open-source-data Screaming in the Cloud Episode 243 with Craig McLuckie: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/innovating-in-the-cloud-with-craig-mcluckie/ Screaming in the Cloud Episode 261 with Jason Warner: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/what-github-can-give-to-microsoft-with-jason-warner/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Redis, the company behind the incredibly popular open source database that is not the bind DNS server. If you're tired of managing open source Redis on your own, or you're using one of the vanilla cloud caching services, these folks have you covered with the go to manage Redis service for global caching and primary database capabilities; Redis Enterprise. Set up a meeting with a Redis expert during re:Invent, and you'll not only learn how you can become a Redis hero, but also have a chance to win some fun and exciting prizes. To learn more and deploy not only a cache but a single operational data platform for one Redis experience, visit redis.com/hero. Thats r-e-d-i-s.com/hero. And my thanks to my friends at Redis for sponsoring my ridiculous non-sense. Corey: Are you building cloud applications with a distributed team? Check out Teleport, an open source identity-aware access proxy for cloud resources. Teleport provides secure access to anything running somewhere behind NAT: SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, internal web apps and databases. Teleport gives engineers superpowers! Get access to everything via single sign-on with multi-factor. List and see all SSH servers, kubernetes clusters or databases available to you. Get instant access to them all using tools you already have. Teleport ensures best security practices like role-based access, preventing data exfiltration, providing visibility and ensuring compliance. And best of all, Teleport is open source and a pleasure to use.Download Teleport at https://goteleport.com. That's goteleport.com.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and recurring effort that this show goes to is to showcase people in their best light. Today's guest has done an awful lot: he led Kubernetes and DevOps Product Management for Google Cloud; he founded the Cloud Foundry Foundation; he set open-source strategy for Microsoft in the naughts; he advises companies including Dell, Accenture, the Linux Foundation; and tying all of that together, it's hard to present a lot of that in a great light because given my own proclivities, that sounds an awful lot like a personal attack. Sam Ramji is the Chief Strategy Officer at DataStax. Sam, thank you for joining me, and it's weird when your resume starts to read like, “Oh, I hate all of these things.”Sam: [laugh]. It's weird, but it's true. And it's the only life I could have lived apparently because here I am. Corey, it's a thrill to meet you. I've been an admirer of your public speaking, and public tweeting, and your writing for a long time.Corey: Well, thank you. The hard part is getting over the voice saying don't do it because it turns out that there's no real other side of public shutting up, which is something that I was never good at anyway, so I figured I'd lean into it. And again, I mean, that the sense of where you have been historically in terms of your career not, “Look what you've done,” which is a subtext that I could be accused of throwing in sometimes.Sam: I used to hear that a lot from my parents, actually.Corey: Oh, yeah. That was my name growing up. But you've done a lot of things, and you've transitioned from notable company making significant impact on the industry, to the next one, to the next one. And you've been in high-flying roles, doing lots of really interesting stuff. What's the common thread between all those things?Sam: I'm an intensely curious person, and the thing that I'm most curious about is distributed cognition. And that might not be obvious from what you see is kind of the… Lego blocks of my career, but I studied cognitive science in college when that was not really something that was super well known. So, I graduated from UC San Diego in '94 doing neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and psychology. And because I just couldn't stop thinking about thinking; I was just fascinated with how it worked.So, then I wanted to build software systems that would help people learn. And then I wanted to build distributed software systems. And then I wanted to learn how to work with people who were thinking about building the distributed software systems. So, you end up kind of going up this curve of, like, complexity about how do we think? How do we think alone? How do we learn to think? How do we think together?And that's the directed path through my software engineering career, into management, into middleware at BEA, into open-source at Microsoft because that's an amazing demonstration of distributed cognition, how, you know, at the time in 2007, I think, Sourceforge had 100,000 open-source projects, which was, like, mind boggling. Some of them even worked together, but all of them represented these groups of people, flung around the world, collaborating on something that was just fundamentally useful, that they were curious about. Kind of did the same thing into APIs because APIs are an even better way to reuse for some cases than having the source code—at Apigee. And kept growing up through that into, how are we building larger-scale thinking systems like Cloud Foundry, which took me into Google and Kubernetes, and then some applications of that in Autodesk and now DataStax. So, I love building companies. I love helping people build companies because I think business is distributed cognition. So, those businesses that build distributed systems, for me, are the most fascinating.Corey: You were basically handed a heck of a challenge as far as, “Well, help set open-source strategy,” back at Microsoft, in the days where that was a punchline. And credit where due, I have to look at Microsoft of today, and it's not a joke, you can have your arguments about them, but again in those days, a lot of us built our entire personality on hating Microsoft. Some folks never quite evolved beyond that, but it's a new ballgame and it's very clear that the Microsoft of yesteryear and the Microsoft of today are not completely congruent. What was it like at that point understanding that as you're working with open-source communities, you're doing that from a place of employment with a company that was widely reviled in the space.Sam: It was not lost on me. The irony, of course, was that—Corey: Well, thank God because otherwise the question where you would have been, “What do you mean they didn't like us?”Sam: [laugh].Corey: Which, on some levels, like, yeah, that's about the level of awareness I would have expected in that era, but contrary to popular opinion, execs at these companies are not generally oblivious.Sam: Yeah, well, if I'd been clever as a creative humorist, I would have given you that answer instead of my serious answer, but for some reason, my role in life is always to be the straight guy. I used to have Slashdot as my homepage, right? I love when I'd see some conspiracy theory about, you know, Bill Gates dressed up as the Borg, taking over the world. My first startup, actually in '97, was crushed by Microsoft. They copied our product, copied the marketing, and bundled it into Office, so I had lots of reasons to dislike Microsoft.But in 2004, I was recruited into their venture capital team, which I couldn't believe. It was really a place that they were like, “Hey, we could do better at helping startups succeed, so we're going to evangelize their success—if they're building with Microsoft technologies—to VCs, to enterprises, we'll help you get your first big enterprise deal.” I was like, “Man, if I had this a few years ago, I might not be working.” So, let's go try to pay it forward.I ended up in open-source by accident. I started going to these conferences on Software as a Service. This is back in 2005 when people were just starting to light up, like, Silicon Valley Forum with, you know, the CEO of Demandware would talk, right? We'd hear all these different ways of building a new business, and they all kept talking about their tech stack was Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. I went to one eight-hour conference, and Microsoft technologies were mentioned for about 12 seconds in two separate chunks. So, six seconds, he was like, “Oh, and also we really like Microsoft SQL Server for our data layer.”Corey: Oh, Microsoft SQL Server was fantastic. And I know that's a weird thing for people to hear me say, just because I've been renowned recently for using Route 53 as the primary data store for everything that I can. But there was nothing quite like that as far as having multiple write nodes, being able to handle sharding effectively. It was expensive, and you would take a bath on the price come audit time, but people were not rolling it out unaware of those things. This was a trade off that they were making.Oracle has a similar story with databases. It's yeah, people love to talk smack about Oracle and its business practices for a variety of excellent reasons, at least in the database space that hasn't quite made it to cloud yet—knock on wood—but people weren't deploying it because they thought Oracle was warm and cuddly as a vendor; they did it because they can tolerate the rest of it because their stuff works.Sam: That's so well said, and people don't give them the credit that's due. Like, when they built hypergrowth in their business, like… they had a great product; it really worked. They made it expensive, and they made a lot of money on it, and I think that was why you saw MySQL so successful and why, if you were looking for a spec that worked, that you could talk through through an open driver like ODBC or JDBC or whatever, you could swap to Microsoft SQL Server. But I walked out of that and came back to the VC team and said, “Microsoft has a huge problem. This is a massive market wave that's coming. We're not doing anything in it. They use a little bit of SQL Server, but there's nothing else in your tech stack that they want, or like, or can afford because they don't know if their businesses are going to succeed or not. And they're going to go out of business trying to figure out how much licensing costs they would pay to you in order to consider using your software. They can't even start there. They have to start with open-source. So, if you're going to deal with SaaS, you're going to have to have open-source, and get it right.”So, I worked with some folks in the industry, wrote a ten-page paper, sent it up to Bill Gates for Think Week. Didn't hear much back. Bought a new strategy to the head of developer platform evangelism, Sanjay Parthasarathy who suggested that the idea of discounting software to zero for startups, with the hope that they would end up doing really well with it in the future as a Software as a Service company; it was dead on arrival. Dumb idea; bring it back; that actually became BizSpark, the most popular program in Microsoft partner history.And then about three months later, I got a call from this guy, Bill Hilf. And he said, “Hey, this is Bill Hilf. I do open-source at Microsoft. I work with Bill Gates. He sent me your paper. I really like it. Would you consider coming up and having conversation with me because I want you to think about running open-source technology strategy for the company.” And at this time I'm, like, 33 or 34. And I'm like, “Who me? You've got to be joking.” And he goes, “Oh, and also, you'll be responsible for doing quarterly deep technical briefings with Bill… Gates.” I was like, “You must be kidding.” And so of course I had to check it out. One thing led to another and all of a sudden, with not a lot of history in the open-source community but coming in it with a strategist's eye and with a technologist's eye, saying, “This is a problem we got to solve. How do we get after this pragmatically?” And the rest is history, as they say.Corey: I have to say that you are the Chief Strategy Officer at DataStax, and I pull up your website quickly here and a lot of what I tell earlier stage companies is effectively more or less what you have already done. You haven't named yourself after the open-source project that underlies the bones of what you have built so you're not going to wind up in the same glorious challenges that, for example, Elastic or MongoDB have in some ways. You have a pricing page that speaks both to the reality of, “It's two in the morning. I'm trying to get something up and running and I want you the hell out of my way. Just give me something that I can work with a reasonable free tier and don't make me talk to a salesperson.” But also, your enterprise tier is, “Click here to talk to a human being,” which is speaking enterprise slash procurement slash, oh, there will be contract negotiation on these things.It's being able to serve different ends of your market depending upon who it is that encounters you without being off-putting to any of those. And it's deceptively challenging for companies to pull off or get right. So clearly, you've learned lessons by doing this. That was the big problem with Microsoft for the longest time. It's, if I want to use some Microsoft stuff, once you were able to download things from the internet, it changed slightly, but even then it was one of those, “What exactly am I committing to here as far as signing up for this? And am I giving them audit rights into my environment? Is the BSA about to come out of nowhere and hit me with a surprise audit and find out that various folks throughout the company have installed this somewhere and now I owe more than the company's worth?” That was always the haunting fear that companies had back then.These days, I like the approach that companies are taking with the SaaS offering: you pay for usage. On some level, I'd prefer it slightly differently in a pay-per-seat model because at least then you can predict the pricing, but no one is getting surprise submarined with this type of thing on an audit basis, and then they owe damages and payment in arrears and someone has them over a barrel. It's just, “Oh. The bill this month was higher than we expected.” I like that model I think the industry does, too.Sam: I think that's super well said. As I used to joke at BEA Systems, nothing says ‘I love you' to a customer like an audit, right? That's kind of a one-time use strategy. If you're going to go audit licenses to get your revenue in place, you might be inducing some churn there. It's a huge fix for the structural problem in pricing that I think package software had, right?When we looked at Microsoft software versus open-source software, and particularly Windows versus Linux, you would have a structure where sales reps were really compensated to sell as much as possible upfront so they could get the best possible commission on what might be used perpetually. But then if you think about it, like, the boxes in a curve, right, if you do that calculus approximation of a smooth curve, a perpetual software license is a huge box and there's an enormous amount of waste in there. And customers figured out so as soon as you can go to a pay-per-use or pay-as-you-go, you start to smooth that curve, and now what you get is what you deserve, right, as opposed to getting filled with way more cost than you expect. So, I think this model is really super well understood now. Kind of the long run the high point of open-source meets, cloud, meets Software as a Service, you look at what companies like MongoDB, and Confluent, and Elastic, and Databricks are doing. And they've really established a very good path through the jungle of how to succeed as a software company. So, it's still difficult to implement, but there are really world-class guides right now.Corey: Moving beyond where Microsoft was back in the naughts, you were then hired as a VP over at Google. And in that era, the fact that you were hired as a VP at Google is fascinating. They preferred to grow those internally, generally from engineering. So, first question, when you were being hired as a VP in the product org, did they make you solve algorithms on a whiteboard to get there?Sam: [laugh]. They did not. I did have somewhat of an advantage [because they 00:13:36] could see me working pretty closely as the CEO of the Cloud Foundry Foundation. I'd worked closely with Craig McLuckie who notably brought Kubernetes to the world along with Joe Beda, and with Eric Brewer, and a number of others.And he was my champion at Google. He was like, “Look, you know, we need him doing Kubernetes. Let's bring Sam in to do that.” So, that was helpful. I also wrote a [laugh] 2000-word strategy document, just to get some thoughts out of my head. And I said, “Hey, if you like this, great. If you don't throw it away.” So, the interviews were actually very much not solving problems in a whiteboard. There were super collaborative, really excellent conversations. It was slow—Corey: Let's be clear, Craig McLuckie's most notable achievement was being a guest on this podcast back in Episode 243. But I'll say that this is a close second.Sam: [laugh]. You're not wrong. And of course now with Heptio and their acquisition by VMware.Corey: Ehh, they're making money beyond the wildest dreams of avarice, that's all well and good, but an invite to this podcast, that's where it's at.Sam: Well, he should really come on again, he can double down and beat everybody. That can be his landmark achievement, a two-timer on Screaming in [the] Cloud.Corey: You were at Google; you were at Microsoft. These are the big titans of their era, in some respect—not to imply that there has beens; they're bigger than ever—but it's also a more crowded field in some ways. I guess completing the trifecta would be Amazon, but you've had the good judgment never to work there, directly of course. Now they're clearly in your market. You're at DataStax, which is among other things, built on Apache Cassandra, and they launched their own Cassandra service named Keyspaces because no one really knows why or how they name things.And of course, looking under the hood at the pricing model, it's pretty clear that it really is just DynamoDB wearing some Groucho Marx classes with a slight upcharge for API level compatibility. Great. So, I don't see it a lot in the real world and that's fine, but I'm curious as to your take on looking at all three of those companies at different eras. There was always the threat in the open-source world that they are going to come in and crush you. You said earlier that Microsoft crushed your first startup.Google is an interesting competitor in some respects; people don't really have that concern about them. And your job as a Chief Strategy Officer at Amazon is taken over by a Post-it Note that simply says ‘yes' on it because there's nothing they're not going to do, or try, and experiment with. So, from your perspective, if you look at the titans, who is it that you see as the largest competitive threat these days, if that's even a thing?Sam: If you think about Sun Tzu and the Art of War, right—a lot of strategy comes from what we've learned from military environments—fighting a symmetric war, right, using the same weapons and the same army against a symmetric opponent, but having 1/100th of the personnel and 1/100th of the money is not a good plan.Corey: “We're going to lose money, going to be outcompeted; we'll make it up in volume. Oh, by the way, we're also slower than they are.”Sam: [laugh]. So, you know, trying to come after AWS, or Microsoft, or Google as an independent software company, pound-for-pound, face-to-face, right, full-frontal assault is psychotic. What you have to do, I think, at this point is to understand that these are each companies that are much like we thought about Linux, and you know, Macintosh, and Windows as operating systems. They're now the operating systems of the planet. So, that creates some economies of scale, some efficiencies for them. And for us. Look at how cheap object storage is now, right? So, there's never been a better time in human history to create a database company because we can take the storage out of the database and hand it over to Amazon, or Google, or Microsoft to handle it with 13 nines of durability on a constantly falling cost basis.So, that's super interesting. So, you have to prosecute the structure of the world as it is, based on where the giants are and where they'll be in the future. Then you have to turn around and say, like, “What can they never sell?”So, Amazon can never sell something that is standalone, right? They're a parts factory and if you buy into the Amazon-first strategy of cloud computing—which we did at Autodesk when I was VP of cloud platform there—everything is a primitive that works inside Amazon, but they're not going to build things that don't work outside of the Amazon primitives. So, your company has to be built on the idea that there's a set of people who value something that is purpose-built for a particular use case that you can start to broaden out, it's really helpful if they would like it to be something that can help them escape a really valuable asset away from the center of gravity that is a cloud. And that's why data is super interesting. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, “Boy, I had such a great conversation with Oracle over the last 20 years beating me up on licensing. Let me go find a cloud vendor and dump all of my data in that so they can beat me up for the next 20 years.” Nobody says that.Corey: It's the idea of data portability that drives decision-making, which makes people, of course, feel better about not actually moving in anywhere. But the fact that they're not locked in strategically, in a way that requires a full software re-architecture and data model rewrite is compelling. I'm a big believer in convincing people to make decisions that look a lot like that.Sam: Right. And so that's the key, right? So, when I was at Autodesk, we went from our 100 million dollar, you know, committed spend with 19% discount on the big three services to, like—we started realize when we're going to burn through that, we were spending $60 million or so a year on 20% annual growth as the cloud part of the business grew. Thought, “Okay, let's renegotiate. Let's go and do a $250 million deal. I'm sure they'll give us a much better discount than 19%.” Short story is they came back and said, “You know, we're going to take you from an already generous 19% to an outstanding 22%.” We thought, “Wait a minute, we already talked to Intuit. They're getting a 40% discount on a $400 million spend.”So, you know, math is hard, but, like, 40% minus 22% is 18% times $250 million is a lot of money. So, we thought, “What is going on here?” And we realized we just had no credible threat of leaving, and Intuit did because they had built a cross-cloud capable architecture. And we had not. So, now stepping back into the kind of the world that we're living in 2021, if you're an independent software company, especially if you have the unreasonable advantage of being an open-source software company, you have got to be doing your customers good by giving them cross-cloud capability. It could be simply like the Amdahl coffee cup that Amdahl reps used to put as landmines for the IBM reps, later—I can tell you that story if you want—even if it's only a way to save money for your customer by using your software, when it gets up to tens and hundreds of million dollars, that's a really big deal.But they also know that data is super important, so the option value of being able to move if they have to, that they have to be able to pull that stick, instead of saying, “Nice doggy,” we have to be on their side, right? So, there's almost a detente that we have to create now, as cloud vendors, working in a world that's invented and operated by the giants.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave is a new high-performance accelerator for the Oracle MySQL Database Service. Although I insist on calling it “my squirrel.” While MySQL has long been the worlds most popular open source database, shifting from transacting to analytics required way too much overhead and, ya know, work. With HeatWave you can run your OLTP and OLAP, don't ask me to ever say those acronyms again, workloads directly from your MySQL database and eliminate the time consuming data movement and integration work, while also performing 1100X faster than Amazon Aurora, and 2.5X faster than Amazon Redshift, at a third of the cost. My thanks again to Oracle Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: When we look across the, I guess, the ecosystem as it's currently unfolding, a recurring challenge that I have to the existing incumbent cloud providers is they're great at offering the bricks that you can use to build things, but if I'm starting a company today, I'm not going to look at building it myself out of, “Ooh, I'm going to take a bunch of EC2 instances, or Lambda functions, or popsicles and string and turn it into this thing.” I'm going to want to tie together things that are way higher level. In my own case, now I wind up paying for Retool, which is, effectively, yeah, it runs on some containers somewhere, presumably, I think in Azure, but don't quote me on that. And that's great. Could I build my own thing like that?Absolutely not. I would rather pay someone to tie it together. Same story. Instead of building my own CRM by running some open-source software on an EC2 instance, I wind up paying for Salesforce or Pipedrive or something in that space. And so on, and so forth.And a lot of these companies that I'm doing business with aren't themselves running on top of AWS. But for web hosting, for example; if I look at the reference architecture for a WordPress site, AWS's diagram looks like a punchline. It is incredibly overcomplicated. And I say this as someone who ran large WordPress installations at Media Temple many years ago. Now, I have the good sense to pay WP Engine. And on a monthly basis, I give them money and they make the website work.Sure, under the hood, it's running on top of GCP or AWS somewhere. But I don't have to think about it; I don't have to build this stuff together and think about the backups and the failover strategy and the rest. The website just works. And that is increasingly the direction that business is going; things commoditize over time. And AWS in particular has done a terrible job, in my experience, of differentiating what it is they're doing in the language that their customers speak.They're great at selling things to existing infrastructure engineers, but folks who are building something from scratch aren't usually in that cohort. It's a longer story with time and, “Well, we're great at being able to sell EC2 instances by the gallon.” Great. Are you capable of going to a small doctor's office somewhere in the American Midwest and offering them an end-to-end solution for managing patient data? Of course not. You can offer them a bunch of things they can tie together to something that will suffice if they all happen to be software engineers, but that's not the opportunity.So instead, other companies are building those solutions on top of AWS, capturing the margin. And if there's one thing guaranteed to keep Amazon execs awake at night, it's the idea of someone who isn't them making money somehow somewhere, so I know that's got to rankle them, but they do not speak that language. At all. Longer-term, I only see that as a more and more significant crutch. A long enough timeframe here, we're talking about them becoming the Centurylinks of the world, the tier one backbone provider that everyone uses, but no one really thinks about because they're not a household name.Sam: That is a really thoughtful perspective. I think the diseconomies of scale that you're pointing to start to creep in, right? Because when you have to sell compute units by the gallon, right, you can't care if it's a gallon of milk, [laugh] or a gallon of oil, or you know, a gallon of poison. You just have to keep moving it through. So, the shift that I think they're going to end up having to make pragmatically, and you start to see some signs of it, like, you know, they hired but could not retain Matt [Acey 00:23:48]. He did an amazing job of bringing them to some pragmatic realization that they need to partner with open-source, but more broadly, when I think about Microsoft in the 2000s as they were starting to learn their open-source lessons, we were also being able to pull on Microsoft's deep competency and partners. So, most people didn't do the math on this. I was part of the field governance council so I understood exactly how the Microsoft business worked to the level that I was capable. When they had $65 billion in revenue, they produced $24 billion in profit through an ecosystem that generated $450 billion in revenue. So, for every dollar Microsoft made, it was $8 to partners. It was a fundamentally platform-shaped business, and that was how they're able to get into doctors offices in the Midwest, and kind of fit the curve that you're describing of all of those longtail opportunities that require so much care and that are complex to prosecute. These solved for their diseconomies of scale by having 1.2 million partner companies. So, will Amazon figure that out and will they hire, right, enough people who've done this before from Microsoft to become world-class in partnering, that's kind of an exercise left to the [laugh] reader, right? Where will that go over time? But I don't see another better mathematical model for dealing with the diseconomies of scale you have when you're one of the very largest providers on the planet.Corey: The hardest problem as I look at this is, at some point, you hit a point of scale where smaller things look a lot less interesting. I get that all the time when people say, “Oh, you fix AWS bills, aren't you missing out by not targeting Google bills and Azure bills as well?” And it's, yeah. I'm not VC-backed. It turns out that if I limit the customer base that I can effectively service to only AWS customers, yeah turns out, I'm not going to starve anytime soon. Who knew? I don't need to conquer the world and that feels increasingly antiquated, at least going by the stories everyone loves to tell.Sam: Yeah, it's interesting to see how cloud makes strange bedfellows, right? We started seeing this in, like, 2014, 2015, weird partnerships that you're like, “There's no way this would happen.” But the cloud economics which go back to utilization, rather than what it used to be, which was software lock-in, just changed who people were willing to hang out with. And now you see companies like Databricks going, you know, we do an amazing amount of business, effectively competing with Amazon, selling Spark services on top of predominantly Amazon infrastructure, and everybody seems happy with it. So, there's some hint of a new sensibility of what the future of partnering will be. We used to call it coopetition a long time ago, which is kind of a terrible word, but at least it shows that there's some nuance in you can't compete with everybody because it's just too hard.Corey: I wish there were better ways of articulating these things because it seems from the all the outside world, you have companies like Amazon and Microsoft and Google who go and build out partner networks because they need that external accessibility into various customer profiles that they can't speak to super well themselves, but they're also coming out with things that wind up competing directly or indirectly, with all of those partners at the same time. And I don't get it. I wish that there were smarter ways to do it.Sam: It is hard to even talk about it, right? One of the things that I think we've learned from philosophy is if we don't have a word for it, we can't be intelligent about it. So, there's a missing semantics here for being able to describe the complexity of where are you partnering? Where are you competing? Where are you differentiating? In an ecosystem, which is moving and changing.I tend to look at the tools of game theory for this, which is to look at things as either, you know, nonzero-sum games or zero-sum games. And if it's a nonzero-sum game, which I think are the most interesting ones, can you make it a positive sum game? And who can you play positive-sum games with? An organization as big as Amazon, or as big as Microsoft, or even as big as Google isn't ever completely coherent with itself. So, thinking about this as an independent software company, it doesn't matter if part of one of these hyperscalers has a part of their business that competes with your entire business because your business probably drives utilization of a completely different resource in their company that you can partner within them against them, effectively. Right?For example, Cassandra is an amazingly powerful but demanding workload on Kubernetes. So, there's a lot of Cassandra on EKS. You grow a lot of workload, and EKS business does super well. Does that prevent us from working with Amazon because they have Dynamo or because they have Keyspaces? Absolutely not, right?So, this is when those companies get so big that they are almost their own forest, right, of complexity, you can kind of get in, hang out, do well, and pretty much never see the competitive product, unless you're explicitly looking for it, which I think is a huge danger for us as independent software companies. And I would say this to anybody doing strategy for an organization like this, which is, don't obsess over the tiny part of their business that competes with yours, and do not pay attention to any of the marketing that they put out that looks competitive with what you have. Because if you can't figure out how to make a better product and sell it better to your customers as a single purpose corporation, you have bigger problems.Corey: I want to change gears slightly to something that's probably a fair bit more insulting, but that's okay. We're going to roll with it. That seems to be the theme of this episode. You have been, in effect, a CIO a number of times at different companies. And if we take a look at the typical CIO tenure, industry-wide, it's not long; it approaches the territory from an executive perspective of, “Be sure not to buy green bananas. You might not be here by the time they ripen.” And I'm wondering what it is that drives that and how you make a mark in a relatively short time frame when you're providing inputs and deciding on strategy, and those decisions may not bear fruit for years.Sam: CIO used to—we used say it stood for ‘Career Is Over' because the tenure is so short. I think there's a couple of reasons why it's so short. And I think there's a way I believe you can have impact in a short amount of time. I think the reason that it's been short is because people aren't sure what they want the CIO role to be.Do they want it to be a glorified finance person who's got a lot of data processing experience, but now really has got, you know, maybe even an MBA in finance, but is not focusing on value creation? Do they want it to be somebody who's all-singing, all-dancing Chief Data Officer with a CTO background who did something amazing and solved a really hard problem? The definition of success is difficult. Often CIOs now also have security under them, which is literally a job I would never ever want to have. Do security for a public corporation? Good Lord, that's a way to lose most of your life. You're the only executive other than the CEO that the board wants to hear from. Every sing—Corey: You don't sleep; you wait, in those scenarios. And oh, yeah, people joke about ablative CSOs in those scenarios. Yeah, after SolarWinds, you try and get an ablative intern instead, but those don't work as well. It's a matter of waiting for an inevitability. One of the things I think is misunderstood about management broadly, is that you are delegating work, but not the responsibility. The responsibility rests with you.So, when companies have these statements blaming some third-party contractor, it's no, no, no. I'm dealing with you. You were the one that gave my data to some sketchy randos. It is your responsibility that data has now been compromised. And people don't want to hear that, but it's true.Sam: I think that's absolutely right. So, you have this high risk, medium reward, very fungible job definition, right? If you ask all of the CIO's peers what their job is, they'll probably all tell you something different that represents their wish list. The thing that I learned at Autodesk, I was only there for 15 months, but we established a fundamental transformation of the work of how cloud platform is done at the company that's still in place a couple years later.You have to realize that you're a change agent, right? You're actually being hired to bring in the bulk of all the different biases and experiences you have to solve a problem that is not working, right? So, when I got to Autodesk, they didn't even know what their uptime was. It took three months to teach the team how to measure the uptime. Turned out the uptime was 97.7% for the cloud, for the world's largest engineering software company.That is 200 hours a year of unplanned downtime, right? That is not good. So, a complete overhaul [laugh] was needed. Understanding that as a change agent, your half-life is 12 to 18 months, you have to measure success not on tenure, but on your ability to take good care of the patient, right? It's going to be a lot of pain, you're going to work super hard, you're going to have to build trust with everyone, and then people are still going to hate you at the end. That is something you just have to kind of take on.As a friend of mine, Jason Warner joined Redpoint Ventures recently, he said this when he was the CTO of GitHub: “No one is a villain in their own story.” So, you realize, going into a big organization, people are going to make you a villain, but you still have to do incredibly thoughtful, careful work, that's going to take care of them for a long time to come. And those are the kinds of CIOs that I can relate to very well.Corey: Jason is great. You're name-dropping all the guests we've had. My God, keep going. It's a hard thing to rationalize and wrap heads around. It's one of those areas where you will not be measured during your tenure in the role, in some respects. And, of course, that leads to the cynical perspective as well, where well, someone's not going to be here long and if they say, “Yeah, we're just going to keep being stewards of the change that's already underway,” well, that doesn't look great, so quick, time to do a cloud migration, or a cloud repatriation, or time to roll something else out. A bit of a different story.Sam: One of the biggest challenges is how do you get the hearts and the minds of the people who are in the organization when they are no fools, and their expectation is like, “Hey, this company's been around for decades, and we go through cloud leaders or CIOs, like Wendy's goes through hamburgers.” They could just cloud-wash, right, or change-wash all their language. They could use the new language to describe the old thing because all they have to do is get through the performance review and outwait you. So, there's always going to be a level of defection because it's hard to change; it's hard to think about new things.So, the most important thing is how do you get into people's hearts and minds and enable them to believe that the best thing they could do for their career is to come along with the change? And I think that was what we ended up getting right in the Autodesk cloud transformation. And that requires endless optimism, and there's no room for cynicism because the cynicism is going to creep in around the edges. So, what I found on the job is, you just have to get up every morning and believe everything is possible and transmit that belief to everybody.So, if it seems naive or ingenuous, I think that doesn't matter as long as you can move people's hearts in each conversation towards, like, “Oh, this person cares about me. They care about a good outcome from me. I should listen a little bit more and maybe make a 1% change in what I'm doing.” Because 1% compounded daily for a year, you can actually get something done in the lifetime of a CIO.Corey: And I think that's probably a great place to leave it. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, how you think about these things, how you view the world, where can they find you?Sam: You can find me on Twitter, I'm @sramji, S-R-A-M-J-I, and I have a podcast that I host called Open||Source||Datawhere I invite innovators, data nerds, computational networking nerds to hang out and explain to me, a software programmer, what is the big world of open-source data all about, what's happening with machine learning, and what would it be like if you could put data in a container, just like you could put code in a container, and how might the world change? So, that's Open||Source||Data podcast.Corey: And we'll of course include links to that in the [show notes 00:35:58]. Thanks so much for your time. I appreciate it.Sam: Corey, it's been a privilege. Thank you so much for having me.Corey: Likewise. Sam Ramji, Chief Strategy Officer at DataStax. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with a comment telling me exactly which item in Sam's background that I made fun of is the place that you work at.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

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10 Tháng 11 Là Ngày Gì? Hôm Nay Là Ngày Sinh Của Nhà Soạn Nhạc Ennio Morricone

Hôm nay ngày gì?

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 10, 2021 2:03

10 Tháng 11 Là Ngày Gì? Hôm Nay Là Ngày Sinh Của Nhà Soạn Nhạc Ennio Morricone SỰ KIỆN 1983 – Microsoft lần đầu phát hành hệ điều hành Windows 1.0, là phiên bản đầu tiên của dòng Microsoft Windows. 1958 - Viên kim cương Hy vọng được nhà buôn kim cương Harry Winston ở New York tặng cho Viện Smithsonian . 1989 - Người Đức bắt đầu phá bỏ Bức tường Berlin . Sinh 1790 – Jean René Constant Quoy, nhà động vật học và giải phẫu học người Pháp (m. 1869). 1888 - Andrei Tupolev , kỹ sư và nhà thiết kế người Nga, thành lập Công ty Tupolev (mất năm 1972) 1895 - Jack Northrop , doanh nhân người Mỹ, thành lập Northrop Corporation (mất năm 1981) 1919 - Mikhail Kalashnikov , tướng và kỹ sư người Nga, thiết kế AK-47 (mất năm 2013) 1999 - Kiernan Shipka , nữ diễn viên người Mỹ 1928 - Ennio Morricone , nghệ sĩ kèn, nhà soạn nhạc và nhạc trưởng người Ý Mất 2015 - Gene Amdahl , nhà khoa học máy tính, nhà vật lý và kỹ sư người Mỹ, thành lập Tập đoàn Amdahl (sinh năm 1922) Chương trình "Hôm nay ngày gì" hiện đã có mặt trên Youtube, Facebook và Spotify: - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aweekmedia#chulalongkorn - Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/AWeekTV - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6rC4CgZNV6tJpX2RIcbK0J - Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/.../h%C3%B4m-nay.../id1586073418 #aweektv #10thang11 #Microsoft #Smithsonian #Tupolev #NorthropCorporation #MikhailKalashnikov #EnnioMorricone #GeneAmdahl Các video đều thuộc quyền sở hữu của Adwell jsc (adwell.vn) , mọi hành động sử dụng lại nội dung của chúng tôi đều không được phép. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/aweek-tv/message

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All About Amdahl

unicorns rico port costa goodnight brian posehn amdahl

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 24, 2021 8:47

Gene Amdahl grew up in South Dakota and as with many during the early days of computing went into the Navy during World War II. He got his degree from South Dakota State in 1948 and went on to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for his PhD, where he got the bug for computers in 1952, joining the ranks of IBM that year. At IBM he worked on the iconic 704 and then the 7030 but found it too bureaucratic. And yet he came back to become the Chief Architect of the IBM S/360 project. They pushed the boundaries of what was possible with transistorized computing and along the way, Amdahl gave us Amdahl's Law, which is an important aspect of parallel computing - how much latency tasks take when split across different CPUs. Think of it like the law of diminishing returns applied to processing. Contrast this with Fred Brook's Brook's Law - which says that adding incremental engineers don't make projects happen faster by the same increment, or that it can cause a project to take even more time. As with Seymour Cray, Amdahl had ideas for supercomputers and left IBM again in 1970 when they didn't want to pursue them - ironically just a few years after Thomas Watson Jr admitted that just 34 people at CDC had kicked IBM out of their leadership position in the market. First he needed to be able to build a computer, then move into supercomputers. Fully transistorized computing had somewhat cleared the playing field. So he developed the Amdahl 470V/6 - more reliable, more pluggable, and so cheaper than the IBM S/370. He also used virtual machine technology so customers could simulate a 370 and so run existing workloads cheaper. The first went to NASA and the second to the University of Michigan. During the rise of transistorized computing they just kept selling more and more machines. The company grew fast, taking nearly a quart of the market share. As we saw in the CDC episode, the IBM antitrust case was again giving a boon to other companies. Amdahl was able to leverage the fact that IBM software was getting unbundled with the hardware as a big growth hack. As with Cray at the time, Amdahl wanted to keep to one CPU per workload and developed chips and electronics with Fujitsu to enable doing so. By the end of the 70s they had grown to 6,000 employees on the back of a billion dollars in sales. And having built a bureaucratic organization like the one he just left, he left his namesake company much as Seymour Cray had left CDC after helping build it (and would later leave Cray to start yet another Cray). That would be Trilogy systems, which failed shortly after an IPO. I guess we can't always bet on the name. Then Andor International. Then Commercial Data Servers, now a part of Xbridge systems. Meanwhile the 1980s weren't kind to the company with his name on the masthead. The rise of Unix and first minicomputers then standard servers meant people were building all kinds of new devices. Amdahl started selling servers, given the new smaller and pluggable form factors. They sold storage. They sold software to make software, like IDEs. The rapid proliferation of networking and open standards let them sell networking products. Fujitsu ended up growing faster and when Gene Amdahl was gone, in the face of mounting competition with IBM, Amdahl tried to merge with Storage Technology Corporation, or StorageTek as it might be considered today. CDC had pushed some of its technology to StorageTek during their demise and StorageTek in the face of this new competition ended up filing Chapter 11 and getting picked up by Sun for just over $4 billion. But Amdahl was hemorrhaging money as we moved into the 90s. They sold off half the shares to Fujitsu, laid off over a third of their now 10,000 plus workforce, and by the year 2000 had been lapped by IBM on the high end market. They sold off their software division, and Fujitsu acquired the rest of the shares. Many of the customers then moved to the then-new IBM Z series servers that were coming out with 64 bit G3 and G4 chips. As opposed to the 31-bit chips Amdahl, now Fujitsu under the GlobalServer mainframe brand, sells. Amdahl came out of the blue, or Big Blue. On the back of Gene Amdahl's name and a good strategy to attack that S/360 market, they took 8% of the mainframe market from IBM at one point. But they sold to big customers and eventually disappeared as the market shifted to smaller machines and a more standardized lineup of chips. They were able to last for awhile on the revenues they'd put together but ultimately without someone at the top with a vision for the future of the industry, they just couldn't make it as a standalone company. The High Performance Computing server revenues steadily continue to rise at Fujitsu though - hitting $1.3 billion in 2020. In fact, in a sign of the times, the 20 million Euro PRIMEHPC FX700 that's going to the Minho Advanced Computing Centre in Portugal is a petascale computer built on an ARM plus x86 architecture. My how the times have changed. But as components get smaller, more precise, faster, and more mass producible we see the same types of issues with companies being too large to pivot quickly from the PC to the post-PC era. Although at this point, it's doubtful they'll have a generations worth of runway from a patron like Fujitsu to be able to continue in business. Or maybe a patron who sees the benefits downmarket from the new technology that emerges from projects like this and takes on what amounts to nation-building to pivot a company like that. Only time will tell.

Goodnight Nancy

PodAskew Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 23, 2021 48:21

Rico talks about meeting Brian Posehn and talks about the memorial for Nancy

Computer Architecture with Mark D. Hill (Part 2)

Catalyzing Computing

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 18, 2021 31:50

Part two of Khari Douglas' interview with Dr. Mark D. Hill, the Gene M. Amdahl and John P. Morgridge Professor Emeritus of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Chair Emeritus of the CCC Council. This episode was recorded prior to Dr. Hill joining Microsoft as a Partner Hardware Architect with Azure. His research interests include parallel computer system design, memory system design, computer simulation, deterministic replay and transactional memory. In this episode, Mark discusses the importance of hardware security, the impact of AI on hardware, and working in academia vs industry. Timestamps to jump to certain topics: Hardware Security & Vulnerabilities - (1:01) Mark's Involvement with CCC/CRA - (5:58) AI and the Future of Hardware - (10:38) Simulation of Computer Hardware - (14:00) Thoughts on Running Successful A Successful Organization - (18:11) Academia Versus Industry - (23:53) Future of Computing Research - (28:24) Outro - (30:56)

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Computer Architecture with Mark D. Hill (Part 1)

Catalyzing Computing

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 13, 2021 37:08

Khari Douglas interviews Dr. Mark D. Hill, the Gene M. Amdahl and John P. Morgridge Professor Emeritus of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Chair Emeritus of the CCC Council. This episode was recorded prior to Dr. Hill joining Microsoft as a Partner Hardware Architect with Azure. His research interests include parallel computer system design, memory system design, computer simulation, deterministic replay and transactional memory. In this episode Hill discusses the importance of computer architecture, the 3C model of cache behavior, and overcoming the end of Moore's law. Timestamps to jump to certain topics: What is Computer Architecture? - (1:01) Three C Model of Cache Behavior - (5:40) Log-based Transactional Memory - (9:58) End of Moore's Law - (16:36) Hardware accelerators - (20:40) The Gables Model - (29:41) Three Other Models of Computer System Performance - (32:24) Outro - (36:15)

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#367: How This Mompreneur Stopped Trading Time For Dollars (& You Can Too) with Maria Dior Duegaard Amdahl

Online Marketing Made Easy with Amy Porterfield

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 18, 2021 34:34

Organic business growth can happen even when you’re juggling home-life responsibilities. Holy Cow, friend! Wait until you listen to this conversation with my student and 7-figure business owner, Maria Dior Duegaard Amdahl. I wanted to invite Maria to the show because I knew her entrepreneurial journey is one that will light a fire under your you-know-what and give you the exact steps you need to take action. When Maria started her business she was juggling a lot -- her business plan, her family (she’s got three kiddos, a hubby, and a dog at home!), and building her online community. As a successful health coach working 1:1 with entrepreneurs, it didn’t take Maria long to realize that she was trading time for dollars and needed to pivot to a different path. (And quickly!) In this episode, Maria takes us along on her journey from trading time for dollars to running a $3 million dollar business. And as you listen to our conversation, I know you’ll see that she’s no different from you. Her success can be your success, sweet friend. Plus you’ll get the insiders scoop into: Maria’s best strategies for accomplishing ALL of your business goals… (even when you have minimal time) The tangible action items Maria uses for growing an online community organically How to pick yourself back up after failing and keep moving forward Here’s what I love about this interview the most... Maria gives you action items you can start implementing today and she doesn’t hold back! If you’re ready to build, grow, and scale your online business and still have enough time to make dinner at the end of the day, this episode is for you. Here is your highlight guide to this episode: [03:21] Maria shares her story of running a fitness studio for pregnant women and how transitioning to an online business allowed her to scale and reach $3 million in revenue. [10:38] Maria created a system to be very mindful of how she spends her time -- she shares more about this in the freebie for this episode! [15:53] She shares about her webinar show up rate of 58 percent with a 48 percent conversion rate and how she made this happen. [22:11] Maria's secret is being herself and allowing herself the time to take the steps she needs to take while still being human flaws and all. [27:12] Don't fall into the habit of thinking you have to learn everything before you take action, Maria shares how to do this. Grab your free resource from today’s episode! Rate, Review, & Subscribe on Apple Podcasts ‘I love Amy and Online Marketing Made Easy.’

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The Unlikely Rise Of The Macintosh

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 9, 2021 21:14

There was a nexus of Digital Research and Xerox PARC, along with Stanford and Berkeley in the Bay Area. The rise of the hobbyists and the success of Apple attracted some of the best minds in computing to Apple. This confluence was about to change the world. One of those brilliant minds that landed at Apple started out as a technical writer. Apple hired Jef Raskin as their 31st employee, to write the Apple II manual. He quickly started harping on people to build a computer that was easy to use. Mike Markkula wanted to release a gaming console or a cheap computer that could compete with the Commodore and Atari machines at the time. He called the project “Annie.” The project began with Raskin, but he had a very different idea than Markkula's. He summed it up in an article called “Computers by the Millions” that wouldn't see publication until 1982. His vision was closer to his PhD dissertation, bringing computing to the masses. For this, he envisioned a menu driven operating system that was easy to use and inexpensive. Not yet a GUI in the sense of a windowing operating system and so could run on chips that were rapidly dropping in price. He planned to use the 6809 chip for the machine and give it a five inch display. He didn't tell anyone that he had a PhD when he was hired, as the team at Apple was skeptical of academia. Jobs provided input, but was off working on the Lisa project, which used the 68000 chip. So they had free reign over what they were doing. Raskin quickly added Joanna Hoffman for marketing. She was on leave from getting a PhD in archaeology at the University of Chicago and was the marketing team for the Mac for over a year. They also added Burrell Smith, employee #282 from the hardware technician team, to do hardware. He'd run with the Homebrew Computer Club crowd since 1975 and had just strolled into Apple one day and asked for a job. Raskin also brought in one of his students from the University of California San Diego who was taking a break from working on his PhD in neurochemistry. Bill Atkinson became employee 51 at Apple and joined the project. They pulled in Andy Hertzfeld, who Steve Jobs hired when Apple bought one of his programs as he was wrapping up his degree at Berkeley and who'd been sitting on the Apple services team and doing Apple III demos. They added Larry Kenyon, who'd worked at Amdahl and then on the Apple III team. Susan Kare came in to add art and design. They, along with Chris Espinosa - who'd been in the garage with Jobs and Wozniak working on the Apple I, ended up comprising the core team. Over time, the team grew. Bud Tribble joined as the manager for software development. Jerrold Manock, who'd designed the case of the Apple II, came in to design the now-iconic Macintosh case. The team would eventually expand to include Bob Belleville, Steve Capps, George Crow, Donn Denman, Bruce Horn, and Caroline Rose as well. It was still a small team. And they needed a better code name. But chronologically let's step back to the early project. Raskin chose his favorite Apple, the Macintosh, as the codename for the project. As far as codenames go it was a pretty good one. So their mission would be to ship a machine that was easy to use, would appeal to the masses, and be at a price point the masses could afford. They were looking at 64k of memory, a Motorola 6809 chip, and a 256 bitmap display. Small, light, and inexpensive. Jobs' relationship with the Lisa team was strained and he was taken off of that and he started moving in on the Macintosh team. It was quickly the Steve Jobs show. Having seen what could be done with the Motorola 68000 chip on the Lisa team, Jobs had them redesign the board to work with that. After visiting Xerox PARC at Raskin's insistence, Jobs finally got the desktop metaphor and true graphical interface design. Xerox had not been quiet about the work at PARC. Going back to 1972 there were even television commercials. And Raskin had done time at PARC while on sabbatical from Stanford. Information about Smalltalk had been published and people like Bill Atkinson were reading about it in college. People had been exposed to the mouse all around the Bay Area in the 60s and 70s or read Engelbart's scholarly works on it. Many of the people that worked on these projects had doctorates and were academics. They shared their research as freely as love was shared during that counter-culture time. Just as it had passed from MIT to Dartmouth and then in the back of Bob Albrecht's VW had spread around the country in the 60s. That spirit of innovation and the constant evolutions over the past 25 years found their way to Steve Jobs. He saw the desktop metaphor and mouse and fell in love with it, knowing they could build one for less than the $400 unit Xerox had. He saw how an object-oriented programming language like Smalltalk made all that possible. The team was already on their way to the same types of things and so Jobs told the people at PARC about the Lisa project, but not yet about the Mac. In fact, he was as transparent as anyone could be. He made sure they knew how much he loved their work and disclosed more than I think the team planned on him disclosing about Apple. This is the point where Larry Tesler and others realized that the group of rag-tag garage-building Homebrew hackers had actually built a company that had real computer scientists and was on track to changing the world. Tesler and some others would end up at Apple later - to see some of their innovations go to a mass market. Steve Jobs at this point totally bought into Raskin's vision. Yet he still felt they needed to make compromises with the price and better hardware to make it all happen. Raskin couldn't make the kinds of compromises Jobs wanted. He also had an immunity to the now-infamous Steve Jobs reality distortion field and they clashed constantly. So eventually Raskin the project just when it was starting to take off. Raskin would go on to work with Canon to build his vision, which became the Canon CAT. With Raskin gone, and armed with a dream team of mad scientists, they got to work, tirelessly pushing towards shipping a computer they all believed would change the world. Jobs brought in Fernandez to help with projects like the macOS and later HyperCard. Wozniak had a pretty big influence over Raskin in the early days of the Mac project and helped here and there withe the project, like with the bit-serial peripheral bus on the Mac. Steve Jobs wanted an inexpensive mouse that could be manufactured en masse. Jim Yurchenco from Hovey-Kelley, later called Ideo, got the task - given that trusted engineers at Apple had full dance cards. He looked at the Xerox mouse and other devices around - including trackballs in Atari arcade machines. Those used optics instead of mechanical switches. As the ball under the mouse rolled beams of light would be interrupted and the cost of those components had come down faster than the technology in the Xerox mouse. He used a ball from a roll-on deodorant stick and got to work. The rest of the team designed the injection molded case for the mouse. That work began with the Lisa and by the time they were done, the price was low enough that every Mac could get one. Armed with a mouse, they figured out how to move windows over the top of one another, Susan Kare designed iconography that is a bit less 8-bit but often every bit as true to form today. Learning how they wanted to access various components of the desktop, or find things, they developed the Finder. Atkinson gave us marching ants, the concept of double-clicking, the lasso for selecting content, the menu bar, MacPaint, and later, HyperCard. It was a small team, working long hours. Driven by a Jobs for perfection. Jobs made the Lisa team the enemy. Everything not the Mac just sucked. He took the team to art exhibits. He had the team sign the inside of the case to infuse them with the pride of an artist. He killed the idea of long product specifications before writing code and they just jumped in, building and refining and rebuilding and rapid prototyping. The team responded well to the enthusiasm and need for perfectionism. The Mac team was like a rebel squadron. They were like a start-up, operating inside Apple. They were pirates. They got fast and sometimes harsh feedback. And nearly all of them still look back on that time as the best thing they've done in their careers. As IBM and many learned the hard way before them, they learned a small, inspired team, can get a lot done. With such a small team and the ability to parlay work done for the Lisa, the R&D costs were minuscule until they were ready to release the computer. And yet, one can't change the world over night. 1981 turned into 1982 turned into 1983. More and more people came in to fill gaps. Collette Askeland came in to design the printed circuit board. Mike Boich went to companies to get them to write software for the Macintosh. Berry Cash helped prepare sellers to move the product. Matt Carter got the factory ready to mass produce the machine. Donn Denman wrote MacBASIC (because every machine needed a BASIC back then). Martin Haeberli helped write MacTerminal and Memory Manager. Bill Bull got rid of the fan. Patti King helped manage the software library. Dan Kottke helped troubleshoot issues with mother boards. Brian Robertson helped with purchasing. Ed Riddle designed the keyboard. Linda Wilkin took on documentation for the engineering team. It was a growing team. Pamela Wyman and Angeline Lo came in as programmers. Hap Horn and Steve Balog as engineers. Jobs had agreed to bring in adults to run the company. So they recruited 44 years old hotshot CEO John Sculley to change the world as their CEO rather than selling sugar water at Pepsi. Scully and Jobs had a tumultuous relationship over time. While Jobs had made tradeoffs on cost versus performance for the Mac, Sculley ended up raising the price for business reasons. Regis McKenna came in to help with the market campaign. He would win over so much trust that he would later get called out of retirement to do damage control when Apple had an antenna problem on the iPhone. We'll cover Antenna-gate at some point. They spearheaded the production of the now-iconic 1984 Super Bowl XVIII ad, which shows woman running from conformity and depicted IBM as the Big Brother from George Orwell's book, 1984. Two days after the ad, the Macintosh 128k shipped for $2,495. The price had jumped because Scully wanted enough money to fund a marketing campaign. It shipped late, and the 128k of memory was a bit underpowered, but it was a success. Many of the concepts such as a System and Finder, persist to this day. It came with MacWrite and MacPaint and some of the other Lisa products were soon to follow, now as MacProject and MacTerminal. But the first killer app for the Mac was Microsoft Word, which was the first version of Word ever shipped. Every machine came with a mouse. The machines came with a cassette that featured a guided tour of the new computer. You could write programs in MacBASIC and my second language, MacPascal. They hit the initial sales numbers despite the higher price. But over time that bit them on sluggish sales. Despite the early success, the sales were declining. Yet the team forged on. They introduced the Apple LaserWriter at a whopping $7,000. This was a laser printer that was based on the Canon 300 dpi engine. Burrell Smith designed a board and newcomer Adobe knew laser printers, given that the founders were Xerox alumni. They added postscript, which had initially been thought up while working with Ivan Sutherland and then implemented at PARC, to make for perfect printing at the time. The sluggish sales caused internal issues. There's a hangover when we do something great. First there were the famous episodes between Jobs, Scully, and the board of directors at Apple. Scully seems to have been portrayed by many to be either a villain or a court jester of sorts in the story of Steve Jobs. Across my research, which began with books and notes and expanded to include a number of interviews, I've found Scully to have been admirable in the face of what many might consider a petulant child. But they all knew a brilliant one. But amidst Apple's first quarterly loss, Scully and Jobs had a falling out. Jobs tried to lead an insurrection and ultimately resigned. Wozniak had left Apple already, pointing out that the Apple II was still 70% of the revenues of the company. But the Mac was clearly the future. They had reached a turning point in the history of computers. The first mass marketed computer featuring a GUI and a mouse came and went. And so many others were in development that a red ocean was forming. Microsoft released Windows 1.0 in 1985. Acorn, Amiga, IBM, and others were in rapid development as well. I can still remember the first time I sat down at a Mac. I'd used the Apple IIs in school and we got a lab of Macs. It was amazing. I could open a file, change the font size and print a big poster. I could type up my dad's lyrics and print them. I could play SimCity. It was a work of art. And so it was signed by the artists that brought it to us: Peggy Alexio, Colette Askeland, Bill Atkinson, Steve Balog, Bob Belleville, Mike Boich, Bill Bull, Matt Carter, Berry Cash, Debi Coleman, George Crow, Donn Denman, Christopher Espinosa, Bill Fernandez, Martin Haeberli, Andy Hertzfeld, Joanna Hoffman, Rod Holt, Bruce Horn, Hap Horn, Brian Howard, Steve Jobs, Larry Kenyon, Patti King, Daniel Kottke, Angeline Lo, Ivan Mach, Jerrold Manock, Mary Ellen McCammon, Vicki Milledge, Mike Murray, Ron Nicholson Jr., Terry Oyama, Benjamin Pang, Jef Raskin, Ed Riddle, Brian Robertson, Dave Roots, Patricia Sharp, Burrell Smith, Bryan Stearns, Lynn Takahashi, Guy "Bud" Tribble, Randy Wigginton, Linda Wilkin, Steve Wozniak, Pamela Wyman and Laszlo Zidek. Steve Jobs left to found NeXT. Some, like George Crow, Joanna Hoffman, and Susan Care, went with him. Bud Tribble would become a co-founder of NeXT and then the Vice President of Software Technology after Apple purchased NeXT. Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld would go on to co-found General Magic and usher in the era of mobility. One of the best teams ever assembled slowly dwindled away. And the oncoming dominance of Windows in the market took its toll. It seems like every company has a “lost decade.” Some like Digital Equipment don't recover from it. Others, like Microsoft and IBM (who has arguably had a few), emerge as different companies altogether. Apple seemed to go dormant after Steve Jobs left. They had changed the world with the Mac. They put swagger and an eye for design into computing. But in the next episode we'll look at that long hangover, where they were left by the end of it, and how they emerged to become to change the world yet again. In the meantime, Walter Isaacson weaves together this story about as well as anyone in his book Jobs. Steven Levy brilliantly tells it in his book Insanely Great. Andy Hertzfeld gives some of his stories at folklore.org. And countless other books, documentaries, podcasts, blog posts, and articles cover various aspects as well. The reason it's gotten so much attention is that where the Apple II was the watershed moment to introduce the personal computer to the mass market, the Macintosh was that moment for the graphical user interface.

ceo university learning chicago apple phd system vice president microsoft mit iphone jobs mac computers stanford millions driven basic windows bay area ibm berkeley steve jobs armed big brother pepsi canon adobe fernandez atari george orwell small talk vw macos dartmouth amiga r d motorola atkinson macs parc commodore xerox scully homebrew macintosh acorn steve wozniak microsoft word ideo simcity walter isaacson california san diego antenna apple inc raskin wozniak apple ii matt carter steven levy caroline rose mike murray xerox parc brian robertson john sculley brian howard general magic hypercard tesler sculley digital research insanely great bill atkinson super bowl xviii software technology susan kare homebrew computer club amdahl apple iii engelbart digital equipment ivan sutherland regis mckenna andy hertzfeld macpaint jef raskin joanna hoffman

Ken Shirriff

On The Metal

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 26, 2021 80:36

You can find Ken on Twitter at twitter.com/kenshirriff and his blog righto.com.- Soyuz blog post: http://www.righto.com/2020/01/inside-digital-clock-from-soyuz.html- IBM System/370: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/370- Amdahl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl_Corporation- Build Your Own Z80 Computer: https://books.google.com/books?id=mVQnFgWzX0AC&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false- Euler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonhard_Euler- Commodore PET: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_PET- TRS-80 (Trash-80): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80 https://techland.time.com/2012/08/03/trs-80/- Visual 6502: http://www.visual6502.org/- MOS 6502: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_6502- Metallurgy microscope: https://www.amscope.com/compound-microscopes/metallurgical-microscopes.html- AM2900: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Am2900- MOS transistor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSFET- Cray-1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1- Intel 4004: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_4004- Datapoint 2200: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint_2200- Intel 8008: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8008- Endianness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness- TTL chips: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor%E2%80%93transistor_logic- Big Endian and Little Endian: https://chortle.ccsu.edu/AssemblyTutorial/Chapter-15/ass15_3.html- Xerox Alto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto- Charles Simonyi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Simonyi- Punched cards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card- Why did line printers have 132 columns?: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/7838/why-did-line-printers-have-132-columns- Teletype 33: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33- Analogue computer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer- Analogue computer thread: https://twitter.com/kenshirriff/status/1223675683387265024- Differential analyser: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_analyser- Bitcoin mining on a 1401: http://www.righto.com/2015/05/bitcoin-mining-on-55-year-old-ibm-1401.html- Mining bitcoin with pencil and paper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3dqhixzGVo- Bitcoin mining on a Xerox Alto: http://www.righto.com/2017/07/bitcoin-mining-on-vintage-xerox-alto.html- Bitcoin mining on the Apollo Guidance computer: http://www.righto.com/2019/07/bitcoin-mining-on-apollo-guidance.html- Colossus computer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer- Accounting machine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounting_machine- Memory phosphor: https://www.britannica.com/science/memory-phosphor- Rowhammer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer- Core memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory- Williams tube: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_tube- Core rope memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_rope_memory- Honeywell 800: https://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/h800.html- Honeywell 1800: https://www.computerhistory.org/brochures/doc-4372956da1170/ http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/BRL64-h.html#HONEYWELL-1800- SPARC delayed branching: https://arcb.csc.ncsu.edu/~mueller/codeopt/codeopt00/notes/delaybra.html- IBM 360 Model 50: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360_Model_50- RR Auction: https://www.rrauction.com/

technology model bitcoin memory software trash ibm intel accounting visual mining hardware magnetic analog colossus punched mos honeywell trs differential analogue cray soyuz euler sparc metallurgy rowhammer xerox alto amdahl ibm system rr auction datapoint mos technology

Connections: ARPA > RISC > ARM > Apple's M1

Technology Leadership Podcast Review

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 17, 2021 14:55

Let's oversimplify something in the computing world. Which is what you have to do when writing about history. You have to put your blinders on so you can get to the heart of a given topic without overcomplicating the story being told. And in the evolution of technology we can't mention all of the advances that lead to each subsequent evolution. It's wonderful and frustrating all at the same time. And that value judgement of what goes in and what doesn't can be tough. Let's start with the fact that there are two main types of processors in our devices. There's the x86 chipset developed by Intel and AMD and then there's the RISC-based processors, which are ARM and for the old school people, also include PowerPC and SPARC. Today we're going to set aside the x86 chipset that was dominant for so long and focus on how the RISC and so ARM family emerged. First, let's think about what the main difference is between ARM and x86. RISC and so ARM chips have a focus on reducing the number of instructions required to perform a task to as few as possible, and so RISC stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computing. Intel, other than the Atom series chips, with the x86 chips has focused on high performance and high throughput. Big and fast, no matter how much power and cooling is necessary. The ARM processor requires simpler instructions which means there's less logic and so more instructions are required to perform certain logical operations. This increases memory and can increase the amount of time to complete an execution, which ARM developers address with techniques like pipelining, or instruction-level parallelism on a processor. Seymour Cray came up with this to split up instructions so each core or processor handles a different one and so Star, Amdahl and then ARM implemented it as well. The X86 chips are Complex Instruction Set Computing chips, or CISC. Those will do larger, more complicated tasks, like computing floating point integers or memory searches, on the chip. That often requires more consistent and larger amounts of power. ARM chips are built for low power. The reduced complexity of operations is one reason but also it's in the design philosophy. This means less heat syncs and often accounting for less consistent streams of power. This 130 watt x86 vs 5 watt ARM can mean slightly lower clock speeds but the chips can cost more as people will spend less in heat syncs and power supplies. This also makes the ARM excellent for mobile devices. The inexpensive MOS 6502 chips helped revolutionize the personal computing industry in 1975, finding their way into the Apple II and a number of early computers. They were RISC-like but CISC-like as well. They took some of the instruction set architecture family from the IBM System/360 through to the PDP, General Nova, Intel 8080, Zylog, and so after the emergence of Windows, the Intel finally captured the personal computing market and the x86 flourished. But the RISC architecture actually goes back to the ACE, developed in 1946 by Alan Turing. It wasn't until the 1970s that Carver Mead from Caltech and Lynn Conway from Xerox PARC saw that the number of transistors was going to plateau on chips while workloads on chips were growing exponentially. ARPA and other agencies needed more and more instructions, so they instigated what we now refer to as the VLSI project, a DARPA program initiated by Bob Kahn to push into the 32-bit world. They would provide funding to different universities, including Stanford and the University of North Carolina. Out of those projects, we saw the Geometry Engine, which led to a number of computer aided design, or CAD efforts, to aid in chip design. Those workstations, when linked together, evolved into tools used on the Stanford University Network, or SUN, which would effectively spin out of Stanford as Sun Microsystems. And across the bay at Berkeley we got a standardized Unix implementation that could use the tools being developed in Berkely Software Distribution, or BSD, which would eventually become the operating system used by Sun, SGI, and now OpenBSD and other variants. And the efforts from the VLSI project led to Berkely RISC in 1980 and Stanford MIPS as well as the multi chip wafer.The leader of that Berkeley RISC project was David Patterson who still serves as vice chair of the RISC-V Foundation. The chips would add more and more registers but with less specializations. This led to the need for more memory. But UC Berkeley students shipped a faster ship than was otherwise on the market in 1981. And the RISC II was usually double or triple the speed of the Motorola 68000. That led to the Sun SPARC and DEC Alpha. There was another company paying attention to what was happening in the RISC project: Acorn Computers. They had been looking into using the 6502 processor until they came across the scholarly works coming out of Berkeley about their RISC project. Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber from Acorn then got to work building an instruction set for the Acorn RISC Machine, or ARM for short. They had the first ARM working by 1985, which they used to build the Acorn Archimedes. The ARM2 would be faster than the Intel 80286 and by 1990, Apple was looking for a chip for the Apple Newton. A new company called Advanced RISC Machines or Arm would be founded, and from there they grew, with Apple being a shareholder through the 90s. By 1992, they were up to the ARM6 and the ARM610 was used for the Newton. DEC licensed the ARM architecture to develop the StrongARMSelling chips to other companies. Acorn would be broken up in 1998 and parts sold off, but ARM would live on until acquired by Softbank for $32 billion in 2016. Softbank is currently in acquisition talks to sell ARM to Nvidia for $40 billion. Meanwhile, John Cocke at IBM had been working on the RISC concepts since 1975 for embedded systems and by 1982 moved on to start developing their own 32-bit RISC chips. This led to the POWER instruction set which they shipped in 1990 as the RISC System/6000, or as we called them at the time, the RS/6000. They scaled that down to the Power PC and in 1991 forged an alliance with Motorola and Apple. DEC designed the Alpha. It seemed as though the computer industry was Microsoft and Intel vs the rest of the world, using a RISC architecture. But by 2004 the alliance between Apple, Motorola, and IBM began to unravel and by 2006 Apple moved the Mac to an Intel processor. But something was changing in computing. Apple shipped the iPod back in 2001, effectively ushering in the era of mobile devices. By 2007, Apple released the first iPhone, which shipped with a Samsung ARM. You see, the interesting thing about ARM is they don't fab chips, like Intel - they license technology and designs. Apple licensed the Cortex-A8 from ARM for the iPhone 3GS by 2009 but had an ambitious lineup of tablets and phones in the pipeline. And so in 2010 did something new: they made their own system on a chip, or SoC. Continuing to license some ARM technology, Apple pushed on, getting between 800MHz to 1 GHz out of the chip and using it to power the iPhone 4, the first iPad, and the long overdue second-generation Apple TV. The next year came the A5, used in the iPad 2 and first iPad Mini, then the A6 at 1.3 GHz for the iPhone 5, the A7 for the iPhone 5s, iPad Air. That was the first 64-bit consumer SoC. In 2014, Apple released the A8 processor for the iPhone 6, which came in speeds ranging from 1.1GHz to the 1.5 GHz chip in the 4th generation Apple TV. By 2015, Apple was up to the A9, which clocked in at 1.85 GHz for the iPhone 6s. Then we got the A10 in 2016, the A11 in 2017, the A12 in 2018, A13 in 2019, A14 in 2020 with neural engines, 4 GPUs, and 11.8 billion transistors compared to the 30,000 in the original ARM. And it's not just Apple. Samsung has been on a similar tear, firing up the Exynos line in 2011 and continuing to license the ARM up to Cortex-A55 with similar features to the Apple chips, namely used on the Samsung Galaxy A21. And the Snapdragon. And the Broadcoms. In fact, the Broadcom SoC was used in the Raspberry Pi (developed in association with Broadcom) in 2012. The 5 models of the Pi helped bring on a mobile and IoT revolution. And so nearly every mobile device now ships with an ARM chip as do many a device we place around our homes so our digital assistants can help run our lives. Over 100 billion ARM processors have been produced, well over 10 for every human on the planet. And the number is about to grow even more rapidly. Apple surprised many by announcing they were leaving Intel to design their own chips for the Mac. Given that the PowerPC chips were RISC, the ARM chips in the mobile devices are RISC, and the history Apple has with the platform, it's no surprise that Apple is going back that direction with the M1, Apple's first system on a chip for a Mac. And the new MacBook Pro screams. Even software running in Rosetta 2 on my M1 MacBook is faster than on my Intel MacBook. And at 16 billion transistors, with an 8 core GPU and a 16 core neural engine, I'm sure developers are hard at work developing the M3 on these new devices (since you know, I assume the M2 is done by now). What's crazy is, I haven't felt like Intel had a competitor other than AMD in the CPU space since Apple switched from the PowerPC. Actually, those weren't great days. I haven't felt that way since I realized no one but me had a DEC Alpha or when I took the SPARC off my desk so I could play Civilization finally. And this revolution has been a constant stream of evolutions, 40 years in the making. It started with an ARPA grant, but various evolutions from there died out. And so really, it all started with Sophie Wilson. She helped give us the BBC Micro and the ARM. She was part of the move to Element 14 from Acorn Computers and then ended up at Broadcom when they bought the company in 2000 and continues to act as the Director of IC Design. We can definitely thank ARPA for sprinkling funds around prominent universities to get us past 10,000 transistors on a chip. Given that chips continue to proceed at such a lightning pace, I can't imagine where we'll be at in another 40 years. But we owe her (and her coworkers at Acorn and the team at VLSI, now NXP Semiconductors) for their hard work and innovations.

director university power apple north carolina microsoft iphone sun mac stanford connections alpha ipads windows ibm apple tv berkeley pi intel samsung newton arm iot nvidia element ipods civilization rs amd atom cad macbook pro motorola cpu m1 gpu raspberry pi softbank darpa soc caltech acorn m2 mos alan turing gpus m3 ipad air ipad mini arpa broadcom unix snapdragon sun microsystems pdp a5 apple ii a6 ghz a10 bsd a9 a7 sparc a8 risc a12 sgi exynos a14 a13 xerox parc david patterson bbc micro x86 powerpc iphone 3gs openbsd a11 apple's m1 nxp semiconductors cisc apple newton vlsi m1 macbook amdahl ibm system sophie wilson steve furber 1ghz bob kahn seymour cray acorn archimedes

Episode 14 of 2020: Elliot Amdahl & Skyelar Devaney

Top Shelf Racing Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 7, 2020 57:16

An episode for first time winners! Elliot Amdahl has won many times in a 305, but on Saturday at I-90 he picked up his first ever 360 win with the MSTS, hear from him! Also on the show, Skyelar Devaney. Previous to this season his only racing experience was on iRacing. He jumped in the 14 b-mod this year and in only his 4th time out he WON his first race. Very cool Story. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

story previous won iracing devaney amdahl msts

EP3: Jonathan Amdahl on Business

Candor

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 7, 2020 46:38

In this weeks episode we have our friend Jonathan Amdahl joining us! we talk in depth about how he started his own business as a teenager and how he has developed his passion for coding. We also explore topics surrounding the stock market and how the Coronavirus has affected it. Hope you enjoy:)

coronavirus amdahl

EMx 066: Going with the Flow with John Mertens

Elixir Mix

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 27, 2019 67:55

Sponsors Sentry– use the code “devchat” for two months free on Sentry’s small plan GitLab | Get 30% off tickets with the promo code: DEVCHATCOMMIT My Ruby Story CacheFly Panel Mark Ericksen Michael Ries Joined by Special Guest: John Mertens Summary John Mertens, from change.org, joins the panel to discuss a recent talk he gave at ElixirConf EU. The panel starts off by discussing change.org’s adoption of Elixir and how John helped to bring that about. John discusses the value of Flow even though it is not part of the standard library. The panel discusses what the pieces of data look in John’s pipeline. After giving some context for his project, John gives details about his work in Flow and why they chose Flow for that project. The panel discusses tuning the numbers in Flow to make it faster. John shares his experience using Broadway and shares his favorite features. The panel asks him to compare Flow and Broadway in terms of configuration and understanding what is going on. John shares factors to consider when deciding to use Flow or Broadway for a project. The panel discusses supervision trees, using graceful shutdown, and the difficulty of messing up a flow. Links John Mertens - Lessons From Our First Trillion Messages with Flow - ElixirConf EU 2019 https://pragprog.com/book/tvmelixir/adopting-elixir GenStage and Flow - José Valim | ElixirLive 2016 https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/debugging.html#observer https://github.com/beam-telemetry/telemetry https://github.com/change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassingly_parallel https://github.com/mertonium https://twitter.com/mertonium?lang=en https://www.mertonium.com https://thoughtfulcoder.club https://www.change.org https://www.facebook.com/Elixir-Mix https://twitter.com/elixir_mix Picks Mark Ericksen: http://avidemux.sourceforge.net/ John Mertens: Solid Ground Money Heist Michael Ries: https://nerves-project.org/

broadway panel elixir gitlab sentry going with the flow mertens solid ground money heist embarrassingly cachefly amdahl elixir mix elixirconf eu genstage

EMx 066: Going with the Flow with John Mertens

Devchat.tv Master Feed

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 27, 2019 67:55

broadway panel elixir gitlab sentry going with the flow mertens solid ground money heist embarrassingly cachefly amdahl elixir mix elixirconf eu genstage

18. The New Definition Of Success

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 19, 2019 15:51

Martin Thompson on Arrested DevOps, Dr. Carola Lilienthal on Legacy Code Rocks, Jeff Gothelf on Agile Atelier, Safi Bahcall on Coaching For Leaders, and Mike Burrows on A Geek Leader. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting August 19, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. MARTIN THOMPSON ON ARRESTED DEVOPS The Arrested DevOps podcast featured Martin Thompson with host Jessica Kerr. Martin and Jessica talked about the parallels between optimizing the performance of software systems and doing the same for human systems. Using ideas from queuing theory, they discussed the notion of adding small amounts of slack to a system to make it drastically more responsive. Martin connected Amdahl’s Law to the more general Universal Scalability Law, which is more comprehensive because it takes into account coherence cost, which is the time needed to reach agreement between parties working together. He added that Brook’s Law from The Mythical Man Month is the Universal Scalability Law by a different name. They talked about the difference between parallelism and concurrency. Parallelism, Martin says, is doing multiple things at the same time. Concurrency means dealing with multiple things at the same time, a definition Martin says he stole from Rob Pike. He further decomposed the universal scalability law into its parameters. One parameter represents whether you can subdivide the work (the contention penalty) and the other represents the time to reach agreement (the coherence penalty). If your team can reach agreement faster, they can get better throughput because they can have more parallelism with less concurrency. They got into a discussion of the importance of feedback in information theory. Sending information and not confirming reception is a naïve approach and this has been understood for a long time and yet software is still built that ignores this. Two phase commit is an example. If you study the two phase commit protocol in any detail, Martin says, you realize it is fundamentally broken, yet corporations don’t want to say that. They talked about how to design distributed applications in the presence of partial failures. Martin says to make your communications idempotent, give each message a sequence number, and use this sequence number to identify and ignore replayed messages. According to Martin, designing your systems this way is just good hygiene and professionalism. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/protocols-and-sympathy-with-martin-thompson/id773888088?i=1000444947737 Website link: https://www.arresteddevops.com/protocols/ DR. CAROLA LILIENTHAL ON LEGACY CODE ROCKS The Legacy Code Rocks podcast featuring Dr. Carola Lilienthal with hosts Andrea Goulet and Scott Ford. They talked about Domain-Driven Design. Carola said her company read Eric Evans’ book and immediately took to it. Talking to users, writing software in the user's domain, and using a common vocabulary fit with what they were already doing so they adopted it easily. They talked about Carola’s modularity maturity index. It consists of three areas of sustainability: 1) modularity, 2) hierarchy, and 3) pattern consistency. Andrea brought up the fact that larger codebases aren’t necessarily more difficult to change as Carola found in her research. Carola says that, based on the three hundred systems she’s studied, systems under a million lines of code are often in a worse state than larger systems. Around a million lines of code, she says, something happens: either people start structuring the system and putting in guard rails that keep the product maintainable or the system doesn’t grow any more. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/sustainable-software-architecture-dr-carola-lilienthal/id1146634772?i=1000443349633 Website link: http://legacycoderocks.libsyn.com/sustainable-software-architecture-with-dr-carola-lilienthal JEFF GOTHELF ON AGILE ATELIER The Agile Atelier podcast featured Jeff Gothelf with host Rahul Bhattacharya. Rahul and Jeff talked about the intersection of Agile, Lean, and Design Thinking to find commonalities. They examined customer-centricity, measuring success, continuous testing, and the importance of having a hypothesis. Jeff had been working as a designer on waterfall projects for the first decade of his career and, on a good day, only saw 50% of his work get implemented. Ten years into his career, Jeff got exposed to Agile software development and it forced him to revisit his design process and his process for doing product development as a whole. Because Jeff was in a leadership position and had a boss that understood the new methodology, Jeff got the chance to run process experiments to learn what the best collaboration model was for him and his team. This became the basis of his book, Lean UX. Rahul asked Jeff how he would define Design Thinking. Jeff described Design Thinking as applying the designer’s toolkit to solve business problems. This includes empathizing with customers, brainstorming ideas, prototyping, testing ideas with customers, and iterating. Rahul asked if there is a specific situation in which to apply Design Thinking. Jeff says that he has yet to find a client or an industry where customer-centricity, continuous learning, risk mitigation, experimentation, and iteration don’t make sense. Even when working with people at GE who make locomotives and working with organizations that make room-sized air conditioning units that sit on top of skyscrapers, Jeff was able to successfully introduce them to ideas like talking to customers, identifying risks, and continuously improving their product. Rahul asked how the principles of Design Thinking fit with the Agile principles. Jeff says that everybody thinks that Agile is its own thing, Design Thinking is its own thing, Lean Manufacturing and Lean Startup are their own thing. The tactical execution of those methodologies might be different, but at their core, Jeff says these methods all share the same principles. They are all customer-centric. They all measure success as an outcome, as a change in customer behavior. They all focus on testing your ideas quickly and moving off of bad ideas quickly. And they all focus on continuously improving and iterating the thing you are making as you continue to invest in it. They then got into a discussion about the importance of measuring the impact on the user of the product you are building. Jeff says that, unfortunately, shipping the thing is still one of the major definitions of success for most organizations. But in a world of continuous software when you can push a software update five times a minute like Amazon does, delivering the thing is a non-event and it should be a non-event. We shouldn’t celebrate it. What we should celebrate is the change in customer behavior that tells us that we’ve delivered value. These are things like showing up at the website, engaging with the app, buying the product, telling your friends, whatever it is we care about for our product. This line of thought led to the quote above. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-11-intersection-agile-lean-design-thinking/id1459098259?i=1000445718430 Website link: https://rahul-bhattacharya.com/2019/07/30/episode-11-the-intersection-of-agile-lean-and-design-thinking-with-jeff-gothelf/ SAFI BAHCALL ON COACHING FOR LEADERS The Coaching For Leaders podcast featured Safi Bahcall (author of the book Loonshots) with host Dave Stachowiak. They talked about what science has to say about the best ways to nurture new ideas. They started out with a discussion of children’s books and Safi’s first example of a loonshot was Dr. Seuss. He had just been rejected by every publisher he took his first story to when he ran into a friend in the street. This friend asked Dr. Seuss about what he had under his arm and when he found out it was a manuscript for a children’s story that Dr. Seuss was taking home to burn, the friend revealed that he had just taken a job at a publisher across the street and asked Dr. Seuss if he would like to come into the publisher’s office. The Cat In The Hat was born. Safi used the story of the moon landing as an illustration of the difference between a moonshot and a loonshot. A moonshot was Kennedy’s speech announcing that the United States would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. A loonshot was forty years earlier when Robert Goddard suggested getting to the moon with liquid-fueled jet propulsion and was ridiculed by many, including the New York Times. The reason it is important to understand the difference is because Goddard’s ideas, though neglected by the Americans, were embraced by Nazi Germany. German scientists used Goddard’s ideas to build jet engines and planes that flew 100 mph faster than any Allied plane. The mistake of neglecting Goddard’s ideas was fatal. Companies often ask Safi how they can innovate and create new products while continuing to keep their original product or service competitive. He thinks about these situations using three metaphors: the ice cube, garden hoe, and heart. He starts by thinking about the artists who create new product ideas and soldiers to execute on turning those ideas into real products in the marketplace. The ice cube is a rigid phase that suits the soldiers and a melted ice cube is a fluid phase that suits the artists. Understanding the problem starts with the ‘beautiful baby’ problem. The artist sees their new idea as a beautiful baby. The soldiers look at the same thing and see a shriveled up raisin. They’re both right. The garden hoe comes from understanding that the failure point in most innovation is rarely in the supply of new ideas, it is in the transfer between artists and soldiers. Great leaders are those who think of themselves as gardeners managing the transfer between the artists and soldiers. The heart is about loving your artists and soldiers equally. When we lionize the artists as the media often do, we demotivate the soldiers. I liked what Safi had to say about the problem with following the standard advice about active listening. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/418-the-way-to-nurture-new-ideas-with-safi-bahcall/id458827716?i=1000443895174 Website link: https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/nurture-new-ideas-safi-bahcall/ MIKE BURROWS ON A GEEK LEADER The A Geek Leader podcast featured Mike Burrows with host John Rouda. Mike talked about his career leading up to the writing of AgendaShift. He described the goal of AgendaShift as trying to introduce agility not by prescribing a set of practices or rolling out a framework but by getting agreement on outcomes and working out different ways of achieving them in an hypothesis-driven way. He then mentioned his newer book that he was working on at the time the podcast aired and has just come out this month, Right to Left. Right to Left is about working backwards from outcomes. John asked what the shift was that led to this outcome-focused approach. Mike said that while working in the government digital space in the UK, he witnessed rapid change. Instead of one supplier creating documentation for a new system, a second supplier building it, and a third supplier supporting it, and the whole thing being an expensive mess that disappoints its end users, he says they now have a system where projects will be halted if they are not serious about engaging with users, doing user research, understanding needs, and working iteratively to deliver evolving services. He says that if it can happen in the government space, it can happen anywhere. John asked about what a new manager coming from an individual contributor role would need to learn for dealing with the people side of managing projects. Mike recommended tempering any temptation to micro-manage. On his first day taking over a management position at UBS, he had people lining up at his desk looking to be micro-managed because that is how his predecessor worked. He told them that if this is how it is going to work, it is going to make him miserable and it is going to make them miserable and he encouraged them to self-organize. Mike’s second recommendation is to learn to value and respect people who come from other disciplines than technology, as he says in the above quote. John asked Mike to describe AgendaShift. Mike says that the best two words that describe it come from Daniel Mezick: it is an engagement model. Much like Daniel’s OpenSpace Agility, AgendaShift describes how change agents can engage with their organizations. In the Lean/Agile space, pushing Agile on people is self-defeating and creates more problems than it solves. Instead, facilitate outcomes that the people of the organization can agree on and start solving problems. AgendaShift starts with discovery. There are workshop tools to creating a high-level plan. Then they use an assessment tool for identifying opportunities to increase transparency, get workloads under control, or to engage better with customers. They identify obstacles and the outcomes hiding behind those obstacles. They use a “clean language”-based game to model a landscape of obstacles and outcomes and get people to think about the journey, their priorities, and what the key landmarks along the way will be. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/agl-081-agendashift-with-mike-burrows/id1043194456?i=1000424584602 Website link:https://www.ageekleader.com/agl-081-agendashift-with-mike-burrows/ LINKS Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:

The IBM System/360

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 9, 2019 12:53

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Todays episode is about the IBM System/360. System/360 was a family of mainframes. IBM has done a great job over the decades following innovations rather than leading them, but there might not be another single innovation that was as influential on computing as the System/360. But it's certainly hard to think of one. IBM had been building mainframes with the 700 and 7000 series of systems since 1952, so they weren't new to the concept in 1964 when the S360 was announced (also when Disney released Mary Poppins and ). But they wanted to do something different. They were swimming in a red ocean of vendors who had been leading the technology and while they had a 70 percent market share, they were looking to cement a long-term leadership position in the emerging IT industry. So IBM decided to take a huge leap forward and brought the entire industry with them. This was a risky endeavor. Thomas Watson Jr, son of the great IBM business executive Thomas Watson Sr, bet the proverbial farm on this. And won that bet. In all, IBM spent 5 billion dollars in mid-1960s money, which would be $41B today with a cumulative 726.3% rate of inflation. To put things in context around the impact of the mainframe business, IBM revenues were at $3.23 B in 1964 and more than doubled to $7.19 B by 1970 when the next edition, the 370, was released. To further that context, the Manhattan Project, which resulted in the first atomic bomb, cost $2 B. IBM did not have a project this large before the introduction of the S360 and has not had one in the more than 50 years since then. Further context, the total value of all computers deployed at the start of the project was only $10B. These were huge. They often occupied a dedicated room. The front panel had 12 switches, just to control the electricity that flowed through them. They had over 250 lights. It was called “System” 360 because it was a system, meaning you could hook disk drives, printers, and other peripherals up to them. It had 16 32 bit registers and four 64 bit floating point registers for the crazy math stuffs. The results were fast, with over 1000 orders in the first month and another 1000 by years end. IBM sales skyrocketed and computers suddenly showing up in businesses large and small. The total inventory of computers in the world jumped to a $24B value in just 5 years. A great example of the impact they had can be found in the computer the show Mad Men featured, where the firm got an S360 and it served as a metaphor for how the times were about to change - the computer was analytical, where Don worked through inspiration. Just think, an interactive graphics display that let business nerds do what only computer nerds could do before. This was the real start to “data driven” decision making. By 1970 IBM had deployed 35k mainframes throughout the US. They spawned enough huge competitors that the big mainframe players were referred to as Snow White and the 7 dwarfs and later just “The Bunch” which consisted of Burroughs, NCR, Control Data, Honeywell, and the Univac Division of Sperry Rand. If you remember the earlier episode on Grace Hopper, she spent some time there. Thomas Watson Jr. retired the following year in 1971 after suffering a heart attack, leaving behind one of the greatest legacies of anyone in business. He would serve as an ambassador to Russia from 79 to 81, and remain an avid pilot in retirement. He passed away in 1993. A lot of things sell well. But sales and revenue aren't the definition that shapes a legacy. The S360 created so many standards and pushed technology forward that the business legacy is almost a derivative of the technical legacy. What standards did the S360 set? Well, the bus was huge. Stndardizing I/O would allow vendors to build expansion and would ultimately become the standard later. The 8-bit byte is still used today and bucked the trend of accessing variable sized arbitrary bit addressing. To speed up larger and larger transactions, the S360 also gave us Byte-addressable memory with 24 bit addressing and 32-bit words. The memory was small and fast with control code stored there permanently, known as microcode memory. This meant you didn't have to hand wire each memory module into the processor. The control store also lead to emulators, as you could emulate a previous IBM model, the 1401, in the control store. IBM spent $13 M on the patent for the tech that came out of MIT to get access to the best memory on the market. The S360 made permanent store a main-stay. IBM had been using tape storage since 1952. 14 inch disk drives were smaller than 24 inch disk drives used in previous models, had 100x the storage capacity and accessed data 10 times faster. The S360 also brought with it new programming paradigms. We got hexadecimal Floating Point Architectures. These would be important to New Drug Applications to the FDA, weather predicting, geophysics, and graphics databases. We also got Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code or EBCDIC for short is character encoding in the 8th bit. This came from moving punch cards to persistent storage on the computers. That 8th bit was from two zone and number punches on cards which made up two bits and another to indicate a small s or a large S. EBCDIC was not embraced by the rest of the computer hacker culture. One example was: "So the American government went to IBM to come up with an encryption standard, and they came up with… EBCDIC!" ASCII has mostly been accepted as the standard for encoding characters (before and after EBCDIC). Solid Logic Technology (or SLT) also came with the S360. These flip chip-mounted packages contained transistors, diodes and resistors in a ceramic substrate that had sockets on one edge and could be plugged into the backplane of a computer. Think of these as a precursor to the microchip and the death of vacuum tubes. The central processor could run machine language programs. It ran OS/360, officially known as IBM System/360 Operating System. You could load programs written in COBOL and FORTRAN with many organizations still running code written way back then. The way we saw computers and they way they were made also changed. Architecture vs implementation was another substantial innovation. Before the S360, computers were built for specific use cases. They were good at business and they were good at business or they were good at science. But one system wasn't typically good at both tasks. In fact, IBM had 7 mainframe lines at this point, sometimes competing with each other. The S360 allowed them to unify that into the size and capacity of a machine rather than the specific use case. We went from: “here's your scientific mainframe” or “here's your payroll mainframe” to “here's your computer”. But the Model 30 was Introduced in 1965, along with 5 other initial models, the 40, 50, 60, 62, and 70. The tasks were not specific to each model and a customer could grow into additional models, or if the needs weren't growing, could downgrade to a lower model in the planned 5 year obscelence cycle that computers seem to have. Given all of this, the project was huge. So big that it led to Thomas Watson forcing his own brother Dick Watson out of IBM and moving the project to be managed by Fred Brooks, who worked with Chief Architect Gene Amdahl. John Opel managed the launch in 1964. In large part due to his work on the S360 project, Brooks would go on to write a book called The Mythical Man Month, which brought us what's now referred to as Brooks' Law, which states that adding additional developers does not speed up a software project, but instead makes it take longer. Amdahl would go on to found his own computer company. In all, there were twenty models of the S360, although only 14 shipped - and IBM had sold 35,000 by 1970. While the 60 in S360 would go on to refer to the decade and the follow-on S370 would define computing in the 70s, the S360 was sold until 1978. With a two-thirds market share came anti-trust cases, which saw software suddenly being sold separately and leasing companies extending that 5 year obscelecence - thus IBM leassors becoming the number one competition. Given just how much happened in the 13 year life of the System/360, even the code endures in some cases. The System Z servers are still compatible with many applications written for the 360. The S360 is iconic. The S360 was bold. It set IBM on a course that would shape their future and the future of the world. But most importantly, before the S360 computers were one thing used for really big jobs - after the S360, they were everywhere and people started to think about business in terms of a new lexicon like “data” and “automation.” It lead to no one ever getting fired for buying IBM and set the IT industry on a course to become what it is today. The revolution was coming no matter what. But not being afraid to refactor everything in such a big, bold demonstration of market dominance made IBM the powerhouse it is even today. So next time you have to refactor something, think of the move you're making - and ask yourself What Would Watson Do? Or just ask Watson.

Episode 173 - Ultra Trail Scotland, Sondre Amdahl and Elisabet Barnes

Develop Great Managers Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 20, 2019 133:25

Episode 173 of Talk Ultra is here… Casey Morgan, Debbie Martin Consani and Rob Sinclair talk all about Ultra Trail Scotland. Sondre Amdahl discusses Trans Atlas and plans for Ultra Mirage and Elisabet Barnes co-hosts.

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Amdahl's Law and GPUs, Asian Student Cluster Competition

Radio Free HPC Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 3, 2019

Results of the Asian Student Cluster Competition In this episode, Dan has just come back from China and reviews the results of the Asian Student Cluster Competition and HPC workshop. For the first time, a non-mainland-Chinese team wins the top spot. Taiwan takes the gold in part by their stellar performance in HPCG benchmark where… Read More »Amdahl's Law and GPUs, Asian Student Cluster Competition

DGM 1: Welcome To The Develop Great Managers Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 27, 2019 10:01

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Ep. 1: International Human Rights and Ep. 2: Finding Balance

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 13, 2017 54:16

Kathryn interviews Cornell Law School Clinical Professor Sital Kalantry, author of “Women's Human Rights and Migration: Sex-Selective Abortion Laws in the United States and India”. Kalantry investigates the actual occurrence of sex-selective abortion among Asian Americans, the social and cultural contexts in which women in the US and India practice sex-selective abortion and the consequences of the laws in each country for women's equality. Kathryn also interviews “Oola Guru” Troy Amdahl, bestselling author of “Oola Find Balance in an Unbalanced World: The Seven Areas You Need to Balance and Grow to Live the Life of Your Dreams”. Why not go into this new year's busy hustle and bustle proactively with a plan to keep your life in balance. Amdahl and co-author Dave Brown deliver a powerful yet simple message. When your life is in balance and growing in the key areas of life, you experience less stress, more balance and greater purpose.

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Ep. 1: International Human Rights and Ep. 2: Finding Balance

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 13, 2017 54:16

'Finding Balance' and 'The Marriage Bureau'

Play Episode Listen Later May 3, 2017 49:41

Kathryn interviews Troy Amdahl, author of “Oola for Women: 7 Key Areas of Life to Have Less Stress, More Purpose, and Reveal the Greatness Within You”. The OolaGuys have put together a tome that is personal and a tribute to women. Throughout you will learn, think, and ultimately take action in a way to find more balance in life. Amdahl is a husband, father, and a successful businessman who traveled the world and retired debt-free at 42. Kathryn also interviews Penrose Halson, author of “The Marriage Bureau: The True Story of How Two Matchmakers Arranged Love in Wartime London”. Before dating apps, people looking for the one knew that real life matchmakers could be their best chance. In 1992 Penrose Halson, a former client, was asked to take over The Marriage Bureau, a matchmaking service launched in 1939. Drawing from her own experiences, along with the Bureau's extensive archives, Halson heartwarmingly crafts an unforgettable narrative of life and love during World War II.

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'Finding Balance' and 'The Marriage Bureau'

Play Episode Listen Later May 3, 2017 49:41

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Episode 130 - Amdahl, Schlarb, Comet, Soria, Ladermann, Mann

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 11, 2017 203:32

We bring you audio from The Coastal Challenge with Sondre Amdahl, Jason Schlarb, Anna Comet and an in-depth chat with Cherie Soria, Dan Ladermann and 'Coastal' the dog. We also talk with UK based fell and mountain runner, Jim Mann.

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Episode 126 - Amdahl Kremer TrailsAreFreeMovie

Modellansatz - English episodes only

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 7, 2017 167:10

Happy New Year! We have an interview with Stevie Kremer, we chat with Lindsey Topham about her movie, ‘The Trails Are Free’ and Sondre Amdahl tells us about racing in Hong Kong and how is preparation for The Coastal Challenge is going… Speedgoat is back too!

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Julia Sets

Modellansatz

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 22, 2016 58:09

Pascal Kraft is a researcher at the Institute for Applied and Numerical Mathematics of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and he introduces us to Julia Sets which he investigated for his Bachelors Thesis. It is natural for us to think something like this: If I take two simple things and put them together in some sense, nothing too complex should arise from that. A fascinating result of the work of mathematicians like Gaston Julia and Benoît Mandelbrot dating back to the first half of the 20th century show that this assumption doesn't always hold. In his bachelor's thesis under supervision of Jan-Philipp Weiß, Pascal Kraft worked on the efficient computation of Julia Sets. In laymans terms you can describe these sets as follows: Some electronic calculators have the functions of repeating the last action if you press "=" or "enter" multiple times. So if you used the root function of your calculator on a number and now you want the root of the result you simply press "=" again. Now imagine you had a function on your calculater that didn't only square the input but also added a certain value - say 0.5. Then you put in a number, apply this function and keep repeating it over and over again. Now you ask yourself if you keep pressing the "="-button if the result keeps on growing and tends to infinity or if it stays below some threshold indefinitely. Using real numbers this concept is somewhat boring but if we use complex numbers we find, that the results are astonishing. To use a more precise definition: for a function , the Filled Julia Set is defined as the set of values , for whom the series stays bounded. The Julia Set is defined as the boundary of this set. A typical example for a suitable function in this context is . We now look at the complex plane where the x-axis represents the real part of a complex number and the y-axis its imaginary part. For each point on this plane having a coordinate we take the corresponding complex number and plug this value into our function and the results over and over again up to a certain degree until we see if this sequence diverges. Computing a graphical representation of such a Julia Set is a numerically costly task since we have no other way of determining its interior points other then trying out a large amount of starting points and seeing what happens after hundreds of iterations. The results, however, turn out to be surprising and worth the effort. The geometric representations - images - of filled Julia Sets turn out to be very aesthetically pleasing since they are no simple compositions of elementary shapes but rather consist of intricate shapes and patterns. The reason for these beautiful shapes lie in the nature of multiplication and addition on the complex plane: A multiplication can be a magnification and down-scaling, mirroring and rotation, whereas the complex addition is represented by a translation on the complex plane. Since the function is applied over and over again, the intrinsic features are repeated in scaled and rotated forms over and over again, and this results in a self-similarity on infinite scales. In his bachelor's thesis, Pascal focussed on the efficient computation of such sets which can mean multiple things: it can either mean that the goal was to quickly write a program which could generate an image of a Julia Set, or that a program was sought which was very fast in computing such a program. Lastly it can also mean that we want to save power and seek a program which uses computational power efficiently to compute such an image, i.e. that consumes little energy. This is a typical problem when considering a numerical approach in any application and it arises very naturally here: While the computation of Julia Sets can greatly benefit from parallelization, the benefits are at loss when many tasks are waiting for one calculation and therefore the speedup and computational efficiency breaks down due to Amdahl's law. The difference of these optimization criteria becomes especially obvious when we want to do further research ontop of our problem solver that we have used so far. The Mandelbrot Set for example is the set of values , for whom the Filled Julia Set is not equal to the Julia Set (i.e. the Filled Julia Set has interior points). One detail is important for the computation of either of these sets: If we check one single point we can never really say if it is inside the Filled Julia Set for sure (unless we can prove periodicity but that is not really feasible). What we can show however is, that if the magnitude of a point in the series of computations is above a certain bound, the results will tend to infinity from this point on. The approach is therefore to compute steps until either a maximum of steps is reached or a certain threshold is exceeded. Based on this assumption, we see that computing a point which lies inside the filled Julia Set is the bigger effort. So if computing a Julia Set for a given parameter is a lot of work, its complex parameter most likely lies inside the Mandelbrot Set (as we find many points for whom the computation doesn't abort prematurely and it is therefore likely that some of these points will be interior). If we want to draw the Mandelbrot Set based on this approach, we have to compute thousands of Julia Sets and if the computation of a single image was to take a minute this would not really be feasible anymore. Since the computation of a Julia Set can even be done in a webbrowser these days, we include below a little tool which lets you set a complex parameter and compute four different Julia Sets. Have fun with our Interactive Julia Sets! References and further reading J. Dufner, A. Roser, F. Unseld: Fraktale und Julia-Mengen, Harri Deutsch Verlag, 1998. H.-O. Peitgen, P. H. Richter: The beauty of fractals: images of complex dynamical systems, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 1986. B. B. Mandelbrot: Fractal aspects of the iteration of for complex and z, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 357.1: 249-259, 1980. P. Kraft: Paralleles Rechnen auf GPUs - Julia Mengen und das magnetische Pendel Fraktal, Bachelor Thesis. 2012. J. Gaston: Mémoire sur l’itération des fonctions rationnelles, Journal de Math´ematiques pures et appliqu ´ees 4 (Rep 1968), pp. 47-245 / 121-319, 1918. P. Blanchard: Complex analytical dynamics on the Riemann sphere, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 11, pp. 84-141, 1984.

Julia Sets

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 22, 2016 58:09

Ep 68: How Resurgent Libraries Offer Content, Classes, Makerspaces and More with Alan Inouye

WashingTECH Tech Policy Podcast with Joe Miller

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 13, 2016 26:15

Alan S. Inouye heads public policy for the American Library Association (ALA). In this role, Alan leads ALA's technology policy portfolio ranging from telecommunications to copyright and licensing, to advance the ability of libraries to contribute to the economic, educational, cultural, and social well-being of America's communities. Alan is a recognized expert in national technology policy, published in various outlets such as The Hill, Roll Call, and the Christian Science Monitor. He serves on advisory boards or committees of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the U.S. State Department, Library For All, and the University of Maryland. From 2004 to 2007, Dr. Inouye served as the Coordinator of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) in the Executive Office of the President. At PITAC (now merged into the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology—PCAST), he oversaw the development of reports on cybersecurity, computational science, and other topics. Prior to PITAC, Alan served as a study director at the National Academy of Sciences. A number of his major studies culminated in book-length reports; three of these are LC21: A Digital Strategy for the Library of Congress, The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age, and Beyond Productivity: Information Technology, Innovation, and Creativity. Dr. Inouye began his career in the computer industry in Silicon Valley. He worked as a computer programmer for Atari, a statistician for Verbatim, and a manager of information systems for Amdahl (now Fujitsu). Alan completed his Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley and earned three master's degrees, in business administration (finance), systems engineering, and computer systems. In this episode, we discussed: the role of libraries in creating opportunities. library resources for entrepreneurs. how libraries and the incoming Tump administration might align on tech policy. Resources: American Library Association's Office for Information Technology Policy The Future of the Professions: How Technology will Transform the Work of Human Experts by Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind NEWS ROUNDUP What a mess. The CIA has officially concluded that Russia hacked the 2016 presidential election not just to undermine voter confidence, but to get Donald Trump elected. This is according to a widely reported secret assessment conducted by the agency. The FBI on the her hand, isn't going that far. The FBI acknowledges that Russia did something--it's just saying it's not clear about Russia's motive: it thinks Russia carried out the intrusions for a mix of different reasons. The National Security Agency is due to release its own findings in the coming weeks before the election. The investigation is getting bi-partisan support from Chuck Schumer and Democrats, but it is also getting support from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker Paul Ryan, as well as John McCain and Lindsey Graham. Here's what we know. We know the Director of the FBI, James Comey, sent a letter to Congress 11 days before the election saying more of Hillary Clinton's emails found on Anthony Weiner's computer could lead to a new investigation. Of course, that inquiry was dropped after a few days but, by then, the damage had already been done. Outging Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid is calling for a Congressional investigation of Comey. We know Trump said many times that the election was rigged. We know that Trump called on Russia during the campaign season to leak Hillary Clinton's emails. And now, Trump wants to appoint ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, whom the Wall Street Journal reports has close ties to Russia. We also now know that hackers got into the Republican National Committee's servers as well but, for whatever reason, only the DNC's emails were released to the public. Trump and others on his transition team called the CIA's conclusions "ridiculous". Ridiculous or not, whether those advocating to get 37 Electors to change their votes in favor of Hillary Clinton win or not, this isn't going away. The electoral system of the country that prides itself on being the greatest democracy the world has ever seen, has been, according to the CIA, hacked to favor a particular candidate. And that particular candidate, by the name of Donald J. Trump, won. He won! This is is crisis mode. --- Andrea Wong reports in Bloomberg that Apple is taking advantage of a massive tax loophole that allows it to earn free money from American taxpayers without paying any taxes. The loophole lets Apple stash its foreign earnings, untaxed, overseas, and then use the money to buy U.S. bonds. The Washington Post reports that this has yielded Apple some $600 million in payments from the U.S. Treasury over the last 5 years. -- The Wall Street Journal reported that the State of Georgia allegedly sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security accusing the agency of attempting to hack the state's voter database. The State of Georgia opposes Federal efforts to declare election systems critical infrastructure, which would enable more robust federal monitoring for cyberattacks. -- USA Today reports that the Trump transition team has scheduled a meeting with the tech sector for Wednesday, December 14th in New York City. Should be interesting since most of the tech sector essentially opposed Donald Trump during the campaign, with the exception of Peter Thiel who now sits on President-elect Trump's transition team. Interestingly, Google has posted a job posting for a conservative outreach manager. e -- Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are partnering to weed on content posted by terrorists. The companies will be creating a shared database that will included "hashes" or digital encoding or fingerprints, which will enable the companies to alert each other as to the offensive content. Each company will retain the power to make decisions for themselves as to whether to take down the content. - The White House has announced further investments in science, technology, engineering and math education in 2017. The National Science Foundation will spend $20 million in addition to the $25 million it spent in 2016. Ali Breland has the story in The Hill. -- John Horrigan at Pew released survey results last week showing those who lack access to smartphones, broadband and tablets actually report more stress and lack of confidence accessing information than those who have access to the technologies. Conventionally, we tend to think of having all of these devices at our constant disposal as the contributing factor to information overload. -- Finally, the FCC set letters to Verizon and AT&T about their so-called zero-rating practices. With zero rating, multichannel video providers select which programming their customers will have access to without it counting against their data caps. Net neutrality advocates argue this is a Trojan horse against the net neutrality rules, allowing the companies to prioritize the content they choose over competing content. Colin Gibbs has the story at Fierce Wireless.

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Episode 110 - MDS Special and Jasmin Paris

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 29, 2016 237:35

This weeks show is a Marathon des Sables special with a load of great content from the Bivouac by Niandi Carmont and then a series of post race interviews with Sondre Amdahl, Elisabet Barnes and Elinor Evans. If that wasn’t enough, we have an interview with Jasmin Paris who has just blasted the Bob Graham Round ladies record to a new level.

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Ultra Trail World Tour (UTWT) with Sondre Amdahl

Trail Runner Nation

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 28, 2015 68:33

The Nation has no geographic boundaries, although it is easy to stay in our own "world". Today Ultra Runner and Coach, Sondre Amdahl, joins The Nation to educate them on the world of ultra running. Sondre is an elite runner and coach from Norway. He recently finished 4th in the Ultra-Trail World Tour (UTWT). Ian Sharman also joins as co-host to help us understand what this race is. The Ethics of UTWT are Equality in Sports Self Respect Respect for others and the environment

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Episode 79 - Amdahl, Pascall, Kimball