I read "Is Parallelism the New New Thing?" on SlashDot this morning.
You ever want to throw a brick at your monitor? I did, but I don't think my current employer would understand. Besides the new LCD screen just wouldn't have the satisfying implosion that the older CRT's had.
It talks about a blog post by Bill McColl , maybe he's right about VC flocking to what they see as the latest. Maybe some day they will learn to jump in before the market gets saturated with clueless idiots.
Back when I was a free man working for myself, I burned my last $100,000 in cash on trying to get aparallel processor startup Enumera off the ground in 2001. I guess at that time nothing I did could have worked anyhow since the streets in Silicon Valley were stating to run red with the blood of dying dot com's. You could almost set up a cot in the middle of the 101 during rush hour and take a nice quiet nap there was so few people left with jobs. Quite the contrast to the stop and go parking lot that it was the year before.
As for the current state of technology
I am still trying to figure out what the hell people are talking about with web 2.0?
With compuserver (1969), BBS's (1970's), UseNet, E-mail & The Source (1979), The Well & Q-link (1985) we have online communities this whole time. With IRC we have been IM Chatting since 1988.
And almost all of this existed over the IP based Internet starting around 1983 and starting in 1993 it became http/browser based. I have been using all of these early after their inception.
What the hell is new about Web 2.0?
There isn't anything I can see new at all, not even a little just hype.
Am I missing something?
Same with Parallelism.
I was a member of the Parallel Computing Connection PPC a club run by Mitchell Loebel in Silicon Valley going back to 1989 that later renamed itself into the Tech Startup Connection http://www.techstartupconnection.org/ . From that club things like the NUMA Architecture arose.
Before that Thinking Machines Corporation by Danny Hillis 1982 with the "Connection Machine" and nCUBE.
Earlier was Control Data Corporation (CDC) and Cray which although technically not parallel processors used parallel Arithmetic circuits.
But even the Code breaking machines in WW2 used massive parallelism.
Richard Feynman's work on the Manhattan project, in which in one of his books (I think is was "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!") he describes a human assisted parallel computer with banks of Primitive IBM computers with humans moving stacks of punch cards between them to plow through the math needed to build the Bomb.
Point being, that in all of the excitement of Internet for the average Joe we forgot about most of these technologies and are now returning to it.
So there isn't anything new here, just a rediscovery.
How to use so many cpu's under Panic in Multicore Land March 11, 2008
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=483070&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=22719658
Ask Chuck Moore About 25X, Forth And So On , Aug 28, 2001
http://slashdot.org/developers/01/08/19/1712249.shtml
1 comment:
> Am I missing something?
I might guess: you're probably missing the "human side". It doesn't matter at all if a technology "was already there".
It's a question about: it's easy enough for the people? Does it matter for them? Are they interested in it?
That's why we were using tools like the ones building web2.0 years and years ago, but just now they are making a sort of hyped revolution. Because people are getting it.
Post a Comment