hardware standards

best time to buy hardware

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it has just come to me what i need to do in regards to apple hardware. i already have a 450 MHz G4 with 100 MHz bus and 1 MB L2 cache. it would be nice to have dual processors and a faster bus, but with the 120 GB internal, and external firewire devices in the future, i’ll be fine when it comes to storage. all i need is a firewire and USB hub to power all my devices.

what i need instead of a new CPU is a firewire DV camcorder or VCR! what i want to do on my new machine is serve webpages. what better “big iron” than the xserve? i want the generation two box, not the current 93 degrees hot box, but the optimized G5 box. i can never buy a machine that is compromised in such a fashion. i got my cube nine months after the new york 2000 announcement, just five months before it was discontinued. that’s the best time to get new hardware, unless you need raw crunching power. that time in almost near, as i want to deliver DVD on MPEG-2, a very processor intensive activity.

i’m hoping apple.com releases all new hardware across the entire product line so nothing will boot into classic. my solution is to get an exclusive OS X box in the future. of my list of equipment that will break next month, most important is the nikon film scanner. it would be nice to use my auroravideosys fuse again, but it’s been supplanted by DV firewire. now include in that progressive scan DV, and i can never go back to interlace. i’m very disappointed that all my audio rig is gone (value $1000), but with two programs and one device, i can get it all back. i need to get apple emagic logic audio anyway, along with either a USB or firewire audio interface. so no real loss. the programs i’ll miss the most are microsoft excel 4 and dantz retrospect. those i’ll be forced to upgrade. i’m waiting for photosphop 8 with foveon native editing (RAW) and final cut pro with progressive scan DV import. life is good. you have to make your own decisions when classic goes away. if you have enough computing power to take you through to the next hardware leap, with firewire 2, USB 2, and the G5, wait.

ACTC dreams

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by becoming apple certified, if nothing else, i will be able to get 90% off apple software like final cut pro, dvd studio pro, logic audio, webobjects, OS X server, and nothing real shake. the small $495 investment, nets me $4000 in savings.

from the keynotes, especially the SUN one, all of us need to develop our projects to open standards. microsoft has an integrated welded box approach, IBM has a “don’t try this by yourself” approach. and SUN offers an integrateable solution, so when you need to run apache server or veritas, you can, but you might break the elegant development over decades and billions of dollars the package that is solaris. my action points have to be:

    secure my computer facility with smart cards
    secure with biometrics
    secure with a lock and key
    secure with power backup
    secure with redundancy
    secure with location disparity
    run on java, UNIX, linux, or open source
    go MPEG-4
    the network is the machine
    metcalf’s law of growing networks holds
    rock’s law of rising semiconductor price holds true
    moore’s law of semiconductor performance hold true
    look for 64 bit architecture
    run fit clients with a dedicated server (netboot)
    simplify the network with fewer computers
    fire everyone
    use oracle database on big iron

comdex 2002

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i’m back from comdex 2002, las vegas NV. here are some interesting links from the show:

now some reflections from the show on monday and tuesday. this year, due to the economic collapse, terrorist attacks, and the republican administration, the IT sector is flat or down horribly. this made it possible to come out to comdex much earlier than normal, to hear the keynotes live. last night bill gates, chief software architect shared his vision of the future. what did gates and a 6 billion dollar research budget get him and microsoft? gates showed and stunned the world with a web enabled alarm clock. with this fantastic device, you can tell the time. you can set an alarm to wake up, and like some mystical omen, check the weather and driving conditions. is this an innovation, or just a small laptop with an embedded OS? i felt sorry for the 3 years of research. next up was the future of web services.

how could disparate systems communicate with legacy systems, ecommerce engines, and harness the power of 30 years on the ARPA NET? gates showed us the remote printing of a two page document to kinko’s. like some transcendency, the microsoft team showed us a print dialog box that looked like a print dialog box. instead of printing locally, the order moved over the web to a kinko’s printer. i could do this seven years ago with a PDF workflow. again gates had egg on his face. the few good nuggets he did show were smart displays, a LCD panel connected wirelessly via 802.11 network back to the main CPU, which allows the user to take her work away from the desk and onto the couch. using as simple stylus as a mouse, and a wireless keyboard, the knowledge worker has a new flexibility to share info. imagine a imac screen that not only swivels, but you can take off the G4 tower. so maybe the 6 billion was well spent, but not really.

in every show, the hope is to make strategic business decisions. the theme for the show keynotes, was nothing is impossible and do the solutions of today, instead of dream of technologies of tomorrow. for the last five years, i’ve been dreaming of ubiquitous heterogeneous wired and wireless networks, but as soon as my opportunity came around, the rug would be pulled from under me, as northpoint communications, rhythms network, sprint ion, @home, and other connectivity companies went belly up. i was the face of disaster, as my business ideas circulated around web services, so no broadband internet, no company. i’ll be concentrating on more mature technologies of today, and utilize and leverage over a large fulcrum my web experience, to create DVD’s, and on the side become an apple certified digital hub specialist.