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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: dybdahl who wrote (66645)	4/3/2002 3:23:27 AM
From: Rusty Johnson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Out of the Box Forbes Magazine Elizabeth Corcoran, 04.15.02 Intel and IBM fight for the post-PC future. Grove's message: Get ready for the electronic future--and get scared that Intel won't play a central role in shaping it. The next chip revolution will take place far beyond the beige computing box under your desk, in a plethora of new and strange devices with an entirely different set of needs. The collision of three tech trends--vanishingly small but powerful chips, the Internet and wireless data communications--is creating a new era of engineering, with great potential to reshuffle business models, spheres of influence and profits. That means Intel will have to earn its top spot all over again, and it is making a huge bet on something called XScale, a dramatic departure from the design that made the company rich. It will show up in handheld organizers this summer, as well as in network storage and communication devices. The most lethal threat to Intel's future, surprisingly, will come from IBM. Bad blood between them goes back 20 years, when IBM unwittingly ceded control of the PC industry to Intel and its software ally, Microsoft. IBM engineers in Austin, Tex. have been working on a top-secret design--code-named Cell--with partners Sony and Toshiba, aiming to plant their breakthrough technology in the bedrock of tomorrow's products. Available in two years, Cell is expected to run Sony's next PlayStation and grow from there. The next chip war looms despite the current downturn, the most brutal slump chipmakers have ever known. Last year it deleted $70 billion--or 30% of industry revenues. PCs will remain the single biggest category for chip revenue for some time, but the days of double-digit growth are over. The new growth will come from cell phones, networking boxes, game machines and new devices. Other titans have a shot at prevailing, such as Motorola, Texas Instruments, AMD and National Semiconductor. Chip-design houses, such as Britain's ARM Holdings, have intriguing designs or tools, as do Silicon Valley upstarts like Tensilica. But it appears that the Intel-IBM clash is the one to watch. "The PC has really driven the industry over the last decade or so. But it is not the driver now. This is going to be a much different world," says John Kelly III, the senior vice president who oversees IBM's $10 billion (revenue) technology group, which includes chips and storage products. Adds Richard Doherty, research director at the Envisioneering Group, a consultancy in Seaford, N.Y.: "The next 36 months will be the most exciting time in the chip industry in the past decade." For years, the industry's driver was speed, speed and more speed: The latest Pentium 4 crunches data at 2.2 billion cycles a second. Move chips out of PCs and the rules change. Speed and raw power are no longer paramount; chips now need to guzzle less energy. Designs must be more flexible, too. Intel cranks out millions of copies of a single design. Cell phones, network gear and new gadgets will need specially tuned chips. And they must be cheap. A top Pentium 4 costs $500; a typical processor in a cell phone is closer to $15. ... Intel supports hundreds of independent developers, and some XScale versions will rely on Microsoft coders. At IBM, Kelly says Cell will use the freely available Linux operating system in its core. That way, IBM can capitalize on the tools and expertise of the thousands of engineers who work on Linux. IBM also says it will publish details of the Cell design and license the technology broadly. ... It's too soon to call which side will prevail. But both remember the lesson of the PC: Today's toy can run tomorrow's world. LINUX ... today's toy running tomorrow's world.

To: dybdahl who wrote (66645)	4/3/2002 9:22:26 AM
From: Just_Observing	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Dybdahl, Re: Uptimes of Internet Servers. Here is some information as to why GNU/Linux is missing from the longest uptimes: According to a separate uptime study by Netcraft, OSS/FS does very well; as of August 3, 2001, of the 50 sites with the highest uptimes, 92% use Apache and 50% run on OSS/FS operating systems. Netcraft keeps a track of the 50 often-requested sites with the longest uptimes at uptime.netcraft.com. Looking at the August 3, 2001 uptime report, I found that 92% (46/50) of the sites use Apache; one site's web server was unknown, and three others were not Apache. Of those three, only one reported to be Microsoft IIS, and that one instance is suspicious because its reported operating system is BSD/OS (this apparant inconsistency can be explained in many ways, e.g., perhaps there is a front-end BSD/OS system that ``masks'' the IIS web site, or perhaps the web server is lying about its type to confuse attackers). In this snapshot, 50% (25/50) ran on an open source operating system, and only Unix-like operating systems had these large uptimes (no Windows systems were reported as having the best uptimes). As with all surveys, this one has weaknesses, as discussed in Netcraft's Uptime FAQ. Their techniques for identifying web server and operating systems can be fooled. Only systems for which Netcraft was sent many requests were included in the survey (so it's not ``every site in the world''). Any site that is requested through the ``what's that site running'' query form at Netcraft.com is added to the set of sites that are routinely sampled; Netcraft doesn't routinely monitor all 22 million sites it knows of for performance reasons. Many operating systems don't provide uptime information and thus can't be included; this includes AIX, AS/400, Compaq Tru64, DG/UX, MacOS, NetWare, NT3/Windows 95, NT4/Windows 98, OS/2, OS/390, SCO UNIX, Sony NEWS-OS, SunOS 4, and VM. Thus, this uptime counter can only include systems running on BSD/OS, FreeBSD (but not the default configuration in versions 3 and later), recent versions of HP-UX, IRIX, GNU/Linux 2.1 kernel and later (except on Alpha processor based systems), MacOS X, recent versions of NetBSD/OpenBSD, Solaris 2.6 and later, and Windows 2000. Note that Windows NT systems cannot be included in this survey (because their uptimes couldn't be counted), but Windows 2000 systems are included in this survey. Again, no Windows system actually made it into the top 50 for uptimes in this snapshot. Note that HP-UX, (many versions of) GNU/Linux, Solaris and recent releases of FreeBSD cycle back to zero after 497 days, exactly as if the machine had been rebooted at that precise point. Thus it is not possible to see an HP-UX, (most) GNU/Linux, or Solaris system with an uptime measurement above 497 days, and in fact their uptimes can be misleading (they may be up for a long time, yet not show it). Still, this survey does compare Windows 2000, GNU/Linux (up to 497 days usually), FreeBSD, and several other operating systems, and a vast number of web servers, and OSS/FS does quite well. Note that the top 50 longest uptimes at Netcraft are all longer than 497 days. BTW, I always enjoy your informative, polite, and well-reasoned posts. Regards, dwheeler.com