Checkers is the game I played to kill time waiting for tables at restaurants. But solving checkers turns out to be a fascinating exercise. Recently, Alphabet’s AlphaGo team has made a lot of headlines with their neural network-based ability to beat human Go masters. But Ray Lucchesi looks back at earlier days trying to solve checkers with much more limited hardware and fundamentally different approaches.
Remembrances of Interfaces Past: Firewire
Ars Technica published a look back at the rise and fall of Firewire.
Some highlights that jumped out to me: the connector was based on the original Game Boy connector, down to the pins. The original working name of the standard was ChefCat. Sony didn’t use the name “Firewire” in Japan because they thought it made Sony sound boring.
Quantum Benchmarks
Quantum computing has advanced outside of being purely theoretical or the purview of science fiction. Several companies have specialized computes as their research projects or proof of concepts. IBM put up a publicly available quantum computer for testing with their IBM Q initiative. They’ve now expanded that from an available 5-qubit processor to 16-qubit. But it’s still the Wild West for the field.
For example, simply measuring performance gets surprisingly difficult. It’s easy to forget in classical computing with the bevy of benchmarks available, but even the language for performance on the quantum side isn’t agreed upon. Chris Lee at Ars Technica gives an in-depth look at what IBM is introducing as a measure of quantum computing performance: quantum volume.
Gestalt Server News 17.6
In this iteration of Gestalt Server News:
– We launch the On-Premise IT Roundtable podcast!
– X-IO pivots toward the edge
– A History of Virtualization and Containers
Plus a look at the rise of RDMA and more!
IPv6 Hits the Weekend, Network Engineers are Programmers, and Epoch Rollover Considerations in Gestalt Networking News 17.5
In this edition of Gestalt Networking News:
– IPv6 has a case of the Mondays
– Do network engineers need to be programmers now?
– Plus, the epoch rollover struggle is real
Remembering the IBM 1403: Hammer Time
The IBM 1403 leaned heavily on IBM’s history with typewriters. Except it used an elaborate series of hammers to hit behind the paper into an ink ribbon and the alphanumeric character. Some models used up to 132 hammers in a single printer.
Azure Gets a Win with Flipkart, Platform9 Simplifies the Cloud, and IBM Brings the Brains in Gestalt Cloud News 17.3
In this weeks Gestalt Cloud News:
– Platform9 simplifies private cloud infrastructure
– Azure gets a win with Flipkart
– IBM launches cognitive computing for private clouds
Plus what else you could buy instead of a $9000 Intel Xeon!
Storage Illumination with BVQ
SVA Software is a pretty new venture. Their big play is within the IBM storage market. It’s a pretty specialized niche, but after seeing some of the product, looks to be useful. It’s no secret that the big trend in IT is abstraction tied to excellent data visualization. We’ve seen this in all sectors, from networking to virtualization. SVA is offering this to IBM storage.
Oracle as the new IBM — has a long decline started?
Curt Monash of DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services comments: When I find myself making the same observation fairly frequently, that’s a good impetus to write a post based on it. And so this post is based on the thought that there are many analogies between: Oracle and the Oracle DBMS. IBM and the IBM […]
IBM Storage “Rebrands”, But Only Partially
Chris Evans of Architecting IT comments: The announcement talks about IBMs leadership in software defined storage yet references products such as SVC, which is only available as a hardware appliance. Then there are the products that don’t appear to be included here; these include FlashSystem (TMS acquisition), DS8000 series (mainframe and legacy enterprise storage) and Storewize […]