<p><pre><code> “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”
</code></pre>
Alan Kay, <a href="http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Creative_Think.txt" rel="nofollow">http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...</a>
Does anyone know any technical details behind this paragraph?
Specifically, are they talking about a new kind of interconnect technology with low power over ~1m distance?<p>(Searching for "rackspace virtual I/O" was not so useful.)<p>"Rackspace is leading an effort to build a “virtual I/O” protocol, which would allow companies to physically separate various parts of today’s servers. You could have your CPUs in one enclosure, for instance, your memory in another, and your network cards in a third. This would let you, say, upgrade your CPUs without touching other parts of the traditional system. “DRAM doesn’t [change] as fast as CPUs,” Frankovsky says. “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could actually disaggregate the CPUs from the DRAM complex?”"
Tomorrow: "In other news, it appears that Facebook has lost every pictures hosted on their services."<p>More seriously though, there were an interesting article on Google DataCenter and how their customize their hard drive to accommodate their needs. There was another blank paper on how, because of the massive scale of the data, Cosmic ray influence quite often data stored. And also they said in that survey that every 3 minutes one hard drive is failing in one of their datacenter somewhere in the world.<p>Pretty neat stuff, but I can't find the source, sorry.
"Now, Facebook has provided a new option for these big name Wall Street outfits. But Krey also says that even among traditional companies who can probably benefit from this new breed of hardware, the project isn’t always met with open arms. “These guys have done things the same way for a long time,” he tells Wired."<p>Maybe one reason is because they've been around long enough to know what happens with bleeding edge technology.<p>And as the (old) saying went, "nobody ever got fired by going with IBM".<p>But the truth is the reliability and "shit hits the fan" if a Wall Street system goes down (and financial loss) is much greater in a traditional business system then if the same thing happens for a free service like facebook. Or somebodies "Show HN what I built this weekend" app.<p>So of course they are going to move slower. And they should. They have more to lose.
It's fascinating to me how software companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, and others have had to push the hardware industry forward, because they often feel so loathe to eat their own children.<p>I suspect there's a huge correlation in there to the net cost of changing hardware compared to changing software code (not to mention the related margins in the businesses).