Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

homestead - [Homestead] Oh, hell, everyone has sleep apnea, time for business success storytelling again

homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Homestead mailing list

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Rob <becida AT comcast.net>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Homestead] Oh, hell, everyone has sleep apnea, time for business success storytelling again
  • Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2012 22:51:11 -0700

Time for a tvo story... Its been awhile..

FWIW On January 27, 2010, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_acquisition_by_Oracle>Sun was acquired by Oracle Corporation for US$7.4 billion, based on an agreement signed on April 20, 2009.

Rob
becida AT comcast.net
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

X-Envelope-Sender: bounce-homestead-2407926 AT listserv.unc.edu
Received: from tisch.mail.mindspring.net ([207.69.200.157]) by lambada.oit.unc.edu with SMTP (Lyris ListManager WIN32 version 7.0b); Fri, 26 Sep 2003 11:09:53 -0400
Received: from sdn-ap-022dcwashp0344.dialsprint.net ([63.191.161.90] helo=infionline.net)
by tisch.mail.mindspring.net with esmtp (Exim 3.33 #1)
id 1A2uCl-0005NM-00
for homestead AT listserv.unc.edu; Fri, 26 Sep 2003 11:08:23 -0400
Message-ID: <LYRIS-2407926-4276447-2003.09.26-11.09.59--rob_b9#lycos.com AT listserv.unc.edu>
Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2003 11:08:09 -0700
From: Tvoivozhd <tvoivozd AT infionline.net>
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.3.1) Gecko/20030425
X-Accept-Language: en-us, en
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: "Homestead mailing list" <homestead AT listserv.unc.edu>
Subject: Oh, hell, everyone has sleep apnea, time for business success storytelling
again





China stories, and industry springing up overnight from rice paddies and water buffalo paths.

I spent a lot of time with the Chinese Nationalists, trained their pilots to fly P-51's and B-25's, and of course had a pilot's commission in both the U.S. and Chinese Air Force. I didn't have a high opinion of Chiang Kai Shek because of the endemic corruption---that opinion has mellowed with the perspective of time---basically he did what he had to do in an economy collapsed by the Japanese occupation. At least he would fight---Mao Tse Tung ran like a goddamned rabbit.

I was at the time, and for many years thereafter, the youngest Group Engineering Officer and Group Operations Officer in the U.S. Air Force at age 22, commanding 400 aircraft and 2800 men four years off a dairy farm and with then only a high school education, albeit a good one. A highly strategic positiion and as much the result of luck and the death of better-qualified contemporaries as any innate ability.

With a pretty foggy memory, I am trying to reconstruct the military history and many photographs for my kids who now see it as a world they never knew existed. The foggy memory lifted briefly---long ago past posts recounted that I flew twenty three types of liaison, pursuit, bomber, observation and transport aircraft for the U.S. Air Force in WWII. It was actually 24---I had forgotten about the cursed UC-64, aka Noorduyn Norseman in which I accumulated some 800 hours. It was designed as a Canadian bush plane---ten passenger with a 600 hp radial engine. The damned thing had zero visibility and no dihedral so you had to fly it every minute you sat in the pilot's seat. It would take off with the cargo space filled with lead, but lead or cotton it wouldn't climb over a fifty foot tree a mile in front of you. My oldest boy is scanning the photos onto a CD. I may post a few when I get a copy.

My friends occupied every position of power in the Taiwan Government---most powerful post being the head of National Reconstruction, and perhaps the next being head of the Chinese Air Force, who stayed at my home in Texas when visiting his children in the U.S.

The most spectacular and most rapid bootstrap operation the world has ever seen took place in Taiwan. By comparison, rebuilding Afghanistan or Iraq is a piece of cake. The Japanese left a tiny amount of industrial infrastructure, but basically rice paddies had to be turned into industrial power. Here's how it was done.
Chiang Kai Shek and the Office of National Reconstruction seized title to most of the land, and paid for it with I.O.U's that had to be invested in infant industry to be worth anything at all. Canny Taiwanese landowners immediately scurried around to see what could be manufactured and sold overseas for hard currency, primarily in the U.S. market, for U.S. dollars.

A few tiny banks came into being---primarily to handle letters of credit with American bank affiliates. There was no stock market, no bank loans to businessmen, all business investment came from individuals---the aforesaid rice paddy landowners and street capital from wage earners who saved 25% or more of their meager earnings and univesally wanted to become employers instead of employees, illustrated by the Chinese proverb, "better to be the head of a rooster than tail of an ox.".

Tiny shops posted in their front window that they needed capital, and what they would pay for it in common stock and interest. The wage earners strolled in, looked around to assess the business prospects, and dug in their loin cloths for whatever they could afford to invest in return for a piece of paper bearing the owner's signature and National I.D. Number. Few of these small shops failed, most thrived, and many quickly became industrial giants.

When I lived in Taichung I watched 14,000 manufacturers spring up there within five years in an area where the total population was well under a half a million. Completely unfettered capitalism (which the U.S. does not have and never has known), has enormous growth potential---like watching bacteria in a Petrie Dish with a 600 power microscope. There's no free lunch---unfettered capitalism also contains rapidly growing seeds of destruction, and in the same five years the water became undrinkable and air unbreathable---appalling to see almost 100% of the population wearing breathing masks in a vain effort to keep poisonous toxins out of their lungs. Regulation of uncaring capitalists has been imposed and the environment slowly improving. Unlike the U.S., Chinese culture did not permit the growth of corporate monopoly and its attendant abuse of competition, wage earners and the economy. In Taiwan general welfare means general welfare, not welfare for a tiny top sliver of the population.

I lived in Taiwan during long periods in the 1980's, and went back and forth like a badminton shuttlecock on the always dangerous Northwest Airlines aircraft, until safer ones such as Singapore Airlines emerged.

Here's where the generalities end, let us turn to specifics---David Lee and Maggie Chen, and Hershey Valve Company (which I chose for them as having good vibes in the U.S. market, and which you will find in every Home Depot and Lowes, most U.S. industrial supply distributors today.

At the time I had designed a long line of thermoplastic valves, the tooling and testing equipment to produce them. I had already encountered a highly dishonest supplier against whom my partner and I obtained a judgment which, with interest is now perhaps $45,000,000. In the search for an honest supplier I ran across Hwatzee plastic injection molding company (see where the Hershey came from?) They had only four or five injection molding machines, in as many small villages where they could find enough electricity to operate them.

David's parents operated a small number of coastal freight vessels---enough to make a living, but not to provide any financial help to David---their most important contribution was to educate him in the essentials of running a small business. David had little formal education however, and could not speak a word of English---essential to doing business in the U.S. Maggie had no money, but could speak English as well as I can, and both were dead honest, could be trusted with your life.

Like all plastic fabricators in Taiwan at the time, they had not the foggiest idea of material specification---as far as they knew, PVC was PVC, so they bought raw material I described to them as "pau pau tah! (Mandarin for bubble gum), which distorted beyond belief at operating temperatures as low as 140 degrees F.

Maggie set up a meeting with twenty engineers at the Formosa Plastics Company (now in Texas), and we spent a full day going over the specifications of what we then called Type I, Grade I PVC---it now has a specification number which I have forgotten. They were technically proficient and understood immediately what they were told---within a week were producing Type I, Grade I PVC, and the Taiwan export valve industry was born. Well, a little more was required---the Fisher Valve Company in the U.S. owned the only patent on unimolded ball valve seals, so I patented an easier-operating variant and licensed it to Hershey Valve until the Fisher patent expired a few years later. Got a few thousand dollars which they gladly paid to avoid a patent lawsuit, and we were both happy. They relocated their crossroad injection machines to the industrial park in Taichung, where electricity is plentiful and cheap---are still there operating a multimillion dollar business..

And now let us shift the spotlight to Chenbro in Taiwan. After Hwatzee aka Hershey was well established in the international thermoplastic valve market, Maggie left Hershey, except as in an advisory position and minor stockholder. Maggie's husband was an electronics engineer---a hell of a good one, and with modest initial capital they started making computer components such as cases, circuit boards etc.---withing three years Maggie had a factory employing almost a thousand people and in five years had a net worth of around $50,000,000.

I was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 1985, given thirty days to live, and divested myself of all assets in 1985 and left the fascinating business of starting new businesses. Two operations and two series of chemotherapy fortuitously got rid of the cancer, but I am now paying the price of the chemotherapy in the form of myelodysplasia. Don't like the price, but what the hell, no one lives forever. This is one of my feel-good days---the reason for assuming the role of story teller, since no one else is posting much.

Now Maggie's operation could go broke within a year or two. Could, I say, she's an enormously gifted individual who is fast enough on her feet to convert her operation to other processes, other products, other markets almost overnight. She sure as hell won't go broke, been there, done that and won't let it ever happen to her again.

The suddenly resurgent U.S. Sun Microsystems is the threat (watch Sun as an investment opportunity if they succeed in making circuit boards completely obsolete, a bypassed relic of the computer age.)






September 22, 2003
New Sun Microsystems Chip May Unseat the Circuit Board
By JOHN MARKOFF



OUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Sept. 19 — Written off lately by the computer industry as a has-been, Sun Microsystems may still have a few tricks up its engineers' shirt sleeves.

On Tuesday, Sun researchers plan to report that they have discovered a way to transmit data inside a computer much more quickly than current techniques allow. By placing the edge of one chip directly in contact with its neighbor, it may be possible to move data 60 to 100 times as fast as the present top speeds.

For the computer industry, the advance — if it can be repeated on the assembly line — would be truly revolutionary. It would make obsolete the traditional circuit board constructed of tiny bits of soldered wires between chips, familiar to hobbyists who hand-soldered connections when assembling Heathkit electronic projects.

"It could represent the end of the printed circuit board," said Jim Mitchell, director of Sun Laboratories here. "It makes things way, way faster."

Sun, an icon of Silicon Valley, has been losing market share and laying off thousands of workers as corporate computing customers turn increasingly to Microsoft and Intel for their software and hardware. Sun is in desperate need of a technical advance that can differentiate it from the others.

The new technology is being developed as part of a military-financed supercomputer effort. But Sun executives said they were seeking ways to find commercial uses quickly for a future generation of computer systems.

Sun has not decided whether to license the technology to other manufacturers or reserve it exclusively for Sun's own systems, Dr. Mitchell said. Analysts, though, say they believe that the company is moving toward a more liberal technology licensing policy.

"This is a big thought project," said Vernon Turner, vice president for global enterprise servers at the International Data Corporation, a market research firm. "It will give them some leadership if they can pull it off."

The recent resignation of Sun's co-founder, William Joy, a leading software designer and developer of the Java programming language, has been seen as evidence that the company is struggling to remain innovative. Still, Sun has maintained its research spending despite corporate cutbacks.

The new breakthrough is based on an insight by Ivan E. Sutherland, a Sun vice president and research fellow who is a pioneer of modern computing. Dr. Sutherland, 65, was a co-founder of Evans & Sutherland, an early maker of high-performance computers. He is also the inventor of interactive computer graphics.

In a paper to be presented at the Custom Integrated Circuits Conference on Tuesday in San Jose, Calif., Dr. Sutherland, Robert J. Drost and Robert D. Hopkins plan to report that they were able to send data at a speed of 21.6 billion bits a second between chips in a scaled-down version of the new technology. By comparison, an Intel Pentium 4 processor, the fastest desktop chip, can transmit about 50 billion bits a second. But when the technology is used in complete products, the researchers say, they expect to reach speeds in excess of a trillion bits a second, which would be about 100 times the limits of today's technology.

Currently, computer data is moved in and out of an integrated circuit through tiny wires soldered to the surface at special pads that ring the edge of each chip. While the pads are small, they are vastly larger than the transistors and wires that make up the chip's circuitry.

A typical gold or aluminum wire might be 25 microns in width and soldered to a pad that is 100 microns wide, about the width of a human hair. Compared with the internal circuitry, this passageway requires relatively large amounts of power. Also, the size of the pads and wires necessarily limits the number there are to ferry information in and out of the circuit.

The new Sun chip has tiny transmitters that are only a few microns in width. In addition to having many more connecting points, the chip should consume far less power. The chip's additional channels increase the processing speed, like adding lanes to a highway; being able to eliminate the pads is another benefit of the chip's design, like getting rid of a series of tollbooths.

Chip-to-chip bottlenecks have long been a vexing challenge for computer designers, who have explored many ways of increasing the overall speed of systems that are composed of hundreds of chips.

Other potential technologies have included optical lasers and even the idea of quantum entanglement of electrons, which holds out the possibility of moving huge amounts of data instantaneously.

Transmitting data between chips by placing a transmitter next to a receiver, along the lines of the Sun design, employs an effect known as "capacitive coupling" to send electrical pulses at high speed. The idea came to Dr. Sutherland when he was visiting Steve Jacobsen, a robotics expert based in Utah, who has developed a technique for ultraprecise mechanical alignment.

This technique might be applied to connect large arrays of ultrasmall transmitters and receivers, Dr. Sutherland decided.

While the concept has yet to be validated fully, Sun researchers have already received an important vote of confidence from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Pentagon.

In July, Sun was a surprise winner of a $49.7 million award from the agency to work on supercomputer designs. Cray and I.B.M. also won contracts, but Sun was chosen over two competitors, Silicon Graphics and Hewlett-Packard.

The choice of Sun surprised many supercomputing researchers because both Silicon Graphics and Hewlett-Packard have larger supercomputer businesses.

"This is one of those things that could have great potential if they can work out the details," said William J. Dally, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford University and a consultant for Cray on its supercomputer project financed by the Pentagon agency.

The Sun technique could pack hundreds of chips in face-to-face checkerboard fashion far more densely than is possible today. The technique holds out the hope of attaining what had been one of Silicon Valley's far-off dreams: a computer packaging technique known as wafer-scale integration.

Today, chips are manufactured in wafers that contain hundreds of identical circuits. The individual chips are cut apart and each chip is wired into a separate package. The chips are then laid out on printed circuit boards and connected to other packages by wires that are thousands of times thicker than the chip circuits.

For decades, computer designers have tried to figure out how to make computer systems out of single large wafers. But designers have stumbled over the fact that it is virtually impossible to create large wafers that are free of defects.

Now the Sun researchers may have surmounted the hurdle with a simple mechanical solution — having a bunch of small chips work together with the computing properties of a single wafer.

"This is a very novel idea that could give you a way to make a very compact computer," said David Patterson, a computer scientist at the University of California at Berkeley who is a Sun consultant. "From the very beginning people have been making circuits on wafers and then chopping them up and then wiring them back together again."

As a graduate student in the 1970's, Dr. Patterson worked on a Pentagon-financed wafer-scale integration research project at Hughes Aircraft. Even though it was not cost-effective, he said, it was one of the few successful efforts to build such a computer.

Since then, the industry has tried unsuccessfully to commercialize wafer-scale circuits aimed at avoiding chip-to-chip communication bottlenecks.

All of them have failed and several have collapsed in spectacular fashion. Gene M. Amdahl, the designer of I.B.M.'s 360 mainframe computer, founded Trilogy Systems in 1980 to build an advanced mainframe computer based on wafer-scale technology. He was able to raise $279 million from computer partners, venture capitalists and a public offering, before going under.

Dr. Sutherland acknowledged that Sun has more to do before it could determine if its proximity communication technology was viable. One issue is potential interference between the tiny transmitters and receivers. A second issue is cooling. As chips are moved closer together the challenges in removing heat increase sharply.

At the same time, Sun's computer designers said they were optimistic about the technology and were eager to consider ways of using it in future Sun computers.

"It's pretty exciting in what it has enabled," said Marc Tremblay, a Sun microprocessor designer. "As you cross boundaries between chips, that's where the pipe has been narrow."

He said that faster chip-to-chip speeds might also lead to a rethinking of the internal layout of computers in ways that would enhance performance even more.

Dr. Sutherland said that he was uncertain where the new technology might be applied first commercially, but that there was already great interest from the company's computer division.

"The news we hear from product-land is, `We want this yesterday,' " he said.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | Help | Back to Top








---
You are currently subscribed to homestead as: rob_b9 AT lycos.com
To unsubscribe send an email to listproc AT listserv.oit.unc.edu with UNSUBSCRIBE HOMESTEAD in the body of the message.




  • [Homestead] Oh, hell, everyone has sleep apnea, time for business success storytelling again, Rob, 06/16/2012

Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page