My last post on dematerialization dealt with developments suitable for experienced engineers, but Bug Labs wants to broaden that to include consumers:
Because everything we’re doing is open source, you are free to make it perfect yourself. You want to change something? Go right ahead. And when you do, we’re hoping you share your improvement with everyone else so we all benefit. It’s why we call our work community electronics instead of simply consumer electronics. We, Bug Labs, don’t own the keys to your satisfaction, you do. And this, in our humble opinion, is how it should be.
The ability to turn a design drawing into a visualization that mimics reality is an invaluable tool for troubleshooting a design, convincing a nervous client or helping to promote a design firm’s capabilities. This segment of the CAD software industry continues to grow and evolve, with rendered visualizations becoming more sophisticated.
While this trend is indeed a positive one, it is fundamentally constrained by an exclusively designer-centric perspective. This view understandably stems from the historical hardware constraints which made customer/end user access to the CAD data prohibitively expensive. However, as can be seen in the high end, proprietary CAD/PLM offerings of Dassault, this tradeoff is not an inherent requirement. In a rhythmeering environment integration is needed for manufacturing, maintenance, supply chain, marketing analysis - throughout the complete product lifecycle. In order to achieve this level of deep integration, the underlying information models for CAD have to become features of the operating system and eventually the hardware. Open source platforms like Croquet point the way.
Along the way to hardware that is really fluid and adapable, software is weaving its way deeper and deeper into the hardware. A couple of writers envisioned the next near-term steps earlier this year:
… virtualization technologies should be pushed down further into the iron and sold in volume. In short, there should be some way to make these technologies a low-cost part of the system, … it should be made in an on-demand fashion, activated with a key for a nominal fee, complete with physical-to-virtual conversion tools and virtual-to-physical tools to undo the virtualization if customers decide to do that, too.
The effect of free, hardware based virtualization which is automatically there would make for very interesting x86 servers. Even more so with a few on-board, fully virtualized, multi-fabric I/O channels. Kind a baby mainframe.
Maybe it’s a crazy idea. Maybe its a vision of the future of computing.
Now, in the aftermath of the VMWare IPO, we’re seeing it unfold.
“With virtualization, where you can run any operating system on top, it seems a lot more logical that it would be effectively a layer sitting on top of a server,” said Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff. “Why wouldn’t it be supplied with the server?”
XenSource announced XenExpress OEM Edition last week, and market leader VMware this week is announcing VMware ESX Server 3i at its VMworld conference. The products run from flash memory built into a server instead of being installed on the hard drive.
The embedded versions aren’t just a fantasy. VMware has partnerships with IBM, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Network Appliance. “We expect them to begin integrating ESX Server 3i into their servers later this year or early next,” a VMware representative said.
The move has strategic importance in these relatively early days of virtualization, elevating the profile of virtualization specialists’ products. Getting a foot in the door could help the virtualization specialists get a foot in the doors of customers who might be interested in higher-level products to manage the increasingly sophisticated computing infrastructure that can be built atop virtual machines.
Virtualization has been around for decades, but its inclusion in mainstream computers with x86 chips is bringing it out of the shadows. And the money is following.
In The Roots of Hardware and elsewhere, I’ve spoken about the software-hardware relationship from a bird’s-eye view, but it can be helpful to zoom in a bit to see what’s important about the relationship. Ice and water are made of the same chemical compound - H2O, but in different states. One could cook or wash with ice cubes but things won’t work out as well as with water. Similarly, it would be ineffective to store perishable food in water. Hardware and software are both made from the same mathematical elements - boolean logic, but in different states. Hardware is fast but inflexible. Software has unlimited flexibility but runs more slowly. It wouldn’t be wise to program a payroll system into hardware because requirements can change. 3D graphics software without hardware assistance runs very slowly. I should note that a short but very powerful book - The Pattern on the Stone demystifies computers making it possible for anyone, regardless of technical background/aptitude to understand the basic inner workings of computing.
In our bodies ice is non-existent. Throughout the ecosystems we typically frequent each day, liquid water is more abundant and useful than ice. The same should be true of software and hardware but today’s hardware dominates the information ecosystem. This prematurely crystallized software frequently serves as an impediment to innovation.
Hardware is really just software crystallized early. It is there to make program schemes run as efficiently as possible. But far too often the hardware has been presented as a given and it is up to software designers to make it appear reasonable. This has caused low-level techniques and excessive optimization to hold back progress in program design. … In short, most hardware designs today are just re-optimizations of moribund architectures.
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People are the foundation of our organization. We empower teams to be business owners, foster boundary-less organizations, and embrace diversity. We enjoy working in partnerships, both internally and externally. Working together toward collective goals Being a “team player” Working with customers and for customers to achieve optimal solutions
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Engineering has been undergoing profound transformations in the last 50 years, going from a discipline which dealt primarily with energy, matter and machines, to one which deals with experiences, knowledge processing and people. These changes in engineering are so fundamental that a new term is required to describe the discipline. Rhythmeering is that term.
Innovation can happen in a more predictable manner than invention, with a shorter time-to-profit
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