October 6, 2006. WebMontag Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, CA. Investment Use of the "Google Test". Bandwidth driven business models have arrived for Internet megaventures - will they displace Moore's law?
October 11, 2003. Vintage Computer Festival 2003. Computer History Museum. Before 386bsd: The Symmetric 375 Computer and Berkeley Unix(With Lynne Greer Jolitz ). Symmetric Computer Systems, a venture-funded company founded in 1982 by William Jolitz, was a contender in the hot race to produce a personal BSD Unix system. The Symmetric 375 was the first system out the door with hardware floating point and virtual memory, beating Sun by years. It was the first system with open source supplied, integrated, and tested, from EMACS to SPICE for use in scientific and engineering work. And it was the first to ship systems with all software fully installed and tested, ready for use immediately. Join William and Lynne as they discuss the design and development of the 375 computer and its influence on 386BSD - the first open source BSD system for the X86 released a decade later.
See the article “Talk About Legacy Machines”.
September 2003. SDForum Emerging Technologies SIG of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, CA, USA. TV Quality Reliable Wireless Video Streaming. Everybody wants to watch movies on a computer, but nobody does. It's worse on wireless, and even more hobbled on a cellphone or PDA. So what's a service provider to do? The customer expects TV or the service is toast. Is this possible? The problem is maintaining continuous service delivery quality. We know this, because downloaded movies play just fine. But download movies have other problems - copyright, storage demand, and unpredictable viewing availability. While there are cures, the cure is often worse - killing the emerging business.
Let's get real - download is really "plan ahead, pay once, use forever". Streaming is "pay per view" - what the service provider wants. It would be so much easier if reliable streaming worked over wireless. Today we either rollout unreliable wireless services or demo reliable services in a fantasy sandbox - the real world is a hard test. When you still can't get good cellphone coverage on the financial mecca of Sand Hill road, can you expect to pull out a PDA at Starbucks and get Shrek even half as good as a cheap TV can?
Yet large-scale wireless deployment is happening worldwide - the business opportunity of delivering on the services that get a ROI on this immense gamble is extreme. We can make reliable streaming over wire connections right now using bandwidth surplus, fast failover switching, and careful network design. But it still takes remarkably little to destabilize a single stream, let alone thousands in competition for transport resource.
In studying the stable stream we've found a novel hardware/software approach for wireless video. The network hardware is InterProphet's Silicon TCP stack used as a distributed transport that can achieve on-time delivery of video. A software framework that provides for reliability and embedded monitoring is a critical part of the deployment story in managing the infrastructure. With it, customer quality is maintained while challenges to the service are acted upon before a loss of quality can occur. Such a framework is re-purposed from delivering reliable web services, as described in my article on Web Services in Datacenter Environments in the April edition of Dr. Dobbs Journal. See TV Quality Reliable Wireless Video Streaming
June 2003. Internet Developers Group of Silicon Valley, AOL Campus, USA. "Open Software Development in the Real World. We hear a great deal about challenges to violations of Intellectual Property Rights. How are open-source developers, interested in bringing new functionality to the software world, able to complete their projects without falling victim to attacks regarding intellectual property challenges? William Jolitz’s experience bringing 386BSD, the foundation of all UNIX like operating systems, to the software community without Intellectual Property challenges gives him special insight into the necessary steps to take. Audio and video streams of the talk are available at Internet Developers Group.
March 2003. SDForum Web Services SIG of Silicon Valley, Microsoft MV Campus, USA. Issues in Deployment of Wireless Web Services. Deploying high valued web services in a wireless environment is an all or nothing proposition - you must deliver on it to keep a loyal customer. This expectation of service quality is key to customer adoption of the product and monetization of the service. A software framework that provides for reliability and embedded monitoring is a critical part of the deployment story. With it, customer quality is maintained while challenges to the service are communicated back to the developers. Concurrent service improvement is possible so that a deployment can recover from the inevitable "soft failures" during rollout. Such a framework is described in my article on "Web Services and DataCenter Environments" in this April's edition of Dr. Dobbs Journal. Issues in Deployment of Wireless Web Services Presentation.