Posts by sturdy1234

After Avago Bought LSi

After Avago bought LSI, it was slice and dice the day after the deal closed; sold off the wireless business to Intel, sold off Egeno to NetApp, sold off the SSD division to Seagate, sold off the patent portfolio to an investment group, laid off the rest of us and kept only the SAS chip, switch and controller business in Colorado. Any idiot can layoff 100's of folks. Getting acquired by Broadcom is bad news big time! The Avago CEO, now the same guy running Broadcom explicitly laid out his plan to slice and dice LSI after the deal was closed in an all hands meeting with us. He stated his intent was to dominate the SAS chip market and raise the margins and eliminate other businesses with low margins. Mike O’Dell better get his cash out quickly as Broadcom will wreck VMware imho

Early Algol68 Compilers

In the early 1980’s UCLA had an active group of graduate students working in a compiler for Algol68 for the IBM 360/91 under Robert Ugalus. The book, “the Informal introduction to Algol68” was the Bible for the language semantics. The book created its own set of specialized words like propositity and lapsity to describe in precious words the language semantics. The underlsying memory model was the stack retention model with variants called the Cactus stack for its threaded nature. The language semantics, referred in previous posts as European sensibilities was quite well done. It lacked a machine description in favor of very precise descriptions of the language semantics, very worthwhile reading for those who like reading compilers semantics by jumping into the way back machine. As Joe Bob Briggs used to say, “check it out”.

The writing is on the wall, Oracle is killing Solaris slowly will

be dumping the old PARC hardware. They have laid off

nearly all of the hardware and software folks in the silicon

valley, so the only thing left is bare bones maintenance.

Larry is spending the cash on the Oracle Cloud trying to

handle his declining revenue from selling software licenses

in favor of pay as you use model. Capitalism at it's best.

Can the old folks, hire new different folks and forget about

ever re-training the software folks you can. God to love it!

Putting the garbage collection, wear leveling and back block mgmt

in the server OS is a no brainer. Trying too cram that huge complexity in

a low powered SDD controller is just an exercise IMHO of beating yourself.

The vendor argument on "up take" is all bs, since the software development

complexity and testing is mind numbing on those embedded controllers.

Going with after brain dead hardware for the controller was going to

be adopted by anyone trying to get to market quickly. The cloud vendors

do NOT want to have to wait for say SamSung to debug there firmware or

fix bugs at a glacial pace.

Roadkill. 20% layoff and folks are streaming out the door.

Nice product but a very competitive space and the IPO

coupled with a less than stellar sales growth curve spells

bad new in the public market.

Joe Smith

Cisco has been trying to figure out storage on UCS and

there rack servers for years. Now that Dell bought EMC,

Cisco has bought springPath as a weak attempt IMHO

to compete in the hyper-converted storage offerings.

At the end of the day, NetApp has the storage hardware

and associated software. Cisco is trying to stay revenant

IMHO. Expensive solution but it does work well for those

who have no expertise on building your own.