Wednesday July 28, 2004

June 8th 1994

June 8th 2004 was the 10 year anniversary of the Intel-HP announcement about what would turn out to be Itanium. I still remember reading this "Intel and HP announce hi-end co-operation" post on comp.arch 10 years ago, and thinking this was the end of the road for all other architectures. How the mighty have fallen!

Up until a couple of years ago, I believed Itanium could and would still make it. I saw the trusty old Stanford mail server xenon.stanford.edu which used to be a Sun server (motd: "A gift from Sun Microsystems") turn into an Itanium box (motd: "A gift from Intel Corporation"). But, unbelievably, the Itanium machine was so unstable that it had to be replaced. Xenon is now a Linux/x86 box and its motd as of August 11th 2004 reads:

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Welcome to Xenon.Stanford.EDU!
The Itanium is dead! Long live Xenon!
Please report Xenon problems to: action@xenon
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Monday July 26, 2004

Wireless everywhere

Apple's new base station is very cool. The one thing it needs is an audio input so you can source the streaming from other sound sources (TV, baby monitor, mikes, etc) and listen to it on your computer. (2004-07-26 22:52:25.0) Permalink

Cricket mania

Cricket season is here again. One of the things no one tells you about doing business in India is that there is a 5% cricket tax to be paid in terms of lost productivity. People think nothing of watching the game during work hours - it's not even a topic of debate.

In any case, Mr. Tendulkar failed to rescue India in Sunday's game, yet again.