There are very few CEOs in high tech who have been at their jobs longer than Steve Jobs. While Jobs founded Apple with Steve Wozniak and Mike Markkula back in 1977, remember he was cast out by John Sculley in 1985 and didn't return until Apple bought NeXT in 1997. Still 11 years is a long time in the top job. Bill Gates didn't last that long as CEO of Microsoft, taking over from Jon Shirley in 1990 and handing the reins to Steve Ballmer in 2000. Among the big companies only Michael Dell has been at it longer than Jobs altogether and Dell is back in his hot seat only reluctantly, returning in an attempt to bring his company back to its number one market position. Once things are fixed at Dell, if they can be, Michael will be gone again, while Jobs seems in his element and determined to stay for as long as possible.

And why not? He has taken the company from also-ran to market leadership based on quality design, not just the best price. Jobs made Porsche his archetype and has built Apple in that car company's image, selling entertainment, which always sells for more than sheer calculating ability. Apple is a lean and mean profit machine that is, more than any of its traditional rivals, poised to dominate the emerging markets for Internet-distributed entertainment and mobile devices. Industry pundits are always watching for the next new thing Jobs and Apple will come up with.

But we rarely watch what Apple is getting rid of, mainly because that doesn't happen very often. Sure, old hardware platforms are dropped, sometimes for lack of sales, but it is hard to even remember when Apple dropped or sold off any of its software businesses. Even FileMaker was dragged back inside the company by Jobs after Sculley's abortive attempt to spin off the database company.

So why, then, was Apple quietly shopping around its entire professional application business to prospective buyers at the recently completed National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas? These include Aperture, Final Cut Pro, Logic, and Shake -- applications that are hardly also-rans in their segments and none of which are antiquated in the least. Final Cut, of course, absolutely dominates the video editing business. Why would Apple want to give that up?

Why indeed?

Apple's professional applications have never directly made a lot of money for the company. Rather, they were always intended to drive hardware sales in the areas of image editing, layout, and audio and video editing where PowerMacs were the dominant machines ever since the demise of Amiga. While Final Cut Pro probably makes a lot of money for Apple, the other professional apps probably just break even. Still, is that reason enough to sell them off?

Maybe, but I don't think so.

Taking a look at Apple's recent success selling Macs (up 51 percent since last year in a PC market that is otherwise fairly flat), your traditional Wall Street analyst would see that Apple is, for the first time in decades, building a broad market position, not just one based primarily on the graphics and video markets. Apple's recent hardware successes have come at the expense of Dell and HP. If that's the case, then the typical Wall Street drone would say, "Why not kill the professional apps, since they seem to no longer even be necessary for Apple's success?"

In Wall Street's quarter-to-quarter perspective, selling off Apple's professional applications makes perfect sense. Except that Steve Jobs tends not to think quarter-to-quarter so much as decade-to-decade. This is a guy with a LONG horizon, which is why he appears, frankly, to be the only one of his peers with either a plan or a clue. As Jobs did with the iPod and iTunes and now with the iPhone, he is setting the standard and most Apple competitors are mainly waiting and reacting, which is hardly a way to lead anything.

Apple has plenty of cash on hand (more than $19 billion) so they wouldn't be offering the professional apps to raise money. Nor, given the recent improvements in Aperture, for example, does it appear that Apple has at all allowed the space to languish. Only in Apple's refusal to date to embrace Blu-ray media is it holding up the pace of development in this category. More on this later.

There are plenty of potential buyers for Apple's professional apps. As the former leader in video editing Avid would love to own Final Cut, for example, if only to kill it. Sony's Vegas editing package is hardly competitive, so that company might well want all the apps to shore up its own hardware sales, not just in computers but also broadcast equipment. So too Panasonic or any of a number of other Japanese companies that might want to add software expertise to their media hardware businesses. That's why Apple was shopping the programs at NAB.

So what's really happening here? Well clues have been accumulating for months and I have already written about some of them. Apple's decision to not yet ship systems with Blu-ray drives or even support third-party or external Blu-ray drives in its professional applications has caused consternation in the $4 billion event video industry where most copies of Final Cut Pro are actually used (Hollywood is the niche market here, while weddings dominate). This has hurt Mac sales and Final Cut sales, and since Steve Jobs isn't stupid it is probably deliberate. Apple wants to slow the success of Blu-ray, probably in hopes that downloads -- especially downloads via iTunes -- become the de facto method for delivering HD content. Still, we haven't yet seen iTunes offer wedding videos, have we? There must be another shoe to fall.

To my knowledge we haven't yet seen Apple include that H.264 video encoder/decoder chip that I have written Apple is committed to using across its entire Mac/iPod/iPhone line. Could they be inside the new iMacs that were just quietly launched? That would be interesting.

It seems obvious to me, however, that there is only one real reason why Apple would sell off its professional applications and that's to avoid antitrust problems when/if Apple buys Adobe Systems as I predicted at the beginning of the year. Final Cut Pro competes directly with Adobe Premiere. While in my opinion the Apple video software is clearly better, Jobs couldn't be at NAB trying to sell Premiere -- software he doesn't yet own. Maybe there's a planned bait-and-switch, seeing who is interested in Final Cut then trying to shift them to Premiere.

The major point here is that Adobe is in play, or at least Apple thinks so. The company has plenty of cash and stock to do the deal and plenty of incentive, too. Apple's goal in acquiring Adobe would be to control first Flash and second Adobe's emerging Air application platform. Adobe announced this week a broad industry initiative to extend Flash to mobile devices, but Apple wasn't a participant. Why bother if you intend to shortly own Flash outright?

Owning Flash and merging it with QuickTime would give Apple near-total dominance of Internet video, furthering the advantages of iTunes and shoring up in the process the iPod franchise. They'd be giving up a sports car in Final Cut Pro, but end up effectively owning the road instead.

Why would Apple, having already jumped from PowerPC to Intel, spend $278 million to buy a company that is best known for designing PowerPC chips? Are they preparing to dump Intel? No. Does it have anything to do with Intel? Yes.

This deal has Steve Jobs' fingerprints all over it. His first formal position at Apple was as head of purchasing and Jobs was known for pushing suppliers to ever lower component prices. He still brings to his work a purchasing manager's perspective and a desire to beat up suppliers whenever possible. So in that sense this acquisition is all about Intel. And the purchase price, which probably appeared to have been pulled right out of the air by Jobs, who then wouldn't budge from the figure, is really based on Apple's target savings over the next two years after forcing Intel to cut prices based on fear of a possible Apple switch back to PowerPC.

"We got it for free!" I'm sure someone at Apple said after factoring in the expected Intel price cuts. There is nothing that makes Jobs happier than forcing one supplier to effectively finance its own demise. It's that Devil thing again.

Whether PA Semi cost $1 or $278 million, Apple still has to DO something with the company and its technology and there has been some speculation that we're looking at the next iPhone chip, or perhaps the one after. That is very unlikely. PA Semi has aimed at workstation and server and high-power embedded chips that use far too much power for any iPhone. And while many pundits argue (and PA Semi even told some of its customers) that Apple was mainly acquiring intellectual property (IP), companies aren't typically bought that way these days. They are purchased for what they have already completed, not for what they might do in the future. There's a PA chip that Apple wants very badly but it won't go in an iPhone.

The fact that PA Semi told its customer that the purchase was about IP is meaningless. How could they know the motivation of this purchaser, especially THIS purchaser?

Of course that doesn't mean Apple couldn't switch to PA silicon for the iPhone over time. Once Apple has in-house this considerable design capability there is no limit to the good it could do on all platforms. But it is very unlikely -- almost impossible -- that this acquisition was based with the iPhone in mind.

Then why did Apple do it?

In the short term, it was to scare Intel into lowering prices by at least $278 million over two years. And in the long term it was to create a replacement for Intel as the prime CPU for Macintosh computers.

Here's the important part: CPU architectural advances are achieving minimal returns these days. It is all about multiple cores and clock rates, nothing else. This means that Intel chips are a commodity, and have become effectively interchangeable with those of AMD. I'm sure partisans on both sides would disagree, but my statement is still true. Except at the very top end of each product line, you can always find an equivalent Intel or AMD chip through balancing numbers of cores and clock rates. All that really varies is the price and that does darned little.

This commoditization means that what keeps Apple buying from Intel and Intel alone is only one thing -- money. Through whatever combination of discounts, non-recurring engineering, co-marketing funds, whatever, Intel is cheaper for Apple than would be AMD at this time. And as the only big all-Intel PC shop any more, now that Dell has succumbed, Apple has special value to Intel -- value worth $238+ million to retain.

But Apple having value for Intel doesn't at all mean that Intel has value for Apple. When it came to jumping from the PowerPC a few years ago, Apple had incentives on all sides. IBM was incapable of shipping PowerPC chips that would run reliably at higher clock speeds while Intel was already approaching 3 GHz. Intel was offering to throw money at Apple while IBM was distracted by manufacturing the PS3's Cell processor, based on PowerPC hardware and built in the same fab. Intel was offering higher performance at lower prices, so Apple made the jump. It was price and clock and nothing else and that's key, because Intel would like us to believe the X86 architecture played a role, too, which it didn't.

Apple is not in the least tied to the Industry Standard Architecture (ISA). Oh it worked out well and has helped Apple sell computers into Windows shops because of Boot Camp and the ability to run Windows as well as any desktop from Dell or HP, but this advantage is fading fast with the increasing popularity of virtualization.

Where Windows now runs better on an ISA (X86) chip, because that's what Windows was designed for, we are rapidly approaching the point where desktop virtualization will allow us to throw multiple cores at the problem, removing forever the X86 advantage, even for Windows.

The scenery is even more compelling looking from the other direction. Where X86 offers no true advantages for running OS X, it is easy to see that it could offer DISADVANTAGES, simply because OS X, as a Unix variant, was never designed specifically for X86, making a lot of Intel hardware simply unnecessary. If there are instructions that will never be used, why spend the silicon real estate to hard code them? CPUs optimized for OS X would be smaller, cheaper, and use less power than any Intel or AMD alternative simply because they could be simpler overall.

Which brings us back to PA Semi. In a world of multiple cores and high clock rates, PA Semi can produce a family of processors to drive everything from the Apple TV to the most powerful Xserve. Because they are not X86 compatible, these chips will run OS X faster on a per-watt basis, which is key for a computing world going largely mobile. Because they'll be Apple designs built on a competitive basis by almost any of the world's fabs, these processors will be cheaper MIPS-for-MIPS than anything Apple could buy from Intel or AMD, which Apple will convert into a profit-margin advantage, not lower system prices. If Windows performance suffers, that can be handled by adding more cores, but most users won't even notice.

Heck, by that time Windows will probably be virtualized anyway (what Microsoft should have spent five years and $5 billion on instead of Vista).

Apple is not tied to Intel or to X86. Jobs said they had OS X running on Intel for two years before announcing the shift, so it is logical to assume they have recompiled the OS to run on almost every competitive processor available today. OS X on the PS3? I'm sure it is running in an Apple lab.

Apple has changed processor families twice before in the Macintosh era so it is more likely, not less, that they will change again. It's even possible we'll see a jump to AMD for some machines before the final days of Apple/Intel. But just as the Intel changeover took a year and was predicted to take two, we're 3-4 years out on this transition. Your next Mac will probably have an Intel CPU, but the one after will be all Apple, through and through.

What led me to write this column were the troubles of a local company here in Charleston -- American LaFrance, the storied maker of fire engines. American LaFrance was last year spun off from Freightliner, the big truck manufacturer, which agreed to maintain the company's computer systems for a few months while the new American LaFrance bought its own systems with the help of a big IT consultant that rhymes with I-B-M. At the time of the cutover the project was months late and millions over budget. The company suddenly had no idea where it stood in any part of its business and today is in bankruptcy likely as a result. The company is close to failure probably because a consultant didn't perform as it promised. The consultant didn't perform as it promised most likely because there was no way to do so and still make money on the contract, which was underbid.

Who does YOUR IT consultant really work for?

So here's my guide to the various types of consultants, what to look for, and how to get the most good and the least bad for your money.

There are generally three types of IT consultants, which I'll simply label A, B, and C.

Type A consultants are hired to do a specific thing -- set up an email system, design and install a network, put in a POS system, etc. Usually the customer knows what they want before they find a Type A consultant to hire.

Sometimes a customer does not know what they want. These customers start with a Type B consultant who is supposed to help them think out of THEIR box, develop an improved business or IT vision, etc. In the early days when finding ways to improve things was easier, good consultants came to a new customer armed with benchmark data. They could look at a company's various departments and give some good guidance on what areas needed work. They'd tell a customer they were spending too much or not enough on xyz. One of the biggest roles of this type of consultant was to help sell the eventual plan to upper management and secure funding.

These days it is doubtful that most Type B consultants can provide any good ideas. They are mostly expert at being salespeople. The solutions they offer are often what their firms have to sell -- not necessarily what the customer actually needs. This can get exciting when it comes time to implement the project, as Type B consultants tend to be very poor project managers. They don't fully understand the technology they are selling so overruns are common.

There is another class of consultants that are mostly project managers, which we'll call Type C. These folks are brought in as contractors to help implement a given project. The good ones are like Attila the Hun and can get things done even in a very uncooperative environment. They don't care about making and keeping friends, just getting the job done. This is both good and bad. Good project management is important, but equally important is the environment. Getting Attila may be a case of treating the symptom and not the problem. Why is it so hard to get things done in your company? Could that be what is really holding back your business?

Far too often projects fail at the requirements phase. That was most likely the case with American LaFrance. The new organization was probably incapable of setting its own requirements and the consultant didn't help.

The next common problem in managing both IT projects and the consultants who usually do those projects is scope. Projects are often too grand by design or by default due to a lack of requirements. In either case you don't know you've bitten off too much until it is too late. This causes many problems and often destroys the ROI value of the project.

Remember that more than 50 percent of big IT projects fail completely with an ROI of zero percent, so while succeeding is good, not failing is even better.

The best consulting efforts are the ones that take a long hard look at the ROI and have a proven track record of making it happen.

The best consultant I ever knew was Christine Comaford-Lynch, who is now an author and a VC and no longer does IT consulting at all. A key part of her success was her requirements gathering process. She turned it into a very effective collaboration effort involving the key people who would use the software. The requirements would be tight, the project would be highly focused, and there would be little or no scope creep. When it came time to implement the project her project managers didn't have to be Attila's -- there was cooperation and enthusiasm. The training and start up of the application was quicker and easier. There were few surprises that needed to be fixed.

The Holy Grail of IT has long been the convergence of applications and databases into a unified environment where everything would work together. The original hope was to use relational databases and base all future applications on them. Next was the ERP wave. Talk about a huge and expensive effort! Putting in ERP was like a Borg invasion. Today we have SOA, which is even more complicated and expensive code that is supposed to be the glue between disparate applications and databases. Most of these approaches follow the classic computer industry business model -- make the customer spend lots of money and invest in lots of consultant time.

There is an easier way to do this stuff. The best consultants are the ones who come with a portfolio of products and tools. Their trick is to have a really good portfolio of stuff that really works, is really good, and can be sold and implemented quickly in a very cost-effective way. So it isn't necessarily a bad thing at all when a consultant offers to sell you tools, as long as they are the right tools and the consultant really knows how to use them.

What's key to my simplified concept of IT consulting is adapting a limited number of very robust and proven products and to do it all in a reasonable amount of time. Having fewer choices is vital because many companies will spend months or years making a decision. And some consulting firms will bill these clients a small fortune as things drag on.

Now to the 10 most frequent lies told by IT consultants. When you hear these lines spoken you have two alternatives: 1) fire the consultant on the spot, and; 2) bring your smartest and most crotchety nerds into the room and make the consultant explain his or her statement to their satisfaction then back it up with some performance guarantee and penalty clause.

1) "This can only be accomplished through a large custom development project."

2) "Of course your data is safe."

3) "We'll need a day or two for optimization and debugging."

4) "Yes, we've done this before. There are several companies using this product (or technology). They really like it."

5) "Server consolidation and virtualization will save you money."

6) "Storage consolidation and virtualization will save you money."

7) "The upgrade (or change) will be seamless and will not affect production."

8) "The upgrade (or change) will be transparent to users."

9) "Yes, we tested this thoroughly before installing it."

10) "If you install Tivoli it will solve all your support problems."

PreEmptive Solutions is a software tools company from Ohio that is best known for its DashO and Dotfuscator products, which are used to obfuscate and to some extent optimize bytecodes for Java and .NET applications, respectively. These interpreted programming environments, where a lot of corporate development is done today, are especially vulnerable because the program code is exposed and can easily be copied or messed with. Obfuscation makes such code theft harder to accomplish by changing the appearance of the code, though not its operation. It's hard to track program logic when every variable -- no matter what the actual value -- is called "a" for example.

PreEmptive has added to its latest version of Dotfuscator what it calls "Runtime Intelligence" -- that ability to send data or to call for help when there is trouble with an obfuscated application.

But wait, there's more! Application failure is only one of many possible triggering events for Runtime Intelligence. It can be triggered by a crash but also by a user exit: why did you choose to close the application? This makes it faster and more reliable to gather data from beta releases and make product improvements, for example. Now it is possible to evaluate what users do and don't use in a beta product, where they stopped working, what features were ignored, etc. Why put a lot of effort into a feature that users apparently don't even care about?

The triggering and reporting code is added after the application, itself, is completely finished. This means you can add these services without modifying or even having access to source code. Adding this code, since it happens as part of obfuscation and optimization, not only doesn't make the application bigger, it usually makes the application code smaller and therefore faster to load and run.

While end-users may not have even heard of Dotfuscator, this doesn't mean it isn't already running in some version on their PCs. As part of Microsoft's Development Environment for .NET (though not from Microsoft, interestingly), Dotfuscator or the hooks to run it are in every Windows machine that has currently installed at least one .NET application. So for Windows users, this capability is probably already sitting on their desks.

This would be a good point to say that I have no personal financial interest in PreEmptive Solutions. I just like their products.

What about privacy? What about my data? Doesn't this Runtime Intelligence stuff make me vulnerable to everything from identity theft to mind control by Bill Gates?

Probably not. In most cases it is opt-in, so you can decide not to participate. What generally counts to software companies is statistical significance, so if you opt out of reporting a beta problem chances are enough other people will have stayed in to report all the big bugs. Also Runtime Intelligence is primarily offered as a service by PreEmptive, so the data first goes to them, where it is aggregated and any identity information removed. Corporate users can choose to gather data to their own servers, but since they are also probably reading your e-mail, that horse has already left the barn. Remember there is no specific freedom of speech or even right to privacy in corporate life.

Let me repeat that in case it came as a surprise: there is no freedom of speech or even right to privacy in corporate life.

One area where this new capability will find wide use is in the sale of software, itself. The software business has changed dramatically in the last decade and most applications are today sold or delivered online and the sales cycle generally begins with a potential customer downloading a demo version. It is in the interest of the software company to convert as many of those demos as possible into paid versions and Runtime Intelligence can help that happen.

Evaluation copies are, for most software companies, a black hole. At best the company can hope to learn through activation of the program that it has been used to at least some extent, but that's it. An otherwise very motivated customer could miss the opportunity to buy simply through distraction or a mistake in using the program. Runtime Intelligence, in contrast, can report back to a CRM system when and how an evaluation version has been used. But even more importantly, it will often show exactly when and where the customer STOPPED using the demo, which could indicate a bug or part of the application that could use improvement. The result is more data, more information, and ultimately more sales.

I think Runtime Intelligence will become an important part of building applications in future.

A very different approach to the same kind of problem was presented this week by Google with its Google App Engine. In this instance, of course, the applications run entirely in the Google computing cloud so there is not much to download or even to, frankly, administer. But if your Python coding is good enough it is easy to see how you could emulate parts of the Runtime Intelligence functions I've just covered from PreEmptive. This is very seductive for developers. Let Google sweat the hard stuff, bearing the brunt of scaling your app to galaxy class. But like Amazon's EC2, which competes in a similar space, Google's App Engine is a work very much in progress.

Dave Winer calls Python "the new BASIC" and I suppose he's right, especially in its BASIC-like choice to abandon thirty years of C, C++, Java, and C# technology for a different path. But there will always be new languages and new approaches to computing. What I think we have here that's truly new with Google's App Engine is a company with deep pockets willing to spend some real money to push its own cloud agenda combined with some new technology that is, because of the nature of the service, entirely hidden from us.

Simply put, Google has made some enormous technical breakthroughs using the new multi-core processors. New platforms that use massive numbers of cores and even more massive numbers of program threads per core have led to performance increases in Google's plant that make it possible to roll out services like the Google App Engine. This is an instance not so much of brute force but of brute elegance. But if you are Google what do you do? Do you share these new ideas with your competitors? Not if you can help it. You EMBODY them in new services where the cogs and gears are hidden. It's strategic for Google and important enough that they'll do whatever it takes to make the platform attractive to us while also doing whatever it takes to keep us from knowing how it really works.

Every generation disapproves of the one that follows and barely claims to understand the generation that follows that. It's the way we are, simply because we tend to see everything in the context of our own experience -- an experience that is changed by age, the times we grew up in, and yes by technology. I'm from the Baby Boom generation and we, by our sheer numbers, have had an inordinate effect on what it means to be "perfect in every way." But our time is passing quickly just as technology explodes after 50 years of Moore's Law. The result is technology that will shortly be beyond us but not beyond the generations that follow. Our grandchildren will run a world very different from the one we ran and many institutions will simply have to adjust or die.

This is the third and, I promise, last week of my look at education and technology. In the two previous weeks we established that there is a generational transition happening that is already having a profound destabilizing effect on education. Parents who are today in their 20s -- parents of the kids who go to school with my three sons ages 6, 3 and 1 -- grew up with personal computers, mobile phones and video games. More importantly, THEIR PARENTS (our kids, except for those of dirty old men like me) did, too.

This new generation of parents lives in a digital world and has little patience with analog traditions. Where we think of bricks and books they think of electrons and photons. Where we remember what time the library opens, they wonder why it should ever close. The world will shortly be more theirs than ours and they'll be calling the shots with the result that many aspects of life, including education, will change forever. This is inevitable and can't be halted.

Nor is it even appropriate or good for it to be halted, which is one point some readers have trouble understanding. If you can't stop the tide, it is a waste of resources even to try.

This emerging world will be very different in many ways. How many of these kids expect to someday earn a pension? Surveys show that few of them expect Social Security to even survive until their retirement -- if they can ever retire at all. Where we went through a couple career changes they'll go through half a dozen or more in a life that will outlast ours by 20 years. Growing up is changing from becoming what you will be to becoming what you will be for a while, and that has a huge impact on the educational requirements placed on our society.

If you expect to start your career over half a dozen times, how do you prepare for careers 2-6?

As we learned last week from the Amish, there are very efficient educational models out there. Few would look to the Amish as role models yet they are remarkably good at what they do.

Part of any answer is figuring out what education is for. We use it for paying dues, for passing time until a certain level of maturity is reached. We use it for networking and finding mates. We use it for acting goofy at the expense of our parents. And we use it, to some extent, to learn what we need to know to get by.

The question that has so far gone unanswered in this series, then, is how will we learn in the future?

It's easy for old farts like me to assume everybody will learn the way we did, but that's unlikely simply because the underlying assumptions are changing. When I was a kid human labor was cheap and technology was expensive. Today technology is cheap and getting cheaper, while human labor is expensive and becoming more so. Yet our model of education technology is still so defined by that remembered Apple IIe in the corner of the classroom that is it difficult for many to imagine truly pervasive educational technology.

This is in large part because there is no way that Apple IIe or any PC is going to somehow expand to replace books and teachers and classrooms. For education, the personal computer is probably a dead end. It's not that we won't continue to have and use PCs in schools, but the market and intellectual momentum clearly lie elsewhere.

So forget about personal computers: the future of education probably lies with digital games.

I say "digital games" rather than "video games" or "PC games," or "handheld games," because the platform doesn't matter as much as the application. Whether it is a PC or Mac, xBox or PS3, PSP or Nintendo DS, gaming has done an excellent job of proving that the application is more important than the platform on which it runs.

Stories came out this week from the NPD Group announcing that 72 percent of Americans play PC or video games with 58 percent of those played online. Those numbers -- which apparently don't include kids, by the way -- are HUGE and explain all by themselves much of what is happening to traditional mass media like TV, magazines and newspapers.

We're spending so much time playing games that we don't have as much time for those older pursuits. Only drive-time radio thrives and that's just because we don't have a practical model for playing games while driving.

Digital games are a bigger business than Hollywood movies, than book publishing, than television, than music.

And at a time when what we're decrying is the lack of attention our children and grandchildren are paying to traditional modes of education, they are spending hundreds of hours learning to steal virtual cars and play lead air guitar.

Clearly the best instructional platform is one that already attracts users to spend countless hours in its mastery. At this point it is a relatively simple matter to bend some games to the will of education and training.

While I can describe this and even advocate it, I can't do it, myself. I'm simply too old. Studies show there are gamers and non-gamers and I am definitely one of the latter. I've been a pilot for close to 40 years and I don't even like to play Flight Simulator. But that's my problem and that of people from my generation and older. My wife, who is 15 years younger than me, plays all the time.

It is easy to imagine how the PC and video game industries could teach us many things other than how to blast our opponents into infinity. If you play a Beowulf game for 20 hours and it includes all the characters and narrative of the book, will you have mastered the material well enough to pass a test? Probably.

I am not saying schools will disappear. I AM saying that new modes of instruction will emerge and they will inevitably involve processing power and context. We took our kids to Washington, D.C. for Spring Break and I would have loved to outfit them with MP3 players loaded with age-appropriate descriptions of what we saw. That's just scratching the surface.

The success of the Nintendo Wii game system is important to this emerging change in education because the Wii is the first game system based on an extremely flexible user experience. It's not an especially powerful game platform compared with the PS3 or xBox 360, but it is adaptable and user friendly. People want to do new stuff with their Wii's, so why not use them to learn?

Add to this mobile data and communication and we're back to what John Scully of Apple called so many years ago a Personal Digital Assistant. Scully was 15 years ahead of his time and didn't know it. But the PDA that actually works, if I've done my Moore's Law calculation correctly, will be at least 1,024 times as powerful as that original Newton.

My vision for future digital education has a key difference from traditional 20th century education. A fundamental aspect of education has always been that it comes to abrupt and quite specific endpoints associated with various cultural rites of passage. We graduate. There is a first day of school and a last day of school. At some highly specific and anticipated moment we disconnect from the education mother ship and go off on our own, often never to return.

Why?

Well to make room in school for someone else, of course.

Why?

In my future model the "school" is only a PC/game machine/mobile phone/headset thingee that clues me in about everything around me and helps me learn what I need to know. Why would I ever give that up?

The truth is we won't. If we have more students, we just build more devices. Classrooms aren't absolutely necessary, nor will location even matter.

My proposed model for future education is actually based on the home life of Ozzy Osbourne. Remember The Osbournes on MTV? Who were those kids always hanging out with young Jack and Kelly Osbourne? Remember, they were slightly older and substantially smarter and better looking but not so much better looking as to be threatening. They hung out with Jack and Kelly but clearly answered to Sharon Osbourne. Why would these cooler kids even bother with Jack and Kelly? They were Osbourne employees, hand-selected playmates intended to keep dropouts Jack and Kelly safe and learning after a fashion. They were the flesh-and-blood versions of a true Personal Digital Assistant that any parent would hire if they had Ozzy's money.

Now turn that model into a Bluetooth headset. Imagine a 24/7 mobile Google with a conscience. "Do you really think this is such a good idea, Bob?"

It's your favorite teacher with you all the time but with an ON-OFF switch. "Well if you really insist on trying to fly this Huey helicopter -- AND I CERTAINLY RECOMMEND AGAINST IT -- start by putting your right hand on that lever attached to the floor, which is called a cyclic."

I grew up in the time warp that was Wayne County, Ohio, in the 1950s. Back then at least the majority of the population of Wayne County was Amish, which is to say they didn't go to public school (or school at all after age 14), didn't drive cars or use electricity except to keep the dairy milk cool, didn't vote, bought as little as possible, sold as much as possible, and barely paid taxes. Wayne County was NOT the middle of nowhere, however, since Rubbermaid was headquartered there as was the Wooster Brush Company (world's largest maker of paint brushes), and Smucker's jams and jellies were just across the Holmes County line where there, too, the Amish were the silent majority.

Very little has changed since I was a kid. As my friend Henry from down the road in Mansfield, Ohio, points out, the Amish have been on this same "new" educational path forever. Their ability to produce nearly 100 percent productive citizens (and very nice furniture) for about fifty bucks per student per year is especially galling to those government schools that spend $16K and turn out a lot of slackers.

Most people would see the Amish as an anomaly, but I don't. I see the Amish as a particularly successful minority that picks and chooses how it will participate in modern life. We see a lot of this, especially internationally. Yes, the Amish have no army, but then neither do, in practical terms, many countries including some of our old enemies. The Amish do not suffer from avoiding public schools OR McDonalds. They live the life they have chosen to create.

Let's consider for a moment what many readers will find to be a politically incorrect position: because of cheap computers and the Internet, the ability to solve problems ad hoc has become more efficient than teaching kids about problems and issues that will never face them. As a result, the United States has let itself become less competitive by putting so much money into a product (a kid) making both its cost and its ability globally uncompetitive. So, instead of putting more effort into making globally competitive products, we put more effort into blaming those who are smarter at using technology that was mostly invented here.

If the idea is to give everyone a nice comfortable pension, if the same money invested each year in a typical kid's education was instead invested in an IRA, it would give that kid a very comfortable living upon reaching age 65.

Well this is a terrible position to take, don't you think? It treats our children like capital goods and denies them any ability to excel, dooming them to mediocrity.

Really?

My Mom (Mrs. Cringely to you) once said, "I may not have been the best mother, but at least I got all my kids through school."

"No you didn't," I replied (this is a true story, by the way). "We would have made it through school with or without you." And we would have.

Not wanting to put too much of a Libertarian spin on it, because I am certainly not a Libertarian, this is a fact that is missed by so many people. There will always be achievers, whether they go to public schools, private schools, home schools, magnet schools, charter schools, or no schools at all. While it is fine for society to create opportunities for advancement, what's more important is removing BARRIERS to advancement. And for the most part that's not what we are about.

What we tend to be about as a society is building power structures and most of those power structures, including schools and governments, are decidedly reactive. This is not all bad. After all, the poster child for educational and government proactivity in the 20th century may have been the Taliban in Afghanistan.

There will always be governments willing to take our money and then deciding to spend some of it in ways we wouldn't approve. That's probably an inevitable social cost of avoiding anarchy. But the idea that government has a lot of power to MAKE our kids become one way or another is only true to a very limited extent.

Our society will continue to create great artists, writers, scientists and engineers because people will be internally driven to greatness in all those fields. How many Picassos do you need in a society? How many Frank Lloyd Wrights? How many Einsteins? How many Bechtolscheims, Knuths, and Brins?

When high tech executives claim that we don't have enough visas for importing programmers from Asia, they are looking for talent by the ton, not by the neuron, yet neurons are what really matter in these things. So they are wrong, too.

Yes, it is important to go to MIT and, along with losing your pants in the Charles River, make social and professional connections that will help you later in life. But how do we measure the strength or efficacy of those connections? If it is in terms of monetary success, as we tend to measure things, then we'd be better off going to some big state school in the Midwest, because more top executives -- more top earners -- come from those schools than from MIT. If we measure success in terms of patents or awards or endowed professorships, there are schools that rate higher than MIT, too.

The fact is that going to MIT can be a life-changing experience and worth any price, but then so can be going to Champaign-Urbana or San Jose State. It's what you do with it.

In my book Accidental Empires I wrote about young Bob Metcalfe who, as an MIT undergraduate, was intimidated by a fraternity brother who could complete the entire New York Times crossword puzzle during breakfast without having to look up a word or linger over his coffee. He was master of his domain. Bob, who went on to invent Ethernet, found 3Com, and is now a rabid VC, was no slouch, either, but he was not the master of any domain, which actually came to be his strength. Because he wasn't the best and the brightest (while still being very bright), Bob had to learn how to work with people and ultimately had to create his own domain that he could master. Sometimes that's the way it is.

The key to last week's column and this one is generational change: it is happening and can't be avoided. The next generations will use technology even more than we do and they'll use it differently. This difference will form a feedback loop that will in turn alter the very structure of our society and its institutions. It may be no better to learn to write on a computer or by firelight on the back of a shovel as Abraham Lincoln was said to have done, but I'll stake what little reputation I still have on the fact that not many people in the future will be taking the shovel route.

As our wealth becomes less physical and more virtual, so will its disposition. Twenty years from now, when my more successful peers are getting old and starting to die, will they be putting their names on university libraries? Will there even BE university libraries then, I mean new ones? Google or Microsoft or Yahoo will have put all the books on disk and all the disks will be networked together and accessible from my house or yours. Then the library becomes, at best, a study hall. And since it is quieter to study at my house and the food is cheaper, too, maybe the library becomes just a place to hang out. This transition will not happen overnight, but it will happen, and then who will give millions to build new libraries? Nobody.

The fact is that we can't really predict with true accuracy what changes will happen in our society over the next 20-30 years, but we can make a good guess that technology will be involved with many of them. Yet there will always be a place for good old common sense.

A doctor in my town back in Ohio had built for himself a grand house, a real mansion, with a huge entrance hall and a sweeping staircase that floated down from the second floor to the first like some set from Gone With the Wind. The house was all built to the highest level of quality by the best craftsmen, only nobody in town (or even out of town) could build the sweeping banister for that grand staircase. It had to be laminated in a single piece of mahogany that somehow matched the curve of the staircase, a curve that had been drawn more by art than science. Nobody could build it.

So they called in the local Amish furniture maker. He came with his son and they spent a couple hours measuring with a ruler and a yardstick then went away and two weeks later returned with the completed banister on the back of their horse-drawn wagon. It slipped into place as if built on some CAD/CAM system, perfect in every way. How did they do it?

They took their measurements back to the farm and spent two days building in the barn a rough-hewn replica of the entire staircase, then laminated the rail in place. Of course it fit and without an algorithm in sight.

This is a war over how we as a culture and a society respond to Moore's Law.

The real power of Moore's Law lies in what the lady at the bank called "the miracle of compound interest," which has allowed personal computers to increase in performance a millionfold over the past 30 years. There's a similar, if slower, effect that governs the rate at which individuals are empowered by the technology they use. Called Cringely's Nth Law of Computing (because I have forgotten for the moment what law I am up to, whether it is five or six), it says that waves of technological innovation take approximately 30 years - one human generation - to be completely absorbed by our culture. That's 30 years to become an overnight sensation, 30 years to finally settle into the form most useful to society, 30 years to change the game.

The key word here is "empowerment." Technologies allow us to overcome limitations of time, distance, and physical capability, but they only empower us when they can be gracefully used by large, productive segments of our society. The telephone was empowering when we all finally got it. Now it is the Internet and digital communications.

Let's be clear about what we're measuring here. It has very little to do with specific technologies and everything to do with our adaptation to technology as a culture. What Cringely's Nth Law of Computing predicts is our rate of adaptation to technological life. This happens not at the rate technologies are developed but at the rate we are capable of broadly absorbing them. We've seen this sort of thing before, of course. I used to work in user interface design and noticed long ago that it took about a decade for every new interface standard to be absorbed by technical culture. This dates back a lot longer than most of us might guess, all the way back to microfilm readers in the 1960s. Older engineers couldn't stand reading microfilm while younger engineers found it effortless. Same for microfiche, which followed microfilm. The same effect could be found in typing: older people - mainly men - wouldn't adapt to it, but those who used a typewriter in high school or college quickly learned they could not live without it. Ditto for computers, first with batch processing, then time-sharing terminals, then command-line PCs, then graphical user interfaces, and now emerging mobile platforms. Each new technology is difficult for the older generation and easy for the younger, which explains why I am a PC master but a texting idiot. I'm just too damned old.

Here, buried in my sixth paragraph, is the most important nugget: we've reached the point in our (disparate) cultural adaptation to computing and communication technology that the younger technical generations are so empowered they are impatient and ready to jettison institutions most of the rest of us tend to think of as essential, central, even immortal. They are ready to dump our schools.

I came to this conclusion recently while attending Brainstorm 2008, a delightful conference for computer people in K-12 schools throughout Wisconsin. They didn't hold breakout sessions on technology battles or tactics, but the idea was in the air. These people were under siege.

I started writing educational software in 1978. The role of instructional technology has changed since then from a gimmick to a novelty to an effort to an essential component of any curriculum. Kids can't go to school today without working on computers. But having said that, in the last five years more and more technical resources have been turned to how to keep technology OUT of our schools. Keeping kids from instant messaging, then text messaging or using their phones in class is a big issue as is how to minimize plagiarism from the Internet. These defensive measures are based on the idea that unbound use of these communication and information technologies is bad, that it keeps students from learning what they must, and hurts their ability to later succeed as adults.

But does it?

These are kids who have never known life without personal computers and cell phones. But far more important, there is emerging a class of students whose PARENTS have never known life without personal computers and cell phones. The Big Kahuna in educational discipline isn't the school, it is the parent. Ward Cleaver rules. But what if Ward puts down his pipe and starts texting? Well he has.

Andy Hertzfeld said Google is the best tool for an aging programmer because it remembers when we cannot. Dave Winer, back in 1996, came to the conclusion that it was better to bookmark information than to cut and paste it. I'm sure today Dave wouldn't bother with the bookmark and would simply search from scratch to get the most relevant result. Both men point to the idea that we're moving from a knowledge economy to a search economy, from a kingdom of static values to those that are dynamic. Education still seems to define knowing as more important than being able to find, yet which do you do more of in your work? And what's wrong with crimping a paragraph here or there from Cringely if it shows you understand the topic?

This is, of course, a huge threat to the education establishment, which tends to have a very deterministic view of how knowledge and accomplishment are obtained - a view that doesn't work well in the search economy. At the same time K-12 educators are being pulled back by No Child Left Behind, they are being pulled forward (they probably see it as pulled askew) by kids abetted by their high-tech Generation Y (yes, we're getting well into Y) parents who are using their Ward Cleaver power not to maintain the status quo but to challenge it.

This is an unstable system. Homeschooling, charter schools, these things didn't even exist when I was a kid, but they are everywhere now. There's only one thing missing to keep the whole system from falling apart - ISO certification.

I've written about this for years and nobody ever paid attention, but ISO certification is what destroyed the U.S. manufacturing economy. With ISO 9000 there was suddenly a way to claim with some justification that a factory in Malaysia was precisely comparable to an IBM plant on the Hudson. Prior to then it was all based on reputation, not statistics. And now that IBM plant is gone.

Well reputation still holds in education, though its grip is weakening. I know kids from good families who left high school early with a GED because they were bored or wanted to enter college early. Maybe college is next.

MIT threw videos of all its lecture courses - ALL its lecture courses - up on the web for anyone to watch for free. This was precisely comparable to SGI (remember them?) licensing OpenGL to Microsoft. What is it, then, that makes an MIT education worth $34,986? Is it the seminars that aren't on the web? Faculty guidance? Research experience? Getting drunk and falling in the Charles River without your pants? Right now it is all those things plus a dimensionless concept of educational quality, which might well go out the window if some venture capitalist with too much money decides to fund an ISO certification process not for schools but for students.

The University of Phoenix is supposedly preparing a complete middle and high school online curriculum available anywhere in the world. I live in Charleston, SC where the public schools are atrocious despite spending an average of $16,000 per student each year. Why shouldn't I keep my kids at home and online, demanding that the city pay for it?

Because that's not the way we do it, that's why.

Well times are changing.

Steve Jobs rejects the idea of Apple making or distributing e-books because he says people don't read books. He's right, book readers are older. Young readers graze. They search. Look how they watch TV. Steve didn't say people are stupid or we're all going to Hell in a handbasket. He just said we don't read books.

Technology is beginning to assail the underlying concepts of our educational system - a system that's huge and rich and so far fairly immune to economic influence. But the support structure for those hallowed and not so hallowed halls has always been parents willing to pay tuition and alumni willing to give money, both of which are likely to change over a generation for reasons I've just spent 1469 words explaining. We are nearing the time when paying dues and embracing proxies for quality may give way having the ability to know what kids really know, to verify what they can really do, not as 365th in their class at Stanford but as Channing Cringely, who just graduated from nowhere with the proven ability to design time machines.

Apple has been a member of the Blu-ray camp practically since its inception. And remember 2005 -- Apple's "Year of HD," when the company declared allegiance at MacWorld in the company of Sony's chairman. So where are the drives, and what does Apple have to lose by providing them or not?

There's a tiny chicken-and-egg problem here in that Apple's professional applications don't yet support Blu-ray. Maybe they'll use that as an excuse, if a lame one. Clearly Apple has had plenty of time to make it possible to burn Blu-ray discs. As the dominant hardware and software vendor to the movie industry -- an industry EAGER to jump to Blu-ray -- it would appear to be in Apple's interest to be shipping those Blu-ray drives right now. So the fact that they aren't shipping has to be a conscious decision at Apple where, as we know, most big decisions -- conscious or not -- are made by Steve Jobs.

Before we attempt to calculate what's at risk here for Apple, let's think about what the company has to gain -- or what they might THINK they have to gain – by delaying. Apple clearly sees a huge part of its future in content distribution including TV shows and movies. I can only guess that Jobs sees Blu-ray as a threat to that download business and this decision to delay Blu-ray deployment is an expensive stalling action, buying time for Apple to launch its own true HD alternative.

Yes, you can download some movies from iTunes in 720p right now, but in the surging HD market 720p is no longer good enough. The obvious standard is 1080p and right now you need Blu-ray or BitTorrent to get that. Putting on my near-futurist hat, then, I'm guessing Apple is working madly to deploy its own 1080p download solution and is hoping the world will wait for it.

Jumping to 1080p is a huge challenge for iTunes. Just look at the comparative sizes of the QuickTime HD trailers for the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on Apple's own web site. The 480p trailer (that's standard definition and slightly better quality than the 640-by-480 shows most people download through iTunes now) requires 47 megabytes while the 720p file is 78 megabytes and the 1080p version requires 126 megabytes. The trailer runs just under two minutes (1:51). The three prior Indiana Jones films were 115, 118, and 126 minutes, respectively, so let's take the average and figure this new movie will come in right at two hours in length. Extrapolating from the size of the trailer, then, a good guess about the ultimate file size for the H.264 download versions of this upcoming blockbuster are 3048 megabytes, 5059 megabytes, and 8172 megabytes, respectively.

Apple faces a number of challenges offering files of this size for download, the least of which is economic. Yes, it will probably cost Apple four times as much to offer downloads of a 1080p version of a movie than its 640-by-480 version, but the market is already expecting to pay an HD premium, at least for a while, so money isn't really a major factor. The real speed bumps are the sheer impact of a true volume HD service on the Internet, itself, and the sad fact that most Macs can't even play 1080p video. They simply aren't powerful enough.

Apple isn't stupid, though, so it makes sense that they are preparing solutions to both problems. The download impact problem will probably be solved with a new iTunes infrastructure based not on Akamai but on Google. All those new Google data centers have to be for something more than just search and I have long surmised that their real intent is video distribution through peering deals with ISPs. This will be where the Apple-Google alliance finally shows itself.

Since Google is already testing their new $200 million data center near my home in South Carolina, I can only guess that this capability will be available shortly.

As for giving Macs enough grunt to play 1080p video, I explained more than a year ago that Apple has privately committed to putting an H.264 encoder/decoder chip in its entire range of machines. That specific chip began sampling last July so Apple should be able to start shipping the new Macs any time soon, certainly long before Christmas.

There is a huge opportunity here for Apple, taking a swipe at Blockbuster and NetFlix at the same time. There are tens of millions of new Macs to be sold, too, though most people will be able to participate by buying an Apple TV. Think about it. An Apple TV is cheaper than a Blu-ray player. Once you've bought the Apple TV, you're committed to the system, which is to say committed to NOT going with Blu-ray. This won't be the case with many techies, of course, but my Mom, once she buys something, sticks with it for a decade or more, and Mrs. Cringely watches a lot of movies.

So there's the upside, to grab control of the HD movie and TV download and rental infrastructure, making iTunes for video comparable to iTunes for audio in terms of market share.

But there's a downside, too, and it is bigger than one might guess. Apple is not in much danger of losing business in Hollywood. Yes, it would be convenient if TV and movie studios could avoid an additional step and simply burn Blu-ray discs out of Final Cut Pro, but that lack of utility won't be enough to drive them to a completely different platform. Steve knows he already owns Hollywood.

What Steve doesn't own and what is definitely at risk is the event video business, which is to say weddings. Here's where the numbers take an interesting turn. There are more copies of Final Cut being used today to edit wedding videos than are being used for broadcast and cable TV and movies -- a LOT more copies. Wedding videos are a $4 billion business in the U.S. alone and, unlike Hollywood, this is a business where the editing system typically also burns the DVDs that are distributed.

Wedding video makers are hot for HD, too, because it is a way to differentiate their work and charge a little more. Nearly all of them are Mac users. ALL of them want to move to HD distribution. And moving to HD is important enough that they just might switch from Apple if a compelling alternative is available.

So my advice to Apple and Steve Jobs is simple: hurry.

Jumping to a completely different subject, I learned something new this week about something old -- the origin of the term "bug," referring to a problem with computer hardware or software. The story I originally heard directly from the late Grace Hopper, the mother of COBOL, was that a malfunction in the Mark II computer at Harvard in 1947 was traced to a dead moth that in its last living act had shorted out a circuit card. They taped the moth carcass in the computer logbook and history was made. Only it wasn't, as I realized this week while reading the 1932 Flying and Glider Manual published back then by Modern Mechanics magazine.

"Once you have built your sportplane," wrote the editor, identified only as Andy, "it must be test flown. If you have already taken flying lessons, you can hop it yourself -- if not, entrust the job to a competent pilot. He'll put it through its paces and find out if there are any 'bugs' that need correcting before the plane goes into active service."

So much for Grace Hopper's version of the story.

It turns out that "bug" was a common term for hardware glitches and dates back to the 19th century and possibly before. Edison used the term in a letter he wrote in 1878. This is no earthshaking news, of course, but simply reminds me how self-centered we are as an industry and there really isn't much that's truly new.

I am beginning to think that Internet social networking is another CB radio, destined to crash and burn.

Social networking has a lot of problems as both a business and a cultural phenomenon. To start with there is generally no true business model. This can vary a bit from application to application but most are vying simply for eyeballs and hoping for Google ads to pay the bills until Time Warner or News Corp make them an acquisition offer they can't refuse. That might be okay for Facebook or MySpace and maybe Linked-In, but there are more than 350 general-purpose social networks out there and I will guarantee you that no more than 5 percent of those will be still operating two years from today.

If you are a social networking entrepreneur and your operation isn't among the top 10, I'd be either looking frantically for an acquirer or turning your site into a social networking aggregator, linking to many others in exactly the way the chat networks appear to be merging while still retaining their individual identities.

Then there is the annoyance factor, which for me is rapidly accelerating as the major social networks try to establish themselves as hosts for third-party applications. This would appear to be a no-brainer tactic for the two or three social networks that are likely to survive. In fact I could argue that what is more likely to survive than most social networks are the truly compelling applications that run upon them, eventually subsuming their hosts. But in the meantime there is all this annoying crap. How many groups do you have to join, how many causes do you have to support, how many silly applications do you have to run until you come to realize that you are being included TO DEATH?

My idea for the perfect Facebook app, for example, is one I call "I've Fallen and I Can't Get Up!" It's a variation on Twitter that is activated ONLY when one participant needs other participants to call 9-1-1 on his or her behalf. Maybe it could be linked to a panic button or to your cardiac pacemaker. The perfect Facebook application, then, is one you hope you'll never have to use. This is far better than the typical Facebook app, which is overused to the point where people withdraw or simply stop noticing.

It's not that I don't see value to social networks, it's that I generally don't see ENOUGH value. Yes, keeping my address book synchronized with reality is nice, but isn't that likely to be shortly absorbed into the operating system or perhaps into networked applications like Gmail and Yahoo Mail?

This trend has happened over and over as hundreds of portals came and went, leaving a few survivors. Same for hundreds of search engines, hundreds of free e-mail services, etc., etc.

Marshall McLuhan argued that obsolete communication technologies survive as art forms. This is true, I'd say, for Morse code and movable type printing and perhaps even for your venerable Rolodex or typewriter. But it isn't yet true for CB radio, nor for most Internet technologies. Maybe they aren't old enough yet to be appreciated. In the case of CB I think range of reception limits the possible population of players to something less than an artistic critical mass.

What will likely happen to social networking is that some applications will survive on a more modest basis than now (used by the trucker equivalents), others will morph into some new Next Big Thing as their more compelling sub-applications take over, and true hard-core social networkers will jump to more advanced technologies that eliminate the riff-raff. In the meantime, 70 percent or so of most social networking functionality -- the really useful functionality -- will be sucked into the dominant portal/search/e-mail/chat/social networks like MSN and Yahoo.

This next transition will happen faster than most people realize. Part of this is because Internet product cycles have been shortening for the past several years, so each generation is shorter than the one before. This hasn't mattered much because the audience has continued to expand. And even now as Internet growth in terms of new users is slowing, that's more than made up for by the shift of advertising budgets from print and broadcast to the net. So while the growth in users is decreasing, the growth in total revenue PER user is increasing. But so is the competition, hence the shorter product cycles.

The tip-off that we're nearing the end of a cycle is the flight to quality we're seeing from some of the bigger players. At Facebook, for example, you can no longer register using an e-mail address from an anonymous mail site like Mailinator, Operamail, or Countermail. Facebook demands that you take an extra three minutes and get a Yahoo Mail or AOL mail address for example. This is clearly the company pruning its subscribers in anticipation of an acquisition in the next couple quarters. There is no other reason to do it. MySpace isn't doing it despite a very real sex offender scandal, but then MySpace has already been sold and Facebook hasn't yet.

Once Facebook has been taken and one or two others, the golden era of social networking acquisitions will be over and the entrepreneurs will be headed for that Next Big Thing.

"Breaker Port 80! Do you have your ears on?"

I'm perfectly happy for IBM to introduce a great new mainframe computer. It's just that the 85 percent faster, 85 percent smaller and a little bit cheaper z10 is coming three years after the z9, and Moore's Law says sister machines that far apart ought to be 200 percent faster, not 85 percent -- a fact that IBM managed to ignore while touting the new machine's unsubstantiated equivalence to 1,500 Intel single-processor servers.

Where were the hard questions? Did anyone do the math? The tricked-out z10 that's the supposed equivalent of 1,500 beige boxes costs close to $20 million, which works out to $13,333 per beige box -- hardly a cost savings. Even taking into account the data center space savings, power savings, and possibly (far from guaranteed) savings on administration, the z10 really isn't much of a deal unless you use it for one thing and one thing only -- replacing a z9.

So the newfangled mainframe is really just an oldfangled mainframe after all, which I am sure is comforting for folks who like to buy oldfangled mainframes.

But those sketchily described IBM benchmarks are, themselves, dubious. IBM never fully explains its own benchmarks nor does it even allow others to benchmark IBM mainframe computers. So nobody really knows how fast the z10 is or how many Intel boxes it can replace if those boxes are actually DOING something.

Remember the stories folks like me wrote a few years back about an earlier IBM mainframe running 40,000+ instances of SUSE Linux under VM on one machine? I wonder how many of those 40,000 parallel Linux images were simultaneously running Doom? My guess is none were.

Far more interesting to me is the vastly increasing utility of Linux as what I would consider a mainframe-equivalent operating system, primarily due to the open source OS's newfound skill with multiple threads that goes a long way toward making efficient use of those multi-core processors we all are so excited to buy yet barely use.

As I wrote a few weeks ago in a column on semiconductor voltage leakage of all things, all this multi-core stuff is really about keeping benchmark performance up while keeping clock speeds down so the CPUs don't overheat. Unlike the benchmark programs, most desktop applications still run on a single processor core and have no good way to take efficient advantage of this extra oomph.

But that's changing. Linux used to be especially bad at dealing with multiple program threads for example -- so bad the rule of thumb was it simply wasn't worth even trying under most conditions. But that was with the archaic Linux 2.4 kernel. Now we have Linux 2.6 and a new library called NPTL or Native POSIX Thread Library to change all that.

NPTL has been in the enterprise versions of Red Hat Linux for a while, but now it is here for the rest of us, too. With NPTL, hundreds of thousands of threads on one machine are now very possible. And where it used to be an issue when many threads competed for data structures (think about 1,000 threads all trying to update a hash table), we now have data structures where no thread waits for any other. In fact, if one thread gets swapped out before it's done doing the update, the next thread detects this and helps finish the job.

The upshot is superior performance IF applications are prepared to take advantage.

"My e-mail application runs on a four-core Opteron server," says a techie friend of mine, "but I've seen it have over 4,000 simultaneous connections - 4,000 separate threads (where I'm using "thread" to describe a lightweight process) competing for those four CPU's. And looking at the stats, my CPUs are running under five percent almost all the time. This stuff really has come a long way."

But not nearly as far as Azul Systems has gone in ITS redefinition of the mainframe -- extending further than any other company, as far as I can tell, models for thread management and process concurrency.

Azul makes custom multi-core server appliances. You can buy a 14u Azul box with up to 768 processor cores and 768 gigabytes of memory. The processors are of Azul's own design, at least for now.

But what's a server appliance? In the case of Azul, the appliance is a kind of Java co-processor that sits on the network providing compute assistance to many different Java applications running on many different machines.

Java has always been a great language for writing big apps that can be virtualized across a bunch of processors or machines. But while Java was flexible and elegant, it wasn't always very fast, the biggest problem being processor delays caused by Java's automatic garbage collection routines. Azul handles garbage collection in hardware rather than in software, making it a continuous process that keeps garbage heap sizes down and performance up.

Language geeks used to sit around arguing about the comparative performance of Java with, say, C or C++ and some (maybe I should actually write "Sun") would claim that Java was just as fast as C++. And it was, for everything except getting work done because of intermittent garbage collection delays. Well now Azul -- not just with its custom hardware but also with its unique multi-core Java Virtual Machine -- has made those arguments moot: Java finally IS as fast as C++.

But for that matter there is no reason to believe that Azul's architecture has to be limited to Java, either, and can't be extended to C++, too.

To me what's exciting here is Azul's redefinition of big iron. That z10 box from IBM, for example, can look to the network like 1,500 little servers running a variety of operating systems. That's useful to a point, but not especially flexible. Azul's appliance doesn't replace servers in this sense of substituting one virtualized instance for what might previously have been a discrete hardware device. Instead, Azul ASSISTS existing servers with their Java processing needs with the result that fewer total servers are required.

Servers aren't replaced, they are made unnecessary at a typical ratio of 10-to-one, according to Azul. So what might have required 100 blade servers can be done FASTER (Azul claims 5-50X) with 10 blade servers and an Azul appliance. Now that Azul box is not cheap, costing close to $1,000 per CPU core, but that's comparable to blade server prices and vastly cheaper than mainframe power that isn't nearly as flexible.

And flexibility is what this is all about, because Azul's assistance is provided both transparently and transiently. Java apps don't have to be rewritten to accept assistance from the Azul appliance. If it is visible on the network, the appliance can assist ANY Java app, with that assistance coming in proportion to the amount of help required based on the number of cores available.

Now imagine how this would work in a data center. Unlike a traditional mainframe that would take over from some number of servers, the Azul box would assist EVERY server in the room as needed, so that you might need a big Azul box for every thousand or so servers, with that total number of servers dramatically diminished because of the dynamically shared overhead.

This is simply more efficient computing -- something we don't often see.

There are other concurrency architectures out there like Appistry (which I wrote about back when it was called Tsunami before we unfortunately HAD a Tsunami -- what sort of marketing bad luck is that?). But where Appistry spreads the compute load concurrently across hundreds or thousands of computers, Azul ASSISTS hundreds or thousands of servers or server images with their compute requirements as needed.

Bear Stearns runs its back office with Azul assistance, but many customers use Azul boxes to accelerate their websites.

Since I am not a big company guy who cares very much about what big companies do, what I see exciting about Azul's approach is how it could be applied in the kinds of data centers where I am typically renting either virtual or dedicated servers. If an Azul box were installed on that network, my little app would instantly and mysteriously run up to 50 times faster.

Cool.

My T-Bird was built at the absolute apex of 20th century electromechanical automotive technology. A convertible, it has a fully automatic electric top that relies on eight electrical relays firing in sequence to put the top up or down. Here's the typical (and inevitable) failure mode. I'm at the beach with the top down. It starts to rain. Quickly I run to the car, start it, and hit the button to raise the top. First the suicide trunk lid opens until it is fully vertical. Next the electric tonneau cover opens until it is vertical, too. Then the canvas top begins to retract, raising until it, too, is vertical, at which point everything grinds to a halt and I drive my car home in the pouring rain at five miles per hour, traffic honking behind me, and all three broken parts sticking eight feet into the sky.

Victim to a succession of good and bad mechanics, some well-intentioned but all in it for the money, I have spent thousands of dollars over the years replacing electrical parts -- window motors, switches, relays for both the top and the sequential tail lights -- all to little avail. New parts failed as quickly as old parts. Eventually I abandoned all hope of viewing my car as a restoration and replaced the relays with brilliant little computers from British Columbia. Now the hydraulics worked beautifully but all it really meant was that the top no longer failed in mid-sequence: it would either work fine or not at all.

When you've replaced everything else the problem has to be with what's left, which in the case of my car was the wires, themselves. Over the years the wires had somehow corroded inside their insulation and the terminals had lost their mojo. I had been replacing perfectly good switches and motors (and knowledgeable folks had been selling me switches and motors) that would have been helped more by simply replacing the terminals or, better still, the wires. Some experts think Ford just got a bad batch of wire back in 1966 -- that this problem is isolated -- but I don't care. So what if my car is two years older than my wife? All her parts seem to be working just fine, why shouldn't my T-Bird?

Which brings me to you, or rather to all of your soldered devices that are two years old or less. Most of these are now assembled using solder joints that have no lead in an effort to save our groundwater and our health. The fact that the lead has been generally replaced with silver or bismuth, both of which are actually greater health risks than lead, well we'll leave that one for Ralph Nader if he decides not to run for President. The longer-term trend is toward all-tin connections, anyway, but they don't work very well, either.

I wrote a column about this back in 2004 (it's in this week's links) that was heavy on information and therefore low on readership. Everything in that column has come to pass and more. Where's my Pulitzer Prize?

Costs have gone up, mean time between failures (MTBF) has gone down (accelerated MTBF tests, which are the only MTBF tests we do anymore, don't reliably pick this up, by the way), and reliability has suffered. Since we don't fix things anymore, it’s hard to say whether your gizmo failed because of bad solder or not, but the problem is becoming worse as a greater percentage of total circuits in use have lead-free solder. The military was especially concerned, even before the whisker crisis.

We're talking about tin whiskers, single crystals that mysteriously grow from pure tin joints but not generally from tin-lead solder joints. Nobody knows how or why these whiskers grow and nobody knows how to stop them, except through the use of lead solder. Whiskers can start growing in a decade or a year or a day after manufacture. They can grow at up to nine millimeters per year. They grow in any atmosphere including a pure vacuum. They grow in any humidity condition. They just grow. And when they get long enough they either touch another joint, shorting out one or more connections, or they vaporize in a flash, creating a little plasma cloud that can carry for an instant hundreds of amps and literally blow your device to pieces.

Since 2006 we have been exclusively manufacturing soldered connections thousands of times more likely to create tin whiskers than previous generation joints made with tin-lead solder. Because of the universal phase-in of the new solder technology and the fact that the solder technologies can't reliably be mixed (old solders mess with new solder joints in the same device through simple outgassing) this means that it is practically impossible to use older, more reliable technology just for mission-critical (even life-critical) connections. So we're all in this tin boat together.

Some experts confidently say that the disparity of joint reliability we are seeing today will go away and that the new joints will become as reliable or even more reliable than the old tin-lead joints as we gain experience with the new processes. What's disturbing, though, is that these experts don't actually know how this increased reliability is likely to be achieved. Just like extrapolating a Moore's Law curve to figure out how fast or how cheap technology is likely to be a decade from now, they have no idea how these gains will be made, just confidence that they will be.

What if the experts are wrong?

Tin whiskers can take out your iPod or your network. They can stop your car cold. They can take down an entire airport or Citibank. They are much more common than most people -- even most experts -- think. The reason for this is that most tin whiskers can't even be seen.

"Maybe it is worth adding," said one expert who prefers to remain anonymous, "that whisker diameters range from 0.1 um to 10 um, while the diameter of a human hair is 70 um to 100 um --- so the largest whisker is only some 15 percent of the diameter of a thin hair, and most are less than 5 percent. A good fraction (of these are) so thin that light waves just pass them by, scattering a bit but not reflecting. So the optical microscope images that (typically used to illustrate whiskers) show only a small fraction of what is really there. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) images are a bit better, but only show a small zone of the sample; also, not many folks are able to acquire SEM images of their equipment. So all too many folks have the idea that whiskers are something that happens to someone else, but never to them. This is an expensive misconception."

What I wonder is whether a cost-benefit analysis of this solder technology changeover was ever done? I haven't seen one.

And if you think this problem is minor, I have been told that just the cost of changing to lead-free solder stands right now at $280 BILLION and climbing. That cost is borne by all of us.

Maybe dumping lead solder was absolutely the right thing to do. Maybe it was absolutely the wrong thing to do. The truth is we haven't the slightest idea the answer to that question and anyone who claims to know is wrong. We didn't know what would happen when we started this and we don't know what we'll get out of it, either, or whether it will be worth the cost. All we know for sure is that a bumpy ride lies ahead.

Fortunately I have new shock absorbers (and a new wiring harness) on my T-Bird.

But what if Microsoft wasn't serious about its offer? Well then things start to get REALLY interesting.

Certainly Microsoft's offer for Yahoo has thrown that company and several others into a tizzy. Yahoo can't be getting much work done, that's for sure. And if you believe the press reports, AOL and News Corp have been dragged into the strategizing, too, and are subject to disruption. For Yahoo, as the primary target, overall efficiency in the company will have dropped instantly by 20 percent just because people will be talking at the watercooler rather than doing their work. And Yahoo wasn't a very efficient place to begin with. This alone has some value for Microsoft, where I will guarantee you the distraction is far less.

Screwing with the minds of Yahoo has value to Microsoft and screwing with AOL and News Corp, too, well that's just a bonus.

You can see that Yahoo is concerned about Microsoft's real intentions in its response to the Microsoft bid. The Yahoo board said the bid undervalued the company, but Yahoo spokesmen (not the board) carefully added that regulators might block the deal and Microsoft was offering no financial guarantees.

If Microsoft were to come back to Yahoo with a sweetened bid nearer to $50 billion and a guaranteed $1 billion termination fee if for any reason the deal should be blocked or fall through, I'm guessing Yahoo would respond much more favorably.

It's up to Microsoft now to prove its intentions.

There is good reason to believe, however, that Microsoft's intentions are anything but good. Redmond's real goal may be simply to poach people from Yahoo, and this deal could help them do just that.

There is plenty of historical precedent for such behavior. Back in the 1990s, for example, Microsoft made many approaches to Borland, a company that was giving it fits in the programming languages business at the time. Borland's products were simply better (and a lot cheaper) than Microsoft's. Bill Gates had also been stung by the defection of an important Microsoft executive, Rob Dickerson, to Borland. Failing to buy Borland at a good price, Microsoft took to recruiting Borland employees, sending limousines during lunch hour with Microsoft signs in their windows to Borland's Scotts Valley, California headquarters to pick up techies for job interviews.

Microsoft reportedly took this technique to an even higher level around the same time when it tried to buy Intuit, which at that point was primarily known for its Quicken home finance application. Microsoft wooed Intuit and won the company in 1994 with a $1.5 billion all-stock offer. Another reported incentive to Intuit was Microsoft's threat to throw $1 billion into development of competing products if Intuit didn't sell out.

Already in antitrust trouble with the Department of Justice, Microsoft eventually dropped the offer, paying Intuit a $46.25 million termination fee. But according to at least one Intuit techie who jumped to Microsoft shortly thereafter, the primary purpose of Microsoft's bid was actually to get information on Intuit's programmers, NOT to buy the company.

Unlike Borland, where Microsoft paid a PR penalty (and later scored a lawsuit) for sending limos to the parking lot and interviewing anybody who would get in, by entering a formal due diligence period with Intuit, Microsoft got access to many details, including Intuit’s product plans and employee records. By the time they bailed on the deal, Microsoft had a very good idea exactly which Intuit employees to recruit to both improve Microsoft Money and to hurt Quicken, QuickBooks, and TurboTax.

It is a testament to Intuit that the company survived.

Now jump to Yahoo, where exactly the same process could be in effect. At a minimum Microsoft is forcing competitors to act when they would rather not. If Yahoo succumbs Microsoft will gain exactly the sort of inside information they got from Intuit. Yahoo is a huge company plagued with pockets of inefficiency (pockets of efficiency?). A failed Microsoft bid, even one involving a termination fee, could lead to horrific results for the company. Remember that Yahoo is staggering here while Intuit was at the top of its market and its game.

I'm not saying this is what's happening, by the way, just that it concerns me. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

And while we are waiting, most of the technology world has been hanging out this week in Barcelona, learning about the future of mobile technology at the 2008 Mobile World Congress, which sounds like a government agency but is really just a trade show for cellphones. Google is there announcing a new version of its Android open source software developers kit for building Linux-based mobile phones that will work well in the Google ecosystem. But unless it is happening behind closed doors and I am unaware of it, nobody in Barcelona is looking at a true Google Phone or gPhone, which won't hit the market until later this year.

The whole concept of the gPhone is problematical both for the market and for Google, itself. I'm making a distinction here between Android phones introduced by any number of vendors and a true GOOGLE phone — a gPhone — actually sold under its own brand by Google.

Microsoft doesn't sell PCs, you may notice, because to do so would step on the toes of their hardware OEMs. Okay, the xBox 360 is a lot like a PC, but it is still a lot more like a video game and Microsoft was around for 25 years before it dared sell an xBox. So conventional wisdom says Google won't sell a gPhone, preferring instead to see the world repopulated with Android phones, instead.

But Google is not like other companies, which means they are sometimes bolder and sometimes more foolhardy, because a Google-branded gPhone — two of them, actually — is on the way.

Here is what little I know, dropped in my lap this week by a loyal reader (you know who you are). There are two gPhones slated for release with the first coming in September and the second probably not appearing until after Christmas. Given that the first is the high-end model and the second is cheaper, Google will probably expect to make as much money as possible on the higher-margin units at Christmas before revealing the budget model even exists. How Apple-like, eh?

Both will include WiFi, which makes me wonder if a VoIP client will be there, too. The high-end phone will look somewhat like a Blackberry Pearl, but the screen flips up and there is a keyboard for texting. No word on pricing for the high-end phone, but the second model is intended to be less than $100 — AFTER Christmas.

The actual manufacturer of these gPhones will be Samsung (rumors to this point had indicated HTC, so this is a change) and Google is still talking with both T-Mobile and Verizon as potential carriers (rumors also said Verizon had passed — not). That means there are both GSM and W-CDMA versions in the works. Given AT&T's success with the iPhone I can't imagine Verizon will let the gPhone pass, but it will be interesting to see if Google will be able go with a nonexclusive deal and get both U.S. carriers.

Nah.

Pundits and industry analysts have been holding forth on whether the $44.6 billion merger will go forward and what it will mean to the Internet, while financial markets have been answering the same questions through the changing price of each company's stock and that of their competitors. Yet nobody seems to be explaining why these two outfits need each other, which has little to do with market share or Google and everything to do with corporate psychology.

Were they cast as characters in The Wizard of Oz, Yahoo would play the Cowardly Lion and Microsoft the Tin Woodman. No Scarecrow would be required since there are plenty of brains at each company to go around.

Yahoo has been adrift, the story goes, unable to compete with Google, its search provider in earlier days. Tim Koogle, the company's first professional CEO, couldn't steer the ship, so he was replaced with Hollywood stalwart Terry Semel, who built an empire but didn't do much to change the company's course. Now Semel is gone, replaced by company co-founder Jerry Yang, who isn't moving fast enough for Wall Street, that's for sure. But what is it that all these very smart executives at Yahoo have actually been fighting against? Though they probably don't realize it, their boogeyman is Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team, the HDNet satellite and cable TV channels, and many other toys.

The basis of Cuban's considerable fortune was his 1999 sale of Broadcast.com for $5.7 billion in Yahoo stock that Cuban and his partner Todd Wagner rapidly converted to cash and moved on with their lives before the dot-com meltdown of 2000. Broadcast.com was an Internet start-up that intended to bring television and movies to the Net, laudable goals that we now know are only becoming technically feasible in 2008 and were hopelessly infeasible in 1999 if you recall the infamous Victoria's Secret streamed lingerie show of that year that brought the Internet to its knees.

Yahoo, which probably shouldn't have bought the company at all, overpaid for Broadcast.com in such an epic manner that the deal quickly became a Silicon Valley joke.

Nerds are sensitive and Yahoo, stung by the deal, resolved never to make such a mistake again, and they haven't. But this determination has come at a cost. Where Yahoo used to shoot from the hip, post-Broadcast.com the company became a model of hard-nosed business analysis, which also meant they couldn't make up their minds. Business development decisions at Yahoo can take months or years and every deal is required to be the antithesis of Broadcast.com. Companies used to want to be bought by Yahoo, but now they don't. Whenever fast action was required it didn't happen and the company fell further and further behind, not because it wasn't smart, but because it wasn't brave.

Like the Cowardly Lion, Yahoo needs to learn to be brave. $5.7 billion -- especially $5.7 billion in stock circa 1999 -- wasn't really a terrible loss for a company like Yahoo. Koogle paid for that mistake with his job but Yahoo has been paying in a different way ever since -- a way imposed by Jerry Yang, who clearly isn't in a position now to lead the company out of a culture that HE created.

The only way for Yahoo to succeed on its own is by becoming wild and crazy again, which Yang isn't and never will be. Ironically, what the company needs now is another Mark Cuban.

Microsoft, on the other hand, is plenty smart and plenty brave but clearly lacks a heart. More than a decade of antitrust litigation showed the company to be cynical and cruel, capable of going to almost any lengths to destroy competitors. While it can be argued that Microsoft's killer instincts are probably responsible for the company's amazing success, it has also held back the company's stock in recent years and probably won't serve the company as well in this century as it did in the last, a fact that has begun to dawn on Gates and Ballmer.

The problem is how to change. Bad habits run deep and bad reputations deeper still. The decision just last week to continue federal court oversight of Microsoft's internal operations for another two years is an indication that even with the retirement of founder Gates from day-to-day responsibilities, dirty tricks are still being played in Redmond.

I hope that Harry Saal, who has been overseeing Microsoft for the court, is planning to write a book about his experiences when he is finally finished.

The only thing that will truly change Microsoft, insiders have long felt, is a huge injection of foreign DNA in the form of a large acquisition. Yahoo is big enough, the company feels, that maybe with the right PR spin Microsoft will start to be seen as a YaSoft or a MicroHoo, the feds will go away and the stock will start to soar again. That's the hope.

Yes, Google is the enemy and acquiring Yahoo will buy market share. Yes, Yahoo has more style than Microsoft ever could. But the assimilation of 14,000 bodies and attempting to don a new style aesthetic will take time and will probably hurt the merged company more than they will help for the first year or two, so the real winner here is probably Google, which Microsoft investors have been starting to realize.

The key to this deal for Microsoft is Yahoo's strong identity and large size. That the deal is expensive is good, too, as I will shortly explain.

The line I keep reading in the press is that Microsoft is buying market share and exciting new technologies with Yahoo. But if you look at the search market it becomes clear that Microsoft could achieve the same market share for less money by buying not Yahoo, but EVERY OTHER YAHOO OR GOOGLE COMPETITOR. Half a dozen little companies would be easier to swallow than one big one, and each of those companies would come with its own secret projects, giving Microsoft actually a higher probability of coming up with a Google-killer.

BUT KILLING GOOGLE ISN'T THE POINT FOR MICROSOFT.

What we have here at Microsoft is a generational transition like we've seen in many other industries as leading companies go from robber barons to industry stalwarts. Look at railroads and oil in U.S. business history and you'll see the same thing. And just as in those industries, Gates and Ballmer know that Microsoft's style has to change with the times, but even more importantly to them Microsoft has to change because they simply lack confidence that any successor can do as well at playing hardball as Gates and Ballmer did.

Think of it like the generational change in command of an organized crime family. Tony Soprano wants the best both for his gang and for his son A.J., but does Tony really think he can count on Anthony Jr.'s ability to put a cap in some future rival? Not likely. So Tony will push A.J toward investment banking and away from loan-sharking.

Same for Microsoft, which with its Yahoo acquisition will quite consciously try to convert itself into the next General Electric, a company that uses its sheer economic power to make most of its money. All those golf games with Jack Welch were for a purpose. That's why Microsoft is assuming debt to buy Yahoo. It is a logical thing to do and will be accepted by Wall Street much more easily than if Ballmer explained that Microsoft was restructuring and acquiring debt to make it possible for the company to not just pay $44.6 billion for Yahoo, but probably another $100 billion for the other acquisitions that will shortly happen to position Microsoft in the GE space, where it will be protected from bad guesses on technology shifts.

Bill Gates is no fool. His company's pirate days are waning and a bold move is required to prove that to the world. Yahoo has no choice at all and can do little but quibble over price. Notice, too, that an all-cash deal gives Yang and Filo no stake in the combined company. They are gone.

Yahoo will give in, the Bush Administration will rubber-stamp this pact in record time, and these dysfunctional corporate characters will be off, together, down that yellow brick road.

This week, then, Cisco Systems announced a new class of enterprise switches called the Nexus 7000 intended to replace its Catalyst router family, which is reaching its End of Life. To me the Nexus 7000, which costs from $75,000-$200,000, looks a heck of a lot like a mainframe computer. To Cisco it looks like a frigging gold mine.

These chances to tell customers they should throw out their perfectly fine equipment come along rarely, and in this case the opportunity to throw out the old and replace with new is particularly huge and gratifying because there is so much of the old stuff to get rid of. The equipment that will be replaced with Nexus 7000 racks was generally installed during the glory days of 1999-2000, when dot-coms and V.90 modems ruled the world, there was little streaming video, and we didn't really buy all that much stuff over the Internet. In anticipation of future growth back then (and just because they could), companies like Cisco pushed so much network hardware into the sales channel that it has taken until now for most of that equipment to finally become obsolete. So now they can push a boatload of new equipment into data centers in exactly the same way.

I'm not saying the Nexus 7000 is not needed or that it is bad in any way. Quite the contrary. Cisco has spent four years and $1 billion building a new generation of routers with new capabilities that are intended to be so compelling they'll keep customers from jumping to Juniper or some other competitor. And along with ensuring customer loyalty, the Nexus 7000s that start rolling out shortly will eventually enable whole new kinds of data services, most importantly robust IP multicasting as I described in this space a few weeks ago.

One huge difference between the Nexus and Catalyst lines, for example, is that Nexus comes with IP multicast turned "on," while Catalyst came with multicast turned "off" as a default. A Nexus 7000 chassis can pump up to 15 terabits per second, which is a heck of a lot of bits. Just for example, if we imagine a DVD-quality H.264 video stream running typically at one megabit per second, that Nexus 7000 could seemingly support 15 MILLION such data streams. In practical service, however, where the Nexus 7000 would be providing bandwidth for storage and network management in addition to pure file service, it is more reasonable to expect a fully tricked-out Nexus 7000 to support more like one million or so concurrent users. It is difficult at this point to even estimate the total cost of that tricked-out Nexus loaded with 10-gigabit-per-second network cards and hundreds of terabytes of storage, but it will undoubtedly set a new low cost point for per-subscriber hardware. Cisco is going to sell a lot of these puppies to telephone companies upgrading their DSL plants to offer IP TV.

What strikes me from reading the Nexus specs and that of the associated NX-OS operating system is how this new switch reminds me of an old mainframe. Nearly all services are virtualized, with multiple copies of the OS starting and stopping as needed. Everything is redundant, isolated, and intended for nonstop service. It is hard to imagine when, if ever, you'd even need to reboot. And while the Nexus supports network connections up to 10 gigabits per second, the really fast networking takes place in parallel between cards over a passive backplane. The Nexus 7000 is a data center in a rack, only with dramatically reduced cooling and power requirements which suggest to me that Cisco has a growth strategy for this architecture that will, over time, make it look more and more like a big computer and less like a router. Throw on a virtualized AIX or Solaris and the Nexus will eventually reveal that its true competition is less likely to be Juniper than it is IBM, HP, and Sun.

Remember this new platform has to last for a decade. From today's perspective making it still attractive 10 years from now requires subsuming as many computing services as one can imagine, not just undermining cable TV.

And speaking of undermining, many readers have been asking me to put in context IBM's recent move to cut pay for almost 8,000 service and support employees. I have resisted commenting to this point mainly because I see my job here as covering stories that AREN'T being handled well (or at all) elsewhere. But in the case of this story the Associated Press and others have done a good job of explaining the problem from the perspective of the employees, so I haven't had to.

But readers keep asking and there does seem to be an arm's length view of the situation that hasn't been well explained to date, so here goes.

If you aren't familiar with the story, IBM was sued several years ago by employees who were classified as exempt and therefore not entitled to overtime pay, yet those employees felt that had they worked at some other company their duties would have been considered non-exempt. IBM lost the case, paid a $65 million settlement in 2006, but took until now to decide that it ought to reduce by 15 percent the base pay of the affected employees in order to keep the settlement revenue-neutral for the company. If IBM had to pay overtime, it would tie that overtime to a lower base pay, thus keeping its costs steady.

While this probably makes total sense in the IBM accounting department, the change was a surprise to the affected workers, who say they are hurt by the lower base since it also cuts their vacation pay and IBM's contribution to their 401K. It might be easy to point to that $65 million settlement as making up for some of this, except that many IBM employees who were eligible to participate in the settlement for some reason didn't sign up for it and no longer can. Now there's a communication problem that needs exploration.

What the big picture shows here is the apparent end of IBM's tradition of respect for the individual. For most of its corporate history IBM has been a pioneer -- a model -- for corporate responsibility, but that era seems to be over. Maybe there is no more fat left to trim so the company is cutting muscle, instead. But I think there is more to it than that. I think this is a logical eventuality of IBM becoming a truly global corporation, not just an American company that does business abroad.

Despite the dark stories I have written about IBM over the last couple years, the company's latest financial reports were very good and the earnings guidance it gave to Wall Street was positively glowing. This makes little sense looking at the company from a U.S. perspective, where customers are upset and profits appear to be fleeting. Cutting through the recent IBM financials shows, in fact, that the company makes little or no money in the U.S. and quite a bit of money internationally. Nearly all of IBM's current profit, in fact, can be attributed to a single condition -- the weak dollar. International sales and profits are bigger mainly because the dollar is so much smaller than it used to be -- a condition that is likely to continue, hence the glowing earnings forecast.

Maybe what IBM is doing is turning itself into a business that is mainly NOT in the U.S. Those rosy forecasts could be based on an active plan to essentially abandon the bottom of the U.S. market in favor of the top of every international market. It hurts the U.S. employees (especially those in services) but makes sense in so many ways. The model it scarily reminds me of is Tyco, which went so far as to switch its incorporation to Bermuda.

And what if this strategy fails or the dollar recovers? Then they'll ramp up production of those vampire robots, I'm sure.

Cranky writer's note: this column has a global audience that includes high school kids and Nobel laureates. From time to time in columns like this one I attempt to explain technical issues in broad terms that are understandable by most readers. This inevitably means that some readers (you know who you are) will think the content is simplistic, obvious, already well known to everyone in your PhD program, or simply stupid. Much as it might surprise you, I can live with this and hope that you can, too.

Now back to Moore's Law.

We used to think what would repeal Moore's Law was the simple inability of photolithography to etch ever thinner lines on each silicon wafer. Now that we are well into nanometer feature sizes, though, it is clear that problem has been solved. What hurts us today is heat. The smaller they get the hotter our chips run. So we end up either with elaborate cooling systems or deliberately hobbled performance, or a little of both.

Today's move to dual- and multi-core processors is in direct response to nothing more than the need to effectively increase die size to keep temperatures down. Multi-core chips can also be run at lower clock speeds to keep down heat while relying on more than one core to recover from this apparent performance disadvantage.

This is, of course, in complete defiance of conventional chip company marketing, which says that the smaller you make a chip the less power it consumes and the lower voltage it requires -- that multi-cores are simply multo-fast. However the truth is that lower voltages tend to be a requirement for keeping CPU temperatures down as much as anything and multiple cores are often just a way of gaining increased heat sink area.

This extra chip heat comes generally from four sources. The first is simply reduced surface area; yes the voltage is lower, but if the ratio of old voltage to new voltage is less than the ratio of old surface area to new surface area from the previous product generation and manufacturing process, well then the chip simply has to get hotter, since it is dramatically smaller yet doing the same work. Voltages drop linearly while surface areas decrease as a far more rapid square function.

The second reason chips -- especially microprocessors -- are getting hotter is the demands of keeping various clocks in sync. Using synchronous logic, some significant percentage of transistors is required simply to keep all the clock signals aligned on a 400 million transistor chip. Asynchronous -- clockless -- logic can do away with the need for that extra, power-wasting circuitry, as I wrote about in this space many years ago (it's in this week's links). As such companies including Sun and Intel are trying to make more and more of their chip circuitry asynchronous, but that is a long and crooked path toward chips that consume no power at all in the milliseconds they aren't being used.

But the greatest producers of heat are relatively new on the scene: two forms of current leakage that are especially prevalent at feature sizes substantially below 100 nanometers. The smaller we go the tougher it gets.

The first type of current leakage is called "gate leakage," which is a quantum effect in which electrons mysteriously migrate through materials they aren't supposed to be migrating through. Gate leakage is active, meaning it takes place only when the chip is actually running. Any leakage consumes power and creates heat without doing usable work, so of course we hate it unless, like I did with my old PDP-8, you are relying on your computer to heat your house.

The other form of leakage is called "sub-threshold" and actually takes place when the chip ISN'T doing any work, when it is off. Sub-threshold leakage is generally attributed to very thin layers that don't do a very good job of insulating, as they are SEMI-conductors.

The big problem with gate leakage is that it doesn't scale. You can make the chips smaller by going to a new manufacturing process (from 65 nanometers down to 45 nanometers, for example) and everything scales down EXCEPT the gate leakage, which remains about the same for similar voltages. Since the gate leakage is the same but the chips are a lot smaller, well you can see the problem, which is why you need that liquid cooling system on your over-clocked game PC.

For 45 nanometer processors these two forms of current leakage consume 70 percent of the power used to run the chips. That is unless you do something to reduce the gate leakage. There have been a variety of techniques used to reduce gate leakage and the best known are "strained silicon," in which the gates are put under compression or tension that somehow inhibits leakage; Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI), in which an insulating layer under the silicon inhibits current leakage and high-K (usually hafnium) metal gates, which are less prone to current leakage. If you are a chip designer intent on reducing gate leakage, you ultimately use all three of these techniques in the order I have presented them because that is from least- to most-expensive.

Intel's new Penryn family of 45 nanometer processors announced at the end of last year uses all three techniques.

But there is a new technique on the block for reducing gate leakage from British inventor Robert Mears, best known for leading the team that developed the erbium doped fiber amplifier that has allowed in situ fiber-optic cables to massively increase their ability to carry data by simultaneously using multiple wavelengths of light to carry parallel data streams. This guy made today's Internet possible. Mears