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- THE FRIDAY LETTER -
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from Gilder Publishing,
for friends and subscribers)
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| http://www.gilder.com/ | Issue 307.0/August 24,
2007
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HEADLINES:
- The
Week / Steve Forbes: Fantasy Fears
- Friday
Feature /
A Seismic Change: Cisco’s shift from in-house ASICs
to NPUs
- Friday
Blogger Bonus / George Gilder: What Else is New in Sultsville?
- Readings /
SPECIAL OFFER
|
-
The Call of the Entrepreneur (Pre-release film screening) -
The Critical Path of Fiberspeed Connectivity, featuring Eli Fruchter of
EZchip |
The
Week /
Fantasy Fears
Steve Forbes, Forbes.com “Fact and Comment”
(9/3/07):
Al Gore went on
a rant recently against those who are dubious about his apocalyptic projections
on global warming. Doubters and disbelievers are simply stooges of big oil,
particularly ExxonMobil, he harrumphed. Newsweek, meanwhile, tastelessly
labeled skeptics "deniers," a not-so-subtle comparison to those sick
individuals who deny the reality of the Holocaust.
Most of the media parrot the Gore/ Newsweek chants about global warming;
its allegedly disastrous consequences are an absolute given. Scientists who
arrive at opposing conclusions are ostracized and often denied grants.
Universities won't hire them or, if they are already tenured, will make sure
they don't get promoted. ExxonMobil is under intense pressure to recant.
Literally thousands of scientists have expressed deep doubts about global
warming, yet those doubts are deep-sixed by a gullible media. Future
generations will look back in astonishment that so many supposedly educated
people came to be caught up in this hysteria.
Not all skeptics, however, are oil company executives. One such person who saw
Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, is Mary Ellen Gilder, a medical
school student at Albany Medical College (and daughter of noted technologist
and FORBES newsletter partner, George Gilder). Ms. Gilder decided to dissect
the movie piece by piece. You can read her findings in her paper, "Diagnosing
Al Gore: Truth in the Balance," at oism.org/pproject. Gilder found Gore's
documentary to be riddled with egregious distortions and falsehoods. She did
the basic, balanced research that so many politicos and journalists have not.
She accessed readily available scientific articles and papers from respected
sources. Hers is the kind of citizen's journalism that we will see more of in
this Internet era.
In his film Gore states, "Now we're beginning to see the impact [of global
warming] in the real world." Among the frightening examples the movie
gives is Africa's rapidly shrinking Lake Chad, a once giant body of water that
is now nearly dry. It turns out that Lake Chad is not very deep and has dried
up many times in the past, the last being about 2,000 years ago. The current
drying has been abetted, Gilder points out, by "a rapidly expanding
population drawing water from the lake, the introduction of irrigation
technologies and local overgrazing."
What
about the shrinking of the snows on Mount Kilimanjaro? According to Gilder, a
2004 article in the International Journal of Climatology says that all
three of the major East African glaciers have seen significant retreat since
the late 1800s, which is long before there was much CO2 around.
Moreover, the Kilimanjaro glacier is melting in a way that suggests it is
probably not caused by the supposedly CO 2-induced higher
temperatures but by reduced precipitation.
Gore
paints a horrifying picture of how global warming may lead to ghastly increases
in infectious diseases because vectors are expanding their ranges. He listed 15
new or recently resurgent diseases. Four of these--Lyme, malaria, dengue fever
and West Nile virus (all spread by insects)--undermine Gore's hysteria.
"Lyme
disease--far from being a tropical disease spreading northward--originated in
the temperate climate of Lyme, Conn., and spread mainly south and west. Malaria
is a disease confined to the tropics more for socioeconomic reasons than
climatological ones," once having been widespread in Siberia and Northern
Europe. "There is a similar lack of evidence for climate-associated spread
of dengue fever." As for West Nile virus, the villainous mosquito here
"is the most widely distributed mosquito in the world, common on every
continent but Antarctica." As Gilder concludes, "there is no evidence
that any of these diseases emerged or resurged due to global climate
change."
Gore's
whoppers do not end here ….
Read Steve’s complete “Fantasy Fears” column:
http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2007/0903/021.html
__________________________________
Please join us for STEVE FORBES’s
keynote address at Gilder/Forbes Telecosm 2007, 8:00 am Wednesday October 17,
at The Sagamore Resort in Lake George, New
York.
Register online today: http://www.telecosmconference.com/
__________________________________
|
The Gilder
Telecosm Forum |
Friday Feature / A Seismic Change: Cisco’s shift from in-house ASICs to NPUs
Gilder Telecosm
Forum Member
#1 (8/20/07): Andrew Schmitt submits (HERE): There are few franchises in the
silicon business where one vendor so completely dominates the market. Everyone
can name Intel’s CPU business as one. But can you name another?
Infineon/TI (IFX) in DSL is a contender. Conexant (CNXT)
in PC modems (but little profit to show for
it). Netlogic (NETL) in exotic CAMs (but beholden to one sugar daddy
customer - Cisco).
But nothing approaches the complete and total dominance
of Broadcom’s (BRCM) grip on Ethernet switching silicon.
Broadcom and Marvell (MRVL) are the Intel (INTC)
and AMD (AMD) of this market, with Marvell occasionally scoring tactical
victories as an insurgent force, but never toppling the regime. Broadcom pulls
in about $1B a year in Ethernet switching and is the Microsoft of switching
silicon ….
Read Andrew Schmitt’s complete “Cisco’s Fear of a Broadband Planet” piece here:
http://www.nyquistcapital.com/2007/08/20/ciscos-fear-of-a-broadcom-planet/
Gilder Telecosm
Forum Member
#2 (8/20/07): What? No EZchip
(LNOP) mention?
Gilder Telecosm
Forum Member
#3 (8/21/07): Andrew Schmitt
back-pedaling on the switch from ASIC's to merchant silicon sure vindicates
George Gilder's long held position. However, I wonder why he can't admit he is
wrong about LNOP being the critical path NPU and instead chooses to tout
Broadcom as the greatest beneficiary of this technological shift.
George Gilder,
Gilder Telecosm
Forum (8/21/07):
Schmitt is focusing on the enterprise Ethernet switch
market which offers volumes well over tenfold larger than the carrier metro
market, and which Broadcom (BRCM) dominates with its Strata SGX product
line, which sells for as little as one tenth the price of a full featured NP2.
If all goes well, EZchip (LNOP) will gradually move down into enterprise
slots, but that will not happen within the timeframe of Schmitt's analysis.
So he is right that a Cisco (CSCO) shift from in-house ASICs to network
processors in the relatively inflexible and fixed function enterprise area
would represent a seismic change. I would expect EZ to come in and exploit it
with future products as the enterprise moves to 10-Gig. Hey, it's all Ethernet
and IP.
Gilder Telecosm
Forum Member #4 (8/21/07):
George, If the enterprise area is "relatively inflexible
and fixed function" why would it be beneficial to switch from ASICs to
NPUs?
George Gilder, Gilder Telecosm Forum (8/21/07): It's all relative--a matter of tradeoffs between
adaptability and price, both of which relate to volumes. At present, ASICs and
near-ASICs from Broadcom dominate fixed function high performance high
volume devices like Cisco enterprise switches. But NPUs are building up
their volumes to the point that their prices are becoming increasingly
competitive. Meanwhile enterprise networks are beginning to provide more varied
services, multimedia, with 10-Gig wirespeed processing at several layers, and
local area Ethernets increasingly give way to a variety of links across the
Net, which cannot be tapped with pure layer 2 Etherchips.
Under these conditions, the NREs (non-recurring expenses, delays and
respins) of ASICs become increasingly unattractive. It's all a matter of
tradeoffs between the volume of the ASIC fixed function chip and the
flexibility of the network processor, which is steadily expanding its volumes
in the ever-changing network arena.
__________________________________
Please join GEORGE GILDER and ANDREW
SCHMITT as they moderate “The Critical Path of Fiberspeed Connectivity” panel at Gilder/Forbes Telecosm 2007, 2:15 pm Thursday
October 18, at The Sagamore Resort in Lake George, New
York.
Register online today: http://www.telecosmconference.com/
__________________________________
Read more posts by George Gilder and the Gilder Telecosm Forum Members.
Login with your subscriber ID today: http://www.gildertech.com/
________________________________________
Friday Blogger Bonus / What Else is New in
Sultsville?
“Watershed” New York Times, Editorial (8/19/07): There are
good reasons to hope — and believe — that the Federal Reserve will ably manage
the turmoil in the financial markets. Its surprise lending rate cut on Friday
and earlier infusions of cash into the banking system show that it is committed
to crisis management.
But the Fed’s moves also show that it believes the markets’ problems have
become a threat to the broader economy. For that reason, calming the markets
should be seen as only a necessary first step toward addressing much bigger
issues — issues that President Bush and his aides continue to deny.
The real work — that of leaders, not managers — is to understand how the
economy became so vulnerable to current global market instability, and to
articulate an agenda for reducing those underlying weaknesses. There is no
return to “normal” that would not be the same as sticking one’s head back in
the sand.
The bare facts are that the nation — heavily indebted — needs to attract
some $800 billion a year from abroad, either by borrowing the money or by
selling American assets. No serious analyst believes that an imbalance of that
magnitude is sustainable.
In fact, the erosive effects are already evident. Debt must be repaid by
sending money abroad, leaving less to invest domestically. Selling off American
assets means reduced investment returns to Americans. And that’s if things go
smoothly. Ever present is the risk that the vital foreign inflows will wane,
with severe repercussions on interest rates and the dollar… Read on: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/opinion/19sun1.html
George Gilder, Gilder Telecosm Forum (8/19/07): This is a predictably obtuse and self-defeating Times editorial
(we need both more savings and higher taxes on the rich who do most of the
saving). It typically blames businesses for Federal policy errors (several years
of too loose monetary policy) and suggests that selling U.S. assets to
foreigners lowers their value (as if banishing foreigners from U.S. markets
would increase the value of U.S. assets). It's a total muddle except for the
usual solution--more regulation and taxes, so what else is new in Sultsville?
More regulations and taxes would of course make all the problems worse,
including the trivial deficit.
__________________________________________
Hear George Gilder speak
at Gilder/Forbes Telecosm 2007, October 16 - 18, at The Sagamore Resort in Lake George, New York.
Register online today: http://www.telecosmconference.com/
__________________________________________
Read more posts by
George Gilder and the Gilder Telecosm Forum Members. Login with your subscriber
ID today: http://www.gildertech.com/.
__________________________________________
Readings /
Patriot
Scientific Appoints Nick Tredennick to Board of Directors
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/prnewswire/CLTU05121082007-1.htm
Google Earth Looks to the Stars
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/08/google-goes-to-.html
America’s Hackable Backbone
http://www.forbes.com/technology/2007/08/22/scada-hackers-infrastructure-tech-security-cx_ag_0822hack.html
Private
equity taxation to rise?
http://tpa.typepad.com/research/2007/08/private-equity-.html
Karlgaard: Only the Bad News is Fit to Print
http://blogs.forbes.com/digitalrules/
School uniforms (w/ GPS) track kids
http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9764275-7.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=NewsBlog
Behold: Dell's
XPS 420 revealed
http://www.engadget.com/2007/08/22/behold-dells-xps-420-revealed/
The Weekly GTI
http://www.gtindex.com/
__________________________________________
FRIDAY LETTER STAFF
Editor: Mary Collins George / mcollins@gilder.com
Research: Sandy Fleischmann / sfleischmann@gilder.com
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