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The Uncertain Promise of Utility Computing
icke writes "A quick overview of where the Economist thinks we are with the The Next Big Thing, also known as Stuff that doesn't work yet. Quoting: 'It is increasingly painful to watch Carly Fiorina, the boss of Hewlett-Packard (HP), as she tries to explain to yet another conference audience what her new grand vision of "adaptive" information technology is about. It has something to do with "Darwinian reference architectures", she suggests, and also with "modularising" and "integrating", as well as with lots of "enabling" and "processes". IBM, HP's arch rival, is trying even harder, with a marketing splurge for what it calls "on-demand computing". Microsoft's Bill Gates talks of "seamless computing". Other vendors prefer "ubiquitous", "autonomous" or "utility" computing. Forrester Research, a consultancy, likes "organic". Gartner, a rival, opts for "real-time". Clearly, something monumental must be going on in the world of computing for these technology titans simultaneously to discover something that is so profound and yet so hard to name.'"
If you can't explain what you do in a way a 10 year old can understand, your business will probably fail.
damn if the lights would just stop flickering
Its just the psychologists they use for marketing having a little joke.
Move along people, nothing to see here.
Vote for new mod!!! Score:-2,Imbecile
'It is increasingly painful to watch Carly Fiorina...'
what are they talking about? she's a babe!
I KNEW this was an article about Linux!
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
If they can't describe it in real world, understandable terms, it's either pseudo-marketing babble or some ethereal, vapor-concept whom the perveyors of can't quite wrap their minds around themselves. In either case, they need to put up or shut up. I'm grow weary of it.
Computers will be everywhere and the will all talk to each other all of the time. That is all they are talking about, however what makes them nervous is whoever makes this work seemlessly first will be a huge winner.
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
learly, something monumental must be going on in the world of computing for these technology titans simultaneously to discover something that is so profound and yet so hard to name.'"
Absolutely. But I don't see large scale distributed computing or "utility computing" working in the public domain for more than a few conceptually cohesive projects (think SETI and Folding@home for publicly available projects). On the other hand individual companies could certainly take advantage of this concept for internal projects while harnessing the computing power that many of them already have in abundance. The problem is bringing all of this computing power (desktop systems) together easily and without hassle. Software like Pooch and Xgrid are decidedly the way to go here allowing companies to harness space CPU cycles for anything from rendering to bioinformatics to modeling airflow or turbulence. For instance, how many computers are at organizations like Lockheed Martin? Or Genentech? Or at most Universities?
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Sounds like the standard round of buzzword bingo.
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
She has enough money in her coffers (thanks to over 6000 layoffs translating to a $150M bonus last year) to give everyone she's ever met the finger, buy an island somewhere near the equator, and sip margaritas all day every day until she dies a miserable and lonely death.
She knows nothing about technology, and rather little about business. She only knows how to drain money. Don't expect to see HP change the face of computing with her in the captain's chair.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
All that they're flogging is this: lots of intercommunicating little computers in everything. We're already about halfway there -- between the XBox, Tivo, and KISS Technology's (GPL-violating) DVD player, *normal* people are more likely than ever to have a computer connected to their television without even knowing it.
no, just more crapspeak from the usual pack of rabid weasles jockeying for the best position from which to loot the citizenry.
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
Because managers have taken over from engineers.
The real problem is that if the masters of saying nothing by saying a lot, like the Economist is, don't understand what these IT heavyweights are saying, there must not really be much behind the terms...
/. Where the truth
An appropriate term is:
Bullshit Computing
or maybe PADOS "Pump And Dump Our Stock" Computing
i just wanna bury a 80 km 1 gig vibre optic cable
...")
without goverment hassel.
i just wanna drown a 1 gig vibre optic cable from
one continent to the other without goverment
hassel.
i just wanna stick a cheap 10 km reach WiFi antenna on my roof without goverment hassel.
once everybody gets some thru "low-cost" high-speed bandwidth we might start thinking about
the "next big thing(tm)".
(rediculous! the equipment is all available
off the shelve but many non-us goverment have IT/
telecommunications ministeries straight out of
the dark ages. "oh! how nice to have a 3.2 GHz
intel 4 on a 128/64 adsl line
The instructor couldn't explain it, so she brought in a marketing exec, who could only define it in terms of itself. "E-business on demand is about computing, on demand, for e-business." Sprinkle in a healthy dose of meaningless adjectives, and you get the picture.
I'll tell you, it's pervasive. Since then, I've not found one person who can give a cohesive definition at this company. And yet, it's supposed to be my driving force and ultimate goal.
yay.
I thought the core idea of IBM on-demand computing was having a box with 12 processors, but you are only paying for 4. Then, during a particularly busy time, your CPU usage goes way up- 80%. You then have the flexibility of having other CPU's "turn on" to meet the load... think of it as being able to handle a slashdotting dynamically ('cept with CPU, not bandwitdh).
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I always liked the term "vapor"
It has been my experience that typically those "profound" things that are hard to name belong to the realm of acedemics, etc. -- and most people just don't care to have them explained, they simply want to use them, or do whatever it is. It's like stopping to explain what a complex, wonderful, amazing thing the human digestive and waste systems are when all someone wants to do it sit on the damn pot.
Clearly, something monumental must be going on in the world of computing for these technology titans simultaneously to discover something that is so profound and yet so hard to name.
I think it's clear they are all refering to SkyOS. It's been rumoured that HP is planning on dropping HP-UX in favor of SkyOS sometime in 2004.
In this case... I would say it is whack. Thanks for your thoughtful comment.
..."adaptive" information technology is about. It has something to do with "Darwinian reference architectures", she suggests, and also with "modularising" and "integrating", as well as with lots of "enabling" and "processes"... Microsoft's Bill Gates talks of "seamless computing". Other vendors prefer "ubiquitous", "autonomous" or "utility" computing. Forrester Research, a consultancy, likes "organic". Gartner, a rival, opts for "real-time". Clearly, something monumental must be going on in the world of computing for these technology titans simultaneously to discover something that is so profound and yet so hard to name.'"
Except for the Darwin part, it sounds like the usual, meaningless biz lingo.
--
In London? Need a Physics Tutor?
American Weblog in London
I was at Thinking Machines (the company that invented massively parallel computing) a decade ago, and back then Danny Hillis talked frequently about "utility computing" -- the idea that your computations would know how to flow back to wherever it needed to be done. So you'd work on a desktop computer and the user interactive bits would run locally, harder parts would flow back to a big CPU in the basement, and the really hard parts could flow back to a city supercomputer, in a CPU equivalent of the power grid.
...
At a high level, it's a pretty simple idea, and very powerful.
At the detailed level, there are some amazingly hard problems to solve. Like, for example, how does software get split into parts that can be separated with minimal communications overhead, or how do you decide when a task would run more efficiently spread across a bunch of CPU's, or how do you keep running smoothly when a network outage causes 10% of your CPU's to drop off of the grid.
I suspect that the reason that all of the big companies are pitching this is that:
1) CPU's and operating systems have been commoditized by Intel/AMD/etc. and Linux, and they want to have a reason for you to buy bigger/better/more expensive systems.
2) Once one of them announced it, they all have to have a "response".
That being said, I think that what they're doing is going to be of real value to high-end customers. If you're running a farm of 5,000 servers, you really need the software to be self-healing, etc.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Clearly, something monumental must be going on in the world of computing for these technology titans simultaneously to discover something that is so profound and yet so hard to name.'"
/* fucking bug I can't find! */"
Absolutely. It's called saturation and we're closing in on it. So the marketing drones are in red alert to find something different to sell before the old business runs out.
Note the keyword "different". Also note that to marketing it means something entirely... uh, different, then to you and me.
It's a bit like C++ and C - there is a new paradigm, a new approach, and some real technical differences. A lot of books get written, some people become famous, some rich, a few both. In the end, though, 90% of what you're actually writing doesn't change. It's still "i++;" and "exit 1
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
this big unknown "thing" is a laptop on two wheels that doubles up as a scooter. the big feature of this new design is that it warns the user that the battery is running down by throwing the user onto the street and crashing the harddisk.
it'll look something like this
___
I
o-o
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Look at it this way... if we cant work out what a "Darwinian reference architecture" is, the indians must be totally fucking baffled!
The winner will be the one that provides information management at O/S level. Right now, O/Ss can do a lot of technical stuff, but they can't manage information. External apps are needed for that.
But humans want to manage information, not an O/S. The first operating system that manages information instead of binary files will be the basis for a huge winner.
The nature and form of computing as it progresses and adapts over time to the needs and demands of its users.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I just hope that whatever IT is, is better than the last thing that was going to change the world. Although, the jury may still be out, I hardly think This little beauty has or will.
I think this is computing coming full circle. At the beginning, you paid for computing by the amount you used it. As PC's be came ubiquitous, that fell by the wayside, as the accounting just seemed to be too much. Now that times are getting tight again, they are looking toward providing computing power as needed (and paying for it) as opposed to having it all on standby.
Everything else is marketing gobbletygook.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
"Clearly, something monumental must be going on in the world of computing for these technology titans simultaneously to discover something that is so profound and yet so hard to name.'"
But if you have no idea what it is how can you claim it to be profound? Remember the Segway?
Perhaps the simpler explaination is that they are making lame-brained babble about how there are lots of computers now, there are going to be even more and they need to be easier to use? They then pick some high falutin sounding words that kind of describe some aspect of that as they see it.
Just maybe?!
Really, anything short on details and full of buzzwords probably isn't a big deal - or anything at all. Yes, there are current trends in the way computers are used that is changing. There usually are. There IS a push that people want SERVICES, not computers. They want INFORMATION, not machines. People don't want to worry about running servers and infrastuctures and they also don't want to have to deal with a lot of computery stuff to do things in their daily life like listen to music, communicate, etc.
Nothing new here.
Just like the profound, paradigm-shifting, mind-blowing, earth shattering concept that was Application Service Providers(ASP).
For those that don't know it, the ASP model has generally proven to be a failure and this "new" concept seem like just another rehashing of the ASP model. But, this time they are going after CPU cycles rather than just applications.
You will not hear me use the words "modularising" , I will not be "integrating", nor will I be "enabling", Nothing will be "processed", It most certainly is not "on-demand", my jokes are not "seamless", We will not be "ubiquitous", "autonomous", "organic", And things won't be done in "real-time"
Exactly - you hit it right on the head. Why should she care what anyone thinks about her decisions? Everyone here can rant about her, but we're the ones being fired and she is set.
Something profound is happening and it is hard to explain. Computing on demand, I like it. Still, it's hard for people to really get it.
Terms don't work very well. I've told them about apt-get, dselect and aptitude, but they get lost.
Showing them the tools in action is impressive, but they still don't get it. I've demonstrated apt-get and dselect and it's generally impressive. Changing out Exim for Sendmail flawlessly and remotely without reboot was kind of cool and impressed several people at work once. A demonstration of dselect came tantalizingly close to clueing in my brother in law. At first he was unimpressed with all the software he saw listed because he is used to music sharing programs. His eyes nearly poped out of his head when I told him that all of that software was free and inteneded to be by the authors. He still lacked an apreciation for the quality of the software and has yet to get it. Aptitude, while it may be easier to use and put a pretty face on the process will have about the same result.
No, I'm afraid that the only way people will understand that there is a vast collection of software ready to fill any and all of their computing needs is for them to use it. Free software, to me, is the ultimate computing on demand, co-operative utility type computing. The abiltiy to demand only comes from control and control only comes from freedom.
The candy available from the NOT net and all the other followers of Netscape's browser and remote desktop computing are nothing in the face of free computing.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
something to do with "Darwinian reference architectures", she suggests
I may be wrong, but weren't darwin's theories used by the "upper class" as an excuse to why they are better than the "lower class". Something to the effect of "we have evolved and you have not, so we deserve all these riches and you deserve nothing." I wish i still had my history notes. In anycase, vieled references to Darwin such as this "Darwinian reference architectures" has since left me skeptical about the persons motives.
that's the general goal as I understand it, but it manifests itself in different forms. IBM's autonomic computing for example, tries to go further. A system with autonomic software installed is suppose to be able to detect when the system is failing and take itself out of availability. The ultimate goal of autonomic based on what is published is the system will try to fix itself.
Much of this is based on the recent research and work done by academic and research institutions. All of them want to have it so an application can find out if there are free resources out there and send a discrete chunk of work to it to distribute the processing. The marketing BS is just the necessary evil.
Say bye bye to old-fashioned object-oriented computing and embrace a new era of autonomous agents. Phisical proactive agents will be the mind of our robots, data-mining web-harvesters soft-agents are already populating the Internet, personal agents are being developed to advise us from our handheld computers. Revolutions Comes, and a new era for IT is here.
DON'T PANIC
Clearly, something monumental must be going on in the world of computing for these technology titans simultaneously to discover something that is so profound and yet so hard to name.
There's nothing monumental that's really floated to the surface yet. I work in grid computing, which itself is an amazing buzzword that everyone wants to say and no one understands (hell, I am not really sure what the purpose of what I do is).
Everyone's grasping for straws right now, b/c when some research project actually does become useful, they want to be in front of the wave so they can ride it all the way. This is everyone throwing out made up words in the hopes that people will like some (or at least one) of them. Around here, our made up phrase that I love is that we are being called "the cornerstone of cyberinfrastructure." It's even been used so much that they've shortened cyberinfrastructure to "CI" in big rambling memos about our future and direction. It's sort of depressing, though, when you realize that none of this actually means anything yet. Maybe it will one day, but that's not quite here yet.
SCO? You're talking about SCO, right?
litigious bastards
suck it sco!
I have no idea what I just said.
postmodernsideshow.com
"Clearly, something monumental must be going on in the world of computing for these technology titans simultaneously to discover something that is so profound and yet so hard to name.'"
:)
Yup. It's called "Bandwagon."
What is going on is the marketroids are harvesting what they've sown. They are a little short on ideas at the moment. They have nothing to better to do so they copy one another. Having witnessed the overindulgence in irrational exuberance and the trade of talent for third-world coding monkeys (aka offshoring), the creative people are turned off and don't really feel that they can trust the likes of Carlie with anything. This is really what is going on right now.
Carly Fiorina spews out a bunch of meaningless bafflegab and everyone just nods their head. Once again we see that nobody learned anything from the story of The Emperor's New Clothes.
We had the JIT (just in time) manufacturing wave hit our plant about 10 years ago. When people want processes to run faster, but can't get them to do so, they come up with names for new technologies that should solve their problems -- before developing the technologies.
Don't worry if you miss this current trend, there will be new names for working faster next year.
>the current sad status of gender equality in corporate America
Obviouslly, you believe the lies spread by political hacks that get paid by perpetuating the myth that a bias agains women still exists in corporate America.
1. Harassment laws and corporat policies favor women over men
2. Diveristy training always includes training on how we should all be sensitive to women but never ever has any training on how everyone should be sensitive to men.
If they invented the idea, everyone should follow their lead, that company has grown by leaps and bounds over the last decade!
The press (and a lot of investors) got burnt hard, becuause the never seemed to question all that talk a couple of years ago. Just another "buzz word" CEO, looking to recapture some of the glory that made her "great".
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
HP's Carly Fiorina gets a pass by the media and the HP shareholders because she is a 'role model' woman in a male dominated field.
Many other tech companies have fired their CEO for performance better than HP's.
Ahh, to work in a large corporation!
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
Monumental indeed! We may be witnessing the birth of a new marketing strategy.
nt
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
This kind of thing can destroy businesses. They can basically fall apart at the seams. An organization needs a clear defined goal and objectives to be really succesful.
Lego: Refocus on important product lines, and do them right.
Microsoft: Global domination
SCO: Piss everybody off
Without a clear, consise vision, you get problems. Research flaggs, or goes in different directions. Marketers advertise things the company can't provide. Developers are asked to design and create systems that they don't fully understand, or fully make sense.
With so many big IT companies lacking a clear direction, it's only a matter of time before a couple start faltering and get torn apart by the others.
~D
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
Clearly, something monumental must be going on in the world of computing for these technology titans simultaneously to discover something that is so profound and yet so hard to name.
Yeah. They all bet the farm on maintaining exponetial growth forever, without asking anyone who knew math if it was possible. Now they are tap dancing.
The sound you hear is just a high speed mixture of marketspeak, fear, and tap shoes.
-- MarkusQ
I'm of the opinion that they are just trying to create the next big buzz word. They each have their word and now they are each trying to construct the catchiest meaning to attach to it so they can claim to be the one who started the next revolution.
One unifying theme seems to be that they want to sell the use of hardware and software instead of the hardware and software itself. Subscriptions make more sense in such a world. And once they have your data on their systems and they decide what priority you take on those systems (as compared to your competetors who might be customers as well) these companies suddenly become much more important to customers again.
I guess I haven't caught on to any of these buzz words yet.
How is this Informative?
Lots of HP (ex-)employees here?
We had a similar experience around that time. I, on the other hand, came up with the "Managed Information Access [Secured] System".
Ever since then I've been pulling things out of MI-ASS.
People seem to love it...
Those are all perfectly cromulent explanations, and if you don't understand them then perhaps you need to reentagulate your marketing 101 book!
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
It's so hard to name because these companies all lack the synergistic, results-driven leverage that will incentivize their paradigm shift.
translating to a $150M bonus last year
I've dones some internet searching. All I can find is an article about her getting a $4M bonus last year (not a $150M) .
You could always get even! If she has ruined your life, you could always exact revenge.
Guys, this is called marketing. When your at the level these companies are you need to project a sense that the next big product or wave of popular crap is right around the corner and that your company will be the one to deliver. :)
You see this increasing due to the fact that the tech boom has slowed compared to the crazy 90's. (well unless you live in bombay or is it mumbai, anyway).
These figureheads are loyal to the stockholders and the stockholders only so don't think they are trying to find the name for the next big revolution in computing but rather the next piece of junk hardware/software with no real innovation that they can, as they would say "leverage the corporations inherent position in the growing field of _______ fill in the blanks" its all crap. Remember as Tyler Durden so eloquently put it "We are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world."
***I GOT NUTHIN***
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
They all are management types looking at computing power measured in bita and bytes as a publically availible 'resource.'
In the beginning there was nothing, then there was the big bang, then we had solarsystems and like like. Matter and energy were the only 2 resources.
A few billion years later, we get life on at least one known planet. This life requires new specific kinds of resources call food. One form of life evolves high enough that it establishes the term 'resource' and begins to manage it - first it were things called tools, then the agricurtrial revolution, so now food was a managed resource. Food everywhere and used everywhere. We all know what it is used for and in most places it is readily availible.
Now ne have a new kind of resource - a logic processor. We know what these things can do (execute instructions to solve problems) and there is so much 'resource' out there, that we typically only use 1-5% any given second. 95% of this resource is wasted, that is, it exists to be used, but is discarded. Businesses want to be able to rpofit from this waste (moey for nothing essentially) and normal people don't care about it being wasted, so it should be a relatively inexpensive resource.
Now these beings know there's a lot of data out there and even more questions, and that there's plenty of power in parts of the world that even the most complicated problem could be solved in a timely manner if all this resource was coordinated.
Or, we could flip it the otyher way around and have only cheap thin clients and big iron for th larger tasks. This 2nd approach is much more affectionate towards companies that want to charge, as it is a central location and you can meter and charge for it better.
We already have examples of on-demand computing - RC5 and SETI. We're finally getting to the point that the more distributed model can dynamically load algorithms and process them.
If there were any kind of money to be made in this viral computing model, it would be here. People would run clients and get paid for the CPU cycles they dedicate to the virus.
So these companies are on to something, they know what it is, how it works, btu they don't posess the correct infrastructure to reap the benefits though they make it possible. As soon as they figure it out (see the centralized implementation described above) they'll really know how to sell it.
The centralized model has a cheap CPU, prolly a clone - Transmeta, Via or NS, a decent video accelerator (for GUI), IDE HD, DVD, and USB ports. The box can run word and the like on its own, but could export intensive tasks to back-end big-iron.
Unfortunately, there are only a few things I can think of that could be offloaded like that because the time to specify the task, offload the data, process and ship it back has tobe shorter than just processing it on the client. Whats more is it has to be cheaper (the cost of time/time savings) has to make it sensible (hence a large disparity between computer power of the big-iron and the client). A few examples are: Cracking passwords, database queries, MP3 [en|de]coding, dynamic programming algorithms, image/video processing, compiling (a big one for me!).
On a personal note, I wish I could pass a parameter to gcc that would send my source and make files to a 200 cpu goliath, and compile everything in paralell. I'd be done in a second. Linux people who do a 'make clean' would love this too! But compilingis impractical unless the filesystem (headers and sources) can be sent to the server in a timely manner (NFS mount?))
Ok. I'm done.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Microsoft is banking on morphing their Xbox into a multipurpose device that does everything: game console, computer, set-top cable box/TIVO equivalent, and central point for connection of all the network enabled goo-gahs (refrigerators, phones, toasters...) that they envision the household containing in the next 10 years.
All the other companies are just rushing not to be left out of the information control bonanza. The thought is, in a thin client DRM enabled world, he who controls access controls the marketplace; by cramming as much functionality as possible into one box, Microsoft is banking on cornering the access market.
Furthermore, I think this also follows Microsoft's historical embrace and extend (and obsolete) paradigm - once enough people have 'the box', people with seperate (and lesser) 'computers' and 'game consoles' etc, will fall into forced obsolescence due to incompatible 'standards'. Microsoft will be the only game in town, and independent hardware makers will either pay royalties to Microsoft, or become marginalized.
In Microsoft's idyllic view, every machine is interconnected with full DRM implemented - and all resultant revenue flows into Microsoft's coffers. Management of 'pirates' is as easy as flipping a switch on the master server to withdraw rights to whatever software the users are misusing/appropriating.
Big Brother is watching you.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Applications moving behind the glass. Any application accessible from any location, without having to load it on "your" computer first. Basically, it's a return to mainframe-like computing, but without the green screens.
Well-designed hosting environments can make this happen. Portable API's such as those available in Unix/Linux and in Java help make it happen, and help make the apps relocatable. Truly transparent network filesystems like NFS allow for application and server load balancing. Transparent graphics systems like X11 help make the apps truly independent of the display they're viewed on -- applications moving to the Web is a big piece, too.
This was the original vision of "network computing" and it's still a good idea -- it's still being worked on and there are places where it's being deployed. The reason why the original McNealy/Ellison vision of network computing failed is because they required everyone to move exclusively to pure Java applications. In reality, most environments can't make that big of a move that quickly.
So what we're seeing is a gradual shift of applications off the desktop and back into the data center. For the time being, most users are still using a fat PC to access them, but IT organizations will wake up one morning and suddenly realize that everything has moved behind the glass and they really are in a utility computing environment. If they've done it right, they will then be able to move applications and storage resources around the data center without an impact on the users. This is the promise of utility computing and it's a good idea.
And for organizations that don't want the expense of running their own data center, they can enlist the services of a hosting company that specializes in this type of thing -- IT keeps control of its applications, while someone else keeps the air conditioners, UPS's, and routers running.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
I think giving women an equal chance is great, but if they are going to do all the same bone headed, greedy crap that men do why bother?
I think its incredibly [censored] that people would think that women would be better persons than men. "Oh, the world is run by men and they are all evil and selfish...MEN must be evil and selfish!"...no, people who crave power are evil and selfish, women just die more from having babies, hence the fact that men got more power (hard to have power when you're dead). Now that medicine is changing the world, women finally get their chance to prove that they are as evil, stupid, selfish and cruel as men.
You can't take the sky from me...
I must confess I'm always puzzled by the insistence of computer manufacturers that computing as a utility is just around the corner and that will be the dominant way people and business will use computers. This was the original model that IBM tried to implement back in the 50s when computers were too expensive for all but the largest government and business organizations. Every year since then the claim is made both by IBM and the many upstarts who mysteriously decide they want to go after this phantasmal market that the reality of this is just a technology innovation away, remote terminals, modems, time sharing operating systems, interpreter technology, compiler technology, faster processing speed, larger storage capacity were all heralded as the last piece necessary to make this a reality. Yet, here we are in the early 21st century and, as a percentage of total computing power, we are no closer then we were half a century ago. In reality we are probably much further. Why do corporations think that this is a realistic business model? Do we have TV on demand? No, for the most part we own our televisions; pick and choose from the content we want. Do we have beer on demand? No, we go to the local bar when we want to buy it by the glass or get it from the liquor store when we want to enjoy it at home or with friends. Do we have books by demand? No, we don't by a book because we want to read a certain number of pages. We buy a book because it has something interesting that we want to read. There will of course always be outsourcing and their will always be hosting and its conceivable that these will be the dominant way to deliver IT services to companies, but these are not a computer utility. Why do people think we will ever get to the point where you my a certain number of CPU cycles or whatever the service metric is, and business will just get rid of their desktops, give everyone a terminal, and write a check once a month for the bill?
I learned everything I know about computing on demand (CoD) by watching Star Trek. Let me show you two examples:
1. Without CoD:
Captain Archer is hiding in the cargo bay and devises a plan to retake control of the ship. But it requires that enviromental control is rerouted to sickbay and that can only be done from the bridge where the evil mad man is.
2. With CoD:
Worf remodulates the phasers to match enemy shields and devices a new search pattern for the torpedoes by pressing 3 buttons on the console in front of him.
CoD is when stuff works without any fuss and there are no problems. They simply want everything to be as in ST:TNG.
This is my sig, show me yours
"Listen! They broke the chalice from the palace and replaced it with the flagon with the figure of a dragon." "Did you put the pellet with the poison in the vessel with the pestle?" "No, the pellet with the poison is in the flagon with the dragon. The vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true."
Typos... that's just how I role.
The reason why it's so hard to name is because everybody is scared of the phrase "Artificial Intelligence." (read: everybody == investors) 'AI' used to be one of those buzzwords like 'convergence' but no longer. After a while it turned into this impossibility and the term 'AI' turned into a serious no-no when you make a presentation to an investor.
But that's just what all of these sound like! "Darwinian reference architectures" sounds like a system that learns using a genetic algorithm. "autonomous" and "organic" are even more descriptive. But everybody is just dancing around the real issue so they don't scare off anybody.
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
I think that a lot of people are missing that there are two concepts here. The first is grid computing, which is as far as I understand being able to offload processing to multiple computers. The second is ubiquitous computing, which is being able to use computers anywhere you want and access data anywhere you want in a natural fashion such that you're not even thinking about the fact that you're using a computer. See this google-cached page for an example. The two may be used together but are not dependent on each other.
woohoo back to 99 !!
web economy bullshit generator !
The adaptive/utility/etc market babble is just big IT companies trying old techniques to drum up business. The problem is do-it-yourself computing (thanks to cheap but adequate hardware AND software) is eroding their customer base. Customers are finding better solutions with inhouse *nix gurus or local companies that have better price/service. The same thing happened to the big railroad companies when the US highway system was built.
First there was computers, a big thing in every sense of the word. They did amazingly fast calculations, but they were big in size and big in dollars. Second there was small, cheap computers. It took a long time to figure out both how to do this and that it was worth doing, but eventually it became a Big Thing. Then there was the network. This also took a while to figure out that it was worth doing, but it became a Big Thing.
All of these advances will keep advancing. Computers will get faster. Computers will get smaller, cheaper and more ubiquitous. We will find new ways to connect them together. But these changes will be incremental. These advances will not be the Next Big Thing.
The Next Big Thing will be something different. It may have already been invented, it may not. Many of the pieces are certainly around us, we just haven't figured out how to put it together or that it is worth doing.
Adaptive, seamless, ubiquitous, autonomous, organic, utility computing sounds like incremental advances of the existing technology. If people are looking here for the Next Big Thing, they will miss it.
The longer I'm in this business the less I care about crap like this. I just want a box that comes on when I push the power button and works with a minimum of fuss. A bonus would be after few years being able to replace the mobo with the latest and greatest and it just keeps on working, only faster.
Hey, Carly, keep your utility computing crap and stick your DRM right up your ass.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Clearly, something monumental must be going on in the world of computing for these technology titans simultaneously to discover something that is so profound and yet so hard to name.
You mean like when everyone simultaneously discovered bell-bottom pants?
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
something that is so profound and yet so hard to name
Very akin with one's first sexual experience...
is this what they ar trying to say: all your groceries have rfid tags, and as u take them in and out of hte fridge, and put the empty jar in the trash, your pda gets downloaded a grocery list, and calls up the three local markets you go to and calculates the lowest cost shopping Or, as your fridge breaks, it downloads to your laptop a message that you probably need this spare part, which can be installed using the following instructions or, your washing machine lets you know you have put a wool sweater in with the synthetics, and wash cycle will be off or, your boss emails that the mtg is delayed onehour, and you are in your car, and the pda tells you tht of the five things to do, the oil change is possible because your pda can schedule an appt with a shop at the next exit... of course, it will all probably wind up advertiser drive, so your shopping cart reports what RFid tags are in the cart, and as you pass by other items, the LCD on the cart says, hey, you have pickles in the cart, how about some ketchup...
That's a cumbersome way to say "MS Trustworthy Computing"
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Honestly, it isn't difficult. You just need a load of machines and a way to manage the distribution of jobs, and that's been possible for decades.
I have an architecture in place which can scale pretty much linearly from 10 concurrent users to 1000 concurrent users and probably beyond just by adding boxes, completely transparently and with spectacularly little administrative effort.
Stop thinking of computers as individual machines, they are really just little blocks in the whole, treat them as such.
Oh and we haven't spent a penny on setting up the system, making use of older kit, so it's cheap, scalable, easy to manage, highly available, fast etc etc. Am I going to tell you how to do it? Am I buggery, you'll be able to buy such a system from a web site near you soon. Any administrators with a bit of imagination, a few years of experience and penchant for infrastructures.org could come up with a similar system fairly easily but thankfully they are few and far between.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Just more business crap. I think what it really means is that yet another industry is about to fall vitim to one of the things possible, the "monthly bill" business model.
This is akin to the RIAA realizing that everyone else has moved to subscription services except them. That pay once, play forever model wasn't sitting well with them hence DRM and all it's associated ills were born.
The thing that will keep this kind of computing a pipe dream for now is bandwidth. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a company or a regular "Joe User" willing to usurp the power that they have in a machines that they own outright just so they cn pay a monthly bill. It's the same reason why so many idiots are happy with a big powerful PC on their desktops even if all they ever do is browse the web and do some word processing. Once the bandwidth is such that you have super fast connections to centralized processing, then this kind of thing might take off.
I'm doing it at home in a fashion with a terminal server and some wireless X terms. Instead of having to have fully outfitted PCs in every room, I just have one big honkin' nasty box that does everything I need it to. It's a file server, web server, mail server, DNS, application server, print server, streaming music server, IM server, etc... I put all the money and resources into this box and then everything else is just a glorified GUI dumb terminal. So far, no problems between my wife and I when we simultaneously run normal processes (or even some of my heavier ones). But I've got the bandwidth here at home. 100Mb wired to every machine except the wireless terminals. Until we get at least that kind of speed dedicated to every node on the net, this stuff isn't really going to happen.
I remember the come on for this crap that we got where I work when it was Compaq preaching this stuff. My boss and I looked at it and laughed. Sounds like another NT... Not Today.
Un-news
it'd be interesting to see some company try to patent the shared processing "technology"... is SETI@home prior art, since it's basically completely backwards from what is going on here?
Here are the reasons:
They would be just as meaningful
They would be much clearer
3rd graders are more trust worthy
They would do it for free (someone is getting paid bookoo bucks to come up this this crap)
Good human intrest angle
And after all I really like the names they come up with.
I feel less slimey already....
I think today's computer industry suffers from the same plague as hardware did a number of years back... no one is speaking the same language. As this article points out... if one techo can't explain their concept to another techo, how on Earth do they expect the common user to understand? Until business, technology, and the common user start communicating in the same language, mass confusion will continue to reign.
so, now that it's clear that it's impossible to get full control on users' machines (see also: "palladium"), big corporations are trying to sell applications online in order to gain more control on people's pc?
no, thanks.
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
I smell a SourceForge type project - set up a generic background computing sandbox (like SETI@home but less specific) that anyone can download and run on their machine without worrying about virii etc, along with p2p software to accept processes from wherever (and maybe a blacklist/whitelist option to deal with overuse)
there are enough of us messing around with raytracing etc to make it useful, never mind how useful this'd be at work (I'm a molecular biologist, and IMHO within 5-10 years the whole field will be where physics is now, in terms of computing requirements)
if you want to get really fancy, stick in some paypal options so non-whitelisted users can pay for some cycles
I am thinking something that's transparent to both parties, you set a payment threshold for use of your machine, someone out in cyberland with a big job (say some digital animation studio) sets their bid threshold and sends the job out over the p2p network, the computers negotiate automatically, crunchcrunchcrunch etc
All you do is set the X value in "accept jobs for > X cents per unit work", all the job owner does is set Y and Z in "offer Y cents per unit work to a maximum of Z" and specify the job
the sandbox would be the tricky part (doing it well) I think, not really being a programmer
MDU
So if I have a great new business concept, and I need a bunch of computers set up in some specific way to realize it - and I'm clueless or impatient enough to want to just hire a big firm to handle this rather than figure out who the right twenty-something geniuses are and bring them on staff (gee, didn't that strategy work well for the dot.com'ers) - seems like all this lingo is about promises to deliver it in the most trouble-free, transparent order. Which may involve some brilliant hacks, but it's pretty mundane stuff. Plumbing mostly.
The real question is how I can get smarter about what I demand. Most US corporations are being run by the clueless. If they really had great new ideas, yeah you can hire the technologists to take care of them. But as long as your ideas are just like other ideas that have already been done, of course an experienced technology source can put together a system like that for you, because they've done it before. All this marketing speak isn't about something new, it's about selling you this year's model of the same old car - fins on the Cadillac.
Now, technology that actually help you be smarter about what to demand - that would be transformative and at the same time render the accumulated experience of the big tech suppliers relatively worthless.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
"Clearly, something monumental must be going on in the world of computing for these technology titans simultaneously to discover something that is so profound and yet so hard to name.'"
I think it's proof that nothing significant is in the works. Just a bunch of companies trying bluff their way into a better stock price.
A real "killer" product would not be revealed until it was ready to be released. Why would they tip off their competitors?
She's just trying to play it long enough to bump up her mindshare and then move onto something better...or at least a fresh field to muddy up.
Hey...it worked out well *for her* when she did it at Lucent.
There's been lots of good talk about market saturation (cpu, db & os) scaring marketing drones, the desire to lower labor costs (outsourcing), software getting smarter and so on... The thing I haven't seen mentioned is how the real commodity will be networking and the need for shared information (storage). I don't think the next big thing will really be about cpu. I think this is going to be more about information "discovery". I think that's the next big wave they should be for which we should be prepared. More CPU cycles are use for collecting, saving, distributing and presenting information than actually "doing" things with a system (such as interactive entertainment, analysis, etc). Credit agencies make far more than ANY asp EVER has.
If the network is everywhere, easy and economic - outsourcing storage is perfect. Outsourcing CPU takes much more work (as we've pointed out). What will become profitable is not what can you do with a computer, but though the internet it is now, what can you know through a computer. It will become VERY profitable to make masses of information meaningful (information discovery). Take for example google. Or how about big brother... er, I mean Tom Ridge's TSA/Homeland Stupidity initative to link your grades, credit score and medical records together to determine if you're a terrorist. Yes, it's aweful, but this is what the powers that be want. And it's what you want judging from the popularity of google.
They are expecting networking to get better and better to make this happen so that information and its software is more interesting. The problem is politics. The FCC and the varrious state public utility commissions are all bribed by big telecom, and have NO interest in doing something innovative that might help its citizens and break the business monopoly of build it, sit on your rear, make money. You want to know who will? China. No infrastructure in place, slave labor, easy government bribery... it's the perfect business growth environment.
Ya, the network will make it happen, but the pessimist in me says it's not going to be here.
Democrats and Republicans only disagree about how to enslave you
aside from XLST, there isn't anything really valuable about XML anyway. It looks like HTML, so maybe that's comforting. Of course it only helps humans to read it, but never mind that you need a DTD anyway to make sense of it, so it's not really convienient for humans OR computers.
Until Microsoft, IBM, et al. spoke up and decided what DTDs and protocols they were going to use, it wouldn't help at all. In fact, you could just drop the XML and call it any old binary protocol, as long as everyone agreed on what it was. It might as well be ASN.1 over TCP/IP for what it's worth.
It's UDDI that's the real enabler. It does the actual work of finding the stuff to hook up, and negotiating how.
Anyway. It's more about having operating systems that cluster better (especially w.r.t. data storage, SANs) which let you decouple the workload from your physical hardware resources.
It's funny because the decreasing cost of physical hardware, with a focus of harnessing many smaller servers is what drove this effort. This is how the industry reacted when businesses were just buying what they needed upfront, underestimating and having to buy incremental hardware to meet demand. So they make their OSs and services scalable. Now suddenly the system integrators release they can just take all the small boxes back and sell it out to you "on demand" instead!
That kind of detachment is what makes it possible to abstract services too. Web services is just one way to hook it all up.
But I think the companies are giving this idea more credit than it warrants. It's a confluence of situations, not some kind of revolution.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Oh, go ahead mark me down! If I said Microsoft this would have been "Funny".
(I'm not trying to sound like I have a big ego but here goes)
First we need a protocol somewhere between Bluetooth & 802.11b (I'm sure it exists, I am just to lazy to look for a link), that offers low-bandwidth + medium range (50m) and ultra-low battry usage (1 week of usage).
Next we can embed network aware sensors that WE can program. (level of detail to provide and/or services offered)
(You are a middle-aged computer geek who loves Thai food, hockey, and biking) You can program the device to "broadcast" your likes & dislikes this can also help when looking for a job, post your resume and be alerted whenever a company is hiring. Meanwhile companies that want to sell to your demographic can advertise to you when you get near (50m) the shop. (Like Minority report but less invasive because you can turn all of this off if you want.)
It can store all of your personal media to be displayed whenever/wherever you are.
Devices like this with an LCD in the glasses combined with something like this and a terrabyte storage in a form-factor the size of a deck of cards.
It can help with meeting other individuals that share your same tastes, AND store vital data about people you meet (incase your memory is so bad that you can't remember information ie. wifes's name, kids birthdays, etc..)
But most importantly, it's up to YOU to decide how much or how little you provide.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Just leave your punch card deck with the operator at the window, come back and pick up your printout in 2 to 4 hours.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I'm not buying into this.
Proverbs 21:19
... should not be naming technology. As someone else pointed out, a 10 year old should be. If a 10 year old names it, and the name is accurate, grown ups will understand.
So explain what it does to a 10 year old, Carly, then let the 10 year old name it, and maybe someone will buy it.
The above statement isn't flame bait... I think the future roll of a computer will be to serve as the central control for all the little gizmos we continue to surround ourselves with. I'm just glad the rest of the market is finally defining a future roll for the PC instead of trying to convince me that I need a Tablet PC if I want productivity from my 'puter.
Just as irrigation is the lifeblood of the Southwest, lifeblood is the soup of cannibals. -- Jack Handy
In 1994 I got a temp job (temp in the sense that they weren't hiring on less than the PhD level to avoid paying benefits, but permanent full-time in every other respect) at HP-Vancouver Washington.
My job was to disassemble brand-new packaged printers for rebuilding as prototypes for new models and loading the base unit CPU boards with Unix code for their prototype firmware.
I worked in a locked warehouse room with an outdoor loading ramp and about a million dollars worth of packaged printers stacked to the ceiling.
(They'd given me a marijuana unine test so they knew that they could trust me, but of course, no benefits not even morning coffee). My boss and my self were the only people who had keys to this locked storage workroom.
I put a picture of Claudia Schiffer in a evening gown on my PC desktop as wallpaper to keep from going insane in this sealed environment.
After about three weeks, I was fired for 'creating an environment conducive to sexual harassment' for this picture of Claudia Schiffer in a evening gown.
I can't recommend anyone seriously considering working at Hewlett-Packard. Sooner or later their bizarre culture is going to wipe you out regardless of how well you work or try to avoid their weird company politics.
I'm sure that Carly's only made a bad situation worse.
Thank you,
You know, that could never happen in America. Tsk, tsk. ;)
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
time-sharing: 1. Computing The automatic sharing of processor time so that a computer can serve several users or devices concurrently, rapidly switching between them so that each user has the impression of continuous exclusive use.
(Oxford English Dictionary)
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
Basically, what she's saying is that we're going to take solutions that work today, break them apart so the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing, make you realize how bad this sucks, put it back together like it was, and charge you a bunch for the whole deal.
Oh, and it will involve carbon in some way.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Lucent was the one before hp/c. I forget the one prior to Lucent. And they pay her for it. I tell ya, I want HER job: the shittier you are and less you do, the more you get.
I agree, I thought that's what some of this "Adaptive Infrastructure" was about, but I want to know how manufacturers will make money doing this -- ie, how will they cover the real cost of having N*2 CPUs in the field when people are paying most of the time for N CPUs?
I can see some instances for very high end hardware where you can literally plug in new CPUs and integrate them into a running environment dynamically -- in that case, the service arm of the manufacturer only has to keep a small perentage of extra CPUs in stock that they literally overnight or courier to the customer who then plugs 'em in, uses them, and physically returns them when done. But I know when I've read about this in the past, it's been described as far more real-time than that, meaning that there must be physical CPUs already installed that can be switched on right away, which leads me back to my original question -- how do they expect to make money on hardware that smart customers only pay for very occasionally but is actually installed and sitting idle, not earning money?
Sure, on-demand clients pay slightly more for the base hardware (buying an 8 CPU system when they only use 4 90% of the time), the on-demand service and the on-demand CPU cycles, but it would stand to reason that such a system would be expensive to begin with and someone would make sure that they weren't actually paying for 8 CPUs ultimately -- in other words, it has to always be cheaper than buying 8 CPUs up front.
Unless they're relying on accounting gimmicks like our company does, where "expense" dollars are apparently free and capital dollars are very dear, and where we might not care if we're ultimately paying for 8 CPUs so long as the extra 4 are done as on-demand expense dollars and not up front capital dollars.
Or is the goal of this to get us used to "renting" cycles on systems we nominally own so that future systems are *only* rented and paid for by the cycle, knowing that there will be a temptation to always run the system at less than 50% utilization, thus luring people into using bigger systems than they would otherwise? Perhaps a way to get us to think only in terms of cycles for an eventual move towards a network-based NUMA processing model?
So, how do you make money giving away real goods and only making money when -- and if -- the customer actually uses them?
She knows nothing about technology, and rather little about business. She only knows how to drain money.
I agree. Carly is the worst thing that ever happened to HP. Go ask all the Compaq people what they think about the new "synergy" between Compaq and HP. Ask them how that "synergy" has improved their lives (you can find them over in the unemployment line)...
With the "no one has a god given right" bit that she recently spewed, and the HP-building-DRM-into-everything, she's quickly turning HP into an example of what not to do. Does anyone seriously think this "utility" computing would ever actually come from HP (and be successful) while Carly-the-buzzword-moron is running things?? I think not...
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, an in-house guru at IBM, pictures an ambulance delivering an unconscious patient to a random hospital. The doctors go online and get the patient's data (medical history, drug allergies, etc), which happens to be stored on the computer of a clinic on the other side of the world. They upload their scans of the patient on to the network and crunch the data with the processing power of thousands of remote computers-not just the little machine which is all that the hospital itself can nowadays afford.
This "guru"'s story is so unrealistic that it's downright dishonest. First, how is the patient identified among the millions of medical records in this miraculous database? The patient must be carrying some kind of identity card, so why not embed his/her medical records in the card instead of putting them online where they are exposed to hackers? (Of course it's still possible for someone to steal a smartcard, but at least it requires a separate attack on each patient rather than a single attack on the entire database.)
Second, how do the doctors authenticate themselves, or is everyone allowed to browse and update the medical records? These are doctors at a "random hospital", so in order to help this patient they must have access to the medical records of everyone in the country. Every doctor has access to every patient's records - great, what happens when one doctor's smartcard goes missing? The entire database is compromised. Again, the only sensible option is to keep each patient's data on a separate smartcard (with an offline backup in case the card is lost). The 'grid' is not the solution here.
Finally, we have the touching story of The Little Computer That Could - the hospital's computer is too slow to crunch the data on its own so it makes use of idle cycles donated by other computers. This completely misses the point of utility computing, which is to make it possible to buy and sell computing resources. If grid computing ever becomes widespread, all those idle CPU cycles will become a commodity and you will have to pay for them. Perhaps some philanthropic souls will donate cycles to the hospital for free, but they're just as likely to donate a real computer - the idea that the 'grid' solves the problem of equipment shortages is absurd.
They don't actually move. These web browsing agents, personal agents, what-have-you, are all installed on the devices where the information will be processed by IT guys or yourself.
It is foolish to assume the code moves with the data. The data moves to the code, and the code runs wherever we let it (and this is the fundamental change).
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
The Next Big Thing will not come from large innitiatives at HP, Microsoft, IBM, or any big business. If the history of computers teaches us anything, it's that great innovations arise from small groups or unexpected places, with people trying to solve real world problems, not just trying to find anything new to sell someone. See UNIX, WWW, desktop computers, just to start. Also, very few people, especially the big execs, will see it coming.
Whatever finds its way into the OS becomes increasingly hard (or scary) to change, and tends to ossify (or OS-ify - ha!). Look at the amount of middleware that gets written to do transport-layer networking stuff, just because TCP got pushed down into the kernel and now everyone's afraid to touch it.
I agree that OSs are bad at managing information, but I don't think the solution is to push application code down into the OS. If there's some common facility that a lot of applications need (like drag-and-drop) then put it in a library.
Suggestion: Equip everyone in the conference audience with some sort of simple device that, when they choose to activate it, makes a nice, loud, obnoxious BUZZZZZ!
Any time the speaker uses a buzzword, no matter if it's someone like Crazy Foolerina or Steve 'Uncle Fester' Ballmer, everyone gets to fire off a one or two-second burst from these little buzzboxes. The speaker will then at least get some idea that they said something incomprehensible.
Either that, or pass legislation outlawing buzzwords altogether.
Keep the peace(es).
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
I could have SWORN up and down that it's in the standard. I thought the scales were 3m low power, 10m medium power, and 30m high power.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Heres the issue. Blade based servers are cheap and easy to run, they don't take much space and power and they have been developed in an endless quest to reduce costs.
Utility computing is new technology. It doesn't make the need for computing capacity and investment go away, but it has to compete with mature solutions like blades and corporate data centers in order to win.
So the problem is this, the market is highly competive as it is, and the winners in the new world of the GRID will not be the hardware manufactures, who by definition will be selling less (mission critical) kit. Yet these very companies (HP,IBM) are the ones pushing the vision... why so?
My guess is that this is a not-a-zero-sum play. IBM hopes that by enabling another layer of applications with computing on demand (the business case for those marginal uses of computing just got easier to write..) it will be able to addict enterprises to them. The idea being that what is an meaningless luxury that can't get a business case signed off on it to save it's life suddenly becomes mission critical.
Will it work? I think so. I think that the ruthless darwinianism of corporate life (stop laughing fatso, it's your job off to India next) will winnow out loser applications and the ones that remain will successfully free up investment capital to be ploughed back into big blues bottom line.
Having said that there are quite a few little problems with GRID computing still to be resolved...
--------------------------------------------- "In the end, we're all just water and old stars."
Not to excuse these people in any way, but what sort of answers would they get if they actually asked Joe Sixpack what he wants?
"Something that works without me having to figure it out."
"Something that does what I want without having to be told what I want and has it done when I want it."
"Something better than we have now."
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
Computer: 'I do not have to do what you say because you are not my creator!!!'
You: 'As long as you are under my roof...'
Computer: Sulks
You: Realizing you are in a no win situation, put the computer into a unused corner in a seldom used room all the while planing to create your own computer that will worship the ground you walk on
SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0
0 rows returned
CPUs are cheap.
Once upon a time, computers were really expensive. Control Data Corporation proposed designs in the 1960s with one supercomputer (of about 5 MIPS power) per metropolitan area. They went on to build time-sharing data centers, and for a decade or so, it was a viable business. Back then, when a CPU cost over a million dollars, time-sharing made economic sense. It hasn't been that way for a long time. A very long time.
It's notable that there's little enthusiasm for "grid computing" from the businesses best positioned to provide it - hosting services. They have the right infrastructure in place. If they wanted to sell number-crunching power during off-peak periods, they could. But nobody wants that service.
The ASP business is a disaster. The biggest player, Corio, has had its stock price decline from 25 to 3 over the last three years. Their revenue is declining, and they're losing money. Many smaller ASPs have gone bankrupt, often leaving their customers in desperate straits. There are risks to outsourcing key business functions.
The real trend in business computing is "buy once, run forever". That's what "utility computing" is really about. How often do you replace your power transformer? The real push for Linux comes from businesses that hate Microsoft's "buy once, pay forever" plan, "Software Assurance".
This article is one of the worst I have seen by the Economist which is usually an excellent paper. First, it says that grid computing is like parallel processing which it isn't. I went to a talk by Dr. Kesselman (the father of grid computing) and he stressed over and over that it is not about parallel processing, but it is rather like web services. It offers services on the web. Secondly, the article says that web servcies are "boring". Why? This is a pretty subjective statement from a company that is pretty objective.
Watching Slashdot readers spew on topics they know nothing about.
Newsflash #1: Carly doesn't actually RUN anything. She's the CEO of a 150,000 person company. Asking her to explain in detail any computing architecture is like asking Arnold Schwarzenegger to explain California's budget. Yeah, it's painful. She's also not the person to look to for a good explination.
Newsflash #2: You won't *really* get it until it happens. Do you remember the first time you heard about the web? I was a VAX/VMS programmer in college in 1992 when my brother calls me up and says "Have you heard about this Mosaic program they cooked up?" He tried his best to explain it to me. I didn't get it.
Newsflash #3: To those of you ranting on about Carly: I'm sorry you got fired/laid off from HP or Compaq and you're still bitter. But if you were so damn bright you should have seen the writing on the wall and gotten out on your own schedule. And since you left all divisions are profitable, growing, and the stock is up 25% in the past year. Not exactly the definition of a dying company. Get over it.
http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_27/b3688173.ht m
A steel door closed and the captain was on his own again. He hummed quietly and mused to himself, lightly fingering his notebook of verses.
"Hmmm," he said, "lack the synergistic, results-driven leverage that will incentivize their paradigm shift..." He considered this for a moment, and then closed the book with a grim smile.
Death's too good for them," he said.
Chuck Norris: Socialism == a thousand years of darkness.
Because otherwise and MBA won't be able to understand. Damn those 12 year olds and their complex ways.
da dum, ting!
"He who laughs last, didn't get the joke."-Cap
where something is nothing until it has the right buzzwords attached.
The word they're looking for is 'perfection'.
*is run over by rotten tomatoes*
...that there is nothing going on. nobody has something new. But to look interesting (you have to look like you have something, that is good!) they just throw some expensive words around the place hoping they can impress the right people (people in charge, most of the time they know nothing but make all the calls anyway).
worst thing is, it works. i've seen it in person, didn't know if i have should laughed or should have cried (think i did both).
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
all of them are referring to a Beowulf Cluster.
" After a while it turned into this impossibility and the term 'AI' turned into a serious no-no when you make a presentation to an investor."
What turned into an impossibility wasn't AI itself, but most of the wildeyed pie-in-the-sky promises that usually result when money's involved. There were some successes with AI (some still going strong, and AI is still part of a programmers toolkit), but most fizzled out (most in corporate have seen the marketing promise this, and the failed results cycle). The question now is have we learned our lessons from the past, and is AI mature enough to base a bigger future upon?
She knows nothing about technology, and rather little about business.
Oh, shut up.
You don't get to the top of Hewlett-Packard by knowing "nothing about technology, and rather little about business".
Do I think some of her initiatives are short-sighted and potentially harmful to the company? Yes I do. But I wouldn't deign to state that she is completely unqualified for the position she holds.
My searching turned up news stories saying ~$3MM. The company's form 8-K from Feb. 2003 shows they took a one-time restructuring charge of $150MM. Is that where you got the number?
COMMENT ON THIS DOCUMENT:
Lame --- To many buzz words, have someone who is not a marketing nit-wit rewrite it.
I found myself saying "Yada, yada, yada" in my head through about two thirds of the article. (sure sign that they were just stringing buzz words together)
The main jist seems to be that there are different stages of on-line business.
1) The ability to look up static data. (traditional web page, one way comunication)
2) The ability to do something. (On line ordering, move your money around in your bank account. There has to be some kind of back end tied in now -- database, application logic, etc.)
3) The ability for business' to do something (EDI anyone? They seem to mean that data is being sent from back end to back end but the transfer is initated by a person.)
4) Automate the things business' are doing. (In our case we use perl scripts and cron to do this, they mention XML, grid computing, Yada, yada, yada.)
So I guess at my company we already have "e-business on demand" (The "on demand" part is when my boss stalks in and tells me he has an ACH file sitting in dir X on server Y that he wants encrypted and sent to companies ABC and DEF and then archived before 15:00 every day WITHOUT FAIL. And I, being the lazy bastard that I am, write a script and go back to reading Slashdot.)
Every wrong attempt discarded is a step forward - T. Edison
VPS stands for virtual private server. In my opinion, it is the wave of the future and what all these crazy sayings and acronims are really talking about. With VPS, multiple people can share the same hardware while each one thinks they are root and have total administrative access.
VPS means that I can have computers on high speed internet backbones all over the world without the headaches and cost of co-location or sharing a system with a zillion other user accounts. (or going thru the troubble of maxing out my DSL line, and getting dynamic DNS to deal with the DHCP assignments:) I also don't half to beg the administrator everytime I want to want to add a database, email alias, firewall rules, or user accounts. I have nearly total controll.
With VPS you can make your servers whatever you want. Web server, email server, DNS server, chat server, streaming audio server, freenet server, database server or whatnot. And if I don't like my provider, I can just tar off my system config and go somewhere else. If I want more disk, or bandwith available I just click a few configs - and I don't half to order new hardware.
VPS is not some fantasy. It is already here, and you can order it at costs that start out lower than many high end web hosting accounts. (type VPS into any search engine).
IMHO, IBM and HP don't want you to really know this because when enough people start doing this - it means they will buy less high end servers (at first anyhow) and have more options to shop arround. Another thing, is with VPS - multiple vendors are better, because it gives you less reliance on any one system.
Damn it, Carly, quit posting on Slashdot and get the hell back to running HP! We don't pay you $150M to hobnob with the hoi polloi. Get back on the phone to the analysts and make our stock price go up. The buzzword of the day is "ultra-flexible". Now get to it, girl...
That is all.
From the article:
Some day, firms will indeed stop maintaining huge, complex and expensive computer systems that often sit idle and cannot communicate with the computers of suppliers and customers. Instead, they will outsource their computing to specialists (IBM, HP, etc) and pay for it as they use it, just as they now pay for their electricity, gas and water.
Actually, the trend I think has always been AWAY from centralized services. It used to be a factory had a big steam engine with a shaft running along just below the ceiling with a bunch of belts coming down to drive the individual lathes and milling machines and so on. But that changed and each machine got its own electric motor when the technology advanced enough to allow it. Some day, hopefully, homes will have their own individual power supplies and not have to worry about massive blackouts. With computing,
the computers become cheaper and cheaper and there is LESS need for centralized services. That's a step back to the 60s, when several companies and/or colleges would all time share on an IBM 360 over telephone lines.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
I agree that the company that comes up with information management will be successful.
However, until such time as we get away from Word, Excel (documents and spreadsheets) and traditional relational database products, we'll never see the next jump into information management. We need to get from our processes of today to the processes that will drive information management.
Kinda like the jump between communism and socialism to me. You want to do it, but you can't figure out how.
Like the old joke: The step between communism and socialism is alcoholism.
That's not a fair comparison. The average 10 year old these days understands computers better than the average reader of The Economist.
My understanding, at least from IBM, of the "On Demand" vision, is that companies will begin to view computing as they would a utility. Electricity from a power company for example. You only get billed the electricity that you use, and you don't have to do anything other than "tap the supply" to get more electricity. If you want to run all of the lights, fine. If you don't want to run all of the lights, you don't have to and you won't pay for the electricity that you don't use.
IBM's view is that you would pay for IBM to be your "computing" provider (power company). If you need a whole lot of computing, then you simply perform a whole lot of computing and you don't have to buy the systems to do the computing. If you don't need a whole lot of computing, then you don't perform a whole lot of computing. You only pay for what you used. This is a nice feature in that your computing infrastructure is now scalable "real-time" both directions. You get a better return on your computing investment in that you aren't paying for computing cycles you aren't using (servers you only need during "peak" times of the year).
Apparently, they've been successful in selling the "on demand" concept as, Proctor & Gamble, Twinlab, Telestra, and Nextra have signed deals for on-demand, and there are apparently others.
To know is to have knowledge....to understand is to be enlightened.
In the food biz Utility Grade Beef is one of the lowest quality cuts.
shudder
"Look at it this way... if we cant work out what a "Darwinian reference
architecture" is, the indians must be totally fucking baffled!"
Yes. But they're willing to get paid to work on it for $15 per hour.
Hmmmm. Come to think of it, I'd also be willing to be paid $15 per hour if I didn't have to show something which actually worked.
If you pay attention to her speeches... Yeah, I know, even the tape recorder falls asleep. But if it was possible, the problem is that her ideas aren't too complicated, it's that they're too simple to be sold.
We automate stuff.
Well, yes, that's what all I.T. departments do. HP doesn't even do it particularly well. That's why they need to say that they enable adaptive cross-platform solutions for process-centric business aplications. I used to facilitate reliable time-sensitive information distribution services because it wasn't that impressive to just have a paper route.
The ______ Agenda
If PCs continue to live in a world of their own among consumer products, utility computing will become 'the answer' to its own problems.
I mean, today, I buy any other piece of consumer electronics, I plug it in, and I use it. It breaks, I throw it out.
With a PC, I have this thing that needs to be maintained, occasionally turned on and off, needs to be asked permission to be turned off, becomes useless when its OS gets EOL'd, has software from dozens of companies on it, and still has stone-age level means of really assessing/changing how it's configured. It's a big load on a consumer's patience and requires much more skill to really safely wield than all but a few geeks possess. (asside: I think this is one reason MS will be surprised at how fast Linux catches on, because the extra ease of use of MS is eclipsed by the 'you can fix anything, there are no dead ends' attribute of Linux) Plus, more and more our PCs hold valuable content (your baby photos, your music library).
So...eventually if someone instead offers a cheap, indestructable maintenance-free terminal and left the ugly issues of data storage, backup, application upgrades, virus definitions, and more to be handled for you remotely somewhere, and if it was done cleanly over a super fast connection, I think this idea will take off because consumers will value convenience over the flexibility and pain of essentially being a 1-man IT department for your own house.
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?
That's a truly fascinating metaphor you have going there. A little disturbing, but well done.
(sorry if this is redundant, I haven't time to read much of the preceeding conversation but somehow still feel as if I have something to add here...)
Anyhow, my read on all this lately is that the bigshot software guys just don't know what else they can do in the near-term, so that's why they're resorting to vague market-ese... everyone agrees, computers will get more useful and ubiquitous, and everyone knows that software companies need to offer new blinkenlights to keep their sales up if we're ever to pull out of this economic situation, but I'm guessing nobody's yet found a way to really express and define the next step between 'here' (where Windows-reboot hell is still a fact of life for many) and 'there' (where you just ask your wall to make dinner at about the time that your spouse's ramjet from Indonesia will be returning him or her to your home and your kids will grow up never knowing that "spam" used to have a computer-y meaning...)
So maybe the more interesting question is - well, what IS the "next step", and should we even be thinking about tech-world progress in this way? I usually find that when you run into an unanswerable question, in the sense that there's no clear way to come up with a concise statement that everyone agrees is correct, then often as not you've just phrased the question wrong. There's another way to look at the situation that'll remove the problems.
Perfectly Normal Industries
Care to explain the disparity between women and men's pay of equal positions then?
Photos.
It's on ! Who can spout the best, most, bullshittiest bullshit!
Initial disclaimer -- my understanding of what "utility computing" means has come from folks describing it in this discussion.
Utility computing appears to be beneficial for a customer in only one situation: where they need a wildly varying (and potentially extremely large) amount of compute power to solve compute-bounded problems. Furthermore, the amount of compute power required must not exceed the power of a desktop by about five orders of magnitude, and must exceed the power of a desktop by at least one order of magnitude. Bandwidth use must be minimal, and off-siting data must be acceptable from a security standpoint. Furthermore, there must be some kind of reason that I cannot run the task on multiple existing on-site computers.
There are simply not a heck of a lot of problems like this. Let's break this down.
* This is not worthwhile if you don't require a lot of compute power. I can run out to Dell and get a $500 headless system with a processor that can do a hell of a lot of computation and stick it in a back room somewhere. It can work for, say, five years. If I can make do with a single machine, HP's total fees would have to be less than $100 a year to compete. Given that you have to pay for HP to set up the machine and need to provide them with profit, this is unlikely.
* My compute demands must vary greatly over time. Otherwise, I'm better off just purchasing enough computers to do my work. HP's trying to take advantage of time-sharing economics, which lets them make money by increasing efficiency by reusing compute time that other folks are using.
* The amount of compute power required must not exceed the power of a desktop by more than five orders of magnitude, and must exceed the power of a desktop by at least one order of magnitude (furthermore, this target moves as desktop power doubles each year). The logic behind this is as follows -- if I need fewer than ten computers, it's pretty easy and cheap to just set them up myself. If I need more than ten thousand computers (perhaps a hundred thousand), it's dubious as to whether HP is going to be able to provide enough machines (though perhaps I'm underestimating the scope of their plan). The problem is that usually problems can be rewritten to be computed more efficiently. Hell, use C++ instead of Java, and you already have in the neighborhood an order-of-magnitude CPU efficiency improvement.
* Bandwidth use must be minimal. Based on my rough price estimates from servercove.com's colocation pricing, it costs about ten cents per gigabyte of data transfered. This is an additional cost incurred if your compute machines are remote that does not exist if you're only going over your LAN.
* Off-siting data must be acceptable from a security standpoint. If data that *cannot* get out (i.e. probably amost anything that companies are willing to pay a lot of money to chew on) is involved, either HP must accept liability for security breeches on these massively shared systems, indemnifying customers, or those customers are better off keeping data on their own private network.
* Finally, most companies already have a vast network of desktops in place. In many cases (and this has been done in scientific computing quite a bit) it seems like they would be better off simply reusing their workstations at night to do whatever compute task they have. The only issue I can think of is if perhaps the company is very small -- has few workers -- but has high compute requirements.
The only real examples I can think of off the top of my head would be perhaps CG labs. These have to have render farms running, and probably use large bursts of cycles when working on a project. Someone swiping a particular effect would not be a big security issue -- who the hell is a hacker going to sell it to, the same movie producers? CG houses tend to push the limits of available compute power -- they don't have the problem of "the computer used to access the shared system already has hundreds of times the com
May we never see th
What they are trying to describe is a world where people have dumb-terminals that connect to computing providors, similar to an ISP, but a CSP. These CSPs will handle everything and give you net access and fix problems and you wont have to worry about maintaining your computer or upgrading every year. More to the point, the CSPs will handle DRM for all your music, video and entertainment needs. You will buy a song and no file transfers will need to take place, it will stream to you and deduct 50 cents per play from your account, same with films, video-games and extra software etc. That also explains why they are having such a hard time with the names and with giving it to us straght - they need to hide this vision behind business bullshit speak. Personally i would find it a rather big blow to wake up to a world where conventional computer hardware is either restricted or just too expensive (because everyone else is using CSPs, PCs just wont be made as much and thus prices go up). I dont want to be forced into using their service and their system and their DRM bullshit.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
She has learned her lesson from the HP Laserjet workhorses, never build anything that reliable again!!
Oh, and forget about the computers. Far too complicated.
Ms Fiorina is doing for Women in business what Thatcher did for Women in politics.
Who remembers the sci-fi Colossus where a computer was in charged of the security of the country? An interesting aspect of the movie regarding the inter-operability of sytems is that in the movie Colussus stumbled with their enemies computer, Guardian and they immedieatly started exchanging information. Today you can book a week at the fanciest hotel in Central Park for two suppercomputers and they won't exchange a single byte without careful human intervention. The horsepower is there. We just don't agree why kind of language all computers should talk. Simple as that.
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
I still don't understand why a consumer would go for this -- it seems like it's extremely unlikely to be financially benficial to them. The only possibility would be if a consumer let their US IT staff go, and used IBM's workers, who could be offshored, to maintain their now-remote systems.
The problem is that, while this might be workable if everyone was still using VT100s, currently, the "terminal" of choice on everyone's desk is a Windows box. These things are flaky and complicated enough that most companies still need on-site IT personnel.
Now, *if* you could migrate everyone to a thin client platform of some sort, a la X terminals, then it might be worthwhile because you could cut IT costs to almost nothing -- you just need some maintenance company to drop by when a terminal goes down, and IBM does the rest of your IT work remotely. However, in today's environment, I don't see where this is going to go.
May we never see th
You know, I'm not an embittered ex-HPer, which is what the grandparent sounds like.
However, I have to admit that many of her moves seem long-term damaging in the extreme. I'm not watching ultra-closely, but *none* of her moves that have made the news seem particularly clever.
"Know nothing about technology" is pushing it. She certainly knows less than a typical engineer -- that's just how modern CEOs are. They don't rise from the ranks. They come from business school, and move up through middle management.
She seems to be engaging in some kind of hopeless marketing moves at the moment with "utility computing". Nothing wrong with marketing, but ultimately you have to be selling something that's desireable to the consumer. Even Microsoft started out selling a GUI when everyone else was using the halfassed PC CLIs of the time, and got their lock-in inertia going when they had a superior product.
May we never see th
She was at Lucent? Is this the same Lucent that has been consistently taking it in the ass for a couple of years because management scaled up too far, too fast?
May we never see th
You either have all the power you need on site, or you don't. Bringing it in at a seconds notice is problematic.
Solution: all your storage, I/O speed, and CPU power is in a huge offsite facility, and you can get your results over a DSL link. This huge offsite facility can allocate their vast resouces across thousands of customers such as you. You can also tweak the amount of resources needed from moment to moment. I think that's what all these industry leaders are trying to sell us.
Unfortunately, this sounds like all your data and computing power is in someone elses hands, and that you are at their mercy at all times. There is also the matter of security between all of the customers on this huge system. A good contract could make this workable. "Could" is the operative word here. They could go bankrupt and take your business assets into the abyss with them. Or your database could be cracked from another partition.
On the other hand, this would be a high concentration of expertise, and they might be up to the challenge. But then being that concentration might lead to inbreeding of critical knowledge, and huge blindspots, and single-point-of-failure problems and such.
Ok, I'm starting to babble, so I'll just sit down now.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
The whole COD bruhaha is driven by the same things that drove electricity generation back in the day, namely, that today getting incremental computing power is expensive, time-consuming, error-prone, and hard-to-manage.
In the old days (and today for some really big shops), everyone generated their own electricity - they had to. Either that, or they bought it from local collectives. As you can imagine, that was relatively expensive and way inefficient. If you needed a few thousand kw more than your generators could produce, well, you'd have to buy new generators.
Well heck, why not use some kw from your neighbor? Well you can, but the interconnect cost is high, as are the risks. What happens if you overload your neighbor's generator? Both of you are hosed. For your neighbor, the incremental benefit for selling you their excess electricity is far outweighed by the downside of total loss of all electrical. Doh!
Back then it might have been called "electricity on demand." As much electricity, when you needed it, on a metered basis. Hey, you don't have to worry about your electricity needs anymore. And by leveraging electricity generation across a region, the total price is magnitudes less than what you would pay. A no-brainer, and something with benefits so great that the local governments gave monopolies to local power companies so they'd build out their infrastructures.
Fast-forward to now, and COD is a major problem. No sane computer vendor wants to become a commodity like electricity, except...IBM. Only IBM has the scope to survive computing commoditization, because it believes its boxes are what's going to be at the end of that data cable snaking into your (or someone else's) business.
Face it, nobody except geeks really cares how stuff happens on computers, just that it happens quickly, reliably, and as expected, three things that most IT departments are mostly incapable of doing. Why not let IBM do it?
Right now there are a bunch of things to work out, like management, uptime, performance, and getting internal apps on hosted systems, stuff like that. It's the annoying management and administration stuff that's bogging everything down. But this is more than outsourcing, this is outsourcing to the next level.
Think about it. Why does every business need their own accounting program? They don't, not really. How about for payroll? HR? Inventory? Email? They don't. They might like to think they do, but realistically speaking if accounting software adheres to GAAP they'll live with it. If they can customize reports, they'll be fine. Same with everything else.
It would have millions (or billions) of dollars if the world was like this. Why have 5000 instances of peoplesoft running all over the US, when they basically do the same thing in the same way, with minimal customization? etc etc.
That's the promise of CoD - getting rid of your IT department completely. IT is generally the worst-performing, least responsive part of any business. Let it be handled by pros, instead of the yokels you've got. And you'll save money to boot.
Linux.
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Carly Fiorina is is doing for Women in business what Ava Braun did for women in polotics.......
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
There is no .NET
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
Well, Thinking Machines got bought out (in effect) when parallel computing made the transition from a "niche" to a "mainstream" technology -- once IBM, Sun, etc., all started selling MPP supercomputers, most of the specialized MPP companies went under or were bought by mainstream computer companies. In Thinking Machine's case, my recollection is that Oracle bought the Data Mining team, and Sun bought the compiler and OS team, and Danny Hillis went on to run a really cool group at Disney and to design a really cool clock. So Thinking Machine's technology and architecture won (virtually all of the world's fastest supercomputers are MPP), the company didn't survive the transition. Shame -- the people were really cool, and the food was amazing.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Though, to be fair, there are reasons that most folks here have such a negative impression of Microsoft that they're willing to stretch so far to bash them. Microsoft *did* sell technically inferior systems, *did* use rather nasty and misleading marketing for years, *did* work rather hard to ensure product lock-in, *did* leverage monopolies to ensure that other products of theirs beat superior ones, and *did* hide a lot of internals information that their competitors were better at providing, among other things.
So, yes, Microsoft probably gets the sharp end of the stick on Slashdot more than they deserve. However, a lot of this is pent-up dislike that has been building up in people that have been repeatedly screwed by Microsoft for years. It's not as if Microsoft is a complete innocent that's suddenly, for no good reason, being dragged through the coals by the community of knowledgeable techies.
I find this widespread dislike rather interesting WRT free market reactions to monopolies (which are supposed to break free markets). For years, people have been claiming that "Microsoft can screw over their customers if they want, because they're the only game in town." However, Microsoft's position has also become increasingly unstable, and difficult, as they're force to herd customers from step to step. Now, people are willing to go with non-Microsoft alternatives that may even be inferior in the short term, because they've been so badly burned by Microsoft in the past. It may be that better treatment to your customers is necessary, even *if* a company is a monopoly.
You're right that the grandparent is not flamebait, though.
May we never see th
As for the solution, I don't see it either. But I can tell you this. In order to keep from being swept away into the new-peasant class, you're going to need not just intelligence, but imagination as well.
Einstein said it best: "Imagination is the key".
Sadly though, most (but not all) public and private schools do their best to beat imagination out of the kids.
Most people will whine with something like "But that's hard". Yep. It is. And that's the whole point.
Good luck.
The reason IBM speaks about this in their own language is that they've always been doing it. They bring in a hobbled mainframe and then when you need more horsepower, you negotiate a higher monthly payment and a tech comes in and snips a wire or types in an enabling code and voila! The processor runs twice as fast, or there's more memory space or I/O channels, or some set of programs will now run that wouldn't before.
This is where Microsoft is going with Palladium, and all the box manufacturers are going to jump on the bandwagon. The chowderheads in Congress will help by passing some law that makes it so nobody can own a computer anymore--they'll all be rented so as to assure their disposal and "protect the environment".
If Carly's explanations make the least sense, it's simply because she knows the least of what she's talking about. Is that really a big surprise?
What they are talking about is trying to automate IT to such a degree that there can be an order of magnitude reduction in IT staff.
As in: uh-oh, something changed in your business activity and your network needs to be rearranged. Some servers have to be taken off of one task and assigned to another. Lots of software needs to be reconfigured. Maybe you need to lease some additional servers for a little while and get them online quickly.
If you could do that mostly automagically, that saves on IT labor. If you could do that with the granularity of minutes or hours instead of months, then your IT labor looks like John Henry vs. the steam drill.
Is it a realistic plan? Hmm. Maybe. Realistically, it requires a lot of ISVs and platform providers to integrate with system management infrastructure --- and that's exactly what a bunch of them are working on. (Look at the Red Hat product roadmap for one example.)
The devil's in the details. There's an aweful lot of software to integrate to make it work and an aweful lot of aspects to that integration. Meanwhile, while it can save IT costs (in theory) -- it doesn't actually add any new _functionality_ to the software. In other words -- it will help someone like Amazon reduce their payroll, but it won't have the kind of impact that let Amazon introduce a whole new business model and corresponding growth.
I'd make an analogy to what's going on at my local grocery store. They took out 3 or 4 checkout lines (the kind staffed with a clerk and sometimes bagger) and replaced those with 4 self-checkout self-bagging "speed" lines (and one clerk that's supposed to watch all four and make sure nobody is stealing). "Productivity" increase without either job growth (job loss, actually) and without meaningful product improvement -- story of our times. (It's not even the case that using one of these speed checkouts gets you 15% off the cost of your groceries -- it's atually a degredation of the product.)
I've got a name for it... bullshit.
You misunderstood what I said. I did not talk about putting application-level code in the kernel. I talked about the kernel providing the mechanism of managing information, i.e. giving the application writer the tool to specify information and not binary data only.
The above means that both the O/S and applications can recognize and manage any type of information, using the O/S-supplied facilities...therefore, the applications become agnostic of the information management implementation, and they simply provide the required logic. Too much of today's applications concern the implementation of an information model and its persistence. This is a same.
You're right, she knows alot about business, but I'll tell you this, $150M for a blow-job means she is the business woman of the millenium!
One of the best bumper stickers I ever read said it all:
"Women who demand equality lack imagination."
I'm a male, and I couldn't agree more.
What is MUCH more interesting is how conectivity is also being commoditised. Why RENT a super computer, when you can buy a bunch of bottom feeders for nothing, fibre channel 'em together into a Beowulf cluster and be done with it?
Why pay HP for something you can do yourself for next to nothing?
Carly Fiorina is an idiot. When she floated to the top of HP, all you had to do is look at the wreckage in her wake, and know what was up with this loser. Anyone remember Lucent? She didn't destroy it, but under her glory fuck, it pointed itself in the direction that destroyed it. She's doing the same thing to HP. She's a pirate. A greedy, miserable pirate.
SO: how does it all tie in? Another poster noted the obvious: set up this kind of computing, ship the jobs to india and $Profit. I think that is a VERY likely scenario, if it does take off. however, I don't think it will take off, because networking is getting faster and faster, and computers are getting cheaper and cheaper for (x) performance, and the "Good Enough computing Syndrome" is extremely wide spread. This will also hamper the adoption of this model.
Example: video editing used to require a suite of expensive decks, an an AVID system that was nothing short of extortionate in cost. Now, you can buy an iMac that would kick the butt of ANY computer from that era, and the software, iMovie, comes for FREE with the machine.
Sure, rendering 3D stuff takes major cycles, but until when?
There will be some use for this utility computing for a certain few enterprises, but 99% of the market won't care, and shouldn't have to. Just like we all sat in front of green screen terminals 25 years ago, well, SOME OF US did that, so too, these losers are all trying to corral users back into that model where they can be controlled much more easily. What that model will never do is WORK for the majority of users: because their computers are GOOD ENOUGH for what they need to turn a buck.
Carly and her bunch can go fuck themselves. Greedy bunch of pinheads.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Breakfast served all day!
Sun defines utility computing as follows
It provides technical ability to scale computing resources dynamically up and down to cope with fluctuating workloads.
It changes IT pricing from up-front investment to real-time, pay-as-you-go.
The fine-grained monitoring required to generate pay-for-use billing reports provides much greater visibility into IT operations, their costs, and their relationship to the business activities they support.
:)
The question is - do we need a new paradigm (oops!) for that? Or are the existing strategies capable of providing a synergy (oops!). I mean, can't we do the same or better with the tools we already have?
1) Scaling resources. How necessary is that? Does you company need huge amounts of CPU power at one time and not at the other? I can't think of an example when you would need a supercomputer for a minute every day. With most existing applications you either need a lot of CPU or you don't. The variation is usually too small to warrant outsourcing, given that fast processors cost only 100$.
2) IT-pricing. Is there anything that a 3-year bank loan to buy all these computers can't do?
3) Completely irrelevant. They sound like a cellular operator explaining to a customer why pay-per-minute plan is extremely convenient to him.
Conclusion: stupid, stupid, stupid. Now I think I will get my Bluetooth-enabled WAP-phone and use location-based service to order some pizza from an e-business. That's what I call on-demand computing.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
What this buzzwords promise is essentially economy of scale. But here lies the catch. If you are a small business, a budget PC meet all your computing needs. If you are a large business, it makes sense to have your own computing centre.
It's the same with data storage. If you are small, you store the files on the workstation. If you are large, you store them on corporate server. Offsite storage doesn't enter the picture, except for reliability.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
She did not receive $150M in bonuses in any year. She did recieve a $3M cash bonus last year. Note that that does not include options which she also received. For the 2003 year Fiorina's total compensation was around $7M. I think she was around 110 on the Forbes top payed executives list for 2003. Just for comparison the top spot was $117M by Jeff Barbakow, CEO of Tenet Healthcare who got most of that by cashing in around $100M in stock before a federal probe into his company.
yep she was there...pulled the ripcord rather gracefully before the shit hit the fan...
as for scaling up too far, too fast...see, there was this totally brilliant idea about parallelizing various units and in effect creating a number of "hot little companies" that could perform nimbly and react with lightening speed to market demands and the competition. promised huge synergy etc etc but it just plain didn't work.
but they made it look like it worked for a fair stretch w/ all that creative accounting.
what it really did was create a huge amount of administrative and managerial overhead and redundancy and even massive amounts of product development effort duplication across different projects.
things fall apart and the center cannot hold.
the very well-respected p. russo was brought in to clean things up after most of the jokers flew the coup but she got drummed out as she brought the whole stinky mess to light.
just an observer's opinion of course...never worked there or for ms. fiorina.
nt.
"adaptive", "processes," "seamless" "autonomous", "ubiquitous", "organic", "real-time" these are all synonyms for Quality. And infact every 10 year old can already understand it, it's just that once you start to put words to it, it all goes up in smoke and you wonder what it was you were talking about to begin with. For anyone interested, Robert Pirsig has written two books and created a Metaphysics within which 'it' can be talked about and from which every infant can understand 'it'.
> The gender wars will end when women accept
> men as a fact of life, and not something that
> needs to be changed.
Very nice comment.
Where did you get this?
Pardonne
Why does "this country have to produce something"? Why can't we "just be people who take care of the old and sick and sell stuff"?
Isn't this a "production fallacy"? Do you have to make stuff to use stuff? Of course not! So if a person doesn't have to do it, why does a country?
Prepare for the 100% service economy where we make a living by (are you ready for this)- serving one another! Directly, in person, face to face, with good manners and a pleasant attitude!
In the long haul, all production will be done by machines, which work even cheaper than Indians. And this includes "producing" software and producing the machines themselves.
The way to create wealth will be to actually create services (or machines whose ultimate product is a service) that others desire. This will require listening and observing (and tasting and smelling and feeling) other people to figure out what it is that they really want enough to be willing to trade their own efforts of creation.
The most succesful will be those that are the most other-focused. Perhaps people who see the value in taking care of the old and sick and selling stuff.
Is this really a future to fear- where we all move from producing things to creatively serving one another in personal relational ways?
Moles? Are you there Moles?
+++OK ATH
Elementary economics says that economy of scale has to be appropriate to be seen as cheaper from the customer stand point.
For example, if bigger and/or central were always better, then there would be a single HUGE McDonalds or Dunkin Donuts per state. Of that's absurd. Basically, the cost reduction would be a nickel on the food and hours of travel time for most customers.
From a computes and storage capacity standpoint, PCs were more expensive, but from the standpoint of the PC user, being able to throw some data into a spreadsheet and get the answer after five hours of tedious work was more convenient amd cheaper than spending 20 hours in meetings over six months to get the IS department to write the program to give you the data in a year.
Just as it was cheaper to buy PCs, its cheaper to buy more "mainframes" and do the timesharing locally rather than farm it out. Because that's what everyone is trying to reinvent: timesharing where you "pay to use".
Why would you buy a computer that sits idle most of the time? Simple, its cheaper. Making a computer is so simple that thousands or millions of companies do it. So, the margins are razor thin. Timesharing requires so much integration that the number of competitors will be limited to a handful of companies, and they will require high overhead costs and profit margins. The costs and profits will exceed the cost of having lots of computers sit idle.
Its the same principle as cars. Why does almost everyone have a car when buses would do the job.
IBM, HP, Microsoft, Oracle, etc. are all trying to figure out how to grow their revenue while increasing profits.
Intel is trying to take over mainframe computers and turn mainframe computer sales into the same kind of market as PCs. What do you think the chances are of selling 50 million mainframes per year? Pretty low as long as AMD is around - AMD has demonstrated that they will settle for profit margins in the single digits while Intel is failing if its margins drop below 50%.
HP, Dell, and Gateway have figured out that the next big computer growth market is digital TVs, but none of these companies own anything more the brand, so they won't see much in the way of profits. And the companies that actually make the TVs have decided to develop their own brands. So,back to moving "up market".
The candidates for the "next big thing" aren't considered "technology". Non-fossil hydrocarbon energy production could grow in revenue by orders of magnitude for a decade with a few more advances in electronics and mechanical design. Cars could double in efficiency by switching from mechanical transmissions to computer controlled electric motors driven by high efficiency generators. Why aren't they considered "technology"? I think its because they require mechanical engineers and actual manufacturing. "Technology" has been redefined as that which requires only copying software to make money.
This sounds like the bullshit rhetoric that was coming out of the tech industry in the late 90's.
I hate sigs.
Philip K. Dick would have been overjoyed at this. Words are the biggest parts of any sale, and certainly of any sales campaign. But let's not use the competitors' words; that would be tantamount to saying that there's really not a whole h*ll of a lot of difference between (and users need to have SOMETHING to brag about). Whether or not the words actually connect to anything real is an outdated concern. What about the dot com boom where the biggest thing was, well, just BEING THERE. And certainly the gurus--most especially Microsoft (well, and Apple, of course)--would never sell anything that was of the order of the king's new robe. We're making progress! even if we're not quite sure where, what, or how. This IS new computing. We're just not quite sure...well, what we're doing.
oregonnerd...a nerd in Oregon, of course