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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
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.
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
Comments like this do nothing to improve upon the current sad status of gender equality in corporate America. People need to be evaluated on their accomplishments and potential, not on their physical attributes. Such insensitive, demeaning comments are indicative of an employee in need of HR training and attention.
An appropriate term is:
Bullshit Computing
or maybe PADOS "Pump And Dump Our Stock" Computing
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 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
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.
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.
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.
CEOs like Carly do nothing to improve the current sad status of fiscal responsibility in corporate America. Man or woman, anyone who is willing to fuck thousands upon thousands of working Americans out of their jobs in order to dump their salaries into a neat little bonus* is Part Of The Problem.
As an AC below me suggested, it is precisely this behavior which might see her head roll from a guillotine someday.
* oh, did I say "little"? I meant $150,000,000, or about $25,000 for every employee she put out of a job in order for HP to "remain competitive" (her words, not mine).
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
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.
"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.
Gee she's done alot for working women, layed them off by the thousands at HP and Compaq, not mention the thousands of contractors that took it up the hiney in houston (at least 30% of whom were working women). On top of that all she has to show for it is a muddled and confusing product line, and she's running long standing customers off in droves (like the co. I work for) and not adding any new ones. At this rate she'll singlehandedly drive HP/CQ into the ground, quite an accomplishment for the little lady.
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?
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
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.
Which means the company made out really well. Assuming the burdened cost per employee was about $70,000 per year (which is low) HP made $45,000 per employee laid off this year, and $70,000 next year. Assuming a 15% discount rate and a 4 year save, the end result is a corporate savings of about $1,200,000,000. Not a whole lot of money, but not bad either. Would you be willing to pay 150 million to get something worth 1.2 billion? I would.
Layoffs suck. I've been there, I've been unemployed in this crappy market. Let's face the facts. For the most part, IT people are overpaid and underperform. Nobody cares about having cool IT, they want to run their business. HP is a rare example of a merger workin as planned. I only hope the recent Bank One and JP Morgan merger (I work for Bank One) will go as smoothly. Even there they are projecting 10,000 job cuts. Layoffs sometimes make sense like those done by General Dynamics in the '80s. Their CEO wrote the book on getting a huge bonus for laying people off. In the long term, it was a good move. Most people found jobs and a company that was headed for bankruptcy was saved.
So the summary version: Layoffs suck, but keeping people that aren't necessary for business just acts as a drag on the company causing productive people to suffer a similar fate.
Mike Mangino
mmangino@acm.org
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.
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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
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.
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.
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
To think that women would (or should) do a better job than men is quite sexist. The point of gender equality is providing an equal opportunity for men and women to prove themselves. It has always been a problem that women in men's fields face a higher barrier for others to take them seriously; thinking that one shouldn't hire a women if they are not going to be any better than a man just makes this worse.
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
... 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,
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
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.
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.
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".
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.
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?
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.
However, Carly has been doing a sensationally poor job. She's cut HP's legendary calculator engineering team. She's managed to kill worker morale in a long running high-profile spat with the well-liked HP founding family. She's cut a lot of jobs, which is okay *as long as HP can continue to provide acceptable service*. She's moved HP back into the PC market, a market that has killed countless companies, and one that HP has been trying to extracate itself from for years, without any good justification of how HP is going to do better this time around. She took part in a high-profile and expensive merger with Compaq, a deal that has benefited few folks but those as Compaq. She's antagonized Microsoft in the high-profile "Tablet PC" incident and in snubbing their music system -- while this may make us Slashdotters chortle with glee, snubbing Microsoft is only a good move if you stand to gain significantly from doing so. Otherwise, you're just using poor diplomacy.
:-(
People get irritated because there's a perception (and one that is, I think, not unfounded) that she's getting awfully gentle handling because it looks good and modern for HP to have a female CEO, and she's female, and that a male CEO would have been fired by now.
In general, I tend to feel that Carly is doing a really, really awful job. I will admit that I am not on the board, and don't have all the information about what she's doing. I tend to find out about her when HP gets in the news. However, compare the times Carly has been in the news with the times that Steve Jobs has been in the news. While I'm sure that some of this is just that Apple is better than HP at manipulating the press, the press is still reporting facts. Jobs has pushed a number of things out that have done Apple good. While he has had rather hefty bonuses (ignoring his much-ballyhooed $1 salary), he also isn't making obscene bonuses for dubious mergers, as Carly is.
Of course, *Carly* isn't a one-button-mouse fetishist...
May we never see th
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=10950
So no, the merger did not work "as planned" unless you plan for losing big revenue.
I suspect that few folks in a merger would call it particularly "smooth", especially when there are redundant positions.
However, HP/Compaq had numerous reports of pretty awful problems combining things. The press, at least, represented it as one of the messier major mergers in recent history.
May we never see th
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
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 forgot, in the bibliography, the three things that define an agent are proactivity, autonomy and reactivity. Mobility is not compelling. Sitting in front of my computer I can do a lot of work without needing to actually go to every place google points out, an agent can help me a lot without moving, even can save a lot of work for me.
DON'T PANIC