ANTICIPATED: Handheld computers and wireless data. EXPECTED: An almost 100% sure thing we'd get there. UNEXPECTED: That same technology that was supposed to be our tool to free us and make us better is used by default to track us, monetize us, maintain and resell portofolios on us. DISAPPOINTED: The success of the cell phone and tablet effectively kills other pieces of dedicated or unique hardware implementations (MP3 player, a physical chess set that you can play against another friend anywhere in the world, etc). ALSO DISAPPOINTED: How freely the common person would cash in their privacy for free services.
HOPED FOR: That "everyone" would finally be online and that you could do real things (and significant things) online. EXPECTED: More individuals connecting with even more individuals. UNEXPECTED: Reaching the tipping point where you're expected to be online or you can't access some desired information. (My offline parents complain about this quite regularly.)
SKEPTICAL: My dad telling me (circa 1980) that computer graphics would be good enough one day to make cartoons just as good as I see on TV. Even further in the future, maybe even something that might look like real life! UNEXPECTED: Just how far we've surpassed even that dream of believable computer graphics in standard definition and in real time.
PROMISED: Useful and interactive household robots. DISAPPOINTED: Roomba and a few small toys.
PROMISED: Television will keep getting better and better. EXPECTED: High quality and lower cost hardware. DISAPPOINTED: Everyday "broadcast quality" video quality has improved, but not as much as I'd thought.
It should cite "System and method for providing quality of service mapping" US8620339B2 while talks about doing that very thing (but with a different spin to it).
You raise some interesting issues, but in the end, what does this proposed change in FCC policy look and smell like? Is this really about how the FCC can best meet the connectivity needs of rural customers? Or something else?
If this was honestly first and foremost about meeting the needs of rural customers, hey, we'd all welcome this! But it looks like the FCC is tinkering (yet again) with the definition of broadband, and this time it seems they're using it with the intention of steering funds.
How? They can define the bandwidth requirements just high enough to be unfavorable to regional competitors who have been building out networks. Yet they don't go too high. They still keep the definition low enough as not to burden those new competitors who have a well-known plan to roll out high speed fixed-wireless technology.
5G promises to be an awesome new technology, and I personally can't wait to see it! But I'd like to see it compete with the wired competitors on more level ground. Not through political lobbying. Not by carving out competition with an arbitrary definition of 5G that artificially tilts the distribution of funds.
It is another story of regulatory capture at the FCC. The FCC was supposed to favor Americans and put limits on corporations. Now the FCC is favoring the corporation they're supposed to regulate and the Americans are just contrived into a justification for doing so.
The current standards for the Connect America were kept low so that they could show a map full of territory that is covered with 'high speed broadband Internet access'. The FCC wanted to look good.
Now that we're on the cusp of 5G, the FCC wants to change the rules of the Connect America (Slush) Fund to turn it into a giveaway for 5G wireless providers (such as his former corporate employer).
They need the number to be high enough to knock out many of the existing landline offerings (often local or regional companies), but at the same time low enough not to significantly obligate those 5G providers to offer significantly more than they want to.
It is a delightful balancing act of minimal levels and timing that is used to shift the reward from wired landline providers to wireless providers. I'm sure his sponsors couldn't have asked for anything more.
There might be a more selfish reason for this. If they're looking for rich alumni who can feed money back into the program some years down the road, they'll want to funnel as many of them as they can into private equity, venture capital and hedge funds after graduation.
I had this guy who thought my ancient [first initial][lastname] email address was his own. He was using it for various things, including signing up for his new credit card. Apparently, his credit card company did not valid an email address before it started sending reward statements, which included a partial card number. The credit card company did NOT provide an unsubscribe feature (unless I logged into the other customer's account which, of course, was not possible). Actually, there was no mechanism for me NOT to get his reward statements!
After escalating to the credit card company's executive customer service (the customer service of last resort when you write to the company's CEO) , they evidently got ahold of the guy to inform him that this email address is bad, and to get his real one.
My recent problems with someone else trying to use my email address have since stopped.
> They were also able to precisely track a virtual reality headset with the same precision.
One does not "precisely track" a VR headset with two centimeter resolution. I'll guess that they continued to use the IMU tracking that is built into the Samsung Gear VR, and they used it to display the tracking of external objects that were measured with two centimeter resolution.
> SunOS/Solaris started out lean; when it got bloated, people like me jumped ship. Linux started out lean and it is getting bloated; when it is getting too bloated, I will jump ship again.
FWIW, Linus said that Linux is bloated. That was at LinuxCon in 2009. I don't think that's much of a factor. I'll agree with you that Linux has plenty of life left in it.
> Wow. How impressive. Oh wait, Linux has had EDAC since 2006. But you keep paying your millions to Oracle. I'm sure its worth it.
Actually, this might be worth an illustration. It was a long time back, so I'm sure I've forgotten a few details, but I'll give you the big picture.
Around 2000, Sun Microsystems had a problem with the L2 cache on their 400mhz CPUs. It seems that IBM misrepresented the error rate on the chips, and they were having bit errors that were much higher than specified. Because of what was supposed to be an incredibly low error rate, they engineered the L2 cache with parity protection. That's enough to detect an error and cause a UE (uncorrectable error) event. So I know that your EDAC functionality in 2006 was in Solaris well before 2000.
After that problem, Sun Microsystems did two things. First, they mirrored the L2 cache. Second, they completely beefed up their handler for CE/UE (correctable errors and uncorrectable errors) along the memory/cache/bus/cpu to bring it up to Enterprise level error handling. You get an Uncorrectable Error in your CPU's L2 cache. Do you panic? I looked over the EDAC documentation and I could be wrong (please correct me, if so) but it looks like that would result in a panic. Or you could just have it log that the UE event happened but take no action.
What would Solaris do differently? It would find the page of virtual memory that had the corresponding error. Has it been modified? If not, just discard the page, log the event, and go on. There is a whole set of rules it goes through to determine the best way to keep the system running when it hits an uncorrectable error. Let's say that the page was modified and that there was an uncorrectable error in the L2 cache. We panic now, right? No. Solaris checks and sees who the page of memory belongs to. If it is a user process, then that process is simply killed (and the event logged) and the OS continues running. Only if it is a dirty page of active kernel memory do we have a panic.
That isn't just recovering from a soft error. That's recovering from a hard error. So, as this story illustrated, there are quite a number of things happening behind the scenes in an enterprise level OS. You picked a good example with Linux EDAC.
> Why bother? Just shut down that server, replace the memory, restart. If your application can't handle a brief downtime for one of your servers, there is something wrong with the application, and no OS magic can fix that for you.
You know, it is kind of funny. Person A will argue, "See? Linux has all of the cool features of an enterprise class operating system. What makes Solaris on SPARC so special?" When you point out just a fraction of the things that Linux doesn't do, person B will jump in and claim, "OMG that OS is so bloated that people are running away from it for that very reason!"
Hey, Solaris on SPARC certainly has its issues, but let's be real here. People are not running away from it in any significant numbers due to the inclusion of enterprise-class features. The irony to that argument is that you'll find that many of these "bloated" enterprise-class features in Solaris have been working their way into Linux for years. Linux has been making great strides over the past ten years.
Wow. It took them that long to put in a handler for CE and UE events? I see. What we're talking about goes beyond that first level of handling those events.
> Also, yes, various Linux virtualization technologies you can hot-migrate running systems between software VMs within the same chassis (and warm migrate with downtime between hardware chassis).
In this case, it was a live migration over two different chassis.
> But the price/perf/features just don't add up in the modern world versus commodity hardware and open source software, except...
In the existing case with a large corporate environment with a Linux/x86 cloud and a Solaris/SPARC cloud, Oracle wins the spot for lowest price point for a system, and wins at the higher end because Linux doesn't (reasonably) scale that big.
> You just have to install the "mcelog" package on e.g. Debian/Ubuntu. I'm sure the same software exists for the other distros.
Will it simply retire bad pages (at a page level) as they happen, or is it able to detect when enough errors have happened on a single DIMM and to retire all the pages on the DIMM (because it understands the hardware layout and can map those pages to specific hardware)? That's the advantage of controlling the OS and controlling the hardware. Here is an example of multiple errors being detected by Solaris on a DIMM and it identifying and retiring all pages on the entire DIMM:
Fault class : fault.memory.dimm_sb Affects : mem:///motherboard=0/chip=1/memory-controller=0/dimm=3/rank=0 degraded but still in service FRU : "CPU 1 DIMM 3" (hc://:product-id=Sun-Fire-X4200-Server:chassis-id=0000000000:server-id=oryx/motherboard=0/chip=1/memory-controller=0/dimm=3)
Description : The number of errors associated with this memory module has exceeded acceptable levels. Refer to http://sun.com/msg/AMD-8000-2F for more information.
Response : Pages of memory associated with this memory module are being removed from service as errors are reported.
Impact : Total system memory capacity will be reduced as pages are retired.
Solaris/SPARC is still going strong in large companies. One of the greatest advantages it has is that Oracle creates and supports the operating system, and Oracle creates and supports the hardware. (If you're running an Oracle database or some other piece of software, then that's an additional component that they create and support.) What this means is that if I'm having a problem, mundane or esoteric, I can go to one vendor and say, "Fix it." There isn't any bickering about what company's problem it is, and who manufactured my RAM, or any other the other silliness that crops up in vendor support. Large companies value this (as do us sysadmins). That also means they can do some very cool software tricks (which I'll mention a few here below).
The decreasing unit shipments is just as much a sign of virtualization as anything. Right now, I'm looking at an older T5240, with two eight-core CPUs which presents itself as having 128 virtual CPUs (execution engines or thread engines), and 64gb of RAM. This is by no means the biggest box on the floor. We carve these up into smaller systems using either Solaris Zones, or LDOMs. That's two different methods of virtualization with two different goals.
I did something great with an LDOM last week. I took a virtual server that was on the box and migrated the entire operating system and all the applications over to another LDOM... WHILE IT WAS STILL RUNNING. Aside from a quick (1 second) pause, the applications on the server had no idea that it just migrated to another piece of hardware while it continued to run. Slick! The original server had a failing DIMM. No worries, though even aside from ECC, the operating system automatically mapped out which parts of the DIMM were defective and retired the pages of memory so that they weren't constantly being exercised. Linux does all that... right? No?
Someone else, above, said, "I don't think you can have a zfs system fail and move it to different hardware like you can with vmware...". Nevermind that we can migrate a running operating system and application to another piece of hardware and keep it running. Yes, of course if you have a hardware fault, you can bring it back up on another machine. The virtualization with Solaris is quite capable.
In the environment of a large company where we're competing against Linux on the low-cost end of things, Solaris/SPARC is not only holding its own, but actually beating our Linux cloud counterparts in the costs of a virtualized OS/hardware. (I should ask my boss if we can publish a paper on this, because it is rather impressive.)
On the high end of things, we completely dominate. We generally use a T5-4 for our internal cloud (which really isn't the biggest Oracle server out there). It has 64 cores, presenting 512 execution threads to the scheduler. RAM goes up to 2TB. If someone starts out on a tiny box with only one CPU and 4gb of RAM, we can scale them all the way up to the top by increasing their virtualization settings. No migrating to different or unusual hardware. If an application team can't scale their code horizontally (hey, it happens), they can go way vertical in this configuration. We haven't had a need yet for an M6-32 (32tb of RAM, and 32 of the 12-core CPUs (3072 execution threads or "virtual cpus"). We have Linux surrounded (on the low-cost side and the high-performance side) in a large enterprise environment, and that's why Solaris is still there.
Now, I'm not an Oracle salesperson. But if Slashdot ever did an AMA with an Oracle sales engineer, I think my fellow Linux admins would be particular impressed on how far ahead Oracle/SPARC is in a number of key areas.
Amazon recently announced it was getting into the advertisement business, and it beat out Google to acquire Twitch.
Pure speculation on my part, but I have to wonder if this is just Google's CEO trying to steal some of the spotlight away from Amazon?
Suddenly, Google is saying, "Oh yeah... delivery drones. We've been doing this for some time now." It smells like petty CEO bickering. (As cool as delivery drones are.)
Based on published information, we know that the NSA gets customer information by compelling companies to produce the records, or it taps the connections between their datacenters and it gets the data in transit). Apple didn't deny either -- neither one of those involve installing a backdoor or giving SERVER access.
I think you're on the right track. There really is nothing that Apple can say to convince foreign users that their data is safe.
Escape from MicroSun (aka "Friday Afternoon") is a text adventure (written by a Sun Microsystems employee) where you play the part of a programmer for "MicroSun" and have to escape the office by 6pm for a date.
I was an original backer for the Ouya. The interface is a bit awkward, but worse, the software titles just aren't compelling. There doesn't seem to be a great reason to make an exclusive Ouya game, and anything you can find there you can get on your phone or another platform. Playing smartphone games on your TV just doesn't deliver any kind of wow factor.:(
Why is it that people name their product the very opposite of what it is? Is it supposed to serve as some sort of rebuttal? Safe for who? The guy going 60mph? Anyone around him when he loses power steering and brakes?
Technically possible, but I'm sure, not practical. Even more so when you consider that the ads can be embedded in the applications. By contrast, consider how practical it would be to install a custom ROM on a iPhone and remove all the ads?
So, Google wanted their place that was free of government regulation to experiment and try new things out. It sounds like, in many ways, they have found it. They can get their feet wet and learn the ropes of wireless networks. Maybe in time, they'll come back to the US and play against the big boys.
“Computer science has a marketing problem." That's what Larry said. And his presentation was about marketing more than anything. He was trying to sell the world view that works great for his company, and he certainly put his sour grapes on the table.
He talks of "resistance to technological change", which is code for Google Glasses and the glasshole syndrome. He talks of how people should should be more relaxed with their medical records, which is code for Google Health. They had a clear plan how they were going to make money with Google Health (selling user data). The problem was that, on the user side, they had a solution that was in search of an actual need. But Google has made it clear that they're not going to learn that lesson.
You know, I kind of like his idea of a mirror universe where more avant-garde ideas can be tested out, in small scale, in the real-world. He wanted a Burning Man type of environment for new technology. Actually, Eureka (the town from the TV show of the same name) might have been a closer fit (although the reference would have been lesser-known, and is almost synonymous with disaster). Being able to try things out (on the small scale and a limited geography) and work out the problems there is great for allowing a company to iterate on a product without the marketing backlash for failures.
In theory, I'd love to live in that Eureka town. But only if it was about the product and about the science. The only thing Google Health did for me was to convince me that Google's products and services aren't about what they deliver (search, ubiquitous health records). They are about Google's real customers (advertisers, health care industry) and Google's real problem is finding a way to get everyone to jump on board so they can make money. That's what he is saying, in code, when he says "computer science has a marketing problem".
The other sites talk about Apple also pursuing a device with curved glass. I have to wonder if they've taken a page from the CST-01 design validation unit on KickStarter. Could they be pursuing an iDevice in the wrist bracer form factor? I'm looking at the pictures and I'm telling myself that Apple has got to be exploring some sort of electronic device in this form. If so, it is going to be significantly more complex than a watch.
Slashdot Mirror
ANTICIPATED: Handheld computers and wireless data.
EXPECTED: An almost 100% sure thing we'd get there.
UNEXPECTED: That same technology that was supposed to be our tool to free us and make us better is used by default to track us, monetize us, maintain and resell portofolios on us.
DISAPPOINTED: The success of the cell phone and tablet effectively kills other pieces of dedicated or unique hardware implementations (MP3 player, a physical chess set that you can play against another friend anywhere in the world, etc).
ALSO DISAPPOINTED: How freely the common person would cash in their privacy for free services.
HOPED FOR: That "everyone" would finally be online and that you could do real things (and significant things) online.
EXPECTED: More individuals connecting with even more individuals.
UNEXPECTED: Reaching the tipping point where you're expected to be online or you can't access some desired information. (My offline parents complain about this quite regularly.)
SKEPTICAL: My dad telling me (circa 1980) that computer graphics would be good enough one day to make cartoons just as good as I see on TV. Even further in the future, maybe even something that might look like real life!
UNEXPECTED: Just how far we've surpassed even that dream of believable computer graphics in standard definition and in real time.
PROMISED: Useful and interactive household robots.
DISAPPOINTED: Roomba and a few small toys.
PROMISED: Television will keep getting better and better.
EXPECTED: High quality and lower cost hardware.
DISAPPOINTED: Everyday "broadcast quality" video quality has improved, but not as much as I'd thought.
For "Offline Trajectories" 20180352383-A1,
It should cite "System and method for providing quality of service mapping" US8620339B2 while talks about doing that very thing (but with a different spin to it).
https://patents.google.com/pat...
I'm not saying it invalidates the patent (I'm not a patent examiner) but it should at least be cited as a related patent.
You raise some interesting issues, but in the end, what does this proposed change in FCC policy look and smell like? Is this really about how the FCC can best meet the connectivity needs of rural customers? Or something else?
If this was honestly first and foremost about meeting the needs of rural customers, hey, we'd all welcome this! But it looks like the FCC is tinkering (yet again) with the definition of broadband, and this time it seems they're using it with the intention of steering funds.
How? They can define the bandwidth requirements just high enough to be unfavorable to regional competitors who have been building out networks. Yet they don't go too high. They still keep the definition low enough as not to burden those new competitors who have a well-known plan to roll out high speed fixed-wireless technology.
5G promises to be an awesome new technology, and I personally can't wait to see it! But I'd like to see it compete with the wired competitors on more level ground. Not through political lobbying. Not by carving out competition with an arbitrary definition of 5G that artificially tilts the distribution of funds.
It is another story of regulatory capture at the FCC. The FCC was supposed to favor Americans and put limits on corporations. Now the FCC is favoring the corporation they're supposed to regulate and the Americans are just contrived into a justification for doing so.
It is sad and unfortunate for America.
The current standards for the Connect America were kept low so that they could show a map full of territory that is covered with 'high speed broadband Internet access'. The FCC wanted to look good.
Now that we're on the cusp of 5G, the FCC wants to change the rules of the Connect America (Slush) Fund to turn it into a giveaway for 5G wireless providers (such as his former corporate employer).
They need the number to be high enough to knock out many of the existing landline offerings (often local or regional companies), but at the same time low enough not to significantly obligate those 5G providers to offer significantly more than they want to.
It is a delightful balancing act of minimal levels and timing that is used to shift the reward from wired landline providers to wireless providers. I'm sure his sponsors couldn't have asked for anything more.
There might be a more selfish reason for this. If they're looking for rich alumni who can feed money back into the program some years down the road, they'll want to funnel as many of them as they can into private equity, venture capital and hedge funds after graduation.
> The most recent Fire TV released this fall canâ(TM)t yet run the Silk browser...
I'm wondering what unfortunate twist of software turned the word "cannot" into "canâ(TM)t"? It seems like an implausible replacement.
I had this guy who thought my ancient [first initial][lastname] email address was his own. He was using it for various things, including signing up for his new credit card. Apparently, his credit card company did not valid an email address before it started sending reward statements, which included a partial card number. The credit card company did NOT provide an unsubscribe feature (unless I logged into the other customer's account which, of course, was not possible). Actually, there was no mechanism for me NOT to get his reward statements!
After escalating to the credit card company's executive customer service (the customer service of last resort when you write to the company's CEO) , they evidently got ahold of the guy to inform him that this email address is bad, and to get his real one.
My recent problems with someone else trying to use my email address have since stopped.
Do you have any plans to do anything with your Metaverse trademark?
Are you looking to sell it off, or to bless a public implementation of the Metaverse with the official title?
> They were also able to precisely track a virtual reality headset with the same precision.
One does not "precisely track" a VR headset with two centimeter resolution. I'll guess that they continued to use the IMU tracking that is built into the Samsung Gear VR, and they used it to display the tracking of external objects that were measured with two centimeter resolution.
> SunOS/Solaris started out lean; when it got bloated, people like me jumped ship. Linux started out lean and it is getting bloated; when it is getting too bloated, I will jump ship again.
FWIW, Linus said that Linux is bloated. That was at LinuxCon in 2009. I don't think that's much of a factor. I'll agree with you that Linux has plenty of life left in it.
> Wow. How impressive. Oh wait, Linux has had EDAC since 2006. But you keep paying your millions to Oracle. I'm sure its worth it.
Actually, this might be worth an illustration. It was a long time back, so I'm sure I've forgotten a few details, but I'll give you the big picture.
Around 2000, Sun Microsystems had a problem with the L2 cache on their 400mhz CPUs. It seems that IBM misrepresented the error rate on the chips, and they were having bit errors that were much higher than specified. Because of what was supposed to be an incredibly low error rate, they engineered the L2 cache with parity protection. That's enough to detect an error and cause a UE (uncorrectable error) event. So I know that your EDAC functionality in 2006 was in Solaris well before 2000.
After that problem, Sun Microsystems did two things. First, they mirrored the L2 cache. Second, they completely beefed up their handler for CE/UE (correctable errors and uncorrectable errors) along the memory/cache/bus/cpu to bring it up to Enterprise level error handling. You get an Uncorrectable Error in your CPU's L2 cache. Do you panic? I looked over the EDAC documentation and I could be wrong (please correct me, if so) but it looks like that would result in a panic. Or you could just have it log that the UE event happened but take no action.
What would Solaris do differently? It would find the page of virtual memory that had the corresponding error. Has it been modified? If not, just discard the page, log the event, and go on. There is a whole set of rules it goes through to determine the best way to keep the system running when it hits an uncorrectable error. Let's say that the page was modified and that there was an uncorrectable error in the L2 cache. We panic now, right? No. Solaris checks and sees who the page of memory belongs to. If it is a user process, then that process is simply killed (and the event logged) and the OS continues running. Only if it is a dirty page of active kernel memory do we have a panic.
That isn't just recovering from a soft error. That's recovering from a hard error. So, as this story illustrated, there are quite a number of things happening behind the scenes in an enterprise level OS. You picked a good example with Linux EDAC.
> Why bother? Just shut down that server, replace the memory, restart. If your application can't handle a brief downtime for one of your servers, there is something wrong with the application, and no OS magic can fix that for you.
You know, it is kind of funny. Person A will argue, "See? Linux has all of the cool features of an enterprise class operating system. What makes Solaris on SPARC so special?" When you point out just a fraction of the things that Linux doesn't do, person B will jump in and claim, "OMG that OS is so bloated that people are running away from it for that very reason!"
Hey, Solaris on SPARC certainly has its issues, but let's be real here. People are not running away from it in any significant numbers due to the inclusion of enterprise-class features. The irony to that argument is that you'll find that many of these "bloated" enterprise-class features in Solaris have been working their way into Linux for years. Linux has been making great strides over the past ten years.
Wow. It took them that long to put in a handler for CE and UE events? I see. What we're talking about goes beyond that first level of handling those events.
> Also, yes, various Linux virtualization technologies you can hot-migrate running systems between software VMs within the same chassis (and warm migrate with downtime between hardware chassis).
In this case, it was a live migration over two different chassis.
> But the price/perf/features just don't add up in the modern world versus commodity hardware and open source software, except...
In the existing case with a large corporate environment with a Linux/x86 cloud and a Solaris/SPARC cloud, Oracle wins the spot for lowest price point for a system, and wins at the higher end because Linux doesn't (reasonably) scale that big.
> You just have to install the "mcelog" package on e.g. Debian/Ubuntu. I'm sure the same software exists for the other distros.
Will it simply retire bad pages (at a page level) as they happen, or is it able to detect when enough errors have happened on a single DIMM and to retire all the pages on the DIMM (because it understands the hardware layout and can map those pages to specific hardware)? That's the advantage of controlling the OS and controlling the hardware. Here is an example of multiple errors being detected by Solaris on a DIMM and it identifying and retiring all pages on the entire DIMM:
Fault class : fault.memory.dimm_sb
Affects : mem:///motherboard=0/chip=1/memory-controller=0/dimm=3/rank=0 degraded but still in service
FRU : "CPU 1 DIMM 3" (hc://:product-id=Sun-Fire-X4200-Server:chassis-id=0000000000:server-id=oryx/motherboard=0/chip=1/memory-controller=0/dimm=3)
Description : The number of errors associated with this memory module has exceeded acceptable levels. Refer to http://sun.com/msg/AMD-8000-2F for more information.
Response : Pages of memory associated with this memory module are being removed from service as errors are reported.
Impact : Total system memory capacity will be reduced as pages are retired.
Solaris/SPARC is still going strong in large companies. One of the greatest advantages it has is that Oracle creates and supports the operating system, and Oracle creates and supports the hardware. (If you're running an Oracle database or some other piece of software, then that's an additional component that they create and support.) What this means is that if I'm having a problem, mundane or esoteric, I can go to one vendor and say, "Fix it." There isn't any bickering about what company's problem it is, and who manufactured my RAM, or any other the other silliness that crops up in vendor support. Large companies value this (as do us sysadmins). That also means they can do some very cool software tricks (which I'll mention a few here below).
The decreasing unit shipments is just as much a sign of virtualization as anything. Right now, I'm looking at an older T5240, with two eight-core CPUs which presents itself as having 128 virtual CPUs (execution engines or thread engines), and 64gb of RAM. This is by no means the biggest box on the floor. We carve these up into smaller systems using either Solaris Zones, or LDOMs. That's two different methods of virtualization with two different goals.
I did something great with an LDOM last week. I took a virtual server that was on the box and migrated the entire operating system and all the applications over to another LDOM... WHILE IT WAS STILL RUNNING. Aside from a quick (1 second) pause, the applications on the server had no idea that it just migrated to another piece of hardware while it continued to run. Slick! The original server had a failing DIMM. No worries, though even aside from ECC, the operating system automatically mapped out which parts of the DIMM were defective and retired the pages of memory so that they weren't constantly being exercised. Linux does all that... right? No?
Someone else, above, said, "I don't think you can have a zfs system fail and move it to different hardware like you can with vmware...". Nevermind that we can migrate a running operating system and application to another piece of hardware and keep it running. Yes, of course if you have a hardware fault, you can bring it back up on another machine. The virtualization with Solaris is quite capable.
In the environment of a large company where we're competing against Linux on the low-cost end of things, Solaris/SPARC is not only holding its own, but actually beating our Linux cloud counterparts in the costs of a virtualized OS/hardware. (I should ask my boss if we can publish a paper on this, because it is rather impressive.)
On the high end of things, we completely dominate. We generally use a T5-4 for our internal cloud (which really isn't the biggest Oracle server out there). It has 64 cores, presenting 512 execution threads to the scheduler. RAM goes up to 2TB. If someone starts out on a tiny box with only one CPU and 4gb of RAM, we can scale them all the way up to the top by increasing their virtualization settings. No migrating to different or unusual hardware. If an application team can't scale their code horizontally (hey, it happens), they can go way vertical in this configuration. We haven't had a need yet for an M6-32 (32tb of RAM, and 32 of the 12-core CPUs (3072 execution threads or "virtual cpus"). We have Linux surrounded (on the low-cost side and the high-performance side) in a large enterprise environment, and that's why Solaris is still there.
Now, I'm not an Oracle salesperson. But if Slashdot ever did an AMA with an Oracle sales engineer, I think my fellow Linux admins would be particular impressed on how far ahead Oracle/SPARC is in a number of key areas.
Amazon recently announced it was getting into the advertisement business, and it beat out Google to acquire Twitch.
Pure speculation on my part, but I have to wonder if this is just Google's CEO trying to steal some of the spotlight away from Amazon?
Suddenly, Google is saying, "Oh yeah... delivery drones. We've been doing this for some time now." It smells like petty CEO bickering. (As cool as delivery drones are.)
Based on published information, we know that the NSA gets customer information by compelling companies to produce the records, or it taps the connections between their datacenters and it gets the data in transit). Apple didn't deny either -- neither one of those involve installing a backdoor or giving SERVER access.
I think you're on the right track. There really is nothing that Apple can say to convince foreign users that their data is safe.
Some additional nostalgia from 1997...
Escape from MicroSun (aka "Friday Afternoon") is a text adventure (written by a Sun Microsystems employee) where you play the part of a programmer for "MicroSun" and have to escape the office by 6pm for a date.
I was an original backer for the Ouya. The interface is a bit awkward, but worse, the software titles just aren't compelling. There doesn't seem to be a great reason to make an exclusive Ouya game, and anything you can find there you can get on your phone or another platform. Playing smartphone games on your TV just doesn't deliver any kind of wow factor. :(
Why is it that people name their product the very opposite of what it is? Is it supposed to serve as some sort of rebuttal? Safe for who? The guy going 60mph? Anyone around him when he loses power steering and brakes?
Technically possible, but I'm sure, not practical. Even more so when you consider that the ads can be embedded in the applications. By contrast, consider how practical it would be to install a custom ROM on a iPhone and remove all the ads?
The kinds of wireless networks the article was talking about were not WiFi (or fiber) technologies.
So, Google wanted their place that was free of government regulation to experiment and try new things out. It sounds like, in many ways, they have found it. They can get their feet wet and learn the ropes of wireless networks. Maybe in time, they'll come back to the US and play against the big boys.
“Computer science has a marketing problem." That's what Larry said. And his presentation was about marketing more than anything. He was trying to sell the world view that works great for his company, and he certainly put his sour grapes on the table.
He talks of "resistance to technological change", which is code for Google Glasses and the glasshole syndrome. He talks of how people should should be more relaxed with their medical records, which is code for Google Health. They had a clear plan how they were going to make money with Google Health (selling user data). The problem was that, on the user side, they had a solution that was in search of an actual need. But Google has made it clear that they're not going to learn that lesson.
You know, I kind of like his idea of a mirror universe where more avant-garde ideas can be tested out, in small scale, in the real-world. He wanted a Burning Man type of environment for new technology. Actually, Eureka (the town from the TV show of the same name) might have been a closer fit (although the reference would have been lesser-known, and is almost synonymous with disaster). Being able to try things out (on the small scale and a limited geography) and work out the problems there is great for allowing a company to iterate on a product without the marketing backlash for failures.
In theory, I'd love to live in that Eureka town. But only if it was about the product and about the science. The only thing Google Health did for me was to convince me that Google's products and services aren't about what they deliver (search, ubiquitous health records). They are about Google's real customers (advertisers, health care industry) and Google's real problem is finding a way to get everyone to jump on board so they can make money. That's what he is saying, in code, when he says "computer science has a marketing problem".
The other sites talk about Apple also pursuing a device with curved glass. I have to wonder if they've taken a page from the CST-01 design validation unit on KickStarter. Could they be pursuing an iDevice in the wrist bracer form factor? I'm looking at the pictures and I'm telling myself that Apple has got to be exploring some sort of electronic device in this form. If so, it is going to be significantly more complex than a watch.