Despite what software vendors like Microsoft and Oracle would tell you, bits don't actually rot. Software doesn't age. It's a mathematical construct that works or doesn't. If it worked once then it always will and if it didn't who cares?
Open projects that have no utility are out of scope for my comment. If you use it and you need it, naturally you'll adopt it. And if nobody uses it or would adopt it maybe it's best stored in the archive against future needs. Certainly the GPL allows for indefinite storage.
If you choose a GPL app for your critical infrastructure, you're pretty safe. If the vendor, sponsor, developers and everybody else involved drops it you can support it yourself until you can migrate to another platform or just become the primary fork. Choosing GPL means never having to say "oops", unless you're the kind of fool that wants to take a GPL app proprietary.
A commercial closed-source app? No, you're maintaining legacy hardware that supports it until you can't get parts on Ebay any more, and then you're sunk.
A non-GPL open source app? Your mileage may vary. Consult your attorney. Consult several attorneys. Be prepared to pay those attorneys to defend you in court.
Generation upload is what a group of corporations is trying to brand the youth generation of today. It's a take on the user-generated content of Web 2.0. Link. It's a kid phone. Just look at the Kin 1. Does it look like a grown-up's phone?
Sun was a good company whose strategy got derailed by poor timing in the global capital cataclysm. By doing some buys early they paid a premium, and overleveraged. When the economy collapsed they found their income insufficient to pay their debt and their stock collapsed, making them a good buyout target. Oracle, who was more fortunate in their cash position and found a good company oversold took advantage. That's why companies save their cookies.
Not that has nothing to do with the actual value of Sun, nor their software projects. Oracle is cutting to the bone because they have more stuff to buy and they need cash engines, not long term strategies.
But then you knew that. You're just piling on because it was a cheap ploy to further push a competitor off the cliff. You're a prick.
You can drop the political bit. I voted for the guy, not for any party loyalty but because on the merits he was better - he was more credible. That doesn't mean I have to like everything he does.
$6B is nowhere near enough to do this job. I guess in the near term we'll get more creative designs out of NASA and their aerospace friends because nobody's in danger of actually flying in them. Lots of engineers across the country will get to keep their jobs, pretending to be part of a manned space exploration effort that died a generation ago. Maybe that's a good thing. I certainly wouldn't want them shopping their skills to the third world - and those guys can get around.
It does nothing to get humans off this rock, into a permanent life in space. It does nothing to restore America's dominance in manned spaceflight. At the end of the five years we'll still be hitching a ride from foreign powers - paying them to improve their spaceflight abilities. In the long term - 25 years it will yield results, 'Lord willing and the creek don't rise. We know how that's going to turn out - the next time the parties change power it's scrapped for a new Vision, and if it's not the timeline is far too long. Think about advancements in technology in the last 25 years. Do you think anything learned in this $6B scam will be of use a quarter century from now? In 25 years we'll need permission from China and India to leave Earth orbit, and I doubt they'll give it. The plan also does nothing to provide for the national defense and being dominant in space exploration is definitely a defense goal.
You see, there are these rocks... they orbit the sun just beyond the orbit of Mars. Most of them are pebbles, but some of them are the size of a good mountain. They're called asteroids. For the most part they're water, but there's a great deal of silica and iron there as well as most of the materials we've built our industry on. There may be a great deal of hydrocarbons as well and there may be the proper elements for fission. If we're the first ones to this area we can use these raw materials to build the next step on our journey to the stars. Yes, we can look at these things and learn more about them than we know now with robots. But think about it: our Mars Rovers have done admirable duty and given great service - but they could be beaten to death with a stick by a man on the ground - or more likely stolen. Robots are good tools but they're no replacement for Men.
And if somebody else gets there first... well, an asteroid massing a million tons with plenty of water to use for reaction mass can be turned. Turning one so much that it crosses Earth orbit at the same time the Earth does when a specific city is under it is not a trivial math exercise, but it's well established math and not particularly challenging. The asteroid belt is big. It has a lot of rocks. I think it were best if we got there first, or at least shared the exploration with everybody else so as to discourage an interplanetary game of marbles.
So no, this is not enough. It will not do. And I guess we can dispense with the "are you stupid?" part of your question too.
When this volcano blows a major Katla eruption follows soon after. Katla is about 10 miles East.
This one shuts down half the air travel in western Europe for a few days. Katla shuts down summer. The farmers are not worried about this volcano:
"I am not afraid of this eruption but I fear Katla. It might not happen immediately but it will happen. Then we will be talking about much more power," Agnarsson said.
It has to do with the type of plate tectonics here. The plates are pulling apart, yielding a very deep rift that releases very hot magma from very far down in the mantle, which is saturated with CO2 and when released goes very high, far, thick and long. Naturally this will melt a great deal of Iceland glacier very quickly, impacting the currents in the Atlantic.
Uncle Larry's going full steam ahead. I'm confident the offers to Sun's free software wizards goes something like: "Row or swim. Choose now."
He's got to turn Sun into a huge cash engine if he's going to build on his buy and acquire the rest of a server, storage, network and software vertical operation to take on HP and Cisco in the IT world war for ownership of the datacenter.
Quite apart from the national security issues, there's a lot of science to learn out there or on the way. As Kennedy put it: "we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
But no, what we need now is a President to look up into the evening sky and see bright Mars. To wonder what it might be like for men to walk on it, to explore and harvest the vast resources of space - and then shrug, crack a beer and catch the game on ESPN.
$6B for five years? $1.2B a year. Less money than Microsoft is losing on Bing. Less than 5% of the annual revenues of Mars candy. For humans to stretch the limits of the frontier, to go to Mars and the Asteroids this is all? This is bold? What deep commitment.
I honestly liked it better when he didn't care enough to pretend to try. Do it or don't do it. Don't go halfway into it and set everybody up for disappointment. This is important stuff.
You lucky Europeans and your fast trains. Here in the US it would take some of us two days by train to get to the next country over and quite a while after that 'till the train got to the third one.
When this Iceland volcano erupts, nearby Katla always goes up soon after. A major eruption of Katla could give us another "Year without a summer" in the northern hemisphere.
Although I endorse this approach for people with big storage needs, space and power budgets, I had in mind an application that would that would RAID 45 of them for an obscenely high IOPS + bandwidth FC node for media content storage for video work. The kind of thing James Cameron would use for shipping his in-progress movies on. I might actually go with something else, like this instead since it supports up to 70 TB in 5U and now is certified to work with normal SAS controllers instead of a proprietary switch.
Naturally at five racks instead of 5U your suggestion lacks a certain perfomance density for this application - though admittedly you do have the advantage in the $/TB area, that's not always the only consideration.
Over time SSD will become cheaper than spinning disc, and as performant as RAM. That will change many of the market dynamics and may cause some unpleasantness.
I was expecting the question, "Why is Apple not in this list". Since you asked the question...
IBM is slow moving, and they're targeting software and services as nearly 90% of their offerring, as the grandparent post proves with a link. Network, server and storage are mostly hardware. Software and service is a fraction. If IBM wants in to this fight they're going to have to migrate from a service & software biz to a different type of organization or intrepeneur one. They're definitely able to get in this game if they want to - I just don't see them trying yet. If they get in they had better bring their A game, because people aren't going to want to hear the mainframe pitch in this space. They have the OS, the VM, the hardware and in all of those they're second to none. They're weak in storage. Hitachi isn't the best SAN partner but WTFEver, we're moving to SSD and iSCSI anyway. They still need a network to get convergence. They've got some serious patents in that regard, but what are they shipping in switches and routers? Nada.
Oh, yeah, and they're going to have to get over the whole price thing. The very word IBM makes people cringe. That's not a good way to start a dialog. Not giving prices has got to go. Most everybody that IBM hasn't already sold has a policy of "If you won't quote a price, it's too much" to counter the traditional "If you have to ask, you can't afford it". In my world if it hasn't got a list price and an expected discount, it's off the table.
Probably this. In mobile Android has >9% market share. That's up 5% from the previous quarter. Projecting out, that's a lot. WiMo7 looks like a Vista debacle from the released specs - no Cut/paste, no multitasking. This one will be over before it's started.
The thing is Adobe doesn't need to abandon their existing customers to port to the up-and-comer. That's a myth you're trying to feed them. They just have to invest in porting their current codebase to emergent markets. There's nothing amiss about that. It's not like that would hurt them competitively - the vendor of their primary market, Windows, has made no bones about the fact that they find Adobe's profits are meat stolen from their table. What's Microsoft going to do if they take this money, kill them faster? If Microsoft could kill them faster then they would have already. Microsoft really wants this Silverlight thing to take off because it's their last defense against HTML5 and Theora. It's their last chance to take ownership of the content distribution market. They've lost it already, but they still hold hope. Adobe doesn't need to be on the losing side of that.
It's a harsh world. Will they see it? I doubt it. Would I invest in Adobe, given their current trend? No. Could they? Yes. I hope they see which way the wind blows before they're lost. They really do have some cool tech, their complete ignorance of security notwithstanding.
I'm not laughing. There were once companies that sold word processors, spreadsheets, email clients and browsers as standalone products that were dominant in their fields for their excellence, and now there are not. Adobe needs to get a grip on their place in tech and realize that their future is open, or it's wikipedia footnote. Everybody in the industry is trying to kill them except the Linux geeks. They need to get cross-platform or they're done.
It's a joke, get it? This guy is the Isaac Newton of Java. He doesn't need a resume, nor a business card. He doesn't apply for work - work petitions him for the privilege of his attention. It's a completely different process.
In 2009 88% (pdf) of IBM's pre-tax income came from services and software. Sun wasn't making money on the software - it was a value add.
Ten years ago IBM did a strategy shift from hardware to services and software. To buy Sun would mark a new strategy. Maybe it's time, maybe not. I'm thinking IBM didn't think so. This market has a bit more shaking out to do. Apple is now going where IBM once hoped to go, and Sun wasn't a good buy for them either. IBM has the benefit of time. They take the long view. They can - their founders retired 80 years ago and they've successfully transitioned from growth mode to the utilities model. That's a feat one in ten thousand companies achieve.
The IT wars are not over. The tyrants of the new era are gathering their forces. There are now three groups: HP, Cisco, and Oracle. Each hopes to have complete ownership of the server room including network, server, software and storage. Apple may yet choose to get into this fight. If there's a winner, it won't bode well for the rest of us. IBM transcended this fight long ago but there's an outside chance they could still stoop in. The prize is great - it's literally us. I don't think they will.
I think Apple will probably choose to win in the way that's been successful for them - in consumer electronics, content, in expanding ownership of the high end of new consumer markets, and letting other companies fight it out for the low-margin leavings. IBM will bide their time, and strike when the iron is hot. From the wounded they'll take the noblemen and heal their wounds. They'll fix up the folks who've been abandoned by dead or wounded technology providers or failed by active ones and be an isle of reliability in the storm. That's what they do, and they're good at it. They'll make good money, but they won't be the energetic driver of new technologies that they once were. HP does that now.
Yes, Andy Bechtolsheim is one of the forgotten geniuses of our time. I think he likes it that way.
He doesn't need anybody to empower him. He could set up a lab in his garage and top engineers from all over the world would come to serve in it for the privilege of sitting by his fire, sharing his vision and building it. It would sell and it would be amazing.
The man needs an agent to put it together for him, to deal with the rabble and the Street so he can focus on his work.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you need a remedial education in Turing.
Despite what software vendors like Microsoft and Oracle would tell you, bits don't actually rot. Software doesn't age. It's a mathematical construct that works or doesn't. If it worked once then it always will and if it didn't who cares?
Open projects that have no utility are out of scope for my comment. If you use it and you need it, naturally you'll adopt it. And if nobody uses it or would adopt it maybe it's best stored in the archive against future needs. Certainly the GPL allows for indefinite storage.
Oh?
If you choose a GPL app for your critical infrastructure, you're pretty safe. If the vendor, sponsor, developers and everybody else involved drops it you can support it yourself until you can migrate to another platform or just become the primary fork. Choosing GPL means never having to say "oops", unless you're the kind of fool that wants to take a GPL app proprietary.
A commercial closed-source app? No, you're maintaining legacy hardware that supports it until you can't get parts on Ebay any more, and then you're sunk.
A non-GPL open source app? Your mileage may vary. Consult your attorney. Consult several attorneys. Be prepared to pay those attorneys to defend you in court.
Generation upload is what a group of corporations is trying to brand the youth generation of today. It's a take on the user-generated content of Web 2.0. Link. It's a kid phone. Just look at the Kin 1. Does it look like a grown-up's phone?
Guppies.
Sun was a good company whose strategy got derailed by poor timing in the global capital cataclysm. By doing some buys early they paid a premium, and overleveraged. When the economy collapsed they found their income insufficient to pay their debt and their stock collapsed, making them a good buyout target. Oracle, who was more fortunate in their cash position and found a good company oversold took advantage. That's why companies save their cookies.
Not that has nothing to do with the actual value of Sun, nor their software projects. Oracle is cutting to the bone because they have more stuff to buy and they need cash engines, not long term strategies.
But then you knew that. You're just piling on because it was a cheap ploy to further push a competitor off the cliff. You're a prick.
i'd say NASA did pretty well out of this.
If you mean they got more money, yes. They got more money.
If you mean this advances their mission to advance the human frontier and maintain the US position in space science, well, no.
This helps them avoid firing some rocket scientists who would otherwise be helping Pakistan design cruise missiles next year. That's all.
You can drop the political bit. I voted for the guy, not for any party loyalty but because on the merits he was better - he was more credible. That doesn't mean I have to like everything he does.
$6B is nowhere near enough to do this job. I guess in the near term we'll get more creative designs out of NASA and their aerospace friends because nobody's in danger of actually flying in them. Lots of engineers across the country will get to keep their jobs, pretending to be part of a manned space exploration effort that died a generation ago. Maybe that's a good thing. I certainly wouldn't want them shopping their skills to the third world - and those guys can get around.
It does nothing to get humans off this rock, into a permanent life in space. It does nothing to restore America's dominance in manned spaceflight. At the end of the five years we'll still be hitching a ride from foreign powers - paying them to improve their spaceflight abilities. In the long term - 25 years it will yield results, 'Lord willing and the creek don't rise. We know how that's going to turn out - the next time the parties change power it's scrapped for a new Vision, and if it's not the timeline is far too long. Think about advancements in technology in the last 25 years. Do you think anything learned in this $6B scam will be of use a quarter century from now? In 25 years we'll need permission from China and India to leave Earth orbit, and I doubt they'll give it. The plan also does nothing to provide for the national defense and being dominant in space exploration is definitely a defense goal.
You see, there are these rocks... they orbit the sun just beyond the orbit of Mars. Most of them are pebbles, but some of them are the size of a good mountain. They're called asteroids. For the most part they're water, but there's a great deal of silica and iron there as well as most of the materials we've built our industry on. There may be a great deal of hydrocarbons as well and there may be the proper elements for fission. If we're the first ones to this area we can use these raw materials to build the next step on our journey to the stars. Yes, we can look at these things and learn more about them than we know now with robots. But think about it: our Mars Rovers have done admirable duty and given great service - but they could be beaten to death with a stick by a man on the ground - or more likely stolen. Robots are good tools but they're no replacement for Men.
And if somebody else gets there first... well, an asteroid massing a million tons with plenty of water to use for reaction mass can be turned. Turning one so much that it crosses Earth orbit at the same time the Earth does when a specific city is under it is not a trivial math exercise, but it's well established math and not particularly challenging. The asteroid belt is big. It has a lot of rocks. I think it were best if we got there first, or at least shared the exploration with everybody else so as to discourage an interplanetary game of marbles.
So no, this is not enough. It will not do. And I guess we can dispense with the "are you stupid?" part of your question too.
When this volcano blows a major Katla eruption follows soon after. Katla is about 10 miles East.
This one shuts down half the air travel in western Europe for a few days. Katla shuts down summer. The farmers are not worried about this volcano:
"I am not afraid of this eruption but I fear Katla. It might not happen immediately but it will happen. Then we will be talking about much more power," Agnarsson said.
It has to do with the type of plate tectonics here. The plates are pulling apart, yielding a very deep rift that releases very hot magma from very far down in the mantle, which is saturated with CO2 and when released goes very high, far, thick and long. Naturally this will melt a great deal of Iceland glacier very quickly, impacting the currents in the Atlantic.
Uncle Larry's going full steam ahead. I'm confident the offers to Sun's free software wizards goes something like: "Row or swim. Choose now."
He's got to turn Sun into a huge cash engine if he's going to build on his buy and acquire the rest of a server, storage, network and software vertical operation to take on HP and Cisco in the IT world war for ownership of the datacenter.
Quite apart from the national security issues, there's a lot of science to learn out there or on the way. As Kennedy put it: "we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
But no, what we need now is a President to look up into the evening sky and see bright Mars. To wonder what it might be like for men to walk on it, to explore and harvest the vast resources of space - and then shrug, crack a beer and catch the game on ESPN.
$6B for five years? $1.2B a year. Less money than Microsoft is losing on Bing. Less than 5% of the annual revenues of Mars candy. For humans to stretch the limits of the frontier, to go to Mars and the Asteroids this is all? This is bold? What deep commitment.
I honestly liked it better when he didn't care enough to pretend to try. Do it or don't do it. Don't go halfway into it and set everybody up for disappointment. This is important stuff.
You lucky Europeans and your fast trains. Here in the US it would take some of us two days by train to get to the next country over and quite a while after that 'till the train got to the third one.
When this Iceland volcano erupts, nearby Katla always goes up soon after. A major eruption of Katla could give us another "Year without a summer" in the northern hemisphere.
Although I endorse this approach for people with big storage needs, space and power budgets, I had in mind an application that would that would RAID 45 of them for an obscenely high IOPS + bandwidth FC node for media content storage for video work. The kind of thing James Cameron would use for shipping his in-progress movies on. I might actually go with something else, like this instead since it supports up to 70 TB in 5U and now is certified to work with normal SAS controllers instead of a proprietary switch.
Naturally at five racks instead of 5U your suggestion lacks a certain perfomance density for this application - though admittedly you do have the advantage in the $/TB area, that's not always the only consideration.
Over time SSD will become cheaper than spinning disc, and as performant as RAM. That will change many of the market dynamics and may cause some unpleasantness.
Google is now providing the traditional email, storage and content services that were once part of the expected role and expense of running an ISP.
Hey, $4K/TB isn't that expensive. What's the performance and reliability like?
Bill left? He's still chief software architect and Chairman of the Board. Really, he's in or he's out. Which is it?
What the hell does it mean to be "the Isaac Newton of Java"?
Unless you're Dennis Ritchie it means you suck. We're going to want proof of your denial in the form of deterministica automata.
I was expecting the question, "Why is Apple not in this list". Since you asked the question...
IBM is slow moving, and they're targeting software and services as nearly 90% of their offerring, as the grandparent post proves with a link. Network, server and storage are mostly hardware. Software and service is a fraction. If IBM wants in to this fight they're going to have to migrate from a service & software biz to a different type of organization or intrepeneur one. They're definitely able to get in this game if they want to - I just don't see them trying yet. If they get in they had better bring their A game, because people aren't going to want to hear the mainframe pitch in this space. They have the OS, the VM, the hardware and in all of those they're second to none. They're weak in storage. Hitachi isn't the best SAN partner but WTFEver, we're moving to SSD and iSCSI anyway. They still need a network to get convergence. They've got some serious patents in that regard, but what are they shipping in switches and routers? Nada.
Oh, yeah, and they're going to have to get over the whole price thing. The very word IBM makes people cringe. That's not a good way to start a dialog. Not giving prices has got to go. Most everybody that IBM hasn't already sold has a policy of "If you won't quote a price, it's too much" to counter the traditional "If you have to ask, you can't afford it". In my world if it hasn't got a list price and an expected discount, it's off the table.
Probably this. In mobile Android has >9% market share. That's up 5% from the previous quarter. Projecting out, that's a lot. WiMo7 looks like a Vista debacle from the released specs - no Cut/paste, no multitasking. This one will be over before it's started.
The thing is Adobe doesn't need to abandon their existing customers to port to the up-and-comer. That's a myth you're trying to feed them. They just have to invest in porting their current codebase to emergent markets. There's nothing amiss about that. It's not like that would hurt them competitively - the vendor of their primary market, Windows, has made no bones about the fact that they find Adobe's profits are meat stolen from their table. What's Microsoft going to do if they take this money, kill them faster? If Microsoft could kill them faster then they would have already. Microsoft really wants this Silverlight thing to take off because it's their last defense against HTML5 and Theora. It's their last chance to take ownership of the content distribution market. They've lost it already, but they still hold hope. Adobe doesn't need to be on the losing side of that.
It's a harsh world. Will they see it? I doubt it. Would I invest in Adobe, given their current trend? No. Could they? Yes. I hope they see which way the wind blows before they're lost. They really do have some cool tech, their complete ignorance of security notwithstanding.
I'm not laughing. There were once companies that sold word processors, spreadsheets, email clients and browsers as standalone products that were dominant in their fields for their excellence, and now there are not. Adobe needs to get a grip on their place in tech and realize that their future is open, or it's wikipedia footnote. Everybody in the industry is trying to kill them except the Linux geeks. They need to get cross-platform or they're done.
It's a joke, get it? This guy is the Isaac Newton of Java. He doesn't need a resume, nor a business card. He doesn't apply for work - work petitions him for the privilege of his attention. It's a completely different process.
In 2009 88% (pdf) of IBM's pre-tax income came from services and software. Sun wasn't making money on the software - it was a value add.
Ten years ago IBM did a strategy shift from hardware to services and software. To buy Sun would mark a new strategy. Maybe it's time, maybe not. I'm thinking IBM didn't think so. This market has a bit more shaking out to do. Apple is now going where IBM once hoped to go, and Sun wasn't a good buy for them either. IBM has the benefit of time. They take the long view. They can - their founders retired 80 years ago and they've successfully transitioned from growth mode to the utilities model. That's a feat one in ten thousand companies achieve.
The IT wars are not over. The tyrants of the new era are gathering their forces. There are now three groups: HP, Cisco, and Oracle. Each hopes to have complete ownership of the server room including network, server, software and storage. Apple may yet choose to get into this fight. If there's a winner, it won't bode well for the rest of us. IBM transcended this fight long ago but there's an outside chance they could still stoop in. The prize is great - it's literally us. I don't think they will.
I think Apple will probably choose to win in the way that's been successful for them - in consumer electronics, content, in expanding ownership of the high end of new consumer markets, and letting other companies fight it out for the low-margin leavings. IBM will bide their time, and strike when the iron is hot. From the wounded they'll take the noblemen and heal their wounds. They'll fix up the folks who've been abandoned by dead or wounded technology providers or failed by active ones and be an isle of reliability in the storm. That's what they do, and they're good at it. They'll make good money, but they won't be the energetic driver of new technologies that they once were. HP does that now.
Yes, Andy Bechtolsheim is one of the forgotten geniuses of our time. I think he likes it that way.
He doesn't need anybody to empower him. He could set up a lab in his garage and top engineers from all over the world would come to serve in it for the privilege of sitting by his fire, sharing his vision and building it. It would sell and it would be amazing.
The man needs an agent to put it together for him, to deal with the rabble and the Street so he can focus on his work.