Actually they have three product lines which overlap, and this is the one that's closest to being a startup.. I assume they wanted the technology to put into one of the others, and they'll happily sell the resulting composite to the Virtual Iron customers.
This neither proves nor disproves that Oracle would like to sell all the components that you need in your server room. I suspect they do, in part because it's now to be a merger, not a buy-and-close like Virtual Iron.
I also suspect that IBM is cursing themselves for missing the chance to do a buy-and-close of Sun.
Why do the Tories distinguish between
on-line and in person (Tories seek to widen police access online - June 18).
Why not require
libraries to keep records of what I've read?
Or have my phone provider collect a list of people with whom I've been talking? Or require my name, address
and phone number if I walk down the sidewalk?
Merely using the internet may be sufficient
evidence to convince the government of Iran I'm some kind of criminal, but I expect
better of a Canadian government.
Letters to the editor, June 20, 2009
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/letters-to-the-editor/why-stop-at-on-line-tracking/article1190659/
--dave
The Conservatives, of course, are now pushing their spin on the
need for internet service providers like Rogers to record and
disclose personal identifying information without a warrant.
As a former postmaster for <a canadian university>, I had a legal
duty to protect this sort of information unless the University
received a court order, or, in the specific and limited case
of a student, if they were brought before an academic tribunal
to answer for an action.
In the entire time I was there, over five year in all, only
one academic investigation took place, and no legal ones,
despite this being the era in which some blatantly unsuitable
material was broadcast via the "alt.sex.pictures" newsgroup.
I would not enjoy knowing that the University or an ISP was
going to hand my name, address and billing information to a
police officer without a warrant, especially as the web is
now a much more civilized place.
Nor would I like to have them reading through logs of who
I spoke to or what I read.
The librarians of the Canada had the best thought-out set of
rules: only a strictly limited amount of information was kept
about who had borrowed a particular book, it was available
only with a warrant, and it was destroyed as soon as the
book was returned undamaged.
That is the kind of behavior we aimed for at the university, and
is the least I expect out of an ISP. Neither they nor the
state has any compelling interest in my activities unless
they can go before a judge and make a real case that a
crime may have occurred.
Yes, but the chill is the problem. Without the same protections for bloggers and newspaper sources, your
only choices are to hope the regulatory part of your agency is honest, or keep your mouth shut and your head down.
Making people face that choice is, as I suggested, bad public policy, and the reason for the whistleblower laws.
If so, we will probably need to fund him enthusiastically, as he'd likely lose his job, as well as need significant backing just to hire the kind of representation he'll need.
Then only persons with nothing to lose will dare to criticize. That is bad
public policy, and the reason that various countries have "whistleblower" laws.
You don't cherry-pick just that, but you'd be foolish to throw it away and consciously go to a just low-margin mass market.
Instead, one might want to start a line of very-many-core processors, to make it more cost-effective than a whole rack of mass market uni- to quad-processors (;-))
I just did a benchmark and capacity planning project using T5240s a front ends and (compute-intensive) middleware machines, and they did better on both price-performance and plain raw performance than the equivalent x64s, so for that workload set, choseing the masm market chip would have cost the customer real money.
Well, I helped build one system which would scale the way Oracle demonstrated with RAC, but it was distinctly unusual: a library system, where the operations were the idempotent borrowing of a particular copy of a book by a particular patron.
So there's a proof of concept, but it's the only one I've seen thus far, in a fair career as a capacity planner.
All the rest have been pretty ordinary large-transaction business systems, which get their performance from being able to apply lots of processors on a fast backplane for
fast consistency checking and raw lock speed.
I speculate that we may need a new form of normalization, one making as much of a transaction run without involving locking, just like the normalization for relational databases made redundant-item updates in network databases unnecessary...
Actually Sun's been doing 3) for years, designing chips to work with a big fast backplane (ex-CRAY, at one time), and which Fujitsu has specialized in.
The Rock is their high-clock-speed box, not their big database box.
128-core SMP enterprise hardware is not a competitive low margin business: 1-4 core small servers are. For the latter market, Sun sells 1U AMD and Intel boxes (;-))
Not joking, but betting that your business parallelizes wonderfully, so you can break up your transaction processing over a Beowulf cluster.
Alas, large transaction processing tends to require something like a POWER or SPARC, to get 128 cores with a common locking architecture working on driving a large database.
This is the traditional IBM/SUN/H-P space, and fits, in rough order of difficulty, large manufacturing, large on-line retail, medium and higher regular retail, banks and telcos.
Not my personal favorite businesses, but definitely where the majority of my income comes from (I'm a capacity planner).
Rock is the high-clock-speed chip, while the Ultra VII and future variants are the high-end chips, which are absolutely necessary for things like the transaction processing loads of an eBay, much less a bank or large retailer.
No-one in their right mind buys something they don't want because their friend is the salesperson. Much less pays extra for it!
Larry is way smarter than that,
and I suspect he's looking at the chance to go from a database company to a
whole-line vendor, just like IBM was back in the mainframe days.
I'll happily believe IBM would have
laid off everyone, starting with the hardware folks. I'll bet they're cursing
having missed the chance to buy Sun.
The article reads a lot like FUD written
by Microsoft about particularly threatening Linux advances.
I just benchmarked a huge Oracle
configuration on T5240/T5440, M5000s and M9000s, and it really made my little
heart beat fonder (;-))
Communicating both the status of their job and it's place in a longer line is a great way to reduce your customer's concerns.
I literally use the above phrase whenever I'm asked to do something, along with a wild-ass guess about how long it will take and a request that they get back to me on a specific date "and see if I've gotten started on it".
I also change the message on my phone when I'll been told something has just blown up, to "at 4:30 PM, I'm in the machine room fixing the exploded machine". That means that when someone call to interrupt me, they'll find out I'm already fixing the problem.
Both of these are communications tricks, so that the users get the information they need in terms they understand.
A variant on the first trick is the the
"Clawdette question", which I direct to my suppliers. "Thanks, when should I get back to you for a progress report?".
That tells them I'll give them time, and won't bother them before, but puts them on notice I will be back talking to them when the time is up. Named for a former boss, who had to schedule a lab full of hard-to-herd cats.
Back in 2005, the U.K. parliament had a publ;ic consultation on DRM, specifically asking about this kind of
DRM end-of-life. My reply of 22 December 2005 follows:
To the All Party Parliamentary Internet Group,
re Digital Rights Management
Gentlepersons,
I am an author in a Commonwealth country, with recent experience in the
trade-offs in copyright law and the relevance of digital rights management to
publishing and can comment usefully on the subject.
I was the coauthor of a technical book, "Using Samba", published in the United
States and Canada by O'Reilly and associates. Despite being made available
electronically for no cost, the book was the outstanding seller in its class,
and made me substantial royalties.
The History of "Using Samba" This book was published without any form of explicit DRM, in a format suitable
for printing from personal computers, with no limitations on distribution of
personal printing, and with a license reserving only commercial printing
rights to the publisher.
There was an implicit form of rights management, in that only commercial
printers have equipment capable of printing and binding on sufficiently thin
paper to make a manageable book: if printed on conventional photocopier paper,
the book is over three inches thick. Printing small sections for reference
on photocopier paper is perfectly practical, but large-scale printing is not.
This effectively reinforced the reservations in the license: printing for
profit is both illegal and impractical, but personal printing, excerpting and
copying is unrestricted.
The net result is that the book was widely used as a reference, and the
on-line readers bought the physical book for its more convenient form in great
numbers. O'Reilly has since published a non-trivial number of other books in
this manner.
This experience allows me to speak to the questions the inquiry is interested
in:
1. Whether DRM distorts traditional trade-offs in copyright law
An explicit DRM scheme affecting the electronic copies of the book would have
negative value. It would in fact restrict the easy distribution of the book,
making it less popular and discouraging persons from depending on it. This
would lead directly to lessened sales of the printed book, and a reduction in
my and my publisher's income.
Copying of the electronic form is encouraged by myself and the publisher, and
the printing, use and wide distribution of extracts is desirable, as it causes
sales of the entire work.
The author's rights management of ordinary commercial copyright law protects
my publisher and I in countries which honor copyright.
In those where copyright does not exist or is ignored, the cost of publication
and shipping are such as to mitigate any counterfeiting printing attempts: the
counterfeiters cannot profit by shipping them outside of the country, and so
are limited in the damage they can do.
2. Whether new types of content sharing license (such as Creative Commons or
Copyleft) need legislation changes to be effective
Using Samba was successfully published under a free content license, under the
copyright regimes of the United States and Canada, without any required or
desired change in that law. I do not see a need for changes.
3. How copyright deposit libraries should deal with DRM issues
Copyright and other deposit libraries, such as the National Libraries of the
U.K., Canada and the United States should seek and retain unrestricted copies,
offering suitable statutory protection to the authors or publishers.
4. How consumers should be protected when DRM systems are discontinued
Upon the expiry of the copyright, the deposit libraries should make the
originals available for a nominal fee.
Upon the failure or discontinuance of a DRM scheme, the publishers should
retain the option of republishing under a different scheme under ordinary
copyright law.
On cessation of publication, the co
I'm actually surprised how many folks
are doing scrum and test-directed development. I did a year with a group in a relatively boring part of the industry (services) and found that they were
heavily into scrum/sprint, java, perl and xml.
They were quite open to adding a trivial performance test to the regression-test suite, just to be sure they didn't accidentally slow it down.
Actually, if you're doing test-directed development, you should have a test that tells you if you've met your performance needs or not. Your management wants to know they have a certain amount of bang/$, to meet their performance budget.
For user-interface stuff, that could be as simple as "3 seconds on average, no more than 5% over 20 seconds", for some number of simulated users on your development machine.
So build a test framework
and measure the first part of the program you write. For example, that might be the front
end of an interactive query program. Put in a dummy delay for the back-end database and
test performance the first day the code responds to a request. Code and tune to meet your
performance targets, and stop tuning as soon as it is fast enough.
In this case the tuning will mostly be looking at code-path length with your test framework
and a source-code profiler, to get both latency and transfer time down to an
appropriate value. Since you have the program available to you, measure the residency
times in each major component with the profiler. The slowest component will be the
limiting factor, and the limit on its performance will be 1/Dmax, where Dmax = V *S,
visit count to the component, times service time for it.
Once the code is performing, now is a good time to stop and look at resource usage.
Find out how much CPU, memory and I/O bandwidth your program uses per transaction,
and save that information for sizing later. You will need to ensure when you size the system that you dont introduce
an artificial bottleneck. This is where your management will want to know the performance, so they can plan to support an estimated number of users.
Returning to tuning, next build a test version of the sql. Run it as a script and measure the
sql response time. Now you can tune the database queries, and get them fast enough.
Finally, if your program contains middleware, arrange for it to communicate via sockets,
and measure performance at the front end and the database. The difference will be the
performance of the middleware. As before, the demand of the slowest component will be
the bottleneck, and will hold performance to 1/Dmax. Speeding up other parts of the
programs wont help.
Consider this the performance experts version of test-directed design.
Actually the summary is wrong: ext4
breaks a guarantee that was part of Unix
since v6, well before Posix was written.
It's probably fixed now.
--dave
[To brutally oversimplify, Posix allows a weakening of a guarantee
about the creation and filling of files
which required a critical order
of data and metadata operations. The weakening is one which ext4 used: one can
defer writes of data and metadata to improve performance, which it did, but
at the cost of writing metadata before the data without a mechanism to recover the data. The filesystem is consistent, it just doesn't contain the data you expected (;-))
This was logical, from the Posix spec, but quite startling to the users of the filesystem, who had been using ext3 or other filesystems
in the past and not suffering similar
problems.
This was also true of very very old programs from Unix, Minix, BSD or other Linuxes, so blaming the developers may have been an overstatement.]
Sun used to charge for stuff until the capital cost of it was paid off, then make it either free or just charge for maintenance.
And, of course, only in the case of commercial use.
This looks similar, except that the
new thing is part of an old thing...
Slashdot Mirror
Actually they have three product lines which overlap, and this is the one that's closest to being a startup.. I assume they wanted the technology to put into one of the others, and they'll happily sell the resulting composite to the Virtual Iron customers.
This neither proves nor disproves that Oracle would like to sell all the components that you need in your server room. I suspect they do, in part because it's now to be a merger, not a buy-and-close like Virtual Iron.
I also suspect that IBM is cursing themselves for missing the chance to do a buy-and-close of Sun.
--dave
Why do the Tories distinguish between on-line and in person (Tories seek to widen police access online - June 18). Why not require libraries to keep records of what I've read?
Or have my phone provider collect a list of people with whom I've been talking? Or require my name, address and phone number if I walk down the sidewalk?
Merely using the internet may be sufficient evidence to convince the government of Iran I'm some kind of criminal, but I expect better of a Canadian government.
Letters to the editor, June 20, 2009
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/letters-to-the-editor/why-stop-at-on-line-tracking/article1190659/
--dave
The Conservatives, of course, are now pushing their spin on the need for internet service providers like Rogers to record and disclose personal identifying information without a warrant.
As a former postmaster for <a canadian university>, I had a legal duty to protect this sort of information unless the University received a court order, or, in the specific and limited case of a student, if they were brought before an academic tribunal to answer for an action.
In the entire time I was there, over five year in all, only one academic investigation took place, and no legal ones, despite this being the era in which some blatantly unsuitable material was broadcast via the "alt.sex.pictures" newsgroup.
I would not enjoy knowing that the University or an ISP was going to hand my name, address and billing information to a police officer without a warrant, especially as the web is now a much more civilized place.
Nor would I like to have them reading through logs of who I spoke to or what I read.
The librarians of the Canada had the best thought-out set of rules: only a strictly limited amount of information was kept about who had borrowed a particular book, it was available only with a warrant, and it was destroyed as soon as the book was returned undamaged.
That is the kind of behavior we aimed for at the university, and is the least I expect out of an ISP. Neither they nor the state has any compelling interest in my activities unless they can go before a judge and make a real case that a crime may have occurred.
--dave
Yes, but the chill is the problem. Without the same protections for bloggers and newspaper sources, your only choices are to hope the regulatory part of your agency is honest, or keep your mouth shut and your head down.
Making people face that choice is, as I suggested, bad public policy, and the reason for the whistleblower laws.
--dave
If so, we will probably need to fund him enthusiastically, as he'd likely lose his job, as well as need significant backing just to hire the kind of representation he'll need.
EFF UK, perhaps?
--dave
Then only persons with nothing to lose will dare to criticize. That is bad public policy, and the reason that various countries have "whistleblower" laws.
--dave
The constable has no reason to appeal, he's already been fingered. I'm not sure who else would have standing ...
--dave
You don't cherry-pick just that, but you'd be foolish to throw it away and consciously go to a just low-margin mass market.
Instead, one might want to start a line of very-many-core processors, to make it more cost-effective than a whole rack of mass market uni- to quad-processors (;-))
I just did a benchmark and capacity planning project using T5240s a front ends and (compute-intensive) middleware machines, and they did better on both price-performance and plain raw performance than the equivalent x64s, so for that workload set, choseing the masm market chip would have cost the customer real money.
--dave
Well, I helped build one system which would scale the way Oracle demonstrated with RAC, but it was distinctly unusual: a library system, where the operations were the idempotent borrowing of a particular copy of a book by a particular patron.
So there's a proof of concept, but it's the only one I've seen thus far, in a fair career as a capacity planner.
All the rest have been pretty ordinary large-transaction business systems, which get their performance from being able to apply lots of processors on a fast backplane for fast consistency checking and raw lock speed.
I speculate that we may need a new form of normalization, one making as much of a transaction run without involving locking, just like the normalization for relational databases made redundant-item updates in network databases unnecessary...
--dave
Actually Sun's been doing 3) for years, designing chips to work with a big fast backplane (ex-CRAY, at one time), and which Fujitsu has specialized in.
The Rock is their high-clock-speed box, not their big database box.
--dave
128-core SMP enterprise hardware is not a competitive low margin business: 1-4 core small servers are. For the latter market, Sun sells 1U AMD and Intel boxes (;-))
--dave
Not joking, but betting that your business parallelizes wonderfully, so you can break up your transaction processing over a Beowulf cluster. Alas, large transaction processing tends to require something like a POWER or SPARC, to get 128 cores with a common locking architecture working on driving a large database.
This is the traditional IBM/SUN/H-P space, and fits, in rough order of difficulty, large manufacturing, large on-line retail, medium and higher regular retail, banks and telcos. Not my personal favorite businesses, but definitely where the majority of my income comes from (I'm a capacity planner).
--dave
Rock is the high-clock-speed chip, while the Ultra VII and future variants are the high-end chips, which are absolutely necessary for things like the transaction processing loads of an eBay, much less a bank or large retailer.
--dave
No-one in their right mind buys something they don't want because their friend is the salesperson. Much less pays extra for it!
Larry is way smarter than that, and I suspect he's looking at the chance to go from a database company to a whole-line vendor, just like IBM was back in the mainframe days.
I'll happily believe IBM would have laid off everyone, starting with the hardware folks. I'll bet they're cursing having missed the chance to buy Sun.
--dave
The article reads a lot like FUD written by Microsoft about particularly threatening Linux advances.
I just benchmarked a huge Oracle configuration on T5240/T5440, M5000s and M9000s, and it really made my little heart beat fonder (;-))
--dave
The article "begs the question": in the process of asking it, they insert their conclusions, and then ask us to accept that in our answer.
The classic example is "Have you stopped beating your wife?"
Whe you see one of these, be aware the author is up to something...
--dave
Communicating both the status of their job and it's place in a longer line is a great way to reduce your customer's concerns.
I literally use the above phrase whenever I'm asked to do something, along with a wild-ass guess about how long it will take and a request that they get back to me on a specific date "and see if I've gotten started on it".
I also change the message on my phone when I'll been told something has just blown up, to "at 4:30 PM, I'm in the machine room fixing the exploded machine". That means that when someone call to interrupt me, they'll find out I'm already fixing the problem.
Both of these are communications tricks, so that the users get the information they need in terms they understand.
A variant on the first trick is the the "Clawdette question", which I direct to my suppliers. "Thanks, when should I get back to you for a progress report?". That tells them I'll give them time, and won't bother them before, but puts them on notice I will be back talking to them when the time is up. Named for a former boss, who had to schedule a lab full of hard-to-herd cats.
--dave
To the All Party Parliamentary Internet Group,
re Digital Rights Management
Gentlepersons,
I am an author in a Commonwealth country, with recent experience in the trade-offs in copyright law and the relevance of digital rights management to publishing and can comment usefully on the subject.
I was the coauthor of a technical book, "Using Samba", published in the United States and Canada by O'Reilly and associates. Despite being made available electronically for no cost, the book was the outstanding seller in its class, and made me substantial royalties.
The History of "Using Samba"
This book was published without any form of explicit DRM, in a format suitable for printing from personal computers, with no limitations on distribution of personal printing, and with a license reserving only commercial printing rights to the publisher.
There was an implicit form of rights management, in that only commercial printers have equipment capable of printing and binding on sufficiently thin paper to make a manageable book: if printed on conventional photocopier paper, the book is over three inches thick. Printing small sections for reference on photocopier paper is perfectly practical, but large-scale printing is not.
This effectively reinforced the reservations in the license: printing for profit is both illegal and impractical, but personal printing, excerpting and copying is unrestricted.
The net result is that the book was widely used as a reference, and the on-line readers bought the physical book for its more convenient form in great numbers. O'Reilly has since published a non-trivial number of other books in this manner.
This experience allows me to speak to the questions the inquiry is interested in:
1. Whether DRM distorts traditional trade-offs in copyright law
An explicit DRM scheme affecting the electronic copies of the book would have negative value. It would in fact restrict the easy distribution of the book, making it less popular and discouraging persons from depending on it. This would lead directly to lessened sales of the printed book, and a reduction in my and my publisher's income.
Copying of the electronic form is encouraged by myself and the publisher, and the printing, use and wide distribution of extracts is desirable, as it causes sales of the entire work.
The author's rights management of ordinary commercial copyright law protects my publisher and I in countries which honor copyright. In those where copyright does not exist or is ignored, the cost of publication and shipping are such as to mitigate any counterfeiting printing attempts: the counterfeiters cannot profit by shipping them outside of the country, and so are limited in the damage they can do.
2. Whether new types of content sharing license (such as Creative Commons or Copyleft) need legislation changes to be effective
Using Samba was successfully published under a free content license, under the copyright regimes of the United States and Canada, without any required or desired change in that law. I do not see a need for changes.
3. How copyright deposit libraries should deal with DRM issues
Copyright and other deposit libraries, such as the National Libraries of the U.K., Canada and the United States should seek and retain unrestricted copies, offering suitable statutory protection to the authors or publishers.
4. How consumers should be protected when DRM systems are discontinued
Upon the expiry of the copyright, the deposit libraries should make the originals available for a nominal fee.
Upon the failure or discontinuance of a DRM scheme, the publishers should retain the option of republishing under a different scheme under ordinary copyright law. On cessation of publication, the co
Sure did: a good healthy competition between the Solarii, BSD folks and Linus is a wonderful thing (;-))
--dave
I'm actually surprised how many folks are doing scrum and test-directed development. I did a year with a group in a relatively boring part of the industry (services) and found that they were heavily into scrum/sprint, java, perl and xml.
They were quite open to adding a trivial performance test to the regression-test suite, just to be sure they didn't accidentally slow it down.
--dave
The Samba team already use email and IM effectively, try asking them.
--dave
Actually, if you're doing test-directed development, you should have a test that tells you if you've met your performance needs or not. Your management wants to know they have a certain amount of bang/$, to meet their performance budget.
For user-interface stuff, that could be as simple as "3 seconds on average, no more than 5% over 20 seconds", for some number of simulated users on your development machine.
So build a test framework and measure the first part of the program you write. For example, that might be the front end of an interactive query program. Put in a dummy delay for the back-end database and test performance the first day the code responds to a request. Code and tune to meet your performance targets, and stop tuning as soon as it is fast enough . In this case the tuning will mostly be looking at code-path length with your test framework and a source-code profiler, to get both latency and transfer time down to an appropriate value. Since you have the program available to you, measure the residency times in each major component with the profiler. The slowest component will be the limiting factor, and the limit on its performance will be 1/Dmax, where Dmax = V *S, visit count to the component, times service time for it.
Once the code is performing, now is a good time to stop and look at resource usage. Find out how much CPU, memory and I/O bandwidth your program uses per transaction, and save that information for sizing later. You will need to ensure when you size the system that you dont introduce an artificial bottleneck. This is where your management will want to know the performance, so they can plan to support an estimated number of users.
Returning to tuning, next build a test version of the sql. Run it as a script and measure the sql response time. Now you can tune the database queries, and get them fast enough.
Finally, if your program contains middleware, arrange for it to communicate via sockets, and measure performance at the front end and the database. The difference will be the performance of the middleware. As before, the demand of the slowest component will be the bottleneck, and will hold performance to 1/Dmax. Speeding up other parts of the programs wont help.
Consider this the performance experts version of test-directed design.
--dave
The apps don't fail on ufs.
--dave
Actually the summary is wrong: ext4 breaks a guarantee that was part of Unix since v6, well before Posix was written.
It's probably fixed now.
--dave
[To brutally oversimplify, Posix allows a weakening of a guarantee about the creation and filling of files which required a critical order of data and metadata operations. The weakening is one which ext4 used: one can defer writes of data and metadata to improve performance, which it did, but at the cost of writing metadata before the data without a mechanism to recover the data. The filesystem is consistent, it just doesn't contain the data you expected (;-))
This was logical, from the Posix spec, but quite startling to the users of the filesystem, who had been using ext3 or other filesystems in the past and not suffering similar problems.
This was also true of very very old programs from Unix, Minix, BSD or other Linuxes, so blaming the developers may have been an overstatement.]
Sun used to charge for stuff until the capital cost of it was paid off, then make it either free or just charge for maintenance. And, of course, only in the case of commercial use.
This looks similar, except that the new thing is part of an old thing...
--dave (biased, you understand) c-b