Category: Computing

Tulip have announced a rather unusual laptop. It’s based on the new AMD Turion CPU, the successor to the Athlon 64, so it should run Solaris 10 in 64 bit mode quite nicely. However what caught my eye was the limited edition Tulip E-Go Diamond version, which has some “unusual” styling touches:

“Tulip E-Go notebook inlaid with solid palladium white gold plates in which thousands of brilliant cut diamonds have been set. The quality is V.V.S. top-Wesselton and the total weight is 80.00 Crt. The brilliant cut diamonds are microscopic and pave set with surgical precision. This magnificent end result is possible thanks to the use of brilliant cut diamonds with a large variety of diameters. A unique square cut ruby has been set in both Tulip logos. For the Tulip E-Go diamond project, Marcel van Galen Design worked closely together with Design Department product engineering and Laurent de Beer Master Jewelry Designer. Consumer price € 283,000“

I can see it now – PC Magazine comparison shopping tables listing CPU speed, RAM, screen size, weight, battery life, and carats….

Regular readers will have noted that two of my greatest enthusiasms are for Formula 1 motor racing and Sun’s Jini™ distributed computing technology. So one item in today’s quarterly “customer wins” press release from Sun is particularly sweet:

“Magneti Marelli Holding (Italy) — Sun designed, for Magneti Marelli Racing Department, a new system to manage telemetry data for Formula 1 teams in real time, using Java and Jini(TM)/Rio technology with the aim of achieving the required performance, to support multiple platforms, such as Linux and Windows, and to provide high availability and location transparency of components.”

I don’t think I’m supposed to identify individual teams, but every time you see a car with this logo, think Jini.

Over in the Register, Andrew Orlowski has a fascinating article entitled Torvalds knifes Tridgell about another bizarre outburst by Linus Torvalds. This time it’s all about BitKeeper, the source code repository system. “Torvalds uses the pay-for proprietary software to manage the Linux source code (obliging other kernel developers to follow suit), but last week its owner, Bitkeeper CEO Larry McVoy, yanked the license, pushing Torvalds to look for an alternative. He’s now going to write his own. For this inconvenience, he blames [Andrew] Tridgell”, the genius behind SAMBA (the technology which finally killed my old PC-NFS product).

And what was Tridgell’s crime? He wanted to reverse-engineer the BitKeeper protocols so that Linux developers could browse the repository metadata. This sounds innocuous enough – after all, BitKeeper’s own website says that “Read-only users (people browsing the source, tracking progress, doing builds, etc.) still need a license but there is no charge for that license.”, so it’s not a question of money. Clearly there is something big at stake – something so important that McVoy is prepared to forego the prestige of hosting the Linux kernel repositories. According to Andrew Orlowski, “McVoy was adamant: ‘sorry, we’re not in the business of helping you develop a competing product.'” So that’s it? The key intellectual property is in the protocols? That seems odd.

I had two reactions to this piece. First, why on earth is the acknowledged flagship product of the FOSS world relying on a proprietary, closed source repository – particularly one run by a guy who clearly has no sympathy with FOSS, nor any understanding of the related business models? I would (naïvely) have thought that BitKeeper would want to hang on to the data and proliferate clients like crazy. (A famous LBJ quotation comes to mind.) And second, what is it that makes BitKeeper so wonderful? Let’s check out their web site. Truth in advertising? You be the judge:

Hardware costs: BitKeeper does not have this problem [of scale] because of its distributed model…. This model means that the hardware costs can be spread over a set of inexpensive PCs rather than a $300,000 SMP machine. BitMover hosts the Linux kernel repositories for thousands of users on a single inexpensive PC.

Human costs: An administrator is the person who makes sure that the hardware and the software is working, the repositories are backed up, etc. The distributed nature of BitKeeper removes the need for such a person.

Wow. Thousands of users on a single PC. No administrators. How cool. No wonder Linus was impressed. [That’s sarcasm, in case you didn’t notice.] I think that in the long term we’ll see that Andrew Tridgell has done the FOSS community a service, by provoking Linus and Larry into falling out. Hopefully the community can create a better – and truly open source – repository. However I wouldn’t rely on Linus to create it – he doesn’t seem to believe in open source any more….

I spent several hours on Saturday replacing the CPU fan on my wife’s computer. The old one had started making a noise like a vacuum cleaner that you could hear all over the house. It’s an middle-of-the-road PC, a bland eMachines box with a ~900MHz Celeron. We talked about replacing it with a Mac Mini, but there’s plenty of life in the old system and it seemed wasteful to replace it unnecessarily.

While I was disassembling the innards to get at the CPU, I took the opportunity to clean out the dust from the power supply fan and replace the video adapter with something a little more functional. When it was all back together, I ran some tests and spent a few minutes upgrading her copies of Firefox and Thunderbird to the latest releases. Nothing earth-shattering: the parts cost about $60 at CompUSA. The biggest challenge was bending the spring clip on the fan to fit more securely onto the tabs on the CPU’s ZIF socket.

The point is, there’s no way she could have done all of this stuff herself: it’s just too complicated. A nice piece on the BBC website makes the point: “But all the people who called me had one thing in common: they were at their wits’ end because they had bought computers after being seduced by advertising into thinking that they would be easy to use and fun, but had found them to be much more complicated than they had expected. And most importantly, none of them knew what to do or where to turn for help.”

I’ve decided that in future I’ll recommend that people get laptops. Not because they need the mobility, not because it’s cheaper (it isn’t) or more comfortable (most laptop keyboards suck), but because if when things go wrong, they can simply fold up the computer and carry it to a human being, to get help.

Over in ongoing · Java, the Grid, and Rio, Tim was “thinking about how you’d run a big distributed Java system as a service across a whole lot of networked computers”. Dan Templeton pointed him at Rio, and I followed up with a link to the papers from last December’s Jini Community Meeting in London. And I remembered a comment by Rob Gingell, adapting Santayana: “Those who do not use Jini are doomed to reinvent it.”

Tim Bray has been reading Brad’s analysis of Microsoft’s numbers. While Brad is bemused by the R&D (where’s the beef ROI?), Tim is shaking his head over the SG&A, which seems to be out of control. (From FY2000 to FY2003, revenue rose 45%, R&D rose 77%, and SG&A zoomed 131%.)
My theory is that most of it is going in “special promotions” to try to prevent large-scale defections. (You may choose different terms; I’ll stick to my euphemisms.) Beyond that, MSFT is clearly doing everything it can to keep the bottom-line income number down, to (1) resist shareholder pressure for even higher dividends, and (2) avoid further (mostly Euro) anti-trust challenges. However they don’t seem to be too successful….

“Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of” RJ-45 connectors and CAT-5 wiring. Thanks to the folks at Sun’s Beijing office, the internal WiFi on my Ferrari is now working. Only in 32 bit mode at this point, but I’ll take it. Now for suspend/resume (he said hopefully).

[Since Broadcom doesn’t release specs or source code for its devices, we’re using the “ndiswrapper” technique, in which a Windows-style NDIS driver is wrapped in a little bit of magic to make it work like a Solaris driver. Wonderful what they can do nowadays, eh?!]

[UPDATED: Curses… foiled again. The drivers worked fine at the office earlier today, but when I tried to boot up just now to use my home network, I was unable to plumb the bcmndis0 interface; some kind of binding error. The only obvious difference was that I was running on batteries, but that shouldn’t affect things. Oh well, more testing….]

[UPDATED: It turns out that it was inadvertent operator error: where the instructions said 43XX, I was supposed to use 4320 or 4324, depending on configuration. I have no idea how it could have worked yesterday. Anyway, 32 bit mode is working fine; I’ve tried the 64 bit drivers, but there are a number of issues to be resolved there.]

I tried real-time blogging at last weekend’s CEC (Customer Engineering Conference), using my Treo 650, but without a decent blog tool it wasn’t really practical. I found myself wrestling with the web interface to MovableType rather than listening to the speakers – bad idea.

So here are my collected notes from CEC (slightly edited, definitely selective), followed by a few closing thoughts.

SATURDAY MORNING

One of the great traditions of CEC is the collection of video clips produced by various geo and functional orgs. It would be invidious to pick one as best, but the French piece – a Ken doll scaling the heights of a server to fix it, and earning the fulsome thanks of Barbie and her friends – got most applause. (But NZ had the best lip-sync.) And US PTS nailed the “piggybacking” joke perfectly. Best music (including alpenhorn) from Switzerland.

Next, Jim Baty & Hal Stern. Moving to utility model, refactoring business. Feels like it’s 1995 – tectonic shift again. Key messages: Technology is cultural. Addressing the PE (principal engineer) role – align with DE model. Community is key – blogging, BOFs. At CEC: Engage – act – share. When you go home: Communicate – train – improve.

Bob MacRitchie – EVP GSO: Described evolution of sales model. Review progress of Project Genesis [reorg of sales, professional services, and field engineering launched 12 months ago]. Simplify, flatten, empower org. (I’d missed that the US sales headquarters is moving to Boston – most of our US sales are east of the Mississippi.)

Marissa Peterson – services: services revenue & gross margin are improving significantly

Jonathan Schwartz – who never uses sports metaphors – appears in a Dallas Mavericks shirt.

How do we grow? Sell more to existing customers, or steal other people’s customers.

What’s changed over 3 years?

• Sparc vs. Itanium
• Solaris
• Storage revival – 6920
• x86 – now #1 Opteron seller, more coming
• JES
• Utility computing & grid (compare with IBM OnDemand fiasco)
• Java on devices

In response to Q&A:

• How come the OSS community is never satisfied with Sun, while IBM can do no wrong? The GPL people will never be happy, but they’re a minority. Second, we’re going to open source everything – JES, N1, etcetera – and if IBM won’t opensource WebSphere or Tivoli, they’re going to be left behind.
• OSS grows revenue. The key is developers, and they have no money. (Jonathan has only one button on his blog – Download NetBeans)
• What about N1? The technology in N1 was right on; our mistake was in overestimating the readiness of existing data centers to buy in. They don’t call them “brownfield sites” for nothing. On the other hand, the N1 technology is going to be critical to successfully creating a utility computing business

Greg Papadopoulos, CTO (via video): Computing becomes a commodity, but (network scale) computer systems aren’t. Consequences: operational concerns dominate, scale matters.

Robert Youngjohns – utility grid: What we’ve done, where we’re going. Great presentation – more material at the Sun Grid page.

.

SATURDAY AFTERNOON

SOA and Jini – Tom Barratt & Larry Mitchell: Nothing unfamiliar, just wanted to see how people were presenting – and reacting to – SOA and Jini. Basic background, ray-tracing demo. Excellent discussion, good questions, lot of interest.

N1 SPS/SJS App Server – David Ogren: Talking about AppServer 8.1 + N1SPS 5.0. We got what David called the “Fire and Brimstone” to “Nirvana” presentation… Plus a nice demo.

InstallFest and Demo Room: Lots of cool stuff in the demo room. Re-installed Solaris 10 on my Ferrari from the latest flash archive.

SUNDAY MORNING

John Loicano, SW EVP: Big emphasis on Solaris, tools, restructuring JES Suites (especially Identity Management with Identity Auditor) Tag-team with Juan Soto (SW CTO & MktDev) for a deep dive on leading with SW for opening new customers. Emphasized importance of Netbeans vs. Eclipse. (Netbeans nailed all the recent tools awards.) Impressive performance numbers on the new TCP stack. Great demos of Solaris 10 Predictive Self-Healing and Identity Auditor.

Mark Canepa – network storage: Data management is more than storage…. Industry survey, strategy, product overview. Nice discussion of synergy between Solaris 10 zones and 6920 virtualization. Head-to-head comparison against EMC. Plea for help in improving remote monitoring connectivity. Java Storage System – not a technology, but a JES-style busness model. [The idea is interesting; I’m not crazy about the name.]

John Fowler & Andy Bechtolsheim: network systems: John summarized NSG history & progress. Stunning benchmark numbers, unveiled Galaxy: 8 socket (16-way, with dual cores) in new 4U packaging. BIG fans. The dual cores are coming very soon – well ahead of Intel. Full product line from 1U 2 sockets up to 4U 8 socket. Also blades – but no compromise in performance. Blades will support virtualized SAN port sharing, will save huge dollars. (Low cost, low speed blades aren’t cost-effective because of software licensing costs.) Will mix-and-match AMD and SPARC blades. Box design is dramatically future-proofed. Also mgmt sw and Nauticus (N2000) switches.Many early sales have been driven by customer solution and Blueprint sales. Seed units work well. Challenge: every sale is an audition. We can sell the boxes, need to make sure service will be able to meet the challenge.

David Yen, scalable systems EVP: What’s the difference between NSG and SSG? Ultimately, competence in system packaging vs. competence in silicon. SPARC roadmaps. Lots of interesting stuff: I wish he’d skipped the umpteenth repetition of “how chip-level multithreading works” to spend more time on the new material. Oh, well.

SUNDAY AFTERNOON

Real World Cluster Grids – Tony Kay: Disambiguating “grid”, all the way back to Foster & Kesselman. Important to match language with customer expectation – we say grid, they (may) say cluster, for example. Detailed discussions of HPC grids, especially oil & gas biz. Importance (or not) of various technologies: OGSA, Globus; cluster, MPI libs, network fabrics, file systems, specialized protocol stacks. Had a chance to talk to my former SunLabs colleague Bruce Daniels who’s now in PS.

ZFS – Nolen Hayden: (Jeff Bonwick was sick: his director subbed for him.) Interesting to hear the issues that were uppermost in the minds of the customer-facing engineers.

Grids for Financial Services – Alec Muffett: Intensely, relentlessly, and amusingly pragmatic and iconoclastic. But you knew that.

FINAL THOUGHTS

• An excellent conference – kudos to Hal Stern and Jim Baty, and their team.
• I really regret that I had to miss the Monday morning session, especially Scott’s talk.
• While I understand the traditional focus on the field engineering organization, I really think that CEC has turned into something that speaks to all of engineering. How we could achieve this while preserving the value to the field I have no idea….
• The openness of the whole event was remarkable. At lunch on Saturday, I asked Hal whether it was all bloggable. “Absolutely!” he said.

I stumbled across this piece in Jamie Zawinski’s blog pointing off to a longer article entitled Groupware Bad. He discusses the history of collaboration and calendaring software, and why it sucks. (There are a bunch of really interesting responses on the blog; see also here.) Direct and to the point (and, apparently, widely linked). Money quote:
If you want to do something that’s going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy. When words like “groupware” and “enterprise” start getting tossed around, you’re doing the latter, [and] nobody would ever work on it unless they were getting paid to, because it’s just fundamentally not interesting to individuals.
So I said, narrow the focus. Your “use case” should be, there’s a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?
That got me a look like I had just sprouted a third head, but bear with me, because I think that it’s not only crude but insightful. “How will this software get my users laid” should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software). [It’s] about making it easy for people to do other things that make them happy: meeting, communicating, and hooking up.
(Linked from Many-to-Many, which is fascinating in its own right.)

In Internetnews.com, Dan Ravicher, executive director of the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) is quoted as saying: “Open source is not about having five different operating systems, it’s about everyone working together to create one rock-solid operating system.”

Wrong. The last “one rock solid operating system” was OS/360. Dan is suffering from a grievous lack of imagination. This is like Pamela at Groklaw, saying “The FOSS community needs to face the world with a united face”, and earlier “when [Sun] say ‘the Open Source community’… they don’t mean Linux. When I say ‘Open Source community,’ I do.”

Open source is about collaboration. It’s about groups (plural) coming together to work on stuff, and sharing the results. It’s not a cult, not a political movement, not a utopian (i.e. unrealistic) dream. Above all, it cannot be about monoculture: one technology, one group with one leader, one license, one goal. All monocultures are dangerous: Microsoft Windows, Monsanto’s ‘Terminator’ seeds, and influenza vaccine – even Linux if “true believers” have their way. I want more OSS operating systems, not fewer. I wish Palm would release BeOS to the world. (Yes, I know about OpenBeOS. I want the original.) I wish HP would post the full source of VMS for all to use. Competition is good. It’s good for engineering. It’s good for customers.

(For better coverage of these issues, check out Simon’s blog.)