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October 2006
October 29, 2006
Project Blackbox and Open-Source Java
Project Blackbox, Sun's scheme to right-size and stealth-colorize the datacenter, has a design je ne sais quoi-ness about it that is almost, dare I say, Jonathan Ive-ian in conception. With a soupçon of longshoreman chic.
I mean really, don't you want to put one of these things on your garage roof or on the edge of the patio to counterbalance the pool house?
The gallery of imaginative Blackbox deployments caused some skeptics to raise issues of security and energy efficiency. Like, if Sun is all into data security and energy efficiency and like that, should you be painting this thing black and putting it outdoors where it can soak up rays and get hauled off on a flatbed in the middle of the night?
"They could also steal the Mona Lisa," Schwartz says, illustrating the point with a (stolen?) photo of the Mona Lisa, "So don't leave a million dollar datacenter in an unguarded parking lot."
And the black color was just for drama, he says. Apparently Henry Ford was wrong; you can standardize without restricting all choice. (But who knew that GM embraced Java that long ago?) So Project Blackbox could evolve into Project Fruitbox.
Rich Green has predicted that all of Java SE and all of Java ME will opensourced by the end of Q1 07. Dates for JavaOne: May 8-11, 2007. So it'll all be done by then. And that'll be a very interesting conference if it isn't.
Posted by Mike Swaine at 04:29 PM Permalink
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October 21, 2006
You've got my vote
The election is coming up, and I hope you're all informed voters. I refer, of course, to the Java Community Process election.
In fact, you can be more than an informed voter; you can, if you're a member, be a nominee. Everybody should nominate herself or himself, because a wide slate of candidates guarantees the best outcome possible. I hope you know you can count on my vote.
And I also hope all the votes count. I'm sure that the right technology will guarantee that. Then, informed by this voting experience, we can approach the immense challenge of putting the planning of the JavaOne 2007 conference up to a vote.
And after that, if we can just get Princeton prof Robert Vanderbei to do a few of his color, 3D, time-lapse animated graphic maps of the outcome, we'll see a picture of democracy in action.
Posted by Mike Swaine at 03:42 PM Permalink
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October 14, 2006
Blogging basements, boiling, and Beans
The Death of Yesterday's Datacenter is the title of Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's latest blog entry, wherein he sentences datacenters to the basement and challenges a basic assumption or two.
Bruce Tate's Beyond Java challenged some assumptions, raised a few hackles, and opened some eyes. That book is not new, but Joel Spolsky's review of it is. Joel manages to boil down the objections to Java in that book to just one: type declarations. Less contentiously, over on another of the six zillion Sun blogs, Sun NetBeans Evangelist Roman Strobl interviews Jaroslav Tulach, who explains where NetBeans came from.
Posted by Mike Swaine at 05:26 PM Permalink
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October 08, 2006
The Law of the Opposite
If you're a CEO of a major corporation, you may have more to blog about than your Mom's latest tatoo. Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz demonstrates this in his blog, where a recent posting includes these nuggets:
Sun's systems are so energy efficient that PG&E offers rebates for Sun's systems in California, and
'Whoever said 'tape is dead' has never spoken to a customer that produces a terabyte of data every couple of minutes.
In The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Al Ries and Jack Trout call it 'the law of the opposite.' You define yourself by defining the market leader, hanging the albatross of its greatest vulnerability around its neck, and saying, in effect, 'You know you don't like that. Well, we're the alternative to that.' When Listerine was the leading mouthwash, Scope used the phrase 'medicine breath' to tag its competitor and present itself as the one alternative to 'medicine breath' mouthwash. But sometimes the competition isn't a company or product, but a technology. And so we see Sun's software honcho Rich Green talking about the unnecessary complexity of service oriented architectures (SOA). And the press release from Mulesource is singing a similar-sounding tune: 'Typically, when you turn to a proprietary vendor for integration, they try to push a complex SOA / ESB / WS-* stack at you that costs big money and is tremendously complex...' Service oriented architectures: the Dennis Hastert of enterprise development?
Posted by Mike Swaine at 03:54 PM Permalink
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