keeping simple

Author: yodaiken

  • Department of hell freezing over

    I have also learned something about my country. I run a global company, but I am a citizen of the U.S. I believe that a popular, thirty-year notion that the U.S. can evolve from being a technology and manufacturing leader to a service leader is just wrong. In the end, this philosophy transformed the financial…

  • Virtualization versus Physicalization

    Data on the overhead of virtualization is hard to come by. Rackable proposes an interesting alternative that they call physicalization. I wonder whether the CPU is the most important resource to multiplex and I remain totally puzzled by the motivation of Intel/AMD in this area.

  • Organizational man

    Irving Wladawsky-Berger started working at IBM in 1970 and retired in 2007 with what is, to me, the smartest corporate response to Linux/OpenSource as his capstone accomplishment. TG: Sun has committed to releasing all of its code as open source. Do you think IBM will do the same? IW-B: I don’t think so, because I…

  • The train to the terminal station

    Digital Equipment Corporation Silicon Graphics Corporation Sun Microsystems One might get the impression that the boards of directors of technology companies have as much ability to intervene to stop suicidal business strategies as the boards of directors of Bear Stearns did. But business is simple: you always have to look at the business model of…

  • The cell phone market in brief

    Although the payoff of a small niche may be less than that of a large, growing market, the competion may often also be less intense. The majority-fallacy concept states that appraisals of fast growing  segments overlook of minimize the likelihood that many competitors will be attracted. This explains why growth areas often stimulate destructive overcapacity…

  • Venture capital, short term, and India

    From Wladawsky-Berger’s blog entry on Carlota Perez’s analysis in 2005: She mentions three particular structural tensions that we need still to work out in order to move on: investments continue to be focused on short-term gain, not on long-term production and growth; the social system continues to foster an unstable environment in which the rich…

  • The ultimate snarky geeky Sun FAIL post

    Well, it seems our friends at Sun have decided that their Spicetm Enhanced brains are completely sufficient to create an entirely new – but far simpler, mind you – module system for the JDK.  Mark “I’m just a simple Guild Navigator” Reinhold has spent a number of blog posts doing the electronic equivalent of the…

  • Suns tracking SGI

    IBM dropped its offer to acquire Sun for $7billion. Sun has now a series of projects for which it has large costs, but no clear method of making money. What did Sun gain from open sourcing Solaris, from giving away Java, from embracing Linux, and so on? Irving Wladawsky-Berger (whose blog is worth reading) or…

  • SGI assets to Rackable – the mighty have fallen

    SGI has filed for banruptcy and Rackable has bid $25M for the assets – which through the miracle of bankruptcy law can now be peeled off from the debts. SGI is partly one of the victims of the Itanium (or the “Itanic” as it was known to the cynical), but it certainly was not Intel’s…

  • Power Systems Reliability Challenges

    It is becoming more common for fire ants to build nests in pad mounted equipment. Their nesting materials can cause short circuits, the ants can eat away at conductor insulation, and they make equipment maintenance a challenge. from Power System Reliability, by Richard Brown, in the Electric Power Engineering Handbook The subdued poetry of engineering…