VMware declares energy-guzzling blockchains 'immoral' At VMware's 14th Radio conference in San Francisco, Calif., on Wednesday, CTO Ray O'Farrell presented two possible paths for corporate adaptation in the face of market changes: BlackBerry's exit from the mobile phone business and Adobe's transformation into a software-as-a-service firm. "Technology companies are not guaranteed …
"We've known for a long time that installing and patching our software is painful ..."
" ... but this is one of the first times we've really felt that pain ourselves. ...The challenge of upgrading every quarter at scale is immense."
That is very funny, except if you're a long standing on prem VMware customers.
The cloud although useful annoys me. Maybe as I have a massive fear of being made redundant because of it. But also, Directors who haven't got a clue believe in the bullshit consultants tell them. Believing that putting EVERYTHING in the cloud will be cheaper (it's not).
So SaaS, to be blunt, fucking annoys me. There needs to be two options. SaaS and pay once use forever copy like in the "old days". I can see SaaS being useful for moments when you want to use Adobe stuff just for a month then not use again, it's cheaper. But if you're a company and need to use it every year, you end up paying more for it because it's now a yearly cost instead of that one off cost. What about the times you're aware with shitty broadband or even no network access, you then can't use your SaaS.
Yes, I do fear of being in an industry where it looks like I'll eventually be made redundant and that could be a big part of the annoyance of Cloud but I still feel people are relying on it too much.
If there is a massive attack on the Internet. That's quite a lot of SaaS (not Students Award Agency for Scotland) that could be lost because of the downtime. How will the glossy magazines then photoshop their models with Adobe down.
"If there is a massive attack on the Internet. That's quite a lot of SaaS (not Students Award Agency for Scotland) that could be lost because of the downtime. How will the glossy magazines then photoshop their models with Adobe down."
I think the thinking is that if an attack that massive is on such that not just one but all clouds are inaccessible for lengthy periods, odds are passing fair World World III is on and there are other concerns.
"There needs to be two options."
NO, according to the vendor, there needs to be ONE option: the option that draws repeat business ("no business like repeat business"). Unless you're ready to go it alone in the world, the captive market dictates terms.
I believe the EU is trialling (and probably has partially working) block-chain systems for tracking provenance of food stuffs.The idea being that every jar of a processed food on a supermarket shelf should have every ingredient traceable back to its point of origin.
@Multivac, even Wikipedia notes (but doesn't make it very obvious) that the energy wastage is in the mining (Proof-of-Work) not the use of block-chains per se.
Errr, they already have , I do the believe the euphemism preferred is, 'thinking outside the box' or in this cas beyond cryptocurrency.
Where some lead, other's are sure to follow ;-)
"The list included: machine learning, the internet of things, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, edge computing, hardware acceleration, quantum computing, adaptive security, serverless, data analytics, blockchain and digital twin virtualized modelling."
FFS! Who isn't playing with these or pretending to? Ask anyone in the tech sector what they're up to and this list reads like a cribsheet for Buzzword-Bingo. Cripes, I reckon I must have said at least 3 of these in the last 3 months at some meeting or other!
SaaS... it's all about revenue streams. I posted this anonymously because my company does SaaS. We do have a handful of standalone customers but.... we are a continuous release cycle, with fixes, updates, features coming in several times per week. Code gets released when it gets done. Our standalone customers simply cannot keep up that pace. They, though, are generally customers who are satisfied with the app the way it is, and they accept a lot of its bugs in order to have control over their customers info and control access to their db. We get less revenue from those customers because they do their own everything. They are two different revenue models, but clearly there is an economic push in the world to trying to establish a revenue stream rather than a one time sale.
funny how these people decide for THE REST OF US what's "moral" and what isn't...
I think the value of bitcoin these days tracks the cost of producing more of them. That being said, if it costs less than the value of bitcoin, you make a profit by mining them. Simple economics.
Back in the 80's there was quite a bit going on with respect to "Co-generation", that is, using otherwise wasted heat from generating electricity for things that made sense, like creating hot (and chilled) water from the engine's jacket heat and exhaust heat. it works pretty well, and you get electricity and hot+chilled water for the cost of maintaining the machinery as it tends to pay for itself.
I suppose that peltier devices and other kinds of heat pumps could be used in various ways to do the same thing with the heat dissipated by a bank of CPUs mining out bitcoin. This would make ECONOMIC sense (which is ALL that matters when you are trying to make a profit).
"Morality" with respect to energy usage - that just *SICKENS* me! If I buy something, whether it's a computer, or electricity from the local utility, it's MINE, DAMMIT! Who _CARES_ how it's used? M.Y.O.B.!
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