Posts by Richard C 12 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Oct 2011
This is really just another data point on the trend back to the mainframe days. The cloud is in so many ways a return to the old-school mainframe bureau; funky hardware is a completely reasonable part of the process.
While Facebook has made much of its disaggregated hardware, there's no particular reason why aggregated hardware is unsuitable for building a cloud. It's not as if you can just go and buy a Facebook specced server off the shelf, and even if you could, it's EXTREMELY unlikely that your requirements will match Facebook's (particularly if you're building a general-purpose IAAS cloud).
(historical points may be a little fuzzy here, but bear with me)
Linux started as a copy of an incumbent (Minix), and matured in its own direction. At this point it was really a glorified toy. Some people used Linux for real work, but it was relatively rare (I'm thinking of those few people who knew Linux 1.X). At this point, the Linux pitch was "Tickle my belly, I'm soft and cute".
During Linux 2.2, or thereabouts, Samba reached maturity, and the dotcom boom was in full swing thanks to Apache ("httpd", for the kids). There was a tremendous kerfuffle when Samba on Linux was benchmarked as faster than an NT4 file server; and Linuxcare sucked up a lot of money and people, and pushed out a lot of advertising. I think this is when Linux got very, very real. At this point, the Linux pitch was "I'm like you, but better".
Into Linux 3.x, we're almost into a post-Linux era. Linux has grown and matured to the point where it's really part of the IT furniture. Linux continues to get crazy new features (ceph!); but for now the Linux pitch is "I'm Linux".
OpenStack will need to forge its own path, and remain relevant to AWS, until the outcome is known. MS knows this, and demonstrates it with Azure. You can't be (and remain) a better AWS than AWS - the real game is to be the better cloud infrastructure.
I am reliably informed that one Fleet St hack/legend/etc. once placed a UKP 1000 claim (sans receipt) for "a camel", which was paid by accounts. At the time, the jargon for an expenses claim was something like "swindle sheet". Other claims by the same person apparently included "a yacht", "a tent", etc.
This isn't TPG's first foray into TV. Once upon a time TPG launched Boomerang TV ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPG_Telecom#TPG_Boomerang_TV ) which was spectacular mess.
Boomerang TV ended with (as one insider put it) "a death of a thousand cuts", as a vicious circle of insufficient bandwidth, poor quality content, and low take-up contrived to push TPG to pull the plug on the venture.
Whirlpool forums ( http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/619086 ) refer to another TPG IPTV push in 2006.
This is another attempt, in a long line of attempts, to get a viable TV service on TPG. Apparently David Teoh is a frustrated Rupert Murdoch ;-)
That clears it up nicely. Given the 10 minutes I spent configuring this system (of which 9 was spent finding the blade systems on the HP website - it seems to think I want a cheap inkjet printer); I'm not surprised that I left some major holes. I've withdrawn my original post, to prevent any confusion.
It just happens to be outside the box (literally). I'm all in favour of breaking down blade servers to commodity parts, but a comparison of the costs would be fairer if it was against a blade chassis. I guess that the NextIO kit would be cheaper, but the gap might be smaller.
HTML5 is just the bones around which JavaScript applications are built; and I think JavaScript is the real story here.
JavaScript's ubiquitous deployment (mobile, desktop, server) and standards base will allow it to suck in new features from other laguages over time. Witness Intel's River Trail project for an example of how this can happen ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/17/intel_parallel_javascript/ ), or perhaps E4X.
The outrageously broad deployment of JavaScript, and focus on performance, means that JavaScript (and HTML5) performance/behaviour is only going to get better over time.
I'm not suggesting that JavaScript is the /best/ language, but I do think it's going to be with us for a very long time into the future. Get used to it.
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