A visit to the Sun Labs open day(s)

My reason for being in Ca, is to visit the Sun Labs Open House. The day was opened by Bob Sproull, the Labs Director and Greg Papadopolous, Sun’s EVP for R&D and CTO. They both spoke about the goals and accountability of Sun Labs. They look to create new technologies, improve our current technologies or occasionally improve Sun. They are beginning to look at Sun Labs with a venturer’s view and no longer measure the output of white papers, books and conference speeches. Greg Popadopolous said, “these things are better done in Universities”. After the speeches I wandered over to the main building and …

Evangelising Opensource in Edinburgh

I was stood in for Simon Phipps at www2006 in Edinburgh, and paid Edinburgh a visit. I wrote up my notes on my sun/oracle blog. AS with other posts originally made there, I copied them to this blog in March 2016, but in this case, I have merged them into a single post.  I The conference was opened by John McConnel, Scotland’s first minister who spoke of a Scotland’s e-University, and was followed by Sir David Browne, (Chairman of Motorola) who told an interesting story about mobility and the network, from movable devices, via luggable laptops to today’s phones, although the fashion for Zoolander style tiny phones was probably on the wane by then. His story provoked the though that the critical technology for mobile computing was the development of the portable (and rechargable) battery. …

Food for Thought

I was invited to Martlesham to visit BT’s innovation Lab; there were some inspiring presentations and technologies on display which at the time of posting this article are a bit dated, since this is another post copied from the sun/oracle blog in March 2016, To see the original on Innovation see here, and on WiFI and Health see here. Other posts on the existential nature of networks, intelligent infrastructure, the analogue/digital interface, bio-feedback systems, and telematics, were posted here.  …

Open Source, friend or foe

The Register today, has an article, headlined “US in open source backlash” arguing that the US is a late, slow and distressed adopter of open source compared with Europe and Latin America. This prompted me to write up notes from a BT conference to which we had been invited. The notes were originally published on my sun/oracle blog, and I created this article on the blog as part of the exercise in unifying the blogs in March 2016. The original article looks at comments from MySQL & Google staff, and finishes with a review of Simon Phipps presentation to the meeting which I repeat here. …

Designing Data Centre automation solutions

Today was planned as a look at Sun’s system management solutions and the day was started by Sohrab Modi, the V/P for the group. We really have a problem with our branding, but we’re sticking with N1, managing maNy systems as 1. Sohrab’s presentation called “Simplify, Integrate, Automate”, hit two key points for me. The first is that its a solution, the second that there are two dimensions to virtualisation.  …