Oracle announced that it’s putting OpenStack into Solaris, which is good fun. James Niccolai asked for my thoughts on the topic for his story. I hadn’t been briefed, so it was just speculation, but here’s the full text of what I sent over:
Solaris was always - and no doubt still is - technically advanced. For example, the zfs filesystem, dtrace, and zones were always tasty looking for Linux folks.
Sun Grid, 2006
They ran it at network.com:
While the Sun Grid has been an interesting alternative for large companies who might want to offload some of their workloads–such as the Monte Carlo analysis used to assess risk in investment portfolios, which doesn’t have any account information in it and is therefore not a big risk for a financial institution to let out on the other side of its firewalls–the Sun Grid is not supposed to be the utility that they use, but rather the utility that is the prototype for the ones that Sun expects its partners to build.
Jaspersoft acquired for $185m by TIBCO
Enterprise software vendor TIBCO has acquired Jaspersoft, an open source business intelligence company, for approximately $185 million.
One of the older charting kit companies goes for pretty cheap to an established BI (and queue/middleware) company.
Jaspersoft acquired for $185m by TIBCO
In the early years MS-DOS versions up to version 5 sold for a relatively high price, of the order of US$1,000, but the executable Terminate-and-Stay-Resident (TSR) database engine file could be distributed with applications without payment of any licence fee.
The good ol’ days: Btrieve, Wikipedia
The IT growth is from new shit, IDC says
According to IDC, the 5 percent IT growth it sees for 2014 is comprised of two elements: Stagnant legacy infrastructure growth (0.7 percent) and a high third-platform infrastructure growth (15 percent). Just to bring the point home, IDC asserts that a full 29 percent of 2014 IT spending and 89 percent of all IT growth spending will be in the third platform; of the latter, a full 50 percent represents cannibalization of traditional markets.
The vast majority of people do not have, nor will they ever have a personal computer. They haven’t been exposed to Windows or Office, or anything like that, and in their lives it’s unlikely that they will.
Stephen Elop, Microsoft’s new executive vice president of Devices, in the post announcing the completion of the deal to acquire Nokia. This is not your father’s Microsoft. (via parislemon)
Seriously though… if anybody but major datamining companies are going to get remotely enthusiastic about this IoT business, two things need to happen:
The Internet, things, and you « Outguessing the machine (via iamdanw)
The incentive for businesses to keep an “internet of things you bought from us” is overwhelming. What’s in it for them to make it open?
LAN-of-Things, then.
(via fadingcity)
“LAN of things.” That’s a-LoT better!
Under Development- new podcast on software development
I have a new podcast up that’s on the ongoing topic of software development, big and small, tools and practices, news and theory, old and new. I’m co-hosting it with Bill Higgins. I’ve talked with Bill Higgins for many years, and occasionally we’ve done a podcast episode together. He was in town a few weeks back, and I thought we should start recording our conversations rather than have them disappear into the ether.
Anything you want will happen, but sometimes it’s hard for people to see that when they’re in the middle of it. It looks like it’s incredibly complicated. Well, it’s not complicated at all. In fact, it’s so uncomplicated it’s amazing. All it is about is the work. Finally, if you do the work people will notice and you will get what you want. That’s it. It’s as simple as that.
On advertising work, but applies to anything where you create (rather than manage an organization, which is it’s own creating if done right). Also: this is sort of what coders mean when they obsesses about shipping.
Nice overview of SolidFire
A good overview of what the software-heavy enterprise storage company does, including this assessment on market segment targeting:
SolidFire is very honest about not being built for the mid-market, as it feels that most of the middle of the market is headed toward cloud providers anyhow. Some may consider this a weakness, but I consider it a great strength. It has allowed SolidFire to focus on the pain points of organizations with large storage and storage performance needs, to do so with great scale, and to do so in a way that greatly reduces operational complexity and all the mental friction that usually accompanies that scale.