Reactions to story from InfoWorld

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  Overhea(r)d - Statistically indistinguishable from perfect

  http://blog.labnotes.org/2008/08/07/overheard-statistically-...
  117 days ago in Labnotes · Authority: 52

  Bringing you the best in corporate speak. A collection of the best non-offensive, non-committal, non-admittance, non-informative quotes that pass through my feed reader. The binary software is pretested and avoids the fragmentation that can happen when only a source product is provided, Hofer said. In delivering a binary offering, Sun is following a trend toward delivering more finished solutions, he said. … when asked “so tell me, how do you really feel about open source?” Though we’re proud of our operational performance in operating Amazon S3 for almost 2.5 years, we know that any downtime is unacceptable and we won’t be satisfied until performance is statistically indistinguishable from perfect. You can never be too statistically indistinguishable from slandered-bodied or financially-solvent. There have been inaccurate reports published this week regarding layoffs at BitTorrent, Inc. We would like to clarify that BitTorrent remains focused on generating the most value for our partners and customers to drive long-term success. While layoffs are always a difficult course of action, we have reduced our staff to better align our resources around our core content delivery infrastructure business. Contrary to published reports, we reduced less than 20% of our team and those impacted were distributed across our organization, rather than focused on a single department. A simple yes/no would suffice.
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  Modular Computers and the Electronic Wallet

  http://www.skunk-works.ca/wordpress/?p=124
  148 days ago in Swampy'- Weblog · Authority: 1

  A couple of posts back I focussed on the new modular cell-phones by ModuMobile with the core that could be inserted into various jackets. I mentioned the idea that we might soon carry our computers around with us and simply plug them into whichever chassis for peripherals was at hand. After I wrote that, I realized we are almost there now thanks to USB and flash memory. Being a hard-core nerd, I spend a lot of time at various computers and I use thumb-drives or memory sticks to maintain a consistent environment, thanks to the magic of portable applications. All your basic programs are available in portable form and can be downloaded from portableapps.com for windoze users. This doesn’t quite qualify as modular computing, but it is getting close, especially because they have the mac operating system in portable form. Various flavours of linux are also available that will run on USB devices. The main drawback to running the operating system on a stick is the speed. This is because USB is not really fast, and at present the results of any operation have to be passed to the real OS via USB. So, we aren’t quite there yet, but we’re getting closer. Back in the days when JAVA was being developed by Sun Microsystems, the original vision was that JAVA would be a universal language for applications that would run on any platform and, essentially, make propietary operating systems redundant. In fact, one of the heads of Sun said that once JAVA took off, people would realize that windows was nothing but a ‘collection of poorly debugged device drivers‘. Microsoft went to war and won, so the full promise of JAVA was never fulfilled. High-speed networks have made it possible for web-based applications to almost replace the OS as well. Now that the fight over web-standards is pretty much over and Web2.0 is coming to fruition, things are getting very interesting. I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of an ‘electronic wallet’, by that I mean integrating our financial stuff with our cell-phones. This is actually being developed, and I can see a lot of advantages to it. One obvious one is security. In order for this to work, they have to ensure that no data is stored in the phone. That way, losing a phone wouldn’t expose you to identity theft the way loss of a credit card does now. Doing financial stuff via cell-phone would also get around the double swiping and wire-tapping ways in which our debit transactions are often compromised. In fact, one of the main places people have been installing these compromised readers is in bank machines that people use to pay bills and withdraw cash. That would all be uneccesary if you could just load cash into you cell via the network. No exposure to phony stripe readers, and no possibility of making counterfeit cards. Sounds like a win to me. Related articles by Zemanta VirtualBox Allows Real-Time Open-Source OS Heresy Sun open sources doohickeys Sun moves on Java for HP smartphone

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