Well

Fairfax County School Board Votes on School Start and Dismissal Times

*Sigh*, and the saga continues...

Fairfax County School Board Votes on School Start and Dismissal Times

The Fairfax County School Board has voted to confirm the existing school start time structure for Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS). Generally, under this existing structure, high schools open first, then middle and elementary schools.

[FCPS News Releases]

Sun & IBM: Speculation

I found this interesting blog post from Ben Rockwood’s site (http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=1024) about the possible IBM/Sun buyout.


Sun & IBM: Speculation
20 Mar '09 - 21:31 by benr

The UNIX world is ablaze with speculation about the news that IBM wants to acquire Sun. Rumors of acquisition have been floating around for a long time, but the fact that institutional investors help almost double JAVA shares means we should take this one very seriously.

To be frank, I'm not sure how to feel about it. I'll try and play both sides therefore.

On one hand, IBM's hardware business has a great many advantages over Sun's. Pairing the hardware lines of the two companies, especially if it potentially meant bringing Solaris to POWER, could be a very big win. One of the things I miss about Sun is the big and beefy midrange systems of yesteryear... running Solaris on an IBM 595 would be amazing. However, IBM is a company that knows how to manage multiple independent product lines, such as it has with OS/400 and the z/OS lines running along with the Windows and AIX lines. They may simply slot SPARC as another parallel line and not bother replacing AIX with Solaris.

IBM certainly would be happy to not just get its hands on Sun's in-house engineering but also on the variety of acquisitions its made, such as MySQL, Lustre, etc. Obviously Java is the great prize and probly more interesting to IBM than the hardware. As for middleware, I'd think they'd gut the stack, taking gems such as Directory Server and Glassfish, then tossing other bits aside.

On the other hand, the corporate cultures couldn't be more different. Sun's internal management has systemic problems that no RIF can seem to shake loose but I don't know the management structure at IBM and it may get worse not better. Would IBM continue to embrace the liberal try-and-buy model Sun is using or honor all its various communities? Given so many diverse efforts there are a lot of people bound to get crunched as the two giants collide.

Sun and IBM have simply competed too long for there not to be pain. NetBeans vs Eclipse. Solaris vs AIX. SPARC vs POWER. There is a very long list of competing technologies and just because we (as Sun enthusiasts) prefer one technology over another doesn't mean IBM will agree on all counts.

Besides... from Sun purple to IBM blue? Ick.

Somewhat naturally, I'm not happy with the proposition, but as I alluded to, I can't rule it out entirely. On one extreme I see Sun ending up like SGI, on a long slow death march... but frankly, Sun has way too much going for it, if they really had to get super lean and mean they would be a stronger player than ever, so thats out. On the other extreme is Sun being acquired and being raped in the way that Cray was by (ironically) SGI.... IBM takes everything good and useful and then discards the corpse. But, again, Sun has too much of value in too many areas, I don't see that happening either.

I think the most interesting potential outcome is that of Sun becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of IBM. So Sun stays Sun but under the wings of IBM. That is not such a bad future, especially because it wouldn't necessarily lead to the technology conflicts... IBM could play the game from both sides of the table. Whats more true is that Sun is a valuable brand... the Sun brand plus the Java business alone are worth more than they are offering. If they were to re-brand everything IBM it would really be a huge mistake. Sun could be the hip and edgy side of IBM.

The single most concerning aspect for me would be OpenSolaris's status as open source. Our board members have continuously shrugged off authority and placed our fate into Sun's trusting hands... but this raises the question, what if Sun wasn't in charge anymore? Many of the original leaders in the OpenSolaris effort were interested not just in including the community in Solaris, but also ensuring their own access to Solaris regardless of what Sun did in the future.

So... we'll see. Please add your own thoughts so we can build up a time-capsule of opinions while we're all in the dark.

Russian Olympiada

Good luck to all the students from Thomas Jefferson, around the Northern Virginia area, and around the United States at the Russian Olympiada tomorrow morning! Hopefully everyone does well, but at least you are going (unlike me)! At the very least you get a cool-looking T-shirt with text that normal people can’t read :)

Good luck!

Sun's Cloud (4 of 4)

This entry has been cross-posted from Jonathan Schwartz's Sun blog.

Sun's Cloud (4 of 4) - In the last three updates to this blog, I've tried to set out a clear direction of where Sun's headed. I've talked about our three basic priorities:

1. Technology Adoption
2. Commercial Innovation
3. Efficiently Connecting Adoption and Commercial Opportunity.

I'm hoping you've got a clear picture surrounding the first of these two priorities - how and where we drive software adoption, and focus our commercial efforts.

So now I'd like to talk about the linkages - while also addressing one of our biggest strategic challenges, our scale.

Selling Scale
First, why is scale a challenge for Sun? To be clear, I'm not talking about purchasing scale. As I've said before, we use innovation to drive product profitability, not simply bulk purchasing leverage. The scale to which I'm referring is selling and marketing scale. With Sun's current products, we could be selling to twice the number of customers we currently serve - our products appeal to an audience far greater than our customer base. But we're limited by our size - our sales and partner force has a tenth the resources of our biggest peers.

This is a particularly tough problem to solve in the midst of an economic downturn. Growing customers while reducing employees is an obvious challenge.

But it's also a huge opportunity. We have fewer than 100,000 customers worldwide. Using just one example, there are more than 10,000,000 MySQL users globally - reaching an additional 1% of them could more than double our customer base. The question is obviously how - we know we're relevant to those users, but we and our partners can't very well put sales reps on airplanes to visit all 10,000,000.

To answer that question, I'd like to examine what may seem like a tangential topic... the search business.

Discovering Intent

Now, why is the search business so valuable? Because it's an exceptionally efficient means of harvesting intentionality - if a consumer is searching for "flights to Cairo," the odds are good she's in the market for a trip to Egypt. That intent represents a ton of value for the airlines, hotel chains and car rental companies that serve travelers to Egypt. Whoever first recognizes that intent can broker a relationship between the traveler and those businesses, and charge a healthy toll for the privilege (that's the heart of on-line advertising). A discount airfare to Cairo, presented alongside the results of a "flights to Cairo" search, has a far higher likelihood of generating a ticket purchase than an unqualified billboard or ad in a newspaper. It's easier to find needles in haystacks when the haystacks are sorted by needle count.

Now I want you to think about the model I've described in these last few entries - Sun's business starts with exceptionally high volume free software adoption, literally millions of assets each day. What does that have to do with search?

Well, what is a customer telling us when they download software? Depending upon what they're downloading, they're telling us about what they value. If you're downloading MySQL or ZFS, you're more than likely storing data. If you're downloading OpenOffice.org, you're likely to create, save and maybe print documents. If you download VirtualBox, our virtualization software, you're telling us you work with multiple operating systems. An enormous stream of this kind of data funnels into Sun every day - signaling intent from customers spanning every corner of the world's technology market. That's the foundation of our analytical marketing activities.

Individuals and organizations opt-in to tell Sun, by what they download, what they're intending to do - which gives Sun a unique vantage point surrounding what comes next. If your company is downloading Lustre, the leading parallel file system for supercomputing, the odds are good you're on your way to building a supercomputing facility. Sun uniquely optimizes our solutions around Lustre, and we target those offers to an obviously interested user community. This is one reason we've been growing in the supercomputing market. We use software innovation to drive preference for Lustre - the majority of top supercomputing sites now use it. We target our product and service development to optimize for facilities using Lustre. And we target our selling and marketing activities around users that identify themselves to us - by downloading Lustre, or whitepapers and content related to it.

But as I've said, the majority of free software users aren't going to be building million dollar supercomputers, nor will they be issuing million dollar software purchase orders. And therein lies a new opportunity - one that helps us address our scaling challenges, as well.

Introducing Sun's Cloud
That opportunity is for Sun's Cloud - which we just announced today - to deliver commercial network services to the entire free software community.

Let's start with what we announced today.

This morning, Dave Douglas, the SVP of our Cloud Computing business, announced we're building the Sun Cloud, atop open source platforms - from ZFS and Crossbow, to MySQL and Glassfish. With more than 4,000 developers hard at work on these enabling elements, and a twenty year history of network scale software innovation, we're very comfortable with our technology lead. By building on open source, we're also able to radically reduce our costs by avoiding proprietary storage and networking products.

Second, we announced the API's and file formats for Sun's Cloud will all be open, delivered under a Creative Commons License. That means developers can freely stitch our and their cloud services into mass market products, without fear of lock-in or litigation from the emerging proprietary cloud vendors.

Third, unlike our peers, we also announced our cloud will be available for deployment behind corporate firewalls - that we'll commercialize our public cloud by instantiating it in private datacenters for those customers who can't, due to regulation, security or business constraints, use a public cloud. We recognize that workloads subject to fiduciary duty or regulatory scrutiny won't move to public clouds - if you can't move to the cloud, we'll move the cloud to you.

The Developing Cloud
How will developers use the cloud? Let me give you a very basic example - inside Sun, we're just now rolling out a version of OpenOffice extended for the cloud. If you take a look at the File menu in this picture, you'll see menu items that don't exist in your version -

but will exist in Sun's distribution. "Save to Cloud," and "Open From Cloud..." will enable OpenOffice users to use our public cloud to store and retrieve documents from the network, rather than their PC. We're in beta deployment inside Sun as we speak, and with around 3,000,000 new users joining the OpenOffice community every week, the opportunity to deliver this as a public service, to nearly 200,000,000 users, adn their employers, is really exciting.

The same applies to, say, VirtualBox - our desktop virtualization product, used by millions of users across the world. VB users will see a new feature later this year, offering an upload service to those wishing to archive or run multiple OS/application stacks - in Sun's Cloud. Those users have already told us they run multiple OS's - now that we know their intent, delivering a cloud to add value is a simple step forward. The same will apply to Glassfish and NetBeans, whose adoption helps us discover and recruit application developers - who might have a similar interest in running and/or storing apps in the cloud.

So in addition to offering the basic infrastructure services developers have come to expect (storage, compute, bandwidth), we'll be bringing tens of millions of free software users a library of cloud services and design patterns - designed to enhance the value they derive from the underlying software, while encouraging community development around open clouds. And all this will be based on what users have already told us they're interested in.

The Network is the Computer
To me, this is the embodiment of Sun's vision statement, the Network is the Computer. The breadth and quality of Sun's open source software is well known, and has created a user community that numbers in the hundreds of millions across the globe. The evolution of Sun's cloud and cloud services, from remote storage to remote execution, will allow us to grow our market, and the value we deliver to customers - even in, and perhaps amplified by the economic downturn. Clouds are just as interesting to students and startups as they are to Fortune 500 customers. If you're interested in Sun's Cloud, just head over to sun.com/cloud.

The network is the computer has always been one of the most powerful statements describing the future of the technology we build. For the first time, we expect to translate that mission statement to our business model, investing in the free software community to grow our market, and leveraging the network to grow the value we deliver - to a market, and partner community, far larger than Sun.

And in that connection between adoption and commercial opportunity, we see near limitless opportunity, measured only by the scale of adoption we can achieve in a world where bandwidth is as pervasive as electricity, and free software adoption continues to accelerate.

With that said, this brings to a close this discussion of who Sun is, and where we're headed. I hope it's been useful. We're a very simple business, we strive to do three basic things. To drive free software across the world, both because it's good for the planet and innovation, and it's good for our business. Second, to deliver the world's most compelling technologies to captivate developers and deployers, alike. And finally, to put those assets to work in creating opportunities in the cloud, for our customers, our partners and for Sun, as well.

Thank you for your time and attention, I'll see you next time.

[Jonathan Schwartz's Blog]

Windows Live Writer Plugins

I’m experimenting with using Windows Live Writer to update my website (based on Drupal – see below for my post on how to get WLR working with Drupal websites). For this post I’ve been evaluating several of the plugins that are available from the Microsoft website, mainly for usability. I’m less concerned with setup or configuration, since one that’s done, it’s done for good (assuming you keep documentation – I’m trying to do this by use of this website).

Here are the first few plugins that I’m going to be testing over the next few days:

Plugin

• Insert Amazon Details
• Requires an Amazon Affiliate ID
• Insert Files Setup
• Insert File Plugin
• Attach File Plugin

Two TJHSST Students Finish in Top Ten in Intel Science Talent Search

Two TJHSST Students Finish in Top Ten in Intel Science Talent Search -

Two students from Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJHSST) finished in the top ten in the country in the 2009 Intel Science Talent Search. TJHSST is a Fairfax County public school.

[FCPS News Releases]

416. Validation - BestofYouTube.com

416. Validation - BestofYouTube.com -  [Best of YouTube]

Sun's Network Innovations (3 of 4)

Cross-posted from Jonathan Schwartz's former blog. The original blog has since been taken down, so here is an archived version.

Sun's Network Innovations (3 of 4) - As I referenced in my prior entry, I'm reviewing Sun's three major strategic imperatives, and our progress going in to next fiscal year. Our strategic imperatives, in order, are:

1. Technology Adoption
2. Commercial Innovation
3. Efficiently Connecting 1. and 2.

This entry focuses on the second, Commercial Innovation, and reviews our core revenue products, services and strategies.

By now, you understand Sun's approach to growing the market - driving adoption of key technologies drives Sun's addressable market. Once you're using one of our fundamental technologies, Sun's innovations focused on those technologies are relevant to you. The beauty of free distribution is you don't have to pick customers, they pick you.

Three very valuable markets emerge from this adoption. I'll focus on the first two here, the products and services we sell.

The first market is obvious. Software isn't downloaded onto air.

Systems Innovations
There's always some system platform underneath software - sure, it might be a laptop in a dorm room*, but it's just as likely to be into a Fortune 500 company, attached to servers, storage and networking equipment. All told, this datacenter systems market is more than $150b annually.

And in this datacenter market we build exceptional systems - screaming fast entry level servers, all the way up to the most efficient mainframe class systems. We build super fast storage, from our new flash based platforms to eco-efficient tape and archive solutions. We also build the world's fastest networking switches, powering the planet's largest supercomputers. We cover the entire spectrum, and work with the smartest partners in the industry to serve customers across the globe. Although we focus on our own technologies, like Java, MySQL and Lustre, we also optimize for VMware, Microsoft's Windows and we're generally recognized to run Oracle better than anyone on the planet.

Now, you heard me call these our Systems products, not just hardware products. These systems are obviously more than just naked components, they're engineered with remote management and monitoring, component redundancy, integrated virtualization, and on board storage and networking. That's why our margins are higher than the industry's***. I'm very proud of our Systems team, they are the most talented platform engineers on earth, and they earn consistently stellar reviews.

But where's this first market headed? Here's where it's going to get interesting.

Datacenter Systems Convergence - Who Plays? Wins?
As I've said before, general purpose microprocessors and operating systems are now fast enough to eliminate the need for special purpose devices. That means you can build a router out of a server - notice you cannot build a server out of a router, try as hard as you like. The same applies to storage devices.

To demonstrate this point, we now build our entire line of storage systems from general purpose server parts, including Solaris and ZFS, our open source file system. This allows us to innovate in software, where others have to build custom silicon or add cost. We are planning a similar line of networking platforms, based around the silicon and software you can already find in our portfolio.

We believe both the storage and networking industry's proprietary approach, and their gross profit streams, are now open to those us with general purpose platforms. That's good news for customers, and for Sun.

At the heart of this convergence is Solaris - enabled by technologies such as ZFS (around which we're building our entire storage line), and Crossbow (around which you'll see us build some very compelling networking products). Technologists interested in ZFS and Crossbow can visit OpenSolaris.org, or request an OpenSolaris CD (click the CD image).

I've provided a picture here to make the point - these three industries (servers, storage and networking), are converging, driven by the raw performance of the underlying server operating system and microprocessor.

That means these adjacent markets are all open to Sun and the Solaris community. Leveraging inexpensive, general purpose components is one big advantage for us, but there are others - using a general purpose OS allows us to easily embrace specialized components (from flash memory to GPU's), or adapt to new storage or networking protocols entirely in software. The underlying OS and server are so fast, these extensions and enhancements are simple feature updates, and ones we can leverage across servers, and storage and networking.

This isn't to say the networking or storage companies don't have their own operating systems. They do, but in both instances, they're proprietary, have tiny volumes, and despite paying lip service to open standards and the Linux community, their core operating software is unavailable to developers, it's truly proprietary. Their niche OS's also lack cross industry support, which is why our Solaris OEM agreements with IBM, Dell, Intel, Fujitsu and HP are so important to our end customers - they know they'll never be locked in. Today's storage and networking vendors remind me of the server vendors in the late 1990's - with expensive software bolted to expensive hardware. Ultimately forced open by innovation.

At Sun, open source isn't for servers. Open source is for datacenters.


Where's the Money?
Let's also look at the financial backdrop to this convergence. For these networking and storage vendors, entering the server market means suffering profit degradation - the server industry is vastly more competitive than the storage and networking marketplace.

On the other hand, as Sun grows into the storage and networking markets, we're thrilled with higher profit margins. We're unique among platform vendors in being able to deliver Servers, Storage, Networking and Virtualization on our own terms, very well integrated and at our own prices. How will we differentiate against our peers?

Simple. Integration, innovation, and as a result of building atop open source and commodity components, we are the low cost supplier. They, on the other hand, will be forced into all kinds of contorted partnerships and complex reselling arrangements. They may ship the boxes, but they won't control the platform software - or profit streams.

How is our Systems business doing? The portions of this business sensitive to software adoption, primarily the low end of all these products, is doing quite well, growing double digits**. The weakness in our Systems business is really focused on the high end. This reflects really two things - the first is the deferrability of high end system purchases. Our high end business was up 20% a little over a year ago, it was down more than 20% in the December quarter of 2008 - across the industry, customers are holding off on big ticket purchases.

The second, and arguably more important headwind was a decision made back in the 1990's to cancel Solaris on Intel, in the belief it would protect Sun's SPARC hardware business. Conversely, that mistake destroyed a generation of Solaris developers, and accelerated the rise of alternatives to traditional SPARC hardware. And now you understand why we prioritize developers - they are the seeds from which great forests grow. If you don't water the roots, the trees wither.

But how do you make money giving software away to developers? Well, let's switch gears, and talk about Software and Services.

When Free is Too Expensive
One of my favorite customer stories relates to an American company that did nearly 30% of its yearly revenue on Christmas Day. They were a mobile phone company, whose handsets appeared under Christmas trees, opened en masse and provisioned on the internet within about a 48 hour period. When we won the bid to supply their datacenter, their CIO gave me the purchase order on the condition I gave him my home phone number. He said, "If I have any issues on Christmas, I want you on the phone making sure every resource available is solving the problem." I happily provided it (and then made sure I had my direct staff's home numbers). Christmas came and went, no problems at all.

A year later, he was issuing a purchase order to Sun for several of our software products. To have a little fun with him (and the Sun sales rep), I told him before he passed me the purchase order that the products were all open source, freely available for download.

He looked at me, then at his rep, and said "What? Then why am I paying you a million dollars?" I responded, "You can absolutely run it for free. You just can't call me on Christmas day, you'll be on your own." He gave me the PO. At the scale he was running, the cost of downtime dwarfed the cost of the license and support.

Numerically, most developers and technology users have more time than money. Most readers of this blog are happy to run unsupported software, and we are very happy to supply it. For a far smaller population, the price of downtime radically exceeds the price of a license or support - for some, the cost of downtime is measured in millions per minute. If you're tracking packages or fleets of aircraft, running an emergency response network or a trading floor, you almost always have more money than time. And that's our business model, we offer utterly exceptional service, support and enterprise technologies to those that have more money than time. It's a good business.

All in/all up, our Software business is among the fastest growing businesses at Sun. I've attached our latest financial summary at the end of this blog. We span network identity (built with the OpenDS community), application infrastructure (biult with Glassfish and OpenESB), data management (built with MySQL, ZFS and Lustre), embedded software (such as Java, and the emerging JavaFX), alongside our core operating system and virtualization software (Solaris, OpenSolaris and VirtualBox). These open source platforms generate, alongside the services attached to them, over a billion dollars a year, making Sun by far and away the world's largest open source software company. (For those that continue to ask if we make money with Java, the answer is yes, it's on a ramp to hit about $250m this year - one of our best businesses - and that's just Java on consumer devices, excluding servers).

Every day, these products are being adopted globally, driving university curriculum, corporate trials and design wins, influencing skills, even supporting Presidential campaigns. We know not every download yields revenue or users, but they do yield awareness and trials - a small, but intensely valuable portion of which yields revenue and profit. Our sales reps see the purchase orders at the point of value, not at the point of download. The revenue's recognized over the period of the Service contract - a business model the rest of the industry, at least for mass market products, will inevitably adopt. Fighting free and open software, like fighting free news or free search, is like fighting gravity - and btw, gravity gets a lot stronger during economic downturns.

Conclusion
And in a nutshell, that's how we monetize adoption - with targeted, high value innovations.

We deliver the world's most effective and efficient Systems portfolio, spanning x86 and SPARC servers, storage and networking. And the world's most appealing Software and Services products, spanning embedded software to high performance file systems.

We call all these products network innovations. I know that defies industry categorization, but that's what innovation's all about, defying categorization.

I've only touched on two of the three opportunities opened by mass adoption. And with that as a teaser, I invite you to return for the final blog entry, talking about what might be the most valuable of them all - a market enabled by the innovations described above, and set to transform the entire marketplace. Embodying the phrase, The Network is the Computer.

See you then.

-----------------------
* and before you dismiss those users, some of the world's biggest internet companies/datacenters were started on laptops in dorm rooms... a trend I expect to accelerate.

** Sun's x86 systems business, for example, grew over 11% last quarter, when both HP and IBM's comparable businesses shrank in double digits. For those wondering "how do you differentiate?", just ask our customers.

*** Compared to other industry standard server vendors.

[Jonathan Schwartz's Blog]

Two Mirrors

Not Enough Work

Install XP on an Acer Aspire 5520

Update 03/16/2009: Here is the link for all Acer drivers, not just specifically for the Acer Aspire

At this point in time, I do not have the webcam fully working. I installed all three drivers, but I think they're now conflicting with each other. I don't use it that much, so I haven't bothered to diagnose why it isn't working (Skype says that the camera is already in use by another application)

Warning: prepare for a mass load of reboots! Each driver will require at least one reboot. For all drivers listed below, do not use the "Found New Driver" prompt from Windows! Each driver can be installed through a zip file from Acer.

• Install XP
• Update to SP2
• Install 1. NVIDIA Chipset Driver
• Install 2. AMD CPU
• Install 3. NVIDIA VGA - make sure the path is short enough, or some files will fail
• Install 4. Realtek Audio driver (if desired)
• Install 5. Card reader driver
• Install 6. Modem driver
• Install 7. Touchpad driver: ALPS
• Install 8. Atheros wireless driver
• Install 9. Bison webcam driver or Chicony webcam driver or Suyin webcam driver
• Install 10. Webcam application (if desired)
• Update to SP3
• Use Microsoft Update (not Windows Update) to install any drivers you might have missed and/or update existing drivers

Button gaffe embarrasses Clinton

Here’s one great reason to learn Russian

Russian media have been poking fun at the US secretary of state over a translation error on a gift she presented to her Russian counterpart.

FCPS - News Releases

FCPS - News Releases

Thirty one Fairfax County public schools have earned the 2009 Governor's Award for Educational Excellence, and 45 Fairfax County public schools have also been recognized by the state Board of Education for 2009 Board of Education (BOE) Excellence Awards.

Correlation

XKCD #552