Not long ago I had a chance to visit the big data center at 365 Main Street in San Francisco. I was invited by friends to help them install the first servers for their startup, which is still in stealth mode. The data center was enormous, though my friends occupied only a small part of one rack not far from the Oakland Raiders and one floor up from Bebo, the social network bought not long ago by AOL. Bebo is a big hit in the UK and I found it odd that all those British profiles are hosted in San Francisco, eight time zones away.
We installed the servers — three little boxes and one big […]
So Oracle ends up owning Sun Microsystems. I couldn’t believe it at first, thinking somehow that it was all just a ploy to get IBM to pull out the Big Checkbook. And while the deal may have begun with that thought glowing in the mind of Jonathan Schwartz, it ends with the heart of Sun moving a few miles up 101 to where it will certainly die.
I’m not the biggest fan of Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Okay, I am not a fan at all. But I have to give the guy credit for keeping up company morale, because when I polled my Sun contacts recently on why they thought IBM might be interested in buying the company, each thought it was because of his or her division. What charming — if misguided — loyalty. These people still feel good about their company.
Last week Google revealed to the world its shipping container modular data centers that I was the first to write about almost four years ago.
This past weekend marked the 30th anniversary of the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island. If you are old enough you may remember where you were at that time and what it was like. I remember VERY well because I was on my way to the crippled plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Our President at the time, Jimmy Carter, was also a micro-manager and a former nuclear engineer: he wanted his own eyes and ears on the scene. Our little group eventually coalesced into the Presidental Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, led by Dartmouth College president John Kemeny, who was also the co-author of BASIC.
“Where are the tumbrils?” asks my friend Adam Smith.If, like me, you have no idea what is a tumbril, it is a type of horse cart used during the French Revolution to transport condemned prisoners to the guillotine for beheading.What Adam wonders is how we can get so deep into such a hellacious financial crisis without finding at least a few bad guys to behead?
