Happy Birthday Lynn!!!!!

Ha!   Happy Birthday Lynn!!

To 35 years & many many more.. YAHOO!!!

Oracle KILLS Virtual Iron

I cannot believe how fast this Oracle-Virtual Iron purchase has come around.   Maybe because Virtual Iron was so much smaller & maybe because Oracle did not purchase them because of their customers & partners.  Why the heck DID oracle purchase Virtual Iron?  Anyone that has Virtual Iron will NOT move to Oracle.. for sure.. with the horrible weird letters and complete lack of support, what a joke.  But not a funny one.

If you have Virtual Iron & need support for the next few months, Oracle says you can call their Virtual Iron desk at 800 223 1711.  Of course that number was not very easy to find & probably should have been listed on their stupid letters to customers & partners. 

Oracle is completely shutting down the Virtual Iron product without giving customers ANY sort of replacement.  You would think that when Virtual Iron agreed to this stupid buy out, they would have had certain terms & conditions set up… I guess they did not care either..   It looks like the numbers are just too small for Oracle to care about.  According to The Times, Virtual Iron only had $3.4 million in revenue last year after spending $17.7 million on sales, marketing, research, development & administrative costs.  

Oracle says that it will continue to provide general support for Virtual Iron Extended Enterprise Product through September 3, 2009 for version 4.4 and through January for version 4.5.  And it will offer lifetime support for all products.  But what a joke, this product is going to be dead very very soon.

Of course VMware is taking full advantage of this jalopy Oracle/Virtual Iron thing.. which they SHOULD.   VMware is offering 40% discount from list to current Virtual Iron customers.  

http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=56B66423-1A64-67EA-E4DD1CABA45A0EB3 

It is not officially out yet, but that is a good idea.

Crazy buy outs.

Cherry – Wifi

Hey did you hear about this..  I read about it in one of my favorite blog/RSS feed things TechCrunch..

So what this new company has is a technology where you install an application on your cell phone that instead of always using the carrier’s signal & charging for minutes, roaming minutes or whatever, it works off the Wifi or the GSM (whatever is the best fit… it automatically switches from one network to the other without you being aware)  Take out your SIM card & you can only call over the wireless network.   So if you are @ home or @ work you can use the Wifi & not be charged the 9283048023840328 minutes you have already been charged.  Really, something like this is super duper needed.    I am so darn sick of a crazy expensive cell phone bill.   The plans are all so expensive & they can be because we all use our cell phone so much.  I have been hearing a bunch about Cricket around here & I looked @ their website & they are a cell phone provider with decent rates but horrible cell phone coverage & tricky billing schemes.  Really this Cherry company has it all right.. an application to use the cell phone over WiFi.  Duh..  Here is the article from TechCrunch if want the true skinny..

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/05/cherry-the-mobile-operator-that-doesnt-care-whether-youre-on-wi-fi-or-not/

Bing

I know, I know.. SOOOO much hype out there on this “new” search engine.   But have you looked @ it yet?  What do you think?  Catchy saying with “Live Search is Evolving.  Tour Bing.”   Sounds true enough right?  Well what do you think?  I did not think I was going to be a fan but I like it so far.. enough to move it to my first search engine over Google.   I don’t do a lot of weird polls in here but I am going to do one now.. so if you don’t mind.. VOTE!!  Do you like Binger or not?

What I do NOT like about it is that there is not this super easy search/ToolBar @ the top of the screen that Google has.  Bing useses I think that Microsoft search engine tool bar but that definitly does not do the tricker for me..!  But if I go to the site on my own I like the search results that come up.  But I cannot get away from Google & that super easy tool bar @ the top of my Internet Explorer Yo.. Just cannot get away. 

A Cryptologist Cracks a Presidential Code

Check out this article from the Wall Street Journal… By Rachel Silverman..

For more than 200 years, buried deep within Thomas Jefferson’s correspondence and papers, there lay a mysterious cipher — a coded message that appears to have remained unsolved. Until now.

The cryptic message was sent to President Jefferson in December 1801 by his friend and frequent correspondent, Robert Patterson, a mathematics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. President Jefferson and Mr. Patterson were both officials at the American Philosophical Society — a group that promoted scholarly research in the sciences and humanities — and were enthusiasts of ciphers and other codes, regularly exchanging letters about them.

In this message, Mr. Patterson set out to show the president and primary author of the Declaration of Independence what he deemed to be a nearly flawless cipher. “The art of secret writing,” or writing in cipher, has “engaged the attention both of the states-man & philosopher for many ages,” Mr. Patterson wrote. But, he added, most ciphers fall “far short of perfection.”

To Mr. Patterson’s view, a perfect code had four properties: It should be adaptable to all languages; it should be simple to learn and memorize; it should be easy to write and to read; and most important of all, “it should be absolutely inscrutable to all unacquainted with the particular key or secret for decyphering.”

Mr. Patterson then included in the letter an example of a message in his cipher, one that would be so difficult to decode that it would “defy the united ingenuity of the whole human race,” he wrote.

There is no evidence that Jefferson, or anyone else for that matter, ever solved the code. But Jefferson did believe the cipher was so inscrutable that he considered having the State Department use it, and passed it on to the ambassador to France, Robert Livingston.

The cipher finally met its match in Lawren Smithline, a 36-year-old mathematician. Dr. Smithline has a Ph.D. in mathematics and now works professionally with cryptology, or code-breaking, at the Center for Communications Research in Princeton, N.J., a division of the Institute for Defense Analyses.

A couple of years ago, Dr. Smithline’s neighbor, who was working on a Jefferson project at Princeton University, told Dr. Smithline of Mr. Patterson’s mysterious cipher.

Dr. Smithline, intrigued, decided to take a look. “A problem like this cipher can keep me up at night,” he says. After unlocking its hidden message in 2007, Dr. Smithline articulated his puzzle-solving techniques in a recent paper in the magazine American Scientist and also in a profile in Harvard Magazine, his alma mater’s alumni journal.

The code, Mr. Patterson made clear in his letter, was not a simple substitution cipher. That’s when you replace one letter of the alphabet with another. The problem with substitution ciphers is that they can be cracked by using what’s termed frequency analysis, or studying the number of times that a particular letter occurs in a message. For instance, the letter “e” is the most common letter in English, so if a code is sufficiently long, whatever letter appears most often is likely a substitute for “e.”

Because frequency analysis was already well known in the 19th century, cryptographers of the time turned to other techniques. One was called the nomenclator: a catalog of numbers, each standing for a word, syllable, phrase or letter. Mr. Jefferson’s correspondence shows that he used several code books of nomenclators. An issue with these tools, according to Mr. Patterson’s criteria, is that a nomenclator is too tough to memorize.

Jefferson even wrote about his own ingenious code, a model of which is at his home, Monticello, in Charlottesville, Va. Called the wheel cipher, the device consisted of cylindrical pieces, threaded onto an iron spindle, with letters inscribed on the edge of each wheel in a random order. Users could scramble and unscramble words simply by turning the wheels.

But Mr. Patterson had a few more tricks up his sleeve. He wrote the message text vertically, in columns from left to right, using no capital letters or spaces. The writing formed a grid, in this case of about 40 lines of some 60 letters each.

Then, Mr. Patterson broke the grid into sections of up to nine lines, numbering each line in the section from one to nine. In the next step, Mr. Patterson transcribed each numbered line to form a new grid, scrambling the order of the numbered lines within each section. Every section, however, repeated the same jumbled order of lines.

The trick to solving the puzzle, as Mr. Patterson explained in his letter, meant knowing the following: the number of lines in each section, the order in which those lines were transcribed and the number of random letters added to each line.

The key to the code consisted of a series of two-digit pairs. The first digit indicated the line number within a section, while the second was the number of letters added to the beginning of that row. For instance, if the key was 58, 71, 33, that meant that Mr. Patterson moved row five to the first line of a section and added eight random letters; then moved row seven to the second line and added one letter, and then moved row three to the third line and added three random letters. Mr. Patterson estimated that the potential combinations to solve the puzzle was “upwards of ninety millions of millions.”

After explaining this in his letter, Mr. Patterson wrote, “I presume the utter impossibility of decyphering will be readily acknowledged.”

Undaunted, Dr. Smithline decided to tackle the cipher by analyzing the probability of digraphs, or pairs of letters. Certain pairs of letters, such as “dx,” don’t exist in English, while some letters almost always appear next to a certain other letter, such as “u” after “q”.

To get a sense of language patterns of the era, Dr. Smithline studied the 80,000 letter-characters contained in Jefferson’s State of the Union addresses, and counted the frequency of occurrences of “aa,” “ab,” “ac,” through “zz.”

Dr. Smithline then made a series of educated guesses, such as the number of rows per section, which two rows belong next to each other, and the number of random letters inserted into a line.

To help vet his guesses, he turned to a tool not available during the 19th century: a computer algorithm. He used what’s called “dynamic programming,” which solves large problems by breaking puzzles down into smaller pieces and linking together the solutions.

The overall calculations necessary to solve the puzzle were fewer than 100,000, which Dr. Smithline says would be “tedious in the 19th century, but doable.”

After about a week of working on the puzzle, the numerical key to Mr. Patterson’s cipher emerged — 13, 34, 57, 65, 22, 78, 49. Using that digital key, he was able to unfurl the cipher’s text:

“In Congress, July Fourth, one thousand seven hundred and seventy six. A declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled. When in the course of human events…”

That, of course, is the beginning — with a few liberties taken — to the Declaration of Independence, written at least in part by Jefferson himself. “Patterson played this little joke on Thomas Jefferson,” says Dr. Smithline. “And nobody knew until now.”

Oracle Terminates Virtual Iron Reseller Partners..

Yeah well oh well.

Partners all received a letter from Oracle & a couple of Virtual Iron’s key sales and channel people have left Virtual Iron which are of course signs that Oracle’s main purpose of acquiring Virtual Iron is to absorb its technology into its Oracle VM server vitalization offering..  Man that was fast huh?

Virtual Iron’s dynamic resource and capability management technology adds the management capabilities which VM requires in order to compete with other server virtualization offerings such as VMware ESXi and vSphere 4, Citrix XenServer & Microsoft Hyper V.

Legacy Virtual Iron solution providers earlier this month received a letter from Oracle via Fedex saying that they have been “terminated” as a Virtual Iron partner but will be reconsidered for re-signing as an Oracle partner.  Yeah will thanks Oracle..

Oracle did not mention anything about transition plans or support for existing customers.  I guess they do not care about keeping Virtual Iron’s customer base & partners.  Virtual iron focuses on smaller customers & smaller customers are not Oracle’s focus.

Kind of fast huh.. Well then there you go..

Microsoft Windows 7 – Retail Offering

Microsoft Retail/Direct is offering half off the price of Windows 7 upgrade if purchased before the actual release date.    Major limitations of course.. is that it is limited to 25 machines per company between now & the official release date of Windows 7 (October 22nd). 

I don’t really know of anyone rushing to this offer because you can get the beta version now for free & if you want to be rolling this out to your company then I would think that you would already have the free license on your software assurance or with your EA agreement.  If you don’t have either of those & you have been waiting around for a system upgrade cause you heard a bunch of bad things about Vista & you don’t like it, then I would think that you would get the licensing & not want boxed products for all of your machines anyway.   

But none the less, this 50% off thing IS out there at http://store.microsoft.com/microsoft/Windows-Windows-7/category/102

Keep it real & all..

Why is VMware so expensive..???

Well this was my biggest beef with VMware. 

I felt like VMware just dominated the market & because they are the coolest & best technology they can charge whatever they want.   That scares me cause I like competition.  It is the free market & helps lower the prices yo! 

But now I believe I have joined the VMware band wagon.  VMware’s technology is WAAAAY better then anything else out there . Way better.  I will talk in simple terms because that is just the way that I talk/write, so excuse me if this is not the most technical explanation.    The fact that VMware is not built on the operating system is huge.   How many problems have your run into with your operating system? You really want that all tied in together? 

When Xen first came out it appeared to be the open source for doing vitalization on Linux.  However KVM (kernel based machine) emerged in 2007 and was quickly adopted in the mainline Linux kernel- something that Xen tried but failed to do.  The startup that developed KVM, Qumranet has been since acquired by Red Hat one of the original companies that invested in Xen.  Since the acquisition, Red Hat publicly said that its vitalization future is with KVM.  RedHat will support Xen in its current products but future products will be with KVM.  Because KVM is a part of the Linux kernel KVM is also gaining momentum in the Linux developer community making Xen’s future very unclear.  Currently there is no commercial grade server vertilization products based on KVM…

(Xen as you know includes solutions from Citrix, Sun, Oracle, Virtual Iron, RedHat, etc)

The way that VMware has such a crazy high density with the memory overcommit, direct driver model, high performace scheduler, DRS & resource pools.. so, so so cool.  That VMsphere is just amazing technology & the competitors are trying so hard to keep up.   I like what VMware says that they focus on virtualization technology.. that don’t try to be the expert in everything (agh.. Microsoft..?)  And I know that Oracle wants to push their Xen product & will hopefully come out with something better someday but they are not even close yet.  Nice try Oracle sales people saying you will not support VMware now.. you DO support VMware.. Duh.

Ok so the technology is cool but the price compared to everyone else is not higher.  The other competitors like to compare cost per server rather then cost per application.  In the virtual word, the cost per application is really what matters and that is what everyone knows anyway.    Cost per server is a very misleading concept in the virtual world because it does not account for how many virtual machines each vendor’s vitalization platform can support on each physical load.  Also when you compare costs, everyone is very very similar, but the main difference is that the other products are not even close in technology compared to VMware.   The other products do a little trickery of having a lower cost (free or low) of one part but for anything important (applications, backup, patch management, guest OS’s, support, etc) there is a large cost associated with it.  So leading on price competitors is not really a good idea.  

Live Migration is huge & it is hard to believe that people are using Microsoft Hyper V when it is not out yet & the dates keep on changing.  Even when it (Microsoft Server 2008 and Hyper V R2)  DOES come out, do you really want your network to be the “tester”? 

Yeah, yeah, I did in fact join the VMware band wagon.. But I am happy to.  It is a good product.  There are so many things that I love learning about it.   It is not just servers that you can be virtualized & part of this network but moving your network attached devices & core switches etc. is all very very cool, and has 32984320483240 benefits. 

Over & out for now..

Power Bill Increase

So what do you think about this increased Power Bill?

On Friday, the house approves the bill that addresses the Threat of Global Warming…. so what does this mean?

The reason for this GREEN bill is to encourage people to use less energy… so here are the results..

• Raise Electricity Rates 90% after adjusting for inflation
• Raise Residential Natural Gas prices by 55%
• Raise an average family’s annual energy bill by $1500 annually
• Raise gasoline prices by 74%

Again, the reason for this bill is because of Global Warming and to try to transform the way people deal with energy. 

So before this green tax increase, it was estimated that 70% of the IT budget was devoted just to keep the lights on.  Is that going to move to 100%? Holy moly!!  It is also said that the operational cost to maintain just 1 server per year WAS $4k.  ( Estimated monthly bills of $63/power cooling per month, $160 maintaince of switches & cables & $112 real estate & labor).  So if you have 100 servers this WAS a bill of operational costs of about $400k per year!!  Now if this increase affects corporations, 90% increase in electricity that would be about $600k in operational costs per year and that is being conservative.  Nuts, just nuts really. 

But I guess it will follow the mission of this bill.. figure out ways to use less energy.. spend less money on energy etc. 

There are ways with technology through vitalization of servers, storage & at least 75% of your physical servers, but not just that, there is a way to consolidate your power bill.  There are a bunch of 3rd companies out there that are buying power @ a decreased rate with all of their other corporates volume power.  Kind of like a corporate power contract.  If you have your companies power piggybacked off of that power contract you can take advantage of the large discount rate of the other companies.  You can save a bunch of money in power each month & year.  Only about 6 states allow for this to happen now, but this is changing.  I will post some more information about this later. I know you just cannot wait.

Kameron is still smiling despite the Friday Power Bill being passed.. but then again fortunately he does not need to know what is going on with crazy power & bills.  He can be a kid & that is just perfect.

Networking is STILL Growing…

The networking market is continuing to grow and grow and grow & it is excected to grow even more..

As budgets are decreased people are looking at putting an emphasis on IT solutions that solve business problems and provide a SOLID ROI, technologies such as wireless and IP videoconferencing also are poised for growth.

Network management, VoIP, unified data center devices and Gigabit Ethernet Switches are the technology set to provide the most growth this year.  Network management also topped the list, along with unified data center devices, Gigabit Ethernet switches & VoIP.

Lots of people that I talk to are interested in cutting travel costs and that is the number 1 reason for teleconferencing. 

ROI is key particularly for small customers.  Things like mobility and wireless seem to be most appealing to them.  The more they can get their staff out to the clients the better.

Who knows, but that is the latest!!!