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Tuesday, May 14, 2002
No, I'm not a leo. I'm a vole. 
| | Business is anal-perfective. It's incapable of admitting that its products aren't perfect even though we all know that. Marketing just naturally assumes we want to see idealized images, and we have learned not to trust those images. But slickness on the Web feels out of place. |
Like a poker game with no smoke, no drink, no chips and no cards
| | In the press room at the O'Reilly thing with the Gillmor brothers, Jon Udell and Gordon Cook (3 Titania, 2 ThinkPads), talking about memory. "My life is a bad FIFO buffer." Wondering why PCs need SSIDs for DHCP and Macs don't. Jon laughs when he discovers the version number of his "old firmware" is newer than his "new firmware." |
To Infinite Loop, and beyond...
| | So Steve's up on stage now. Planning two hours, perhaps three. |
| | Sitting behind Avie Tevanian, just met him. Nice guy. Very enthused about UNIX. |
| | "Stream of innovation..." iMac, eMac, new TiBook, DVI and other connectors, Quartz Extreme (hardware based), Rendezvous (wireless IP-based discovery with zero config), MPEG-4, iChat... |
| | "Apple is now the largest UNIX supplier in the world." |
| | New product, first pure server: Xserve. "When you think about enterprise and apple, you usually think of this." Round of laughs. |
| | Very low flash, kind of a humble approach: "For every one thing we know, there are ten we don't." |
| | The box has a dual G4s, fast L2&3 cache, an ASIC Gigabit Ethernet and FireWire sys controller, Big 266 MHz DDR SdRAM Dual Gigabit ports, quad ATA drives, on a 533MB/s bus, buncha other stuff I can't keep up with. "Fastest architecture we've ever built." (He's been describing the maximum configuration.) |
| | In a rack, 84 processors, umpty terrabytes.. |
| | Interesting how hard it is to make a rack mounted box look anything other than purely utilitarian. Except for the fact that this is Apple and Steve, this show so far is little different than countless other announcements I've seen by Sun, IBM, Tandem... "Storage flexibility..." The meta-message: Apple means business. |
| | Remote management. It monitors drive status, pre-fail, temp, fans, power supply, network link... Does it use SNMP? |
| | Comparing with Dell, IBM, Sun. Apple's is $3,999. The others go up to $19,590 for the Sun. Only the Sun has L3 cache. Only the Apple has 266MHZ DDR SRAM. Others use SCSI, Apple's uses ATA. 4 bays on the Apple, less on the others. (What is he not saying, I wonder...). Others are using Linux or Solaris. No additional OS cost (same with Apple, also UNIX-based). $3295 for 25 users if running Windows on the IBM and Dell. In other words, lining up in the UNIX camp, knocking Windows hard. |
| | Truthfully Sun's scale is much broader than anything Apple is going to offer. And, if they are smart, they'll take the pushbutton simplicity that they bought in the Cobalt Raq and expand it to the rest of their line. |
| | We just purchased a V100. The V100 comes in three standard configurations ranging from $995 to $2295. And they are ATA-based, just like Steve is hyping on his Mac. The RAQ XTR is probably a better comparison to the what Apple is hyping and it tops out at $3599. |
| | Phil Shiller is up. Talking OS X server. |
| | So, time out. Why am I writing this? Because I can, Silly. I'm a reporter, taking public notes. |
| | Phil: Protected memory, preëemptive multitasking... support for Windows (using Samba, SMB/CIFS), Linux, UNIX, net through FTP, etc.... Web services... Apache, QT streaming, SMTPTP, POP, IMAP, SSSL, PHP, WebDAV, MySQL, CGI, Java, caching, BSD networking servicdes, IP filtering firewall... DHCP, DNS and LSP server... LDAP, SSH, Net-SNMP, MIB II (to plug into existing SNMP management systems). |
| | Okay, it's starting to look like Apple is going after a hunk of the BSD hosting business, or the BSD corner of the UNIX hosting business. "You need to be able to plug into existing management infrastructure. We're humble here." Unlimited clients. |
| | Looks to me like these are priced almost as loss leaders to flow into enterprises, legitimizing Apple clients outward from the data center. |
| | This is a lateral upgrade for BSD shops, methinks. |
| | Want to make this a Windows client server? One button. SSL? Another button. Nice graphical management tool for administering Apache. The server monitor does for aministration what iTunes does for MP3 management (my line, not theirs). Pretty. |
| | Apple, it now appears to me, is walking the Earth, picking up and putting to use all kinds of freely available innerstructure. They seem to be careful not to position themselves against other UNIXes. Or anything in particular, other than the high costs of Windows. I think they expect this stuff to be added, like a new crop, to existing server farms. |
| | The new crops will be dedicated to new apps. Not just file, print, Net, Web and mail, but media streaming, computational clusters, database, big UNIX apps, workgroup management. |
| | Showing the NBA's Sybase database, running on OS X Server and some of these boxes. (Shaq is a big iPod user, Phil sez.) |
| | Comparing genetic sequences against known genetic code. A java client running BLAST, an Apple-Stanford-Genentech collaboration. "Real cluster-based computing." |
| | [Later...] A number of people wrote in to offer background on this one. Here's a reply that's short and makes the point: |
| | The BLAST program the Phil demoed was TurboBLAST from TurboGenomics. TurboGenomics recently integrated the freely available AG BLAST algorithm into their commercial TurboBLAST product. This was the product running on stage and in the piano bar. |
| | Showing existing server-driven apps, served by Xserve, on an Apple (but could be on any) client. |
| | Now showing over 100, 200, 300, 400, 500 clients getting "DSL quality" QuickTime video streams. CPU load on the monitor hangs around 50% at max. His summary: "An amazing UNIX platform." |
| | Tim Cook, service and support: "We are entering this really, really humbly..." Big word today: humble. |
| | "Server support is really hard..." |
| | What do customers want? Surprise: not support, but reliability. "We have very robust QA processes." |
| | Bulletin from deep in the Reality Distortion Field: "In mixed environments, Mac is better." Integrated HW and SW is the pitch. |
| | Customers want really expert technical support, he says. Brings this up because there really seems to be a paucity of it. I think that's because, generally speaking, real experts don't like talking to idiots on the phone. |
| | Yeah, not that many users, especially hi-level ones, are idiots. But just the threat of it is aversive enough. |
| | Number one customer service compaint: finger-pointing rather than problem-solving. |
| | This all leads up to three new support offerings. "Anticipating an enormous attach rate to the servers that we sell." What's being attached, of course, is more than a service. It's a cost. That's why the base units are so (relatively) cheap. |
| | It's yada time, so I'm off writing this up for LJ... |
| | Now Tim's talking about the channel, including education, which Apple <humility off> pioneered. |
| | Mike Rocha is up now. He's Senior VP, Platform Tech, at Oracle. The Number 1 hit on Oracle's Web site from UNIX customers has been for Mac support, he says. "Oracle is about high availability computing through low-cost clustering." (Translation: expensive software, cheap hardware. Interesting how everybody wants the allied technology they don't make to be cheap, no? With the possible exception of Windows, of course. Apple wants competing server Windows OSes to be expensive.) |
| | "Companies want to roll out their app infrastructure across their entire environment." Yada, sir! |
| | Steve's back up. Intoduceds Russ Daniels from Hewlett Packard, VP & CTO, Software Business. Talking OpenView. He's stage shy. "HP has been in the news a bit, it turns out," he says. Wants to acknowledge the values of the HP Way "going forward." Yada, cont'd. "Manage in a seamless fashion..." |
| | Nice: "Our management console runs on this server with no modificatoin at all." Coordination lacking: nothing about this on the HP Openview site. |
| | Bobby Harris from Clear Channel, the commercial radio jihad. (Disclaimer: on the whole, I don't like Clear Channel. Look it up.) Seems like a nice guy, though. Says they're big Mac users. Surprises me. He just a funny line about how it's good that the boxes come with lots of lock-down, or they'd walk. |
| | Guy Kraines, VPk Corp Info Tech, Genentech. Bought a thousand iMacs. Love the engineering and performance on this thing. "Not a desktop box with rack mount ears... this is a data center box.... everything down to cable management flexibility." G4 is "a heckuva processor." "Clusters of these things distribute very well across the rack... can't say massively parallel... yet." Did a lot of testing. Won't give numbers, but: "More than a measurable improvement... a meaningful one." |
| | Steve's back up, with "one more thing": Xserve Raid. |
| | Alex Grossman, director of server and storage at Apple. Steve just opened up another part of the demo rack. 14 drive bays in one horizontal enclosure. 1.68 "terrorbytes" of storage per rack set. Dual 2Gb Fibre Channel... Redundant drives, power, cooling... Independent ATA controllers. RAID processor, 128 MB of processor cache. |
| | Now this sucker is looking like Mr. Moon, quietly eclipsing Mr. Sun. |
| | Redundant load-sharing power supplies, redundant drive cache, high throughput and fault tolerance. |
| | Here by "the end of the year." |
| | Q&A... benchmarks? They're running them. Hope to have numbers to share by the time the product is available." Steve: "We want to get it exactly right." Maybe I missed when they'll be available. |
| | More positioning as a UNIX company. "People are calling us who never used to want to talk to us.... We're in a lot of Fortune 500 accounts..." Calls a past server exploration as "a dream when Apple was in a coma." |
| | It's over. Now we go to the piano bar. |
| | Talked to Steve on the way. Asked him what other server farm crops this would likely run alongside. "Everything," he said. "Linux, BSD, Sun..." |
| | Bottom line: Apple bring sex to the UNIX server biz. Hey, it could use some |
| | Gotta go. I'll copy edit this later... |
| | [Later... had hell posting. I think I'm getting blogdotted.] |
Bigger question: what was in it for Celine?
| | Look at you. Look at yourself. Look at what you've BECOME. Your job is writing code to BREAK PEOPLE'S COMPUTERS if they dare to put a CELINE DION CD into their disk drive. Is this what you always wanted? Is this what you went to school for? Is this what we've all -- all of us, every other hacker and programmer and geek and computer person -- is this what we've all helped you to do? |
Using your head
| | Now this is deeply cool. So to speak. |
| | I sit down in the john off the lobby here at Apple, open the laptop, and find that...Shit! I'm on the Net, no less absolutely than I am also on the plumbing. |
| | Let's hope the wifi coverage in the meeting room is as good as it is here. |
Far in
| | In it I suggest something the need for a bigger lexicon to cover the stuff that supports infrastructure, starting with innerstructure. |
Next stop, Infinite Loop
| | I'm on my way to a big Apple whindig/announcmet thing this morning. After that, the O'Reilly thing. Should be a fun day. |
Shoot low when they're ridin' Shetlands, dude.
| | Armed and Dangerous is Eric Raymond's new blog. He says it's experimental at this point. Whatever, it's way cool to have him aboard. |
Giving identity the second degree
| | A requirement equal in importance to, and inseparable from, getting the technology right will be to get the underlying business model right. What business model? Well, for us to be able to use our e-wallets with the same level of functionality as our leather ones have today in real transactions where such weighty things as reputations, legal rights, or money are at stake — we'll need a comprehensive service infrastructure to support that, plus someone to operate the infrastructure, ideally for profit. |
| | He suggests a new category of service provider, the IDSP: an intermediary one degree away from both customer and vendor. |
| | While he locates his scenarios in the mid-distant future, I think the first killer app will be a personal ID-based way of charging a tiny sum for nearly all incoming email. That would kill spam, which is our #1 problem right now. Why? Because it makes ordinary citizens want their lawmakers to regulate the Net. I'm at the point where I barely notice a subject line with the phrase "teenage cocksuckers" before I delete it along with the several dozen other spams that washed in with it. Chances are you don't either. But I know some good, sweet people who do, and want the guv'mint to do something about it. |
| | We should first. What Tom's talking about is one good approach. |
A gathering of the copyrighteous
| | Declan is circulating a '"celebration" of the DMCA on May 16 in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington. Hosted by Jack Valenti, Hilary Rosen and chiefs of various publishing, film and other organizations in the business of advocating the maximal leverage of intellectual property law. The "invited guests" include ... what is that, the Judiciary Committee? Biden, Hatch, Helms, Leahy, Coble, Berman, Conyers, Dingle, Hyde, Frank, Markey, Sensenbrenner and Tauzin. Plus Ambassadors from 33 countries, none, oddly, in downtown Europe. |
| | Not you, me, or any artists, writers, film makers and other first sources of "content." |
Inspamming!
| | I'm at the house of a friend whose ISP is Earthlink. Since I maintain an Earthlink account for when I'm on the road, I can use EL's SMTP server here, which is nice. It won't let me use my own. |
| | Anyway, since I don't use my EL mail address, I usually don't bother to check it. But just for the hell of it, I decided to go ahead a couple of minutes ago. |
| | 1154 emails are coming in, all spam, of course. Amazing. |
Bonus ride
| | Well, I got here. Drove over an earthquake on the way, too. When a 5.2 shook the South Bay at 10pm, I was on the long elevated ramp from 101 to 85 North in South San Jose. I just thought the old Subaru's handling sucked (which it does, and yes, I still drive the damn thing), or that a wind had come up (which had been happening all day). I didn't know the real reason until the guy on the radio said there had just been a quake. In fact I had driven over what would become the epicenter near Gilroy about 20 minutes earlier. |
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