Day 4, tooth fairy and Moores Law
Weekend came and went, not bad at all. The number of invites for playdates, meals and such make me think that we should do this more often! I have eaten better in the last 4 days than have for a while now. If she sees this, I am in trouble.
The little one did lose one more tooth though, and the tooth fairy had to visit. On her previous visits, the fairy has brought little trinkets like bead bracelets, fake pearl necklaces etc. This time, the tooth fairy, being of a rather hirsute persuasion, left behind 4 quarters. Got some quizzical looks in the morning, but that seems to have passed.
Am missing a very important staff kick off meeting for our Q3 and Q4 going on in Santa Clara right now. We - actually they - are discussing some new initiatives that we are planning on launching very soon - Mobile Banking, Ultra Thin Traders desktop and a Low Latency workshop are on the books.
Mobile banking introduces your mobile phone as a new channel for you to do banking - check accounts, move money around, pay bills (while riding the train!) etc. Banks are keen on launching this capability this CY, some already have albeit using a rather arcane approach. Amir from my team and Carl - who heads up our Banking segment - are slated to present the Sun architecture for Mobile Banking at the Mobey Forum in Amsterdam end of this month. If you are around, make sure you stop by and say hello - Amir Halfon and Carl Morath (firstname.lastname@sun.com).
The Ultra Thin Traders Desktop is a response to strong demand from our large Capital Markets customers to reduce the carbon footprint of their trading floors, where each trader runs 3-4 high powered PCs today. As most of these come to the end of their lease lives, the CIOs are looking at alternative technologies to brand themselves green, yes, but also to reap fringe benefits like moving the number crunching to datacenters, and moving these datacenters away from the expensive locales where traders typically sit. The Sunray device is ideal for this situation, as one of the largest UK based bank's Investment Management division recently found out.
The Low Latency work that we are doing I have written about before. The Workshop is a productization of the work that we have done before, and gives us the ability to launch this work outside of New York city. We are targetting London, Frankfurt, Paris, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo and Mumbai with this workshop.
Oh - I am working on a presentation that might be of interest to you. It is intended to talk about Moore's Law, the end of single threaded performance, the systems design challenges that this presents and what we are doing to address this, the OS design challenges and what we are doing in Solaris, the application architect's dilemma and the work going on in our software tools division, new languages like Fortress and innovative concepts such as Transactional Memory. I'll post it on mediacast.sun.com and blog a link in a couple weeks.
Time to go get the girls from school. There is a mommy-child yoga class I have been invited to this evening, followed by dinner... could definitely get used to this!
