An audience of two

Wednesday October 04, 2006

CEC Closing Session
The closing keynote speech was delivered by Jonathan Schwartz as you'd expect. He's a good, charismatic speaker with a good sense of humour and as with McNealy in previous years he really makes you feel good about working here.

Not surprisingly one of the first questions he faced concerned Executive Compensation. Not surprisingly he sidestepped it somewhat, saying that the SEC figures are distorted by the fact that the stock options have to be expensed at around double what they are currently valued at. And that may well be true, but 2.9 million stock options is a pretty big number. It's also 2.9 million more than just about anyone else I know got. So later on there was a follow up asking when the great unwashed were going to get options again, and the answer wasn't encouraging. The new accounting rules make it too expensive, so in the event that we get anything it's more likely to be in the form of cash rather than options. At least cash doesn't expire, go underwater or take 5 years to vest.

So that's it for 2006. They're promising to do it again next year - where and when is of course TBD, but I'll be gobsmacked if it's not at the Moscone again. Even Kevin is upbeat, which is amazing. It looks like it's going to be a good year.

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Rise of the x86 Hypervisors
I was caught in a dilemma; Brian Cantrill was presenting on DTrace at the same time and I really wanted to attend that. I'll just have to check out the recording. I made the right decision as Tony Kay's talk on virtualization was excellent. I had been planning to give Xen a try (and I may still do) but since VMware seems to be way ahead of the curve and is free. The down side was the overhead; I think he mentioned 15%, and given that my laptop is such a crock I may find applications start running backwards.

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