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Tuesday May 13, 2008
Student Reviews Contest
Are you a student? Are you looking for the chance to win a little extra cash? If you are then you might want to check out the new Student Reviews Contest sponsored by Sun Microsystems. It's really a pretty easy contest to enter, simply:
For more information visit the Student Reviews website or contest web page. You can also find more information on the Student Views and Reviews blog. Hurry up, get your review in and good luck! Posted at 03:43PM May 13, 2008 by Kent Price in Sun | Comments[0]
Friday Feb 22, 2008
Context
There was a post today on Blogs.sun.com that sparked a lot of discussion inside the Sun Blogging community. This post and the ensuing discussion embodied what is great about blogging. It was a somewhat controversial post, not really bad, just controversial. It was a prime example of what can happen when something is taken out of context. In this case the context was the blog itself and the chosen writing style of the owner of the blog. The post seemed to be a little whiny and maybe even a little immature, but hey it wasn't the first blog that could have been described that way. For me, what was really interesting was the discussion that it generated. The subject of the first email was simply “Cringe”. This person said that the post made him “cringe” and he simply wondered if he was being “too sensitive or not”. This simple inquiry generated a diverse discussion that ranged from the appropriateness of the language used in the blog on a corporate blog site and censorship to the first amendment and the author's right to freedom of expression. There were opinions but it wasn't until later in the day that the author of the post in questions actually weighed in. He seemed genuinely surprised by the reaction that his blog generated and he wondered if anyone had even read his blog over the last four years that he had been writing. He finished by saying that his goal for his blog was to write about a somewhat normally dry topic “with as much silliness and humor as I can muster”. One of the responses opined that perhaps the blog in question was more like the “Colbert Report”. What I take out of this whole incident is that when viewed on it's own, this post could be viewed as possibly inflammatory but when viewed in the context of the entire blog site it could now be viewed as somewhat humorous. Context is important! It provides a point of reference within which to understand what is being observed. In this case it was just a blog, but the same could be said of just about anything. As a systems engineer my job is translate a customers requirements into a solution. Without context, a customer's comments or stated requirements can be misinterpreted and the result will be a proposed solution that neither meets the actual requirements nor solves the real problem. Context is indeed important! Sun is really a great place to work and one of the reasons is the people. We are a diverse group of individuals with different views, different opinions and one thing in common - We all want to do the right thing for the company and our customers. One thing that can help us do both is to remember that everything is not always as it seems and that context matters in everything under the sun. Posted at 08:20PM Feb 22, 2008 by Kent Price in Sun | Comments[0]
Sunday Feb 17, 2008
Virtually Your's
virtual virtualization It seems to me that one of the hottest trends in IT is virtualization. If you mention virtualization to someone it will bring to mind visions of servers running multiple operating systems on “virtual machines”. One of the sad things is that it's not just our customer's who think this way. A lot of folks at Sun seem to believe this way as well and I surmise that this is one of the reasons Sun has difficulty articulating a complete virtualization vision to our customers. This is the issue I will attempt to tackle in this blog. While “server virtualization” is without a doubt the most prevalent form of virtualization, I would like to point out that it is far from the only application of the word. As I see it, there are multiple types of virtualization, some of which include:
Server virtualization is using software and hardware to allow computing resources to be shared by different services (i.e. users, programs, etc...). Most computers are woefully under utilized. By virtually slicing these systems up into virtual machines you can increase the utilization of these system to near 100 percent. Storage virtualization is the ability to provide storage as a “service” without the consumer of that storage knowing the specifics of what kind of physical device the data is on and even the location of the physical device. Think about it, most people don't really care about these kinds of things. They just know that they need to be able to save their data and be able to retrieve it when they need it. Desktop or client virtualization is the ability for a person to access computing resources whenever and from wherever they need to. Could it be any simpler? Perhaps they have a desktop computer, or maybe they get to their applications on a thin client or a cell phone. Services virtualization, is a little bit fuzzier. This encompasses managed services, having someone else manage your systems for you, or maybe this is outsourcing. In addition it might include using an application service provider. My personal definition of software virtualization imagines some sort of layer that sits on top of a set of applications and abstracts them in such a way as to give a person the ability to access data from multiple applications or systems from a single view. I hesitated to bring up the topic of workplace virtualization, but it is something that we've doing for a number of years at Sun. We are made up of virtual teams and very few of the people that I work with work in the same office. In fact, some of these people don't even have an office to work from. These are just some of my thoughts on the topic of virtualization. Over the next several posts I'm going to look at each of these areas in more detail and maybe we can start to see that virtualization is much more that just slicing up a server into multiple virtual hosts. Posted at 02:35PM Feb 17, 2008 by Kent Price in Sun | Comments[0]
Friday Feb 08, 2008
Who Wants to Win $50,000
What to learn about Solaris and win some money at the same time? Well if you do, does Sun have a deal for you. From now until March 31, 2008 Sun is running a Solaris training sweepstakes where you can take some official Solaris on-line training and at the same time enter to win $50,000 US. First, visit the Official Sweepstakes Website and register with the Sun Learning Connection. After you've registered you can then take any or all of the following Solaris related courses:
For every course you complete you will receive an email with a sweepstakes code that you can use to enter the drawing for $50,000. That's five chances to win and all you have to do is learn and enter. Oh and if that wasn't enough you also get the opportunity to score instant-win prizes such as gift cards to Best Buy, Subway, and Starbucks. How cool is that? Good Luck and hurry time's a wasting! Posted at 02:06AM Feb 08, 2008 by Kent Price in Sun | Comments[0]
Sunday Feb 03, 2008
Three, Two, One, Go...
I have been contemplating starting this Blog for sometime, what do I write about? What do I want to communicate? These questions and more have been rattling around in my head as I've thought about what I should write. Who I am, what interests me and what you can expect from this Blog are imperative to answer before I begin. I am Kent Price and I'm a systems engineer at Sun Microsystems. All of my energies at work are spent with colleges and universities in the mid-west. What are my interests? They are too numerous to count, however; my greatest interest is technology! And what is Sun's forte? Technology and innovation! EURKEA, I now know the major topic of this blog. You can expect a few other professional odds and ends thrown in, but for the most part I'll be blogging about technology, Sun Microsystems and my work with our customers. I'll be writing about “Everything Under the Sun”. If possible, my goal is to write at least a couple of times a week, who knows I might even attain it sometimes. Lately, the hot topic of great interest to my customers is virtualization. So over the next few posts I'll be exploring exactly what virtualization is and what Sun is doing in this field. Until the next time, Cheers! Posted at 04:55PM Feb 03, 2008 by Kent Price in Sun | Comments[1] |
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