Meet Contrarian Minds -- an extraordinary series profiling the engineers, scientists and dreamers of Sun Microsystems. (It also happens to be authored by one of the most talented writers I know -- my pal Al Riske.)
Below, a look at who's been profiled.
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Jon Greaves Every System Tells a Story Although "personality mapping" is still in nascent form, Greaves says it has already proved effective with customers, including an international banking consortium. |
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James Baty The Online Build-Your-Own-Business Mall A systems architect looks at design patterns for a virtual economy powered by storvers, servage, chipvers, and other innovations that break our old mental models. |
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John Busch New Trajectories To research director John Busch, the key to creating breakaway products is not intuition but analytical explorations. |
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Jim Hughes The Security of Data at Rest Few people recognize a disruptive technology the first time they see it. One of the few is Jim Hughes. |
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Sara Gates Why do cars have brakes? Sara Gates offers a counter-intuitive answer and applies it to identity management. |
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Susan Landau Wiretapping, Piracy, and Policy A Distinguished Engineer, Landau has long focused on the interplay between security and public policy. |
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Bryan Cantrill No Bad Dogs The energetic engineer behind dynamic tracing has been named one of the top 35 innovators under the age of 35. |
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Marc Tremblay The Multicore Advantage Sun's Most Prolific Inventor Is Causing Problems for Competitors. |
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Jim Waldo One Miracle at a Time With the Neuromancer project, Waldo and his team are adding orders of magnitude to the scale of system design. |
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Dick Sillman Solving the Storage Problem With Project Honeycomb, Sillman and team deliver a radical, low-cost, high-availability storage solution. |
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Tim Bray The Loyal Opposition XML pioneer Tim Bray keeps a wary eye on complexity while he pursues new innovations. |
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Guy Steele The Soul of a New Programming Language The challenge for Steele and a small team of researchers in Burlington, Massachusetts, is this: Create a programming language better than Java. |
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Radia Perlman Disappearing Act This Sun engineer creates technologies at are virtually invisible; now she wants to make your data disappear. |
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Scott McNealy Shy, Unassuming, and Controversial "If your strategy isn't controversial," says Sun's CEO, "you have zero chance of making money." |
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Robert Drost Bye-Bye Bottlenecks One of the world's top innovators under the age of 35 speeds chip-to-chip communication 100-fold. |
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Kenny Gross Looking for Trouble How a physicist's invention paved the way to five-nines (99.999 percent) availability for a major European bank. |
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Rick Cattell Making and breaking the rules. "Good technology is only 10 percent of real-world success," Cattell says. But the Distinguished Engineer is discovering ways to give good technology better odds. |
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Sheueling Chang Making security solutions stronger, faster, and smaller. The beauty of elliptic curve cryptography is that it uses very small keys, which makes it perfect for billions of pocket-sized devices. |
| Jonathan Schwartz You have to be different to win. The Java Desktop System stirred debate within Sun and ran counter to what analysts said we should to do. Schwartz explains why we did it anyway. |
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Jon Bosak How a simple new standard, known as UBL, could take over the world. The driving force behind XML, Sun's Jon Bosak is clearly a pioneer, but he continues to focus on the practical rather than the far out. |
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Whitfield Diffie The secrets of strong security. Sun's chief security officer is a contrarian voice in a hard and thankless business, and yet there's still a twinkle in his eyes. Find out why. |
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David Yen What comes after throughput computing? The conventional wisdom of simply lashing together "dirt cheap" commodity boards and boxes -- sold by weight in Asia -- isn't going to work for long, says David Yen. And the reason isn't so much technical as economic. |
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James Gosling A fundamental break in the history of technology. As the principal creator of the Java programming language, Gosling set in motion one of the industry's most powerful contrarian currents -- though his creation first had to survive several near-death experiences. |
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John Gage A global perspective. Few are better qualified to chronicle Sun's evolution than the man Bill Joy credits with encapsulating the company's vision in a single, utterly contrarian statement. |
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Bill Walster The mother of all paradigm shifts. Sun's expert on "interval arithmetic" wants to replace the flawed floating-point math of today's computers -- and give Sun an astounding competitive advantage. |
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Hal Stern Turning innovation into customer value. As CTO of Sun's services business, Stern sees his job as putting innovation to work for customers -- not an battalion of high-priced consultants. |
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Jim Mitchell Leading the charge to create a peta-scale computer. The inventor of the Java Community Process is taking on a new challenge -- directing Sun's efforts to create a computer that can execute hundreds of thousands of software threads simultaneously. |
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Greg Papadopoulos Why Sun's chief techology officer is driving a strategy of radical simplification. Gray-haired but still boyish, Papadopoulos guides the company's $2-billion-a-year R&D portfolio with an eye toward reducing complexity. |