Podcasting the inside of Sun Microsystems, for those on the outside. I/O Podcast

Friday is my last day as an employee of Sun Microsystems.

That's not an easy thing to say. It only really starts to hit home when you email friends and colleagues throughout the Sun community and let them know.

My email said that there was "a touch of sadness" about the move. I lied. It's actually a very sad moment, but one that I felt I had to do.

I think that the technology industry, and indeed the whole space around the Internet is hotting up. People are finally getting to grips with the fact that the pace of development on the Net never slowed down after the bubble, and there are some compelling uses of the Internet. I want to be a part of the second phase.

As Jonathan Schwartz said, "the Dot Com Bubble Was Just A Proof Of Concept." I want to be a part of the productization of the Internet.

So, I'm finally a full-time consultant, entrepreneur, and author.

Watch my personal blog for announcements over the next few months. I have some exciting projects I'm just about to embark on.

If you want to say hi, please don't be shy, email me at richard.giles@gmail.com.

Jonathan Schwartz is on the Gillmor Gang from November 25. You can get it as a stream, MP3 or AAC file, or subscribe to the RSS and never miss it as a Podcast. It's a great listen because it sums up his recent entries on his blog.

It sounds like he had a whale of a time!

After an overview of the week's IT news, Jonathan updates us on the progress on open-source Solaris and the future of that product. Then The Gang digs into many of the issues surrounding new architectures: What's happening with utility computing on-demand processing? What about composite applications and the shift to services? How do these changes affect the role of the CIO? And what have we learned about the business models associated with the commoditization of computing?

The great news is that we'll be releasing the internal shows from Schwartz and McNealy in MP3 format. Effectively Podcasting our internal conversations. It's about time. Instead of tying the listener to a desktop for an audio stream, we now get to carry the shows on our MP3 players.

There is a little bit of talk about some "amazing" statistics that Secunia is releasing on its web site. Apparently we can now see how secure, or un-secure, an OS is by the number of advisories that are released. This seems like a great way to raise some press about a company. Simply publish some statistics that disprove popular perception and watch the profile of your company rise.

Everyone knows how reliable statistics are, given how easy they are to manipulate. For instance, the article in question, Mac OS X security myth exposed, suggests "Windows is more secure than you think, and Mac OS X is worse than you ever imagined" all based on the number of advisories for Windows XP, 46, and OS X, 36.

However, before you go out an replace your PowerBook, consider this slant on the figures. Microsoft's list of products in its Advisories section totals 154, and Apple's product list totals 11. If I had time I'd go in and count all the Microsoft advisories to compare them to Apple's grand total of 54, but the list is just too long. Being a bit more realistic, a Windows XP system, with Direct X 9, Media Player 9, Internet Explorer 6, Office 2003 and Outlook 2003 had 133 advisories. Mac OS X with Quick Time, iTunes, Safari and OpenOffice had 46. I could suggest from these figures, given that a user doesn't just use an OS but also the applications that sit on top, that Microsoft's products are several orders of magnitude less secure than Apple's. 289% more un-secure based on advisories.

I won't suggest that though. I'll just suggest that you should always be careful when relying on statistics.

We use Sun Ray desktops throughout Sun, eating our own dog food. We've done so for some time because of the amazing benefits. Hot Desking is certainly one of the tangible benefits that we see in the office, but obviously centralised system management is another.

A huge difference that is amazingly noticeable when you replace 30 desktop workstations with Sun Rays in a open plan office is the reduction in noise. You might think it's a trivial difference, but you'd be amazed at the reduction in noise if you turn all your PCs off in your office.

Eating our own dog food is one thing, but it's fabulous when a local company implements a Sun solution and is then happy to talk to people about it. That's what happened recently when a Perth based construction company, BGC was interviewed for an article in Computerworld, Switch to thin clients boosts builder's productivity.

I've known about BGC's use of the technology for a couple of years, and have visited them twice. They are very proactive when it comes to using new technology to reduce the complexity of their network. So they've even made a few tweaks to the Sun Ray environment they run.

The fabulous thing about BGC's use of the technology is that they run some remote offices on the environment as well. In Australia, with a very dispersed population, that type of story is really quite important.

Hot on the heels of Cory Doctorow's DRM Speech, several technology heavy weights, including Sun, are announcing an alliance called the Personal Technology Freedom Coalition.

More information at CNET, Tech heavies support challenge to copyright law, and the Register, Microsoft, Apple snub consumer freedom coalition (is it alright for a blogger to link to Orlowski these days?).

If you're not sure what all the fuss is about then it's well worth reading Cory's speech at his craphound.com site, or you can download Kottke's mp3 version at kottke.org.

This Coalition should make for some interesting press over the next few months, and hopefully they rattle enough cages to make a difference to everyones freedom.

Coles Myer, one of Australia's biggest retailers, is testing RFID to see how it will help its supply chain. Sun, Intel, Accenture and EAN are all assisting in the trial. UPDATE: Coles Myer kicks off RFID trial.

"The trial, which started in late May, uses RFID tags to track the movement of roll-cages in the supply chain from a Coles Myer distribution centre to a Coles supermarket."

In an example that is often cited by Sun Australia's CTO, it's important that organisations consider RFID today or they could substantially limit their use of it in the future without major changes of expenses. If Coles Myer didn't consider the correct roll-cages when they were buying a new batch, it could have left them without the ability to use RFID. This is explained in another article, RFID ready: Sun. "But if a product had a lot of metal around it -- such as in the metal roll cages often used for stock in UK and Australian warehouses -- RFID readers could have difficulty picking up the tag’s signal through the gaps in the metal, Clarke said."

Congratulations to the SpaceShipOne Team for making the first non-governmental flight to enter space piloted by the first civilian astronaut. What a great day for mankind and science.

Details of the flight as they happened at Space.com. More info at How Things Work and Scaled Composites.

Nicholas Negroponte has been a role model of mine for about 10 years. I'd read his articles in Wired, and bought his Being Digital book while at University. These days he's not as plorific. So it's great when an article pops up with him in it, and it's interesting to compare what he sees coming with what Sun is currently doing.

For me there is two key takeaways from the article in Business Week, Q&A With MIT's Nicholas Negroponte. Peer-to-peer and R&D.

Negroponte says that "Peer-to-peer is key". He's right, it's everywhere, and the more we network the more we'll see it explode. That's what makes JXTA so interesting, and why it's even more interesting that we've had it around for years when Bill Joy launched the Project. By the way, for those people that don't see Sun in open source, we made JXTA open source under the Apache Software License.

For those going to the JavaONE event later this month you can go to a few presentations and birds of a feather sessions about it. Just do a search for JXTA at the JavaONE Conference site. If you're not, then it'll be worth keeping an eye on John Clingan or GonzoMoFo blogs.

The second main point from Negroponte is summed up when he says that the key "is the question of where do new ideas come from. Historically, four places: government labs, big corporations, startup companies, and research universities. Government labs are shrinking (in the U.S., at least). Big companies are looking closer term, and even the most technological companies spend less than 1% of sales on research. Startups have suffered the burst bubble."

In most cases I'm sure he's correct, but when it comes to Sun we go to great lengths to continue significant R&D. In Jim Jubak's article, Checking Out Five Winners for Winner-Take-All Market he says that R&D is key, and he explains Sun's position. "But for a real dedication to R&D in tough times, look at Sun Microsystems. Sun's revenue plunged from $18.3 billion in 2001 to $11.4 billion in 2003. But R&D spending as a percentage of revenue rose from 11.5% in 2001 to 14.4% in 2002 to 15.8% in 2003". Not a great quote revenue wise, but with $7 billion in the bank it shows who's going to be the innovator for years to come.