Hal Stern's thoughts on the economy, software, services, technology, and snowmen. Hal Stern: The Morning Snowman

No, I'm not trying to find the most statistically improbably phrases for blog titles (although it may turn into a form of web phrase-squatting for Google search placement, remember, you read it here first).

The planet is Neptune, also known as Sun's 10G Ethernet network interface, described in the latest Innovating@Sun podcast by Distinguished Engineers Erik Nordmark, Shimon Muller, and Ashley Saulsbury. It's quite a slick piece of engineering, ensuring that higher level operating system abstractions (like virtual interfaces) have hardware support, and conversely reducing the processor performance tax typically paid for a high-speed network interface.

Crossbow is the weapon, and it's the OpenSolaris project that creates virtual interfaces and virtual networking stacks, allows you to do flow management through those stacks, and is cognizant of the hardware support provided by Neptune.

Ariel Hendel has a great blog entry drawing a parallel (literally) between the Neptune and Crossbow network virtualization and a very deep set of Russian nesting dolls. Ariel makes a number of astute observations about parallel and serial data transfers, and how some of our historical thinking about what is serialized and what runs in parallel data transfer lanes has evolved with I/O and memory interface standards.

The bottom line is that efficient, scalable networking helps reduce the overhead of building distributed applications. Face it: every application today is distributed, unless you're off on a laptop in some airport without network access, in which case you wish you had distributed applications. Everything that's interesting is networked, and when you start to aggregate input, output, and data management streams the 8 fallacies of distributed computing become critical scaling rate-limiting factors. The combination of Neptune and Crossbow don't eliminate physical realities like transport cost or latency, however, their impacts are reduced through network stack processing efficiencies. Demands for, and benefits from, this combination are statistically likely.

Disclaimer: I really like our Sun branding. Simple thematic elements of curves and greater-than signs (rotated carets), and a reasonable color palette make it easy to produce brand-compliant graphics that actually convey information.

Nobody in brand marketing, however, expects bad brand behavior, especially from Sun employees at the Analyst Summit. Which is why I felt compelled to take one of the carets off of the breakout room signs (apologies if anyone got lost as a result) so that I'd have a prop while we were recording a podcast. Got a few chuckles from our production team (laughing at me, not with me) and of course I was able to joke that it clearly indicated where the taping output was going: redirected to me from my guest, Michael Keller of Stanford University.

Neal Stephenson had it right: in the beginning, there was the command line. But if I continue to deface our corporate signage, it will be me that's the deprecated shell, even if I do make Solaris-themed humor with my visual aids.

Baseball has been a forerunner of technology for decades: night games played under high-intensity lights, televised games bringing the American national pastime into American living rooms, and in July 2000, mlb.com delivering pitch by pitch animated network casting of live games, along with a treasure trove of statistics, video, images, and most recently, a public fan blogging facility.

Major League Baseball Advanced Media is the image of scalability, with about 2 billion visitors a season, over 2,400 games from April to October, and a fan base that is willing to stay up until 3 AM on a Tuesday night if the Twins are playing and that fan happens to be in the Middle East. The content volume generated per day, the level of interactivity with the site, the statistics and the game delivery in a variety of real-time or compressed-time formats, crossed with the fact that blogs and fantasy leagues make it all writeable, and you have a Web 2.0 franchise player.

Justin Shaffer, VP of Architecture at MLBAM and I went 9 innings on how to avoid chin music from the big boss (and the fans) when your technology platform throws wild pitches and how mlb.com consistently delivers the high cheese to a growing variety of devices. If you want the full story modulo the inappropriately used baseball slang, check out our latest Innovating@Sun podcast.

Marc Hamilton and I put the spin on High Performance Computing in the latest wave of our Innovating@Sun podcast program.

HPC normally conjures up images of big FORTRAN applications and ray tracing, look for radar shadows or casting light shadows to make computer animation more pleasing to our visual radar. But we're now seeing a class of HPC applications that shift the usual time-space tradeoffs, putting enough data into memory to allow near real-time analysis in areas like transaction fraud detection and logistics optimization.

Spent part of Tuesday night tooling through the "Innovation Dinner" at Sun's Analyst Summit with a microphone, talking to employees and analysts about their perceptions of the rather long day. Bill Vass, president of SunFed, got us onto a sidetrack enumerating programming languages (not all of which support enumeration) that start with each letter of the alphabet.

A is for Algol, APL, and ADA.

B brings back BASIC; C is self-explanatory.

Eiffel, Prolog and yacc made guest appearances, with minor discussion of whether yacc is a language or just the name of a tool (and if it's just a tool, what do you call the syntax for specifying the syntax of a language?)

After parsing the alphabet, we found ourselves lacking languages that begin with G, N or Q. Vass decided that nroff didn't count, because it's a tool rather than a language. First time all day we were at a loss for words or tokens.