Virtual workspaces

Sessions I haven’t mentioned so far included one on Immersive Education – a 3D virtual reality tool similar to Second Life with real time discussion rooms, and blended with audio, video and web pages. It had been created using Project Wonderland, an open source 3D engine written in java. Some good applications demonstrated, including a virtual workplace for Sun employees, as on any given day 50% of them can be working remotely, and this gives them a place to meet and interact with colleagues. Perhaps something for our collaboration project to look at?

Scott McNealy – co founder of Sun, formerly CEO and now Chairman, always gives a presentation at this conference – it’s always highly anticipated, and heavily attended. His web page describes him as a human quote machine, and over the years I’ve certainly heard him come up with a few! This year his theme was open source – and why software should be open sourced wherever possible. His 5 reasons to use open source were:

It lowers barriers to entry – ie it’s free!
Interoperability is increased
Research and development costs are lower – the community doing much of it
It’s more secure – how many java viruses have you heard of? There are no secrets, as everyone can see the code so there’s nothing to exploit
It lowers the barriers to exit – is it doesn’t work you haven’t spent a fortune on it.

Overall a good talk – he finishes with asking us to think of what other industries could be open sourced, and suggested that the drug development companies would be a good start!

I’m now home, still slightly jet lagged, but a good long walk round Monsal Dale and Millers Dale yesterday blew a lot of cobwebs away!

Free beer, or free puppy?

Sun have just bought mySQL, the open source web database company, and one of the VPs was taking part in one of the sessions. He was great – very interesting, and gave a lot of insights into the world of open source, particularly into the commercial aspects. Obviously because of the theme of the conference he talked a lot about the community aspects of open source development. In his words, “if you operate transparently your users will tell you if you screw up”. Scale fast and fail fast – if something’s not working, find out why and do something differently.

We also had a session on some of Sun’s products for storage and HPC. This was a much more technical session, and one which I won’t go into in too much detail – lots of talk about teraflops (a great word). Also mentioned was project Blackbox – this is a datacentre in a shipping container. I saw one last year at this conference, and wanted one! A shipping container full of racks. Three plugs on the outside – power, data and chilled water. A datacentre that you could put in a car park, or a warehouse. You might not want to have Sun plastered all over it if you were going to put it in a car park though.

A panel session on open source in admin computing produced a good quote about open source not being free and needing a lot of support: “It’s not free beer, it’s a free puppy”.

Final sessions of the day were on energy and the environment. Sun have a VP for Eco Responsibility, and seem to be taking the issues seriously. In order to be sustainable, we’re going to have to be innovative – computing being part of the solution to how we do things differently but also part of the problem. I’ve quoted this before, but IT is responsible for as many carbon emissions as the airline industry. Although Sun are looking at many areas – they saved 99m sheets of paper for example by not printing their Annual Report – their main priority is energy efficiency of computers. Some facts:

Data centres cost $7.2billion to operate annually
Power consumption doubled between 2000 and 2005 and will probably double again by 2010
60% of data centres are running out of power, cooling and space
Utility grids are not keeping up with the demand for power.

He outlined a number of initiatives Sun are taking, including redesigning data centres, rolling out sunrays instead of PCs (they use about 1/20th of the power), looking at energy efficiency at every component level and designing for disassembly and recycling.