The Miricale That is Kobayashi
By John | July 4, 2008
Some might say Babe Ruth was the greatest athlete in modern history. Others might argue Willie Mays or Hank Aaron. Few hockey fans would dispute Wayne Gretzky. Here in the United States we can often be short sighted about our sports heroes (can you say World Series). Globally there are those that might argue Pele or Maradona as the greatest athletes ever.
However, amidst all the debate there really is only one who owns this special crown of the “greatest”. The “One” who shatters records beyond reasonable possibilities. The “One” who in the face of uncertainty chomps at his competition. This unlikely hero reigns from the rigorous and exhausting sport of “Competitive Eating”. This hero while only standing at a mere 130 pounds is often referred to as the miracle that is Takeru Kobayashi. This giant among men was born in Nagano Japan and is the undisputed king in his respected sport. Yep, Henrik Zetterberg of the Detroit Red Wings may throw a bad-ass cross check and is great at setting up power plays, however; can he eat 50 hot dogs in 12 minutes? In fact in Kobayashi’s rookie debut at the 2001 Nathan’s Coney Island hot dog-eating contest he doubled, yes doubled, the previous record of 25. Even the “Great One” Wayne Gretzky, never doubled Esposito’s total goals in one season. Trust me, the “The Minister of Defense”, Reggie White might have been a horror for quarterbacks but image how you would feel if you were a hot dog when Kobayashi steps up to the table. So hopefully today the earth will get back to normal when Kobayashi re-claims his crown and again he will stand alone as the greatest athlete in the history of all sports.
UPDATE: Say it ain’t so … two years in a row… Kobayashi looses in a “Speed Dog Eating Overtime” after tied n regulation at 59 dogs in 10 minutes. However, he still holds 6 of the last 10 titles and better luck next year.
Topics: sun | 2 Comments »
Keeping it Real - IBM and PSI
By John | July 3, 2008
Here are some more links on the IBM PSI debacle…
IBM Buys Its Way Out of Antitrust Trouble
IBM mainframe acquisition raises antitrust concerns
IBM Tightens Stranglehold Over Mainframe Market; Gets Hit with Antitrust Complaint in Europe
Topics: ibm | No Comments »
IBM v Tata
By John | July 3, 2008
This should be interesting. It looks like Citigroup Global Services might be shopping around for a provider and IBM and Tata are on the list.
Citigroup entertaining IBM and others to run its BPO in India
Topics: ibm, tata | No Comments »
Cloud Cafe Podcast #6
By John | July 3, 2008
I was able to catch up with Michael Crandell the CEO of Rightscale on this podcast. This is the “first” second timer on “Cloud Cafe”. Michael walks me through their two recent announcements that they made at Structur08 for MySQL and GigaSpaces. Michael also throws out some great numbers on the status of Rightscale:
- 125k instances launched
- 4k instances in one 24 hour period
- 100+ paying customers
- 5k registered users
We also talked a little bit about what Benchmark is brining to the table to help with these new partner relationships. Then we end up with a discussion on cloud standards.
I wanted to add a special thanks to Florence Neal for the artwork and Mike Colletti for the music. If you find any of their works interesting, please feel free to link their sites and contact them directly.
Topics: cloudcafe | No Comments »
Ten XML Schemas you should know
By John | July 3, 2008
DeveloperWorks has a good XML Schema introduction explaining 10 top XML Schemas. Here are the 10 they cover in the introduction:
- SOAP
- WSDL
- RDF
- vCard
- Doc Book XML
- FIXML
- SVG
- Dublin Core
- XForms
- UBL
Topics: xml | No Comments »
Do You Hadoop?
By John | July 3, 2008
Maybe you should. Yahoo entered and won a sort contest using 1000 lines of Java code with the open source Hadoop. They were able to use a 900 node cluster and sort 10 billion 100 byte records (1 TeraByte) in 209 seconds. Here is a PDF of the details.
Topics: hadoop | No Comments »
If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Sue ‘Em, Then Join ‘Em?
By John | July 2, 2008
Once there was a little startup that figured out how to run IBM’s Z/OS on Itanium-based servers. In fact the founders of this startup had been doing this sort of thing forever since they were ex Ahmdahl guys. At first IBM didn’t mind this little startup selling their low end mainframes until HP tried to buy the startup for $200m. Then IBM filed a lawsuit and put a stop to the HP sale? So then the startup shot back with a counter suit claiming that IBM was abusing its mainframe monopoly and being anti-competitive. I am sure IBM legal, in their infinite wisdom, were figuring this would be just another run of the mill bring your guns to a knife fight and it would all be over reall quickly. However, somewhere along the way David showed up and some of IBM’s other refurbishing resellers partners started yelling and some even joined in on the lawsuit. Then the cleaver startup started a parallel antitrust complaint with the European Commission. Now this opened a huge can of worms for IBM. However, the little startup was still having a hard time convincing it’s customers to buy their solution while the IBM lawsuit was holding over them. Just about the time IBM thought they had the startup on the ropes guess who stepped in with $37m in funding? Yep, Microsoft. This put a little wind in the startups sails and stretched the lawsuit out longer than IBM ever imaged. So after about 18 months, IBM announced today that all disputes are resolved and IBM will be acquiring the startup. Ain’t capitalism great?
Topics: ibm | No Comments »
Coté Gone Wild
By John | July 2, 2008
As discussed in out last IT Management Podcast Coté was a busy boy last week. This week he has posted some really good articles about the Structure08, Velocity and Force.com conferences he attended last week.
- Part 1 - Velocity, Cloud Camp, Structure
- Part 2 - You Think It’s Bad Now: Get Ready for Cloud-* - Defining Cloud Computing
- Part 3 - Know Your Cloud Consumer: ISV or Enterprise?
- Part 4 - Don’t confuse SaaS with Cloud Computing - Cloud Conference Week
- Part 5 - Cloud Standards and Open Source
- Also, I actually detailed most of my thoughts in last week’s IT Management Podcast. But for those of you who can’t put with that medium, there’s plenty of text in the blog here.
Topics: redmonk | No Comments »
A really good review of Structure08
By John | July 2, 2008
Cloud Computing’s Identity Crisis: Does a Definition Matter?
Topics: cloud computing | No Comments »
Another Cloudy Day in the Cloud-o-Sphere
By John | July 2, 2008
Stacey Higginbotham over at GigaOM wrote a great though provoking article about the Enterprise and Clouds called “10 Reasons Enterprises Aren’t Ready to Trust the Cloud“. However, some of her arguments, IMO, were a bit cloudy, As with most thought provoking blog articles the comments section usally yeild some of the bet disucssions. Here are my comments to the post:
1) It’s not secure.
Cloud computing is not an all or nothing game. Enterprises have been sharing data outside the firewall for many years. The “Big Switch” concept is not how enterprises will migrate to the cloud. They will choose parts of their IT to run behind the firewall and others to run outside the firewall. I have talked to quite a few vendors and enterprise customers who are already using the cloud for non sensitive data. The biggest issue with the “Enterprise” and the cloud is that most global 5000 companies don’t want to disclose that they are using a public cloud. As far as compliance and regulation goes, I have talked to at least one huge financial institution that told me (off the record) that they do a cost analysis on the fine vs. the cost of the regulatory implementation. In some cases they opt for the potential fine instead of implementation costs associated with the regulation. Cloud computing costs will have some impact on those type of decisions. In the early 1990’s the Gartner’s of the world were convinced Linux would never play in the enterprise due to security concerns. Also not all cloud computing is public. Vendors such as 3Tera, Cassatt, and IBM provide public cloud infrastructures.
3) It’s not platform agnostic.
Neither is AIX, HP, or Sun. Also, AWS is not s