ITWorld

Lucian, I suspect that you

Lucian,

I suspect that you are right. Nature/fate/accident has found a way to allow us to deal with higher levels of complexity. I'd love to have been in a position to ask Herbert Simon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Simon) his opinion. I remember reading a book of his - The architecture of complexity which argues for hierarchy being the timeless route to complexity management.
The internet is fascinating in that the one thing is most certainly is *not*, is hierarchical!

Sean

Simon, Thanks for the

Simon,

Thanks for the pointer. Reminds me of the "sticky bit" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky_bit).

Sean

Anonymous, Mea culpa. Both

Anonymous,

Mea culpa. Both fixes will be applied.

Sean

Superboreen, Yes, I think

Superboreen,

Yes, I think gmail is a good example of re-intermediation with spam-removal as one of the value adds.

Sean

The mobile carrier dimension

The mobile carrier dimension is an interesting one for where "laptops/notebooks" are headed. The established players - both in OS and h/w terms - are making smaller and lighter machines but the mobile people are coming at it from the other direction : making "phones" bigger and better to basically encompass common PC tasks.

Then there are the dark horses : the e-book reader manufacturers...

Sean

Gibson, I'm sorely tempted

Gibson,

I'm sorely tempted to put one together! Philips screwdriver in one hand, digital camera in the other.

Sean

Jim, As you say,

Jim,

As you say, virtualization is very useful as a test technique. Nobody wants to have to set up and manage, say, a dozen (Windows, service pack, browser) variants for application testing when a bunch of VM images will do a better job.

But I still see scenarios where separate boxes are needed. For example, a problem I have with using the VM option for every scenario is the doubt it creates in my head during application testing. When my app refuses to print via USB, is it because my app has a problem or that I have configured the virtualization of the USB port incorrectly? Maybe my experience with hypervisors has just been unusually bad?

I also like the ease of horizontal scaling I can get for compute-intensive workloads. There is something real appealing to me just adding more slave units to a "farm" of CPUs by spending, say, 1k at a time. With bigger iron, I have to increment processing power in bigger leaps.

regards,
Sean

Andrzej, Thanks for the link

Andrzej,

Thanks for the link to those Mini Systems. They look very interesting.

Sean

Richard, Beautiful! Sean

Richard,

Beautiful!

Sean

Jim, I write software for a

Jim,

I write software for a living. When debugging and soak testing its real useful to be able to isolate the application completely. Using an entire machine for that in production might be overkill but its very useful for development.

Its also really handy when you have to juggle multiple operating systems. The virtualization techniques involved in sharing network connections, parallel printer ports etc. add an extra level of config that sometimes, I just plain don't want to have to deal with.

I'm not against virtualisation by the way. Far from it. I just don't see it as a solution to all multi-os scenarios - not even in a SOHO environment.

Sean