Exactly right. A 'statement of direction'. In fact, the poster should have read the article. IBM states that they should know in 2 years whether lithium-air technology will work or not. They didn't state a battery would be ready at that time.

I was going to say that I'm really getting tired of the 'geek' and 'nerd' terms. But after reading several of these posts, never mind. :) Anyway, I don't understand why we still put up with those labels. The Palantir team is making a contribution. More than I can say for the WSJ geeks. Hell, they can't even make money off of advertising.

Many of the production data centers I've worked on have been using VMs for web servers for quite some time (e.g. ESX 2.x). That includes one of the companies that is on the list of unknowns in the article. I'm surprised it wasn't addressed and that so many jumped to a physical server conclusion. However, even if the 50k servers are all VMs, that's a major management load. 50k of just about any configuration item takes some work.