Apple is definitely not the most powerful company ever. Not disagreeing that some of their tactics (legal, technological, and ecosystem-lockin) are "evil", but their enormous size and profit is currently coming from enormous margins on incredibly popular consumer goods.

Profits != Power, per se. Exxon-Mobile, for example, is deeply involved in government policy, and they (and other oil companies) have enormous sway on environmental policy, military and foreign policy, and incredibly sway in many nations where they have oil production operations.

Meanwhile, arguably Microsoft is more powerful as well; despite their much lower market cap they are deeply entrenched in big areas, including servers (where they are basically the big alternative to Linux), they are a dominant force in the traditional gaming market (b/n XBox and their influence on PC gaming), and they're making interesting inroads in new areas like virtualization/cloud services. They've even managed to make some headway with Bing, rising to the #2 search engine spot. (Where Google still dominates; Google won the Bing challenge 5-0 when I took it.)

Apple is a very unique company though, and they do have certain "powers" that nearly no other company - at least US company - has, but most of them are hard to use for evil. For example, they're possibly the only company left in the US capable of doing the full-platform hardware/software design that they do. The Dells of the world have outsourced too much of their design to their supply chain and it makes them apparently unable to break new ground. If anything, I think the most likely company to rise up and produce their own hardware is actually likely to be Google, since they're actually willing to do engineering work that isn't purely in pursuit of a hardware profit.

FWIW, any honest comparison of Apple products on a price basis can't really conclude they are "incredibly overpriced". Apple has extreme control over their suppliers - Foxconn operates on a very thin margin, so much so that Apple basically had to directly approve pay raises for their workforce because their margins are so tight. Yes, they do have higher margins, and depending on the model, you -may- pay an extra $100 to $200 that goes to Apple's bottom line. Most of the rest is Apple picking superior hardware. Go check a teardown list.

Richman recalled that Apple amassed $4.976 billion in revenue from the sale of 3.76 million Macs during its previous quarter, yielding an average selling price of $1,323.40 per Mac. He then multiplied that figure by a 28% gross margin estimate for Mac sales from Jefferies & Co. -- which is still several hundred basis points below the company's reported average -- to arrive at a profit of $370.55 per Mac sold.

By comparison, HP’s Personal Systems Group brought in $9.415 billion in revenue and turned a profit of $533 million last quarter. The PC maker's operating margin, which doesn’t factor in overhead costs, came in at 5.66%.

slackware -> redhat -> centos/ubuntu, with more thrown in (debian and (ugh) suse)

I now typically install CentOS on servers and Ubuntu as a development VM/desktop environment. (But in ~08 I switched from using a Linux Desktop after 15 years of Solaris and Linux desktops, to using a Mac.)

Twice I got reps to list my name as John Doe for my phone number listing. When someone called for Mr. Doe, I said I was speaking. Whatever they offered, I quickly sounded very interesting, and said, "Just one minute, I'll be right back, that sounds great." Then I would set the phone down (not hanging up) and go about my business. Then I simply stopped getting a land line.

I'm going to contact my Congresspeople, and ask them to ask the Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute any violation of wiretapping and/or computer crime laws which may have occurred.

So, the general attributes of cloud for IaaS, offhand, are:

- Elasticity; you can provision and deprovision it dynamically and rapidly, and you pay only for what you use (and granular billing to go with it)
- Redundancy "under the hood"; your specific instance may fail, but a cloud service should heal without intervention from a tenant, beyond doing things required by their instance(s) restarting
- Multi-tenancy - meaning many unrelated entities can safely share the same hardware with a separation of concerns
- API interfaces
- Accessibility over a network

Some people would include a lot of other attributes, such as "linearly scalable" (ie, 1 instance = N units of processing, then 2 instances should = 2N units of processing).

Ultimately, the promise of cloud computing is to deliver just as much computing as you need, where you need it, only for as long as you need it, with ~0 setup needed on your part. If you've ever provisioned servers, you end up asking something like:

- Do I need shared, dedicated servers, or my own colo space to set up?
- Do I need routers, firewalls, load balancers, vpn concentrators, etc?
- Which things need (for security/role reasons) separation?

And then, what's your timeline when any of those answers change?

Cloud handles application scale-up and scale-down more gracefully; this is one of those things that's been driving virtualization in the enterprise for a decade; enterprises can consolidate servers, and old applications can share a tiny slice of hardware but still not be end-of-lifed, rather than needing their own server to run on. Applications which have a sudden burst of popularity could conceivable scale up massively - imagine a world where no one is ever slashdotted.

Virtual networking can give every application its own isolated network with its own firewall policy, using ~30mhz worth of cpu.

Anyhow, this sort of thing has driven virtualization in the enterprise for a while because of capex cost. The average utilization of non-virtualized servers is, iirc, ~30%; post-virtualization, it's 80-90%+. That means enterprises that use virtualization simply spend less than half on servers and the costs of maintaining them. Then there's opex. Rather than the complex provisioning associated with sizing, installing, and maintaining bespoke computing for every user/org/BU, the IT process can be streamlined to having a one-size-fits all provisioning, and the virtualization/cloud layer can carve it up dynamically. You have way fewer people needed per piece of hardware. To say nothing of how the resource sharing makes it self-healing. Physical server dies? The virtual machines that were on it power up automatically on a different machine. (In fact, VMware FT can actually add an application-independent hot-failover to any x86 server; physical hardware dies, the shadow copy immediately resumes running with the full state on the failover hardware)

Thin clients hitting servers (ie, dumb X terms hitting mainframe-type servers) was a similar concept in the sense that you were time-sharing resources, but this makes a similar arrangement possible without operating system dependencies, with application portability (ie, I can move a virtual machine from one cloud at one provider, to another cloud at another provider, about as fast as the bits from the virtual disk can copy over the network - and of course, all the empty space doesn't need to move).

Not really even touching on what private/hybrid cloud means to an enterprise; but suffice it to say, there's a reason why nearly every company in the Fortune 500 has some users pulling out corporate cards and buying compute from AWS; and why they'd like to supply that same experience to their users on a private cloud platform.

Funny, we just hired two COBOL programmers at $80K each to maintain some legacy mainframe systems.

This reminds me of a guy I knew in ~1994, who was griping that all his experience was in COBOL, and after getting laid off from making $75k/year, he couldn't find another job. At the time, I was in college, and so I wasn't really familiar with the idea of keeping your skills updated...

When cloud technology can permit hard core data entry, say for insurance records or the like, then I'll worry. But until then, throughput is more important than an app being able to run from wherever in the cloud. Besides, in my line of business. We don't run apps. We run programs that process millions of secure transactions. We have data entry clerks that key documents and data that can't be captured electronically.

You would probably say that we have our own private cloud. I would say that we have our own methods to allow secure access to our internal systems. By the way, I would predict that there will be COBOL programmers still programming even after cloud computing has been replaced with the next marketing hyped phrase.

So I don't know that I would recommend cloud for you; there are reasons to use it, and reasons not to use it. As the technology and ops experience matures, it will be easier to adopt - basically like any tech. But for almost everyone, there are real benefits. Both capex and opex; and some people are using cloud in a way that their capex savings is ~0 (or negative) but their opex savings is huge. (See: Netflix running their entire infrastructure with 3 admins) Program ~= App. I file my expenses through an Oracle app, that runs in a cloud, that automatically fetches corporate card transactions from Visa, and lets me roll them into an expense report.

I'm one of the authors of Securing the Virtual Environment, and my co-author is a QSA, and one of the points of writing the book was to talk about the fact that cloud *can* be secure and can be compliant. (Although in the case of a public cloud, obviously compliance requires underlying compliance by your provider, as well as your own processes) Of course, there are a bunch of risks, too - but there are, for example, cloud services that have passed HIPAA and FISMA audits.

In short, cloud is more than just a buzzword; it's an evolution in the technology that powers IT. I'd say it's more evolution than revolution, but it is more than a buzzword.

There's a term used called "cloudwashing" that covers inappropriate use of the term cloud, but cloud technology is real and every company in tech is pouring money into this transition.

Anyone who has worked in IT in large enterprise has seen the benefits of virtualization in action; there's an enormous amount of capex and opex savings, and VMware basically dominates the market. There's a reason 99%+ of the Fortune 500 have an ELA with them.

The same principles behind that revolution are now reaching into the public space, and looking to blend the private IT compute farms with public cloud resources as well; plus more apps being deployed as SaaS, and more apps being developed on PaaS stacks; all the technology of big data (eg, Mongo), messaging (eg RabbitMQ), and so on just form a virtuous circle with this trend. Apps become more able to run in generic clouds without requiring very specific hardware control, and thus IaaS clouds become more attractive.

If you're in system, network, storage, or security administration, or IT of any sort, and you're not learning about this, you're basically a COBOL programmer waiting to be put out to farm.

It's meant to be syllogistic.

As in:

Linux:Operating Systems::OpenStack:Cloud

At this point, though, OpenStack is still pre-1.0, perhaps equivalent to Linux circa 1993. Whether it can polish up and continue to deliver what is needed is yet to be seen.

The impetus behind cloud right now means that this will be a lot more high profile than Linux was in 1993. There's all sorts of politics (eg Why Citrix Left Openstack) at play, and no one has an OpenStack cloud of any significant size running. OpenStack has been tooting its horn for 18+ months and yet the most advanced player is really just going into production. Rackspace clearly sees OpenStack as an avenue to leverage outside development in an effort to go after Amazon, but whether that makes it viable for other people - and thus creates a rewarding ecosystem - has yet to be seen.

OpenStack isn't a distro. It's a collection of utilities for virtualizing and managing compute and storage resources to build clouds. Putting Apache, PHP, and MySQL onto a linux box doesn't make the LAMP stack "Linux" any more than putting OpenStack services (Nova, swift, etc) onto a Linux distro makes OpenStack Linux.

I have two suggestions that are close to staying with Java:

(1) Check out Spring (http://www.springsource.org/); Spring has a bunch of goodies that make developing web apps easier, and the guys from spring (Adrian Colyer, Richard MacDougall) are thinking really hard about scalable web services. This is a foundation that will let you write in Java but still be prepared for the future.

(2) Even better, don't go with Java, but leverage some of what you learned and pick up Scala. See http://www.scala-lang.org/, or pick up Martin Odersky's book. Think of Scala as what Java would be if someone who appreciated terse, expressive syntax and great convention redesigned Java. Odersky wrote a reference JVM implementation while at Sun, and Scala compiles into Java bytecode and can directly use Scala libraries. (My first Scala project, for example, I used unboundid's LDAP libs directly in my Scala code.) Odersky along with some other luminaries (Viktor Klang, Paul Phillips, etc) have formed Typesafe, and are producing Scala the language + Akka (an actor framework) + Play (a web framework). Outside of play, many people are huge fans of Lift, and it does have some magic that no other framework has.

Remember how you said "modern" web application? Well, Scala supports functional programming, and you can fix functional and imperative code in the same application, which means you can support massively scalable sites by writing clean, idempotent code where needed.

If all this sounds bad, then I'd recommend Django+Python, as it is, imo, the best way for a relative web novice to produce decent code, and the amount you can do with a few hours reading docs and then digging in is shocking.

This is generally incorrect advice at least for a VMware environment. Best practice is to virtualize vCenter Server and its database, and use them with HA/DRS. The way that vCenter interacts with ESXi (the hypervisor it administers), ESXi is "preconfigured" with HA/DRS rules; if the server running vcenter does down, a different hypervisor will actually bring the management VM back up. (In other words, the vMotion and HA stuff, while CONFIGURED by vCenter server, doesn't not need the vCenter server online to actually carry out an HA restore.

The TSA would not be able to keep the scanners in service if every person opted out every time. (FWIW, I've passed through SLC several times, and the agents have always been respectful, polite, and not particularly aggressive with my crotch region. That said, for the sake of all of our privacy and that of our children, please opt out every time. They will HAVE to change.)

This certainly puts the recruitment message from an IBM recruiter I got on LinkedIn last week in a new light.

Yep. I bought an 06 in late 06 and got a call about a year later offering to buy the car back from me for (slightly) more than I paid for it, so they could sell it to someone else. (They're pretty eager to buy it again now, even though it is now 5.5 years old. I ran the numbers and thanks to rising gas prices, if I did sell it, I think I'd have about $3k less depreciation than expected.)

It's actually probably because the subsidies have expired. I bought two hybrid cars in late 2006 - one 06 prius and one 07 camry hybrid. First, I've been very happy with the cars in general. Nothing has ever gone wrong with either, at all. Looking at the '12 models, there is basically a $4k difference to get a hybrid.

Assuming your mileage is ~50% city vs highway (and mine isn't; it was, and remains, more like 80/20 city/highway, because I don't have a commute) then you get a est MPG difference of 11 miles per gallon (41 vs 30). 894 gallons of gas is somewhere between $3k and $4k depending on where you live, I think. (Here I think it was ~3.60 last I checked; when I filled up a rental in CA last week, I think it was more like $4.50). That covers ALMOST all of the difference, and if you are a heavy city driver, it does cover all of it.

When I bought our cars, however, there was also a tax credit - something on the order of $3k per car. It appears, glancing at the IRS site, that the last year of car this was available was model year 2009.

Anyhow, gas was a lot cheaper when we bought ours and with the credit I still expected to make it back. When gas went through the roof, it made the value proposition much more attractive, of course. (In fact, about a year after we bought them, I got an offer to buy the Prius back for more than I'd paid for it, because gas prices had gone up so much, it had driven demand for used cars through the roof.)

So in a sense, it DID work the first time, but the lack of tax credit makes it unworth it for some buyers.