Oracle Open World, Day 2, in the bright sunlight overlooking downtown San Francisco:
TRANSCRIPT:
Hey! This is Steve, its Day 2 – actually, no, it’s Day 3 of the Oracle conference. But I’m going to tell you about Day 2, because it’s Day 3 in the morning, the sun’s just coming up, and it’s bright in here, I’m not blind, it’s just bright in here. So I thought I’d put on the sunglasses, because I’m really hip that way.
Anyway, good morning, this is Steve, and I’m on the 39th floor of a hotel in downtown San Francisco, here for the Oracle Open World Conference 2012. I’m overlooking the downtown area where most of the conference is taking place. So let me share with you something that you – that probably won’t make the news, you probably won’t hear about this, there’s a lot of talk about the keynotes, CNBC is interviewing folks here, you can see all that elsewhere, let me share something with you I don’t think you’ll hear anywhere else. The magic phrase is “software defined network”, or SDN. There is a lot of buzz about it here in Silicon Valley, and Oracle quietly is working away on this. I was in two separate meetings where this came up. And one person told me that recently VMware paid 1.2 billion dollars – billion dollars- for a company of 20 people with less than 10 million dollars in revenue. For this, VMware paid $1.2 billion, just to get the SDN assets. (Speaking of the bright sun – ) Wow, that’s bright. That’s bright!
Anyway, Oracle’s working away on this as well. And the idea is to create something of a hypervisor for networks, the same way a hypervisor works for virtualized operating systems. And I would say that the most important thing that I heard probably the whole day, was one key person told me – who’s involved with the effort, involved with the process at Oracle, said to a small gathering of us: “everyone is talking about it, nobody understands it”.
Anyway, there’s more to share, about the events, the presentation, the exhibit hall, the parties, uh, but, um, you can get that information elsewhere, and quite frankly, I’m working, I’ve been here working away, and so I haven’t participated in everything, and besides, there’s too much, there’s so much cool stuff going on.
Here’s my video report from Oracle Open World 2012, Day 1. A full transcript follows.
TRANSCRIPT:
This is Steve, it is Monday, October 1st, 2012, and I am here, at they uh – I’m in my hotel room, at the Oracle Open World conference here in San Francisco. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison made a big announcement last night at the keynote session opening the conference. It was about Oracle’s latest cloud computing offerings, and as I listened to him last night in Hall D of the Moscone Center, I was thinking – you know, I know the media is going to bash him for being a hypocrite. Sure enough, The Wall Street Journal this morning reported the following:
After once dismissing cloud computing as “gibberish,” Oracle Corp. Chief Executive Larry Ellison announced three new features for its cloud computing service at a customer conference in San Francisco.
And Doug Henschen at InformationWeek blogged about this today:
The irony of seeing Larry Ellison extol the virtues of cloud computing, in-memory computing, and multitenancy after so many memorable attacks on earlier versions of these technologies offered by rivals was indeed rich.
I don’t think the slams against Larry Ellison are warranted. It’s true that he’s bashed certain implementations of what we now call cloud computing, but I think his intent has been to warn against immature implementations of these technologies in services that didn’t offer the robustness, the security, the stability, the standards-based architectures and other kind of features that are typical with a more mature, professional platform along the lines of the Oracle relational database management system.
But one part of Ellison’s keynote on Sunday night really resonated with me. Ellison reminded the audience that he first advocated cloud computing in the 1990s. Well I heard some people in the audience snicker when he said that. But snickerers, I’m here to tell you – it’s true. He did advocate cloud computing in the 1990’s, I know he did. I wrote about it, in a publication that came out in 1998.
The publication was titled Oracle8 Server Unleashed. It’s a compilation work consisting of several dozen chapters contributed to by about 40 authors. My chapter was about Oracle’s Web Application Server 3.0, and a concept known as Network Computing Architecture, or NCA. The goal of NCA was to remove all software off of your computer, and put it into the network. This was consistent with a concept that was being advocated by Sun Microsystems. The phrase “the network is the computer” was the phrase that summarized this. In fact, I think it was even Sun’s official corporate slogan for a while. Friends, this was cloud computing, but the term “cloud computing” had not been coined yet. This was the 1990’s. In my chapter of Oracle8 Server Unleashed, I wrote the following:
Larry Ellison, the founder and CEO of the Oracle Corporation, has frequently mused at what life would be like if common household appliances had the same complexity of maintenance as a PC. For example, you never hear someone say something like “Sorry, I can’t go out tonight, I’m staying home so I can upgrade my TV to version 7.0”. Nobody has to go to training class to learn how to use their microwave oven. Nobody has to get a refrigerator adapter when they find out their latest leftovers aren’t compatible with their existing refrigerator. Yet computer users deal with these issues all the time. Software that runs on a Mac won’t run on a PC. Upgrading from one version of Windows to another is a significant effort. Ellison’s argument is that this is unacceptable, and that in order for computer technology to reach the masses, the PC must become as easy to use as any common household appliance.
And I continued:
In a recent presentation to a Japanese IT convention, Ellison was asked by a member of the audience if the network will be stable enough – won’t it crash from time to time? Isn’t it risky to place so much dependence on the network? Ellison’s response was to ask the audience member another question: what is the last thing that crashed on you: your telephone, or Windows 95? The audience roared with laughter, making the answer obvious. Yes, a network can experience problems once in a rare while, but when a network is maintained by a professional technical staff on a full-time basis, then the burden of the rote, technical system maintenance is lifted off of the consumer, who can spend her time focusing on her actual work…
The number of networks we already depend on is impressive: plumbing, electricity, highways, television, radio, — all networks professionally run by others, that consumers use frequently, yet do not worry about personally maintaining, upgrading, or troubleshooting. Why should a computer user experience anything different?”
So when Larry Ellison stood on that stage on Sunday night, and when he reminded his audience that he’s been long advocating utility computing – the old name for what we now call “cloud computing” – I knew exactly what he was talking about.
Today’s headlines should not have read that Larry Ellison finally embraces cloud computing. No. That’s not what it should’ve been. The proper headline today should’ve been:
Cloud computing has finally caught up to Larry Ellison, who has advocated the concept longer than anyone else in leadership in Silicon Valley today.
So folks, I’m here at the Oracle conference, I’ll have more information to share, we’ll see if we do some more later.
The late Phil Lynott of the rock band Thin Lizzy was an Irish musician and the voice behind the song I consider to be Thin Lizzy’s biggest hit, The Boys Are Back In Town. Of all the songs from that timeframe, that’s one that runs through my head all the time, a great song. Lynott passed away in 1986, at the young age of 37, quite a loss. There’s a great bio of him on Wikipedia, and it includes a great photo of a statue built to memorialize Lynott in front of the Bruxelles club on Harry Street, Dublin, Ireland.
Here’s a live performance of Boys by Lynott and Thin Lizzy:
I just came across the following blog post from the OTN Discussion Forums, published shortly before my current book came out. The blog post author, Sunil Parida, recommends my work, see below:
Thank you, Sunil!
And for those who are just joining us, the book is now available – this blog post goes back to 2009, I’m blogging about it now because I just learned of it.
Ok, folks, even fans of the Gregory Brothers and their brilliant Auto-Tune The News may not have seen this, the most brilliant awards acceptance speech ever, at the 2010 Streamy Awards:
They won for Best News or Politics Web Series, beating Rocketboom, the Young Turks, VBS News, and The Tomorrow Show with Mo Rocca.
They also won for Best Experimental Web Series, beating Green Porno, HBO Cube, INST MSGS, and Level 26.
They ALSO won for Best Original Music in a Web Series, beating Horrible Turn, Key of Awesome, Sparhusen, and The Coat.
The show was held at the Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles, California, on April 11, 2010.
And incidentally – that was the “Second Annual Streamy Awards”, in 2010. According to the Streamys website, the first show was in 2009.
But the third show hasn’t happened yet, so apparently – no such show in 2011. And it looks like it won’t happen in 2012 either, the third show looks like it’s scheduled for February 17, 2013.
And for any aspiring YouTubers or other streaming content creators out there, it looks like they’re still accepting entries for award submissions.
TheGregory Brothers is a quartet featuring Michael Gregory, Andrew Gregory, Evan Gregory, and Rose Gregory, who obviously isn’t a "brother", she’s married to Evan.
They are the brilliant minds behind Auto-Tune the News, one of the most popular channels on YouTube. The power behind the Gregory Brothers work is their technical skill with auto-tune software. takes real news broadcasts, and through clever editing and the power of auto-tune software, an invention of an Exxon engineer, believe it or not. His name is Andy Hildebrand, and his Auto-Tune software enables a skilled editor to process audio recordings and bend the pitch to achieve a musical effect. I think the original use of Auto-Tune was simply tol correct off-tune singing.
But the Gregory Brothers use it to take original spoken-word mainstream news broadcasts, and transform them into songs. The result is one of the most innovative creations on YouTube.
One of their best known creations is the Bed-Intruder Song:
As of this writing, that video has over 105 million hits – incredible.
One of my favorites of theirs is the Backin Up Song:
I could go on forever with other hits of theirs, but I’m guessing many of you already have seen them.
BUT WAIT – I didn’t create this blog post to just talk about their hits, but to share something new that even their biggest fans probably haven’t seen.
But … tell you what, I don’t want it to get lost in this blog post. So … I’m going to post it tomorrow.
I was recently made aware of this rather unique video, a series of snippets from a wide variety of TV shows and movies, featuring the same guy in the background as a film extra.
His name is Jesse Heiman, and he’s made his experience of being an extra into an event unto itself.
Way cool! So if you ever wanted to get into films and an opportunity to be an extra comes up, take it! You never know where you might be able to take it.
A friend brought a great blog post to my attention, it’s by Duke Ganote in Cincinatti, OH, USA. Duke describes himself this way:
ETL Technical Lead, SQL Sculptor, Query Cowboy, Data Munger
Very cool. He wrote an August 15, 2010 blog post titled Certifiable.. by Oracle, and here are a couple of screen shots:
…
Congratulations to Duke on joining the ranks of SQL Experts! And I appreciate his compliments about my book.
Check out Duke’s bio here. And be sure to check out his quotes, he has several that are great, but my favorite is one that is apparently his own original words of wisdom:
I advocate the Ruthless Exploitation of Technology for Business Purposes.
— Duke Ganote
That’s fantastic. I wish I’d thought of it first; had I done so, that would be my company slogan.
The first pop song I remember hearing a lot was called Close To You. I was a kid taking my first swim lessons at a pool where the juke box seemed to be stuck on this song, and it was a HUGE hit. It was written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David.
Around the same time, I was attending elementary school and we had a music teacher who decided to make our classes “hip” by teaching us a then-current pop song called Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head. That was also written by the same duo of Burt Bacharach and Hal David.
Those two wrote a slew of huge hits back then, and experienced something of a resurgence in the late 90’s and early 2000’s with the Austin Powers films, which featured some of their music and even included cameos of Burt Bacharach himself.
Hal David passed away September 1, 2012, at the age of 91. He might not have been a household name, but he was certainly well known, and his work is loved by a great many people spanning multiple generations. I’m a fan and was sad to hear of his passing.
Here’s some video of the songs I mentioned above; first, Close To You, sung by The Carpenters:
Next, B.J. Thomas singing Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head:
Finally, here’s a scene from Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, featuring Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello performing I’ll Never Fall In Love Again, as “Austin Powers” (Mike Myers) and “Felicity Shagwell” (Heather Graham) cut up, a great scene from the movie:
