Cameron Stokes’s Blog

I’ve had a geek crush on Sun Microsystems for several years now. Sometimes I find myself just browsing the Servers section of their website configuring different servers and imagining what I would do with ridiculous mounts of CPU power or storage. They make many cool products and technologies that continue to fascinated me:

• UltraSPARC T2 Processors – Highly scalable, energy efficient processors with Chip-Level Multithreading (CMT).
• Unified Storage Systems – Storage systems that scale up to 576 TB.
• Enterprise Class Servers – Systems that scale to 256 CPU cores and 2 TB of ram.
• Modular Blade Systems – Blade systems capable of running SPARC, AMD, and Intel blades all in one blade chassis.
• Sun Rays – True thin clients providing low cost, low footprint virtual display clients.
• OpenSolaris – An open source operating system proving to be a serious contender to Linux.
• DTrace – An open source dynamic tracing application giving insight into any running process with little overhead.
• ZFS – An open source “next generation” filesystem.
• Java – An open source, machine independent development platform.
• GlassFish – An open source Java application server.

Given all this, I am amazed at how poorly they do quarter after quarter, year after year.  They bring in over $10 billion a year in revenue but make marginal income and little to no profit.  I don’t see HP, Dell, IBM, or even Microsoft innovating in all these areas yet they’re all making money.  So…what is wrong with Sun?

Microsoft released their latest Xbox Live update today, cleverly named the New Xbox Experience (NXE). While I haven’t had a chance to take a look at all the new features I can speak to the upgrade process.

I turned on my Xbox to play some Call of Duty 4 and was greeted with the friendly update notification. As with past Xbox Live updates, Microsoft forces you to upgrade or otherwise disconnect from Xbox Live. While I can understand the technical reasons for Microsoft doing this, its frustrating when all you want to do is play a quick game before fixing dinner. In any case I chose to upgrade and after about 5 minutes of downloading the Xbox restarted. I was looking forward to getting to my game when another download launched. Seeing that this one was expected to take 15 minutes I started fixing dinner.

After this download finished, the Xbox restarted yet again. When it came back on I was presented with the new Terms & Conditions (T&C) for Xbox Live. Curious to see how long they were I becan scrolling through them, not bothering to read them. After 3 minutes of scrolling continuously through something that could rival War and Peace in length, I reached the end and clicked Accept. Had I actually read through the Terms and Conditions I would probably still be reading it now 2 hours later.

Once past the T&C I was given the option to choose my avatar and not wanting to choose one of the goobers I was offered I spent the next 10 minutes trying to put together someone that looked like me. It was truly amazing how many different hair style, color, noses, ears, chins, and clothing options that were available. I finally found a combination that I was satisfied with. This part of the process was very Nintendo Wii’ish both in the graphics and sound effects.

After my avatar, I went hunting for the feature I had been waiting for in the new release, the Netflix integration. After finding the link in the Video Marketplace, I had to agree to and start yet another download. Once that finished I had to activate my account. This was the first part of the NXE update process I was actually pleased with. The Xbox gave me an activation ID that I had to take to Netflix’s website and enter once logged into my account. I entered the ID, clicked enter, and about 2 seconds later the Xbox was updated and had my 30+ Instant Queue movies available. This process was very quick and easy.

After all this, dinner was ready and I had to give up on Call of Duty. I haven’t actually tried to watch a movie yet so I’m curious how well that will work but all in all the update process was pretty frustrating. Given it took about 45 minutes to actually get through all that, I didn’t have any time for actual gaming. Maybe tomorrow…

I was getting my ‘04 Tundra’s emissions tested this morning and asked the operator, Anthony, a couple questions regarding his business.

I was mainly curious how much revenue an emissions testing busines could bring in and based on Anthony’s numbers it doesn’t sound too bad. Anthony’s location charges $20 per vehicle and he said he averages about 20 vehicles a day, sometimes 30 on Mondays. So $20 a vehicle, 20 vehicles a day, open 6 days a week and 50 weeks a year, comes out to about $120,000 a year. That’s a good bit more than I would have thought.

What made the conversation more interesting was that Anthony said his business had been declining given the recent economy and he was lucky to do 15 vehicles a day. How would the economy affect Anthony’s business? It’s state law in Georgia (and all states as far as I know) to get your vehicle’s emissions tested every year in order to renew your vehicle registration. If it’s truly the case that emissions testing is declining, that would mean we would see a corresponding decline in vehicle registrations. Is everyone suddenly claiming their second and third cars are agricultural vehicles and thus don’t require registration?

Last month Cobb County showed off the latest addition to their police force and the beginning of their military arsenal. The AJC reports the county recently refurbished a donated L.A.V. 300 that was used by the U.S. Army in Panama and turned it into a lean, mean crime-fighting machine.

Aside from being fun to drive around scaring fellow drivers on the road, what could the police force possibly need this for?

Cobb County's Tank