The title above is a play on the famous Bill Gates memo, The Internet Tidal Wave, written in May, 1995. Gates, on one of his reading weeks, realized that the Internet was the future of IT and Microsoft, through Gates’s own miscalculation, was then barely part of that future. So he wrote the memo, turned the company around, built Internet Explorer, and changed the course of business history. That’s how people tend to read the memo, as a snapshot of technical brilliance and ambition. But the inspiration for the Gates memo was another document, The Final Days of Autodesk, written in 1991 by Autodesk CEO John Walker. Walker’s memo was not about how the future could be saved, but about how seemingly invincible market advantages could be quickly lost. If Autodesk, the Computer Aided Design pioneer, was ever going to die, this was how Walker figured it would happen. And Gates believed him. Now it’s about to happen again. Amazon Web Services — the first and still largest public computing cloud — is 11 years old, which is old enough for there not only to be some clear cloud computing winners (AWS, Microsoft Azure and a bunch of startups) but some obvious losers, too. This rising tide is not raising all ships. That’s why it’s time for the Cloud Computing Tidal Wave.
In the world of computing, almost every platform transition creates a new market giant. Old companies generally die to make way for new companies. Univac and Burroughs were parts of the mainframe era that didn’t survive, replaced by minicomputers from companies like Digital, Data General and Prime. Those companies in turn gave way to personal computing pioneers like Apple, Compaq, and Microsoft. Only IBM seemed to remain a constant from one hardware generation to the next. But now we’re in the mobile era and IBM has almost no presence there, so the platform transition rule may still hold true.
The new thing’s the cloud and that wave will have its new champions, too, as well as losers. We’ve tended to focus our attention on providers of cloud hosting services, but the cloud is much more than data centers and servers. It’s applications and services, too, and hardly any of those are coming from old guard companies.
First among the losers in cloud computing are the venerable mainframes that survive today mainly because Big Business still relies on a lot of old COBOL code — code too big to be comfortable on a PC or even a minicomputer. But the cloud scales infinitely and COBOL is heading there and it can only hurt mainframe computer makers.
Suffering, too are the personal computer makers. As processing moves from the desktop to the cloud, desktops get punier, cheaper, and less profitable. There’s money to be made in the initial transformation from desktop to cloud, but what happens when all those desktops have been replaced? For the most part they won’t need to be upgraded… ever. The three-year PC upgrade cycle for businesses is already being disrupted. I am writing this column on a mid-2010 Apple MacBook Pro — a seven year old computer I have no plans to replace because it works just fine, thanks to the boost it gets from cloud services.
In every platform transition there are companies that probably can’t make the jump. One of those that stands out today especially because it has been in the news is Citrix Systems, the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) pioneer. VDI is, on first glance, a lot like the cloud. Citrix even refers to itself as a “cloud services company.” But VDI isn’t the cloud. VDI allows businesses to make one PC serve several users or one server help dozens or hundreds. But in cloud computing even the PC is virtual, which is very different.
Old market leaders like Citrix are making too much profit in legacy VDI contracts to really switch to the cloud. The company can’t bring itself to make obsolete its own products and so that’s left to some other company — in the case of Citrix the likely vanquisher is a Silicon Valley startup called Frame, which has been moving companies like Adobe, Autodesk, HP, and Siemens to the cloud.
Citrix, which hired Goldman Sachs earlier this year to help it find a buyer, would probably love to sell itself to Microsoft, but how likely is that given Microsoft’s absolute commitment to the cloud? Not very.
I remember working on a Citrix transition at Agilent Technologies/HP. It didn’t go well. The basic design was flawed from the start. Cloud computing will be the same way. A lot of people trying to shoehorn in concepts that just will not fit. Yet. I don’t see the desktop going away for extreme content creators (VR, code development) but I do see the PC market going away for just about everyone else. The cloud could be used to replace a lot of PC functions in business.
The only downside is that when you lose your internet, you are toast. Chromebooks anyone?
Money is historically an emergent market phenomenon establishing a commodity money, but nearly all contemporary money systems are based on fiat money.[4] Fiat money, like any check or note of debt, is without use value as a physical commodity. It derives its value by being declared by a government to be legal tender; that is, it must be accepted as a form of payment within the boundaries of the country, for “all debts, public and private”.[6][dead link]
The money supply of a country consists of currency (banknotes and coins) and, depending on the particular definition used, one or more types of bank money (the balances held in checking accounts, savings accounts, and other types of bank accounts). Bank money, which consists only of records (mostly computerized in modern banking), forms by far the largest part of broad money in developed countries.[7][8][9]
Wikipedia can’t be trusted to tell the truth about power relations. Money’s value comes not from that declaration, but from enforced debts (i.e. taxes) that can be paid with that money. Without the pull force of taxes, there is literally no reason to value money and no difference between scrip and scrap, and indeed, “your money’s no good here” would be heard much more frequently.
Having control over one’s personal data is pretty fundamental. I can see with burgeoning cloud usefulness or just popularity, there will be a demand for devices that curate a local copy of all our cloud data. This would enable us to cancel one service and simply start another one then sync, contolling an urge toward depency and lock-in This local device, a 1TB SSD-based device at the small end, or a multi-TB NAS at the other, would basically mirror everything (or some subset).
There could also be a parallel market to mirror your mirror — in another cloud. My Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Dropbox clouds are all different. I want a master that is a superset of all of them. And it would sync with your new full-service cloud account (amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, etc.) lightning fast.
A user-controlled mirror-cloud subset, with basic management services, seems feasible now. The pricepoint of rentable storage is the bottleneck to this being practical for full mirroring now. A fuller mirror on a local device, on the other hand, would be feasible now.
I’m not convinced that the mainframe will be replaced by the cloud. Systems appear to be tied less to the mainframe’s compute power (old mainframes, after all, were not that powerful), and more to the ecosystem. If COBOL code existed in a vacuum, moving it wouldn’t be all that difficult – but it doesn’t. Many of the systems written in COBOL depend on special data structures that are very different from file systems found on Mac/Windows/Linux desktops, and the pain of migrating that data is what will keep the mainframe (regrettably) around.
Advocates claim that cloud computing allows companies to avoid up-front infrastructure costs (e.g., purchasing servers). As well, it enables organizations to focus on their core businesses instead of spending time and money on computer infrastructure.[4] Proponents also claim that cloud computing allows enterprises to get their applications up and running faster, with improved manageability and less maintenance, and enables Information technology (IT) teams to more rapidly adjust resources to meet fluctuating and unpredictable business demand.[4][5][6] Cloud providers typically use a “pay as you go” model. This will lead to unexpectedly high charges if administrators do not adapt to the cloud pricing model.[7]
It technically feasible:
https://medium.com/aws-enterprise-collection/yes-you-can-migrate-your-mainframe-to-the-cloud-92df0277d1ac
but companies are reluctant to spend money migrating something to somewhere else it they just end up with the same thing as its viewed as spending money for nothing.
Even though mainframes are expensive for large applications the cost per transaction can be very low. Main problem with mainframes compared to modern applications is lack of agility. i.e. expensive and time-consuming to modify an application.
It’s not necessarily that mainframes will go to the cloud…but that they are in essence being virtualized, much like they were timeshared back in the ’60’s and ’70’s…
I used to work fpr Wipro’s datacenter division, and the biggest profit maker was shared mainframe services. Wipro would buy these huge z Series boxes, then cram dozens of customers in partitions.
As companies move their systems to cloud-based distributed systems, the mainframes will slowly die off, but for now they are happy to simply let someone else take care of the maintenance.
Bob, when did your heart stop functioning? You advertise a product for children and them don’t even bother to acknowledge them when you seemingly failed to deliver.
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Just put them out of their misery and say something! We know you are not dead (from the continual blog posts), so show a morsel of compassion, login to the KS site, and post a damn comment that it’s all over! Fuck you very much!
From the Kickstarter site:
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“Some projects won’t go as planned. Even with a creator’s best efforts, a project may not work out the way everyone hopes. Kickstarter creators have a remarkable track record, but nothing’s guaranteed. Keep this in mind when you back a project.” Source: https://www.kickstarter.com/trust
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It didn’t work out, like thousands of other things in this world. So what? You’ve never before spent money you wished you hadn’t nor have you ever made a commitment you couldn’t keep?
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Get over it. Move on.
@Am Nobody – I agree that KS projects aren’t guaranteed but this one started with a promise (from what we believed was a trustworthy person) that the project was complete except for custom cases. Since then there have been several postings that “everything is now done and we will ship in a couple of weeks”. since the latest posting on how everything is done, we haven’t heard anything. What we have seen is the execution of a con. That is why we will not stop.
If you want revenge so badly, go to SEC with copies of Bob’s old posts praising various companies. They probably match up with his share purchases. Like when he said Blockbuster would make IPods the media for movies.
“It didn’t work out, like thousands of other things in this world. So what? You’ve never before spent money you wished you hadn’t nor have you ever made a commitment you couldn’t keep?”
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“Get over it. Move on.”
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I’ve posted excerpts from comments I’ve made previously in order to save myself some typing, but long story short, figure out the details of what’s going on before you shoot your mouth off. I’ve backed a lot of projects (and ran one myself) so I am well aware of the risks.
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So what makes the Mineserver project different? It was backed by a known figure who I, and many others, assumed was honorable, honest, and reputable. Turns out he isn’t. But it’s not just about not getting a Mineserver, it’s about what we really paid for — to be part of the project. To go along on the ride, vicariously, of bringing a product like the mineserver to fruition. That’s the real reason people don’t just wait until something shows up on Amazon to buy it. But that didn’t happen hear. All along, even when he *was* communicating, Bob wasn’t fully transparent. And then he just. stopped. communicating.
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Ponder that for a moment — someone who built their career on their ability to communicate couldn’t even be bothered to post the occasional update or even just say “It’s over, it’s not happening. Sorry.”
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So, yeah, the backers are pissed.
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But perhaps more importantly, at least in my mind, because Cringely *IS* known, it seems to me that I have a civic duty to my fellow man to do whatever I can to make sure Cringely doesn’t scam anyone else.
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And now, from previous comments:
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First, the details:
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The Cringely boys Kickstart Mineserver™, a $99 Minecraft server — https://www.cringely.com/2015/09/29/the-cringely-boys-kickstart-mineserver-a-99-minecraft-server/
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Last chance to get a Mineserver™ for Christmas! — https://www.cringely.com/2015/10/19/last-chance-to-get-a-mineserver-for-christmas/
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The original Kickstarter campaign — https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/583591444/mineservertm-a-99-home-minecraft-server/
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[another commentor wrote:] “Sometime, Kickstarter items fail to achieve their objective. I’ve given to many.”
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This is true and, had Cringely been communicative all along, been up front about the problems, and finally admitted “I’m sorry folks, but it’s not working out and I’ve spent all the money and I can’t go any further,” most of the backers would have been okay with it. I’ve backed somewhere over 120 projects that were funded. Some of them I selected “no reward” simply because I just wanted to help them reach their goal. From a dance floor in a town I’ll likely never visit to helping a theatre go digital in the town where I spent my honeymoon to getting the Fagbug to Hawaii, there have indeed been times I just wanted to help with no need for any reward. And there have been times where the final product was not as had been hoped and, yet, because the creator was honest and forthright and included the backers in the process, no one really minded.
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If you feel he did something wrong then take him to court. If you can’t sue him then STFU.
Why don’t you STFU yourself and let the Mineserver customers express themselves. They’re being quite reasonable for a group that has collectively had over $30k ripped off from them by the proprietor of this very webpage.
“If you feel he did something wrong then take him to court. If you can’t sue him then STFU.”
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Interesting. Here’s the thing: I have three kids and between the three of them, each week they have 8 dance classes, 3 piano lessons, 2-3 choral rehearsals, 2-3 theatre rehearsals, baseball practice and game, and assorted fund-raisers, gatherings, and so on. And I have a full-time job. So to quote a popular internet meme, “Ain’t nobody got time for that.”
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And, yes, the amount of money involved isn’t enough for me to make time to go to court. At least, not yet.
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But it is enough that I spend some time while waiting for clients or computers writing up words of warning so that others are made aware of Crookely’s behaviour.
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As for STFU, why should I? Oh, is it inconveniencing you? Is it uncomfortable for you to read about your hero’s failings? Well, bummer.
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Sorry, but if I can prevent even one person from losing any more money to Crookely, then it’s worth it to me to inconvenience you. And, if you’re at all a decent person, it would be worth it to you as well.
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“So what makes the Mineserver project different? It was backed by a known figure who I, and many others, assumed was honorable, honest, and reputable.”
Based on what you said above, just chalk it up to a learning experience and be more cautious in your future investment endeavors with people who are “known figures.”
‘Based on what you said above, just chalk it up to a learning experience and be more cautious in your future investment endeavors with people who are “known figures.”’
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Yeah, that’s what I’m doing… except that I’m a really fast typist with spare bits of free time during the day so I’m doing my small part to ensure that Crookely doesn’t con anyone else.
One more thing…
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“have you ever made a commitment you couldn’t keep?”
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Of course I have. I screw up royally on a regular basis.
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Want to know the difference between Crookely and me? When I screw up, I own up to it. I go to the person I have wronged and I apologize. I accept responsibility. I try to make it right.
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I’ve yet to see Bob do anything like that.
In case you’re too lazy to find the link, here it is: Why hearts go to die
That Mike Bellew is NOT real probably. haha, wtf! Cringely, How about just an update? You haven’t updated since November 10, 2016. Get your act together, man!
Cool photo, brah.
Zombies have a complex literary heritage, with antecedents ranging from Richard Matheson and H. P. Lovecraft to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein drawing on European folklore of the undead. In 1932, Victor Halperin directed White Zombie, a horror film starring Bela Lugosi. Here zombies are depicted as mindless, unthinking henchmen under the spell of an evil magician. Zombies, often still using this voodoo-inspired rationale, were initially uncommon in cinema, but their appearances continued sporadically through the 1930s to the 1960s, with notable films including I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959).
Rob, don’t be the worst. We know you’re just Mike Bellew in disguise.
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P.S. Cringely is the WORST…FACT
While dinosaurs were ancestrally bipedal, many extinct groups included quadrupedal species, and some were able to shift between these stances. Elaborate display structures such as horns or crests are common to all dinosaur groups, and some extinct groups developed skeletal modifications such as bony armor and spines. While the dinosaurs’ modern-day surviving avian lineage (birds) are generally small due to the constraints of flight, many prehistoric dinosaurs (non-avian and avian) were large-bodied—the largest sauropod dinosaurs are estimated to have reached lengths of 39.7 meters (130 feet)[12] and heights of 18 meters (59 feet)[13] and were the largest land animals of all time. Still, the idea that non-avian dinosaurs were uniformly gigantic is a misconception based in part on preservation bias, as large, sturdy bones are more likely to last until they are fossilized. Many dinosaurs were quite small: Xixianykus, for example, was only about 50 cm (20 in) long.
Good article! A Nit: “The new thing’s the cloud…” That contraction seems awkward.
Maybe change it if you go to any print publication 🙂
[…] Cloud Computing […]
Bain is funding Frame, they also funded VMLogix, which made software for managing Virtual Machines in enterprise environments. VMLogix was acquired by Citrix about 6years back. Looks like Citrix never showed any interest in the software they acquired, which could have been easily modified to manage systems on the cloud.
“Big Business still relies on a lot of old COBOL code — code too big to be comfortable on a PC or even a minicomputer.”
Huh? Even the huge mainframes of the COBOL era have less resources than a typical current desktop PC.
I was actually going to post the same thing as a question. What has happened? The old main frames have far fewer resources than a modern PC, or so I thought. Is there something about COBOL that makes it inefficient in an era that demands large scale work? Does the code outstrip the resources? Would you mind expanding on this concept? I’m not in the industry; I’m a doctor who just likes reading what you write. A lot of times I get the picture, but this is one time that I don’t understand the issue.
Well, as someone who actually did some COBOL programming for a living way back in the 1980’s (Sheesh, it’s hard to believe the 80’s were so long ago!), and hasn’t been near a mainframe since then, I think it’s not an issue of mainframe computing resources vs. modern PC (or smaller) devices, I think it’s more a matter of the COBOL operational and support environment necessary for the applications to run not being available anywhere else BUT on those old mainframes.
Old-school COBOL high-volume transaction applications were developed and put into live production, and maintained, in an old-school mainframe architecture environment that included zillions of support systems, utilities, languages and other structures that are no longer (and possibly never were) available in a PC environment.
Remember the old days of looking thru the newspaper’s “classified ads” (how archaic!) and the required systems knowledge of job candidates they indicated? Your typical ad probably said something like “Must have 2+ years experience in MVS JCL, CICS DOSVS with ICCF, DB2, System/370, etc. etc. These are all part of the existing mainframe COBOL development/production/maintenance environment.
So it’s not just that COBOL programs won’t run a PC….it’s that these old school mainframe programs can only operate and be maintained in an old-school mainframe environment which is not available in today’s world of modern devices and systems. Kind of like trying to put a brand new set of modern wheels and tires on an old Model T…..just won’t work. So until these old solutions are re-written, or their existing environment can somehow be emulated and virtualized into the cloud, we’re stuck with the mainframes (i.e. the Model T’s). That’s my take on it, anyway.
absolutely correct. My first real job was as a COBOL programmer at the Social Security Administration in the 70’s. We thought the New World had finally arrived when you didn’t have to stand in line at the card-punch to change a line of code. You could see the program on a terminal and change it right there! Incredible!!!
I wonder if those same (batch) programs are still running, to process the nation’s Self-Employed Earnings Reports. Go ERBSB (Earnings Reports Balancing Systems Branch)!!
I often wondered whatever happened to all the COBOL programs that supposedly had to be revised because of the “year 2000” problem? Did they get fixed, were they just kluged somehow, or were they just abandoned? It seemed to be a big deal at the time.
They were fixed mostly. If they had not been, the world be in an even worse state than it is. Just imagine if the US Medicaid system had failed to handle payments for even a few months. Huge numbers of people that voted for Bush & trump would have died earlier. Whether you think that is a nice idea or not, it would be a major change.
They were indeed fixed. And not just COBOL applications. Everything on OS/390, VM, TPF at the time. As part of a Y2K action team and we patched all applications and system software and this started in earnest in 1997 or so up until the very night the ball dropped. Things that could not be fixed were either replaced or re-evaluated and retired prior to the drop dead date as well. People think Y2K was no big deal but it was a lot of time and work that made it smooth!
Thanks for the info guys. I always wondered what it would have been like to spend a few years on a crash project. (Ha, ha. Used the wrong email address for my original comment.)
Not to mention that those old mainframes were highly CISC based architectures. A lot could be done in one instruction. Whole new compilers would need to be created to make that COBOL work on modern architectures. Possibly build a mainframe emulator that could run the stuff natively on x86 architecture. Hmm, I wouldn’t doubt if that already exists.
“Even the huge mainframes of the COBOL era have less resources than a typical current desktop PC.”
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This is indeed true and there are versions of COBOL running on PCs. I’ve been wrangling COBOL code for 35+ years and still do — I can afford to pay for my house in San Francisco *AND* lose money on the Mineserver scam by working in COBOL.
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But it’s not all about resources. COBOL was designed for business and, as such, is optomized for it. Languages written by techies, for techies, are great — technically. Business folk don’t care about that. They want reports that line up. They want fixed decimal places — generally speaking, business doesn’t use floating point numbers. They want infrastructure and batch jobs and reliability. You don’t get any of that with a PC running Java or PHP or what-have-you.
And, fwiw, in my day, “cloud computing” was called “timesharing.” It’s nothing new.
Also, where the heck is my MineServer?
So “Bob” has no dignity. And you’ve drained yours away on every post crying about it. Seems like neither of you are worthy of respect.
“So “Bob” has no dignity. And you’ve drained yours away on every post crying about it. Seems like neither of you are worthy of respect.”
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I would say that I’ve never asked for your (or anyone’s) respect, except that I did, in the very same way Bob did — via a kickstarter project. So how is my project different from Bob’s? I completed mine — sending every backer their rewards in a, for the most part, timely manner. Yes, I got the t-shirts went out later than they should have, but I kept in communication with my backers all through the process, even when doing so was painful (admitting my failures). In my defense, my life kinda fell apart in the middle of it, but even so, the t-shirts were only a month or so late.
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Compare that to the Mineserver project. It’s been nearly 6 months since he even *posted an update* to the project.
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I agree that Bob has no dignity and deserves no respect. As to whether or not I do, well, frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.
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Steven, good question. COBOL is just another language. However its users are not just another user. Financial institutions for instance. Wildly risky in throwing money around at times but paranoid in resisting change in infrastructure generally. Mainframes used to have a higher reliability and partitioning, virtual or otherwise. This capability is now evaporating with virtualisation becoming the norm anywhere except small devices. Interestingly there is a mainframe emulator. It has many IP restrictions on its’ use understandably. Conclusion: IP laws are preventing COBOL going into cloud, not technical issues.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_%28emulator%29 and https://www.hercules-390.org/.
“Suffering, too are the personal computer makers.” Such suffering! I should know! I’m suffering from the funds provided to me to produce Mineserver. Suffering from the vitriolic comments from former fans because I refuse to man up and admit defeat.
Tell you what Bob. You post a comment on the campaign so we don’t have to all start filing small claims. Let’s avoid further suffering, yes?
If people have a serious and legitimate complaint about about mineserver, I’m not sure that posting messages pretending to be another user on Bobs site is the best way to go about things.
“If people have a serious and legitimate complaint about about mineserver, I’m not sure that posting messages pretending to be another user on Bobs site is the best way to go about things.”
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Yes, I agree. People shouldn’t spoofing other users isn’t kosher. Fellow Mineserver victims: Don’t do that!
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But, you know what else isn’t kosher? Taking money from a bunch of people and not delivering.
Okay, no doubt the cloud is way above my head (pun intended). But I will always have a desktop computer for my stuff. Now if only Apple will update their iMacs.
Thanks for the good columns, Bob.
” Big Business still relies on a lot of old COBOL code — code too big to be comfortable on a PC or even a minicomputer.” Given the common memory sizes back in the mainframe days, a PC that you could buy today at Costco (8 cores, 16GB RAM, 1TB disk) could probably handle those old Cobol programs just fine.
@Jon – As Ken Dee mentioned above, the issue isn’t just the size of the code but the absence of the environment that is required for the code to execute. Another issue is that a large amount of the code that is being executed is sometime running in an emulator for an older version of hardware. Then some of that emulated code is running in an emulator of even older hardware (turtles all the way down).
I think you are starting to lose your touch. So many basic mistakes, kind of important ones too.
As a regular of the Friday lunchtime pizza parties in the late 80’s / early 90’s on Marinship in Sausalito (I used to work at Wordstar so knew lots of AD people) I can tell you John Walker wrote the last memo in 1986 and I bought my copy of The Autodek File in 1989, when it was first published. Walkers predictions about AD almost came to pass a few years later and AD only survived due to the multiple self inflicted wounds by their main opposition, Parametric. Most companies dont survive such a total catastrophe as the R13 fiasco. I know AD barely did.
As for Bill Gates and the internet. Dont you remember the first edition of “The Road Ahead”? The one where he was still rubbishing the internet as he had for the previous few years. The second edition was a hasty rewrite after Bill lost the battle inside MS. He never was very good at tech. MS did not develop IE. They hastily licensed Spyglass (who as usual got complete screwed over.. a tale in itself) and the last time I saw the complete IE source code, (IE6), it was still little more than the original Spyglass code with lots of hastily bolted on RFC (ish) additions. I know for a fact that the Mac IE team had little real understanding of how the code worked circa 2000. Just port monkeys. I found some basic functionality by casual inspection that the MS team were completely unaware of.
If you think Cloud (a.k.a Grid ) computing can replace typical mainframe infrastructure then you really dont understand what most of the legacy code on Big Iron really does. And why trying to use what is little more than timeshare computers will prove a suitable replacement. Its basically the hardware equivalent of out-sourcing your dev team to India. And we know just how well that worked out.
AWS is only “profitable” due to Amazons rather interesting interpretation of accounting principals. Think AOL and The Learning Company. Whose acquisition almost sunk Time Warner and Mattel.
Remember X terminals / thin client back in the mid 90’s. And we all remember how that played out. The Cloud is that sort of stupid. Just waiting for the first really serious cloud fiasco and the current fad will soon run its course. I’m not talking Azure going offline for hours due to someone forgetting to renew the SSL cert. I’m talk multi-hundred million real business losses. Blow a big whole in a 10Q size losses. Because some clueless CTO bought the hype and soon discovers the difference between four nines and seven nines. And how much the difference costs when everything falls apart. Which it always does.
With technology like computing history tells you all you need to know about the future. If you remember your history correctly. Its mostly changing form factor. Not functionality.
Doing this crap since 1975..
Holy cow — you should start a blog. I would read a hundred posts written in this style.
@jmc –
Sorry, but there are non-trivial errors in your rebuttal to Cringely’s historical account.
“John Walker wrote the last memo in 1986…” By this do you mean an item titled “The Last Memo”? I have a vague memory that there was such a thing, possibly in 1986 or earlier, but I can’t locate it just now. But perhaps you are thinking of Information Letter 13, dated November 5, 1986, in which John Walker announced his exit from the office of CEO. [If you seek a citation, see below.] This was not, however, the last thing he wrote, FSM knows.
BTW, I don’t think I ever noticed that that announcement was not only numbered 13, but was released on Guy Fawkes Day! What a sense of timing.
But anyway, Cringely’s date for the famous memo is right. (Nitpick: the title of the significant paper was _The Final Days_ with no “of Autodesk”). It is dated April 1, 1991 and may be found at
https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/chapter2_86.html . Other items mentioned here, like IL #13, can be tracked down at the fourmilab address. Oh, and the reference to John as CEO is a little misleading, as he had not held the title since 5 years before; see above.
The date of the paper as first distributed was some days before April 1; the story of its unplanned early general release is in the introductory note. To that account I would only make a small shift of emphasis: That afternoon, I read my (authorized) copy of the letter and pondered it, coming to the opinion, as a minimum, that “This will stir up a lot of shit.” Then I headed for the exit to go home; and when I got to the lobby, I found a knot of people (3 or 4 knots, I think) discussing the matter with great animation. That’s the kind of reception it got, within an hour or two.
How strong the effect of IL #14 was on Gates four years later, I don’t really know, not having inside info about Microsoft; but in ’91 it was soon known that Gates had obtained a copy and circulated copies for his henchmen to read. As to the Internet, no one who was in the industry at the time failed to know that Microsoft was fighting the Internet in 94-95, and then did a sudden about-face, which it carried out with great determination and in a Microsoft style. Whether that was after “Bill lost the battle inside MS” or the result of an epiphany and decisive action on the part of Gates, I leave to people with much more knowledge of Inside Redmond.
Porlock Junior,
Thanks for the excellent link. I now know I had a very incomplete understanding of the history of John Walker.
This is perhaps the most important website I’ve seen in years.
This reinforces my understanding that original source material is almost always significantly more useful then second party interpretations.
Best Regards
Cringely has ALWAYS written like someone who was told something, but never really understood it. Readers have been correcting his nonsense statements for years.
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One quibble with your post… CTOs are not clueless. They are self serving. Management gets their bonuses for cost cutting mostly. Accidents happening because of five 9s or some other mistake will be blamed on the vendor.
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Few people understand. Management runs companies FOR MANAGEMENT. The tripe about shareholders coming first is laughable.
NASA still uses punch cards.
According to teh Google, NASA shut down its last mainframe in 2012. It was a zSeries, so it did not user punchcards.
https://www.cnet.com/news/end-of-an-era-nasa-shuts-down-its-last-mainframe/
No it still uses punch cards. It’s not the hardware, but the legacy software. The input files have to be formatted like punch cards.
The interesting thing about the Cloud Computing Tidal Wave is that it is a low-margin business from day one. Normally in past transformations from mainframe to minicomputer to PC the early companies earned big fat margins. Early PC were thousands of dollars and microsoft and apple were very profitable from day one.
In the cloud computing era AWS the leading cloud provider has margins of less than 10% of revenue and all the big cloud providers are investing billions each year in infrastructure. This is only possible because increase rates are so low.
This why IBM despite moving into the cloud are not earning big profits in the cloud so they have to do share buybacks to keep the share price up.
Also the public cloud vendors are consolidating IT spending. Instead of the spend going to a number of different companies that provide network kit, servers etc it all goes to the cloud provider.
AWS currently has revenue of £14b but still are growing at 50% a year so they are going to get to £100 billion in revenue its just a matter of time.
I’ve never been a real programmer, but it looks to me like Frame is nothing but a dumb terminal, with all the processing in the cloud, which we used to call a mainframe. Have we come full circle?
Bob, how I miss a more regular analysis from you. Please never retire!
Our company has had Citrix for the last ten plus years. It’s the worst thing ever and they won’t let it go. It makes them feel like they are a big boy club.
But when I talk to people that work at Sonos, ESPN, and a very large data analysis company that deals with all the car makers, the feeling is universal. Everyone hates Citrix.
WIndows can already do everything Citrix can do (with Hyper-V, etc) out of the box and it’s an order of magnitude faster.
They have stolen tens of thousands of hours away from our productivity just on the login time alone, forget the hotfixes.
I hope they go under.
Big companies run even their web applications on mainframe. FedEx tracks packages on the Internet from their mainframe. The reliability is unparalleled and the site is always very fast. So, the problem isn’t the computer language, or the platform. Businesses thrive or die on two things processes and costs. IBM ran a test with another package tracking company running airline transaction rates with translations (data mapping for package translation) at 3000 messages a second on 3 mainframes. Airlines run their reservations at 5000 messages a second. Mainframes do a limited, pre-defined set of transactions extremely fast, faster than any other platform. Therein lies the rub, they are expensive to support, maintain, and not very flexible. I personally hate COBOL and swore to never program professionally in it because it is extremely rigid; every variable is global scope, and the layers upon layers of copy books make it very difficult to manage the namespace. The key problems in the IT business right now is that the expectations are way out of line with what can be done for what is being paid. Amazon can give you “cloud computing resources” to do your application and might be able to help with a “web store” (Amazon Marketplace). Otherwise, they are just selling you pre-packaged “computing resources” that you assemble into an application. Mainframe oriented companies built very rigid and expensive business processes around their mainframes, and business wants cheap and fast, and they compromise on “good”. That is why mainframes are dying, too expensive and too rigid. I think Amazon eventually loses as well, because “basic computing services” are a commodity business. The next revolution is in the Salesforce.com model where companies provide web-based computing services at a higher level. Cloud marketing, CRM, call center, “Commerce Cloud” (recent Demandware acquisition), and eventually business services, ECM, and even ERP. Provide common, but highly customizable web-based high level business services in the cloud, which provide value “above and beyond” commodity services like database, web servers, inventory and payments.
It looks like a very stupid comment but I have to ask. What is REALLY the difference between Cloud and main frames? If I replace the word mainframe with datacenter, then it is still the same, is it not? Of course, the technology is better, it is flexible and the interfaces are friendlier, but still it is the same concept in which the computing power is in some remote place and users are running instances of the software. Although the cloud does offers much much more for startups, at the end of the day, it is a financial transaction that replaces ownership if bits, to leasing. And it is still a single point of failure, right? When you look up the plans offered by frame that is mentioned here, you actually need to pay more money to manually backup your stuff. And what about offsite backup? It looks like the next thing is creation of private clouds, with a complete ownership. I guess that the big cloud providers will not like it because of the added value of getting to analyze the usage and the traffic in the data centers. This metadata on date, by itself, worth more that the actual revenue from cloud computing.
@Alex Finkelstein: Private clouds have been here for some time and some companies will never use a public cloud. Some because they are too protective of their “stuff”, some for regulatory reasons, other for bandwidth issues. The actual upcoming trend is for what is called a hybrid cloud. Most of the workloads are in a private cloud. Workloads are then transferred to the public cloud when excessive demands are present. The excess demand could be seasonal or project related. Actually, Amazon originally started their public cloud to use the capacity that they built up to handle their Christmas related demand that was unneeded most of the year.
Thanks, great clarification. Appreciated!
In addition to my previous comments about why cloud/modern computing archictecture won’t/can’t replace existing mainframe systems (unless the mainframe systems are all completely re-developed and re-deployed into the cloud which is an undertaking that would make Y2K…..remember that?……look like a game of checkers), I believe there are three other reasons the wide-scale move from local processing to cloud processing is not going to occur so quickly (at least in the U.S.):…….
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1) Bandwidth
2) Bandwidth
3) Bandwidth
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Our bandwidth is getting WORSE in the U.S., not better. Aging infrastructure, ISP throttling, potential government restrictions hanging over everyone’s head, ISP’s “playing games” with throughput, ever-increasing demand (including ever-increasing use of internet for telephone service) higher and higher resolution of content, ever-higher overpricing, more Netflix/Amazon/Hulu on-line content use expanding at a logarythmic (sp) pace, etc. etc. are ALREADY way over-taxing our existing bandwidth capability.
Come on, man, just try playing some of the higher-resolution HD Youtube videos…..even at 90 Mbps download speed there is hesitation and buffering. Our internet infrastructure is over-loaded, especially for the non-technical general public who expects everything to work well, and quickly. And now you’re gonna add to that the wholesale move of multi-millions of locally process apps…..apps that frequently deliver high graphic (and other high-bandwidth use) content, to our internet bandwidth delivery structure?
(continued)….so that all the data that currently is processed on local machines and delivered to the user at 500Mhz internal bus speeds, or 5 GB/s USB 3.0 speeds (or even 480 mb/s USB 2.0 speeds) is now going to travel over the internet infrastructure to users who are lucky to have 50-100 mb/s bandwidth? (and most really don’t even get close to that in real thruput….have you ever looked at your ACTUAL speed while playing a Youtube video on your advertised 100-150 Mb/s connection from your ISP)? ….
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And even THAT’S assuming you have a wired connection to your router (which I always try to do if at all possible)….if you’re wireless, now you have even MORE bandwidth contention/thruput issues)…..
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Please tell me if I’m missing something technically, but I just don’t see how Cringely’s prediction is do-able before major improvements….the type that take years if not decades (just look at the condition of our roads!)to be completed ….occur.
It’s a different world now. Companies are so large, Apple as about 100 BILLION in cash on hand, and can hold on for a very long time and purchase companies that are on the cutting edge.
Citrix is such an interesting use case because, as a technical person, could never understand why MSFT didn’t just bundle this feature with windows or buy Citrix… there’s got to be a good story behind this.
These mega companies like IBM, MSFT will be around forever. There was a lot of talk on how Cisco was dead, esp. when key folks broke off to create Juniper.
The purchase and tech cycles of large companies are so long and the large tech titans have such hooks into them, that it’s hard to change , and I continually see the old guard sell sub standard solutions and companies buying because of the name.
Look, CAI is still kicking around. It’s great that these new companies are coming about. There will always be winners and losers, but the days of the huge mega companies falling into dust are gone. They are too big and have too much cash.
@Tim – MSFT has tried to kill Citrix multiple times. It is called Terminal Services:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831447(v=ws.11).aspx
Yep, and they did it the Microsoft Way: half-assed and cheap. That can work in the consumer market, where people don’t want to pay for anything. But the enterprise is willing to pay for performance, features, and reliability, and Terminal Services, while not horrible, doesn’t measure up to Citrix.
At the risk of offering the the quibble which proves the point, the Unisys Corporation — which still makes devices one might classify as “mainframes” — might take issue with your statement that “Univac and Burroughs were parts of the mainframe era that didn’t survive…”
Just for the record, someone on here decided to use my name for their posts. So not cool that a person would hide behind someone else’s identity instead of remaining anonymous or stepping forward.
Such is the internet now, I suppose.
Speaking of mainframes and cloud, what has happened at IBM in all these years where Cringely has predicted the company is set to fail? Is it possible that this was another con to sell his e-books, just like the Mineserver posts?
Cringely, I used to love reading you. But honestly this mineserver thing is just so degrading. Shame. I enjoyed and trusted your analysis but now the whole thing is just so tainted by the willful disregard/disengagement from the issue. Boo.
Bob,
Mike Bellews’ post about money (presumably written in relation to The Cloud) is worth a couple of weeks of stories. As, you write, technologies ‘bust’ out becoming the technologies of the future until many years later they ‘go’ bust themselves. We are currently at the tipping point for money going fully cashless as the world quickly heads into the next Great Depression.
The advent of Bitcoin is showing governments that a totally cashless society is possible using digits instead of paper notes and coins. When governments start to collapse from their debt burdens the likelihood of moving to a digital currency in the cloud is almost absolute. It will be difficult to hide from paying taxes plus the overhead costs of maintaining a cash society will be alleviated. It will also be a re-set point for governments.
All this is coming soon, so look up usdebtclock.org and see the need to write about it.
After a lot of futzing, I managed to get Coinbase to say that I’m the privileged owner of one bitcoin. Now all I can do is hope I get cryptolockered, without a back up, to see if it’s really true. 🙂
Back in the 70s I worked for a bank that had completely bought into the centralisation of its computing, with a massive (for then) data center in Chicago where it seemed that IBMs and Amdahls seemed to breed like rabbits. Individual PCs where absolutely forbidden. This led to any problems being fixable in one place, but they tended to be BIG problems and affected the whole world at once. Some of our competitors went to a more distributed structure and had many more problems but they tended to be less damaging and more easily fixed. It was a matter of debate as to who had got it right (each often thought the other had!).
The really gnarly stuff came with requirements that Country A specifically required something that Country B specifically forbade. And none of the action was within either country.
If there is a problem to arise from the growth in the cloud it would seem to mirror these concerns. Already the European data security requirements produce a headache that Google and AWS are finding difficult to manage. Rather like the internet itself, which looked so pure and beautiful in the 90s, but which is fragmented with rules and checks now, I suspect the cloud too is going to have to fragment into less economic units. And the first big collapse in operation or security will send many chasing back to more internally controlled processing at least for back up, which will have to be tested and maintained driving more cost.
So we’re back to client-server computing with clients trending dumber? Yes I agree with Bob that the cloud is where it’s at. For those of you left behind and not raptured to the cloud, there is a dwindling ecosystem for PCs that will continue to shrink and move it back towards its hobbyist roots, perhaps not an especially bad outcome.
Connectivity will be King in this new era. Ubiquitous semi-intelligent devices (e.g. Internet of Things) will all ultimately be slave to some server in the sky. We’ll need 5G. We’ll need improved batteries. Personal computers will go the way of the guitar, something to play on for fun, not to create a rock band startup with an eye for climbing the charts.
You’ve nailed it, John. The pendulum swings back and forth between local control and centralization. This is mostly drive by VENDORS.
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How do you sell more profitable servers instead of cheap, commodity PCs? Convince some rube (senior manager) that this will solve his problems.
@John, see earlier informed comments on bandwidth. Also given the new anti laws on selling users data/browsing and generalised snooping, one has to wonder how much commercial stuff is able to go into the Cloud/whatever because of the states that still have rules on use of citizens data. There are also firms which wish to control and secure their own IT. Lastly, where is this bandwidth coming from ? Why won’t it be swamped by more entertainment downloads as previous bandwidth improvements ?
IMNSHO, given the absolutely bloating mush masquerading as GUIs these days, I doubt that everything in a cloud backend can cope running over a distributed system. Businesses have time constraints for transactions to complete. Users are sick of slow loads on simple web pages because the programmers call on 5+ source sites to draw a screen. There will never be enough bandwidth.
Re: “There will never be enough bandwidth”. To that add “or processing power”.
For some parts of the industry this makes sense and will be taken up, but others like in the home and enthusiasts will want the machine to be standalone and not depend on a cloud service/connection.
Also reliability is key and there are too many things to fail still.
Summary of events for those in the dark regarding the MineServer Scandal.
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Submitted to a few news channels. Here’s hoping something comes of it and justice can be had (or at the very least, breaking this unnecessary silence): https://www.topix.com/forum/city/santa-rosa-ca/TUF94SVJC5M6I6I5Q/well-known-technology-journalist-mark-stephens-swindles
Your link redirects to: https://www.topix.com/forum/city/santa-rosa-ca which makes no mention of “stephens” or “cringely” .
Yea, I’m not sure why it only shows for me. I emailed a few news channels and newspapers too. Cringely’s blog won’t let me post it in full and flags it as spam. I think it’s too long so I’ll post in two parts:
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Hello, I wanted to share a story with you that is still ongoing and originated from Santa Rosa and could do with some further investigation. To give you some background, 388 people have seemingly been swindled out of $35,452 by a well-known technology journalist, Mark Stephens (who goes by the pseudonym, Robert X. Cringely) via a KickStarter campaign. I am not one of 388 individuals who backed this project but instead stumbled across this story via a friend who did and told me about it in passing.
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On the surface, this complaint just looks like a failed KickStarter, but if you explore Bob’s blog (www.Cringely.com), that is where the real meat of the matter starts to come to the surface and you see that it is so much more.
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Many people backed Bob’s project because he has decades of experience in the technology industry and has amassed quite a following. He used his reputation to lure 388 individuals into backing his project under the guise that his children were the real ones running the show (though minors cannot run a KickStarter campaign so it was entered under Bob’s wife’s name, Mary Alyce Neader Stephens. Additionally, other than the intro video, no one has ever heard from any of his kids). Bob stated on the campaign “virtually all development work is already done so risks are minimized. If we had cases we could start shipping tomorrow. – September 29, 2015”
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The project started out promising enough, but then updates started to come less frequently. On November 10, 2016 (over a year after the planned ship date), Bob stated that the product was essentially finished and “we’ll finally start shipping the week after Thanksgiving”. That was the last anyone heard from him via the KickStarter website.
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On Bob’s blog, he continued to post regularly so the backers took to the comments section demanding updates on their project. Bob eventually responded on January 10, 2017 and said “more on that in a few days.” but no response ever came. In fact, he stopped participating in the comments section on any of his posts to anyone from that point forward (he commented fairly regularly prior to this moment). This is the last anyone has ever heard from Bob in the comments section (4 months ago). He continues to post regularly to his blog, but has ceased participating in the comments.
Part 2:
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What’s more, there is a bit of a civil war happening between the backers of the KickStarter campaign and those loyal to Bob from decades of following his journalism. A few loyal followers have looked into this story and are starting to voice that something is not right and that others need to open their eyes, as Bob seemingly swindled $35,452 without any repercussions.
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Many have requested an update or refunds only to be met with silence. Additionally, many individuals have voiced complaints to KickStarter directly who has washed themselves of any liability and say it must be taken up with Cringely himself, who has not responded to any calls, emails, or messages. What’s more, he has a website up where he will still accept money for the MineServer external of the KickStarter (I am unsure whether this has amassed him any additional funds: http://mineserver.com/)
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I do not live locally, nor do most of the backers, but he lives locally to you all based on research done by the community:
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Robert Cringely
1934 Los Alamos Rd.
Santa Rosa CA 95409
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I am not monetarily invested in this story, but I am invested nonetheless simply to see justice or transparency about what is happening and why a well-respected journalist would throw his career away, which he worked 20+ years creating and amassing a following, over a few thousand dollars. What’s worse, is that the majority of the backers have stated if he simply came clean that the project failed, many would move on, and yet he remains silent and invisible dipping further in the eyes of those who read his blog week by week. Any light you can shed on this story would be helpful.
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Thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope you are able to help. My hope is that you, too, stand for justice, and can help blow the lid off of this.
Interesting. That is a bogus address. Google Maps shows an empty highway in the middle of Sugerloaf Ridge State Park.
@Scott Google Maps doesn’t know where it is, but according to most real estate websites it is actually a home:
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1.) Realtor
2.) Zillow
3.) Trulia
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Additionally, some google searches show Mary Alyce N Stephens as linked to the house, so it seems like it could be the real deal (alternatively, maybe they built their home under the ground and the google map search IS correct 😛 ). It’s likely just one of those houses in that general area since satellite view shows a few houses that stretch off that street further to the west of the Google Maps pin.
Looks like despite saying Los Alamitos Road, it’s actually up the road on Holst Ln (which later becomes Holst Rd): http://i.imgur.com/N9hdMBn.jpg.
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Google maps didn’t go up that way which is likely why it just shows a vague location and won’t let us do street view up there (shoot!). The same is true if you search for most of the Holst addresses (and there is not a 1934 Holst Ln/rd. It seems most of the numbers are associated to either Holst or Los Alamitos despite the road to the left saying Holst Ln).
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and for only $759k, you can even be Bob’s neighbor: 1946 Los Alamos Rd Santa Rosa, CA 95409
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Roadtrip, woooo! (/^o^)/
Notice that “1946” is also on the sign right underneath Cringely’s number (1934), and both are Los Alamitos Road addresses, yet you need to go up Holst to get to them (as seen on the map for that real estate listing). *solves the case that no one was investigating/cares about* Yussssss!
Hey Cringely! My kids would like to know where their MineServer is…what should I tell them?
I told my kids about a group of kids their age who had their own company selling MineServers. What am I supposed to say when they talk about it? I don’t want to say it was just a criminal enterprise.
@MikeN I wouldn’t be too hasty to pump the brakes on that. The Cringely boys aimed small, but if your kids aim for a larger target audience they could walk away with a considerable amount more with minimal work/repercussions. If you can make up a pseudonym to post under and then go into hiding, all the better! Lemme know how it pans out!
Just wondering if there’s been an update on the mine server Kickstarter?
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A grate idea would be to run the whole thing in the cloud and then use some sort of thin client like a raspberry Pi to connect.
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I’d pay 99 dollars for that!
How many years of cloud service would you expect for $99? That’s the whole point of avoiding the cloud, to reduce the cost below infinity. The other whole points being bandwidth and data cap restrictions, followed by the fourth whole point of reliable up time. Check out Uncensored posts above.
“Just wondering if there’s been an update on the mine server Kickstarter?”
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This page automatically calculates the time since the last update on the Kickstarter project: https://www.sinasohn.net/Mineserver/
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(Note: I won’t guarantee 100% accuracy of the calculations — I wrote it quickly and have no interest in doing lots of testing. Also, it probably won’t survive a Kickstarter redesign.)
I’m sad to say that last night after much debate and dragging our heels holding out for hope, we finally decided to rent a Minecraft server for our kids since Bob didn’t pull through for us. Now we’re stuck paying $25 per year, which ironically would still be less than Bob’s server at this point if we had done that from the onset.
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Thanks for nothing Bob, I wish nothing but the worst for you[r business]. You’ve wasted my time, as well as 387 others. If any of you are left feeling bad for Bob, go check out the KickStarter website, namely the comments section and look at the constant comments just asking for any update and what these people should tell their kids.
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I read a few of the comments here on Bob’s blog from people defending Bob and saying it’s KickStarter and to get over it, but I have to either think many of you either don’t know the full story or are just as heartless as Bob. You don’t steal $35k+ from kids, some of which likely put up some hard earned allowance, mine included. Ugh.
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I’ve wasted a year+ of promises to my kids, as well as $75, only to have to start paying an additional $25/per year now. Thanks for nothing. I’ll send you my bill once my kids tire of Minecraft (which will likely come far before you ever address anyone publicly, you coward!). Congratultions, you’ve just added another individual to your Blog who is going to continue to flood your comments section and make sure people know what a lousy human being you are. Yay for you.
Just a sidenote about the illustration: I reckon that’s a cloudburst, not a tidal wave.
Perhaps a few clouds over a calm marina. Nothing bursting or waving. 🙂
Cloud is just a way for the establishment to take computing control away from users and consolidate it back into the hands of a few large corporations – that way it can be controlled, censored, and – when they wish – shut down. The establishment demands complete control and by taking desktop power away from the masses, it will have that control once again. Cloud is all about undoing the personal computer revolution and the power it gave users – as well as re-consolidating the CONTROL of information.
Maybe we should all just go back to using WYSE dumb terminals.
There will be continued need for local computing as long as the volume of calculations impinges on human response times. Video Gamers who play MMO FPS or Role Playing games will continue to need local processing to compete effectively. People will continue to build high performance machines to get that competitive edge.
I also see problems more prosaically for companies trying to virtualize people’s desktops with limited success. Sure the admin clerk doesn’t notice the lack of performance when running MS Word….but developers and operations people sure do when tasks that took a few seconds are now taking many minutes to accomplish (and added together this lack of performance does have an impact over time that I think will be enormous).
Maybe there is some magic sauce that will get us there – but I can’t see it working for everything without an adjustment of people’s performance expectations en-mass.
My experience of cloud computing versus a desktop alternative is the power and accuracy of Google’s voice-to text system, which blows away the desktop versions of any voice to text application that I have tried. Also, not limited to one user’s voice and/or how — internet availability a given — and when it can be used.
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