Congratulations, Jonathan, on your elevation to the CEO position. I hear your commitment to another ten years with Sun and match that commitment. Please accept my best wishes for your success and happiness.
Technorati Tags:
Sun Microsystems,
Jonathan Schwartz
I just read a great article in this month’s Reader’s Digest about a group of minority kids from a public high school on the “wrong side of the tracks” in Phoenix, AZ, who bested a well-funded team of engineering students from MIT to win first place in the 2004 Marine Advanced Technology Education Center’s ROV Competition. You can see some videos of the winning entry here.
We often hear of under-dog sports teams that beat all odds to win a championship. Remember “Hoosiers,” the great basketball movie about a small town team that won the Indiana state basketball championship? My kids got me the DVD for my recent birthday.
But I don’t remember hearing about these robot kids in the Arizona local press. We were probably all too pre-occupied with professional sports and other glamorous stuff.
I recommend that you read the article. It starts on page 114. My hat is off to these kids and their inspired teachers.
Technorati Tags: Carl Hayden,
Marine Advanced Technology Education Center
I’ve been incredibly busy at Sun and the home front, which is a good thing, but my blogging has suffered as a result. Kind of like us in Arizona. Until last Saturday, we endured over 140 days without any precipitation. We get precious little rain each year anyway – about 7 inches in a normal year. But since last March, we had received only 1 inch of rain. Ouch! Needless to say, we were praying for rain for our parched land.
Last Saturday, our prayers were answered, with over two inches of rain coming down in a steady 24 hour storm!
Now that we have some rain, I’d better get back to blogging!
I am trying out the newest release of Performancing for Firefox. I like the fact that it works hand in glove with the Firefox browser. Let’s see if it really publishes to my blog.
Well, the title didn’t post correctly. I do like the way technorati tags are added.
Technorati Tags: Firefox, Performancing
I have really enjoyed viewing the scenery photos Cuibel has posted on Flickr. Who knew that the Great Salt Lake could be so beautiful?
Tags: Flickr
Great Salt Lake
This is really weird. It speaks volumes about how New York commuters mind their own business.
Tags: New York Subway
No, Novell wasn’t founded by Ray Noorda.
Dennis Fairclough hired me as a junior engineer at Eyring Research Institute in April, 1977, just after my junior year at BYU. Dennis had returned to Utah to study for his PhD after working for a few years in Silicon Valley. We met while working as lab assistants in BYU’s Electrical Engineering department.
Dennis had a vision of using small computers networked together to perform big computing tasks. Eyring Research Institute had some government contracts from Hill Air Force Base that provided a sandbox for his ideas. Under his tutelage, some of us young EE and CS kids built the “ERI 1” computer using Texas Instruments 9900 16-bit microprocessors and “huge” 5 mbyte hard drives that were as big as a suitcase. Someplace in my stack of old photos I have a shot of the cardboard mockup I made of a chassis to house that computer.
Using that foundation, I built a color graphics display system to plot missile trajectories for a Minuteman Missile simulation system. It was very rudimentary by today’s standards, but the brass at Hill Air Force Base liked the flashing colors, and I got a modicum of notoriety for the project.
After my senior year at BYU, Dennis gave me a full-time offer to work at Eyring. However, he left Eyring only days after I had accepted his offer and turned down offers from HP, Burroughs and Fluke Technologies.
Despite my fondness for Dennis, I stayed with Eyring as he took his ideas to a couple of other small startups. Then came Novell.
Dennis and a few others secured a bit of funding to renew his quest. Novell would deliver a computer system with Z-80 clients running CPM and a hard drive server based on the Motorola 68000 processor. Dennis asked me to join his engineering team, but I declined because of the unknowns surrounding the little startup. Did I make a mistake? Who knows?
I remember the first time I saw the demo – in a little office just off the I-15 freeway in Orem, Utah. Kyle Powell had worked briefly for Eyring, but was now part of the Superset Group, three consultants Novell hired to write the software to make the little computers communicate. Novell didn’t have the cash to pay Kyle and his cohorts, so they received Novell stock. Little did they know how valuable that transaction would prove to be! Kyle invited us over to see the amazing things that could be done with networked computers — and to play a networked computer game they devised.
Well, the rest, as they say, is history. Novell failed as a hardware company. Ray Noorda arrived in 1983, I think, to lead the company to prominence. Dennis is now a professor of Computer Science at Utah Valley State College, and I’m an Identity Management guy in Arizona. We haven’t talked in years. But I’ll always be indebted to the real founder of Novell for giving me an early chance in my career and providing some great stories to tell.
Tags: Novell
Dennis Fairclough
Ray Noorda
Kyle Powell
Eyring
Insightful article about the excruciating level of preparation behind Steve Jobs’ seemingly effortless “keynotes.”
Steve’s attitude is aptly summarized, “he has little or no patience for anything but excellence from himself or others.”
Tags: Steve Jobs
Apple
Rohan Pinto posted a thought-provoking article about the relative merits of Google and Yahoo in the race for Web 2.0 dominance.
I took a quick inventory of how I used the two services:
I use Google for search, maps, RSS news feeds and email (infrequently).
I use Yahoo for Flickr (photo posting and RSS feeds), instant messaging, groups and email (rarely).
I guess it’s about a standoff for me.
One ironic thing, however. If you Google SUNW, Yahoo Finance is the first item on the list.
Tags: Google
Yahoo
Web 2.0
Sun Microsystems
I got a kick out of this cartoon on the FastTrac Grovesite.
FastTrac is a “practical, hands-on business development program designed to help entrepreneurs hone the skills needed to create, manage and grow a successful business.” FastTrac is sponsored and coordinated in Arizona by Stealthmode Partners, “an advocate and accelerator for entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs,” led by Francine Hardaway and Ed Nusbaum, two outstanding contributors to the Arizona entrepreneurial community.
