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gnat (29)
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Super-seekrit Apple meeting
This is the first Unix guru briefing they did, but I believe they're planning more. They brought out a variety of technical and marketing people. We, the Unix gurus, got the most benefit from the technical people. One of the goals of the organizers was also to expose the marketing folks to us, so they know what matters to us (e.g., dual power supplies on the Xserve and multi-button mice).
Of the technical talks, the two that really stood out were the hardware profiling demo of CHUD, and the Rendezvous talk by Stuart Cheshire (which was repeated at OS X Con--watch for mp3s and Quicktime of that talk). Rendezvous is amazing. So elegant (built on existing DNS--no proprietary extensions at all!) and so powerful.
The most success, though, was in simply establishing contact. I now have a lot more inside access than I did before, and if I have a question or problem then I'm closer to the people who can solve it.
Not that networking was the only benefit. We all came away with a greater understanding of Apple and more faith in where they're going. And boy, were we a tough audience! You should have heard Brian and Paul pushing hard for dual power supplies in the Xserve. Definitely the wrong crowd for the marketing guy to try his "well, most people who say they want dual power supplies don't actually have the infrastructure to support them correctly" line on! And the two-button mouse discussion was painful to watch
Anyway, that's where my Monday went. Instead of watching Brian and Dan, I was insinuating myself into the belly of the beast. Well, we may not have made it all the way to the belly, but the esophagus of the beast was still pretty cool.
--Nat
--Larry Wall in stab.c from the perl source code
dual power supplies (Score:2)
The marketing guy, sadly, does have a point about customers not having the infrastructure to use dual power supplies as they are intended. I've been in a lot of data centers and countless numbers of them had both power supplies plugged into the same PDU and often the same power strip. This is not to say that anything in a server class box shouldn't have them but they are 90% of the time used improperly. There's always a lot of handwaving about redundancy but it's a really rare system that actually has it. M
Re:dual power supplies (Score:2)
--Nat