Jumping Ship to JumpBox

In two weeks I'll be walking away from my role with Apriva to join friends and former co-workers at JumpBox. Why would I leave a cushy job at which I do mindlessly simple work and leap head-first into the seemingly unending tempest that is a startup? The simple answer is that I'd prefer to be challenged and happy rather than bored and miserable. Some people thrive in startup environments while others are wholly consumed by them. I fall into the former group.

The more complex answer is that, for quite a while now, I've believed that one of the major problems in computing is its gross inefficiency. Data centers full of servers each exposing different facilities and operating at about 90% idle is an incredible waste of space, energy, time, and resources. Furthermore, the thousands of clients connecting to those servers are almost guaranteed to be operating at 90% idle as well, thus compounding the problem of wasted CPU cycles.

The answer to the server-side dilemma, as is becoming increasingly more obvious, is virtualization. The guys at JumpBox have understood this for a while, and instead of embarking on the route of providing a virtualization platform, they've instead sought to provide a comprehensive set of virtualized appliances. They do the busywork of installing and configuring solutions for you, providing them as portable virtual machine images that you need only double-click to launch. Anyone who's ever installed and configured Trac or MovableType will understand the inherent value of this service.

That said, there's more to solving the overall inefficiency problem than simply virtualizing the server side of the computing process, and it is my hope that my joining JumpBox will in some way assist in identifying and developing solutions.

Technorati Tags: Careers, Life, Virtualization, Technology

Slashdot | Dealing With Dialup

Slashdot | Dealing With Dialup: Some dumb-ass on Slashdot is wondering how to get faster internet access for his rich-ass parents who live on Cape Cod. One thing he suggested was this:

I also suggested they talk with their senators and local political reps.

Since when is it your god-given right as an American to have high-speed internet access, so much so that you'd feel it appropriate to put pressure on your senators when they have other, more important shit to take care of? You know, shit like a failing economy and a war that has contributed to the failure of that economy?

Seriously, what the hell is wrong with Americans? We live in this massive, United-States-sized vacuum of entitlement and irrationality that disgusts many of the people living within it, and undoubtedly the entirety of the rest of the world. Yet, we believe that the rest of the world is simply 'jealous' and hateful of our 'freedom' rather than simply reacting to our obliviousness and arrogance.

Over one hundred twenty thousand people in Myanmar just died, with up to one hundred thousand more possibly dying due to secondary illness. Over ten thousand have died in the Chinese earthquake. About a half million Iraqis have died as a result of our invasion. There is horrible genocide occurring throughout Africa and Asia. Yet we Americans, people of the richest country in the world, would rather do nothing and sit in our comfy little Victorians worried about whether or not we can download photos of our spoiled and entitled brat grandkids in under ten seconds.

What the fuck, man?!

Technorati Tags: Democracy, Myanmar, Technology, United States of America