Fred White wrote:
> On Monday, December 8, 2003, at 10:49 AM, Cornelius, Rosanne wrote:
>> This sounds like a security mess in the making.  Who becomes
>> responsible for breaches?  On the other hand, on a personal user
>> basis, maybe this is the next step beyond the "internet cafe."
>
> Also, who takes responsibility for physical breakdowns? Power
> blackouts. Bombings. Etc..
>
> How would you locate the responsible person(s)? How would you contact
> them? How would they identify the point(s) of failure? Who would fix
> the point(s) of failure?
>
>   Especially if communication systems are out.

I admit that it's tough to get past the marketspeak, but when I think about
it, virtualization has been going on for years.  IBM's VM (Virtual Machine)
has been around for decades and VMWare more recently.  Remote disc
mirroring, even on MPE, has been around for many years.  RAID systems have
been virtualizing storage for a long time too.  In the application area,
Java's VM and .NET's CLR both attempt to provide a virtual machine to run
applications on a many platforms.

There's been an insane move to centralization, IMHO, strictly for those
maintain systems and the risk of a central point of failure is much greater
(and service is worse).  Certainly, having systems all over the world is
difficult and probably more expensive to manage.  A good virtual system
would have the advantages of both a central and decentralized system:  fewer
systems to manage but redundancy to protect against communication
breakdowns, power failures or other nasty events.

I think it is evolution (Duane?).  It is looking more like the human body,
there are main functions but none are served by a single cell.  If you
remove parts, at least not too many at a time, the system still runs.  It
seems to me anyway, a natural conclusion.

Mark W.

* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *