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> People across the globe are doing something that is and feels truly different and new: they're thinking and arranging their entire stacks in terms of remote v
by uriel 17y ago
> People across the globe are doing something that is and feels truly different and new: they're thinking and arranging their entire stacks in terms of remote virtual machines.
Except that there had been people doing precisely that for ages. Seems that computer science is condemned to eternally reinvent wheels... sigh
- timf 17y agoWell I guess your definition of "precisely" must be much different than mine.
- slackenerny 17y agoWell, in the seventies IBM mainframes had the Control Program (CP) and what is now the z/VM hypervisor, so yes precisely the same paradigm was dominant in architecting systems back then.
- timf 17y agoSure, squint hard enough and it's the "precisely the same." Being in a virtualization/utility-computing job for the last five years, I've heard this kind of quip over and over and I agree with it on the surface but it's true only in the most general ways. I guess I was not specific enough above with simply saying "remote virtual machines." With a credit card almost anyone can rent thousands of machines programatically (with redundancy across multiple datacenters if you want) and be using them in minutes. And make them go away just as quickly. And construct the VMs themselves programatically or by hand on a laptop. And the people renting out the hardware don't need to even trust you. All of this is a new development that changes the way business is done. Like I said above, you can say everything is "just" logic gates plus electricity and claim nothing new ever happens (and I'll agree with you, too, I just won't think the conversation is going anywhere interesting).