I work for a major financial firm and our trading floor is a geek's wetdream.

Hundreds of traders, each with 4-6 monitors. Thousands of monitors and hardware across a large, open floor. Lots of buttons and widgets and graphs of all colors blinking and flashing.

It's kinda like this (but this isn't my firm): http://www.rodrickbrown.com/docs/images/ubsld1.jpg

Ever go on a picnic and see bees enter your soda can? Or see a trashcan buzzing with bees because people throw away their sweet, sugary beverages?

Santa is powered by cookies and milk. Bees are powered by honey... that's why they make it. Why not leave some "honey" out for them as a mid-flight snack?

My only question would be how this affects their ability to collect pollen and make honey back at the hive. If it allows them to pollinate more flowers, then hell, I'm all for it.

Deep pockets versus deeper pockets. Google's market cap is $125b and Microsoft's is $200b. Not long ago, the gap was larger. Falling PC sales have taken a bite out of Microsoft's revenue. They recently had their first down quarter in their history.

Microsoft still makes 4X the money Google does, though. In 2008, Microsoft earned $17b in net income compared to Google's $4b. Now, $4b is nothing to dismiss, especially when you're using and writing entirely free and open source software, but still, if Google has deep pockets, Microsoft's are even deeper.

See: MSFT and GOOG

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Google is probably the only company in the world that can generate excitement about a new OS, and making an open platform will encourage software developers to write apps for it. Hasn't that been one of the big complaints, the lack of software for Linux?

Many have tried taking down Microsoft. All have failed. Perhaps Google is finally the David to slay Microsoft's Goliath. Perhaps not. Exciting times, these are.

JRockit has all kinds of monitoring features, memory profilers, and other useful metrics built into the JRE, but you need a license key to unlock them. Core Java was always free. You pay for the value-added stuff.

They already own a chip maker. That bit of news was from last year. It shouldn't surprise you today that they plan on actually using the chipmaker they bought.

Why any country would voluntarily base their national security on imported, closed-source, non-free software is beyond my reasoning. If a country wants to control its infrastructure, it must use free software. Same goes for us computers users, too, of course, but the stakes are much higher for a sovereign nation.

VMWare licenses for ESX server cost something like $5k apiece. My company uses VMWare and I don't quite get it. We pay for expensive blade hardware ($8k each for those, not to mention the chasis), then we pay $5k per virtual server. And for what? Adding virtualization overhead to the runtime cost.

Meanwhile, in articles like this, people are showing how to run many applications and different versions within a single container. A single node in the cluster can run any application. There are always busy, keeping the hardware fully utilized. Isn't that the promise of utility computing? Rack up a bunch of cheaper (but not cheap/shoddy) servers and let your cluster go to town.

So, my question is, why are we (as an industry) embracing virtualization when apps written for a smart container (like OSGi) give the same benefits without all the additional co$t and runtime overhead?