Quite possibly. We have a toxic mixture of overspending, insufficient revenue to cover the spending, and a borrowing limit. Several ideas have been floated over the last few weeks, including minting a $1T USD coin and depositing in the federal reserve. Thats $1012 USD folks. This is sort of like quantitative easing, aka printing more money, but far far worse. Anyone whom has ever been early into a startup and watched the value of their options get diluted with each new capital infusion knows exactly what this is.

Remember this? Can we all just finally admit that not only isn’t it secure, but you can drive a semi truck through its security holes? Unfortunately, many of the kvm-over-ip stacks still use it. So you have these embedded web services things to talk to your java client, your horrifically insecure java client, to ship bytes out over the network to give you console. Can we all start demanding an end to these?

Long backstory which boils down to this: Every time a customer tries to pay with AMEX, we have to deal with a broken/borked verification system. None of our other credit card companies have issues, just AMEX. This time, they called up and questioned we were legitimate. Ok. They really did. I am going to start recording my calls with them, you know, for quality, and entertainment, purposes. After 5 minutes of dealing with the rep who called us, I asked for her manager.

Our cluster/cloud OS environment now has modules for CentOS 6.x and Ubuntu 12.04. The latter is the LTS system. We’ve got some other tools/bits to setup for this, including working to see if we can build an ARM based PXE booting stack. We are working on making a number of cluster/cloud file system setups as absolutely painless as possible. More later.

This has been making the rounds on Hacker News, Slashdot and others. The author’s central thesis is that Javascript has become something akin to the swiss army knife of cool programming, though its missing bits. He then compares this to Perl. He notes: Hot is subjective, and in a very real sense, just last year, a teenager in his bedroom not only built a very cool tool, and company, but he sold it.

I’ve written about this before, about 6 months ago. Basically, the Encanto supercomputer in New Mexico, is being disassembled. The parts appear to be headed to universities in New Mexico, so its not a complete loss, but they will still have to pay for maintenance and power/cooling. What I had written before may be summarized as “there are no silver bullets” to economic growth and prosperity. There are no magic stimuli that automatically return profits atop principal for investment purposes.

For years, we’ve been hearing how this year (for all values of this year) is the year 10GbE takes off. I’ve commented on this a number of times, from the context of 10GbE breaking out in clusters, 10GbE killing off infiniband, etc. Looking back, these comments extend 6+ years into the past. The point I have always argued as being the most important, has been cost per port. Well, the technical press noted this today.

Ok, I didn’t quite see this one coming. Really. Honestly, I’ve not paid much attention to Imation in a fairly long time. I do remember tape drives and systems attached to parallel ports from them. I might even have one in my basement somewhere. Nexsan is an array vendor. For those not in the know, the array business is in a slow motion collapse, dumb arrays and associated storage targets aren’t a growth area.

Dave Barry in his usual fine form … summarizes our year. The one take away should be … WHAP

There is now a Mac Mini on my desk. It is named neutrino. It is light. This isn’t getting rid of my Linux machine(s) by any stretch. And now having used neutrino for a day and change now, I note a few things. This list might make some howl in derision, but these are my observations. The default fonts and font setup on Mountain Lion is execrable. I mean, really really horrible.