hair cut this past

Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog JP Morgan's House The Future of IT ? All | General | Java Friday March 25, 2005 The Power - and Fallacy - of Convenience At one of Sun's Bay Area campuses, the buildings are oriented in a half circle. The cafeteria (and a couple other buildings) are dotted in the center of the half circle, which leaves our employees walking around a curved path to go from one end of the campus to the other. Despite the best intentions of the people who designed the campus, our folks etch straight paths in the lawns to save 10 or 20 paces they'd otherwise spend on the curved concrete path. And if you find yourself walking back and forth across campus, 10 or 20 paces multiplied by a few trips does, in fact, add up. Now there are two ways to look at the problem of dirt paths. One would be to put up a sign, and vector people to the concrete path. Just being honest, this would fail at Sun. The sign would end up being a blog topic (and likely hung as a prize in someone's office), and the paths would end up as mud pits. The more practical approach would be to pave the dirt walkway, and just admit that convenience is more powerful than elegant design. So that's exactly what we did, paved the paths. Don't fight convenience. Now that's not to suggest convenience always yields the right answer - a point made plain to me when I took my 2 year old to get his hair cut this past weekend. He wasn't particularly happy about the ordeal, and the only thing that seemed to calm him down was my sitting in the haircutter's chair with him on my lap. Midway through his haircut, the pleasant but frenzied woman cutting his hair asked if I'd like mine cut. Foolishly, thinking "how convenient!", I consented. I now face a minimum of 60 awkward hair days, and the tradeoff wasn't a good one. Live and learn. IT organizations, like walkers on our campuses or me at Kid Cuts face decisions based on convenience all the time. And they, like me, often live with the consequences (for typically far longer than 60 days). And in talking about the standardization of IT infrastructure, from grids to our Java Enterprise System to Solaris, I've seen a range of decisions in the face of convenience that are worth noting. A few examples: I was recently with a customer in the retail industry that continues to run its own private Linux distribution. The distro was developed a couple years ago, by a team that stepped off the beaten path for good reason (at the time) - that same development team now owns maintaining the distro, and making decisions about whether to replace it. As time has moved on, the customer has found no major ISV willing to certify to their private distro (without a check, that is - we declined the opportunity to port our Identity engines), and the team involved has found themselves buried with support obligations - driving more resource requirements while the parent company is looking to prune costs. I've seen a number of companies in this predicament (a few on Wall Street, btw). My view, in this instance, is the "private distro" mud path should be paved with a commercial product, on the assumption Sun, Red Hat or Microsoft will all outinvest and outsupport the dedicated team - and bring with them a bevy of already certified ISV's. But neither the team, nor their management, will hear any of this. "Our OS costs less than Solaris, it's free." Right, free like a puppy. Consider another example - a packaged goods company deploying a large scale enterprise application, that failed to resist the tempation to customize their implementation. Their customization looked convenient (the end users will get "exactly what they want") - but such customization actually ends up creating bad hair days for CIO's (and CFO's) that linger for years. As with the custom distro, a custom SAP or Siebel or Amdocs deployment is vastly more expensive to support than a "standard" off the shelf implementation. The short cut, even paved over with a "commercial off the shelf" product, stays pretty muddy. Now contrast this with true network service offerings. How much do you customize EBay? Or PayPal? Or MLB.com? Or your Cingular phone service? Not at all. Which brings me to our grid. As you'll recall, we announced $1/cpu-hr offering a few weeks ago. At this point, we've had the benefit of talking to a large spectrum of grid opportunities. And it's becoming obvious that there are two sets of customers. The first set is eager and willing to listen to the concept of using infrastructure as a service. They quickly move to architecture and security as areas of primary focus. Once there, we get on with finding immediate applications to leverage the grid, and we start a proof of concept. These folks understand the power of convenience - our grid offers our customers an ability to use our computers, our capital, our networking, our storage, our operating system, electricity, real estate, HVAC and administrative automation. Which is far more economically and strategically convenient than building your own grid. Especially when the time comes to walk away if plans change. Truly on demand, implies truly off demand. Now the next set of customers starts their interaction with us in a different way. "We build our own grids, we've done the math, and it costs us less than $1/cpu-hr." Now, I recognize this may not ingratiate Sun to a segment of the marketplace, but many of the folks who present that position are actually responsible for the creation, maintenance and support of in-house grids. The always unasked question in these dialogs is, "does your calculation include your salary?" More often than not, it doesn't. And even that's not the totality of the equation - if you add in the real estate costs of housing your own grid, the electricity costs to keep it running, the costs of securing it, insuring it, administering it - I could go on and on. These costs, from among those convinced they're operating at below $1/cpu-hr, are in every situation I've encountered, left off the tab. Now it's an emotional issue, no doubt. And it's one the entire industry will inevitably grapple with, as we move toward enterprise application service providers such as Hewitt/Exult, toward commercial service providers (like eBay's partner storefronts), toward pre-built (vs. custom built) operating systems or enterprise software - all in all, the standardization of IT will only truly occur when the IT industry makes it more convenient - and when enterprise IT culture evolves to recognize it. At home, we've all realized using network services like weather.com is by far more convenient than running a server farm. At work, I'd say we - the IT industry, and IT culture, have a ways to go. (2005-03-25 20:12:25.0) Permalink Wednesday March 23, 2005 Inaugural Podcast I've posted the aforementioned Churchill Club podcast here . This feels bizarrely primitive, but somehow momentous... like so much of what's happening on the net. (2005-03-23 22:53:59.0) Permalink Tuesday March 15, 2005 Scare Tactics in the World of Open Source Not too long ago, I was sitting on a panel at the Churchill Club moderated by John Markoff (of New York Times fame). Joining me on the panel were Charles Phillips, President of Oracle, and Dan Rosensweig, President of Yahoo!. The topics ranged from what it's like working with/around founders, how we balance work/life, leadership styles, etc. My favorite question of the evening (and I'm planning on making the session available on my inaugural podcast, stay tuned) related to the world of free and open source software. Markoff asked something to the effect, "I was just up at Microsoft, where Bill Gates equated open source with communism. How do you respond?" That same day, Dan had posted absolutely incredible performance at Yahoo!, delivering their first billion dollar year (in earnings, not revenue, earnings ). Which gave me the perfect backdrop for my answer. "Last I checked, Yahoo! was free. But with a billion in earnings, Dan, has anyone ever accused you of being a communist?" Dan said "Nope." In my view, the economics of free and open source software are identical to the economics of free search, TV, radio, checking accounts or mobile phones - the money's not in the access to the product, it's in the services and value delivered around the product. The vendors of those products have a huge interest in eliminating the divide between them and their customers, one typically based on price - as a means of enabling higher value opportunities. It's a basic concept, and if you've read this blog for any length of time, you know my views on how networks and subscriptions (whether to handsets, software updates, roadside emergency services or sell-side analyst reports), over the longer term, can change price and value equations for businesses that know how to exploit them. Now just this morning, like me, I'm sure you got an email entitled "Know the risk. Compare the protection." from Microsoft. In it was embedded a link to an independent analyst's report, provided by the Yankee Group - which I've provided here . I'd encourage you to read this for a view on how "open source" is misunderstood. Reading the report, you get a sense that open source is somehow irresponsible compared to Microsoft's products or approach. And moreover, that customers have to choose - open source, or safety. Nothing could be farther from the truth - any more than "free checking" is more dangerous than paid checking, or free TV is more dangerous than cable. Solaris is being open sourced, under an OSI-approved open source license, and will be indemnified by Sun - customers do not have to succumb to the view that using open source is somehow less safe than closed source. The critical point missed in the report is a simple one: the license or price under which a product is released to the world is entirely orthogonal to the indemnity for that product provided by its supplier - and the view that open source software is somehow more dangerous than closed source is just as misinformed as the view that customers don't need indemnity ("Since IBM is not a Linux distributor, it does not offer direct indemnification," say IBM execs.) What I've seen customers wanting is open source, open standards, and an open dialog with vendors willing to stand behind their products. They've had enough duplicity and scare tactics. __________________ ps. stay tuned for news on Java's open source accessibility, too... (2005-03-15 21:27:03.0) Permalink Saturday March 12, 2005 The Economies of Scale - The Scale in Economy One of my best friends in life started his professional career at Carnegie Mellon University, where for a while he worked (back in the 80's) on the challenges surrounding parallel computing. Back then, it was a relatively esoteric field, in which one of the challenges was finding problems that lent themselves to parallel approaches, and another was trying to build programming models that made those problems tractable. Spooling forward about 20 years (yipes), during the recent Boston Red Sox victory, MLB.com served 100,000,000 page views to 10,000,000 unique visitors. Each doing roughly the same thing. Talk about massive parallelism, it's in front of our eyes. The internet itself has yielded the world's largest parallel applications - from instant messaging, to bidding on beanie babies. Now Sun has long been an investor in parallelism. First, we built systems capable of managing tremendous load (we're honored to supply the infrastructure under America's baseball addiction); and as importantly, we built an operating system that knew how to manage multiple threads of execution. Managing parallel "threads," historically one per CPU, is key to scalability - simply put, the more work you've got to do, the more CPU's you throw at the problem. And having an operating system that knows how to run efficiently across 100's of cpu's is a handy thing, at the core of Solaris's reputation for "scalability." Standing on the shoulders of giants, the Java platform was built with parallelism in mind, too. Now oddly enough, despite the crises introduced when businesses have insufficient capacity, more often, businesses have too much capacity - average utilization in a datacenter is something like 15%. Which means most businesses waste enormous sums of the money on systems (not to mention the concomitant waste in power to keep dormant systems on, cooled and housed). Mainframes, historically, had very high utilization. Why? They were (and are) incredibly expensive, but they also have a feature called "logical partitioning" (LPARs) which allows big systems to be divided into many smaller mainframes. Until this year, no non-mainframe operating system offered logical partitioning. (Paraphrasing Gilder, "you waste what's cheap." Jonathan's corollary, "Until you build your whole datacenter out of it.") That is, until a few weeks ago. One of the key features in Solaris 10 is just this - " containers " are logical partitions that allow a single computer to behave like an unlimited number of smaller systems, with little/no overhead. Reboot a partition in 3 seconds, keep disparate system stacks on the same computer, assign different IP addresses or passwords to each, treat them like different computers, and use them to consolidate all those otherwise 15% utilized machines - sky's the limit (on any qualified hardware platform), and with it, customers can now drive utilization through the roof. With no new licensing charges. (And personally, I'm a fan of 3 second reboots.) But back to baseball. One thing to recognize with businesses like MLB.com (and Google and Amazon and eBay) is that system level performance is now all about parallelism - defined as the art of behaving well when 3,000,000 baseball viewers (or searchers or shoppers or bidders) arrive to use your service. Sun, in fact, saw two years ago what Intel saw this year , that the gigahertz race was over. So we biased our entire system roadmap to "thread level paralellism," and started designing systems with many, rather than one, thread per CPU. Most SPARC systems now ship with two threads of execution per socket (standard in all UltraSPARC IV systems). But that's just a baby step toward true parallelism. How parallel can we get? Niagara chips, built into our upcoming Ontario systems, will feature 8 cores, each with 4 parallel threads of execution - 8 times 4 yields a 32 way system - on a single chip. These systems will consume far less electricity and space than traditional system designs - and will be optimized for MLB.com style applications: thread sensitive, big data, throughput oriented apps. Moreover, they'll drop our customers' power bills and real estate costs - which may not sound like the class of problem today's CIO cares about... until you actually talk to a CIO. Massive power and space bills are a big problem, and the physics of cooling a space heater is a more popular topic than you'd think. (btw, a dirty little secret - remember California's power crisis a few year's back? One of the leading suspects? Computers chewing up huge amounts of power, and producing heat, which required air conditioners, which chewed up even more power...) As we scale out these systems, it's perfectly reasonable to expect greater and greater levels of parallelism. And the good news is not only do Solaris and Java (and most of the Java Enterprise System ) eat threads for lunch, but with logical partitioning, we can deploy multiple workloads on the same chip, driving massive improvements in productivity (of capital, power, real estate and system operators). But let's not stop there. Simultaneously, much the same inefficiencies described above have been plaguing the storage world. A few years back, "SSP's," or storage service providers, began aggregating storage requirements across very large customer sets, providing storage as a service. Most SSP's found themselves stymied by the diversity of customer they were serving. Each customer, or application opportunity, posed differing performance requirements (speed vs. replication/redundancy vs. density, eg). This blew their utilization metrics. Before the advent of virtualization, SSP's had to configure one storage system per customer. And that's one of the reasons they failed - low utilization drove high fixed costs. So that was the primary motivation behind the introduction of containers into our storage systems. The single biggest innovation in our 6920 's is their ability to be divvied up into a herd of logical micro-systems, allowing many customers or application requirements to be aggregated onto one box, with each container presenting its own optimized settings/configurations. This drives consolidation and utilization - and when linked to Solaris, allows for each Solaris container to leverage a dedicated storage container. Again, driving not simply scale, but economy. On top of all this, the same challenge has plagued the network world - diverse security requirements, and a desire to partition networks into functional or application domains, have driven a proliferation of "subnets" for applications, or departments. HR, Finance, Operations and Legal, for example, each require their own VLANs (virtual local area networks), the result of which is a gradual increase in partitioning, paired with a creeping inefficiency in network utilization - as the static allocation of subnets outpace anyone's ability to manage them. (If you recall, prior to their downfall, Enron - one of the beneficiaries of California's power crisis - was setting out to create a market for surplus network capacity - nice idea, turned out to be tough to execute). This was the primary motivation behind Sun's building containers in to our application switches - the devices that now sit in front of computing and storage racks, to help optimize performance of basic functions (network partitioning, security acceleration and load balancing, for example). The network itself can be divided into individual network containers, or virtual subnets, and programatically reprovisioned as loads change. Meaning that a customer can now divide any Sun system into logical partitions or containers, each of which draws on or links with a logically partitioned slice of computing, storage and networking capacity. Which presents the market with an incredible opportunity to drive utilization up, and exit being one of the most inefficient (and environmentally wasteful - where are the protests?). Which is a long way of saying the internet is the ultimate parallel computing application - millions, and billions, of people doing roughly the same thing, creating a massive opportunity for companies that solve the problems not only with scale, but with economy. A unit of computing has been detached from a CPU, to whatever a baseball fan wants at MLB.com. Or a bidder wants at eBay. Or a buyer at Amazon. Can you imagine how big a datacenter MLB.com would have to build if we were still in a mode of thinking each customer got their own CPU? Just think about that power bill. _________________ Some other thoughts: What happens to software licensing in a virtualized world? What's a CPU in a per-CPU license when the system you're running has 32 independent threads? An anachronism in my book. Can you imagine if MLB.com charged by the CPU? That's why all software from Sun, from the OS to the middleware, will be priced by the "socket" or employee. We believe the rest of the industry should move in the same direction. Who's the ultimate beneficiary of this mass virtualization? In the short run, customers who can now both recover dormant capacity and boost productivity (consolidate to Solaris 10, UltraSPARC IV, our 6920's or our app switches - have yourself a "look at all this capital I freed up!" experience, and guarantee yourself a spot at your CFO's summer party). But the ultimate beneficiary may be the company that deploys all these systems - and can link together, as well as dynamically provision across, it in its entirety. The combinatorics are staggering - thousands of containers, against thousands of threads against the same orders of magnitude in storage and network partitions. That's some serious scale. Requiring some serious economy in provisioning and operation. So what business could possibly require or operate infrastructure at that scale? Sun's Grid , of course. No reason to think we won't be serving one of the largest markets in the world - driving utilization to be both prudent, and responsible. (2005-03-12 23:34:04.0) Permalink Friday March 04, 2005 Freedom is More Powerful than a Budget For years, Sun has run Executive Advisory Councils (EACs). At these events, we host CEOs and CIOs from the largest corporations in the world for a day and a half's worth of conversation - about strategy, business and technology. This week, I hosted the first ever EAC targeting IT architects and developers: folks who code, manage those that do or are known as thought leaders or architecture setters. The attendees were from a really diverse crowd, and from around the world (literally) - some flew 24 hrs. to participate. They were also from every industry imaginable: global financial services, gaming, sports media, systems integration, telecommunications even a large postal service. Personally, I love these events - I always learn from the experience. But they're normally reserved for C[x]Os, a pattern we decided to change this year. Why? Read this and this for a discussion on the shifting IT power base, and the value of understanding constituencies (vs. traditional hierarchies). The world is changing, and these are some of the folks doing the changing. A few takeaways from the event: 1. Free and Open Source Software is more alive than ever. That was probably the biggest takeaway - and speaks to why CIOs are losing some measure of influence over IT decisions. If the means of enforcing organizational influence is budget, and technology goes to free, then budget isn't so powerful a weapon. Exactly why CIOs don't pick search engines - they couldn't if they wanted to. Almost universally, no one in the room felt that giving access to source code presented a risk (or distraction) to their developers. All felt giving access was really helpful. Under which license? Most folks didn't care, so long as they had the ability to look at a feature or bug, and recommend changes back to Sun, or deploy a custom fix for their own system - without tainting themselves or their customer's intellectual property. This was a global sentiment. 2. Java is more alive than ever. Employed by the companies in the room, there were nearly 100,000 programmers represented (and given the telco, another 50M+ Java handset customers). They're all training new developers in Java (and many leveraging Java Studio Creator for the training) - and Java's winding its way into all kinds of performance sensitive environments, like gaming. Take a look at this (beware, it's about 20MB to download). Has making Java source available helped? Some said yes, some no - but everyone loves the compatibility and portability. Java is here to stay, and grow and evolve. 2. And C/C++ is alive and well. Think the world has moved away from "native" development? Nope, not by a long stretch, and not for folks doing core systems work (or writing operating systems or SAN apps). And these folks want our compilers (and the source to them), and preferentially over their free equivalents (gcc). Great feedback, give us a week or so. C++ (heck, Fortran too!) is massively important to us. 3. The bloom is off the rose with Red Hat. We're beginning to get through with Solaris 10's new pricing (free as in beer, not as in puppy - even for commercial usage). Adoption, especially in the financial services world, is beginning to take hold. The funniest stories? The *multiple* developers who admitted their teams built, tested and qualified apps on Solaris, given far better tools and utilities, then ran them on Red Hat to appease those who've tied their reputations to it. Well hey, I think that's a great idea - I'd like to invite the entirety of Red Hat's installed base to use dTrace on Solaris 10 to drive free performance improvements you can take back to running on Red Hat . What's not to love? And while it's running so well, just remember Solaris is free (as in the real free, not $1,000/cpu free). 4. We're not getting the message out about our newest hardware. We heard this loud and clear - we need to shout from the rooftops about our newest x86 systems, app switches, storage and the upcoming Niagara systems. Got it. 5. Web services may collapse under its own weight. No one at the conference said this. Those are my words. I'm beginning to feel that all the disparate web service specs and fragmented standards activities are way out of control. Want proof? Ask one of your IT folks to define web services. Ask two others. They won't match. We asked folks around the room - it was pretty grim. It's either got to be simplified, or radically rethought. As you know, I also believe simplicity and volume always win - and that today's web services initiatives are in danger of vastly overcomplicating a very simple (really simple) solution. 7. Security security security. Who was the most vociferous about security? Oddly enough, the gamer in the room - because a lapse in security can lead to an immediate loss of business from customers that didn't want their identities (or on-line wealth or reputation) compromised on-line. What's that worth? Well, the gaming industry is bigger than the the software industry (by far). It's big bucks. 8. Everything is global. Nearly all the developers in the room are "following the sun" with development activities - Sun itself does development in Bangalore, Beijing, St. Petersburg, Broomfield, Burlington, Menlo Park - I could go on and on. So we made a conscious choice, a little over a year ago, to start injecting interactivity into our tools. What does that mean practically? It means that you should expect to see developers putting on headsets when they start up their development tools - to listen and respond to the voice over IP (VOIP) chatter from peers and delegates spread across the world. Development is now, by default, a global activity (and, as a sidebar, has begun looking like a massively multi-player on-line game (MMOG)). ______________________ What's the net of all this? Architects and developers are growing in value and importance as the price of software declines. Strange side effect, but true. It's one reason why as a part of this year's planning activities at Sun, we'll be making a simple statement: the single most important horizontal market segment for Sun to serve is, in fact... the developer . (2005-03-04 20:23:03.0) Permalink Saturday February 19, 2005 Bubbles Precede Build Outs Just got back from a 5 city tour in Europe, with a two day stint at 3GSM World Congress . For those that don't know, the 3GSM conference brings together the world's mobile operators, technology and service companies, a sprinkling of policy makers and a throng of journalists for a frenzied few days in Cannes, site of the so-named film festival . This is the event's last year in Cannes - 35,000 attendees (and an energy level officially sealing the coffin of computer tradeshows) is overload for the small beach town, to the point that companies rent boats in the harbor for lodging and exhibit space (the most impressive of which was definitely this one ). A quick run through of interesting events. First, the humor: the pilot on my flight to Cannes walked up to me after our arrival and said, "hey, Solaris 10 is really cool." I figured he was pulling my leg. And he said, "No, seriously, I just downloaded it." Turns out he's a developer in his spare time, and was running it on his laptop. Gotta love the internet's reach. Here are the latest stats: _________________ Total Number of Solaris 10 Licenses Downloaded Since First Commercial Ship : SPARC : 191,107 x64/x86 : 348,155 Total : 539,262 _________________ FANTASTIC! After we get to a million licenses (which on this trajectory, should be within the next 30 days or so), Solaris 10 goes Platinum. These figures are blowing by our initial estimates (and straining our download centers - my apologies to those having to wait while we get mirrors set up). Solaris certainly wasn't the focal point of my presence at 3GSM - and frankly, with a market this big, growing this fast, the only unifying themes are scale and security. Everyone, but everyone at the show has a different agenda - from the African operator, whose service expansion is gated by building and securing electricity generators colocated with cell towers; to the developer of one of the most successful new Java services, Virtual Girlfriend . Don't forget her birthday, or all hell breaks loose (I didn't check, but I don't think she can lock you out of your phone). I'm sure Virtual Boyfriend is on its way (virtual Mother In-Law? I digress). I met with executives from our largest operator customers, hosted a panel with our OEM's (original equipment manufacturers, who embed everything from SPARC to Solaris to Java in all range of network equipment and 3G handsets), and some time with the media and new service developers. Discussions ranged from collaborating on very low cost handsets for developing nations (the African operator, above, believes they can double their 15 million subscriber base with a sub-$30 handset), to managing heat and power in network operations centers with our upcoming Niagara systems; the media was as different as the operators, from the traditional American business pubs wanting to know about Microsoft's role in handsets (folks, move on), to the Asian and European journalists focused on next generation mobile services (in-car is hot). Our OEM's were really happy with the license we'd chosen in open sourcing Solaris - the CDDL deliberately avoids the viral attributes of the GPL (General Public License), and encourages intermingling proprietary intellectual property with Solaris without fear of being forced to divulge trade secrets, or price them at zero (two downsides of the GPL for OEM's are the obligation to change the licensing and pricing of their IP in the event their code is mixed with GPL code). The big theme from OEM's was convergence and control - the telecommunications world is moving to adopt the same general purpose infrastructure deployed in the enterprise, and our ability to help them accelerate that shift, while leaving them in control of their IP, creates an opportunity to dramatically lower cost and grow the market. We've also planted the seeds for an OEM led carrier grade Solaris (stay tuned), and a large-scale shift away from proprietary databases, toward open source alternatives. There was a lot of talk about Liberty services, and interoperable network identity - the era of "MCommerce" (mobile commerce) is clearly well underway, and requires interoperability between institutions for the really interesting applications. Two examples: Mobile ATM allows you to check your bank balances, transfer money, charge up your pre-paid calling card, or send dollars to do the same for other subscribers, all from your Java enabled phone. Globe Telecom in the Philippines (a nation totally hooked on SMS text messaging), has deployed GCash, a text based service that enables commerce at the point of sale (your phone is your wallet, you use it to make purchases at any merchant's cash register). Both are predicated on multiple parties being able to interoperate securely - this is a trend we'll see accelerate. Contrast this to PC's, where, lacking hardened security or integrated billing operators (DSL is a flat fee service, vs. a cellular calling plan, which is basically a micro-billing platform), identity islands are still the norm. Java is continuing to grow, and accelerate - on both the devices (and SIM cards embedded within them), and in the network infrastructure. There are now over 500,000,000 Java enabled phones in the world, and more than 60% of all new phones will ship, from the factory, Java enabled. The rush of new developers we're adding to the nearly 5 million Java developers are J2ME developers, folks creating the services (from commercial to social) through which the majority of the world will experience the internet. And just in case you missed it, let me say it again: the majority of the world will first experience the internet through their mobile phones . We sometimes forget that 10 times as many people bought handsets last year as PC's. Round numbers, there were a BILLION wireless devices sold last year, and around 100 million PC's. To that end, the odds are much higher you'll watch broadcast broadband content on your phone than on your PC - and now that Nokia (and their peers) are the world's largest camera manufacturers (just think about that for a moment), the odds are far higher you'll even create broadband content on your handset. Talk about change. Comdex is dead, long live 3GSM. Another interesting meeting was with the CEO of Oberthur, who predicts we'll see 1 GigaBYTE SIM cards by years end - that's right, a Gig on an interchangeable SIM card. For extra credit, what happens when a significant portion of that memory is executable? That's a mighty small computer. The net of all this - bubbles precede the buildout. And the buildout's clearly underway with mobile operators chasing revenue and value. With operators beginning to see a market driven by services and content, maybe there's irony in 3GSM and the Cannes Film Festival having shared a venue for so long. How much longer before a first run movie premieres on a handset? Laugh now, get it out of your system. Convergence doesn't respect form factors. (2005-02-19 09:57:38.0) Permalink Friday February 11, 2005 Transparency and the Turning Tide I just got the first summary download numbers for Solaris 10 since we shipped a week or so ago. One word, "wow.": _________________ Total Number of Solaris 10 Licenses Downloaded Since First Commercial Ship : SPARC : 151,039 x64/x86 : 269,856 Total : 420,895 _________________ An early look suggests we're not going to have a problem with demand. I was with a big ISP (internet service provider) prospect yesterday that said, "the only reason we left Solaris was to run x86 on low end boxes. Now that Solaris is there, we're going back." I asked how they liked the open source license we worked with the community to draft, and they said "we like the CDDL." We obviously do, too - and we'd like to see others in the industry adopt it (note: that's why it's an open license, not restricted to usage or control by Sun.) Doing some basic analysis on the numbers, above, suggests the majority of downloads are to non-Sun based hardware (ie, x64/x86). One of the folks in the meeting I mentioned asked me how we felt about what he viewed as "leakage" onto non-Sun hardware. I said, "THAT'S NOT LEAKAGE, THAT'S GROWTH!" We've now got a relationship with customers we would never otherwise meet - running Dell, HP, IBM and other hardware. They're all prospects now. And if there were one knock I heard during our analyst conference a week ago, it was "where's the growth?" Well, we've obviously planted a few more seeds. (Not to mention giving a massive boost to utilization and performance of our newest USIV SPARC systems - and as much as giving free hardware to existing Sun customers: run Solaris 10, retrieve the (average) 80% of your datacenter currently deployed as a space heater (because it's unutilized).) Speaking of the analyst conference , it's been about a week since we had a couple hundred industry and financial analysts in town. The conference was a surprise in a number of ways. First, and this takes some humility to say - after years of brooking no end of harsh criticism, I was surprised to hear how positive the analysts were. Many of them haven't exactly been our fans over the past couple years - so it was... jarring is the word I'll use... to have them say "we love the strategy." I definitely heard (and you will hear, shortly) that the perception tide is turning. My favorite quip came from my last meeting, in which an analyst said, "look, around the hotel bar last night, I heard only positive comments." Not like I spend a lot of time in hotel bars, but I'm assuming that's a big change. The second surprise was being beaten up for (get this) not being vocal enough about our storage offerings - and for not talking more about our newest 6920 . Which one analyst said "was one of the hottest offerings in the storage market today." To the analysts who made this point (you know who you are): please consider this a step toward being more effusive :) More on the 6920 (and why storage, and storage containers/virtualization is going to be the belle of the ball for the next decade) in a later entry. After we launched the world's first true computing utility (and an exchange to keep everyone honest), IBM never managed to respond to our head to head offer to compare grids - which Dan quickly pointed out . Again, I truly believe transparency is one of our biggest competitive advantages. Finally, I've been promising myself to stay out of the discussion on open source software licensing, and why we elected to use an open Mozilla-based license for Solaris, vs. something more restrictive. So instead of wading in, and taking a stand on everything from the self-determination of developing nations to the needs of OEM customers, I'll make only two points. One, the notion that all free software has to ship under a singular license is like saying all news has to come through one newspaper. Java, Firefox, FreeBSD, Windows, Debian, JBoss and Solaris - The New York Times, The Economist, The Onion, The Register, The Wall Street Journal - prove that there's value in diversity, not homogeneity. In thought. In speech. And intellectual property licenses. Second, I agree with RedMonk . At minimum, 400,000+ downloads proves there are a silent majority of open minds in the world. _______________Update: and as usual, Simon has more insights on the topic... (2005-02-11 11:27:05.0) Permalink Tuesday February 08, 2005 Caro Presidente Lula... Carta Aberta ao Sr. Presidente da República Federativa do Brasil Ilmo. Presidente da República Federativa do Brasil Sr. Luis Inácio Lula da Silva Caro Presidente Lula: Nós da Sun Microsytems acompanhamos com especial atenção e otimismoa sua participação no Forum Social Mundial, realizado na cidade dePorto Alegre, Brasil, e no Forum Econômico Mundial, em Davos, naSuíça, durante a última semana de Janeiro. Nós consideramos as suas iniciativas governamentais voltadas àinclusão digital como corajosas e sábias. Nós aplaudimos a suaadoção de plataformas de padrões abertos e software livre, econcordamos firmemente que tal inovação permite que todos ossetores da população, e não apenas os privilegiados e influentes,tenham acesso a auto-determinação e independência. Uma rede aberta e software livre são a base para oportunidadesiguais, e o seu compromisso é um alerta para o mundo ver que oBrasil pretende desenvolver suas próprias soluções tecnológicas,suas próprias competências e sua própria indústria. A Sun Microsystems, com raízes na Universidade de Stanford, é omaior doador mundial de código fonte para a comunidade mundial desoftware livre. Do OpenOffice e StarOffice , do OpenSolaris aosistema operacional Solaris , e do trabalho pioneiro com o sistema Java Desktop System , baseado em Linux. Nós acreditamos na inovação, e nós acreditamos na liberdade deescolha. Está muito claro que dividimos esta crença com você e como Brasil. Por favor, aceite os nossos melhores votos de estima. Cordialmente, Jonathan Schwartz Presidente, Sun Microsystems Inc. ______________ Portuguese to English translation . (2005-02-08 22:50:37.0) Permalink Monday February 07, 2005 Blogosphere's IQ just rose You'll notice I've added a newbie to my blogroll (the column to the right), Greg Papadopoulos . For those of you that know Greg, you'll agree that the always rising IQ of the blogosphere just took a step function north. Greg's right brain job is to be Sun's Chief Technology Officer. His left brain job is to be the voice of reason in Sun's internal strategic debates. Leveraging both hemispheres yields wild ideas that somehow always turn into business opportunities. (To boot, he's one of those rare individuals from whom the phrase "I told you so," has never been heard.) (After months of needling) He's just added his voice to the discussion surrounding our choice to adopt a liberal license for OpenSolaris (vs. the GPL). At some point, those of you that aren't up to speed on the vagaries of intellectual property licensing are going to want to get educated. It's going to matter to just about every business on earth. His first blog entry is a good primer. On a related note, I've also added Piper Cole , who leads Sun's public policy initiatives as Vice President, Global Government & Community Affairs. She was a cornerstone in driving the adoption of Project Liberty across the world's governments (she's currently focused on the US government's fixation with options expensing). Piper and her global team are now continuing to educate the world's policy makers about the promise of open standards and open source. As foundations for national opportunity, technical interoperability, and economic self-sufficiency. And not just for operating systems, either. Piper's point? You can't get locked out of the future with open standards and open source. Greg's point? OpenSolaris and the CDDL can't lock you in, either. (2005-02-07 21:24:10.0) Permalink Wednesday February 02, 2005 Comparing Sun's Grid to IBM's Grid We did it! The grid is live! I have to admit it was fun throwing a big switch to "light it up" (although I did ask the techs on stage about 10 times if there was live current going through the props we used - the answer was no, thankfully). We're well on our way to building out a global grid, with partners across the world, to make the network service called "computing" as ubiquitous, and affordable, as electricity. Ditto for storage. Our view is that many suppliers in the technology industry have relied on mass inefficiencies and opacity to drive short term profits - why bother delivering a computing service if you can custom build a grid for each customer and sell 10X the infrastructure? To us, that sounds like betting against the network - a bad move for any market. So what we introduced was simple - an opportunity for any customer needing a computing or storage grid to leverage ours for a simple, transparent price: $1/cpu-hr, or $1/GB-mo. Having read a lot of the coverage and commentary, there's definitely a population of folks on one end of the spectrum saying "Are you nuts? Why would I pay $1/GB-mo if I can buy an iPod and tote it everywhere?" To those folks, let me safely say, You are not our target audience. To the crowd that did the math for their enterprise archiving installations, and figured they're paying quite a bit more than $1/GB-mo, help is on the way. Now what was especially gratifying was seeing all the coverage in the press. IBM took the bait to start a discussion on price. Remember, in the commodity world, it's all about price and transparency - that's at the heart of an efficient market. Now we're playing on our terms. IBM has relied on a broad portfolio of products to make competition tough for companies that lack their breadth - IBM Global Services in particular specializes in complex outsourcing contracts, where the price of any individual line item - say, the price of a server for a year - is nearly impossible to divine. By design. My view has been transparency is therefore our competitive weapon - make the price transparent, and presuming they're forced to follow, they'll get dragged into a discussion on price. Drive the discussion to standard offerings, and they'll have to play defense. One journalist I spoke with said, "IBM said their offering is only 48 cents." I responded, "And did you ask IBM what you get for that?" The journalist said, "IBM said 'it depends.'" Sorry, that's opaque pricing, not transparent. Another journalist said, "IBM said you can't specify a single price, because every customer wants something different." Maybe so, but then we're not talking about a utility service - utilities rely on the ability to aggregate demand with a standard offering , not one offs. If you wanted something other than water from the taps in your house, the utility company providing your water would say "sorry, we're not interested in your business." Utilities aggregate demand. Aggregation isn't possible without standards and uniformity. We're well aware that grids are inappropriate for many of today's applications or customer environments. But there's a broad market of workloads that are right in our crosshairs, from risk analysis to movie rendering, data warehousing to reservoir simulation. We understand full well that this represents a very small portion of today's computing needs. But we also know that's where the network's headed - that more traditional apps are spilling into the grid, and the market's growing. So in the spirit of giving IBM an opportunity to respond with greater clarity, here's a table presenting what $1/cpu-hr buys you from Sun. Sam, we hereby invite you to fill in the blanks: Comparing Sun's and IBM's Grid Utility Pricing Elements Sun's Grid IBM's Grid Industry Standard Server V20Z Opteron (2.4 GHz) , V210 SPARC ? RAM per CPU 4 Gig ? Cache storage per CPU 20 Gig ? Operating System Solaris 10 ? Is OS open source? Yes ? Is OS Protected by ALL* corporate patents? Yes ? Minimum Commitment 4 hrs. ? Price per hour $1 US ? * Not a subset, but all patents related to and covering operating systems (do not include unrelated patent chaff ). We're definitely interested in IBM's response - and something tells me customers are going to be mighty interested in how IBM fills in the blanks, as well. Let's start counting the days until they respond. After all, it's all about transparency. (2005-02-02 20:27:58.0) Permalink Sunday January 30, 2005 Looking Back on Commodities You may recall one of my first blog entries assessed the fitness of the word "commodity" for the computing marketplace. Distilled to a single sentence, my conclusion was that despite the self-interested rhetoric of some vendors (and gullibility of a few pundits), computers weren't the commodity - computing (and bandwidth) was. Just as power generators built by my friends at GE aren't the commodity, electricity is. It's not even close to a subtle distinction. In looking at the evolution of the commodity called computing, history provides an extraordinary parallel to the evolution of electricity. In fact, if you haven't read it, I'd highly recommend " Empires of Light ," by Jill Jonnes. It's a very entertaining historical examination of how electricity was first discovered (rubbing amber produced mysterious sparks), reliably generated, and ultimately distributed across the world. One of my favorite anecdotes from the book describes the financier JP Morgan's decision, as the primary backer of Thomas Edison's Menlo Park electrical inventions, to wire his house for electricity. He elected to dispense with the "vile poison" of gas lighting, and place lightbulbs throughout his Madison Avenue mansion. Not only did he have a customized generator placed in his stable, but given the fragility of the system, he had a professional electrical engineer staffed to manage it. So at 11pm every night, the lights went out, because the engineer went home. It makes the point - early in its evolution, only the wealthy could afford electricity (along with the requisite generator and electrician), and the technologies were fragile. Businesses that wanted power generation facilities were similarly wealthy enough to afford large-scale versions of the same, staffed with a "chief electricity officer" and teams of electricians. They didn't exactly experience 5 9's availability (and people actually died regularly, talk about MTBF). It took about a decade for those deploying electricity to settle on a few standards that ultimately accelerated consolidation. From voltage to cycle to plug configuration. (The processes used to get there, although they involved far more violence and loss of animal life, bear a remarkable resemblance to standard setting in the computing industry.) Spooling forward, once the standards existed, businesses could plug into a grid - labor markets went through a fairly sizable dislocation (all those engineers and "CEO's" had to find other work), but electricity was firmly established as a ubiquitous service. Scale efficiencies and the resulting massive decrease in price allowed the government to bridge the power divide through rural electrification . Electricity that started out 20 times the price of gas lighting - obviously got a lot cheaper. What's most interesting to me is that once the standards were set, and the grid powered up, electricity finally established a transparent price - the hallmark of a true commodity. If pricing isn't transparent, products can't be deemed a commodity - by transparent, I mean equivalently defined for a standard unit of measurement. Here are a few examples, "5 cents per kilowatt hour," "2 dollars per gallon." It's either a standardized physical delivery (gallon, barrel, ton), or unit of consumption (typically time based, 100 megabit hours, megawatt hours, etc.) - but it's the same across the industry. Here are some examples of things that aren't commodities: a 4-way x86 dual core Opteron server running an open source indemnified Solaris OS with a J2EE 1.4 compatible Java Enterprise System web services stack, optimized JVM and 256M of RAM. Should be obvious, but I'm amazed that some folks still think that's the commodity - vs. a unit of computing on such a device, or moreover, on a very large scale grid of such devices. And so it's to that very issue you're going to see Sun address our upcoming quarterly announcement event this week - the evolution of a true computing grid, priced at $1/cpu-hr; the business and technology models underlying such a transformation; and moreover, the impending impact on the marketplace for computing power and value. (Whereas power operators can't add a lot of value to a powerline, things are a tad more hopeful for the network operators.) As I pointed out in some of my earlier musings, there's a sense of dysphoria among those that see computers as commoditizing, a belief that no one can make any money if the technology's interchangeable. In my view, the great thing about commodities, whether financial services, telecommunications, oil and gas, and now computing - is that the companies whose business it is to monetize those commodities, along with the businesses that supply the technologies necessary to compete in a commodity market, are among the largest on earth. Vodafone, Citigroup, Exxon Mobil. What do they have in common? 1) They're among the most valuable businesses on earth. 2) They're primarily technology companies. 3) They're among the largest buyers of technology in the world. And 4) They're all in commodity businesses. And how do they all thrive? Innovation. _________________ ps. You've got to love IBM's ability to play the community. Going through some of the patents they "donated" to the open source community a few weeks back, it looks as if they all , curiously, seem to be due for payment - and thus potential expiration - this year. Were they destined for the bit bucket (turns out IBM is among the largest patent expirers in the world, along with its largest issuer). And some of the patents have nothing to do with open source software - my favorite in the heap is this one . Not sure that's going to be quite the comfort the community's looking for. Here are a few others - for those working in gel embodiments ; and for the open source doctors in the crowd. We know we need to help the community understand how to take advantage of our grant - but at least all 1600 of the patents we've granted to the world were for operating systems and software (USPTO 700, for the wonks in the crowd). (2005-01-30 09:47:04.0) Permalink Friday January 21, 2005 An Open Letter to Sam Palmisano, CEO, IBM Corp. Sam Palmisano Chairman and CEO IBM Corp New Orchard Road Armonk, NY 10504 Dear Sam, IBM and Sun have a long history of partnering. We've worked on Java together, more recently you joined us in the Liberty Alliance , helping to drive standards around network identity. We, and our customers, appreciate constructive partnership. As you're no doubt aware, Sun is set to ship the newest release of our Solaris operating system, Solaris 10 . It's the most secure OS the world has ever seen - bringing mainframe features, like logical partitioning, to every platform on which it runs. Solaris is now available on over 300 systems , from vendors such as IBM, Dell, HP and of course Sun's SPARC and Opteron systems. We've made Solaris into a truly vendor neutral OS. Customers and partners have noticed. From Federal Express to Verisign, SAP and Oracle to Siebel, Veritas and BEA - from across the globe and marketplace - there is tremendous demand and support. They love that we're open sourcing Solaris, and that we'll be the first open source vendor to offer a commercial version of our product with indemnification against intellectual property lawsuits . They love that we can run linux apps unmodified. I'm assuming you've seen comments such as those from Tony Scott, CTO, General Motors, in the recent eWeek article - we've got dozens more customers happy to speak with the press about their growing concern. We've repeatedly passed along customer interest in having IBM support Solaris 10 with WebSphere, DB2, Tivoli, Rational and MQSeries products. Customers have made repeated calls to you and your staff. Those same customers have now asked me to begin communicating with you in a more public and visible way - they'd like the choice to run IBM products on Solaris 10, and they're feeling that your withholding support is part of a vendor lock-in strategy. A strategy to trap them into IBM's proprietary Power5 platform only . Frankly, that behavior is reminiscent of an IBM history many CIO's would like to forget. We've made sure your engineers know that moving from Solaris 8 or 9 to Solaris 10 takes no work, given that we offer true binary compatibility. If you're on SPARC, and you'd like to take advantage of a world of x86 systems, it's a simple recompile. There's no recoding at all. Same applies to scaling up from Intel or Opteron to SPARC. No recoding. So the technology is there, and so are the customers, partners and opportunities. But it's more evident by the day, the only vendors that fear choice are those trying to block it. We stand at the ready to help you tear down this wall. Regards, Jonathan Schwartz, President, Chief Operating Officer Sun Microsystems, Inc. _________________ (2005-01-21 08:57:55.0) Permalink Monday January 17, 2005 Network Intelligence My Dad, now retired, used to work in the US intelligence community (he was the academic/researcher type, not the "envelope swap at midnight" type). He and I were chatting recently about the evolution of intelligence gathering, and the recent tsunami. And how it related to, of all things, blogs. And mobile phones. On the one hand, and at the risk of offending some of my more blogomaniacal friends, I do admit to feeling blogs are a tad overhyped. But only in the sense that blog content isn't all that different from the content that preceded the blog's building blocks. What is underhyped , in my view, is the impact of blogs on the advancement of simplicity and convenience. The most powerful weapons known to this industry. My friend Adam's long been a proponent of the simple - I could not agree with him more. Simplicity changes the world. Convenience is a force multiplier. Simplicity drives ubiquity (and you know how I feel about volume ). How many people use search software today, vs. 10 years ago? If you Google, you're a searcher, and I'd say the ratio of internet users to Google users is pretty impressive. The number's large partially because the price is right, and partially because it's so simple. (Although I was appalled to note my father just bought a book on "Using Google," proving the demographic for that genre is closely related to those of us that grow too cocky believing we're making the world a simpler place). Google has hundreds of millions of users, driven by simplicity and convenience. Just as there are hundreds of millions of cell phone users now using camera phones. Now how does any of this relate to intelligence and the tsunami? Around the time of the coup that removed Gorbachev from power , I remember my father talking about CNN as an 'intelligence asset.' Information traveled fast through CNN, and their signal was global and readily accessible. And the quality of their intelligence rivaled government sources . That was a fascinating thought - CNN was as efficient, for a breadth (not all) of intelligence gathering, as a far more expensive 'private' network. Granted it was a singular voice, there was a single editorial team (doing all the interpretation), but the speed and color of the coverage was amazing. It was simple, and effective. So it was doubly amazing for both of us to realize that in the recent tsunami, blogs were beginning to eclipse even CNN as a source of instant primary intelligence. As far as on-the-ground coverage of that extraordinary disaster, bloggers were more accurate, speedy and accessible than any other news or intelligence vehicle. Using everything from camera phones to Typepad to video footage. It was awe inspiring. And I agree with Dan Gillmor's sentiment that the tsunami will be seen as a turning point in understanding the impact of Citizen Journalism (or, in my view, network intelligence). But there was more happening than just bloggers blogging. The most interesting evolution, to me, went two steps beyond. First, it's one thing for a web site covering, say, digital cameras, to have a review of the latest camera. But there were no "Tsunami Update" sites before the tsunami hit. They were created on the fly, as fast as the tsunami hit, impromptu outlets for the latest updates and information. Just go look around, you'll be stunned at the breadth. And they're continuing to grow in value, both as sources of information on missing loved ones , as well as gathering points for critical science or fund raising (and hats off to Amazon for quickly deploying a " One Click Donation "). Aggregation happened on the fly. Second, the diversity of content sources is beginning to grow. Mblogs and vlogs are emerging around the world, pointing to an even more interesting future (although one aid worker with whom I spoke found the prevalence of .wmv (Windows Media) files disturbingly inaccessible to non-Windows users). The common wisdom is that mobile devices are insufficient for the demands of content creators - who must therefore default to a PC. Me, I wouldn't bet on that as a lasting conclusion. My bet is more people will buy camera phones this year than the world will buy PC's. And from an intelligence gathering perspective, who would've thought the anachronistic Minox's arch rival would become Nokia - delivering a far higher resolution, more compact, video-enabled information gathering asset. (And with cell coverage more ubiquitous than Minox processing facilities, I'd short the market for trench coats and plain manila envelopes.) The simplicity of blogs, the convenience of pervasive networks, and an explosion of new content sources - as a combined force, is radically underestimated. And not for its impact on the publishing industry, in specific, but on any industry that finds competitive advantage in the latency of information, or in complexity. From national security to the whole IT industry. Simplicity can be a sustainable competitive advantage. It's becoming more obvious by the day. (2005-01-17 22:02:40.0) Permalink Thursday January 13, 2005 Interpreting Q2 - and IBM's Behavior So you've probably seen our earnings announcement - across the world, I want to extend a heartfelt congratulations to the men and women at Sun, and in our partner base, that drove us to a GAAP profit. I know you've all memorized those eleven words - so please consider yourself to have checked off the first two. Now it's time to keep the discipline around driving earnings and cash flow, and move on to the next priority on the list (Grow). The coverage has been pretty good - and the industry pundits are beginning to reflect the momentum we see out in the marketplace. I met with a (hugely passionate) member of the open source Solaris community today - I'd argue one of our most important constituents in the upcoming year. And I got a bunch of great ideas and feedback. But also a sense of validation - the big message I took away, "keep going, you're headed totally in the right direction." (Yes, I heard "Go faster," too, among other ideas.) That felt great. One of the industries that showed revenue growth this quarter was financial services. For those that watch Sun, you'll know our decline on Wall Street was pretty dramatic (and ugly) over the past three years - and after a ton of hard work, in the engineering world, in the field, in the support organization, absolutely everywhere - we saw growth. Double digit growth, even. And this from the folks who tossed us out on our ear a few years back. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. (And humbler.) To our customers on Wall Street (and around the world's financial community), thank you. For your patience and feedback. And your Q2 purchase orders :) And to our incredible field team - great job, folks. Great job. But what's been really interesting is noticing who's not necessarily been so supportive of helping us drive more opportunity with our financial services customers: IBM. Yup, IBM's deployed in a number of customer accounts we share, and with the rapid uptake of Solaris 10 in early access, some customers have been running into dependencies - from MQSeries to Tivoli, Rational to DB2 - that stand in the way of their deploying Solaris. What's IBM's stance on Solaris 10? "There's no demand." Please. We know groups of our customers have called in directly to IBM seeking Solaris10 porting dates - and heard the same story, "you're the only customer that wants it." Which frankly, is pretty infuriating. A few of those customers have said it feels like the "old IBM," the anti-competitive monolith that attempted to "lock and block" customers into proprietary IBM solutions. So if you run into an IBM representative, make sure to let them know you, too, would like to be considered the "only customer that wants it." More seriously, that they shouldn't attempt to lock customers in. Come on, IBM, you've got nothing to fear - Solaris is open source, it's cross platform. It's even indemnified. And here's some free advice: you can't lock customers in. They always, always , have a choice. Personally, I wouldn't tempt them to exercise it. (2005-01-13 22:21:46.0) Permalink Wednesday January 05, 2005 Developers Don't Buy Things, They Join Things One of the smartest software execs I've worked with had a saying, "Developers don't buy things, they join things." That's been a pretty focusing statement for us over the years, and as we enter the new year, you should expect 2005 to be one in which we place an ever heightening focus on our dialog with the community, and the developer community in particular. And not simply maintaining the dialog we have today, but finding new constituencies , and expanding our reach. Establishing a relationship with a developer is all about starting a conversation - one that always flowers. And often into opportunity. One community with whom we've maintained a strong (nothing's ever perfect) dialog over the past few years is the Java developer community. It's vibrant and thriving, not only among the ranks of commercial companies, but also the looser, self-managing communities (where there are some truly outstanding examples of community engagement and dialog). The principal mechanisms through which we've maintained that dialog are the Java Community Process (the most comprehensive open process in the history of computing); and the evolution of our NetBeans open source development environment . Our enterprise offerings begin to really push the notion that development is conversational by incorporating structured instant messaging within the development environment, so while you're coding away, you can interact with your cohorts, even if they're in Prague, Bangalore, Menlo Park, Hamburg, Tel Aviv and Tokyo (where, at Sun, many are). Our newest addition, Java Studio Creator , lets us approach an entirely new developer community, web app developers more accustomed to Visual Basic. But a developer environment without a desktop is like a media company without a search engine - ultimately vulnerable. And what's been interesting over the course of the past year is the growing interest in alternatives to Windows desktops. Equally interesting is how little of that interest appears in corporate America - vs. across the rest of the world. But academia's a different world. And one of my favorite ironies of 2004 was walking through a computer science building funded by Bill Gates, and seeing students running Sun's linux-based Java Desktop and StarOffice. Returning to our roots in the academic community, the spawning ground for Sun, and a ton of open source development, is a big part of our '05 focus. (Remember, the U in SUNW is University.) That said, developers (and most users) experience the web through a browser. So the growing momentum around Mozilla Firefox is particularly gratifying. If you took out your magnifying glass, you'd find a lot of Sun employees and executives contributing to the ad that just ran in the New York Times . The world needs a strong cross platform web browser, and the Mozilla team has done an outstanding job. And I'd put the Firefox community (enabled by the Mozilla Public License ), near the top of all open source community efforts. Hats off, Mitchell. The OpenOffice community's alive and well, too - as the foundation for commercially supported suites ( StarOffice among them), and as the most popular and affordable alternative to Microsoft's Office. And by last count, it's got to be one of the most popular open source products on the planet - safely spanning the Windows environment, the Mac, Solaris and most linux distros. And StarOffice 8 is shaping up to be the strongest, fastest, safest ever - with teams of localizers helping to bridge the digital divide around the world. And then there's Solaris. Whose community has been almost exclusively users and operators, but not developers. Given our roots in the open source BSD Unix, we really view the open sourcing of Solaris as a return to the community. It certainly feels that way. I've heard a rousing chorus of support from far off audiences, from students in France, faculty members in Brazil, research institutes in Russia. The open source community is truly everywhere. And it's evident that beyond features in the OS, we've got a big competitive opportunity in creating the right governance model for Solaris, as well. There's a lot to be learned from the Java Community Process, and a lot to be learned from the linux world, as well. I was talking to Greg Papadopoulos last week about a big network equipment company that he'd just met with. They were complaining about how changes they'd wanted in the linux kernel weren't being accepted - so they were left with having to create a fork of the kernel (which IBM gleefully built and was now being paid to support). That fork seemed like a good idea at the time - but it was now unsustainable, given no software vendor could be convinced to support it. So the true cost of the IBM-created fork was prohibitive, and the company was being forced to Red Hat. (I saw the same thing occur on a recent trip to Europe, where a government agency had been convinced by IBM to create their own distro in the name of "technology independence" - another expensive folly now being undone). It's from conversations like that that we're learning - and having created in the JCP a process supported by Google, Vodafone and even Zend and Apache, my sense is we're starting from a good knowledge base. Good governance is critical for building community. Another really interesting and growing community is the open source database community. There are some really interesting (and rapidly growing) open source databases out there. Not many folks talk about them, curiously. The most interesting to me are Red Hat's database , known as Postgres, and MySQL . For the most part, those products lead the open source database world. What makes Red Hat's database so interesting is that two of Red Hat's biggest backers are database companies, and the continuing evolution of the Red Hat database implies as Red Hat grows, so will the ubiquity of a free alternative to Oracle and IBM. Maybe we should challenge Red Hat to a scalability contest on Postgres. Hm. Hey Matthew, what do you think? Let's find a neutral benchmark. I'll wear a red hat if we lose. You can wear a Solaris t-shirt :) We might even provide the hardware. The upshot of all this? Developers don't buy things, they join things. And to the extent we're positioning Sun to start growing new customers, all such opportunities start, at some point, through a conversation . Typically with a developer. Sometimes that conversation occurs through a blog (and the dialog that ensues), sometimes through a code base, through an IM session, or an IDE. But there's a new dialog starting, every minute of every day. It's just a matter of joining in. (2005-01-05 08:54:40.0) Permalink archives « March 2005 » Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Today links Blogroll Chief Gaming Officer Greg Papadopoulos JavaPosse John Loiacono MaryMary MonkChips Morning Snowman Piper Cole Planet Sun Simon Phipps Sin Yaw in China Steve Gillmor tecosystems Tim Bray ZDNet Blog News CNET News.com eWEEK.com NY Times The Economist The Register Cool stuff DP Review java.com OpenSolaris.org opentable.com Sun Blog Policy blogs.sun.com Weblog Login

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ClassicCloseouts for famous designers Blair.com: Gifts Under $20 Birkenstock footwear Folica.com my favorite beauty store! Swap gift cards online Photo Credit: lifehacker.com Don’t you just love the American entrepreneur . . . What a great idea, I’ve been carrying around a couple of gift cards in my wallet for months. I’m going to swap them for ones I can really use. Enjoy! “ Your Money Capitalism at Work on Unwanted Gift Certificates By ERIC DASH Published: December 17, 2005 Gift cards that can be bought, sold and traded online Sheryl and Dale Huber have saved hundreds of cats and dogs in the last few years, but recently they discovered a way to save hundreds of dollars. The Hubers scour the Internet for store gift cards that can be bought, sold and traded online at deep discounts. ,, Read the entire article Technorati Tags: money management Got a question, war story or comment about this topic? Share it in the link at the very bottom of this article. Some of my best ideas for future articles come from reading reader comments. I’d love to hear from you! December 26, 2005 @ 5:36 pm Leave your comments (0) , You're input matters. -- Long hair? Getting a haircut? You can make a difference in a childs life by giving your hair to Locks of Love “ Locks of Love is a not-for-profit organization that provides hairpieces to financially disadvantaged children Provides hairpieces to financially disadvantaged children under the age of 18 with medical hair loss. These custom-fitted hair prosthetics are provided free of charge or on a sliding scale to children whose families meet the Locks of Love Board of Directors guidelines. Donors provide the hair, volunteers staff the office, and the manufacturer hand-assembles each piece, which requires approximately four months. The organization, which began in 1997, has helped over 1000 children since its first year of operation. Thousands of bundles of donated hair arrive from around the country as a result of national publicity Locks of Love received in newspapers, magazines and television programs. The donations continue to pour in. Most donors mail a note and a photo with their bundle of hair. Children comprise over 80 percent of the donors, making this a charity where children have the opportunity to help other children. Locks of Love provides its recipients with a custom, vacuum-fitted hairpiece made entirely from donated human hair. The vacuum fit is designed for children who have experienced a total loss of scalp hair and does not require the use of tape or glue. Most of the applicants suffer from an auto-immune condition called alopecia areata, for which there is no known cause or cure. Others have suffered severe burns, or endured radiation treatment to the brain stem, in addition to many other dermatological conditions that result in permanent hair loss. Donated hair is evaluated for its usefulness according to the following guidelines: The donated hair must be at least 10 inches (preferably 12″) in length It must be bundled in a pony tail or braid It must be free of hair damaged by chemical processing The hair must be clean and dry, placed in a plastic bag, and mailed in a padded envelope to: Locks of Love 2925 10th Avenue N., Suite 102 Lake Worth, FL 33461 Monetary donations to Locks of Love are tax deductible. Donated hair that is not suitable for use in children’s hairpieces may be sold at fair market value to offset the cost of manufacturing. For more information about Locks of Love, please contact us . ,, Related Articles Long Hair . . . Do you know how to care for it , How To Trim Bangs , Styles for long hair and straight hair Technorati Tags: gift recomendations , hair cutting , long hair Got a question, war story or comment about this topic? Share it in the link at the very bottom of this article. Some of my best ideas for future articles come from reading reader comments. I’d love to hear from you! December 22, 2005 @ 9:35 am Leave your comments (0) , You're input matters. -- — Next Page » Dedicated to helping you look your very best with daily updates on the latest tips and tricks for styling your hair. Hair designs, hair style pictures, hair color and advice from Barb Quinn, Internet hair designer. Web This Site Most Read Articles Chart of Hair Colors Celebrity Hair Style Trends Styles for long hair and straight hair Easy hairstyles for the holidays Getting back to your natural hair color Stuck in a hairstyle rut? Fine hair or thin hair? Here’s help I am Fashion: Hairstyle Trend Fall/Winter 2005 Nicole Ritchie--The Classic Bob Hair Style Walk the Line, Hair Styling Article Archive December 2005 (21) November 2005 (22) October 2005 (15) September 2005 (10) August 2005 (10) July 2005 (8) June 2005 (5) May 2005 (8) April 2005 (6) Some Sites I Like • How to Get a Makeover • Barb's Web Site • I am Fashion • Short Hair Style • Boss Hair Guide • Salon Web Licensed to www.gsinet.org under a Creative Commons Attribution License . -- Home Studio Tips | Ending Hairstyle Struggles | Financial Freedom Online | Continuing Education Online Online Classes | Scrapbooking Blog | American Idol Stars | Job Interview Questions | Autism News | Hairstyles By Barb Quinn | Lifelong Learning Resources

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Laser Hair Removal New York

Smooth Synergy - Beauty & Fitness - New York, NY, 10022 - Citysearch 8 BOC Spa & Beauty: 8 days till voting begins -- New to Citysearch? Sign In · Help · Dec 28 2005 Home Restaurants Bars & Clubs Hotels Shopping Spa & Beauty Movies Events See More Categories » Search Business name, category, and/or keyword Search by name only Address, city & state, or zip | Neighborhood Address, city & state, or zip | Neighborhood Address, city & state, or zip | Airport Address, city & state, or zip | Attraction Select a New York Neighborhood Astoria Bronx Brooklyn Carroll Gardens/Cobble Hill Chelsea Chinatown East Village Financial District Flatiron District Fort Greene Gramercy Park Greenwich Village Harlem Little Italy Lower East Side Meatpacking District Midtown East Midtown W/Hells Kitchen Murray Hill Park Slope Queens Soho Times Square/Theater Dist Tribeca Union Square Upper East Side Upper West Side West Village Williamsburg Select an New York Airport Select an New York Attraction My Locations Add/edit locations Recent Locations Clear recent locations Save to My Citysearch Printer Friendly Version Home · Yellow Pages · Beauty & Fitness · Spas · Profile Smooth Synergy 686 Lexington Ave New York, NY 10022 (212) 397-0111 Business Profile Improve skin or look younger with skin care services including laser hair rem... Read More | User Reviews (5) 9.1 Overall Recommended About our ratings Ratings feedback Reservation Send to a Friend Business Info Hours: · Mon-Fri 9am-8pm · Sat 10am-4pm · Sun 12pm-5pm Payment: · American Express · Check · Discover · MasterCard · Visa Own this business? » Enhance or edit your listing See something wrong? » Suggest a correction Things to do nearby: 686 Lexington Ave New York, NY 10022 · Restaurants · Hotels · Bars · Movie Theaters · Department Stores · Shopping Centers & Malls · Grocery Stores · Pharmacies · Florists · Banks Related Searches · New York Beauty & Fitness · New York Spas Beauty & Fitness · Search anything in New York · Search Yellow Pages in New York · Search other Cities · Browse New York Editorial Lists Smooth Synergy A message from this business Synergize your mind & body! Great products & services for men & women! Laser hair removal/All types Endermologie/Microdermabrasion Soothing environment View more 20% off your first laser hair removal visit when you mention citysearch. Professional & Courteous ServiceMidtown medispa for men & women. We offer a full line of great products and services including: facials, microdermabrasion, peels, endermologie, botox, collagen, restylane, sclerotherapy, mesotherapy, laser hair removal for all skin types, and much more. All our aestheticians are well trained and experienced and we also have MDs on site for your comfort. Convenient and upscale midtown manhattan location. Services offered 7 days a week. Call us to schedule your free consultation or to inquire about our great prices!!!We look forward to hearing from you. Thank you.Nicole ContosOwner Close Instant Offers Schedule your appointment during the week anytime between 12pm - 5pm and get $10 off any treatment. Print 20% off your laser hair removal treatment when you mention citysearch.First time clients,one time only. Print Citysearch Business Profile Improve skin or look younger with skin care services including laser hair removal, microdermabrasion, facials, peels, Restylane, Botox and more. User Reviews What users are saying Satisfaction: yes Sanitary: yes Sales Pressure: no On time: no Evening hours: yes Write a review and share your thoughts with other users. NOT COOL Posted by lagurly on 11/28/2005 1 out of 1 people found this review helpful First of all, I like good value and clean places and they were clean, however, the spa owner shares an office with her doctor husband. I don't like that and they act weird about it. The facial was fair, but I had blackheads (3) very visbile on my chin even after the facial. I would truly not recommend that you go there. If you want to pay that kind of money for an office in a high rise building that has a small waiting room with patients (that look like they are on welfare) waiting to see the doctor, then this is your place. Pros: none Cons: med offic not medispa, owner is rude, act like your the 1st Overall user rating: Not Recommended Was this review helpful: Yes or No | Request removal of this review » Read all 5 reviews Related Editorial Content Nolita Shopping Guide Soho East offers an edgier selection of boutiques. Thanksgiving Planner Make reservations for Thanksgiving Day dinner, or host your own no-stress holiday with caterers and gourmet takeout for Turkey Day. Ski and Snowboard Guide We've got the lowdown on where to carve some turns, spend the night and shop for gear. View More » Specialty ratings for Smooth Synergy: 8.9 Hair Removal About Us | Advertise with Us | Contact Us | Press Center | Site Guide | List Your Business on Citysearch | Become an Affiliate | Job Opportunities | Other Cities | Get a Business Website | Submit an Event | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | New York Yellow Pages Citysearch is a registered trademark of 720619 Ontario Inc. and is used under license (C) 2005 Citysearch.com All rights reserved. partner sites: Evite - Entertainment.com - Gifts.com - TripAdvisor - ServiceMagic - Ticketmaster - Expedia - Hotels.com - Hotwire - HSN - LendingTree - Match.com - RealEstate.com - ReserveAmerica - Zerodegrees - CondoSaver - ClassicVacations - Ballard Designs - Frontgate - Garnet Hill - Smith+Noble - The Territory Ahead - Travel Smith

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Jennifer Aniston Hair

Jennifer Aniston Quotation Homepage  |  What's New  |  Movie  |  Photo  |  Wallpaper  |  Screensaver  |  Contact Us Jennifer Aniston Homepage What's New Movie Reviews Photo Gallery Download Music Wallpaper Screensaver Contact Celeb Most Popular . Angelina Jolie . Jennifer Lopez . Jennifer Aniston . Jessica Simpson . Pamela Anderson . Hilary Duff . Britney Spears . Charlize Theron photo | wallpaper | quote | bio | box office | dvd | link | mail Jennifer Aniston Quotation (1969-) I was told to avoid the business all together because of the rejection. People would say to me, 'Don't you want to have a normal job and a normal family?' I guess that would be good advice for some people, but I wanted to act. The best smell in the world is that man that you love. Quirky is sexy, like scars or chipped teeth. I also like tattoos - they're rebellious. I've gone for each type: the rough guy; the nerdy, sweet, lovable guy; and the slick guy. I don't really have a type. Men in general are a good thing. Nobody thinks of themselves as sexy, really. Some days you go, 'Hey, I'm not going too bad today.' But if you try and be sexy, you'll never be sexy. Okay I know it was a cheap shot but I feel soooo much better now! The fisrt time I kissed Brad my knees went weak I literaly lost my breath! I couldn't have found a better man than Brad. He still opens door's for me and brings me flowers.He's the sweetest goofball on the planet. I was petrified of touching something I wasn't supposed to Jennifer Anistion owns up to being nervous about her love scene in the good girl. I almost resent the whole fashion thing. Good God- never wearing the same thing twice and all of those things. It's a pain in the ass. When someone follows you all the way to the shop and watches you buy toilet roll, you knw you're life has changed. He can't get away with that shit [that he's the sexiest man alive] at home. He's not Brad Pitt. He's Brad, pick up your stuff. He's Brad, shut the door. He's my Brad. Just finding somebody that was your best friend, who you could be with and enjoy the passage of time--and that's what I found. Brad is the kindest person I know and the sweetest goofball on the planet. I always thought two children, but Brad wants seven. Woman should stop going for the bad guys, stop looking so far when the good ones are right there. There are no regrets in life, just lessons. I hate when I read "Try that Jennifer Aniston Diet." There was no diet! I'm pround of it. I dont think there's anything in the world that I can face having faced that. That was the scariest thing that ever happened to me. You get a whole new respect for yourself and life when you go through something that difficult"-about her parent's divorce. I still live somewhat by the Zone, it's the only thing that works for me. Before, I had been starving myself and in a dieting vortex I couldn't get out of. Now I pretty much eat whatever I want. Some days you're not in the mood. I'm premenstrual and cranky and you just want to tell everyone to f--- off, but you can't. The people are so warm. They come right up and practically hug you."-about fans. I don't think any father who knows anything about this business would be thrilled to have a daughter in it. I wanted her to go to college, and she just didn't want to. She was anxious to get on with it. Once she decided what she wanted to do, she was very driven. (About John Aniston) [Matt]LeBlanc is the biggest teddy bear on the planet. I remember dreaming about it, about being on TV. I remember seeing Children of a Lesser God on Broadway. I was sitting in the second or third row, and I was just so blown away, and I walked out saying, 'That's what I want to do. It's hard, it's just 10 years of this incredible group of people and it's weird that it's ending because it doesn't seem like it really needs to but it does. We're all with Friends until Friends dies. If one of us goes, we all go. One of us wouldn't leave. It wouldn't be the show it is without each of us. David [Schwimmer] is the most committed, talented person. When you watch the show in reruns..it's so funny to be flipping channels and see an old episode and think, 'God, we were awful. Such babies. It hits in moments and thats when you get all teary and weepy. The money that people have made about these tabloid papers and TV shows is unbelievable. It's the disgusting side of Hollywood. They're always making up fights between the Friends co-stars. There was one in Star Magazine that said I was "The Queen of Mean." I was, like, Whaaaaaaaaat! We've all cried. We don't know what it's going to be like. Like we didn't know what it was going to be like when we started, we have no idea [what it will be like at the end.] We're all gonna be blithering idiots. The boys are like our brothers. We love our boys. (About Matt, Matthew and David) True love brings up everything - you're allowing a mirror to be held up to you daily. I don't have a religion. I believe in a God. I don't know what it looks like but it's MY god. My own interpretation of the supernatural. When I first got an agent, they gave me some advice--lose weight. Life is funny. Life isn't categorized into comedy, drama, action, is it?So I don't know why they try to categorize everything. It drives me crazy-why it would have to be just a romantic comedy or...I want to have a little integrity, a little story, you know. Everyone asks if we're happy. Give me a break. We're married for two years. In Hollywood years, thats forever. Once you figure out who you are and what you love about yourself, I think it all kinda falls into place. You're damned if you're too thin and you're damned if you're too heavy. According to the press I've been both. Its impossible to satisfy everyone and I suggest we stop trying. This is gutting us. We have a week and a half left of work and we are like delicate china speeding toward a brick wall. Sounds fun, huh? I admit I love clothes and I buy clothes. But they sit in my closet. I like a pair of comfy pants, flip flops and a t-shirt. And when we pick a restaurant, my criteria is: Where can I wear this? The greater your capacity to love, the greater your capacity to feel the pain. I was somebody who never loved my hair. I had curly hair and wished it was straight. I love that feeling of being in love, the effect of having butterflies when you wake up in the morning. That is special. I'll start crying [thinking about the end]. That's a tough one. If you go back to the beginning, I think everybody has a special place for Ross and Rachel. I don't know what it means to be a sex symbol. When I look myself on a magazine cover I don't see it as me, but as someone painted, fluffed, puffed and done up. I'd just like [Rachel] to keep venturing out into the world. Have more experiences in dealing with real life. I'm just so sad about Friends ending that I got all goosey and weepy thinking about it. It's already been nine years, which is longer than I've stayed with anything. I know my bank account has changed, but otherwise I'm the same person I was when I started. There have been wake-up calls though. I started out wanting to succeed and prove that I could be an independant working woman. Now I'm seeing the bigger picture, realizing that family and enjoying your life are more important than the next role. We are having children after Friends is finished. We had a window there when Rachel was pregnant on the show. It would've been great but we were doing other things. Really try to follow what it is that you want to do and what your heart is telling you to do. It is an absolute bonus to make friends out of colleagues, but we are genuinely friends and our relationships grow stronger every day. We rely on each other for strength because we've been through so much in our lives together already. At some point in my life I hope my mother and I will get together...unfortunately that got dragged out into the public eye. This is a wound that needs to heal slowly and time does that. And we love each other. When I got the script to this movie, The Good Girl, I read it in an hour. The writer, Mike White, has an ability to create characters that are so creepy and dysfunctional and human, with this duality that makes people feel empathy for them at the same time. My first thought was 'Was this sent to the right person?' I called my agent. 'Are they sure? Let's say yes before they realize they've sent it to the wrong person! I would love to sit down with all the people who are doing wrong in the world and go: Hey, what's up with you? What is your fucked up problem? Go smell the roses for crying out loud. I was the talker of the group and somehow I got the role of therapist among my friends. You kind of want to take care of everyone, which can be a bad thing, trying to be a saviour for everyone. You kind of miss out on letting them take care of you. I remember seeing "She is the one" for the first time. I was like 'I should not be on a screen that big. It doesn't work ADVERTISEMENT Homepage - What's New - Movie - Photo - Wallpaper - Screensaver - Contact Us 2005 Absolutely Celebrity Network

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hair growth. A normal

Hair loss International Edition | Member Center: Sign In | Register Home Page World U.S. Weather Business Sports Politics Law Technology Science & Space Health Entertainment Travel Education Special Reports Video Autos CNN Pipeline E-mail Newsletters Your E-mail Alerts Podcasts RSS CNNtoGO Contact Us In association with: WOMEN'S HEALTH Hair/Nails/Skin • Corns and calluses • Nail fungus • Ingrown toenails • Moles • Acne • Skin cancer • Psoriasis • Hair loss • Sweating and body odor • Rosacea • Hives and angioedema • Athlete's foot • Dermatomyositis • Dermatitis/Eczema • Cold sore • Scleroderma • Lice • Common warts • Melanoma • Cellulitis • Scabies • Anal itching • Dandruff • Impetigo • Boils and carbuncles • Psoriatic arthritis • Ringworm of the body • Jock itch • Plantar warts • Folliculitis • Dry skin • Actinic keratosis • CREST syndrome • Vitiligo INFORMATION CENTERS: Pick a category Health Centers =========== Family Health Men's Health Women's Health Children's Health Seniors' Health Fitness & Nutrition Working Life Pain Management Condition Centers ============= AIDS/HIV & Immune System Allergy Alzheimer's Arthritis Asthma & Respiratory System Brain & Nervous System Cancer Cold, Flu & Viruses Diabetes & Endocrine System Digestive System Heart and Blood Infectious Disease Mental Health Note: All links within content go to MayoClinic.com Diseases and Conditions Hair loss From MayoClinic.com Special to CNN.com Overview Your hair loss may have started with a few extra hairs in the sink or in your comb. But now you can't look in the mirror without seeing more of your uncovered scalp. Baldness typically refers to excessive hair loss from your scalp and can be the result of heredity, certain medications or an underlying medical condition. Anyone — men, women and children — can experience hair loss. The medical term for hair loss is alopecia. The most common type is pattern baldness (androgenetic alopecia). It accounts for about 95 percent of hair loss from the scalp. It's typically permanent and can be attributed to heredity. Another type of alopecia, alopecia areata, can be temporary. It can involve hair loss on your scalp or your body. Its specific cause is unknown. Some people prefer to let their hair loss run its course untreated and unhidden. Others may cover it up with hairstyles, makeup, hats or scarves. You may also choose one of the medications and surgical procedures that are available to treat hair loss. Before pursuing any of these treatment options, talk with your doctor about the cause and best possible treatments for your hair loss. Signs and symptoms Having androgenetic alopecia may mean you experience hair loss as early as during your teen years. For men, this type of hair loss is typically characterized by hair loss that begins at the temples and crown. The end result may be partial or complete baldness. Women with androgenetic alopecia usually have hair loss limited to thinning at the front, sides or crown. Complete baldness rarely occurs in women. With alopecia areata, hair loss usually occurs in small, round, smooth patches. You may lose only scalp hair, or you may lose body hair as well. Causes About 90 percent of the hair on most people's scalp is in a 2- to 6-year growth (anagen) stage at any given time. The other 10 percent is in a 2- to 3-month resting (telogen) phase, after which time it is shed. Most people shed 50 to 150 hairs a day. Once a hair is shed, the growth stage begins again as a new hair from the same follicle replaces the shed hair. New hair grows at a rate of approximately 1/2 inch each month. Hair loss may lead to baldness when the rate of shedding exceeds the rate of regrowth, when new hair is thinner than the hair shed or when hair comes out in patches. Androgenetic alopecia is caused by heredity. Although it's most common among men, it can also affect women. A history of androgenetic alopecia on either side of your family increases your risk of hair loss. Heredity also affects the age at which you begin to lose hair and the developmental speed, pattern and extent of your hair loss. Alopecia areata is classified as an autoimmune disease, but the cause is unknown. People who develop this type of hair loss are generally in good health. Some scientists believe that some people are genetically predisposed to develop alopecia areata and that a trigger, such as a virus or something else in the environment, sets off the condition. A family history of alopecia areata makes you more likely to develop it. Unlike androgenetic alopecia, hair generally grows back. But you may lose and regrow your hair a number of times. Other causes of temporary hair loss include: Disease. Diabetes, lupus and thyroid disorders can cause hair loss. Poor nutrition. Having inadequate protein or iron in your diet or poor nourishment in other ways can cause you to experience hair loss. Fad diets, crash diets and certain illnesses, such as eating disorders, can cause poor nutrition. Medications. Certain drugs used to treat gout, arthritis, depression, heart problems and high blood pressure may cause hair loss in some people. Taking birth control pills also may result in hair loss for some women. Medical treatments. Undergoing chemotherapy or radiation therapy may cause you to develop alopecia. After your treatment ends, your hair typically begins to regrow. Recent high fever, severe flu or surgery. You may notice you have less hair three to four months after events such as an illness or surgery. These conditions cause hair to shift rapidly into a resting phase (telogen effluvium), meaning you'll see less new hair growth. A normal amount of hair typically will appear after the growth phase resumes. Infancy. Newborns often lose hair during the first several months of life. This baby hair (vellus) is eventually replaced by more permanent hair. It's also common for babies to lose a patch of hair on the back of their heads from rubbing against mattresses, playpens and car seats. Hair will grow back once a baby begins to spend more time sitting up. Childbirth. Some women experience an increase in hair loss several months after delivering a baby. This is because during pregnancy the hair is shifted into an active growth state that then goes back to baseline soon after delivery. This increased hair loss usually corrects itself. Hair treatments. Chemicals used for dying, tinting, bleaching, straightening or perming can cause hair to become damaged and break off if they are overused or used incorrectly. Excessive hairstyling or hairstyles that pull your hair too tightly also can cause some hair loss. This is known as traction alopecia. Scalp infection. Infections such as ringworm can invade the hair and skin of your scalp, leading to hair loss. Once infections are treated, hair generally regrows. Ringworm, a fungal infection, can usually be treated with a topical or oral antifungal medication. Type 1 diabetes Lupus Hypothyroidism Eating disorders Gout Depression High blood pressure (hypertension) Fever Influenza (Flu) Treatment Baldness, whether permanent or temporary, can't be cured. But treatments are available to help promote hair growth or hide hair loss. For some types of alopecia, hair may resume growth without any form of treatment. Medications The effectiveness of medications used to treat alopecia depends on the cause of hair loss, the extent of the loss and individual response. Generally, treatment is less effective for more extensive cases of hair loss. The types of drugs for treatment of alopecia that are approved by the Food and Drug Administration include: Minoxidil (Rogaine). This over-the-counter medication is approved for the treatment of androgenetic alopecia and alopecia areata. Minoxidil is a liquid that you rub into your scalp twice daily to regrow hair and to prevent further loss. Some people experience some hair regrowth or a slower rate of hair loss or both. Minoxidil is available in a 2 percent solution and in a 5 percent solution. New hair resulting from minoxidil use may be thinner and shorter than previous hair. But there can be enough regrowth for some people to hide their bald spots and have it blend with existing hair. New hair stops growing soon after you discontinue the use of minoxidil. If you experience minimal results within six months, your doctor may recommend discontinuing use. Side effects can include irritation of the scalp. Finasteride (Propecia, Proscar). This prescription medication to treat male-pattern baldness is taken daily in pill form. Many people taking finasteride experience a slowing of hair loss, and some may show some new hair growth. Positive results may take several months. Finasteride works by inhibiting the conversion of testosterone into dihydrotestosterone (DHT), a hormone that shrinks hair follicles and is an important factor in male hair loss. Rare side effects of finasteride include diminished sex drive and sexual function. As with minoxidil, the benefits of finasteride stop if usage is discontinued. Finasteride is not approved for use by women. In fact, it poses significant danger to women of childbearing age. If you're a pregnant woman, don't even handle crushed or broken finasteride tablets because absorption of the drug may cause serious birth defects in male fetuses. Corticosteroids. Injections of cortisone into the scalp can treat alopecia areata. Treatment is usually repeated monthly. Doctors sometimes prescribe corticosteroid pills for extensive hair loss due to alopecia areata. Ointments and creams can also be used, but they may be less effective than injections. Anthralin (Drithocreme). Available as either a cream or an ointment, anthralin is a synthetic, tarry substance that you apply to your scalp and wash off daily. It's typically used to treat psoriasis, but doctors can prescribe it to treat other skin conditions. Anthralin may stimulate new hair growth for cases of alopecia areata. Surgical procedures Hair transplants and scalp reduction surgery are available to treat androgenetic alopecia. During transplantation a dermatologist or cosmetic surgeon takes tiny plugs of skin, each containing one to several hairs, from the back or side of your scalp. The plugs are then implanted into the bald sections. Several transplant sessions may be needed as hereditary hair loss progresses with time. Scalp reduction, as the name implies, means decreasing the area of bald skin on your head. Your scalp and the top part of your head may seem to have a snug fit. But the skin can become flexible and stretched enough for some of it to be surgically removed. After hairless scalp is removed, the space is closed with hair-covered scalp. Doctors can also fold hair-bearing skin over an area of bald skin in a scalp reduction technique called a flap. Scalp reduction can be combined with hair transplantation to fashion a natural-looking hairline. Surgical procedures to treat baldness are expensive and can be painful. Possible risks include infection and scarring. If you're interested in these procedures, consider only board-certified dermatologists, plastic surgeons or cosmetic surgeons, and check local and state medical boards for a record of patient complaints before choosing a doctor. If you would like an alternative to medical treatment for your hair loss or if you don't respond to treatment, you may want to consider wearing a wig or hairpiece. They can be used to cover either permanent or temporary hair loss. Quality, natural-looking wigs and hairpieces are available. Coping skills Chances are that the greatest challenge of losing your hair is coping with the change in your appearance. You may be frustrated or upset by other people's reactions or after trying various treatments with little success. If you're having difficulty coping with baldness caused by heredity, a medical condition or medical treatments, you may find some of the following suggestions helpful: Learn about the cause of your baldness and treatment options. Be wary of alternative treatments that have no proven track record or may cause dangerous or unpleasant side effects. Educate those near to you. Your family and friends can be more sympathetic if they understand the cause of your baldness or your concerns about your looks. You may also learn that they are less concerned about changes in your appearance than you are. Consider joining a support group. While support groups aren't for everyone, they can be sources of information and comfort. Talking with people who experience the same challenges or medical conditions and learning how they cope can be reassuring. Hair loss: Cancer-related causes and how to cope March 12, 2004 © 1998-2005 Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research (MFMER). All rights reserved.  A single copy of these materials may be reprinted for noncommercial personal use only. "Mayo," "Mayo Clinic," "MayoClinic.com," "Mayo Clinic Health Information," "Reliable information for a healthier life" and the triple-shield Mayo logo are trademarks of Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research.  Terms of Use . © 2001 Planetree, Inc. All rights reserved. International Edition Languages --------- Arabic Japanese Korean Turkish CNN TV CNN International Headline News Transcripts Advertise with Us About Us © 2005 Cable News Network LP, LLLP. A Time Warner Company. All Rights Reserved. Terms under which this service is provided to you. Read our privacy guidelines . Contact us . External sites open in new window; not endorsed by CNN.com Pay service with live and archived video. Learn more Download audio news | Add RSS headlines

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