Ontic Oren

As of today, I’ve had my Kindle for two months.  I’ve read 13 books in that time, a few magazines, two newspapers, one blog, and a PDF or two.  The verdict?  It’s a good device.  It’s clearly the future.  If you’re not an insane geek, wait till something a bit better comes up.  Here’s my more in-depth thoughts:

Screen:

Amazing, and a bit disappointing.  If you’ve not yet seen e-ink, you’ll be in for a surprise.  It looks like printed text.  It is extremely readable in all lighting conditions.  The slight grey background has no impact for me at all.   The screen can display the text in 5 sizes; I’ve found that I most like the second smallest.  It’s the right compromise between jaggy and density.  The screen is only 600×800 pixels, so the smaller font sizes are noticible for not being smooth.  They are totally readable, but just not as good as the printer page.  I’d almost call them comparable to an inkjet on quick – a little messy, but totally readable.   If they could double the resolution, I’d be happy.  The single font doesn’t bother me at all, nor does the lack of formating.  Just get rid of the jaggies.

The flash: yes there is one.  The screen goes black for 1 second while it’s changing pages.  Beyond the speed impact, it’s not an issue.  At all.  I got used to it in 10 min, and don’t notice it.  Move along.

Graphics in books are a joke.  The “screensaver” shows that it’s possible, but I suppose that no one is releasing graphics optimized Kindle e-books yet.  If your book includes graphics as a key element, just get it in print for now.

Ergonomics:

The first real red flag.  Take a gander at that picture.  See how the disembdied hand is holding the Kindle?  Good, cause that’s basically the ONLY way to hold the kindle.  Pick it up anywhere else, and you hit a button.   But you don’t want to hold it that way?  Tough.  And see those nice big buttons on the side?  You are going to hit them.  Not only to turn the page, but every time you glance at the thing.  You will lose your page a dozen times till you get locking religion, and lock out the keyboard everytime you put it down.  A sneeze will change the page.  The keyboard?  It feels like crap, but that’s ok, cause you’ll use it for 5 min max.  So why does it take up 20% of the machine?

You can hold onto the included case, which gives you some more options.  Till the Kindle drops out, as it’s held in by weak little monkeys trying vainly to clamp onto the 2 square micrometers of free space that doesn’t have buttons, and even their genetically engineered hands don’t have the strength.  Especially if you’re like me and hold books in odd ways, upside down hanging off couches, etc.

Oh yeah, about that case.  You’ve been trained like a good Pavlovian OCD pigeon to lock the keyboard EVERY time  you put the Kindle down?  Right?  Right!?  Cause if not, forget it.  The cover will hit some button, if you’re lucky you’ll be 50 pages from where you were when you put it down.  If you’re like me, your battery will be DEAD.   Let’s say your lucky, and only some random location from where you originally were.  Well, good luck.  Changing pages takes ~ 3 seconds per page.  3 x 50 = 150.  That’s 2.5 minutes of flipping pages.  SO BORING.  So remember, LOCK the keyboard, even if you’re putting it down for 5 seconds.

Now, the much maligned, and well, frankly asinine back button.   This deserves a special place in hell.  The concept is great – take me back to where I was just at. The problem is, let’s say you’re reading a book, and maybe, for some reason, you might have say first started this book at the front, then flipped forward 20 pages.  Then you hit the back button.  and you’re back… to the begining.  Literally.  Yes, you now need to flip 20 pages.  It’s SO easy to hit this, and totally lose your place.  It’s in the #1 button position, begging to be pressed.  DON’T DO IT.  I have yet to find a situation in which I’m not better off figuring out some other way of getting back.  I’ve trained myself to just never hit that back button, and I’m much better for it, thank you.

Content:

Content is king, or so 18,900,000 people say.   Amazon has decent coverage, borderline acceptable.  I am constantly finding books that aren’t available however.  I’d say around 50% of the books that I’ve wanted to read have not been available, and some are not exactly long tail.  If you are into some more obscure content, forget it.  I was curious to get some philosophy books, with NO luck.  The collection is fairly similar to my library.  That’s not fair – my local library has more books.

The other aspect of content is appropriateness for format. Obvisouly, this isn’t the device to read coffee table photography books.  Unexpectedly, I’d also argue that it isn’t the device to read reference material on.  The Kindle is ideal for linear content, such as fiction or some non-fiction.  However, I often find when I read more challenging material, 10 pages after reading something, I suddenly realize I need to re-read a paragraph.  Usually it’s a 10 second flip flip, found the section, read and think, then back to where I was.  Not with the Kindle.  Here, you’ve got to find the passage, which can take a while as you press, flash, wait, scan over and over.  Then you need to get back to where you were.  ick.  This cuts out all reference, programming, and intellectual content for me.  Sure, you can search, but I need the serendipitous random search, not the computer driven kind.

Blogs and periodicals fall into the same problem.  I like to skim, and dive.  Kindle doesn’t work for that.  Stick to linear works.

Social:

Reading is inherently a social activity for me.  My family goes on trips once a year, where everyone brings books, reads everyone elses, and powers through way too many.  Not with the kindle.  No sharing here.  This may be Olivia’s #1 issue with it.  I read something, tell her about it, and basically taunt her, since I’m not going to give her my Kindle.  This isn’t really Amazon’s fault, it’s just something to be aware of.  If you do have multiple Kindle’, it actually works fairly well.  My dad also has a Kindle, and it’s tied to my account.  Although he’s in NJ, and I’m in CA, we both have full access to anything the other person purchases, barring periodicals.

Technology:

The wireless is slick.  Great signal everywhere I go, and it just works.  Surfing web pages is stupid painful, due to the screen and UI refresh.  Wikipedia access is cool, and useable.  I use the embedded dictionary at least once an hour, possibly my favorite ancillary feature.  Battery life, assuming you lock the damn thing, is great – 5 days with wireless on, 2 weeks with it off.  Although it has a USB port, that’s just for data transfer, not charging.  Only way to charge is to plug in with the wall-wart.

The sample feature is neat.  You can download the first few pages of any book for free.  It seems to be the first few pages from the beginning, regardless of the book.  If there’s a huge TOC, you may only get 1-2 pages of actual book.  If there’s not much fluff at the beginning, you could get a whole chapter.  I’ve love to see them move to the first 20 pages of “content” if possible.

Je ne sais quoi:

All things being equal, there’s still something about the paper book.  It just feels better to read on paper.  There really just is a certain something about paper.  Now, that said, I’m very happy with the Kindle.  I’m reading more, both on paper and electronically with it.  Especially for traveling, the Kindle is great.  Having 5 books on hand at once, in a light package, is wonderful.

If they fix the basic ergo issues, I’d recommend it for linear reading with a big thumbs up.  As it is, go in with your eyes open, and you may find it’s a great device.

I’ve concluded the tools analysis that I kicked off a few weeks ago. What initially began as a look into requirements management tools quickly expanded into the entire product development lifecycle. Tools can not make up for broken process, so that’s the place to start. As I looked back at what’s worked and not in the past, I realized that the MOST critical success factor has always been alignment. If engineering, product management, sales and the customer aren’t all aligned on what, when, how, and why, we create massive headaches for ourselves. To ensure alignment, we need one source of truth, one place to track everything that’s going on. If we need to keep two system in sync, we lose. If everyone in the company can’t see everything, we lose. If everyone isn’t bought into the process, we lose.

In order to get everyone on the same page, we need to look at the toughest participant. I’m sure this won’t come as a surprise to anyone, but usually that’s engineering. Not only are they the largest team, they also have the strongest opinions. Starting from that vantage, I realized the plan of record has to be kept in a bug database. It’s the only thing engineering will update. In my past lives I’ve many times tried to keep a separate list, one focused on features, and engineering’s DB focused on bugs. But what happens when you classify a bug as a feature enhancement? It’s such a grey area, do you start replicating and moving data? Duplicating it? Either way, it’s a disaster. I’ve gotten into massive fights over this before, and even if I was “right”, is it worth fighting that over and over?Yes, tools like Rally and Accept can interop with Bugzilla or Jira. But if I need to have the bug DB anyway, is the extra effort and cost worth while? For such a small shop as ours, I’m not sure the answer is yes. I’ve used Accept for a few years, and have loved the tool. For traceability and analysis, it’s the perfect tool. I think I may have let those aspects get in the way of focusing on what the requirements themselves are, and how we get alignment in the groups. Frankly, all the tools I looked at in the previous post just seem like total overkill for any <50 (and maybe even <300) person company.

Now clearly, the bug database by itself isn’t sufficient. You need a place for more unstructured data, for planning, notes, etc. For marketing data, sales plans, and just the rest of the company. Obviously, a wiki is the best place to put this. This leaves us needing a great bug DB, and a great Wiki. In a stroke, I’ve thrown out almost all the tools I was looking at before: Accept, Rally, Feature Plan, VersionOne. They all are… complex. I’m sure for a large company, they’d work great, and have their advantages, but for a startup looking at Scrum and frankly trying to save some money, I just couldn’t see the value. So that leaves us with only four options that I could see out there:

• Fogbugz (with or without external wiki)
• Twiki + Bugzilla
• Trac
• Confluence + Jira

Fogbugz I quickly ruled out. Although it’s got a great UI, and I hear good things about it, it’s also just not the right fit. Some of the additional features were lackluster (the wiki is atrocious, the forum useless compared to phpBB), plus it’s very general (good), and needs to be shoehorned to fit Scrum or other agile processes (bad).

The next three was a much tougher decision. Trac looks great. For an internal focused project, or an open source project, it’s probably the one I’d use. However, we have need for both private and external content, tighter security controls, and some more advanced commercial features that they don’t seem to cover. I REALLY liked Trac, but I didn’t see it fitting into our commercial environment.

Now it’s really hard. I LOVE twiki. Better than Confluence. I like Jira better than Bugzilla. Ultimately, the support & integration that Atlassian is providing, plus the larger suite of products such as Fisheye, Bamboo, etc all pushed me over the edge. Maybe it’s just a dream, but the thought of having a view into CI data, test status, check-ins, all tied and traceable, makes me a tingle.

From a cost perspective, for a small team like ours we’re looking at a $3,600 investment for Jira and Confluence, plus $1,800 for maintenance. We’ll put them in VMs on existing HW, running Fedora. The incremental admin costs for two new machines should be minimal. I’m figuring if we buy into their whole stack, we may wind up spending 10K with them. On the one hand, that ain’t chump change, especially when we could be getting it for “free” with Twiki/Bugzilla or even Trac for internal + Twiki for external wiki needs. I’m counting on the support, the features, and the overall new development will all make this pay off.

I know many other people out there on the internets have gone through similar evaluations. Which way did you go? 6 months or a year later, are you happy about it?

BTW, the photos are from a recent drive I did. They are there just for decoration.

Once I get started, it’s hard to stop. After picking up the NHT, I of course had to look around on the internet some more, and opened my eyes up to the world of DACs. (head-fi.org is pure evil. If you value your wallet, do not visit.) Not content to wonder, I ordered two DACs. One was almost the same price as the NHT PVC, the other twice as expensive.

NHT PVC PC

What: A passive volume control. Simply attenuates whatever is fed into it. In home computer use, the claim is keeping your computer audio at maximum, and then using this analog controller provides better audio quality. Includes ground loop eliminator.

Connections: RCA in and out. Hook up to monitors only. No power. No headphone.

Aural: Compared with direct, it’s honestly hard to say. In my case, the ground loop noise was BAD without this. With, it’s clean and nice. I’ll call this baseline, but I honestly don’t know if it sounds better barring the ground loop noise.

Purchase: ListenUp.com. $179 delivered.

Fubar III

What: A small little integrated USB DAC and amp. Front features a big smooth pot, headphone jack, and two LEDs. Bottom blue led is power. Top led indicates active audio source. Green when active. Red when unplugged or computer is sleeping. The bottom blue one is so bright it’s distracting. 2-3x brighter than the green/red one. At eye level, it’s almost blinding. Off-axis, it’s just damn annoying. It’s always on.

Connections: USB to computer for DAC. Just plug in, and the mac automatically routes audio out to it. Truly PnP. Provides line-level ouputs as well as headphone jack. Headphone and line-out are active at same time, i.e. plugging in headphones does NOT turn off line-out audio. I left speakers always plugged in, but turned off when not in use. Unplugged headphones when not in use. 12V DC. Includes cheapo wall wart. Offers upgrade for another $100. Didn’t purchase upgrade.

Aural: A clear step up from the PVC PC and iMac. Enhanced, broader and clearer imaging. Better overall definition across the range. Slightly less boomy sounding on the NHT M-00 (though it’s still there, and annoying me more and more). Getting into serious audio realm. Check out this great review of the NHT/Fubar combo for more details. He does a better job than I, so I’ll leave it to him.

Other: Every 20 min, I’m getting audio drop out and stutter for 1 second. Annoying, and not sure what’s causing it yet.

Purchase: Audiophile Products. $238.97 delivered to California. Although in Canada, cheapest shipping took exactly 1 week door to door. Between this and the PVC, it’s a NO brainer. Dump the PVC, get the Fubar III instead.

Apogeee Duet

What: Firewire AD/DA. Targeted to musicians. Mac only. Level meters and big old knob on top. Build like a brick. Perfect fit in a mac environment from build and looks.

Connections: XLR mic input, 1/4″ instrument input, 1/4″ monitor out, 1/4″ headphone jack. The 1/4″ monitor is running straight into my NHTs. First, I set the levels from a test signal to 94db (84db with -10db test signal) on both the duet and the Fubar. Since the NHT have both 1/4″ and RCA in, I was able to leave both DAC hooked up, and switch in the Sound control panel back and forth.

Aural: I A/B’d this with the Fubar for about 6 hours of listning. Music included:

• Joshua Judges Ruth by Lyle Lovett
• Speakerboxxx / The Love Below by Outkast
• Don’t Mess With The Dragon by Ozomatli
• O by Damien Rice

plus a smattering of Paul Simon, Imogen Heap, AC/DC, and Vampire Weekend.

Compared with the step from the PVC to the Fubar, the difference between the Fubar and the Duet is relatively small. The first thing I noticed is an unveiling (sorry Tara, not quite an unleashing) of the music. A layer of gauze has been removed: the soundstage is broader, the layers of the music clearer, the tone more balanced. There’s a sense of space that emerges in the Duet that is totally missing from the Fubar. Interestingly, the Duet is less sibilant than the Fubar. I can’t tell which is more “accurate”, but I am preferring the Duet.

Unlike the PVC/Fubar comparison, which it instantly recognizable as better, the Duet requires more careful listening to appreciate. Further, I’m very aware of the price bias I have. My wife and I setup a little ABX test, and we both could actually tell the difference. In her words, “the duet sounds clearer”, which is just about the perfect description.

Other: Apogee has done a great job integrating this into the Mac. The volume control is unified – changing the system volume with the keyboard is the same as turning the wheel. Turning the wheel displays the volume on screen. It feels like a part of the normal flow.

The Duet is actually designed for input – instruments, mics, etc. I am NOT the target audience here. I’m hoping to use it for some podcasting work moving forward as well, but frankly that’s just icing on the cake.

Purchase: Sweetwater. $495 delivered.

What am I keeping?

The Apogee Duet. It sounds better. It’s integrated. It doesn’t skip every now and then. It has input, which I can at least pretend I’ll be using at some point. Plus, it looks damn good on the desk, and doesn’t have those insanely bright LEDs. The Fubar is sitting in full on sun right now, and the blue LED is STILL too bright.

For those headphones users – I compared the Fubar and Duet with my Sennheiser 580 for an hour or so as well. I couldn’t balance the levels very easily and thus can’t really tell to accuratly. I’d say the Duet sound better, same comments as above. Perhaps better bass and cleaner power delivery.

Hi, my name is Oren, and I’m a borderline audiophile. It used to be really bad, with new speakers every few months, CD players sitting on sandbags, leadshot in the speaker stands. Luckily, my wife and her style sense have cleared me of much of that. But I’m still at heart an audio snob, if not phile. After suffering for years with my Microsoft Digital Sound System 80, I finally broke down last month and picked up a new pair of speakers for my computer.

Allow me a digression: I was flipping through AudioAdvisor’s catalog one day, and saw this big “SALE” notice next to the aforementioned speakers. Save 38%!!!! Big flashy colors!!!! I did a quick internet search before buying: too bad they’re still 25% more expensive than you can find for a “normal” price at ListenUp. In a nice circle-of-life type thing, ListenUp is the CO based store that nurtured my original addiction back in college. I would spend hours hanging out there, talkign to the sales guys, playing with the toys, going at least one weekend a month. I probably spent <$1,000 in the four years, and they never treated me as anything less than a great customer. I was ecstatic to buy from them again.

Back to the speakers. I picked up a pair of the NHT M-00 (affectionately called the Moo), the S-00 and the PVC PC on top of it all. While the speakers and sub are self evident, what’s the PVC PC? There are those who claim that adjusting the volume on your computer limits it’s quality. The PVC allows you to keep the audio at 11 on your computer, and adjust the volume in the analog world. Plus, you can use line-out sources (i.e. the iPod) and not blast your ears.

ListenUp was originally out of stock on the PVC. My initial hookup was a mini->RCA into the sub, then balanced from the sub->satellite. There was a ton of groud loop noise, enough that the auto-power would never kick in, and the speakers would all stay on unless manually powered off. The quality while playing was pretty good besides the noise, but I didn’t listen super critically.

Two days later, the PVC PC was in place. I’m now running the mini->RCA into the PVC, RCA->RCA from PVC to sub, and balanced from sub -> satellite. As it turns out, the PVC is also a ground loop eliminator. There is NO noise at all, and my cables are crossing power lines 20 times up and down, left and right. Silent.

Enough yammering, how does it sound? Amazing. I can not get over how much better this sounds. There is a level of clarity and musicality I’ve never expected from my computer. Compared with my Sennheiser 580, the Moo are more analytical, less crystal clear, but somehow more engaging (probably cause the physical bass). Sure, the cans are better, but not enough that I really care. The M00’s are involving, accurate, fun, detailed, crisp, natural. With the S00 there’s some bass, nothing below 50hz to speak of, but enough to annoy the dog.

In my room, they are far from tonally flat. Possibly because of the layout (tucked into a corner, on a desk), I get this huge +5-10 db (as measured with my rat-shack hand held SPL meter) mid-bass bump around 100hz. It’s noticeable in listening, and even at times a bit annoying. It’s cloys up the sound, almost a bit of pollution in this otherwise accurate gem. None of the settings on the cross-over have had a positive effect – I’ve minimized the impact as much as possible. Don’t let that scare you away though, I’m not listening to the 580’s any time soon while I’m sitting here! I really just love this setup.

I can honestly say this has totally changed my listening habits. I can’t wait to sit in front of my computer now. I’m working more, I’m sure as hell listening to music more, and most importantly, I’m enjoying the hell out of it. Every song just sounds great (or terrible, if that’s what they intended). Yes, it’s a lot of money to spend on computer audio, but I’m using it more than my home setup, it’s significantly cheaper, and frankly it sounds better for stereo music listening. Highly highly recommended for anyone looking for great computer audio.

Next up – A friend has the Adam A7 and Mbox setup. All the cool kids scoff at the NHT (it’s not even sold at sweetwater) and drool over the A7. At some point, one of us will bring the other’s speakers over so we can compare. In the meantime, I have NO regrets, and strongly encourage anyone out there to give these a spin.

Disclaimer: My source so far has been 192KBPS VBR MP3 (or higher) from either the Great Re-Rip of 2006 (that’s a blog post for the future) or Amazon MP3 store. For some out there, that’s enough to invalidate any thoughts I have, as clearly my ears are crap if I’m not listening to FLAC/Apple Loseless/whatever with some fancy external DAC.

What should I build? And who says so? When do they need it? Will we be able to deliver?I’m working with my team and engineers every day to answer these. Although tools will never make up for a terrible process, a good tool can also make things go much much smoother. For 2 years, I’ve been using Accept 360 for requirement tracking. My wife is leading up an evaluation at her company right now, which sparked some more investigation on my part.To look at all the players out there, you need to break the SW development process down. I’d say there are three phases, irrespective of development methodolgy. Regardless if you’re a Scrumer, a XP developer, or a plain old waterfall, it seems like you always have three tasks:

1. CRM/Customer interface. Collect data from customer, define and justify your requirements with data. This is almost always driven by email, personal interaction, meetings, notes. The tool is here to help the product manager collect their thoughts, organize the data, collaborate with other marketing people, and feed the status back to the field and customer. Very focused on traceability – show me who is asking for what, when and how. Very CRM like.
2. Project Management. Manage the development, what is in what release. Know when and what you’ll have. A very blury line often between product management, engineering, and gobs of other people. Focus on the deliverables, the specifications, and getting releases out. Heavily used during development by all involved.
3. Release management. Bugs on released products, feedback into step 1. Close the loop. Collect the feedback from users, community, post-release QA. Feed back in to Phase 1 and continue ahead. I see this as a combination of bug database and Wiki.

I looked at bunch of tools. All except featureplan I’ve looked at in the past month – featureplan I last looked at over a year ago, so much may have changed.

• Accept 360
  • Phase 1 Focused
  • Web UI, Slowest interaction, though still acceptable
  • Very focused on the requirements gathering phase. Very strong relationship definition.
  • Recreating the CRM – if you use anything else gets frustrating to enter in data duplication.
  • Methodology agnostic. Neither helps nor hurts with Scrum.
  • Weak Phase 2. Not worth using IMO. Too complex, can’t actual inteagrate. Very heavy project management overhead.
  • Seems big-company centric. Doesn’t feel “cool”
  • Doesn’t publish pricing, but it’s >$1000/user/year.
• Rally Software
  • Phase 2 focused. Plugins with others to satisfy phase 1 and 3.
  • Medium-complex UI. Very usable, fast.
  • All about Agile/Scrum. Uses terminology, flows that force you to use agile.
  • Focused on what they can do – doesn’t try to solve it all
  • Best integration – subversion, eclipse, Visual studio, jira, salesforce, etc.
  • Super cool wiki/community integration with end-to-end salesforce tracking as well.
  • $35/user/month or $420/user/year. Salesforce integration extra.
• FogBugz
  • Phase 2 & 3 focus
  • No methodology implied, do whatever you want.
  • Integrated wiki appears weak – separate from reset of product. Would personally use mediawiki instead.
  • Very slick UI, very fast, VERY easy to use.
  • $25/user/month
• VersionOne
  • Waiting to get a demo account still. Demerits to them. Who requires talking on the phone in this day and age to get a demo account?
  • $30/user/month
• Feature Plan
  • Phase 1 only, but crushes it.
  • Deep requirements planning. Integrates with Rally.
  • Development methodology agnostic.
  • Only windows only client (they’ve got a web UI, didn’t exist when I looked last)
  • All about pragmatic marketing (but then, I am too. :)
  • Darn expensive as I recall.
• Trac
  • Phase 2 and 3.
  • The dark horse in this group – open source, PITA to install
  • Scrum plugins to make project management in Scrum very reasonable.
  • Good integrated Wiki features
  • Possibly better as a project tracking than a product – need investigation but initial feeling is this works GREAT for open source projects, but may run into issues with wiki and others for real product release lifecycle (i.e. permissions on documentation).
  • “free”

Rally really impressed me. I used it 18 months ago, and was underwhelmed, now it seems like a great tool. I especially like the integration – Salesforce for your CRM (and bugs even), take continuous integration data, and have it all useful from one tool. It’s probably a high investment strategy, but I could see starting small, just trying it out, and growing to make it a core part of the platform.Alternatively, fogbugz looks like a great choice. It’s less of the uber-tool, and more focused on the development. For Scrum management, I’d suggest using good old paper (burn down, planning, etc).The data geek in me says go for Rally. KISS says Fogbugz and paper.

A warning and complaint to all:Offline support in Mail.app in 10.5.1 (and 10.5.0) is a DISASTER!  Actions performed offline (filing) DO NOT get synced when you connect back up.  Further, every time you send a message it warns you that you’re not connected!  I lost 2 hours of email work on the plane.  Apparently only 50% of the 40 emails I sent actually found their way out, I can’t tell what is what, and who has seen whom.  It’s a disaster.  DO NOT USE mail.app for offline.darn it.

Be careful of the windows you look through – sometimes you won’t be happy with what you see. Sun has posted review widgets on our site for a few months now. In keeping with our blog philosophy and our open source culture, it makes sense to solicit feedback direct from the source. One of the keystones of a review is a fair basis of understanding – the reviewer knows and understands what it is they are reviewing. So what do you do when that breaks down?One of my products, Sun Connection has had a spate of bad reviews recently. As soon as they came up, we looked closely at each one. And each one has the same problem – it’s not for the product that we have listed! To a tee, every review was really feedback on a feature in Solaris that provides single system patch updates, confusingly called Sun Update Connection (vs this product – Sun Connection). Sun Connection is an enterprise patch management tool that works across Linux, zLinux and Solaris systems. Sun Update Connection is a simple interface into downloading patches from Sun for a single machine.Choice reviews inlcluded such pointed feedback as:

• Extremely buggie product. It hangs very often and sometimes is very difficult to put the tool working again.
• I will never use Sun again. I have been migrating my business and my customers from Solaris to Linux. This is absurd. No more patch clusters. Register for this. Register for that. Sun used to be a great company. No more. I can’t get security updates without remembering my username for this, my username for that. Ubuntu and Debian, here we come!
• While the GUI is nice in theory, I hate it. It gives no feedback onwhat it is doing and which machine it is doing it on. I wouldmuch rather have a CLI based method that give proper feedback and syslogging. Plus updatemanager is unreliable
• Unusable. Would much rather download clustered patches, which doesn’t seem to be an option anymore

Ouch. Frankly though, fair. All these comments point out very real deficiencies in the built in patch management tools with Solaris. They also point out frustration with our patch policy. What they don’t point out is any feedback on the product the reviews show up on – Sun Connection, our enterprise patch management tool. Clearly, this is our (SMI’s) fault. We haven’t done a good enough job naming and describing our products, we haven’t communicated out patch policy well, and we apparently haven’t given customers enough options on how to use the system. We’re working aggressively on addressing all of these – with Project Indiana, launching new products and restructuring the web site.In the meantime, we’ve taken the reviews down off our product page. I want to apologize – this is a failing of my team that we’ve needed to do this, and we’re working overtime to relaunch our pages with a clearer delineation on what exactly our products are. The point of the reviews is to help spark the conversation, and keep it open even among the disenfranchised. Reviews will return soon (before the end of the calendar year). In the meantime, please take advantage of the comments, and let’s have a discussion on the issues and merits of our products! We know we’re not perfect, and we do want to make it better!