I caught a touch of food poisoning yesterday and I'm not still not totally right. While generally not a great experience, something about pulling over in the Tenderloin to hurl felt all too comfortable.
Some links for your enjoyment:
Join me and John Rowell from Opsource, Wednesday, July 9, 2008 9:00am PDT on a webinar discussing how the Cloud affects the Enterprise and vice-versa.
Learn about common concerns organizations face when incorporating SaaS applications into their growing enterprise architecture and how to make the transition from on-site to internet based applications.
As the cloud continues to emerge as a serious option, many people are starting to catch on that there are limits to what can be done outside that particular platform.
Right now there only a few options if you are a cloud or PaaS provider:
1. Cordon off virtual machines and use VM images (like Amazon.com or Joyent)
2. Allow development on some programming language (like Google App Engine)
3. Force users onto your platform (like Salesforce.com)
The applications that are built on top of a particular vendor's infrastructure are locked into that provider's way of doing things. I always expect the cloud to be about freedom from vendor control--much like how open source gives control to the users.
Where is the "write once, run anywhere" ideal of Java? Sun should be the next big Cloud vendor--it's got hardware, virtualization, and Java all under one roof and yet it remains late to the game.
Over at GigaOm I read about Dreamfactory which provides some cloud-agnostic/opportunistic offerings to integrate its own applications with other SaaS vendors.
But rather than being tied to a particular cloud, DreamFactory works with many of them. Relying on a rich client that runs as a browser plug-in, DreamFactory's application only needs the cloud for storage. It can use Salesforce, Webex Connect and Amazon EC2. Quickbase support is just around the corner, with Google BigTable hot on its heels. It will even run on your hard drive.
The fact that the Dreamfactory plug-in runs locally solves a major issue--what happens when you are not connected. It also means you can move from platform-to-platform.
But this approach is merely the tip of the iceberg. When you consider the domination of the Flash plug-in, you can certainly imagine Adobe making strides very quickly. For that matter, this approach could be Microsoft's first step into being cloud-relevant.
The next stage of the cloud is the maneuverability of data regardless of its location or destination.
Your brain lies to you, says the NY Times in an Op-ed piece about the upcoming elections. For me, the article illuminates some of the implications of the social-media world where information flies at you from every direction. You don't know what's true or false and odds are you can't handle the volume of information in a manner that lets you process it effectively.
Basically you hear or learn something, the brain processes it multiple times and by the time its fully part of your brain you've forgotten where it came from.
This phenomenon, known as source amnesia, can also lead people to forget whether a statement is true. Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer, people often later remember it as true.
With time, this misremembering only gets worse. A false statement from a noncredible source that is at first not believed can gain credibility during the months it takes to reprocess memories from short-term hippocampal storage to longer-term cortical storage. As the source is forgotten, the message and its implications gain strength.
I find myself following my Twitter list and posting my own inanities having little to no idea if there are implications or if what anyone posts is actually true. This requires a level of diligence that the brain isn't necessarily prepared to deal with as well as a level of attention that goes beyond being a communications utility and into a part-time job.
Personally, this Twitter thing was fun for a while but it has become a burden.
Lately I am obsessed with video games, not so much in playing them but figuring how they work. It's kind of surprising that companies like Amazon and Google tell you how their entire infrastructures are built but as my fellow CNET blogger Don Reisinger points out, the gaming industry is shrouded in anonymity and secrecy.
It makes me think there is a huge opportunity for some kind of open source-esque video game console and game development. Gaming is a market dominated by 3-4 giant players just like how software was, and music has been. We've seen the effects of open source and SaaS on giant software vendors and what digital music did to the music industry. Will gaming be next? It seems ripe for a shake-up.
Today Venture Beat brings us a Q&A with Insomniac Games chief Ted Price on cloning the golden goose which gives a bit of a window into the world of game development vs. publishing.
Overall the state of the gaming industry makes me think that the companies who doing everything browser based are going to be very successful at some point.
If anybody is interested in discussing gaming either for this blog or privately, please hit me up.
David Rice's book Geekonomics: The Real Cost of Insecure Software calls the software industry to account for its careless attitude toward security.
As reported on Forbes.com: Rice blames the software industry for a litany of hidden costs, ranging from the infrastructure needed to fix hackable bugs in software to recent data breaches at the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon--even a Boeing 747 crash in 2005 that resulted from software glitches. All told, he places the total economic cost of security flaws in software at around $180 billion a year.
Companies like Oracle or Microsoft say their software is unbreakable or trustworthy. But those statements are vacuous and cheap to make, and there's no consequences for when they're wrong.
I didn't receive the book yet so I am not sure how much mention of open source it contains. But you certainly can't make the argument that the risk is hidden such as with proprietary products.
I can't believe it took Yahoo! this long to create a Cloud Computing division. They are easily in the top 5 most impressive infrastructures and maybe will now take advantage of it.
In order to expand its cloud computing capabilities, the Company will form a Cloud Computing & Data Infrastructure Group, charged with developing a computing infrastructure that balances scalability with cost effectiveness.
Yahoo! is making changes to its technology organization, led by Chief Technology Officer Ari Balogh, to better position the company to execute on its strategic priorities. Principal changes are developing a world-class cloud computing and storage infrastructure; rewiring Yahoo! onto common platforms; and creating a stronger partnership between product and engineering teams.
Nick Carr sent a message to the Structure conference audience and noted the symbolism of Bill Gates leaving Microsoft to the ushering in of computing moving from the desktop to the network.
Definitely worth a view.
Over on the NY Times, David Pogue explains how he deals with the deluge of daily emails he receives.
Here are the questions he answers:
A) How many wackos do you hear from in a day?
B) How do you handle said wackos?
C) Do you use elaborate file/folder systems?
D) How much of your day is spent on replying to e-mails?
E) How do you determine who gets a reply?
F) How often do you check e-mail?
G) What advice would you give to a public figure about what to watch out for if you publish your e-mail address?"
According to Scott McNealy "We were the Red Hat of Berkeley Unix before Linus Torvalds was out of diapers." And yet, Sun decided to keep Solaris closed until Linux had taken a huge amount of the Unix market away.
In an outburst that he admitted himself was "a little Al Gore-ish," Sun's Scott McNealy earlier this week claimed, in front of Canadian journalists who were asking whether Sun was feeling "pressured" to open source Solaris: "We're the number-one donator of code to the open source community on the planet."
