The Pervasive Data Center

How photo products (mostly didn't) evolve during 2011

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The successor to the full-frame Nikon D700 and Canon's follow-on to the EOS 5D Mark II were widely expected to put in an appearance of some sort during 2011. They didn't.

It appears as if the D800 will be a 36-megapixel camera that will launch in early 2012. What Canon's prosumer follow-on (5D Mark III?) will look like and when it will debut is anyone's guess. The combination of the Japanese earthquake/tsunami and Thailand flood tragedies contributed to significant delays throughout the photographic industry.

Other cameras were announced but are still not widely available, apparently more

How I did with my 2011 cloud predictions

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At year's end, it's customary--or at least common--for prognosticators to trumpet the predictions they got right and to ignore the rest.

However, I've decided to break with tradition and review my entire list from last November. There aren't any howlers, but I must admit I was a bit impatient on a few fronts. (I'd like to note that fellow ex-analyst Andi Mann also did so recently.)

Less focus on definitions (and dare we say hype?). Grade: B. There's been incremental advance in user education, but I find I still need to keep a NIST definition (

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Is software customization passe?

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The ability to customize purchases has become the norm across so many industries, but it wasn't always so.

In the PC industry, for example, small local retailers built custom "white box" PCs going back to the fairly early days. But it wasn't until Dell went the build-to-order route in the 1990s (PDF) that it became commonplace. Today, although retail stores stock standard configurations, the option to order a custom config online is the norm.

It's therefore notable that the increasing shift, for some types of applications from on-premise software to software-as-a-service (SaaS) reverses this customization trend. "We'more

Will the cloud change programming?

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The early preview of Dart, a new alternative to JavaScript for Web programming unveiled by Google earlier this week, is the latest entrant into the pantheon of programming languages. As such, it's hardly a rarity. There are hundreds of programming languages--perhaps thousands if experimental and academic variants are included. That said, the number of widely used languages is much smaller, numbering perhaps in the dozens, with fewer still broadly relevant to general-purpose server operations and Web software.

In fact, what's so notable about the computer programming language landscape over time isn't so much its diversity and adaptability, more

What became of multi-core programming problems?

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SAN FRANCISCO--As the Intel Developer Forum gets under way this week, one hardly unexpected theme of CEO Paul Otellini's keynote address was that Moore's Law continues. Ivy Bridge, Intel's upcoming 22-nanometer processor platform, is slated for 2012. This continuation of Moore's Law means that a given area of silicon will contain more transistors.

Until relatively recently, more transistors more or less mapped directly to faster processor performance. That's because the additional transistors were primarily used to boost processor frequency and increase fast local memory--changes that were largely invisible to software. However, beginning around the middle more

Enterprises build optimized data centers too

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Web giants and mega-size cloud-computing providers garner most of the attention when it comes to highly tuned and optimized data center designs. In April, Facebook shared the specifications for the servers it builds as part of an effort its calling the Open Compute Project. More recently, Facebook engineers have written about testing an extreme multi-core chip design from Tilera. Google has long been known for taking unique approaches to server and data center operations and design, although the company is generally secretive about the specifics.

This sort of hyper-optimization around scale was supposedly going to rapidly drive all computing to more

The PC isn't dead, but it's still a post-PC era

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In early June, market researcher IDC cut its forecast growth for PCs in 2011 from 7.1 percent to 4.2 percent. Gartner Group, another IT analyst firm, had earlier trimmed its numbers. Meanwhile, Apple iPad sales continue to skyrocket, with 183 percent growth compared to the year-ago quarter. Android tablets remain more of a mixed bag when it comes to gaining buyers, but they'll gain traction over time as well.

Those numbers would seem to lay out the case for a post-PC world rather starkly. Especially when you consider that they don't even consider phones which, in more

The open-source license landscape is changing

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There's no such thing as "the" open-source license. There are lots of them. Sixty-nine to be precise if one accepts the Open Source Initiative (OSI) as the definitive arbiter of what is open source and what is not.

Some are essentially legacy licenses; in general, the continued proliferation of licenses has abated in recent years but it's often more trouble than it's worth to fully retire licenses that are still in use by active software. Others won't be relevant to a specific type of copyrighted material, such as software programs. (Material under an open-source license is more

Tom West of 'Soul of a New Machine' dead at 71

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Tracy Kidder's 1982 Pulitzer-Prize-winning work of book-length reportage, "The Soul of a New Machine," is perhaps the best narrative of a technology-development project ever written. It's up there with "The Mythical Man Month" and "Showstopper." And the hero of that book was Tom West. The pages open with Tom at the helm of a sailboat in a storm. "In the glow of the running lights, most of the crew looked like refugees, huddled, wearing blank faces. Among them, Tom West appeared as a thin figure under a watch cap, in nearly constant motion."

Tom West, 71, died Thursday more