EDS' Next Big Thing Blog: Read and Respond to What the EDS Fellows Say About Technology

2008 The year of thin-client?

Over the last couple of months SUN, Microsoft and HP have all announced hardware and/or software designed to support thin-client computing. Added to this, Gartner analysts have expressed doubts over the future of Microsoft Windows in it's current form. There are lots of buzzwords in all this: thin-client, flexible client, virtualization and so on. So is 2008 the year when thin-client computing finally catches on in the user community?

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WiMax finally on the move in the US??

I've written before about WiMax and it was good to see this past week that efforts may be taking place in the US in 2008.

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Cloud Computing Forecast

In Network World magazine there was an article that predicted a cloudy future for cloud computing. They listed a number of problems:

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There is Better and There is Better...

In reading Ray Kurzweil's article Making the World A Billion Times Better, we need to start asking ourselves: where is technology leading us to. Think about a mobile phone for instance. When the first mobile phone call was made in 1973, the phone weighed in at 2.2 pounds! Now 3 oz is the new norm! At the same time, however, the phones got smaller and smaller, thereby reducing the keypad to sizes that are only useable by teenagers or people with small fingers. This technology advance is an improvement from a size (i.e. weight) perspective, but not necessarily from a size perspective...is better really better?

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Is the Market Ready for “Green Services”?

At the moment there is a lot of discussion going on around Green IT. In the broadest sense, Green IT can be defined as the practice of deploying and using Information Technology (IT) as efficiently as possible. Based on this definition, the concepts of virtualization, power management, technology refresh, and mobility can all be encompassed under the Green IT umbrella. Even from a data center perspective, the focus is on data center design, maintenance, and operation. As such, the overarching end-to-end data center Green Services solution may be there in practice, but it does not come to the forefront.

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Retailers at the Gate…

From a study by comScore, we can conclude that the current social networking society includes visitors that frequent retail site more often than the average Internet user. That brings to bear an interesting point of marketing: could and should these social networking sites adjust themselves and open up for more targeted marketing towards this very interesting market segment (from a marketing and advertising perspective).

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Will Physical Media Go the Way of the Dinosaur?

According to EMC's Worldwide Information Growth Tracker, we have created more than 112 exabytes of information so far this year, with an anticipated compounded growth rate of almost 60% between now and 2011.  By contrast, it is estimated that in 2007 the British office workers printed up to 120 billion pages. This amounts to a paper mountain over 8,200 miles high!

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Gaming and Business

In reading "Wargaming, the business", one can imagine that a simulation of a complete enterprise is created that over time can model different scenarios and associated outcomes. If we take a step back and see how teenagers and pre-teenagers are working and interacting with technology (specifically simulation and gaming), we gain an insight on how corporations have to adapt in the future.

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Will Cloud Computing solution sing Sweet Caroline?

Last week I saw a demonstration of Project Caroline at Sun. Its main design features are to:

• Enable services to programmatically allocate, monitor, and control virtualized compute, storage, and networking resources.
• Expose resources through high level abstractions, including language level virtual machines, networks, and network accessible file systems and databases.
• Provide a horizontally scaled pool of distributed resources as a single system, providing developers with a unified platform for allocating and controlling these resources.

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Will Technology Become “Free”?

With Moore's Law still alive and kicking in the processor space, similar trends are taking place in the network space (Gilder's Law) and storage area (areal density law). These three technology laws, if taken at face value, would indicate that a fixed amount of money would provide you with double the amount of storage, processing capability, and network capability within an eighteen month time frame.

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Enterprise Mobility?

I finally made some time to go over some of the magazines and articles that were collecting dust. Charlie Bess' blog on the 8 Technologies to Master in '08 combined with recent article published in Asia on the Read full entry...

A Different Kind of Cloud Computing

In reading through the recent blog on cloud computing, my mind started wandering to this very topic. However, I was not thinking about cloud computing in the "traditional" sense of compute-as-a-service, but in a more controversial fashion.

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Is cloud computing vaporware or almost here?

In the past few months, I've been in numerous discussions about cloud computing and when it will get here. Lately there's been discussion even in the bastion of proprietary computing hardware -- the gaming industry moving away from consoles. You can already see today on some of the MMOG, that there is significant backend computing taking place with the console focused on presentation. Many organizations have already looked hard at putting thin client solutions (like the Sunray) on many of the desktops that perform normal office functions. They take less power and they're easier to support. Of course without a network, they are just a brick.

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Sensors, Sensors, Sensors - Can they really help us get green?

Sensors in bridges, sensors in highways, and sensors in buildings could all help save lives, reduce energy and tell us how to best design and use a structure.

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FCC nets $19.6 billion for 700 MHz auction

Since there have been a number of entries on this blog about the spectrum action (this, this and this), there had to be at least one more on the fact that the auction is over for the 700 MHz spectrum.

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