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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The software industry in conflict

I've written a number of times about the SaaS movement and what organizations need to think about when looking at its value to them.

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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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AI vs. the Expert

Back in the early 90s I used to work in an Artificial Intelligence group within EDS. We used to joke around that if we could actually do the task at hand, it can't be AI. At that point, I was working on a knowledge based tooling design that used geometric orientation and information on car parts to generate welding and clamping solutions. Now that we have significantly more computing power available, many of the activities we could only dream about are becoming a possibility.

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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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Event Driven Management and Opportunistic Computing

A while back I wrote a blog entry on Opportunistic Computing, what an organization can do with cloud computing that they wouldn't have done before. I just read an entry on the Smart Enough Systems blog that looks at some similar issues but from the perspective of proactive use of IT to increase the value of the business. He wrote that the characteristics of an organization using Event Driven Management are:

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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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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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Risk of Third Party Claims Clouds Open Source

The use of open source software carries the risk that third parties may claim that the open source code incorporates their intellectual property. The SCO claim that Linux contains copyrighted SCO code is a well-known example. Mechanisms incorporated in open source code also may infringe on patents. See Pet Loshin, "The Linux Liability Problem." Making patents of a few companies free for open source does not solve the problem. Large corporations that use open source software are particularly at risk because the open source software can become a critical element of their business operations, and third party claims could be substantial.

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Is IT becoming extinct? No, it’s just evolving.

I read Michael Krigsman's blog entry titled Is IT becoming extinct?, and had to wonder what his definition of IT really was?? If he views IT as a technology focused organization that is separate from the core business, I'd probably agree, but if we're talking about IT being the use of information and knowledge to maximize value delivery, than he couldn't be farther from the truth. Vinnie wrote a response to Michael's entry in his blog as well.

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Expanding Access to the Night Sky

A few weeks back there was the announcement of The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) by Microsoft research. It is a visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the ground- and space-based telescopes. Although it is not available publicly quite yet, there are some other sites for those who can't wait and have too much light pollution to see the sky at home.

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Opportunistic Computing in the Cloud

I've been thinking more about the entry the other day on heeding Moore's law.

I've had a few conversations with folks in other organizations about cloud computing. I am always fascinated by their almost blind focus on cost reduction. I see real opportunity for the shift in the value side. Value is what makes IT relevant. An exclusively cost focus is why IT doesn't matter.

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IT development organizations needs to heed Moore’s law

Now that cooling has become a major problem for computing, the focus for the last few years has been on adding more cores rather than increasing clock speed and adding more cache.

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What’s time for anyway??

I remember hearing the story once of a mother who was taking her daughter to the zoo. They were rushing from place to place and the little girl was frustrated by the harried pace and her inability to enjoy the experience. She asked her mom "Why can't we look at everything?" The mother stated "We don't have time for that." The girl's response was "What's time for anyway???"

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