Word-whore. I write 'em. I talk 'em. Information, politics, media, and the cybers. I drink. I use bad words. All publication is a political act. All communication is propaganda. All art is pornography. All business is personal. All hail Eris! Vive les poissons rouges sauvages!
I’m currently looking back through some old posts here and stumbled across a wonderful quote from Lin Yutang which I’d previously published in 100 Random Thoughts: “A man who has to be punctually at a certain place at five o’clock has the whole afternoon from one to five ruined for him already.”
Stilgherrian’s links for 04 November 2008 through 09 November 2008, gathered via Twitter and spat onto the page with love and some lemon juice and garlic:
Every year Gartner, one of the Big Consulting Firms, runs the Gartner Symposium where they disgorge their predictions for the IT industry into the eager minds of Big End of Town clients with deep pockets. Imagine a crow feeding its young, but wearing a suit.
This year’s Sydney symposium is next week, but tonight Gartner consultants are previewing their Vision to a bunch of folks from the blogosphere.
I’ll be live blogging it right here from 6.30pm or shortly thereafter, depending on when the food and drinks get served. I won’t be live blogging anything, as it wasn’t that kind of event. However I did have good drinks and conversation with interesting people. More in due course.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is doing his Power to Developers shtick in Sydney today. I’ll be live-blogging it right here.
The Big Deal is that he’s talking about Microsoft’s strategy for cloud computing or “software as a service” (SaaS) — which I notice Microsoft is calling “software-plus-services”. Is there a difference? I think an essay could be written on that point alone!
Now I must admit I’m fairly sceptical about this whole “cloud computing” thing. Not that it’s a Bad Idea, just that it’s nothing new.
Unless your computer isn’t connected to the global grid we call the Internet, then it’s always been about having a service running on a remote computer (“the server”) and some software on your own computer the mediate your access to same (“the client”).
It seems to me, though, that every few years someone wants to make some big song-and-dance about the idea that they’ve put stuff in their data centre for you to access… and this year’s buzzterm is “cloud computing”. Wow.
Still, it’ll be interesting to hear what Mr Ballmer has to say. And probably more amusingly, how he says it.
Continue reading “Live Blog: Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer in Sydney”
Yesterday Crikey used CoveritLive for their US Election Live Blog and it seemed to work OK, so I’m trying it today.
I’ll use this to blog about whatever’s in front of me at midday today, Sydney time, on this very post. If you’d like to take part, feel free — and do post comments afterwards to let me know what you think.
Continue reading “Testing the CoveritLive live blogging tool”
I won’t be doing Stilgherrian Live tonight. Instead, I’m covering two presentations via “live blogging”.
Steve Ballmer, CEO of some tin-pot outfit called Microsoft, is doing his Power to Developers presentation at 3.30pm Sydney time. It’s being promoted as a “Liberation Day” and a “live web rally”. Wankers.
Peel away the pseudo-revolutionary bullshit, though, and there’s something worth hearing about: “Microsoft’s vision around Cloud Computing for the software-plus-services world, followed by demo-packed sessions on the new technologies just announced at the Professional Developers Conference — including the much anticipated Azure Services Platform.”
Using “around” as an all-purpose preposition and failing to hyphenate “much-anticipated” confirms Microsoft’s illiteracy, and The Register‘s negative review of Azure has already poisoned my view. We’ll see.
Then tonight from 6.30pm consulting firm Gartner has “Gartner meets you in the blogosphere”. They’re previewing material to be presented at next week’s Gartner Symposium: “emerging trends and technologies… and what to expect in 2009”.
I’ll be live-blogging both events at special pages on this website. The links will be posted soon. Stand by.