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!
The Defence Strategic Review dominated the relevant news from Canberra these last two weeks, but we also saw moves on combating far-right extremism, fighting the scams and spams, and various minor bits and pieces.
Continue reading “Digital developments from Canberra 33”
I’ve finally posted a new episode of my Corrupted Nerds podcast, a wide-ranging conversation with Peter Coffee, vice-president and head of platform research at Salesforce.com.
Cloud computing is inevitable, says Coffee. “Processing power has grown at about 25% per year, and compounded over a period of 30-some years that’s a lot. But bandwidth has grown at about 45% per year over that same period of time.”
So whatever the application, no matter how complex, eventually it’ll be cheaper to process the data somewhere else, and your device — desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone — only has to manage presentation and interaction.
I’d been wanting to catch up with Coffee for two or three years, and we finally managed to arrange being in the same room at the same time. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation, and I think you’ll enjoy it too.
Just a quick reminder that in a few hours I’ll be winging my way to San Francisco for NetSuite’s SuiteWorld event. If you’ll be there, do get in touch. If there’s something you reckon I should cover, do let me know.
In May I’ll be visiting San Francisco for the third time in six months. This time it’s to attend NetSuite’s SuiteWorld conference, on their tab.
Curiously enough, NetSuite’s CEO Zach Nelson has been warning against the false cloud.
It’s pretty clear that everything is going to the cloud. I think the real issue is that there are real clouds and fake clouds. The fake clouds are people who are taking existing technology and saying, ‘We can host it for you and that’s the cloud’.
That is not the cloud. If the application is not web-native it’s not going to give you any of the benefits of the cloud. You’re not going to get any of this cost reduction, customisation migration or anytime, anywhere access because you are still using this funky intermediary technology to access that hosted application.
Microsoft is famous for saying ‘all our applications are in the cloud’. No they’re not. They’re their existing applications hosted someplace. That failed back in 1999 — how’s it going to succeed in 2010?
That’s interesting because Salesforce.com’s CEO Marc Benioff was also telling us to “beware of the false cloud” at their Dreamforce conference, which I attended in December. You can here him say exactly that on the Patch Monday podcast.
And that’s interesting because Nelson and Benioff used to be colleagues at Oracle. Funny old world.
Anyway, I’ll tell your more about this particular trip as it aproaches.
A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets — which this week wasn’t very much at all because I lost a couple of days returning from San Francisco.
None this week.
Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.
[Photo: Since I didn’t take any photographs this week, here’s one of the rather serious seagulls they have in San Francisco.]
A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets — very late this week because I just couldn’t be arsed doing blog posts while I was in San Francisco. But here’s the summary of last week. On Wednesday. So I’ll refund your goddam subscription fees.
None. What wrong with you people?
Where do you start? This week was all about me travelling to San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce.com. So they paid my airfares, accommodation, food and drink throughout the event, and “networking functions” at the W Hotel and the Palace Hotel. Plus they gave me a Flip HD video camera, a scarf, a t-shirt, a universal power plug thingy and a can of whipped cream. Don’t ask.
Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.
[Photo: A comparison of real American men with the idealised version portrayed in advertising in a storefront on Market St, San Francisco.]