I’m going to file this in the great TED Talks tab on this site too. It’s beautiful and suggests we wake up every day and give thanks for the awesomeness of life. Thanks, Carole, for sending me this link.
TEDxSF – Louie Schwartzberg – Gratitude – YouTube
I also found this link today posted on a FB friends’ status. It is also a reminder of how to be happy. Thanks to Ron.
So I just posted last month about the disks from the late 70s that were the size of small refrigerators and held 1GB. Well, I just install a 2TB disk into my desktop PC at home! I am about to move all of my old high 8 video tapes onto this disk. 2TB is a lot of space!!! It cost $129.00 This is probably more space that all of the machines in the room when I attended SuperComputing in the early 90s.
This is a new technology that will virtualize the network. I think I need to see an example so I can understand what this means, but I think it may allow applications to look at the network in an abstract way that will be very powerful. Probably can’t even grok the impact of this yet.
Here’s a report on the characteristics of Technology Accelerators
This Wiki compares Eucalyptus, OpenStack and CloudStack for compatibility with various EC@ Features:
Now I’m getting really off topic. But, what was the topic anyways?
I used to be a programmer and had a spin-out company from Queen’s University in early 1980s where we had designed and implemented an awesome and mathematically robust parallel programming language, Nial http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nial.
Listen, this was a loooong time ago – there was a bit of a Unix micro-computer bubble and the IBM PC arrived around 1982. Our research group was sponsored by IBM back then.
Anyways, the article below talks about how difficult distributed programming is. But, there is a new kind of application layering going on now with the cloud. I understand that it’s not easy to design a scalable application for the cloud, but I don’t think you have to worry so much about the grotty details that you do when distributed systems programming. I think you can achieve a tremendous amount by working primarily at the application layer and letting the virtualization and load-balancing do a lot of the auto-magic. I do know something about load balancing distributed systems as I wrote my Master’s on it and I also know that there is still a lot of promise that isn’t quite yet delivered in the cloud.
On the other hand I am not a programmer any more, so if it is still very very difficult, it’s not my problem!
The Game of Distributed Systems Programming. Which Level Are You? « Incubaid Research.
I probably should have mentioned Klout a long time ago. It provides a measure of your online influence. It seems to only use Twitter and Facebook and provides a score based on how much you post and are retweeted or liked.
It should probably also use linked in and various blogging/sm apps.
One of my summer jobs during University was in computer operations in a large data centre in the early 1980s. Back then hard drives were about 3 ft across, the size of a small refrigerator and held less than 1GB and most information was stored on magnetic tapes in a large library. Part of my job was to get tapes out of the library and mount them on tape readers as the computers needed them. I felt like a mechanical PART OF THE MACHINE.
Now, many of us read online information, digest it, organize it, connect it, curate it using various tools like WordPress “Press This” that I’m using now for this blog, or Pinterest “Pin IT” or Scoop.it. We are now, not just the mechanical, but part of the man-machine post 2.0 Intelligent System PART OF THE MACHINE.
Another interesting (but are they useful?) information consolidator is Scoop.it. It allows the user to set up a newspaper style layout that allows text and images. It is focused along a user curating on a topic. Is it like Squidoo perhaps?
Here’s one on “Dynamics of Social Interaction” called Social Foraging Social Foraging | Scoop.it.
So Many Sites 