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A recent BBC poll suggests that the future of the net is by no means a certainty with many of the industry experts disagreeing on certain important aspects.  I recently read a publication by Kevin Kelly from wired magazine and he had some quite enlightening thoughts on how he thought the net would progress.  I have posted these ideas on forums around the net and most people seem to think the ideas are ridiculous (I have in fact received quite a lot stick from various professionals), however I still believe that his predictions hold some weight, and those that can shape themselves correctly for the new internet will be very rich indeed.

Common concensus is that cloud computing will be the way forward. We have already seen Mosso, Amazon and Google jumping into this field as industry leaders.  You can now expect a host of other service providers taking the leap over the coming year.  A cloud can offer greater redundancy at less expense if managed correctly and as a customer, instead of buying a server or a VPS to host your web site, you will pay for the resources that you use (for example bandwidth, processing cycles etc).

IPV6 is another important factor.  The current IPV4 naming space is inadequate to sustain the crazy amount of IP growth that the internet is experiencing for much longer. Therefore a new IP version has been brought in.  The mobile phone industry will benefit greatly from IPV6 introduction, primarily due to mobile application and seamless connectivity.  Presently, due to the restriction of IP's, phone applications that require internet connectivity are sent through NATs that can split one IP into multiple IP's.  The problem with a NAT is the timeout period, which ranges from 45 seconds to 5 minutes or so.  So, every timeout, an application has to reinstigate the transmitter to reconnect to the net. Obviously this is a laggy process, but moreover, the transmitter is the most battery intensive component in a phone....IPV6 will mean no NATs, no timeouts and thus less lag and longer battery life!

I'll carry on with this article tomorrow where I will mention having chips in every day objects that integrate with the cloud...!!! Sounds scary huh!

My Film Forum and Film Reviews site is coming along nicely still - over one hundred reviews now and going strong. Although we are considering a rewrite in Ruby on Rails - still yet to be persuaded though!

My colleague Tom Bracegirdle and me have devised a fairly simple cold-air outbreak index. If you know the temperature of the sea surface and the air temperature at an altitude of some 2,000 metres, this index can be calculated at any time and place. I've done just that and picked out the most extreme cases in the last few years. This satellite image was taken over the North-East Atlantic around noon on 23 January, 2003 (click for a larger version):

The wind is coming from the north-west, down through the Fram Strait between Spitsbergen and Greenland and off the sea ice along the east coast of Greenland. After travelling a few hundred kilometres over the open ocean, it is heated enough for some no-nonsense clouds to develop. The white areas with the spirally shape are polar lows. The surface winds in this region were around 50 knots at the most intense. That's not so far from hurricane force winds.

Another very cool feature is the von Kármán vortices [?] downstream of Jan Mayen near the middle left edge of the picture.

This kind of weather is important in many ways. The potential for accidents is only the most obvious issue. The worst accident in later years was when the British trawler FV Gaul went down in 1974, killing all 36 men on board [?]. Colleagues of mine here in Bergen have simulated the weather on this day using numerical weather prediction models, and they found that there was an "arctic front" (a phenomenon that is highly related to polar lows) in the region when the ship sank.

In Norwegian waters, there are numerous examples of ugly accidents at sea, especially in earlier times, when the forecasts were erratic or even non-existent.

Cold-air outbreaks are also important for the ocean. Alan Condron of Woods Hole, MIT is the lead author a new, important paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research. His group found that if the weather typically associated with cold-air outbreaks had been better represented in the widely used re-analysis data sets such as ERA-40 [?], it would have led to (in models)

enhanced surface latent and sensible heat fluxes and a dramatic increase in the cyclonic rotation of the Nordic Seas gyre by four times the average interannual variability. In response to these changes, Greenland Sea deep water formation generally increases by up to 20% in 1 month, indicating more active open ocean convection.

Condron's study is a welcome addition to the literature, in that it couples the atmosphere and the ocean in an elegant manner. The disciplines of meteorology and oceanography, for all their similarities, are too often treated as separate entities. For instance, it was not until 1957 that one realized that the ocean phenomenon El Niño was intimately coupled with the atmospheric Southern Oscillation. Although one sometimes still refers to this system as simply El Niño, it is now known as the combination of the two: El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO [?].

• Oslo (MS’s modelling strategy)
• Windows 7 (MS’ future desktop O/S)
• Biztalk 2009
• Windows Strata (MS Cloud computing platform and strategy)

A key indicator of how important MS sees this year’s PDC is that they interrupted its normal two year cycle and didn’t hold it last year – so they could have it this year to coincide with these big announcements. Previous big strategies that MS announced at previous PDC’s have included Internet Explorer, .NET etc.
This last area has attracted the most speculation recently, but also has the sketchiest information. Based on what I have read, I thought I would have a go at divining what Microsoft cloud architecture might look like. This is based on what I know of other cloud architectures by Amazon and Google, and a trawl of rumour surrounding key code-words currently in use (lots collected by Microsoft watcher Mary-Jo Foley). Even ‘Windows Strata’ as the overall name is not certain, as this was associated with a number of presentations on the PDC agenda, but has recently disappeared again!

None of what Microsoft is announcing is pioneering – others started to offer cloud infrastructures offering similar services over a year ago, but what Microsoft is doing as a ’fast-follower’ in this space is ironing out the wrinkles and making all this work and deliver value to businesses. Think Netscape, think Word Perfect, think the Microsoft Elephant, panicked by a threat to its revenues, rampaging into the cloud space and squishing everything else in its path. In this post I’m going to cover Windows Strata.

OK so here goes. Windows Strata is a multi-layered approach to providing cloud services that will enable Microsoft Software + Services strategy – i.e. a hybrid of desktop applications and power mixed with in-the-cloud services to provide ‘information on demand’ to the enterprise, whether the internet is available or not.

Windows Strata could have three main layers:

• Foundation Services
• Infrastructure Services
• Application Services

In addition on top of these will sit Microsoft’s  ‘Live Mesh’ applications which can themselves be utilised as services. End user applications will be written using services at any of these levels. This is what I think this may look like:

Now lets take a look at some of the code words and lower level components in each layer.

Foundations Services

There has been quite a bit of mention of ‘Red dog’.  Mary Jane Foley (eminent Microsoft watcher and blogger) believes that Red Dog will turn out to be the core platform services that form the ‘cloud OS’. This is what the basic hosted platform will be – running on top of Microsoft global-class data centres. To fulfil this function we can speculate that Red dog will as a minimum provide basic storage, networking and processing, and probably virtualisation and ops management as well.

But, hedging my bets, Red dog may actually refer to the Windows Strata platform as a whole, which is fine, within it you will still fine a foundation services layer of some kind.

Infrastructure Services

At the next level up, we can put a bit more flesh on the bones. Microsoft has already delivered beta or CTP’s of a number of services that fit into this layer, and more are likely to follow:

• Biztalk Services.

This miss-named component (it doesn’t use Biztalk as we know it) will provide integration services and workflow services to your cloud applications. This is now what the illustrious Darren Jefford is actively blogging about (he has some sample apps that are just 5 lines of code ;))

• SQL Server Data Services.

This is, effectively an RDBMS in the cloud that provides on-demand database storage and query processing. No more worrying your database is going to run out of space or grind to a halt.

• Windows Live ID.

Or more accurately Live ID Identity Services, is the identity gateway for all Microsoft online services, Live ID will provide federated identity and authentication services.

What is immediately setting these services apart from the competition is guaranteed scalability and reliability. As announced at Microsoft Architect Insight in April by Burt Kawasaki, Microsoft is going to be offering a business-ready SLA on these services which will include protection against data loss.

Application Services

This is the layer that is probably most to do with the initiatives code-named ‘Zurich’. Of course, Zurich could refer to all the layers, in the same way that Red dog could. Anyway whether it’s Zurich or not, Microsoft’s cloud offering will need an application services layer. Here’s what could be in it:

• .NET Services will extend the .NET development platform into the cloud.  That could mean that  it will provide development services – model, code compile test and deploy as a cloud service. No need to be creating an expensive development environment in house – just use Microsofts. Or it could mean that they are extension .NET to better enable control of cloud computing resources for cloud based services. Hopefully both.

• Mesh Framework.This is what was previously referred to as ‘Live Mesh Platform’. And its one of the keys to Software+Services. It provides a framework to build apps that ‘live’ in the Live Mesh, that is, that can be run both through a browser and off-line, and also has wrappers to utilise many of the infrastructure services. You will be able to build applications on the Mesh Framework in Silverlight 2 or Javascript. Mesh applications run in an Internet Exploer wrapper called Mesh Operating Environment (MOE). I’m wondering what the relationship will between Mesh Framework and .NET services

• Dynamic xRM (code name Titan). This is Microsoft attempt at a Saleforce.com killer, and has already been released. Behold, Microsoft Dynamics applications will now be available in the cloud. The x stands for everything, i.e. going beyond the customer in CRM and managing any entity, internal or external. Now this in itself is nothing to do with the cloud – its about opening up Dynamics CRM as a platform so you can do stuff like (important for us) use it to roll-your-own Case Management system – which is interesting. But it goes beyond that. Titan was the codeword for Dynamics CRM 4, which for the first time has introduced Dynamics as a hosted solution in the cloud. But more than that, resellers can build applications (like a Case Management System) on top of Dynamics, and host it themselves. So not strictly part of the Microsoft cloud offering, but tangential and worth mentioning,

Cloud\Live Mesh Applications
So this is where applications utilising the Strata cloud infrastructure will sit. At the moment, this is largely the ‘Mesh’ enabled applications that will take advantage of the Mesh Framework to do peer to peer device independent data and always-available data through the online-offline software plus services model.  Microsoft already has a number of these applications that stand on their own, but also can be mashed-up as a service to create composite applications, for example live search and live earth. You can expect more in the way of Live Mesh applications, including I hear, Office applications (a demo of this is expected at PDC) but maybe different from the current Live Office (maybe  fuller functionality?).

So it will be interetsing to see how much of this guesswork turns out to be true. I loo forward to PDC!

In the case that the cloud is "ready-to-manufacture", the next step is analyzing which application can be moved into the cloud and who will be your cloud-provider. When looking at the type of applications you will be "clouding", it is important to verify the "value" of the application to the business.

First of all you are moving an application (which requires data) to the internet / cloud. So there are possible security risks. The Cloud Computing Incidents Database (CCID) tracks all events that impact cloud computing providers. Do not forget that the CCID is an open-community (only founded earlier this year.), so it relies on people logging the events, as you can espect major cloud-providers are not logging their events.

If you look at the stats for Q3/08 you get 3 critical events, 3 high severity events and 3 others, the incidents range from disaster recovery, design faults, ... into session hijacking, user impersonation, ... Even one resulted in all data being lost due to closure of the service (The Linkup).

It must be said, whatever cloud initiative you will be implementing keep a very close eye on the financial stability of your provider, the relationship with your provider and the security your provider is offering you.

A vendor that is specializing in offering cloud solutions to cloud providers must be aware of the security risks and react accordingly in order to prevent security breaches which might result in data theft, resulting in lost profitability of the customer. 

Looking at the earlier mentioned vendors, we see that VMware is moving with small steps ahead when it comes to providing security solutions for their cloud initiative and it must be said that their solution will be probably the latest on the market.

Addition 13.10.2008 - If the information on the web is correct, it seems to be that VMware will indeed takeover BlueLane Technologies, a specialist in protecting both physical and virtual servers. Yet it gets integrated on the server itself and is in that way not the security solution when it comes to protecting the data center or the cloud center.

Microsoft has already a number of security solutions onboard, but do their security features meet the grade? We will have to wait for the next big event from Microsoft, probably more will be announced then.

Citrix is probably in this field, the one that is leading the pack. Their Netscaler can be equipped with layer 7 application firewalling, the access to the cloud can be encrypted with SSL-VPN solutions and their end-to-end virtualization solution can be integrated with the market leaders on 2-factor-authentication such as Vasco.

Another question that comes to mind is the type of cloud provider. Do endusers need to go ahead with big cloud providers such as Amazon.com, Google, Flexiscale, .... or can they rely on their value added reseller. Seen the fact that VAR has been implementing the IT infrastructure for the enduser and supporting its infrastructure, he is probably the best positioned to offer cloud services. Afterall it is just moving the infrastructure to another virtual location (sort of speak).

On the other hand the value added reseller might not have structure to setup big clouds. This might lead to clouds being set up by different value added resellers across the world, resulting in a gigantic cloud with follow-the-sun support.

One thing is for sure, the cloud computing initiative has just been founded, vendors are still working on their final offerings, the market is preparing itself, VARs & integrators need to prepare business cases, ... we are not there yet ! However, we might be there in a very short time ! Prepare !

Mae Linat © 2008

Mae Linat © 2008

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

TROIKA + GLOWLAB

the cloud

tetris + knight rider on office building windows

- starbucks has the largest wireless cloud in the world - they are now an entertainment channel
- doing the same with internet connection as they did with music cds
- war chalking / war driving
- hobo culture / signs / graffity to communicate and warn one another
- marks on buildings to let people know where free internet access is around the city
- notion of privacy of how much of your life is public and how much is private
- google is keeping track of every single search that we do
- web crawler and cyber squatters flipping internet domains

drift.relay in san jose by glowlab
"information wants to be free" = guiding moto of open source movement
book called "The Long Tale" - by Chris Anderson who is the editor of Wired Magazine
- digital content (sitting on a hard drive) versus brick and mortar inventory in a store
- there will be a market for my work
- eventually you will be able to buy the license to a piece of content that you have already paid for (cd, dvd, blue-ray, next gen...)
- digital has transformed everything
- google is the single largest data mining enterprise in the world - save every search until 2038

- google knol - is this the precursor of the CIC (Central Intelligence Corporation - Snow Crash)?
- knol = unit of knowledge - go and get information and if you want more, you can pay for it
- Google is giving you information that they THINK you may want
- civil liberties = main concern: aggregation of personal data in commercial databases
- government databases are subject to privacy act
- commercial databases fall outside of privacy act, and the use of contractors has transformed law enforcement
- ChoicePoint or Seisint, aggregate data from commercial transactions with public records (prescriptions, groceries, travel plans, criminal records)

- potential for abuse
- concentrated target for hackers, identty thieves and authorities otherwise constrained by privacy act
- Seisint compiled a list of 120,000 based of a "terrorist quotient", a profile they created including ethnicity and religious beliefs and handed it over to law enforcement
- Florida relied on ChoicePoint to identify convicted felons registered to vote - as many as 1 in 7 were wrongfully expunged from the voters list (voter margin in 2000 was 537 votes)

RFID - Radio Frequency Identification
- shock bracelets with EMD Technology (Electro-Muscular Disruption)

Privacy and Social Networks
Google's Value Proposition - "is to figure out what people want, but to read our minds, they need to know a lot about us"
- will pull ads containing certain keywords, but will not state what those keywords are
- handed over user-records of Orkut to Brazilian government for an investigation
(orkut is a social networking service which is run by Google and named after its creator, an employee of Google - Orkut Büyükkökten. The service states that it was designed to help users meet new friends and maintain existing relationships.)
- censored and constrained its Chinese search-engine to gain access to that market
- the Chinese government is in the process of saving SKYPE messages that pass through mainland China and now SKYPE has ended their relationship with their Chinese affiliate

Google Streets - recorded some random kid who saw the Google van drive by and he ended up wiping out on his bike
"Don't Be Evil"

Second Life Lawsuit
http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/005816.html

The Worst of Real Made Virtual
- the covenant of Extropia
- A Declaration of the Rights of Avatars - by Ralph Koster

189 Satellites that don't officially exist (spy satellites CIA, KGB)
iridium satellite flashes - search when the satellite will flash on the web
- Russian town had 400 people show up in yellow raincoats and stood in the town square when the google satellite went overhead

Words that German musician Peter Schilling used to describe the ill-fated Titanic.

That phrase invokes the same elegance, if not the dazzle of the clouds at sunset last night. They were colossal, beautiful, and majestic.

Around seven o'clock the western sky was filled with golden clouds, a rich contrast to the iron-grey clouds that had been raining most of the day on East Tennessee. The rain was welcome here, not so much the cold with it. I had to mail a package that morning, and walking ten meters from the car to the UPS Store resulted in soggy pantshems (I despise being short).

There were also several clusters of birds diving in and out of those clouds that looked like cloth snippets falling from the sky. It was beautiful. The clouds were low, fast, and beautiful. By 7:10 the display was over, as the sun had fallen deeper and the clouds were shading into the standard lavenders, peaches, and pinks of a sunset. The clouds were going by quickly and to the west were rotating a bit like the skirt of a dancer.

I would have killed to have a camera, or an ultralight plane that night.

GERMAN WORd of the DAY

<!-- @page { size: 8.5in 11in; margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } -->

Die Wolke: (n) the cloud, plural die Wolken

Why do I announce this now? My colleague Amy Ballard and I spent a considerable amount of the past 9 months creating a start-to-finish learning experience. It supplements hands-on activities with sample code, explanatory videos and screen casts to create a quick and easy way to get into web development. All you need to bring is some basic understanding of Object-oriented Programming.

Developers who complete the core curriculum get an official welcome aboard kit for the Bungee Connect Developer Network, including a spiffy Bungee Connect t-shirt. See? Time well spent.

If you'd like to see a couple examples of applications built with Bungee Connect, go to demos.bungeeconnect.com.

Executives are searching for ways to open new doors, speed up their sales cycles, gain new clients and book more revenue.  The economy is dictating that organizations do more with less.  Globalization is creating more competition for customers.  Large companies are moving down market while smaller companies are moving their focus up market.  Traditional methods of client acquisition have been falling short for some time.

With the exponential growth of data available on the web, tools, strategies, process and techniques are available today that possess game-changing possibilities for those that embrace these developments and leverage this new information to enhance the processes used to obtain new clientele.  Enterprise Intelligence, Social Media, Online Databases, Blogs, Mashups, Software delivered via the Web (SaaS), Cloud Computing, RSS feeds, Podcasts, Online Video and more provide a depth of actionable information and capabilities that, if harnessed, has the potential to alter the competitive landscape within a short period of time.

WIth a backdrop of over 20 years of active involvement in sales and sales management, I look forward to sharing with you some of the most significant tools and technology that has ever been available to salesmakers.  I look forward to your comments and contribution as we explore this exiting next wave of selling.

my favorite of the series is FFVII, aka 7 for the roman numeral illieterate party reading =D. i like it for kewl storyline, cool characters (i mean cmon barrett is literally a video game version of Mr. T) and also the latter part being the branches of VII, movies and games.

i've played III, VII, VIII, X, X-2. i haven't gone much further, but i wish to get a ps3 for FFXIII Versus which looks awesome in the trailers XD

my favorite character, ironically, isn't from VII, but VIII. squall leonheart. something about a gunblade, beater with a lionheart sweater/jacket, and the hair makes me wanna be like him XD. i could probrably pull off the look for halloween, but that requires some moolah which i have none of it for haha.

my favorite music from FF is probrably the victory theme in the early games. for those who watched FFVII: Advent Children, Loz has a ringtone when he gets beat down by Tifa. that's the victory fanfare i like haha.

• TES Cloud
• TES Hitman
• TES ccarlsen

Remember you can get full info on the clan and all it's members on R3Match.

Fruux.com is a new web service that let you synchronize address book, calendar and bookmarks (with more to come!) to their servers. I'm currently using it to add yet another backup option for addresses. All you need to do to start syncing is install a simple preference pane and create an account.

Currently the service is in free beta and OsX only! Go give it a spin: http://www.fruux.com/

dArio

He then drew a dog on a donkey
That so barked on canvas
That he outlined it company
Cheerfulness
A sweetie rubber plant nose
Plus wannabe brown beard
Of a fantastic
Willowly she-dog

Soon
It was like the male wanted to get rid of her
She couldn't tell a tone anymore
She-dog was well too proud
While the donkey's dithering
Behind a puzzling background

So In a breath of life
The yellow man
Changed the course of things
Seized the knife tool
And wiped dogs away in the nacelle
Of a gasping balloon

Mae Linat © 2008

smoga berkenan dan semoga terhibur :)

salam...

I came up with a list of the my favorite free (as in price) online programs and services:

ThinkFree Office

“Enjoy instant access to your files, and share them with colleagues and friends anytime, anywhere. Documents editing is fundamental.” -ThinkFree Home Page

Pros:

• Online and Offline access to your documents

• Provides a FULL drop in replacement for Word, Powerpoint, and Excel

• Download Thinkfree office (Free Too) for offline edits of your documents

Cons:

• Does NOT auto login when using the offline client, so you have to manually login every time you turn on the computer, however - when you suspend and hibernate - it does keep you logged in.

Notes:

• Even though it doesn't auto login, its still my favorite for an online office.

Dropbox

Syncs your files across multiple computers instantly, using a folder in your home folder. Developed for Linux, Mac, and Windows. Also, it's open source.

Pros:

• Open Source

• Works perfectly, never had a problem

Cons:

• Gnome Only; Uses nautilus for its Linux port.

Notes:

• a lot of people are going to get angry at the fact that they cant use KDE with it. but it is open source, so if you know how, you can fix it.

Zoho

Is a VERY large online office suite. Including programs that replace everything imaginable in an office

Pros:

• Many program offerings

• Allows login via your Google account

• Uses Google gears for offline edits

Cons:

• No way to create new documents when offline

Notes:

• Zoho would be much better than Thinkfree, if they would find a way to allow offline document creation

Google Docs

C'mon you don't know what “Google Docs” is?!

Pros:

• It's Google!
• Uses Google gears for offline edits.

Cons:

• Not as feature rich as any of the other offerings
• No way to create new documents when offline

Notes:

• Just like Zoho, I think it would really be beneficial if they found a way to allow offline document creation.

Meebo

An online IM client, that allows you to login to all of you IM accounts at once.

Pros:

• Login to all IM accounts at once
• Supports webcam conversations via flash

Cons:

• Flash is not the best medium for webcam communication

The debate is on. I'm listening, but again, only kinda. I am more excited about seeing the fact checking done after the debate.

I'm a bit distracted by the new sketchbook I bought. It's a cheap 70 sheet, medium weight drawing paper that I picked up when I walked to Food Lion today. I have a few incomplete books, but they are full of random works and I want this to be about getting shit done (GSD).

The book will be my to do list, sketchbook and plans in one place.  I'm hoping it'll motivate me as well as inspire.  I want to GSD. I have never been able to keep up a planner.  Maybe this will be better.

I have already made my to do list, wrote out plans and sketched out a project.  And as you can see above, I've colored the back inside cover.  In a few weeks, we'll see if this suffers the same fate as countless planners.  I always start out strong, but sizzle out in the end.

I'm going to try to pay attention to this debate.  It is becoming heated.

[take me home]

Analysis: With their annual "Hype Cycle" reports, Gartner usually does a solid job of tracking over-optimistic assessments of the "latest and greatest" in technology and calling out overly hyped "hot new tech" and providing realistic assessments of the projected future of trends in software, hardware, and business processes.

Sometimes, Gartner slips up, and falls prey to the error they ascribe to others.  That's the only interpretation I can make on a curious blog posting on an official Gartner blog designed to promote their new book "Mastering the Hype Cycle: Choosing the Right Innovation at the Right Time."  Mark Raskino, the book's co-author with longtime analyst Jackie Fenn, argues that "We have to simplify the business proposition behind this ‘big shift’,  explain it well and socialize it deeply to convince non-tech business leaders to buy-in." 

Mr. Raskino makes clear that he wants to babytalk these business-side executives into believing "a little cloud hype" because, in his words, IT leaders and CIOs "need help explaining the fundamental change."

I haven't read the book; it may be a fine work with other (more valuable) insights. After all, it's published by Harvard Business Press; here's the Amazon page for it, you can read it and judge for yourself, as I likely will. But this blog posting is an official one on Gartner's own site, promoting their book by their analysts, so the firm bears accountability for this curious approach.

In the blog posting, Mr. Raskino sums up his case on "hyping the buzz" about cloud computing as follows:

It’s too simplistic to say cloud hype is bad. If we are technically expert is might irritate us with its breadth and abstraction, but we are not the only audience.  Somehow the idea has to  cross the corridor into other business departments and that’s just as likely to be via a Business Week article or even (dare I say it?) an airline in-flight magazine.  Whether we like it or not, repeatedly promoting a basic collective term through broader media has a long history of overcoming corporate resistance and inertia in ways IT departments can’t do alone. ‘The cloud’ is a BIG idea, its a reasonable visual metaphor and most of all its not an acronym.  It may not be perfect, but if it captures the imaginations of a broader audience of decision makers we should cut it some slack. 

My opinion is that the technology of cloud services is developing at a blistering pace, and adoption rates are incrementally moving along at an appropriately lagged step behind the technology.  Perhaps we need to clarify our definitions of words like "hype" and "buzz," and more importantly distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate "technical education."

Marketing the promise of cloud services is fine; intentionally "hyping" the technology is unnecessary and will be counterproductive. Why on earth does Mr. Raskino think technologies wind up going through a "trough of disillusionment" on Gartner's own hype cycle?  Is that now supposed to be a desirable thing?

Ah, got that off my chest. Feels better. Breathing deeply, calming down, taking the long view.  In fact, taking the long view is something I advise to those (like Mr. Raskino) who are too focused on hyping technology's advance, not building it.  Here's a suggestion: look back several years and read something you wrote about the future, and see what lessons you can learn from history and your attempt to predict it.

An enjoyable read along those lines is the legendary Charles Simonyi's piece from this summer, "Programmers at Work: Follow Up."  Simonyi (of Xerox PARC, early Microsoft, and space tourism fame) reflects on an interview from two decades ago, with some fascinating observations about advances in programming languages and practices, software, education, aviation... it's a thought-provoking read from an entertainingly complex fellow. (Maybe that's what Martha Stewart saw in him for the 20 years they dated.)

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HA NOI — IBM has announced that it will establish two new cloud computing centres in Ha Noi and HCM City, the company’s first Cloud Computing Centres in the ASEAN region.

The cloud computing model allows businesses and consumers to remotely access computers over the internet to access services, according to IBM.

The US-based computing firm said the ASEAN region was experiencing increasing demand for Internet-based computing models and skills.

IBM announced on Thursday three other newly launched Cloud Computing Centres in Korea, India and Brazil, joining nine others located around the world.

Coupled with IBM’s five New Enterprise Data Centres, the centres represent the world’s largest consumer network of cloud computing centres.

IBM Cloud Computing Centres host computing activities for clients to provide access to expertise and infrastructure to design and deploy their own cloud environments.

The centres work with clients across multiple industries such as banking, telecommunications, government, education, and IT hosting services.

"Our growing market is embracing cloud computing as part of the new technology in the IT world. It will become an integral part of new business designs, especially in growth economies like Viet Nam, where a heavy focus is placed on education and human resource development," said Nguyen Viet Hoang, Country General Manager of IBM Viet Nam. —