“We didn’t go with them because they didn’t support Ubuntu” is something that I wouldn’t have expected listening to a cloud service creator talk about selecting cloud vendors. That is exactly what I heard when I was at CPOSC last month. I took it as a throw away statement, and didn’t think much more of it.
Until today, when I saw this graphic posted by Steven O’Grady:
There is something very interesting happening in the cloud space, and it will be very curious to see how this evolves over time.
Ars Technical has a great write up of some of the uncertainty of the 4th amendment (protection against unreasonable search and seizure) when it comes to your data in the cloud. The first test case for the Supreme Court of this is actually going to be around text messages.
But what may be just as telling as the forthcoming Quon decision itself is the way in which the Justices attempted to wrap their heads around the technology during oral arguments. For example, Justice Anthony Kennedy asked what happens if a text is sent at the same time that one is being received. Justice Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice John Roberts expressed surprise that the text was routed through the service provider and did not go directly from person to person.
“Could Quon print these—these spicy conversations out and circulate them among his buddies?” Scalia also asked. And even the lawyer representing Officer Quon was not sure whether deleting a message on a pager would also delete it from the service provider’s records. This might paint a worrisome picture of a judiciary that will be making important technology-related decisions with only a limited understanding of that technology.
It’s also interesting that protection to voice communication wasn’t extended until 1967 when a court case around wiretapping phone booths came to the Supreme Court.
Our local IEEE chapter does an annual fall workshop each year. Last year was robots (which I apparently forgot to blog about…). It was quite good, and showed off robots for largely military and educational purposes. Some live demos (not for the military types) and videos were shown over the course of the day. Good times.
This year the IEEE is doing their workshop on Cloud Computing. While the website and pdf still say Nov 3rd… it’s not, it’s Friday the 6th (this event is always on a Friday). I’m going to repost the details embedded in the PDF here, because while google deals with PDFs, it’s a lot easier to refer people to a website.
Sponsored by: The Mid-Hudson Section of the IEEE and The School of Science and Engineering, State University of New York, New Paltz Co-sponsored by the Mid-Hudson IEEE Computer Society
When: Friday, November 6, 2009
Where: The Terrace Restaurant, SUNY New Paltz campus (all campus facilities are fully accessible and comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act).
Registration Fee: $20 per person – free to Mid-Hudson IEEE members or students with valid ID (includes coffee breaks and buffet lunch, plus CD ROM with presentation materials and invited papers). Please contact the organizers for information on registration fee waivers due to economic hardship. Advance registration payments (checks drawn on a U.S. bank only) may be made out to the CAS 8600. Send check to: School of Science and Engineering, 1 Hawk Drive, State University of New York, New Paltz, NY 12561. Attendees may also register at the door on the day of the workshop.
Scope and Purpose: There has been a great deal of recent interest in new ways to deliver information technology (IT) resources to large organizations. This has been driven by significant reductions in the cost of computing cycles, mass storage, and network bandwidth, as well as a desire to pursue more federated data center designs, reduce operating expenses, and conserve energy. One significant emerging trend involves outsourcing selected business to IT service providers; the enabling technology and business model are both referred to as Cloud Computing. There has been a great deal of discussion around what cloud computing actually means to the IT industry, maturity of the enabling technologies, and training a new generation of IT staff. In this workshop, we’ve invited a number of distinguished speakers with first-hand experience in cloud computing to describe their work and share their vision for the future. The emphasis will be on development of cloud computing architectures, software, and networking for a range of practical applications, and on the viability of this approach for emerging data center designs. A panel discussion on current trends and directions in this field will also be included.
Attendees will have the opportunity to interact with the guest speakers through informal discussion breaks throughout the day, and a question/answer session will be held at the end of the panel discussion to assess those attendees wishing to apply for continuing education units under the New York State Professional Engineers program (there are no prerequisites for this workshop). Attendees will also have the opportunity to provide written feedback on the various sessions during the day. Invited papers and other presentation materials will be made available on CD as part of the registration package.
Agenda (as of Oct 23):
8:00 – 9:00 On-site registration and coffee
9:00 – 9:30 Welcome (Dr. Daniel Jelski, Dean, School of Science and Engineering, SUNY New Paltz; Dr. Baback Izadi, (2009 Chair, Mid-Hudson Section of the IEEE) Prior and future SUNY workshop topics (Dr. Casimer DeCusatis, IBM)
9:30 – 10:00 Dr. Casimer DeCusatis, IBM, and Todd Bundy, Adva Optical Networking, “Cloud Computing Fundamentals & Applications”
10:00 – 10:30 Michael Haley, IBM, “Emerging Cloud Data Centers”
10:30 – 11:30 Brian Goodman, IBM, “Building the compute cloud: firsthand experience”
11:30 – 12:30 Buffet Lunch, The Terrace Restaurant
12:30 – 1:00 Carolyn DeCusatis, Pace University, “Converged Networking for Cloud Data Centers”
1:00 – 1:30 Dr. Robert Cannistra, Marist College, “A new curriculum for cloud data centers”
1:30 – 2:00 Dr. Aparicio Carranza, City College of New York, and Jorge Martinez, EMC, “Migration of legacy storage area networks”
2:00 – 2:30 coffee break
2:30 – 3:00 Aneel Lakhani, IBM Global Services, “Cloud Computing showcase data center”
3:00 – 4:00 Panel Discussion, “The future of enterprise data centers: what will be the role of cloud computing ?” (all invited speakers)
4:00 – 4:15 Concluding Remarks (Dean, SUNY New Paltz)
I’ve seen all manner of people in the twitter verse complaining that Google’s AppEngine Java support is a subset of Java, and how that “breaks a decade of compatibility”.
Seriously?
I mean, really, seriously?!?
I’ve got to have 3 JVMs installed on my system to use ~ 5 java applications in total. So I’m not buying the compatibility complaint, as “best practice” in the java world is to ship your own copy of the vm.
And I definitely sympathize with the Google folks that really don’t want to be running millions of idle 2 GB memory footprint VMs. It is basically free after all, so what’s up with all the complaining. And, honestly, if it gets Java folks rethinking if they really need 5000 classes floating around at all times, I think that’s doing the world a favor. 🙂
It's always more complicated 