Albert Einstein, you may have heard, was a clever man. He scribbled equations
on blackboards, thought big thoughts, and all of that. But, allegedly, he
also said
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
These words have resonated with me recently, as I’ve heard pitches from one
company after another, all of which are trying to cut through the complexity
of data to make it accessible. Their goals appear laudable, but all too often
I find myself wondering how simple this stuff can be? If we make it too
simple, do we run the risk of unleashing a flood of half-baked
‘analysis,’ undertaken by people who really shouldn’t be allowed near a
calculator, let alone a Hadoop cluster? On the other hand there’s a
persuasive argument to be made for democratising access to data and tools,
freeing organisations from over-reliance upon their new High Priests... (more)
The #CloudFirst trend is spreading, with Government Minister Francis Maude
finally committing the UK to the approach earlier this month. But I remain
concerned that there’s too much stick and not nearly enough carrot… and
that cloud adoption more generally is ill-served by this mandate-driven
‘solution.’
Technological advances and shifting business requirements affect Government
just as much as they do the enterprise. Fragmentation and siloisation can be
used to explain sprawling data centre estates, which officials now work hard
to consolidate. Shifting requirements, over-engin... (more)
The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) is holding its Forecast event in San
Francisco in June, and I’ve been invited to moderate the panel discussing
Virtual Machine Interoperability. As moderator, I’ll be far more interested
in facilitating insights from panel and audience than in wittering on about
what I think, so I wanted to use this blog post to begin getting some of the
issues clear in my mind. What is VM interoperability, and why does it matter?
From time to time, I write about Open Data. This has nothing to do with
that. The Open Data Center Alliance is interested in data c... (more)
Last night, cloud database company Xeround announced that they’re shutting
down the version of their service hosted in public clouds such as Amazon,
Rackspace, GreenQloud, and others. Users of the free service have until 8 May
to move elsewhere, whilst paying customers have until 15 May. The company
describes this as an attempt to “re-focus,” with the implication that
other parts of the business remain viable. It’s never easy to admit
mistakes and kill products, but the ability to do so is an essential part of
running a business that’s viable for the long haul. Xeround’s
announ... (more)
Google’s impressive Chromebook Pixel is just the latest in a series of
devices which are trying to entice users to compute in a different way. With
(almost) ubiquitous connectivity, and an increasing reliance upon web-based
services for mail, calendars, document creation and more, might we be
reaching a point at which the browser really can be our means of
accessing everything? Philosophically, the idea resonates. And yet, although
I am not a power user who needs to regularly process video or edit high
resolution images (the usual excuses for not embracing the Chromebook
vision... (more)
Paul Miller works at the interface between the worlds of Cloud Computing and the Semantic Web, providing the insights that enable you to exploit the next wave as we approach the World Wide Database. He blogs at 
Derek Granath
Tom Flynn
Patrick Pushor
Bob Evans
