The Obsolete Blues

After struggling for over a year to get a VMWare solution up and running robustly and then priced out for a recharge service, I find that our central IT group has done the job already and for not much more than we can do it for. Thus, there is really no reason to be in this particular business.

I did see this coming, it is pretty clear that cloud computing is the real next wave. VMWare is what established IT shops do, and will do, to make those 'private' clouds.

The real cloud computing outside of the private world, will be based on higher level abstractions than the Operating System. Since I have been an advocate of abolishing any user interface into an operating system (after all, are we not really trying to perform application logic?) it should come as no surprise that I would also advocate for cloud computing using interfaces or API's well above the operating system.

What people are going to want at the most primitive level is going to be Ruby on Rails servers, PHP servers, Java servers or some other programming abstraction (Hadoop?). Then they are going to want data management, but not file managment, I mean contextually relevant data management. That could be via database systems or it could be via something else. This is the developer level access to clouds.

But what even more people (non-developers) are going to want are applications that just work and do useful things. Contact managment systems, billing systems, mail systems, customer relationship systems, social networking, media sharing and purchasing, etc.....

So, my new career, should I choose to accept it, will most likely be trying to show end users in academic research, how to get what they want out of clouds. I would like to think that I will be part of building a private/public cloud to facilitate the transition, but I don't think that a group of my size can ever effectively be in the infrastructure business. I don't know what I was ever really thinking in trying to do that anyway....vanity maybe.

Everything you know is wrong (again)

More people are finding me on facebook now than twitter. I still don't really know how to effectively use facebook or twitter, so I continue to write this blog since writing lots of words, whether I succeed at communicating or not, is what I seem to be good at.

Yesterday, I signed the petition to encourage my federal representatives to support the use of VISTA as the core of a proposed new bill "Health Information Technology Public Utility Act of 2009"

Many, in the technical communities I travel in, find VISTA's core use of MUMPS as reason enough to ignore it. This is because MUMPS is an 'old' technology and everyone knows that old technology can't be as good as 'new' technology. Or at least we have built a market based on that, with computers 'lasting' just 3 to 5 years before they need to be replaced. That sort of technological imperative thinking is just too simplistic for me anymore.

(Bet you were wondering if I would get back to the title of this post :)

So, what else do we know that's wrong? One thing that really strikes me is the nearly universal notion that 'we have to get this economy back on it's feet'. I take that to mean, at it's simplest, that we need to get back to the way things were! You can see this everywhere: Banks are now making money so those high paid executives who created that innovative engine of growth, financial derivatives (say sub-prime mortgage's), need to be rewarded again. The automotive market simply has to re-structure itself for lower operating costs, as if alternative living, working and transportation arrangements that are demonstrably better along many important dimensions (health, energy consumption) no longer need to be encouraged. Finally, we need to spend a lot more 'stimulus' money to get all those retarded health care practitioners to adopt the latest technology.