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Forward!
Author: velveeta jones    Date: 07/15/2012 15:36:26

Mitt wants to move us back to the past. Back to "woof woof, who let the dogs out", back to the W. Bush era of tax cuts for the rich while fighting corporate wars that are not in our budgets so we can borrow more money to fight them. Back to "let the auto industry fail while I reward my Wall St friends".

Well, I'm all about moving forward.

Turning those old pay phones into something useful:

Payphones, those relics of the pre-cellphone era, may just get a new lease on life in New York. The city is testing a pilot program in which it installs free Wi-Fi on select payphone kiosks.

The hotspots are initially coming to ten payphones in three of the boroughs and will be open to the public to access for free. You can see a list of sites here. Users just agree to the terms, visit the city’s tourism website and then they’re up and running. Currently, there are no ads on the service, but there could be in the future.


Who knew that the word 'cloud' would take on a whole new meaning. (Bobber and Mondo notwithstanding).

Sun Microsystems’ slogan, “Write once, run anywhere,” (WORA) was hot stuff in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Today, a new technology wave is forming, “Deploy once, scale anywhere,” or DOSA. So why should we care about WORA now? By understanding the evolution of Java and the emergence of WORA, we may discover insights into how the various cloud computing paradigms will evolve in the coming years.

As cloud computing platforms start to mature and the seeds of interoperability begin to sprout, the days of DOSA are not far away. The Eucalyptus-AWS API compatibility deal is one way this could be accomplished. Another might be the ubiquitous availability of OpenStack-enabled cloud services from such providers as HP, RackSpace and AT&T. VMWare’s recent acquisition of DynamicOps also points in this direction. These are just some of the developments that are happening every day. DOSA looks even nearer with PaaS technologies, such as CloudFoundry and OpenShift, providing elastic application containers the same way that Java promised ubiquitous availability of Java virtual machines 15 years ago. Clearly, key industry players are starting to get ready.

My bet is that cloud computing’s chaotic landscape (especially IaaS and PaaS) will evolve into a more nuanced DOSA message. Enterprise IT will have the ability to shrink and surge based on open and flexible infrastructure platforms. These infrastructure platforms will largely consist of commodity hardware and smart software that ensure interoperability across service providers.


I found this article interesting. I was using computers back when DOS ruled and you were thrilled with 40M of space! Backups were done on floppy disks and there was talk of one day - a long way off - cd's might be used for data storage. Sheesh! I feel old, but my newest laptop doesn't have a DVD slot uses flash drive technology and isn't even wide enough for an Ethernet cable.

With all the exciting things moving us forward in technology, and that includes being able to report on things happening around the world in places where we usually cannot get access, there is also the down side. Or, at least the scary side:

The device in your purse or jeans that you think is a cellphone — guess again. It is a tracking device that happens to make calls. Let’s stop calling them phones. They are trackers.

Most doubts about the principal function of these devices were erased when it was recently disclosed that cellphone carriers responded 1.3 million times last year to law enforcement requests for call data. That’s not even a complete count, because T-Mobile, one of the largest carriers, refused to reveal its numbers. It appears that millions of cellphone users have been swept up in government surveillance of their calls and where they made them from. Many police agencies don’t obtain search warrants when requesting location data from carriers.

Thanks to the explosion of GPS technology and smartphone apps, these devices are also taking note of what we buy, where and when we buy it, how much money we have in the bank, whom we text and e-mail, what Web sites we visit, how and where we travel, what time we go to sleep and wake up — and more. Much of that data is shared with companies that use it to offer us services they think we want.


Well, this is a good reminder to be sure to throw those that are tracking us off the beaten path every once in awhile. Things that I've recently shopped for or researched on my computer and cellphone: Wedding dresses, large firearms, pancake mixes, ferret rescue, how to remove a kidney, Meet Christian singles, Scientology, Swiss cheese, toilet bowl cleaners, the Kardashians, beers of Belgium. That should keep them guessing.
 

2 comments (Latest Comment: 07/15/2012 19:12:03 by BobR)
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