- Second Life's strange second life | The Verge - "A million active users still log on and inhabit the world every month, and 13,000 newbies drop into the community every day to see what Second Life is about."
- Innovative CIOs run their applications a completely different way | The Enterprisers Project - RT @lcongdon: Thoughts on cloud computing: Innovative CIOs run their applications a completely different way via @4enterprisers
- Our Numbered Days: The Evolution of the Area Code - Megan Garber - The Atlantic
- ▶ Bayesian or Frequentist, Which Are You? - VideoLectures.NET
- Are you a Bayesian or a Frequentist?
- Politics of openness - The Ed Techie
- Red Hat Summit - New infographic on 2014 Red Hat Summit sessions/content & alumni feedback 4/14 in SF. I'll be in a couple sessions.
- Critique of Boston MBTA Transit Map - "Well meaning, but seriously flawed. Needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. With the addition of the Silver Line, the centre of the city needs far more space given to it, while the edges can afford to be compressed a bit to compensate (look how much room the Braintree leg of the Red Line has, for example). One-and-a-half stars."
- Platform-as-a-Service: Lessons from Manufacturing | Cloud Computing Journal - RT @CloudExpo: Cloud Expo Session | Platform-as-a-Service: Lessons from Manufacturing [by @GHaff] ▸ #PaaS #Cloud #CloudExpo
Monday, February 24, 2014
Links for 02-24-2014
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
5 ways in which OpenStack doesn't parallel Linux
Last month, I wrote a post discussing the parallels between OpenStack and Linux. Briefly, these are the following:
- Part and parcel of a new approach to computing
- Adoption rates won’t be uniform
- It takes time
- About community as much as technology
- Open source development is an incremental process
- Commercial distributions make consumption by businesses possible
- Need for complementary components and integration
A number of folks have pointed out that there are differences too. To which I say "I agree!" From my perspective, here are five of the most salient deltas.
1. Open source is now ubiquitous and part of the landscape. In 2001, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was giving interviews like the one he gave to the Chicago Sun Times in which he said "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches." In 2001, Gartner analyst George Weiss was writing that between 2003 and 2005, "enthusiasm for Linux will increase selectively... However, their enthusiasm will be tempered by the entrenched position of Unix, which has already achieved mission-critical scalability and availability, by the strong Windows 2000 upgrades in the pipeline, and by the potentially heavy cost of migrating to Linux." My point here isn't to pick on anyone in particular (well, maybe Steve Ballmer) but to highlight that, circa 2001, Linux and open source generally faced an environment that ranged from skeptical to unremittingly hostile outside of (mostly) leading-edge technology adopters like Wall Street. Today, by contrast, open source is used widely--ubiquitously even--and companies like Google and Facebook would not even be feasible in open source's absence. In short, OpenStack's birth and maturation is taking place in a much more welcoming environment than did Linux'.
2. Open source is in the enterprise. And not just some enterprises in some industries. According to Red Hat's data, "more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies use Red Hat products and services." That's just Red Hat. (And, one suspects, there are open source pockets at most, if not all, of the remaining 10 percent.) Here's what Gartner is now writing about open source software in their Hype Cycle for Open-Source Software, 2013:
Continuing a trend over the past 10 years, the open-source software (OSS) model continues to expand and affect market segments across nearly the entire IT industry spectrum. For example, Linux was the first widely acknowledged success of open source in many IT organizations, and it remains the flagship of OSS success; however, the list of "industry-changing" OSS solution continues to grow year after year as well. Today, projects like the Apache Web Server, the JBoss Application Server, MySQL RDBMS, Eclipse IDE, MongoDB, and many more show the broad influence that OSS continues to have on the industry as a whole.
3. Open source is driving innovation. Historically, open source was more about commoditizing and democratizing technology approaches that already existed and were proven in the world of proprietary software. BSD and then Linux did so to proprietary Unix but they are hardly the only example. OpenOffice, the Apache web server, and MySQL database all didn't initially drive the state of the art forward so much as they drove price points dramatically downwards--and thereby greatly increased the number of people and organizations that had access. This dynamic remains true for some open source software, but the collaboration that the open source development model makes possible is now driving industry innovation in so many areas. In data storage and analytics, almost all of the interesting new approaches are in open source. And that's true also with building IaaS clouds where OpenStack is gaining so much attention. OpenStack isn't about mimicking a proprietary IaaS. There isn't such a thing outside of a few big public cloud providers (and, with the exception of Microsoft, they all make extensive use of open source as well).
4. OpenStack is for the datacenter. So far, I've mostly discussed how the milieu in which OpenStack plays is different from the one in which Linux operated at first. There are some differences in the projects themselves too. Linux has probably had its greatest impact as a server operating system, but there's nothing inherent to Linux that limits it to that role. Indeed, the fact that someone could spin up Linux on an old PC and tinker with it arguably had a great deal to do with its grassroots encroachment into the server room. In the modern era, variants of Linux appear in everything from mobile devices to Mars Rovers. OpenStack, designed as it is for datacenter infrastructure, is more expressly tailored to run on a (moderately large) pool of servers. It's also more likely to enter the datacenter by the front door as a result.
5. The OpenStack community is different from the Linux kernel one. Finally, it's worth observing that the OpenStack project's organization differs significantly from that of the Linux kernel. There are some similarities in that large commercial organizations (not least of all Red Hat) make significant contributions to both projects. But the Linux kernel runs as a sort of "benevolent dictatorship" (reflecting its roots) while OpenStack is governed by a foundation established for the project (reflecting its establishment primarily by a number of companies coming together). The difference also reflects how the Linux kernel has a singular identity and purpose while OpenStack is more of a framework for a number of sub-projects and includes more rapidly changing technology. In some ways, OpenStack looks more like a distribution than a single open source project--although that comparison fails in a number of respects as well.
Different doesn't mean better or worse. It means different. I always favor looking for historical parallels because they can be instructive and offer a window to the future. It's equally important though to understand the differences in the environment between yesterday and today, as well as between the things being compared themselves. In the case of Linux and OpenStack, there are lessons to be drawn for OpenStack by looking at Linux adoption so long as they're not slavishly drawn.
Links for 02-18-2014
- Office on the iPad is a product absolutely nobody needs | CITEworld - I don't really get the interest in most iPad content creation apps. I guess they can sometimes be a fallback if you're somewhere and don't have your PC with you but that's a pretty marginal use case.
- Why An Open API is Like a Loaded Gun | Security Management - "From a governance, audit, security, and compliance perspective, no business should ever consider opening up their APIs to any users—internal or external—without adequate controls, such as identity and access management, threat protection, error detection, usage tracking, and rate limiting."
- How Mobile Cloud Services Will Consolidate After The Death Of StackMob – ReadWrite - "StackMob, Parse and Kinvey all started with a focus on developers. Each, in its own due course, realized that selling to developers is basically impossible. Indie developers don’t have money and enterprise developers don’t have control over budgets. The developer-centric approach was not scalable."
- If Invading Switzerland, Please Do So Outside Of "Office Hours" | Zero Hedge - RT @natfriedman: Please don't invade Switzerland outside business hours:
Monday, February 17, 2014
Links for 02-17-2014
- How PR landed humans on the moon | Articles | Home - "With all the recent hoopla about how online content serves as a tool for public relations, few people realize that content has been around as a PR tool for more than 50 years. The greatest story never told (until now) about content as a marketing tool is that it helped to deliver humans to the moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s. While everybody is looking for the next big thing in public relations, I found inspiration by going back half a century."
- Intel’s Sharp-Eyed Social Scientist - NYTimes.com
- Klaus Teuber, the Man Who Built The Settlers of Catan : The New Yorker
- Paddy Chayefsky: The Dark Prophet of ‘Network’ News - The Daily Beast - "When you watch Network now, even the extremest of conversations—the idea of actually killing someone live on air—is not an exactly alien stretch of our reality TV-soaked imaginations. Chayefsky forecast perfectly the changing universe of TV news, with news ceding ground to entertainment, blowhard posturing, personality and extremity."
- It's time for Netflix to stop acting like television - The Week
- The National Map
- George Packer: Is Amazon Bad for Books? : The New Yorker
- London’s West End, a Stage for Good Eating - NYTimes.com
- Watch actual members of Congress read lines from House of Cards - The Week - RT @TheWeek: 'House of Cards' sounds even more chilling when real-life congressmen act it out:
- Instapainting Turns Your Photos Into Hand-Painted Oil Paintings On The Cheap | TechCrunch
- NC snow meme: Attack on Glenwood Ave :: WRAL.com - North Carolina snow meme
Friday, February 14, 2014
Links for 02-14-2014
- Why There Will Never Be Another RedHat: The Economics Of Open Source | TechCrunch
- History Camp Tickets, Cambridge - Eventbrite
- Instagram - I think I'll just stay in front of the fire.
- Twitter / EricHolthaus: Quite possibly the craziest ... - RT @EricHolthaus: Quite possibly the craziest snow photo I've ever seen, today in Raleigh NC:
- Star Wars OL - YouTube - RT @bakertweets: It's over. They can shut down the Internet now. This wins.
- Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators - Megan McArdle - The Atlantic - "Like most writers, I am an inveterate procrastinator. In the course of writing this one article, I have checked my e-mail approximately 3,000 times, made and discarded multiple grocery lists, conducted a lengthy Twitter battle over whether the gold standard is actually the worst economic policy ever proposed, written Facebook messages to schoolmates I haven’t seen in at least a decade, invented a delicious new recipe for chocolate berry protein smoothies, and googled my own name several times to make sure that I have at least once written something that someone would actually want to read."
- San Franciscans Wait Two Hours in the Rain For Day-Old New York Bagels | Uptown Almanac - "While we've become dizzy with all the eye-rolling, we cannot help be impressed by the brilliance of this pop-up and its ability to lure people into the most degrading "yuppie bread line" possible."
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Links for 02-11-2014
- How DevOps Can Accelerate the Cloud Application Lifecycle - "Yes, there's often friction between development and operations, and being part of the same team would undoubtedly improve personal relationships. This approach might incrementally improve the current state by fostering cooperation and less finger-pointing. However, it's not clear that better personal interaction would significantly quicken application functionality release cycles."
- Instagram - Dartmouth winter carnival
- How Skeuomorphism Can Make Electric Car Safer | MIT Technology Review
- Digital Nibbles 02/06 by Digital Nibbles | Technology Podcasts - I was on Digital Nibbles yesterday talking mostly PaaS and #OpenShift starting at about the 27 minute mark.
- Daring Fireball: Microsoft, Past and Future - One of the better pieces. "The next ubiquity isn’t running on every device, it’s talking to every device."
- Instagram - I've been on empty flights this trip. LHR<->EWR
- Microsoft Board names Satya Nadella as CEO - RT @Craw: Smart move by MSFT. Hope they use Gates the right way. Narrow = better
- Twitter / pythondj: This is NOT a test, the apps ... - RT @pythondj: This is NOT a test, the apps are launching on @openshift live from #fosdem today
- Twitter / mhelft: Harsh working conditions in ... - RT @mhelft: Harsh working conditions in Silicon Valley
- Lessons about Community from Science Fiction « Fast Wonder - RT @geekygirldawn: My slides (with speaker notes) for my community lessons from science fiction talk at #monkigras
- "Paperwork Explosion" - YouTube - The Paperwork Explosion video from IBM (& Jim Henson) in 1967.
- Donnie Berkholz presentations
- Getting Rowdy About Cloud in London — Red Hat Open Source Community - RT @jzb: Getting Rowdy About Cloud in London: Thanks to @dberkholz @mfdii @sebgoa @andypiper @TheSteve0 @EMEACloudGuy et al.
- » The End of Higher Education’s Golden Age Clay Shirky - This expansion created tensions among the goals of open-ended exploration, training for the workplace, and research, but these tensions were masked by new income. Decades of rising revenue meant we could simultaneously become the research arm of government and industry, the training ground for a rapidly professionalizing workforce, and the preservers of the liberal arts tradition. Even better, we could do all of this while increasing faculty ranks and reducing the time senior professors spent in the classroom. This was the Golden Age of American academia.
- Help Center : SlideCast Updates - SlideCast feature of SlideShare going away. A reminder that it's sometimes worth effort to create in portable format