Overheard: Cloud computing too big a risk for mission critical apps

The nature of Grid/Cloud computing means a business has to migrate its applications and data to a third party solution. This creates huge barriers to the uptake. Paul Wallis, Is the Cloud There Yet?

Recently we’ve seen the London Stock Exchange fail, undersea data cables cut in the Gulf, espionage in Lithuania and the failure of the most modern and well-known data farm at Amazon.

In such a climate it will require asking the business to take a leap of faith to find solid footing in the cloud for mission critical applications.

And that is never a good way to sell to the business.

Overheard: India faces “employability” problem

Recent statistics show that the job opportunities in India have outnumbered the available hands. The problem is more of “Employability” rather than employment.   vidyai, The Soft Skills Training – Where it begins!!

Overheard: More than token opposition to tokenization

The most popular reason for not implementing tokenization is that companies have already implemented data encryption and key management systems costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, and either they did not feel they needed tokenization or they were unwilling to be perceived by upper management as “changing course” by recommending the removal of the data they just spent all this money to protect. Evan Schuman, Opposition To Tokenization A Lot More Than Token

Overheard: Enterprise Web 2.0 inbreeding

Spending too much time with the ‘in crowd’ who ‘get’ Enterprise 2.0 can result in serious over-enthusiasm and lack of realism. Martin Kloos, The state of Enterprise 2.0 and why we need new stories

Ever since Forrester released a report last month saying that Web 2.0 technologies will have a world-wide market value of $4.6 billion by the year 2013, the early adopters have been patting themselves on the back, saying “I told you so.”

Not so fast, bucko. 2013 is a long way away and enterprise IT is not just going to open its doors to the new kids on the block just because a new generation is entering the workplace. What’s more likely to happen is that legacy IT applications will make updates, incorporating Web 2.o features that work for a particular industry or software application.

At the very least…those Web 2.0 apps wanting consideration will need respectable names. Manly names. Serious names. Names IT professionals don’t feel embarrassed talking about at manager’s meetings. Twitter? Tweets? I don’t think so.

Overheard: Visual Studio Express — Hello World

The reason we’re able to offer Express for free and even let developers build commercial applications with Express is because we limit 3rd party extensibility of Express, specifically by removing support macros, add-ins, and VSIP packages. Dan Fernandez, Visual Studio Express and TestDriven.NET

Microsoft wasn’t happy when developers began to extend what was freely given to them. Dan’s post above could have been called “We give you an inch and you take a mile.”

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On another totally unrelated Dan Fernandez note:

Wow! He’s blonde in this interview. I’m a big Dan Fernandez fan — but I had a hard time watching this video because I kept thinking “why did you bleach your hair?”

In spite of my hair distraction, I liked the interview. Dan is a great evangelist for Visual Studio Express. He’s able to capture and convey that feeling of accomplishment we all felt when we made those magical words “Hello World” appeared on the monitor. He’s not a snob. He appreciates the hobbyist, the hacker and the curious.

Ok…I can’t resist.

Q: What do you call a swimming pool full of blonde Visual Studio Express evangelists?
A: Frosted Flakes.

Overheard: Leveraging rich presence — a marketer’s dream

Ignoring the fact that I find the whole concept of “presence management” a solution in search of a problem for most people, there’s the whole technical problem of trying to work within the various walled gardens…Until we have a single identity across networks, no method of managing presence will be effective. Dameon D. Welch-Abernathy,  Presence And Identity

Rich presence is simply networking on steroids. And people are right to be wary about how the information aggregated from rich presence opt-ins could be used by marketers.  Sure, Facebook backed down on Beacon — but you know its just a matter of time before the “tweet” saying you wish you were in Hawaii brings you snail mail brochures.  Our best protection right now is that there isn’t a way for marketers to leverage rich presence effectively.  We have too many networking identities.

Overheard: Your PUE number is like golf

“Your PUE number is like golf — the closer to 1, the better. At least that has always been the common wisdom. The goal, says experts, is to reduce your PUE. But sometimes an IT energy efficiency project can play games with that number.” Mark Fontecchio, How a virtualization and server consolidation project could hurt your PUE

Overheard: AT&T and American Idol

You have to hand it to the hit FOX reality series: It’s putting SMS systems to maximum use, turning them into a giant cash machine. Om Malik, “American Idol” — Cook-ed by TXT Messages

Om Malik asks a good question. How much did AT&T make off those 78 million text messages? That’s a revenue stream I’ve never even considered. It’ll be awhile though. According to a survey by ExactTarget, 95% of U.S. online consumers have given at least one company permission to deliver messages to them by email — compared to 7% for text messaging. That may change when this next generation enters the workplace.

I’m guilty of sending a few txts earlier on. By the end, I was ok with whichever David won. In fact — I loved the duet they did together. It blew me away how well the timbre of their voices blended.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/kGnE2wcdClE" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Overheard: I don’t want to ever have to wait for Java to load

Java doesn’t do anything by itself. It’s a programming language. Programming languages are like sewage plants: if the average user becomes aware of them, something’s gone wrong. Rupert Goodwins, Gallery: 10 most annoying programs on the Internet

Love it!  When I see that Orange Java box come up, I go get a cup of coffee.

Overheard: Who invented the Internet?

During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating theInternet.
- Al Gore describing his 1986 legislation to interconnect five supercomputer centers (17 years after thefirst Internet servers hooked up)

If Gore invented the Internet, I invented spell-check.
- Former Vice President J. Danforth Quayle

The day I made that statement, I was tired because I’d been up all night inventing the Camcorder.
- Al Gore attempting damage control

Those days were funny, weren’t they? Actually, the Internet is just a grown-up version of ARPANET.