August 6th, 2010
I noticed an August 2, 2010 article from the University of Texas at Dallas that should be of interesting to anyone focusing on cloud computing: it describes a collection of recently-released tools to help application developers build more robust and secure cloud applications. The article is titled “Team Releases Tools for Secure Cloud Computing.”
The tools [...]
June 20th, 2010
I spent most of last week in Boston, attending the annual Enterprise 2.0 conference. This is the second or third E2.0 conference I’ve attended here (they begin to blur after a while), and it was generally a productive experience. But for the sake of posterity, here are a few other details:
The blatant sales pitch in [...]
June 6th, 2010
Aside from putting our faith in the continuation of Moore’s Law for another decade or two, how do we anticipate the future of IT?
Let’s start by acknowledging that is not just one future lying ahead of us. There are many “potential” futures, some of which will come to fruition, and some of which will be [...]
June 5th, 2010
The great anthropologist Margaret Mead popularized the terms postfigurative, cofigurative, and prefigurative — and it’s something we need to be aware of if we want to anticipate the impact of future IT technology. (See Mead’s Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap for more details.)
A postfigurative culture is one in which things don’t really [...]
June 4th, 2010
To anticipate the social impact of future IT, it would help to be an expert sociologist with a perfect crystal ball. I don’t have such expertise, so I’ll restrict my comments to specific areas where I think I have some vague idea of what I’m talking about … and aside from that, I’ll simply recommend [...]
June 3rd, 2010
As soon as you start discussing future advances in IT, someone will make a familiar observation: not everyone embraces change. This is not news, and it’s not restricted to IT — or to any technology, for that matter. Some people resist changes in fashion, music, art, cuisine, politics, sports, religion, and technology. Some people are [...]
June 3rd, 2010
The last several postings in this blog thread have focused on the future of IT from a technical perspective. For those of us who work in the IT industry, this is no surprise: there’s no question that we want to use the new “stuff” as soon as it’s available, and the main questions are simply [...]
June 1st, 2010
The last several postings in this thread about the future of technology have focused on the consequences of hardware advances — e.g., all of the marvelous things we can look forward to in the next 5-10 years as a result of computers/chips that are 10-100 times cheaper, faster, smaller, etc.
But as an intellectual exercise, suppose [...]
May 31st, 2010
There is one last “dimension” of Moore’s Law to discuss briefly — the continuing advance in our communication networks. Again, all you need to do is think back a few years (well, all right, maybe more than just a few) to the era of 100-baud modems, followed by 300 baud, 1200 baud, and then 2,400 [...]
May 30th, 2010
In an earlier blog in this series, I reminisced about an experience I had had in a mainframe computer room, back in the mid-1960’s: a high-speed drum, roughly the size of a family-size washing machine, had begun vibrating so hard that it snapped the bolts anchoring it to the floor, and began vibrating its away [...]
