My brother provided me with a theme for my blog. Its pretty clean and simple - yet not a simple or clean as I would have wanted it to be, but that's entirely my fault. Its a matter of modifying the structure of the various elements and using font families and colors that make sense.
I purchased two iPhones from Las Vegas ( Thank you for the invitation Patrick ). I used to dislike cell phones with a passion. Especially those engineered by Nokia. Complicated for no reason, cumbersome to use, fancy for the sake of being fancy and loaded with a gazillion crappy applications and 'services'. The only cell phone I actually liked was the original Nokia phone ( short-lived moment of glory for them ) used in the Matrix 1 movie. So, naturally, my expectations were rather low when it came to putting the iPhone to the test.
"The iPhone is a revolutionary mobile phone". It actually is. Everything just works, supported by an ultra sleek UI, robust facilities and solid design decisions. It is by far the best mobile device I ever used, far surpassing any expectations I may have had.
Amazon kick-started the cloud computing era by introducing an ever expanding array of facilities and services, from S3 to EC2, to SimpleDB. Microsoft is entering the game with SSDS. Google made available a dozen APIs and WebService as a means to interfacing with their core services but everyone knew Google would come after Amazon and co, big time. It did. What is perhaps the most important benefit and side-effect of the availability of such a platform is that the everyone can build any web application without having to shelling out for the kind of resources that would have made this application possible. The AppEngine service is going to provide everyone with free access to resources and documentation - all one would need to do is signup with them, build the application on his computer using the provided SDK and then push it back to the cloud. Once the application gets successful (say, 4-5 million page views / month ) that said developer would pay Google for access to more resources. Everyone wins.
I am looking forward to similar offerings from IBM and Sun. For those who are into buzzwords, Web3.0 is here.
I like the new look Markie, easy to see your bro's influence.
Simple & effective. Very nice :)
Hope all is going well & that we get to meet up soon - it's been too long! ;)
Simple theme. Simple is beautiful :) Take care mark.
For those who are into buzzwords, Web3.0 is here.
Mark, let's be a tad more cautious before increasing the major version this time, shall we? :)
For the first two years of its existence 'Web 2.0' was a complete travesty, a label without any well-defined semantics, a marketing gimmick, of the kind thinking people typically hate. Now, it's found a home as 'the social web'. I still find it ridiculous as a term.
The time to up the version will arrive when broadband will become as ubiquitous as it takes to not depend on the Googles, the Amazons, the IBMs and the of this world. I've tried writing about this briefly in the past and I firmly believe that's where we should be heading; technologically we're closer to this goal than ever, despite the threats to net neutrality or various laws selectively permitting segmentation or control of the 'net. In many parts of this world, anyone can host a semi-popular regional site/web service at home, aided by a cheapo serverfarm made of commodity hardware and running linux and/or *BSDs and one (or more) business grade aggregated ADSL/SDSL links or FTTH. I've seen it happen more than once and it seems to work (at least until the site becomes popular enough to allow for fatter pipes and hardware). There are no barriers to entry, no dependence on corporate policy. I fear that --- despite the very obvious advantages all those 'services' provide to developers --- what's at stake here is much larger than developer ease of use, lost revenue or choice.
Hopefully true web services, completely decoupled from the presentational layer (html, xslt, rich clients, flash, silverlight, whatever) and --- most importantly --- living and provided by a peer-level decentralised internet will blossom in the future. If anything, decentralisation is the greatest safeguard from abuses of power --- both in an economic and social sense --- we could ever possibly get. And neither Amazon's nor Google's web services, no matter how great they might be from a technical point of view are moving us towards it.
Just my ¬.02