What are IT professionals valuing, using and potentially considering? This infographic from Insight Cloud Computing Solutions tries to shed some light on the issue, including the differences between private, hybrid and public clouds:

In the competitive world of cloud-based computing infrastructure, Amazon remains top dog. It’s highly visible, its footprint is almost global, it incrementally adds features or cuts prices to keep competitors on their toes, and it generally manages to meet most people’s needs, most of the time. It may not always offer the lowest prices, or the best support, or the fastest processing, or the friendliest management console, but it consistently manages to meet customer demand with an offer that is more or less ‘good enough.’ It is a convenient choice, and it’s the standard against which its multitude of competitors will typically be measured. Amazon is Asda or Carrefour or WalMart to the competition’s Tesco, Marks & Spencer, Fortnum & Mason, Whole Foods, and neighbourhood deli. Amazon is not, of course, the only game in town. Far from it. Rackspace comes a close second by most measures, big names such as HP and Google are becoming increasingly serious contenders, and there is a healthy – and growing – crop of smaller providers that differentiate themselves by geography, by price, by customer domain, by specific features, and more. Indeed, I looked at some of those differentiations recently. But every one of the cloud infrastructure providers […]

read more

It would take but one simple sentence from the Obama Administration: “The United States will not extradite Julian Assange from the UK, Sweden, or anywhere else for any actions he’s taken in the past.”

Thus would end a multi-country international incident that seems to grow every day. Assange is hardly a journalist, in my view, and I’ve written before that his actions were likely to precipitate just the sort of fascistic activity that we’re apparently witnessing today. Yet he is already a martyr, metaphorically speaking, to the cause of free expression and what should be a universal right not to be harrassed. That fact that he seems to be a deeply uanappealing hero is irrelevant.

So here we are, in a 21st century that’s evolving into an all-seeing, global police state, all due to the unlikely combination of box cutters and digital cameras. When will it end, and what can we do to end it?

Perhaps Assange’s plight should be viewed as a First World Problem. After all, children are among those being murdered in Syria these past months, North Koreans remain enslaved, and there are uncountable incidents of mass violence occurring throughout the world, including the United States.

All that brotherhood/sisterhood stuff that we just saw at the London Olympics, personified by a photo of two wrestling opponents, one American and one Iranian, hugging each other, rings hollow as usual.

Julian Assange’s troubles, the troubles of of the unfortunately named female punk band in Russia, even the ongoing Occupy movement arrests in the US, can seem trivial by comparison.

But these latter incidents seem to be part of a pattern, one in which the highly developed nations of the West (and I include Russia here) are as likely to place an iron grip on those they dislike as are the dictatorships of the world.

Lest anyone be offended by the comparison of the US and UK governments being compared to that of Syria, one has to ask the difference between a missile fired on Aleppo versus one fired in Tripoli or a caravan in Yemen. I frankly don’t know.

The Kingdom of Sweden has not yet gone this far, as far as I know. Perhaps, though, Sweden will feel a moral pang and issue the “no extradtion” statement that I never expect to see from the United States. One wonders how long this long-neutral nation will be willing to be at the beck and call of the CIA’s waterboarders.

Does anyone have Carl XVI Gustaf on speed-dial? His email? Does he tweet? He has no concrete power, but a statement from the man who presents the Nobel Peace Prize would be a game changer.

As I wrote last week, the emerging unitary global sheriff is made possible only by advances in technology. It’s glib (and wrong) to say we’re all guilty. But how long shall we keep cranking out more powerful hardware, more industrious software, and more ingenious ways to connect them if we’re only serving to limit the freedom that allowed us to create in the first place?

read more

The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) has announced and published more documents for data center customers of cloud usage. These new cloud usage models for to address customer demands for interoperability of various clouds and services before for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) among other topics which are now joined by the new Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and foundational document for cloud interoperability.

Unlike most industry trade groups or alliances that are vendor driven or centric, ODCA is consortium of global IT leaders (e.g. customers) that is vendor independent and comprises as 12 member steering committee from member companies (e.g. customers), learn more about ODCA here.

read more

In case you missed them, here are some articles from June of particular interest to R users. The FDA goes on the record that it’s OK to use R for drug trials. A review of talks at the useR! 2012 conference. Using the negative binomial distribution to convert monthly fecundity into the chances of having a baby in a given time period. Some benchmarks and a video demonstration of big-data Tweedie models with Revolution R Enterprise. Why Orbitz’s R-based models present more expensive hotels to Mac users. How to convert a rugby score to an equivalent soccer score, with GAMs….

David Smith

read more

Secrets never stay secret very long at HP, but this sounds more like a secret they want known.

HP is moving its webOS gang into a new semi-autonomous company called GRAM.

webOS Nation broke the story after it got its hands on a flyer and an internal e-mail penned late last week after an all-hands meeting by HP chief of staff
Martin Risau, who’s been responsible for the webOS Global Business Unit.

read more

EMC has $5.65 billion in cash in the bank and Bloomberg says it wants to buy security software houses with it to fuel growth.

COO Joe Goulden told the wire service last month that security is the biggest area for potential acquisitions since the company already had “all the key parts we were looking to put together” in data storage.

He also said that security had to be “reinvented” for the cloud and that a bunch of start-ups are doing that very thing.

read more

SYS-CON Events announced today that TelecityGroup, Europe’s industry-leading provider of premium carrier-neutral data centers, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 11th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

read more