The year is 1995, I am in a small computer shop, bringing back a harddrive. It is a 2 Gigabyte harddrive with bad sectors, that I am exchanging for a brand new, Fujitsu 5 Gigabyte monster. “Wow…that is the space I am not going to fill up for a loooong time”, a thought goes through my mind…Fast forward to 2010 and I am sitting here with my main computer sucking away it’s storage of more than 5 Terrabytes of data (albeit split across 6 harddrives). That’s a thousand times more and counting. If it keeps on ticking with a logarithmic progression I will be looking at 5 Petabytes around 2025. Or is it wishful thinking? (look, no flying cars yet!)

Business knows that an IT department is important. It saves money in many ways, keeps the back-office running and helps in executing business processes. But in many organizations IT costs too much, with all its security, high availability, disaster recovery, compliance and support requirements. Business cringes seeing all the capital job proposals and budgets for IT spendings. This is why they are looking for an alternative. Say, an alternative, that gives the back-office support without having to worry about all the high-ticket items, like HA, DR and GRC. Items that IT seems to stick every year on the annual budget proposals. An this is exactly what the “cloud” tries to provide. The cloud is an abstracted business function, where all high-ticket IT items are spread over multiple clients and thus are cheaper to have for any particular client. The IT department, after all, is just a business paid expense, that has no real, intrinsic value all by itself.

The business, of course, wants the high level of service, the good “Service Level Agreement” to cover the needs of the business. This is where we enter the world of ITIL. The SLA’s the ITIL are a step in getting IT outsourced. An SLA’s without a extra value is a way to make IT separable, commoditizable. I am not saying they are bad. I am saying if you exceed at delivering the services on the SLA’s without bringing benefits to a business, you are no different than a third party outlet selling server time for a monthly fee.

So, before you dismiss the “cloud” business as yet another popular, but short lived word in the IT vernacular, think of the implications that this model has for the future of IT. There is a trend of businesses cutting back on the IT departments. I really see only one way for the IT department to survive this transition. IT can live on by becoming a cloud integration department. On the low level, someone needs to integrate in-house systems with the clouds during and after the transition to could based services. On the high level, someone needs to understand the business and to know how to map it to the services different clouds provide.

Granted, it may take a decade before the onslaught of the clouds, depending on how much push the business is doing toward cost-cutting, but start training up now for one of these roles, if you are working in an IT department.

PS. Yes, the cloud providers will need the IT skills to develop and maintain the cloud offerings, but the number of jobs will be much smaller compared to the in-house IT staff.

Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.4 Linux is out.

I’ve got it installed on all my boxes, except may be a shoe box. I am thoroughly thrilled about its looks, apps, performance, features and stability. After testing it for some time (ever since alpha 1 version was out), installing and reinstalling it numerous times I  have to say – it’s a great operating system! All the devices worked out of the box on all the computers, even the brand new, fresh smelling Radeon HD 5830. It boots in an instant, it has all the apps you’ll ever want (for free) and, with the Compiz eye candy, it looks even better than OS X. In fact it was the OS I was waiting for, from the times I’ve first installed Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) on my laptop back in, well, 2008.10. Yes, Jaunty 9.4 and Karmik 9.10 offered a great ride, but they are not the LTS.

Lucid Lynx is a long term support release (LTS) that means that the Ubuntu folks spent lots of hours working out kinks and quirks of the previous release (9.10). They’ve fixed [most of] the problems and will provide fixes in a future for 3 more years.

Is it for an average user? I think so. The install process is trivial (pop the cd in, run the installer) and quick. The user base and the all the forum/wiki support that comes with it is enormous. In fact it is so big that when I need to google a linux related topic, it get more relevant results by using the work “ubuntu” instead of “linux”.

So, if you are still thinking about Windows 7, stop. Start thinking about a better alternative, that will cost you $0.

To prove it, here is the list of services (ps -ef) iPhone runs simultaneously at any given time.

What the media perceives as a lack of multitasking is the fact that the iPhone’s application launcher (SpringBoard) forces an app to exit before showing an home screen where you can launch another app. In doing so it merely makes sure that the apps do not eat up your battery like termites, while not interacting with the user.

So, ignore all the fuss and just know that iPhone OS 4.0 will not force an app to exit before lauching another one. That is it.