My del.icio.us bookmarks for May 21st through May 29th

Here’s what I tagged on del.icio.us between May 21st and May 29th:

Storm warning for cloud computing: more like a miasma

[As ever, you can read this on the BBC News website, and Nick Carr has an excellent piece on ‘miasma computing‘ that moves the argument on nicely.]

My friend Simon is one of those net entrepreneurs with the attention to detail it takes to have an idea and turn it into an effective company. He’s currently on his second job search service, and it seems to be going very well.

One reason for the success may be that Simon has embraced the network age with a dedication that most of us can only wonder at. He uses a range of productivity tools, scheduling services and collaborative systems to manage both his personal and professional life, and once confessed to me that he had ‘outsourced his memory’ to Microsoft Outlook and its calendar service.

So far I’ve resisted the temptation to pay a team of hackers to break into his laptop and add ‘jump off a cliff’ as his 10am appointment on Thursday.

Recently I’ve noticed that Simon’s head is in the cloud. Or rather, his business is, as he and his team have moved most of their systems online, taking advantage of the move from local storage and processing to ‘cloud computing’, where data and services are provided online and accessed from a PC or any other device.

Continue reading “Storm warning for cloud computing: more like a miasma”

Landing on Mars

Phoenix Lander

From NASA:

NASA’s Mars Phoenix Lander can be seen parachuting down to Mars, in this image captured by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This is the first time that a spacecraft has imaged the final descent of another spacecraft onto a planetary body.

One of the most beautiful, compelling and hopeful images I have ever seen – up there with the Apollo earthrise photographs. We can do this, we can send a robot millions of miles and then take a picture of it using another robot we sent a while back.

Are we all law-breakers?

[As ever, you can read this on the BBC News website]

It has always been difficult to stay completely on the right side of the law, however law-abiding one tries to be.

I try to check the copyright status of every picture I use in my presentations, but may sometimes slip up.  Copying CDs I own to my iPod may – or may not be – illegal, and copying DVDs I own certainly is.  And like all drivers I sometimes see the speedometer creep up above the speed limit when I’m not paying attention to it on a quiet motorway.

But now it seems I could face prosecution for the wide range of user accounts I’ve created on MySpace, Facebook, Googlemail, Flickr and Bebo to support the various projects I’m involved with. The ‘Norfolk and Norwich Festival’, ‘Tyneside 100’ and ‘Wysing Arts Centre’ identities I have lovingly crafted may well fall foul of a US decision that breaking the terms and conditions of a social network site can count as unauthorised access, turning what would seem to be at most a civil offence into a criminal act under computer misuse laws.

Continue reading “Are we all law-breakers?”

I saw this…

Here’s what I’ve tagged on del.icio.us on %date%:

My del.icio.us bookmarks for May 19th through May 20th

Here’s what I tagged on del.icio.us between May 19th and May 20th:

Steven Spielberg interviewed on Seesmic


Steven Spielberg interviewed on Seesmic

Originally uploaded by BillT.

Gia and Sizemore are in Cannes interviewing cast and crew of Indiana Jones on Seesmic and posting to the timeline as live as they can – George Lucas, Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett and the man. It’s a fascinating experiment in community interaction, with a lot of Twitter action supporting the Seesmic stuff… and it feels real.

http://seesmic.com/harrison

http://seesmic.com/steven

http://seesmic.com/shia