I ran across this article by way of Slashdot.  A teacher had punished a student for handing out live linux distrubution discs, for those that aren’t familar with a liveCD, it allows you to boot your computer off of CD and test drive linux without modifying your hard drive.  You can remove the CD and reboot and be back to using windows or whatever in no time. This teacher wrote the head of this particular linux group and stated:

I am sure you strongly believe in what you are doing but I cannot either support your efforts or allow them to happen in my classroom. At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful. These children look up to adults for guidance and discipline. I will research this as time allows and I want to assure you, if you are doing anything illegal, I will pursue charges as the law allows.

and also:

This is a world where Windows runs on virtually every computer and putting on a carnival show for an operating system is not helping these children at all. I am sure if you contacted Microsoft, they would be more than happy to supply you with copies of an older verison of Windows and that way, your computers would actually be of service to those receiving them..

Now the person at the Helios distribution had some key things in response (these are snippets):

First off, if there was even the slightest chance that I was doing something illegal, it would not have been done. To think that I would involve my kids in my “illegal” activities is an insult far beyond outrage.

linux is superior to MS windows in so many ways, they are too numerous to mention here…I am weary of enumerating them. Unlike Microsoft who meters their “improvements” and then shovels them to you every five years or so for purchase; Linux releases their improvements upon their completion. We receive the newest and the best of the system when it is tested to be usable and stable

The most disturbing part of this resides in the fact that the AISD purchases millions of dollars of Microsoft Software in a year’s time when that money could be better spent on educating our children. A dedicated School Teacher would recognize that fact and lobby for the change to Free Open Source Software and let the money formally spent on MS bindware be used on our kids.

Now I do recommend you read the original article, but I do think this shows the ignorance of the teachers in our systems. Some people try to tell me when my child arrives that home schooling is a worse option then sending the kid to public or private schools.   I know I went through similar issues like this with my teachers, sometimes it was on english, other times it was on history.   Teachers won’t admit they are wrong and will continue to spew the same crap to students year after year.  They feel they must be the ones in the right otherwise they wouldn’t be the teacher.

I’m stopping now before I bust into a complete rant – read the original article and let me know what you think.

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I have a profound fascination with cloud computing, internet computing, bamboozled processing (whatever you want to call it).  The problem when you start using these terms in the IT world it becomes “Software as a Service” (SaS) in some attempt to legitimize the business model.   There is a distinct difference, however.   That difference is money.

“Cloud Computing” is still one of the ephemeral terms that no one is quite sure what it means.   It’s akin to the “Network Computer” model pushed out by Oracle in the mid 90′s – it’s all as hard to explain, ridiculed, ahead of its time, and understandable as the Network Computer was.  The idea of cloud computing means why you process your data locally through some window (Browser, Local PC) into the cloud (Internet), your data is stored in the cloud and accessible from anywhere.  Terms like Webmail have become keeping your email in the clouds – I like the concept but we are bringing back the 90′s terms about “thinking outside the box” with this type of labeling.   Social networks such as Myspace and Facebook are also considered to be cloud platforms, I assume this means because you can annoy your friends anywhere with applications invites – even if you’ve never met them in meat space.

Current definition essentially is if you are doing anything online except reading a static web page (library interaction in the clouds?) – is considered cloud computing.   Some people are referring to any of this same type of activity as SaS when it is in the IT realm.  It’s not, please change your wordings, understand what you are talking about, respect both the IT world and the non-IT world.  You are confusing people with concepts that are also completely non-explainable already.

SaS is much like cloud computing, much like a cheetah (SaS) is similar to a bobcat (cloud computing).  Both of the latter animals are members of the feline family and have similar body makeup, but we can also recognize that they are not the same and have vastly different feature sets.   A bobcat is also more common.  First I’ll say it, most SaS is boring.  It’s the kind of stuff you do at work.  Whether it’s Peachtree’s online application,  it’s the remote backup service and outsourced server monitoring your company purchases.   These are software packages your company can buy and manage but they’ve moved them off site and out of their direct control over the hardware.  It’s on the network and that’s all that matters.

SaS products come with service level agreements that guarantee up time and will compensate you for excessive (which is sometimes 15 minutes) of downtime.   I have yet to see a check from Twitter or MySpace, and I’m sure some users can show real cause and effect of damage to their online businesses if there is an outage.   SaS is normally pretty niche, costs money, and replicates things you already do.

I pay for Flickr?  Does that mean it’s an SaS?  No it doesn’t, the Flickr “application” is free, what I am paying for is storage space and a small number of features – not the application.  The same goes with Google Apps and Smugmug.  If it’s a consumer grade product it’s still a cloud computing application.  When we move into things like Microsoft offering remote hosted MS Exchange packages, we are entering into SaS.

It’s been a long time since I’ve beeen excited about a new browser.  Theoretically I’ve never been excited about a new browser that was announced.   I remember being excited when AOL resurrected Netscape – but that turned into a flaming pile of poo and Netscape lost dominance being THE browser to use.   Like many users at that time frame I used Internet Explorer 5 and at the time it was best of breed, then a new challenger arose.

The Mozilla foundation announced they were taking the open source bits of the Netscape browser and making a new slimmer browser called Firebird.  Because of issues of legal and copyright, Firebird was renamed to Firefox.   I’ve been using this browser since Firebird and I have had no reason to move to a different primary browser.   I’ve tried Flock and Safari, there hasn’t been a sticky reason to keep using those over Firefox.   I was excited, kind of, of the release of Firefox version 3.   But that wasn’t a new and different browser, it was more of the same.

With last nights announcement of Google’s New Chrome Browser, but they put up a nice little web comic that explains the features it offers.   The security, privacy, performance enhancements alone make this a must watch for browser.  WHen it is actually released later today, we’ll see how I feel then.

UPDATE:

Found a site that has some Chrome screenshots you may enjoy.

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Previously I railed against Google Docs and my issues with them there, now it’s the Google Calendar‘s Team that I’m having issues with.   I want to love Gcal.  I really truly and deeply do.   I do love it more then Microsoft Outlook‘s Calendar, but that is still an issue since it doesn’t have complete integration with Microsoft Exchange.  I have however recently configure my Outlook calendar to sync with Gcal with a nifty tool Google released.  For that I bless them.  No more hacks or work arounds, or siphoning data through Plaxo to get this going.   I still use Plaxo, but I don’t need a desktop client for it anymore, it replicates the back end internet data now.

Now I’ve said everything (well not really but I spoke nice about them) that I like about Gcal.  Let’s look at some of the things I want.  The first thing that I have always wanted was the ability to import RSS feeds into to Gcal.  I’m not talking news feeds that I want to read, but personal lifestreaming data that I can track about myself.  I should be able to use Google Calendar as a personal diary of events, but this leads to a lot of back tracking because of the manual work this would cause.

Another option that would allow me to deal with the fact that I can not import RSS feeds would be allow us to send in events via E-mail.  You allows us to send in events via SMS (which I don’t use since i don’t pay for  an SMS plan) – yet not e-mail?  It’s not really a bandwidth thing since most of your users are probably using Gmail anyways.   I don’t get it.

Final thing I would like, the ability to attach a file (which in reality could be stored in Google Docs) to an event.  Whether it would be a picture (ok this would be Picasaweb for storage) or a presentation, this would lead to a more organized life for business users making a transition.

Give us some killer apps, you have us as users, now keep us.   Show us some love.

creeva’s Recently Played Tracks

I’ve been working diligently like a good Google zealot and have slowly over the last couple months started migrating over to Google Docs.   The one thing that keeps tripping me up is the space they offer each document.  The space given is as follows:

So far I’m not hitting a barrier issue with Spreadsheets or Presentations (though I see hitting the presentation limit very soon) what I do have an issue with is the documents size and the PDF size.

The PDF support has just been added so I’ll give them a little slack on that, I think a good size in this web era would be 50 MB for PDF’s this should get you most any PDF around into your Google Docs size.  I have a couple PDF’s on my desktop that are close to 30 MB and being able to store them here would be a god send.   Until they do this won’t be my central PDF repository.

The document size though is really killing me, I have a ton of documents that are over 500k.  I have one detailing my home network that is almost 6 MB.   I think the documents need to be upped to 10MB.   that way the crazy bastards like me who use graphics and diagrams in their documents won’t have to worry about hitting this cap.

While we are on the subject though of Google Docs, why can’t there be better integration with G-Mail.  Theoretically it should be able to search through all my e-mail during a search and prompt me if I want to import this or that document into my Google Docs cache.

While Google has been great at adding new products over the years.  Even the ones that take off are nor properly maintained nor are they integrated with other related service soon enough.  Some of these products are around for years before proper integration takes place, when are they going ot be moving a little more away from 20% time for projects and focus whole teams on the integration side of the coin.

Anyways – /rant off.

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Introduction

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E-mail in the clouds.   Essentially back in 1996 when Hotmail was first released (in the pre-purchased by Microsoft era) the dawn of popular cloud computing for e-mail began.   The main issue was storage space.  I believe that Hotmail launched with 5 megs of storage space for all of your e-mail.   It is frustrating to know all the e-mail that’s been lost over the years due to inadequate storage space.   I now have single pictures in my email archive that are larger then 5 megs.   Times change and space get’s cheap.

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When Google released Gmail into the wild it was a game changer.  By offering 1GB of storage space it made it seem that you literally could keep your e-mail forever.   Other providers such as Hotmail and Yahoo were maxing out at 25 MB at the time, this seemed ridiculous in comparison.

Currently Gmail supports almost 7 GB of storage space and Hotmail and Yahoo went to “unlimited”.  I consolidate almost all of my e-mail to Gmail.

Data Types

To utilize e-mail storage you can attach any (supported) file and keep it in your mailbox.

Data Security

While you have to rely on a username and password to access your e-mail as the security barrier entry, if you want true protection from snooping it is suggested that you either get a web plugin that allows you to do encryption with Gmail, or keep your private messages encrypted and use them with an offline client.

Data Redundancy

Since you can forward e-mail from Gmail, I have it configured to forward all incoming mail to both my Yahoo Mail account and my Hotmail account.  If for some reason GMail loses my data or in the unlikely event Google goes out of business I’ll still be able to access my e-mail messages.

It is recommended that you keep an offline backup of your mail messages so they can be accessible while being off the grid.

Data Accessibility

With Gmail offering accessing via a rich web interface, a basic web interface, a mobile web interface, POP3, SMTP, and IMAP; it seems unlikely that you are going to find an Internet device that can not access it in some way or fashion.

Conclusion

This is the e-mail scenario that works for me.  Since encryption really isn’t ubiquitous across the board I don’t use it like I should.   Beyond that this scenario is highly redundant and should allow you operate from anywhere with a network connection without worrying about losing your data.

Previous entries in the Living in the Clouds Series:

Living In The Clouds Part 1 – Introduction To Cloud Computing