Maybe this hits too close to home.

I did like the part about burning all the Service Desk tickets, “It’s the quickest and most efficient way to deal with service requests in a timely manner… this way we can address all of them at once.”

The smoke is a nice touch.

It’s all fun and games until the Halon fire suppression system dumps.

(See also: fnal.gov: April Fools 2010)

Tinkering with remote desktops as supported by the eyeos.org project. The current version offers few applications including a simple Office-like suite and chess game. While not yet Citrix on the cheap, platforms like this could mature into an interesting VDI option.

Connectivity will become that much more critical if these tools are to be taken seriously. Connectivity and carriers will move to the center of the enterprise.

(See also: eyeos.org)
(See also: eyeos: eyedocs)

I was pleasantly surprised to read there are others that share my view regarding the current consolidation push into virtualized guest operating systems, largely built on VMware. A recent article by James Urquhart on Cnet, quotes a blog post by Chris Hoff from Cisco Systems as a thesis:

If I had a wish, it would be that VM’s end up being the short-term gap-filler they deserve to be and ultimately become a legacy technology so we can solve some of our real architectural issues the way they ought to be solved.

…The approach we’ve taken today is that the VMM/Hypervisor abstracts the hardware from the OS. The applications are still stuck on top of operating systems that don’t provide much in the way of any benefit given the emergence of development frameworks/languages such as J2EE, PHP, Ruby, .NET, etc. that were built around the notions of decoupled, distributed and mashable application “fabrics.”

Virtualization efforts are a stopgap measure to make up for the inadequacies of current operating systems, specifically Microsoft-based systems.

Cloud services offer a new opportunity to focus on application services, rather than hundreds of copies of superfluous infrastructure. We’re quickly approaching a situation where collections of services can be run on lean kernel guest environments built specifically for their purpose. Virtualized database appliance engines, light weight server web farms, etc.

Operating systems as we know them will need to change considerably or get out of the way. This could be an opportunity for Open Source projects to shine.

(See also: Cnet: Cloud computing and the big rethink, Part 1)
(See also: Cnet: Cloud computing and the big rethink, Part 2)
(See also: Cnet: Cloud computing and the big rethink, Part 3)
(See also: Cnet: Cloud computing and the big rethink, Part 4)
(See also: Cnet: Cloud computing and the big rethink, Part 5)

Despite several rendering issues on the SlideShare site, the presentation is available here:

(See also: SlideShare: Cloud Computing Services and the Data Center)

The following weekend an interesting article about data centers appeared in the New York Times magazine:

(See also: NYtimes Magazine: Data Center Overload)
(See also: NYtimes Magazine: Data Center Overload slides)

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

“Gestural i/o, recombinant networking, real-world pixels” and a stunning immersive interface. You may have seen the film Minority Report and even if you didn’t you can appreciate the power of such an interface.

Big images and direct manipulation.

(See also: Oblong Industries)