Jan
23
One Billion Served
Filed Under Web | 48 Comments
I would like to congratulate the Internet on serving over a billion unique visitors in December. While this is a tremendous milestone (and I am sure that the Internet’s parents are very proud) I must point out that this is less than 15% of the total world’s population so there is plenty of room to grow.
For all of us cloud developers, there is some interesting information contained in the comScore research report as well. For starters, China has surpassed the US in internet visitors and Asia Pacific as a region accounts for 41% of all Internet users. I am not sure what you are thinking about, but if I happened to be developing a SaaS solution that was targeting this vast audience, I might think twice about how I can enable said application to provide its service to the 84% of users that live outside the United States.
Jan
21
Day 1
Filed Under Politics | 16 Comments
Day 1
I heard a lot of pundits speaking yesterday on how historic the inauguration was, how we were collectively witnessing history and other such sentiments. I agree that yesterday was a wonderful milestone for civil rights in this country, but I have a fervent hope that President Obama will not be remembered by our great-grandchildren as the first African-American US President. January 20, 2009 should not simply be the answer to question #10 on a 5th grade social studies quiz.
I hope that future generations will remember this presidency for what it will accomplish, for setting us on a trajectory of peace and prosperity that was unmatched in human history, for engaging and inspiring a new generation of leaders, for fostering a culture of service, for ushering in unparalleled access and transparency of government, for ensuring that every person has affordable access to quality healthcare, for solving our climate and poverty crisis, for building the world’s most effective primary and secondary educational system, and yes for closing the loop on 300 years of racial inequality and strife. The President can obviously not do this alone, the power of the government is (thankfully) limited and scope of our problems is unbounded; however, he can inspire us to achieve all of this and more.
President Obama’s new job will be to identify what needs to be done and motivate the American people to take action. The genius of this presidency is that nothing now seems out of reach. If, given the current state of race relations and politics, Obama was able to pull together and motivate an organization that was able to get an African-American elected president, are these other goals really unachievable? Who can deny the implausibility of what he achieved? Who can say that the other challenges facing us are more entrenched or difficult to navigate than what has already been accomplished? I cannot.
I can no longer bury my head in the sand and say that the problems facing us are too difficult to solve and therefore should be ignored. Barack Obama has proven that anything is possible, let’s help expand his chapter in the history books. Today is Day 1 of the Obama administration and we all have the opportunity and responsibility to ensure that yesterday’s event ends up as a footnote to history.
Jan
19
I am Back
Filed Under Uncategorized | 1 Comment
I want to apologize for taking such a long hiatus; I took some time off from real life to play World of Warcraft for a while. Over the last couple weeks though, WoW started feeling more like work than play and I haven’t really developed any friendships in the game that would keep me playing. Essentially, I beat the game and don’t have much left to do in it any more.
On the other hand there is so much to do in real life! We have a new president (as of tomorrow) and I am really excited about that. We have a worldwide financial meltdown brewing and there will be much to say on that as well. In addition I think the time is right to start a blog (and possibly a podcast) on Cloud Computing.
When I logged back into wordpress today, I had over 4000 spam comments to moderate. The process to do this involves clicking on a checkbox and then clicking on “Mark as Spam”. WordPress only shows 25 comments at a time, so I had to do this this about 170 times. This would be daunting task for anyone, but one good thing about WoW is that it desensitises you to having to repetitively do the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over and over (well you get the point) so I cleaned up that spam in no time.
It feels great to be back, stay tuned for more greatness to come and my thoughts on the innaguration tomorrow.