Shameless review Pentax wg-1 camera

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My father first bought a Pentax camera when we went to Thailand in 1972. He has had a Pentax for the most part since then (although moving into the digital world he ended up buying a Fuji, and he used my old Kodak for awhile).

I was intrigued by the new Pentax WG-1 camera. It seemed to offer a lot of things that various other point and shoots I’ve had in the past had. Burst mode, waterproof to 30 feet, video and shock protection.

It also add a GPS (which by the way if you are lost in the wilderness and need to find your way back to civilization this is not the UPS for you. My Delorme PN60 boots faster, gets a connection faster and frankly the battery lasts 2 times as long). It is however a nice tough to be able to geotag your photos.

The camera is also small and lightweight. It doesn’t weigh anywhere near where the other camera’s in that rough and tumble point and shoot class do.

What I like:

• light
• easy to set-up and use quickly
• Takes SDHC cards so you can have more pictures
• 14.1 megapixels
• video
• waterproof
• shock resistant
• cold resistant
• rugged look and feel

What I don’t like

• takes forever to catch a GPS signal
• 14.1 on a point and shoot is not the same as 14.1 on a DSLR

Overall if you are looking for a camera that the kids can borrow, like the Olympus I reviewed over a year ago this is a great camera. It takes reasonable pictures and once the GPS signal is locked it does a good job with locations. All and all this is a pretty good camera.

.doc

The great balancing act

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The fine details of cloud computing.

You can put anything into a cloud environment with the following provisos

• Can the solution be virtualized or does it require physical hardware (still “cloudable” but now in a different way)
• Does the solution take advantage of bursting, elasticity and portable storage?
• Does the application have unique security requirements

Just these three will delay or even hamper most cloud applications. Number two is a significant shift in fact developers will struggle with number two for the next couple of years I predict. Its not about changing the way they develop, its about adding the agility to the application so that it is smart enough to know what is happening.

The other side of cloud computing however is your chosen or preferred platform go forward.

If you platform is mobile, you need to think different than we think about applications and solutions today. Mobile is about speed. Small footprint data that can easily move up and down the smaller mobile pipes. No forced moved to wi-fi as that in the end reduces the value of a mobile solution.

Validation of the data and loss prevention also become critical with the mobile application. What do you do when the device is lost?

You can’t over secure the mobile device it in the end will produce worse results if there is more security than usability. So you balance the needs of security against the portability and usability that mobility provides.

It becomes the great balancing act.

.doc

Cloud Ethics 101 (a learn as you go program)

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Clarity.

“People who cheat while playing online games likely don’t stop there.” The thing about cheating with online and in online games is you are more cheating yourself of an experience. But you have to worry about the ethics overall of a person who would cheat because they could. Sometimes smart people do dumb things like cheat because its simple. Not because they should but because they can.

More simply put this is an essay I am going to call the “Ethics of the social world.”

Perhaps I will become the miss manners of social computing.

• If you cheat, consider why? Winning isn’t the point of social games. Having fun and playing the game is the point.
• Don’t post a picture you wouldn’t show your mother. If its gross and you would show it to your mother, perhaps that is something else you need to work on.
• Posting everything that comes into your head isn’t the best way to be a twitter star.
• Twitter wars, really? Need I say more?
• There are two sides to every negative post. Frankly if you post only one side then in fact you are wrong.
• the internet is not the wild wild west. Act as though you will return to everywhere you go.
• If you are selling cloud and a woman walks in wearing a black cape and a black hat, its not someone dressed as Zorro for Halloween it’s the Cloud Whisperer. Ask not for whom the Cloud Whisperer enters the room for, she is there for YOU! Tell the truth.

.doc

The burp is coming…a prediction

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Over the years I have argued that the internet will have a burp moment. As my boss used to say years ago an “Ah #$#$ moment.” One of those moments wipes out 20 atta boys.

The impact of the burp will be significant. As someone who think about the future I wonder if the impact won’t actually slow the overall adoption of cloud computing. The reason I am thinking this right now is that the burp will cost some companies and some people some amount of data.

What they lose will not only be the data. Hopefully everyone understand the concept of backing up their data so it will be the confidence in the system that is lost.

That confidence is in the end the risk of the overall system failure. That people will no longer see the internet as “all being” and instead come to realize that like anything built in a Hodge-Podge manner the reality of failure is greater than the reality of success.

You throw enough bailing wire and chewing gum at something and eventually it will cease to work the way it did before. Add into that the rubber band effect and you have a nice little destructive burp.

It won’t start out large of course. It will start out as a small error in one segment or two possible. Perhaps for people to take me seriously I should put this into a Nostradamus type quatrain.

The ends will weaken

the middle bow

and the great beast know as the internet

will bow to the pressure

and collapse

You can see the ends weakening now. The drops are greater today than the were 10 years ago. Of course the potential content is also greater therefore of course the drops are greater. But reality is it doesn’t take a lot of water, just a weakness in the wrong levy at the wrong time. Where is that levy on the internet? Which one will break first?

.doc

The Cloud Whisperer

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Cloud Hype.

I was thinking about a few scenarios for a new episode of my imaginary television show “The Cloud Whisperer.” Some of the shows I’ve kind of mapped out. At this point I am beginning to wonder if in fact I ought to make this into my next book.

Cloud Hype is the next episode in my head. I was thinking about all the different definitions of cloud computing, starting with NIST and heading downhill from there.

The Hype factor in cloud computing today is amazing. The reality factor isn’t quite as well, real. So the next episode of the cloud whisperer will be our heroine (podcast) dealing with cloud hype.

• Save money
• Reduce time to market
• reduce complexity of solutions
• Definitions

More to come!!!!!

.doc

The Cloud Whisperer

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Cloud Hype.

I was thinking about a few scenarios for a new episode of my imaginary television show “The Cloud Whisperer.” Some of the shows I’ve kind of mapped out. At this point I am beginning to wonder if in fact I ought to make this into my next book.

Cloud Hype is the next episode in my head. I was thinking about all the different definitions of cloud computing, starting with NIST and heading downhill from there.

The Hype factor in cloud computing today is amazing. The reality factor isn’t quite as well, real. So the next episode of the cloud whisperer will be our heroine (podcast) dealing with cloud hype.

• Save money
• Reduce time to market
• reduce complexity of solutions
• Definitions

More to come!!!!!

.doc

The Seven Wonders of Cloud Computing

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The seven wonders of cloud computing.

It’s a catchy title, sadly for some of my blogs a catchy title is all you get. In this case I was thinking of considering the internet and cloud computing as a complete presentation of the society of 2010. Based on that we could consider the “pantheon’s” that we all strive to achieve.

1. Facebook – the social interloper (MySpace was first) that has become the social destination. My nephew says “its not real if its not on Facebook.”
2. Google – like Facebook started by college students, now a company generating income and revenue while improving and building out more and more technology solutions.
3. Icloud – its coming.
4. Amazon.com – what can you say about the store that brings people to the cloud and the store that brings the cloud.
5. The internet itself – it hasn’t burped yet. It may soon and I still project it will but so far its held up.
6. Open Source Movement – really the basis for a lot of cloud computing solutions available today.
7. Network connectivity – what once was the bastion of work and dialup is now the world of portable network and on demand networks. I suspect we could also add the smart phone here as it drives so many different cloud solutions.

Interesting because if you had asked me a year ago I would have had a slightly different list. Numbers 6 and 7 are the newest on my lists realistically they are also the strongest.

feel free to disagree.

.doc

To find a path when the light is dim…

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The concept of “personal clouds” isn’t new. Its been floating around for the past ten years. Just like the concept of cloud computing itself it has nudged the edges of IT and IT thinking for the past decade.

I think it is time for the personal cloud concept to change. In my book “The Syncverse” I proposed a set of changes that would allow your personal cloud to represent both what you needed as a professional/partner etc., as well as what interested and intrigued you. With a level of intelligence built into the solution knowing what you were using (device) and where you were (bandwidth) to determine what to move.

Such a system would require a series of over rides that would support users being able to change their preferences and settings on the fly (I really need this information is the example of a required system over ride).

The problem with the dream? It would require infrastructure that wasn’t owned by a company. That leaves the government and frankly that would reduce the value of the solution. Which means that we would need to consider my already proposed internet policing agency as the place that would host the “Myverse” as outlined in “The Syncverse.”

My first assumption is that there is some value in this dream. That may be more of a leap than I should make but it is my starting point right now.

The second thing is that you could create a policing agency (like the UN) that wasn’t wholly bound to the sponsoring nations. The UN is highly limited today because of its overall need for money from other organizations.

Perhaps the Internet Management Agency (IMA) or the Internet Policing Agency (IPA – also a great beer) would be allowed to “taxes” as part of the overall usage model that would allow it to abstract itself from the governments that sponsored it.

.doc

 

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To find a path when the light is dim…

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The concept of “personal clouds” isn’t new. Its been floating around for the past ten years. Just like the concept of cloud computing itself it has nudged the edges of IT and IT thinking for the past decade.

I think it is time for the personal cloud concept to change. In my book “The Syncverse” I proposed a set of changes that would allow your personal cloud to represent both what you needed as a professional/partner etc., as well as what interested and intrigued you. With a level of intelligence built into the solution knowing what you were using (device) and where you were (bandwidth) to determine what to move.

Such a system would require a series of over rides that would support users being able to change their preferences and settings on the fly (I really need this information is the example of a required system over ride).

The problem with the dream? It would require infrastructure that wasn’t owned by a company. That leaves the government and frankly that would reduce the value of the solution. Which means that we would need to consider my already proposed internet policing agency as the place that would host the “Myverse” as outlined in “The Syncverse.”

My first assumption is that there is some value in this dream. That may be more of a leap than I should make but it is my starting point right now.

The second thing is that you could create a policing agency (like the UN) that wasn’t wholly bound to the sponsoring nations. The UN is highly limited today because of its overall need for money from other organizations.

Perhaps the Internet Management Agency (IMA) or the Internet Policing Agency (IPA – also a great beer) would be allowed to “taxes” as part of the overall usage model that would allow it to abstract itself from the governments that sponsored it.

.doc

 

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What lies beyond cost for cloud computing?

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Part of any good solution is the overall mapping to what the business needs and what the solution provides that maps to and hopefully fills that need. In many cases in the short run many cloud solutions have an easy row to hoe, they simply throw out the costs savings card and all is good.

Many if not all cloud solutions in the next couple of years will save money. From the ability (that you have to design in and for)to have your data and application in multiple data centers to the more complex abilities that I’ve talked about before (Portable, Application Intelligence, Flexibility, Elasticity etc.).

The reality is we have two problems in the short run. The first answer I have is to the problem of confusion. I created a blog series and now a podcast (which will hopefully become a series) on the concept of the Cloud Whisperer. Someone who could cut through the marketing and provide the solid answer they organization was looking for in the first place. The Cloud Whisperer representing an almost super-hero as a service solution.

The second problem is broader and will probably have a larger impact.

Beyond cost why go to the cloud?

The US Federal Government has decided to head down the FedRAMP process for certification of solutions. This means that organizations wishing to sell their solution to the government will be required to have that solution checked by a third party. This “check once run often” solution is very different for the US Government. For that matter having dealt with a few governments over the years it is in fact a new way to deal with the problem of vendors and solutions.

IT does not however answer the question of what lies beyond cost. For that we may have to polish our crystal balls. The first market I see beyond cost, is cloud as a platform for two things.

1. Big Data
2. Security

The second of these, security has a broad market (let’s 100%) the first is smaller but may have a greater short term economic impact, as proper implementation of a big data solution in the end could reduce security risks and provide security information much faster than it is available today.

The question that I am left with today and have been for awhile is simply what lies beyond those two? They seem pretty straight forward, I suspect they are good requirements for many organizations. The reality is they aren’t for everyone. What else can we consider in this space?

Its what I think about nearly every day…

.doc