Comments for Tom Talks http://tomsalonek.com Tom Salonek's Leadership Blog Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:13:18 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Comment on What is Cloud Computing? by Saul http://tomsalonek.com/2011/12/30/what-is-cloud-computing/#comment-235 Saul Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:13:18 +0000 http://tomsalonek.com/?p=258#comment-235 Much as I aepipcrate your diss in the second paragraph of your reply, the arithmetic for calculating the cost is quite simple, but depends on having knowledge that cloud customers are selected for not having.Most anyone who has been writing PHP for more than two years can get up and running on a VPS in only a few minutes longer than it would take with GAE, but also be able to migrate to many other VPS providers without substantially more pain. The point of cloud computing isn’t having your trivial site up in 2-3 minutes, is it? I thought it was all about that scalability.On FB, my point is exactly that they have the same infrastructure internally, because there’s nothing magical about the cloud, it’s just infrastructure. But they’re not renting space on Google or Amazon, because it’s not cost effective at the high end. Which leads back to one of my core points, which is that the cloud is neither technologically interesting nor cost effective over VPSes or having physical machines.I would say you’ve hit the nail on the head about the last 30 years of technology. I think if there were zero innovation apart from hardware continuing to become cheap and widely used, I would have trouble saying life is worse than it is now. Definitely the last 20 years. We could be using Standard ML, the only language with fully specific semantics, but instead we switched from C to C++ and Java, bringing with them different kinds of unbearably inhuman complexity. We could be using Plan 9, the successor to Unix with truly integrated networking and distributed computation–a true platform to build cloud-like services on–but instead we’re using the Unix clone written expressly to the lowest common denominator. We could be using message passing instead of threading, we could be using a truer relational calculus rather than SQL, and so forth. It’s as though we chose wrong every time. We live in a world without a reliable networked filesystem, and instead we have so many logging frameworks in Java we have to have a meta logging framework to abstract over them. Now that I think of it, I would miss ZFS, HTTP, and Haskell, but I can’t think of too many other successes we’ve had in the last 30 years.Like most pessimists, I would say I’m merely a realist. The cloud never was your savior, so there’s no sense pining for the days when you thought it was. It never was anything more than marketing. If you want to do something good for technology, find a way to delete two lines of code for every line you write from now on. Avoid busy work but accept that some code just has to be written by a human and not hidden behind an abstraction layer.Thanks for listening to my crazy rant. I’ll return to irrelevance now. Much as I aepipcrate your diss in the second paragraph of your reply, the arithmetic for calculating the cost is quite simple, but depends on having knowledge that cloud customers are selected for not having.Most anyone who has been writing PHP for more than two years can get up and running on a VPS in only a few minutes longer than it would take with GAE, but also be able to migrate to many other VPS providers without substantially more pain. The point of cloud computing isn’t having your trivial site up in 2-3 minutes, is it? I thought it was all about that scalability.On FB, my point is exactly that they have the same infrastructure internally, because there’s nothing magical about the cloud, it’s just infrastructure. But they’re not renting space on Google or Amazon, because it’s not cost effective at the high end. Which leads back to one of my core points, which is that the cloud is neither technologically interesting nor cost effective over VPSes or having physical machines.I would say you’ve hit the nail on the head about the last 30 years of technology. I think if there were zero innovation apart from hardware continuing to become cheap and widely used, I would have trouble saying life is worse than it is now. Definitely the last 20 years. We could be using Standard ML, the only language with fully specific semantics, but instead we switched from C to C++ and Java, bringing with them different kinds of unbearably inhuman complexity. We could be using Plan 9, the successor to Unix with truly integrated networking and distributed computation–a true platform to build cloud-like services on–but instead we’re using the Unix clone written expressly to the lowest common denominator. We could be using message passing instead of threading, we could be using a truer relational calculus rather than SQL, and so forth. It’s as though we chose wrong every time. We live in a world without a reliable networked filesystem, and instead we have so many logging frameworks in Java we have to have a meta logging framework to abstract over them. Now that I think of it, I would miss ZFS, HTTP, and Haskell, but I can’t think of too many other successes we’ve had in the last 30 years.Like most pessimists, I would say I’m merely a realist. The cloud never was your savior, so there’s no sense pining for the days when you thought it was. It never was anything more than marketing. If you want to do something good for technology, find a way to delete two lines of code for every line you write from now on. Avoid busy work but accept that some code just has to be written by a human and not hidden behind an abstraction layer.Thanks for listening to my crazy rant. I’ll return to irrelevance now.

]]> Comment on Social Media in Business by Mike Friesen http://tomsalonek.com/2011/12/14/social-media-in-business/#comment-217 Mike Friesen Mon, 16 Jan 2012 01:14:48 +0000 http://tomsalonek.com/?p=253#comment-217 Thanks Tom. Thanks Tom.

]]> Comment on Social Media in Business by tomsalonek http://tomsalonek.com/2011/12/14/social-media-in-business/#comment-216 tomsalonek Sun, 15 Jan 2012 20:17:24 +0000 http://tomsalonek.com/?p=253#comment-216 Mike, Sorry for the delay... I was on vacation out of the country. Thanks for the positive feedback. If you have a Facebook "Fan" page for your business or brand, and you have some # of fans, I'd recommend building that up vs. starting a second presence. That said, if you don't have a ton of fans make sure you've setup the right type of page (go to http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php) and choose the right local presence vs. brand vs. company before you work to get followers. Hope that helps, Tom Mike,

Sorry for the delay… I was on vacation out of the country. Thanks for the positive feedback.

If you have a Facebook “Fan” page for your business or brand, and you have some # of fans, I’d recommend building that up vs. starting a second presence. That said, if you don’t have a ton of fans make sure you’ve setup the right type of page (go to http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php) and choose the right local presence vs. brand vs. company before you work to get followers.

Hope that helps,
Tom

]]> Comment on Social Media in Business by Mike Friesen http://tomsalonek.com/2011/12/14/social-media-in-business/#comment-215 Mike Friesen Thu, 12 Jan 2012 21:37:16 +0000 http://tomsalonek.com/?p=253#comment-215 Wow ... great, rapid fire information!. Am investigating QR codes and Google circles based on this video with several other ideas on the to-do list as well. Question - If I have a business FB page attached to my personal FB, is it still useful to create a separate business FB account? Best, Mike Wow … great, rapid fire information!. Am investigating QR codes and Google circles based on this video with several other ideas on the to-do list as well.

Question – If I have a business FB page attached to my personal FB, is it still useful to create a separate business FB account?

Best,
Mike

]]> Comment on Surviving and Thriving in the Face of Failure – Post #1 by Christopher Marshall http://tomsalonek.com/2011/10/19/surviving-and-thriving-in-the-face-of-failure-%e2%80%93-post-1/#comment-124 Christopher Marshall Fri, 21 Oct 2011 20:59:47 +0000 http://tomsalonek.com/?p=181#comment-124 Good read. It is really interesting to see how failure works as motivation for some. How some people take it in stride, learn from their mistakes, and become better for it. Looking forward to reading your next posts! Chris Good read. It is really interesting to see how failure works as motivation for some. How some people take it in stride, learn from their mistakes, and become better for it. Looking forward to reading your next posts!
Chris

]]> Comment on Second in a series: “The power of collective intelligence in organizations” by Jim W. http://tomsalonek.com/2011/08/17/second-in-a-series-%e2%80%9cthe-power-of-collective-intelligence-in-organizations%e2%80%9d/#comment-33 Jim W. Thu, 18 Aug 2011 01:52:49 +0000 http://tomsalonek.com/?p=84#comment-33 Great post Tom! I could not agree more! Great post Tom! I could not agree more!

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