Another day done here in Santa Clara, and quite the day it was, earthquake and all.
There were presentations on SAML, the Internet Archive Project, and even SETI@home II. And the show floor opened this morning at 10 am.
Two of the presentations I attended warrant mention - one for its good points, one for its bad points. But first, let me mention one I didn't attend that astounded me because of the number of people who did. There was a session on the Google APIs. I thought it would have low turnout for people who hadn't yet delivered on an intranet search engine. The room was packed. I'm not sure what the appeal was, but obviously Google made a good choice in opening up their APIs.
Now the two presentations I mentioned
First up was Richard Fomo's presentation, "Why Current PKI is a House of Cards".
Overall it was a good session. Richard speaks well, and he has some good points. He mentioned things we've heard before (is that company encrypting your data on its internal network?), but I've never heard these points organized together. He really stood out, however, because he's approaching PKI from the end-user point of view. He makes the case that where the trust was broken is not as important to Joe end-user as the fact that he saw the little padlock on the bottom of his web browser, but now his credit card has charges originating in Singapore.
Next was the Keynote by Richard Rashid from Microsoft, "Rethinking the Modern Operating System".
I am not one to bash a company - any company - without a specific issue. Unfortunately, this keynote led me down a road I'd rather not have traversed; I do have specific issues with it.
The word that springs to mind when I think of this presentation is "Hubris." The message was "Never mind that little court case we're wrapping up with some States, here's all the "new" stuff we want to fold into your OS." The list included "profiling" of your workday, so the computer could do tasks for you automatically and a plug for the oft-touted query based file system.
I don't want the computer to track my phone calls; there's one doing that already. I don't want it to note how long I was gone (based on input - possibly to include motion sensors) for this or that type of meeting. And I certainly don't want the stability and recoverability of my operating system compromised by this kind of garbage.
From my conversations with other attendees, this reaction was typical, and other people felt that he was selling us on things that are not yet real. One can only hope that is the case.
I also had a press meeting with the Chief Architect at NEXTPage this afternoon. The company's NXT3 platform is worth looking into if you're interested in P2P CDNs, but you need a less tightly bound solution.
The show floor opened today also, populated mostly by P2P vendors with various distributed applications. Some of them are interesting, but I'm not seeing the P2P killer app here yet. Maybe I'm just missing it?
That's all for today. I'm hoping for less shaking tonight. It wasn't bad here in Santa Clara, but it's still an odd feeling to have the building swaying under your feet when you're on the eleventh floor.
Until next time...
Don.
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