Another amazing Internet icon … and what the Internet future holds
I had the opportunity to hear Vint Cerf speak at a Java conference almost a decade ago. He was an awesome person to listen too. He has an incredible perspective of the ‘Net. It was really impressive to hear him talk about the early days of the Internet and what they were thinking. He also talked about taking the Internet into the solar system, and defining the IPv6 addressing. He talked about inter-planet routing … how Internet traffic will be routed off the planet to Mars, for example.

I came across the article below and want to thank Adam for pointing it out. The quote below is an example of the depth of thought that occurs within Vint, and I can truly identify with his thoughts. I am not sure that I agree that society requires “fixing”, however I do believe that people could choose a different way to be.

Along with the things that Vint talks about, I have to admit that I never believed I would be so close to one of the largest acts of cyber-terrorism that we might witness so far in Internet history. The MyDoom virus is looking like one of the largest attacks of this type ever seen. Working at SCO provides an interesting viewpoint on how people are treated when they follow the defined judicial process, within a democratic society, in pursuing their rights and asking for their day in court. Hopefully the writers of this virus are caught and prosecuted. It would be great to see someone from the “Open Source Community” turn them in …

I hope that as world governments and global businesses evaluate their options in choosing who will control their destiny, they fully understand that they are dealing with a very amorphous entity that is able to strike outside the boundaries defined by laws, and that can choose to defy the structures that we have put in place for “modern” society to exist. No matter what people think about other peoples actions or behaviors … there is no excuse for terroristic attacks, of any kind, towards anyone. Period.

I believe that we are witnessing an aspect of one segment of society. If they are choosing to attack like this now … over this issue … then who is next on the list? First Microsoft, then SCO, then who? What will they do to a government that might find in favor of SCO? Or a company that does business with SCO? And what will be the collateral damage?

Vint Cerf: “The internet is a reflection of our society and that mirror is going to be reflecting what we see,” he said. “If we do not like what we see in that mirror the problem is not to fix the mirror, we have to fix society.” [Adam Curry: Adam Curry’s Weblog]

Grid grows … because it is becoming possible!
Grid Computing, Utility Computing, Distributed Computing … they are all buzz words evolving through the last decade or more. Why is everyone talking about them so much?

One of the core reasons is because it is becoming possible to build and manage in a simple way. At SCO we have been looking at Grid and Utility computing, and have some ideas on how this will evolve and emerge. Some of the foundation technologies have been coming together, and I believe we are going to see this accelerate.

First is the computing power and bandwidth. Computers and the Internet have evolved to the point where the overhead of distributed computing is something that is completely manageable and acceptable.

Second is the networking protocols and standards – like SOAP – that have emerged as the standard way to have application components communicate across the network. These standards provide the “least common denominator” langauge for interoperability between components written in different langauges on different operating system platforms. Software can call functions in other software … even if it exists on an entirely different machine.

Third is the virtualization that I talked about in my last post. As more software components are written in languages that can be executed on a diverse set of hardware/software platforms, it provides more places for these components to “live” … hence distributed computing.

I agree completely with these forecasts, and believe that we are going to watch the continuing acceleration of distributed applications … and I’m going to continue to work in this area.

Survey: Interest in grid computing grows. Corporate IT decision-makers are showing more interest in grid computing at their companies, with 20% saying they could adopt it within two years. [Computerworld News]

Virtualization … above the OS
For over six months now, I have been looking into the evolution of software technologies, and where we are heading beyond the Operating System. For a proper abstraction of an operating system to be created, there are two core solutions required. The first of these is what I call “encapsulators”. An encapsultor is a software component that wraps some sort of logic or programming and exposes it through a standard interface. At SCO we are developing a series of encapsulators that wrap up OS functionality, terminal sessions, and SQL databases and expose them as SOAP web services.

The second, almost more important solution, is what I call “virtualizers” … Virtual Machines … or “dynamic language” support. The article below touches on this subject, as it explains how much of the development of new software has moved from being written in C or C++ – and tightly coupled to the OS platform it was written for – to newer languages that have greater portibility.

As more people move to developing in languages like Java, C#, PHP, Perl, Python, etc. their resulting applications can migrate between operating systems much easier. There is a flip-side of this flexibility however, and that is the commoditization and marginalization of operating systems themselves. We are moving into a new phase of computing … where the hardware computing platforms that we are using are able to execute so quickly, that software layers of virtualization produce completely acceptable performance levels. This means that more development will occur in these languages, and more applications – and application components – will be developed in a form that is cross-operating system ready.

The value of the operating system of the future, in my opinion, is going to be judged by the encapsulations of its functionality, and its support for virtualized execution environments.

App dev rides the virtual machine. Today’s enterprise developers have many choices when it comes to virtual machines that handle the plumbing and let them focus on user features. [Computerworld News]