Cloud Events: OpenStack, AWS, Azure

2013-04-17: OpenStack Summit (HP, Rackspace, Ubuntu, ...)

2013-04-18: Amazon AWS New York Summit

2013-04-23: Mirosoft Windows AzureConf

OpenStack Summit: HP, Canonical Ubuntu Flex Cloud Muscle | Cloud Computing and Open Source content from Talkin' Cloud
"...real-world OpenStack cloud deployments involving Best Buy, Bloomberg, Comcast and HubSpot...  HP and Canonical to offer updates on their respective public and private cloud efforts. 
AT&T, T-mobile and China Mobile are running OpenStack with Ubuntu..."

Global Windows Azure Bootcamp! On April 27th, 2013

Amazon's S3 Now Stores 2 Trillion Objects

Amazon's S3 Now Stores 2 Trillion Objects, Up From 1 Trillion Last June:

"... it took Amazon six years to grow to get to 1 trillion stored objects, “and less than a year to double that number.” S3, Barr also writes, now regularly sees peaks of more than 1.1 million requests per second."

Windows Azure price = AWS price

poscast on Microsoft Channel 9:
Episode 105 - General Availability of Windows Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) | Windows Azure Cloud Cover Show | Channel 9:

Interesting info: Azure price is being significantly reduced, to match competition
(that is Amazon Web Services :).
Microsoft will keep reducing, since AWS keeps reducing prices.
Features up, price down: competition is good :)

Microsoft Windows Azure... announcing a commitment to match Amazon Web Services prices for commodity services such as compute, storage and bandwidth. This starts with reducing our GA prices on Virtual Machines and Cloud Services by 21-33%.

Azure Service Bus + Node.js

Microsoft Offers Module to Scale Out Real-time Node.js Applications:
"A new open-source contribution from Microsoft uses the Windows Azure Service Bus to provide scale out support for real-time Node.js applications. 
This module, called socket.io-servicebus, connects multiple servers running the popular Socket.IO module."

Energy Future: Thorium?

An interesting podcast:
Geeking Out on Thorium @ .NET Rocks!

NORWAY BEGINS FOUR YEAR TEST OF THORIUM NUCLEAR REACTOR

Almost all of the world’s nuclear power plants are uranium reactors.
But interest in thorium reactors is strong, particularly in nuclear happy China.

Energy Independence and Sustainability - The Energy From Thorium Foundation


Thorium is apparently much safer and efficient that Uranium,
but it was not "interesting" during cold war
since it could not be used as a weapon.

If only a fraction of military spending is used
to speed up this research/development,
it could enable safer future for energy and environment...

And if USA does not do it, China will. What is US government waiting?

"energy from thorium" Blog

DARPA Gigapixel-class Camera

2012/07/05 DARPA Successfully Tests Gigapixel-class Camera

"DARPA successfully tested cameras with 1.4 and 0.96 gigapixel resolution at the Naval Research Lab in Washington, DC. The gigapixel cameras combine 100-150 small cameras with a spherical objective lens. Local aberration correction and focus in the small cameras enable extremely high resolution shots with smaller system volume and less distortion than traditional wide field lens systems. The DARPA effort hopes to produce resolution up to 10 and 50 gigapixels"