Your tech career depends on preparing for the cloud

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Redistricting for the masses: Cloud software lets voters participate

Why should politicians have all the gerrymandering fun? LA County's cloud service lets voters participate.

By Robert L. Mitchell
May 23, 2011 06:00 AM ET

Computerworld - As the 2010 U.S. census results arrived in March, Los Angeles County's politicians started ramping up for redistricting -- the once-a-decade, computing-intensive, often contentious process of geographically carving up the populace into discrete parcels of voters.

In the past, such decisions were made by politicians using expensive computer systems and software. Participation in the process was limited to an elite few who could afford experts who understood redistricting's arcane rules and geographic information system (GIS) technology well enough to game them.

"Redistricting is an extraordinarily important process in terms of who has a political voice, but it's an extraordinarily elitist field," says John Kim, co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights advocacy group based in Los Angeles.

This year, however, it won't just be the politicians and special interest groups poring over the data and tweaking boundary lines. All 4.5 million registered voters in LA County have access to a cloud-based redistricting application called the Public Access Plan. Hosted by GIS vendor Esri, the application lets voters view and modify existing maps and boundaries, submit comments, and even create and submit their own plans from scratch.

Users have access not just to maps with political boundaries, but to geo-coded census and county voting data as well, all of which can be tabulated and displayed over a district map as a table or graph. Or, if they already have a GIS and redistricting software, they can download the data.

"The county wants to promote the widest practicable citizen involvement in the redistricting process," says Martin Zimmerman, assistant CEO for LA County.

I said, hey! you! get off of my cloud.......Don't hang around cause twos a crowd On my cloud, baby.

I am seriously confused about the 'cloud' I understand office 365 and I will refrain my comments about that, I just don't understand the rumors and conjector about an actual cloud OS. I seems to me that that was their original vision of the xbox being a dumb box that constantly got updates from their servers and had very little hardware. I really want to understand this but I am not getting it.

Well I sure hope they don't think I'm gonna be able to play my games in html5 that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard except for the fact that steam just started offering gta 3 (released October 22, 2001) for the mac. LOL LOL LOL

it's got....ya know, electrolytes

before "cloud" computing becomes the utopian computing option for our great grandchildren - our net infrastructure, privacy/usage laws/security protocols, and telecoms need a massive revamp

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May 25, 2011
Microsoft betting everything on the cloud

TechEd saw Microsoft doubling down on Windows Azure. Will its cloud gamble pay off?


Microsoft is putting all of its power behind making its Windows Azure cloud offering stable and flexible. From what I've seen, it looks like this strategy will pay off.

I'm not sure I would have been this confident even six months ago, but compelling use cases highlighted at last week's TechEd conference expanded my sense of what is possible in the cloud. One example, a handheld ultrasound unit that utilized Azure on the back end, allowed technicians to perform ultrasounds with just a slate PC and an ultrasound mic. That kind of portability could benefit people all over the world.

But where Microsoft makes its strongest argument for Azure is in its ability to provide solutions that bridge the gap between the public and private cloud. This can be seen in the development of such Microsoft products as Exchange, where you might have some of your mailboxes on-premises and some in the cloud through Office 365. Having the ability to manage both zones and to move mailboxes between them at will is an attractive pull for shops not yet ready to go all-in with hosted messaging.

Microsoft's System Center, code-named Concero, is an intriguing solution along those lines. System Center allows for deployment, management, monitoring, and provisioning of systems, applications, and services of both public and private cloud resources. I'll be discussing this solution in greater detail in a future column as we get closer to a release date.

Technologies like these demonstrate Microsoft's conviction to own the public cloud. I've often joked that Azure (aka "sky-blue") is a tell as to Microsoft's ambitions: It doesn't just want a cloud, it wants to take up the whole sky.

Link below

Windows 8 Preview: 23 New Features You Should Know About

Cloud Storage

Despite curmudgeonly resistance from a certain segment of self-described power users, the cloud is now an integral part of mainstream computing. Microsoft has been pushing hard to catch up with third-party services like Dropbox and SugarSync with its LiveMesh syncing service, which lets users sync folders on their PC to a Windows Live account.

Leaked screenshots from Windows 8 alpha builds show code that apparently integrates cloud syncing directly into the operating system itself. It’s unclear whether this will simply allow users to link their LiveMesh/SkyDrive account to Windows 8, or if this kind of functionality will be extended to third-party cloud storage services as well.

Probability: 80%

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Microsoft, SAP team to ease cloud deployments

The two companies will bridge Microsoft .Net and Azure with SAP's NetWeaver Gateway
5/31/2011 9:39:00 AM By: Joab Jackson

In an attempt to ease cloud deployments for their combined customer base, Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) and SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) are configuring some of their software products so that they work more easily together.

SAP will expose some of the functionality in SAP software so it can be readily harnessed within the Microsoft .Net platform as well as from the Microsoft Azure cloud computing service. These tweaks should speed development of .Net applications that interact with SAP programs, as well as make it easier to connect Azure cloud applications to internal SAP systems, the two companies said.