Gary’s Tech Thoughts Blog

It’s been a busy week as usual this time of year, but right in the middle of the week appeared my very own shiny Droid phone.  I’m still just  a little in awe that Google has offered a new Android based phone to everyone at the conference.  Wow, what an impressive display of financial clout.  I feel it is a smart move – to get the people that obviously care most about what Google is doing to get interested in building Android apps.

I’m very interested in any announcements that might be made at the conference.  I feel relatively confident that Google is working on a tablet to compete with iPad as predicted in this blog in January. (Oh, that was my last post.  Like I said it is very busy this time of year!)

Will they follow Apple’s move and push a table based on Android?  Seems like a plausible move.  With the wood they have behind Android application development, this seems the logical course.

I can’t wait to build an app for this phone.  Yep, tech bribery works.  Good job Google.

Today, Amazon announced their Amazon Elastic MapReduce cloud web service.  A natural extension to their EC2 cloud services on one hand, and a somewhat startling event on the other.  In a recent post, I spoke of the global implications of the readily available low cost cloud computing infrastructure.  Now, it seems this service has entered the realms of massively parallel computing.

Not clear at this point what the limits of this service are, but the possibilities are staggering.  Not enough computing power in Pyongyang?  No problem, run your nuke simulations right here Mr Kim Jong-il. An extreme case, and perhaps too complex / compute intensive for this offering, but the point is never have resources of this scale been so readily available.  Amazing.

A better fit for tasks like SETI@Home, these distributed networks are useful in solving very large data intensive types of problems like web indexing.  Google even provides a nice tutorial on mapreduce.  This is also a nice class lecture on mapreduce from Cal Berkeley.  Enjoy.