Podcast Update

• Anna Nagurney gave a presentation about networks of all types. She was well prepared and brought many perspectives to the subject including consideration of traffic patterns and the influence of the acts of individuals on the performance of a network.Networks. This is a very interesting, but heady presentation.
• Tim O'Reilly delivered the closing session at the MySQL User's Conference. Tim delivered a great presentation talking about what is coming around the corner (his radar talk). He offered very insightful observations about open source and notions of "small parts, loosely joined". A meaningful presentation I intend to quote at presentations of my own.
• Jimmy Wales, President & Director, Wikimedia Foundation delivers a talk about wikipedia and the wiki phenomenon in general. His talk includes content relevant to people sharing and the impact of the web. An excellent presentation.
• A panel of CIO's met to talk about software vendors and how the recession has influenced their behavior. More importantly, they talk about changes that are still required. The variety of perspectives provided made the whole presentation quire interesting.
• A group of pundits (analysts) participated in a panel talked about IT budgets, consolidation and the impact of open source on IT companies and their work. A very interesting presentation with some humor between the panelists. One panelist sees open source projects leading to the emergence of new companies. He believes that open source is challenging existing companies as it is not held down by existing legacy and compliance. He sees both cost and innovation offering opportunity for business models to be defined to leverage some of this innovation. Off shoring was another topic discussed. They pointed out that this offers opportunity and threat. Another pundit suggested that automation will cause more job loss.
• Only Connect was a panel discussion about how broadband and wireless is affecting the telecommunications industry. For example, rulings indicating that VoIP providers must supply support for 911. This will potentially add all kinds of demands and introduce new innovations. This was an interesting and worthwhile listen.
• Andrew Morton, Lead Maintainer for the Linux Production Kernal talked about the processes and procedures behind managing the large numbrer of changes to the Linux Kernal. He is a very relaxed and calming speaker, but delivers a lot of content. He made a very interesting comment about Steve Balmer's comments about open source development and its comparison to communism. Since the Linux kernal is managed from the bottom up (unlike Microsoft development), he thought Steve's comment was laughable.
• Werner Vogels talked about eCommerce at Interplantary Scale. This very interesting presentation talked about mimicking the patterns observed in nature to achieve scale for computer science problems. The main one Werner referenced was the epidemic pattern. Very, very interesting presentation.
• Mark Carges, CTO, BEA Systems talked about service-oriented archiecture (SOA). He built a good case for composability and how one achieves it. This is an excellent presentation and I would highly recommend it for those interested in SOA.