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John and I get together at the beginning of this week to make up for last week’s holiday skipage. While there’s not a lot of news items & announcements, we manage to pull out a nice 90 minutes of several topics (out of order):

• John is putting together Cloud Camp Atlanta, Jan 20th, 2008.
• Sun is supporting Alice, an educational programming environment that John digs.
• On the topic of Sun, we do the favorite parlor game of playing “what will happen to Sun.” See Stephen O’Grady’s excellent write-up on that topic, as mentioned, as well.
• The Groundwork Opensource/HP pricing dust-up. We spend a long time analyzing both sides, and generalize on the theory that it’s always best to argue against numbers with words.
• Online gambling, possible data-analysis in the cloud, and how that all relates to the cyberpunk, data-haven thriller Islands in the Net.
• A brief comment on my Data Center Automation and Cloud call with CA this morning.
• The forming of a new power-center in the IT department: The Hyper-Visor Police. Just like the feudal kingdom of the DBA, it’s clear that there’ll be the group that controls virtualization and uses that control for much power in the department. I for one welcome out new IT overlords.
• How virtualization is making operating systems less of a constraint and more of a piece of middle-ware, or, The Big Blog Theory of Virtualization.
• We talk about Doug McClure‘s recent podcast series (check one here or just subscribe to his feed), which gets us into an extended discussion of what a “transaction” is vs. a “services” and how that all relates to top-down vs. bottom-up approaches to IT management.
• Finally, I mention that Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Second Choice is a good, non-IT book for understanding what “thinking strategically” means using the example of American foreign policy.

Also, check out the sweet potato casserole recipe John mentioned, and, as I mentioned, Royer’s out in Round Top, Texas – damn good food and pies.

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned above and in the podcast.