by Dwayne Phillips Lest we forget, we have always had more data than we could process. For some reason, we are now recording it with magnetism. I just read yet another article telling me that “data is everywhere.” Then there are the usual numbers of peta-peta-something-or-other bytes of data every second or so. Cries follow […]
Data has always been Everywhere
January 20th, 2022 · No Comments
Tags: Computing · Culture · Data Science · History · Scale · Science
The General Store (as a Service)
January 13th, 2022 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips We have XaaS or EaaS. We have returned to the day of the general store. We have almost everything as a service. Some call this XaaS. I call it EaaS (Everything as a Service or maybe AEaaS Almost Everything as a Service). Examples, IaaS, DHaaS, SaaS, PaaS, etc. (how many letters are […]
Tags: America · Computing · Customer · Technology
The CRUD Systems
December 23rd, 2021 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips Once stripped of all the extras, the great majority of computers systems we use are CRUD. And that is okay. We invented computers to compute, i.e., to calculate things. 1+2=3 and so on. We also learned that computers are good at storing information. We put information in the computer, it is there. […]
Tags: Change · Cloud Computing · Computing · Writing
RISC, CISC, and General Systems Thinking
September 23rd, 2021 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips Reduced complexity optimizes for simplicity. Increased complexity optimizes for simplicity in another form. Which simplicity is “best” is a matter of situation. Apple has recently moved to their own “Apple Silicon” processors. In general terms, Apple switched from Intel’s processors to ARM’s processors. ARM processors are a form of RISC. Intel processors […]
Tags: Choose · Computing · General Systems Thinking · Systems · Technology
The Essence of Data Science (attempt #2)
September 2nd, 2021 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips After a few more years, I think I understand the essence of Data Science. It isn’t that complicated. I wrote a post in November of 2020 attempting to describe the essence of data science. A few thoughts came to me recently. So here goes another attempt. A person has a large amount […]
Tags: Computing · Data Science · Questions · Science · Time
Forward to the Past: Infrastructure as Code and JCL
February 22nd, 2021 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips We tend to reinvent the past as we move into the future. Remember JCL? I took an class in operating systems in 1980 (yes, I am that old). At least that was the name of the class. In reality, it was a class in what IBM called Job Control language or JCL. […]
Tags: Change · Computing · History · Language
The Mundane Necessity of Computing (Professionals)
December 17th, 2020 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips Some things are so obvious that we all miss them for a long time. Moving from experiment lab to the real world requires some expertise. To do artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, etc. you do computing. This means a lot of software work. Though not as old as physics and chemistry, […]
Tags: Computing · Engineering · Experiment · Programming · Reality · Systems
The Hybrid Cloud: Forward to the Past
October 10th, 2019 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips We reinvent the past and give it a new name. IBM is pushing into the cloud computing business. They are “behind” the competition, but have hopes of making ground and money with “hybrid” technologies. Let’s consider this idea of hybrid cloud. I trust the cloud provider to keep my stuff reliably and […]
Tags: Computing · History · Technology
Close Enough for a Good Approximation
August 26th, 2019 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips Somewhere, somehow we forgot what a good approximation was. We used to tell this “joke” a long time ago in a place far, far away. Consider the situation with an amorous young gentlemen on one side of a room and an amorous young lady on the other side of the room. Every […]
Tags: Analysis · Approximation · Computing · Mathematics
A Tangled Web
June 3rd, 2019 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips Present and past weave together. New tools or old techniques? I am a bit slow on the uptake of “new” things from time to time. This past week or so I stumbled across this thing called Jupyter. It is a type of “notebook.” Some call it yet another implementation of the “notebook” […]
Tags: Computing · Concepts · Programming