If this is Wednesday I must be telling people about Cloud Computing

[major_clanger]

Monday was the fourth week teaching down at Exeter, and to my pleasant surprise I still seem to have just as many students as I started with. This week we started on patent law, with me trying to give an overview of the whole topic so that the students have some context when I spend the next few weeks going into detail. They seem to have been listening as they coped well with some basic 'could your client patent this?' questions in the subsequent tutorial, and even asked some good questions of their own. Talking of questions though, I've just had it confirmed that I do have to write part of their exam (which I expected) - first step, get some past papers so I have some idea of how hard to make it!

I came home via the Westminster Skeptics meeting, where I hooked up with clanwilliam to watch the 'political blogging' event. A good write-up here, but I like J's pithy summary: "it actually turned into a comment flame war, live on stage!"

Yesterday was spent at a Cloud Computing conference near Tower Hill. (The basement conference suite we were in had a section of London Wall running through it.) The conference is finishing off today with an entire day dedicated to legal issues. I'm not the keynote speaker - but I am on the first item after him.

Comments

[smofbabe.livejournal.com]

At the "Welcome to Oracle" webcast that Larry Ellison did last week, someone asked about cloud computing and he practically turned apoplectic about the fact that the concept has been around for years, and everyone is acting as if they invented something new, and could anyone explain to him the difference between the way they had been operating and whatever "cloud" is, etc. (Meanwhile, I'm busy finishing an edit of a course on cloud computing :-> )

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

Has someone sidled up to him yet and coughed "on-demand virtualisation" into his ear yet? That is pretty much what makes Cloud both attractive and different from traditional hosting.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

The basement conference suite we were in had a section of London Wall running through it.

One America Square? I was there for a JISC event last week...

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Actually, no - it's a different conference suite with a section of London Wall running through it. I wouldn't be surprised if there are quite a few similar others in the area, now I think of it.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

In fact it was 1AS we were in yesterday; for obscure reasons, day 3 of the conference - which was really a separate event stuck on the end, but with pretty much the same membership - was in a different venue.

[andrewducker]

Jon Honeyball (of PC Pro) had several columns talking about Azure and his attempts to get any kind of legal assurances from Microsoft that data stored in their Ireland datacentre (nice and safely covered by EU law) wouldn't be migrated to their US datacentre (clearly not covered by EU law). Their legal people didn't seem very keen to actually promise anything at all...

[penguineggs.livejournal.com]

I'm doing my first ever breach of confidence/copyright case "in the cloud". Will let you know how it proceeds, but I can tell you one thing, getting hold of the evidence is a right bugger.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

I'm faintly surprised; most of the Terms of Service I've been examining inform the customer that the provider will disclose content on receipt of little more that a stiff letter from a lawyer. (Some of the UK-based ones, to be fair, are made of sterner stuff and stipulate that nothing less than a court order will do.)