BlueSpace

MLS Clouds

I now bring the ‘Cloud’ blog series to an end by discussing MLS clouds and how BlueSpace fits into the cloud topic. If you’ve missed the last two blogs, this is the final of my first 3-part blog series. Each of the three have focused on some subtopic within ‘Cloud,’ so if there is interest in reading more, I suggest looking at Parts One and Two.

What do Clouds mean for BlueSpace?

What Does Cloud Mean, Exactly?

In case you missed out on the last blog, I should mention first off that this is the second of a 3-blog series all relating to that ambiguous word we hear thrown around so often: ‘Cloud.’

What was ‘Cloud’ again?

Preamble
“I wandered lonely as a cloud” is the starting line from a poem I studied at school, written by William Wordsworth – a famous English poet.  His inspiration came from wandering around the Lake District, which is about an hour’s drive from where I grew up, and I even visited his cottage several times.

Among the many epic battles in Star Trek, a plucky young Captain Kirk in his obscenely tight trousers never got an error message like this.  No matter what weapons some new and unduly ugly biped quasi-hominid (with bad studio makeup) brought to the field of battle, Captain Kirk only ever heard the likes of "Shields at 40%," "Warp drive offline," "She can't take much more of this Captain."

I was over in NATO a month or two back, and it was just at the time that NATO took over the Libya mission.  One of the wry comments made by a flag officer there went along the lines of, "Wouldn't it be good if we could stand up a Libyan Mission Secret network before we either win or lose the war."  

So here I am, sitting on a plane again, currently at an altitude of 35,001 feet, having just watched a particularly dark and depressing film about life after death, which was really a sequential montage of negativity – I will endeavor to ensure that the spirit of the film does not infect my fingers as I write this.

I have actually gone beyond my usual musings while stuck on a plane somewhere in this blog article, and attempted some investigative journalism.  Well, I asked two friends (the former CIO of NSA and the former CTO of DIA) for their thoughts, so I don’t expect any Pulitzer prizes to wing their way to my desk anytime soon.  I’ve structured my thoughts into how we got here (What Happened?) and what we can do next (How do we Plug the Leak?).

What Happened?

Over the past few weeks, it seems like we have done a lot of conference calls trying to explain what the term ‘seamless windows’ means, and it came to a head on Friday this past week when I had two calls about this on the same day.  Each call was accompanied with much hand waving (unfortunately lost over of the telephone), and much use of the word ‘windows’ to mean different things in different contexts – adding to the confusion.

I was passing through Dulles airport on Friday evening back to Austin, and I happened to pick up a copy of the Financial Times.  On the front page was an article entitled Warning over malicious computer worm launched at industrial targets.  An excerpt is as follows:

OK, so I’m British, and I have wanted to work James Bond into a title for ages.  A slightly less contrived title might have been “Why the world needs a multi-level handheld”, but that’s not nearly as titillating.  I could have gone with “President Obama’s new iPhone”, but again, I’m English.