It’s been a busy week this week! Finally finished the series of C training courses I’ve been attending, and in the midst of some freelance too. Add a conference to all this and you can see why I was hankering for a lie in this morning! Plus being so busy cost me a couple work trips to the pub, and I like the pub…
The Oxford University Information Technology Support Staff (ITSS) Conference was on Thursday, and there were a fair few talks that were very interesting (which is rare for a conference, so many thanks to those that organised it)
A Microsoft representative centered his talk around the future of our existing technologies, and highlighted the trends of disk usage and how we can save energy, plus the disruption of Serial ATA disks and the upsurgence of flash memory. The most worrying thing that I hadn’t thought much about recently was the ceiling of the power grids that supply power to hotspots of computing, such as data centres, and how in order to keep increasing storage and performance to meet demand, there will need to be a way to do this without increasing power consumption.
The BT representative gave a very entertaining and comical talk about the future of technology, but the thing that struck home for me was the comment “in the next 10 years we’ll probably see more change in technology than the last 100”. It’s not the figures that caught my attention, it was the concept of adapting to change at the rate at which the technology is changing, and not investing everything in now, but thinking ahead to the future. Hard to explain but in order to be where I want be I’m going to have to stay sharp over the next couple years. I don’t think a fair few companies are thinking like this though and are going to get caught out.
Being an Apple user I was obviously going to be excited by the Apple talk, but contrary to what I expected the focus was on OS X 10.5 ‘Leopard’ Server, as opposed to covering similar themes to the WWDC Keynote. There are many features that seemed pretty useful, and some that I hadn’t even thought would be useful but have peaked my interest. Can’t say much more until I’ve tried it out but it looks promising.
Right, now back to work… on a Saturday, ah well!