I wanted to do a quick post before I take off for the next couple weeks. I'll be at my cottage next week and in Venice Italy the following week speaking at a private business summit at a monastery in the heart of the city. Rough life, I know. As part of this gig they even agreed to fly out my wife and 7 month old son.
A few random thoughts before I leave. As we move more towards autonomic computing future, I think the greater test of a efficient fault tolerant infrastructure will be to measure the human factor in it's management or possibly the lack of it. I know that some may not like a future where computers and infrastructure no longer need humans to manage it, but the reality is we as human operators are the biggest single limiting factor when it comes to computing. So while I'm away, ponder this. The next big thing in computing may very well be humanless computing.
I'll leave you with this great presentation by Lew Tucker at Sun Microsystem where he theorizes applications that are entirely self-sufficient, where humans will be able to set boundaries, of course, but will no longer be needed to turn servers, or anything else for that matter, physically on or off.