Google Cloud Partner Summit Singapore

Attended the Google Cloud Partner Summit in Singapore today.

Not quite the usual Mr Jacket-and-Jeans affair.  Though there was still the usual mix of commercial/account speakers (boring) and technical speakers (interesting).

Spoke to Øyvind Roti and he's also of the opinion that the current advances in machine learning should not worry humanity too much because computers are still to develop any real understanding of the world.  Until such time as they do, they are still very fast, dumb calculators that can be used for very fast identification of correlations rather than understanding actual causations.  Hmm, that's almost like a cargo cult...

Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est

At a reception for us fresh-faced (well, maybe more like spotty-faced) computer science freshers in 1987 I was asked by a fellow student what I thought the best computer was. My answer was, "Orac from Blake's 7"

Thinking back it may not have been such a facetious answer.

Orac was powerful because it networked with other computers, not just sitting there on its own like the traditional super-computer of science fiction (and super-computers 30 years ago). Orac had the ability to communicate with all other computers that carry tarriel cells - the basic component of all computer systems in the Blake's 7 future, designed by Ensor (Orac's creator) at a young age.

Able to mine any data on any computer system it had a vast wealth of raw data at its disposal that it could process into useful information. Thirty years on from the creation of Blake's 7 we are beginning to see the wealth of information that can be provided by the Internet and the beginnings of practical distributed computing in the form of cloud computing.

As Sun Microsystems says: the network is the computer