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Today, AOL Time-Warner announced that it was halting further development of the Netscape web browser. It's hard to believe it has been fourteen years since Mosaic was born at NCSA, with Netscape following shortly thereafter. Sic transit gloria mundi.
The big news in Seattle just before the holidays was Amazon's plan to lease up to 1.6 million square feet for a new corporate headquarters near South Lake Union. (For you non-local types and newbies like me, geographically, that would be near here.) As a frequent and happy customer, I am pleased by Amazon's success.
Like many of you, I am exceedingly distressed by recent news about the Federal research budget and the prospects for an omnibus appropriations bill. Peter Harsha cogently describes the bleak situation in the CRA Computing Research Policy Blog. The major science agencies – NIH, NSF, DOE, NIST and NASA – will see minimal budget increases, many below the rate of inflation.
Given the enormous effort mobilized by the academic and industrial research communities and strong bipartisan support for the COMPETES Act , we expected a positive outcome for appropriations. The storm is rising, and we're in a leaky rowboat. This does not bode well for America's competitive future.
I promised in my last blog entry at RENCI that I would host a new blog once I got settled at Microsoft. Herewith is the fulfillment of that promise, with new ruminations on the state of large-scale data centers, multicore hardware and software, computational and computer science, high-performance computing, science policy, industry observations and random musings on life and its idiosyncrasies. This is just another way to say that I will write about my passions and interests.
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