Consumer spending will recover, but it will not make up as large a share of the US economy as it once did. That ship has sailed. Best not lie about waiting for it to return to port.

All arguments about devices aside, I see software-as-a-service as good for IT. The internal IT department is not tasked with installing, licensing, upgrading servers or storage, or many of the other costly and tedious chores of traditional IT work. IT can re-orient itself to providing a secure, dependable infrastructure for the internal users. After spending 20 years working in IT dev, test, and analysis, I think both IT and their customers would be better served by this model in many cases. The scope of the modern IT organization has become so large that IT cannot respond effectively to all the challenges presented to it. SaaS offers a way to decouple at least some business applications from IT departments. The only application to be installed and maintained is a Web browser. As an IT professional, I'm all for it.

Maybe my company should spin-up a risk management group that helps business units decide if they should move to SasS or not?

Looking for gurus seems like a needle-in-a-haystack proposition. Would it not be easier to take some of your current employees and train them on Hadoop? Assuming your employees are homo sapiens, they could be trained to deploy, develop applications with, and maintain Hadoop installations.

I remember when the disposable razor companies Gillette and Schick had an advertising war that centered on whose razor had the most blades. It all started when the Gillette Mach III hit the market and introduced the world the safety razors with a third cutting blade. Until then, the ignorant masses had been shaving with safety razors that possessed only two blades. After an advertising campaign that would have make Coca-Cola jealous, Gillette unveiled the "Quattro Technologically Advanced Shaving System". In a triumph of engineering prowess, Gillette added a fourth blade to their razor cartridge.

These events changed my world because the price of most razor blade cartridges sky-rocketed to fuel ad campaigns. I now have less money for food and four-core tablet devices

Maybe Geckos have a degaussing gland?

NPR has a segment called "Lizard Study May Create Super-Strong 'Gecko' Tape". It sounds like the idea has gone from concept to proof-of-concept. It's good to know some these ideas do eventually lead to prototypes.

Here is the link: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1290473

One-tenth sounds conservative.

Here is an alternative perspective.

In the US, there seems to be a very strong connection between universities and vocational education. I never really grokked that. I grew up thinking that universities is where people who loved to learning gathered to learn, share ideas, and advance knowledge. Education was its own reward. If one wanted to learned something practical, like something for a job, one attended a vocational school, training course, or the employer took responsibility to train their employees. I think it used to be that way.

Somewhere along the line that seems to have changed. A four year degree has become the minimum entry criteria for a desk job. Over the last twenty years, I've had nothing but desk jobs. I've been a software developer, a business analyst and a solution architect. None of these jobs required anything more than a two year vocational degree-- 90% a motivated high school grad could have learned to do the job.

Why is there such emphasis on university degrees in the job market? I understood that employers liked to hire university grads for certain jobs because employes knew these people could learn things on their own, enjoyed learning, and in general wanted to do a good work. I later realized that a university education had class implications and employers often want employees from certain social classes. But there is nothing wrong with vocational school, training courses, or even learning on the job. Why try to pump a quarter of your population through the university system when the needs of many of the students (and their future employers,) would be as well or better served by other avenues of learning?

It saddens me when I see people with master's degrees in computer science spending their days executing test cases for point-of-sale systems or Web shopping carts. It saddens me when I see chemistry majors running the same water quality tests five days a week. It saddens me when I see people with advanced degrees in economics spend their working years fiddling with Excel spreadsheets to balance project budgets.

From my perspective the system we have created is a tragic waste human capital and other resources. The indebtedness it is creating threatens to turn the next generation into indentured servants with white collars. Meanwhile, the university system continues to water down its curricula and loose its vitality.

How did it come to this?

Has Intel, PGI, Microsoft or IBM committed to producing a commercial quality C++0x compiler?

To be fair, most consumers who have a 4G phone or 4G service have no idea what makes it 4G. And in all fairness to the consumers, telecos have defined 4G to mean "exactly what I want it to mean". I spent Tuesday at a T-Mobile switching center and I'm not entirely clear on what 4G means to them. I think it means either "HSPA+ with IP back-haul" or "someone somewhere will be able to transfer data at 42 Mbps when the right handset becomes available".