Photo by Flickr user lrargerich  I am sure all of us are taught the virtues of practice in Childhood - most often "Practice Makes a man perfect" or familiar Kabir's doha: करत करत अभ्यास के, जड़मति होत सुजान   रसरी आवत जात ते, सिल पर पड़त निसान We are taught to rote the mathematical multiplication tables or to mug up nursery rhymes ... the list is endless. And we all HATE IT! Even as we grow up we start disdaining and condemning the method of rote which is perpetuated across the educational system. However, secretly we all know that we benefit somewhere from some of the rote we did. When you secretly calculate the percentage of your increment or the approximate EMI required to fund the next investment we remember our math tables. Yesterday, as I was watching Mtv Unplugged , I realized one more advantage of practicing any activity or art. As I watched the guitarist or the tabla player play their instrument so effortlessly and then experiment with it during the eve...

Image Credit:  Kevin Dooley via flickr The Cloud is often considered an amalgamated progression of web2.0 (SaaS) and virtualization technologies(IaaS) - which it indeed is! However, the emergence of Cloud Computing also draws from a organizational shift in IT departments - from in-sourced to outsourced. What started in IT depts as routine maintenance outsourcing is now taking shape in form of the Cloud which promises to not just outsource routine operations but everything including financial management (move from  Capex to Opex ) of IT infrastructure owned by the company. As the organizational structure shifts from in-sourced IT to the Cloud - it impacts the role of the CIO, which has been a much talked about topic. However, what has not been talk about much is how the Cloud will impact the rest of the IT department and the roles of techies in it. To understand the impending metamorphosis - we need to understand the existing position of the IT department. Acros...

[Warning: Suited for techies and tech enthusiasts; others may find it boring] I was talking to one of the new joiners at our firm today - we were talking about a client using Sun's hardware for a project when he asked why Sun ran only Solaris and no other OS - I started to explain him that Solaris was actually a Unix variant when the conversation turned to free software, Linux etc. and generally into  the lineage of operating systems, the history of modern computing etc. During our brief chat I realized that for most of us post-90's generation, the seeming "excitement" times in computing were either the mid-90's when Linux and GNU/ FSF grew or it was even later when Web2.0, Software as a Service etc grew. But I think the most exciting times for the computing industry when the real "pirates" swarmed the industry was the period of 60s / 70s when the foundation of the personal computing world was being laid. The foundation of personal computing - unlik...