In What was Sun thinking? (CNET News.com), Charles Cooper tells us that storage is now in high demand:

What with some of the confusing–make that idiotic–federal regulations governing corporate behavior that have appeared the last couple years, there’s a near bottomless demand for big storage systems. After the passage of Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA, CEOs are so keen on covering their posteriors these days that there’s no such thing as too much documentation. Identity and management access is the hot ticket these days as every management team worth its salt wants to tout how tough it now is on compliance.

Wow. Seems like it is going to be a nice era for data warehousing and OLAP, no?

Jeff Erickson makes available a fixed ACM proceedings template. If you’ve had trouble with the default ACM template, like me, this might save you some headaches.

Atlantic Canada (and Stephen Downes) is finding out about the creative class theory (see Richard Florida). Downes point to a post by Robert Paterson explaining why things go badly over there:

Culture? Adventurous people create sustainable jobs not government. Buildings don’t create sustainable jobs. Creative people create sustainable jobs. PEI works hard to marginalize those that are creative. This is I believe the heart of our problem.

Precisely.

You see any gays around? People with long hair? People playing weird music? People doing weird adventurous things?

No?

Your economy will be so-so.

We’ve known this for some time. The key to economic growth doesn’t lie in better highways (Atlantic Canada has the best roads in the country), or more government money… The key is in the culture.

Progressive cultures grow economically, repressive cultures decline.

That’s how I know that the Bush-era USA is in economic decline. I don’t have the statistics, I don’t care to have them, I just know.

Want to better yourself? Want to grow? Don’t hang out with the rich folks, hang out with the creative folks. Not the gay weirdoes with long hair; being weird doesn’t make you creative, but tolerance for weirdness is tolerance for creativity. You won’t find the creative folks unless there are gay weirdoes with long hair in your society.

Update: Harold also made the link with Florida.

Expert Opinion has a thoughtful analysis of modern day university students:

They pay money, they want the tools and certification to get jobs, and they resent being subjected to “irrelevant crap”. I don’t know how to respond to this. Certainly, I feel that this is not the best mode of operation for a university. I’ve stated before that I don’t view students as ordinary customers of universities, both because universities have other customers (employers, governments, society as a whole) and because the “product” that we deliver is rather unique in that its true value is likely not to be seen by students or families until many years after graduation. So, are we failing in our jobs by not getting students to the point where they understand the idea of education as more than training? Should we change our core values? Or should we develop a bifurcated higher education system, either within existing universities or by ceding part of higher education to the universities of phoenixes?

What are you going to cede to the University of Phoenix or the Trump University? What exactly?

To realize the dream of a university without job training, it seems to me you have to take away from universities medical schools (that’s training), engineering schools (training again), architecture schools, nursing schools, business schools, communication schools, library science schools, software engineering schools, IT courses, environment sciences, forestry, meteorology…

Ok, then you are left with Physics, Mathematics, Chemistry, History, Philosophy. Even Computer Science, once you’ve taken out all the IT and software engineering will only remain as a shadow of its current self.

Oh! Wait. Many students take Physics or Mathematics so that they can teach the field. So you’ll have to create a Teacher schools covering these topics and turn down students who want to train as teachers.

I’m not done: you’d have to ensure that nobody can take a Ph.D. has a form of training in order to become a professor.

Now, after taking out pretty much everything, you are left with the pure minded students. Those students who go to college just to learn and growth. How many will you have? Not very many at all. Maybe 9 out of 10 faculty member will have to be let go; maybe tuitions will go up tremendously.

So, you’ll be educating a very small elite while being cautious not to “train” them too much. Better make sure these students come from wealthy family because with no marketable skill, it is very hard to find a job these days.

Can someone remind me why we went there in the first place and what problem we solved?

Abdel sent me a link to Joe’s OpenSolution Page. It is a page with some of the best open source software for your business project. I learned about two open source ETL software!