China building a city for cloud computing

If this article about China's investment in cloud computing doesn't keep you up at night, then not much will. This article and the link included for another article Five reasons why China will rule tech clearly indicate that on a national level China is out to rule the world and they are doing it from the ground up.

While the US is still the economic and computing super power of the world, those days are surely numbered. The continued decline of our ability to teach math and science to our population is one factor that is baffling many in Washington. One reason why the pundits in Washington are struggling to understand what is necessary to get our kids back to levels that are associated with our countries technology domination of the 40's, 50's , and 60's is that most of the folks in DC are lawyers. Unless we want to be the worlds paralegal we need make a tremendous effort in improving our kids math and sciences scores so that they will have the knowledge and interest in designing the next generation of technologies for the future.

A second reason why China will be challenging our current position in the world is that their infrastructure will be considered brand new and state of the art by US standards. While the numbers can be argued, China's infrastructure package released for the "Great Recession" is estimated to be $586 Billion. Of the $825 Billion of the US stimulus package only a third was slated for infrastructure. The president has pledged to add an additional $150 Billion, but for a country that earned a "D" grade from the American Society of Civil Engineers that does not seem to be enough to keep up with our far east neighbors. They estimate that we need $1.5 Trillion to get up to a acceptable passing score.

Finally, with every factory that opens in China whether it be from the US or any other country, China is getting instant access to the technology used in these factories. China makes it mandatory with few exceptions that the technological know how is transferred to them. So what you may say, but the real kicker is that in the US when a factory closes the people that had the knowledge of the technology are no longer employed and the knowledge is essentially lost. Just ask someone how to make a TV in the US.

I feel lot more enthusiastic to help my kids with their math homework!!!

Verizon Applies The Brakes

While I am not surprised that the large wireless careers are trying to control the usage of their heaviest users, it is disappointing that Verizon levied a warning to it's users the day after offering the iPhone. Verizon stated it has the right to throttle down its access speeds to bandwidth hogs.

Apple's iPhone is known to be a bandwidth sucker and not because the device is inefficient. Quit the contrary, the iPhone makes it so easy to consume mile after mile of internet highway. The iPhone delivers a rich web experience and users are just doing what they normally do when they are tethered to their machines at home or the office. Phones running the Android operating system also provide a similar experience and are most likely the genesis of Verizon's existing bandwidth hogs, since few other devices are even capable guzzling bandwidth at the rates at which the iPhone and Android powered devices can.

My only point of contention is why would the wireless carries even care now that most have done away with unlimited data plans and are moving to a metered model. What is wrong with pay for what you eat?

BTW, if you didn't pre-order yesterday you have to wait until the iPhone arrives in retail stores. The iPhone pre-order ended today. No surprise there.

Look for the iPhone online February 9th and in stores the 11th.

iPhone Available on Verizon

So today the iPhone adventures continues on Verizon. You can pre-order your iPhone with the expectation that within a few weeks you have your iPhone in your hands.

It will interesting to see if the iPhone does what it did to AT&T. Which is namely over saturate their network cause quite a bit of customer complaints. I think Big Red will be in somewhat better shape, since they did recently introduce LTE infrastructure that many mobile devices will be able to use instead of the existing 3G environment that the Verizon iPhone will be running on.

Time will tell.