Attached is a video in which we've spliced Ellison's rant, delivered last week at the Churchill Club and recorded by TechPulse 360, with excerpts from an interview Ellison gave to Charlie Rose in 1996. At the time, Ellison was campaigning for the world to adopt "Network Computers," jargon for Web applications operated from stripped down computer terminals. "Cloud Computing," meanwhile, is the contemporary jargon term for Web applications.

As he told Rose, Ellison was convinced PCs were way too complex for ordinary people, and would eventually be replaced by his "NCs." Of course, things didn't turn out that way; in the ensuing 13 years PCs have spread not only to many more homes but also to many more datacenters, where clusters of cheap boxes with the same hardware guts as home Windows machines have displaced large servers from the likes of Oracle's Sun division. As Ellison alludes to in his more current rant, Google runs on such machines.

Maybe it is precisely because Ellison himself once employed "NC" jargon and hype to predict the imminent decline of certain competitors, Microsoft chief among them, that he can so eloquently rant against people who are trying to do the same thing with "cloud computing" today. Of course, Ellison's newfound distaste for hype also might have something to do with the fact that his company, Oracle, is now the supposedly declining competitor, and ex Oracle executive Marc Benioff's SalesForce.com is the company pumping out the hypey internet jargon.

The Obama administration just announced a new cloud-computing initiative. It claims it merely wants to streamline $75 billion in federal IT spending. So what's with the "mind mapping" component of the plan? And why so cozy with Google?

The "mind mapping" software is listed under "productivity apps" on the cloud computing initiative's website. Glenn Beck, call your office! To paint the president as a socialist big brother, a monster computer "cloud" that centralizes sensitive government information and is deeply interested in your brain is a boon.

Especially when it is tied, however loosely, to that all-seeing corporate eye in Mountain View, California, Google Inc. Google is the leading proponent of cloud computing, in which shrink-wrapped PC software (like, say, Outlook) is replaced with Web applications (like, say, GMail). In fact, NASA Ames CIO Chris Kemp, who is in charge of NASA's cloud computing program, has quoted Google's CEO as an inspiration for it. NASA Ames is where today's federal announcement is being made, so presumably Kemp's work is now spreading.

It seems likely Google will be on hand for the announcement: NASA has announced that "top Silicon Valley information technology leaders are scheduled to attend," and, besides, adjoining Moffett Federal Airfield is where top Googlers park their private jets, per arrangement with NASA. Google cronies at private zeppelin company Airship Ventures are also allowed use of the field. Kemp, in turn, has apparently used a Google jet for NASA "meteor hunting," and heralded the release of high-resolution NASA imagery for use on moon.google.com (see 9/17 entry here). He has also hosted "VIP guests," including from the Silicon Valley tech scene, at a space shuttle launch.

This must all seem, no doubt, perfectly innocent to Kemp, who is steeped in the startup world. The 31-year-old worked as chief architect at Classmates.com before being "pushed aside" as co-founder of vacation rental broker Escapia and detouring into the public sector. But amid the increasingly paranoid partisan rancor of Washington, DC, the Obama Administration's "mind mapping" cloud computing plans and ties to Google will inevitably be re-marketed on the distinctly irrational market that is national politics.

(Top image via, second pic via)

After Flickr users asked on the site about the caricature, with some saying it was covered as transformative political speech, Flickr locked down the thread. That's hardly the first time; locking discussion threads about mysteriously deleted accounts is a routine occurrence at Flickr. It's a perplexing customer-relations move for a site that asks people to trust it with some of their most precious memories — and that faces intense competition from Facebook.

At least some discussions are allowed to run for a while before hey got locked, like this one, about a guy whose perfectly innocent account was mistakenly deleted.Flickr did eventually apologize to the guy and, unlike in most cases, was able to give him his digital photos back. Why? Because was deleting so many other people's pictures that it was backlogged and never got around to his. Progress!

(Pic: Taken at Twitter HQ by Daniel Catt.)

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Microsoft has tried to combat the problem by building a variety of safeguards into its operating systems and its Internet Explorer browser, with mixed success. The User Account Control feature of Windows Vista, which popped up an endless stream of warnings that irritated users, proved to be one of the key factors in the poor reception for Vista. Last week in Los Angeles, the company said it had entirely reworked the user interface of its new Windows 7 operating system to minimize user frustration.

Thanks in part to Larry Ellison's hard work and rapacious libido, databases are to be found everywhere. They lie at the bottom of most web applications and in nearly every bit of business software. We're all using databases all the time.

But that's about to change. Chips with two and four processor cores are common and Intel hints that we'll eventually see hundreds of cores per chip, which brings us right back into the 1970s and '80s and the world of parallel computing. That's where databases start to screw up. More than just slow reads and writes, relational databases also create false dependencies between pieces of data. If one chunk of data (A) is dependent on another chunk of data (B), then no work can be done on A until all work on B is complete.

While the database guys are busy figuring out how to add more and more concurrency internally, in reality when you take a few steps back and think of a large set of commodity boxes all executing a single data munching app, then no matter how sophisticated we get, the relational database will still effectively be a single thread to that app.

To scale the Google search service, Google first had to free itself of the false dependencies. So they created MapReduce — a set of operations and a way to store the data for those operations while preserving the natural independence that is inherent in each problem, building the whole mess atop the Google File System.

Google led the way but many other companies have followed suit, opening doors to a wide range of new ways of thinking about large-scale data manipulation. Suddenly there are different ways to store the data, new ways to write applications, and new places (thousands of cheap boxes) to run such applications.

I don't know much about Etelos, but I find this much curious: Before joining Etelos, Garon was CFO at a company called Tripath Technology. Garon quit in 2006, and Tripath filed for bankruptcy last year. Etelos hired Garon a year ago, and opened up an office in San Mateo. In April, Etelos went through what's called a reverse merger with Tripath, whose shares still traded over the counter — a somewhat messy maneuver to give Etelos a public listing at a time when few tech companies were going through conventional IPOs.

Oh, and Garon seemed easy with money when it came to burnishing his image; our tipster said he spent $155,000 of the company's cash on a "diamond sponsorship" at the Web 2.0 Expo conference, which gave him a speaking slot as a perk. Anyone know more?

A GE spokesperson who did not want to be identified said their decision was based around issues of personal and corporate privacy, functionality, support, features and Zoho won hands down. The spokesperson said the Google application was intrusive and the ads started to become a nuisance.

Here's Foley's description:

Albany consists of 2007 version of Office Home and Student; Office Live Workspace, Microsoft's collaboration-service complement to Office; Windows Live OneCare, Microsoft's consumer security/backup service; and three Windows Live services — Live Mail, Live messenger and Photo Gallery. The bundle will be delivered via a single installer. When Microsoft releases new versions of any of these software or service components, Albany users will get the latest versions pushed to them automatically for as long as they are paying for the Albany subscription.

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• Office-productivity software that can be had for $119 at Amazon.com, but is likely already installed on a user's computer.
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• A "collaboration" service most home users will have no need for
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• Windows Live OneCare, a PC-security and maintenance service which Microsoft already sells as a subscription
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• Three Web services Microsoft already offers for free
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Microsoft hasn't specified what they'll charge, but lets assume they don't plan to lose money. A discounted copy of Office runs $119; OneCare costs $49.95 a year. Office Live Workspace is in beta, so Microsoft's not charging yet. Still, let's call it $15 a month. I can't see consumers paying that much for a package they mostly already have.

In "Albany," Microsoft has picked a perfect codename: a byword for bureaucratic waste, dysfunction, and corruption. As in New York's capital, someone needs to clean house. And as in New York's capital, it's not going to happen.