Podcast: SF power outage, Apple earnings, mashups and more...

Admittedly, earthquake prone San Francisco isn't the most stable location for a data center, but you would at least expect 365 Main, which calls itself the "developer and operator of the world’s finest data centers," to have its back-up generators kick in properly. Unfortunately, the hosting provider didn't have its act together (see Rich Miller's post on what went wrong at 365 Main).

David also offers his vision for the future of middleware and desktop computing. Widgets, mashups, APIs and connectors will make it far easier and cheaper to assemble useful programs and services. He cited Apatar's open source data integration tools and services, which allow users to design a workflow via drag and drop for exchanging data between files, databases and applications and services, such as RSS feeds, Amazon's S3, without any coding.

On the desktop computing front, David predicts that in the near future, the flavor of operating system will be less relevant as browser-based computing become more mainstream. The poll on his blog indicates that most people don't believe that desktop operating systems will be irrelevant by 2010.

Finally, David and I rant about self-check out systems at stores like Home Depot.

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