21CN: It's not the data saviour
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If there's more, we'll take more Column It does seem to be a rule of data processing that we use all we can get of it. As BT starts to test its 21st century networking (21CN) with partners like Entanet, it's a safe bet that this rule will mean the dream of universal high speed data will turn sour as people try to squeeze more data through a limited pipe.â¦
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Few precise details of the product are known although the company has been releasing tidbits of information.
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U.S. consumers don't want to pay for low-power, high-performance chip.
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When Amazon introduced S3 a couple of years ago I knew I would useit and I was sure a lot of other developers would. I saw it as a solution to a problem we all have -- storage that scales up when needed, and scales down when not. Otherwise we all have to buy as much bandwidth as we need in peak periods. With S3, you pay for what you use. It makes storage for Internet services more rational. Later they did the same for processors and queuing. And a couple of days ago they announced a lightweight scalable database, using the same on-demand philosophy and simple architecture and API. It's going to be a huge hit and forever change the way apps are developed for the Internet. I was explaining the significance of this to Scoble on the phone this morning. It's worth repeating here. When I developed Frontier in the late 80s and early 90s my target platform was a modern desktop computer, a few megabytes of RAM, a half-gig of disk, a few megahertz CPU. A system capable of running Quark XPress, Hypercard or Filemaker. It would be used to develop apps that would drive desktop publishing. Later, it was used to generate static websites, then a demonstration of democracy (a multi-author ultra-simple CMS), then news sites, which became weblogs, then blogs, and editthispage.com, Manila, weblogs.com, and that's when scaling became an issue. (Later we side-stepped the scaling issue by moving most of the processing to the desktop with Radio 8.) As we approached then cracked ease of use in web authoring, scaling became an issue, then the issue. A Manila server would work fine for a few thousand sites, but after that it would bog down because the architecture couldn't escape the confines of a single machine it was designed for in the 80s. (Before you say it's obsolete, there still are a lot of apps for single machines. Perl, Python, JavaScript and Java share the same design philosophy.) Same with weblogs.com. It worked great when there was a few thousand blogs. Once we hit 50K or so, we had to come up with a new design. Eventually we were tracking a couple million, and Frontier was hopelessy outclassed by the size of the problem. If only Amazon's database had been there, both Manila and weblogs.com could have been redesigned to keep up. It would have been a huge programming task, but it would have made it economically possible.  Today, when a company raises VC, it's probably because their app has achieved a certain amount of success and to get to the next level of users they need to spend serious money on infrastruture. There's a serious economic and human wall here. You need to buy hardware and find the people who know how to make a database scale. The latter is the hard problem, the people are scarce and the big companies are bidding up the price for their time. Now Amazon is willing to sell you that, to turn this scarce thing into a commodity, at what likely is a very reasonable price. (Haven't had time to analyze this yet, but the other services are.) Key point, the wall is gone, replaced with a ramp. If you coded your database in Amazon to begin with you will never see the wall. As you need more capacity you have to do nothing, other than pay your bill.  Further, the design of Amazon's database is remarkably like the internal data structures of modern programming languages. Very much like a hash or a dictionary (what Perl and Python call these structures) or Frontier's tables, but unlike them, you can have multiple values with the same name. In this way it's like XML. I imagine all languages have had to accomodate this feature of XML (we did in Frontier), so they should all map pretty well on Amazon's structure. This was gutsy, and I think smart.  They're going down a road we went down with XML-RPC and then SOAP. There may be some bumps along the way but there are no dead-ends, no deal-stoppers. All major environments can be adapted to work with this data structure, unless I'm missing something (standard disclaimers apply). Their move makes many things possible. As I said earlier, if it existed when we had to scale weblogs.com, we would certainly have used it. One could build an open identity system on it, probably in an afternoon, it would be perfect for that. A Twitter-like messaging system, again, would be easy. It's amazing that Microsoft and Google are sitting by and letting Amazon take all this ground in developer-land without even a hint of a response. It seems likely they have something in the works. Let's hope there's some compatibility.
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Data tracking and management policies lag behind the risk involved with mobile devices.
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TechWeb - Those that know what they're talking about see EII as extending the data warehouse -- not replacing it.
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By Lesser, Amichai Liebmann, Lenny  How do you compare solutions for your network? Here's one metric.
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That's not all. Microsoft also has new tools geared to help cut costs of managing corporate data.
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We won't call it a racket, but megapixels are no longer an accurate gauge of a camera's quality. By SeÃ¡n Captain from Wired Test.
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What happens when ubiquitous computing renders us mere searchable, mappable, traceable specks of data? Commentary by Momus.
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Don't take big chances with your money -- look for SIPC protection.
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(InfoWorld) - If Werner Heisenberg had pursued business analytics in the early 21st century instead of quantum physics in the early 20th, he might have struck on a different uncertainty principle: If your analysis and decision-making capabilities don't keep pace with the explosion of critical event data across enterprise networks today, soon you won't know the state of your business, the direction it's heading, or how fast it's getting there.Â  A host of technology companies are working on the science behind taking these measurements. Perhaps the newest of these event stream processing or complex event processing vendors is Amalgamated Insight, a Silicon Valley startup founded on work led by co-founder and CTO Michael Franklin at U.C. Berkeley, where Franklin is a professor of computer science. Amalgamated is just emerging from stealth mode and may have a new name by the time you read this. The seed of Amalgamated was planted in Franklin's frustration at what he considered wrong-headed approaches to the analysis problem. Many seemed to think that analyzing event streams -- be they RFID events from sensor networks, service events from SOA networks, system events from traditional networks, events from financial markets, or other kinds of electronic transactions -- was merely a matter of plumbing. If you could just get this device talking with that device, you would somehow enable pervasive computing. "And my view," Franklin recalls, "was that once you solved the plumbing problems, what you've got is a data management problem. Because you've got huge volumes of data being created all over the place. Lots of applications need that data, and lots of users need insight into what's going on in these dispersed environments." Beyond the plumbing, others were trying to reinvent the wheel. Attending an RFID standardization meeting as a guest, Franklin listened as group after group, each working at a different level of the system, described the data at their level and how to access it. And he realized, each one was defining a data model and a query language, and each one was different. That's when the seed sprouted. "Sitting there as a database guy, I was just getting irritated," he says. "Jeez, why wouldn't you just use SQL for all of this stuff across all the levels? And on the way home from that meeting, I realized, well, you know, why don't I just do that." Amalgamated's three-part solution combines a stream processing engine, a Java-based integration framework, and a visualization front end based on Adobe Flex. Naturally, the processing engine, which is embedded into the open-source PostgreSQL database, uses SQL to continuously query events as they flow past. "It lets you write SQL queries that are basically always running," Franklin explains. "They're always producing the answer so far based on the data they've seen so far." To enable SQL to query infinite data streams, Amalgamated extended it in two ways, adding a windowing capability to restrict the amount of data it would be exposed to in any instant and adding some "syntactic sugar" to define event patterns you might want to inspect. The "continuous analysis" engine is adaptive, Franklin says, meaning you can add or remove queries on the fly. Amalgamated sees the decision to embed the core processing engine in Postgres not only as key to advancing the development effort, but also as a key differentiator in the marketplace. Franklin notes that it gave the solution complete SQL, JDBC, and ODBC interfaces, internationalization, and all of the extensibility of Postgres right out of the box. As Boyd Pierce, the company's president and CEO, points out, Postgres lets users of Amalgamated's engine to write SQL that joins tables and streams, provides subqueries and views, and does all the magic that SQL can do. Programmers already know how to code in it. "We got all that based on having Postgres," Pierce notes. "But the other thing we've found in dealing with customers in our application space is that if you don't have a relational database that speaks full SQL and lets people program, you're hugely disadvantaged in terms of doing what the customer needs." Noting that Postgres allowed Amalgamated "to jump in front of a 10-year database systems development curve," Franklin sees a larger lesson in building on the open-source database. "We really hit upon what I think is the future of enterprise software development," he concludes. "If you start from scratch today, if you're building anything complex, you're crazy. That's just not going to be a viable way to build enterprise software in the future. You're going to have to leverage open source and other available tools that are out there."
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I've not made much of a secret of the fact that I've been working on a new product, and am getting close to offering it as a public pre-alpha thing for Mac users only.  It's fairly Flickr-centric, sucking photos down from Flickr in a variety of ways and pushing up photos in others. Like Radio 8 and Google Reader, it has the ability to maintain an output feed of stuff you want to pass on to friends and associates. As I was developing this I wished that Flickr had the ability to store simple text files, because I needed a place to put an RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures on behalf of each user. Of course I used Amazon S3, but I had to implement my own lightweight identity system so that Juan couldn't accidentally or intentionally replace Alice's feed. If only every user had a place where they could store stuff that's net accessible so that once and for all we could stop inventing new places. I was inspired to write about this when I read an Uncov review of Pownce where they reminded me that they were reselling S3 storage at a big markup. What if the users had their own S3 storage that they paid for themselves?  Then it occurred to me to ask if people thought S3 could be an end-user thing. I'd like to find out, so if some non-technical users who have Amazon accounts would like to try setting up an S3 account, I'd be interested in hearing how it goes. Here's an idea of how you get started. 1. You must already have an Amazon account. Nothing special about it, if you buy shirts or books or stereo equipment from Amazon, you use the same account for S3 storage. Already that's pretty easy, millions of people have Amazon accounts, right? 2. Visit this page on Amazon, ignore all the stuff about objects and buckets. In the right margin is a big button that says "Sign up for this web service." Click the button. A very familiar page appears, asking you to sign into your Amazon account as if you were going to buy something (you are!). 3. From there, I'm not sure what you see, because I have already enabled my account. But the end result of signing up is that you get two strings with weird names: Your Access Key ID and Your Secret Access Key. Any software that would save a document in S3-space on your behalf would need these two strange strings. In return each document would have a URL just like any other document on the web. Nothing strange about that.  4. You could also use the space to store stuff using an FTP-like app that runs in Firefox called S3 Organizer. It's about as hard to use as the Mac Finder or the Windows Explorer, i.e. it's no challenge for a moderately geeky user. The cool thing about it is that you're able to share anything you upload into S3 space with anyone else. You can even use BitTorrent to access any file to save you bandwidth bills and distribute the load round the net. It's all very easy to do, imho. As a developer who has to pay for his users' storage needs I would very much like to see users learn how to use S3 to store their stuff, so I can focus on writing software and fixing bugs instead of paying to store your stuff.
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Blog: The video is safe, but the download mod it advertises is not.
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Fluery still roots for JBoss...Edward Tufte mostly likes iPhone interface...mysteries of Linux's /proc files...multicore compression...Actually *using* mammoth telephotos
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A few of my previous columns discussed my vision of creating a more secure Internet. It involved replacing the Internet's default anonymity with pervasive authentication, from the hardware initialization, through the OS and all applications, the user, and ending with a verifiable network stream. It is my strong belief that without a complete overhaul of default authentication, malicious hacking is going to continue indefinitely.
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Underpromising in order to overdeliver can't make up for sluggish operating results.