Racklabs TechTalk: CouchDB featuring Jan Lehnardt Part 1

Most data is not inherently relational. CouchDB takes this idea and provides a data storage model that easily accommodates modern applications’ needs. Instead of doing the equivalent of manual memory management in a database, splitting all data up...

Racklabs TechTalk: CouchDB featuring Jan Lehnardt Part 1 @ Yahoo! Video

KEATING ECONOMICS: John McCain & The Making of a Financial Crisis

Inside Chrome: The Secret Project to Crush IE and Remake the Web

Blogged and edited using Chrome. It's great! -- MG

Inside Chrome: The Secret Project to Crush IE and Remake the Web
Why is Google building a browser? A better question is, why did it take so long for Google to build a browser? After all, as Pichai says, "our entire business is people using a browser to access us and the Web."
"The browser matters," CEO Eric Schmidt says. He should know, because he was CTO of Sun Microsystems during the great browser wars of the 1990s. Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin know it, too. "When I joined Google in 2001, Larry and Sergey immediately said, 'We should build our own browser,'" Schmidt says. "And I said no."
It wasn't the right time, Schmidt told them. "I did not believe that the company was strong enough to withstand a browser war," he says. "It was important that our strategic aspirations be relatively under the radar." Nonetheless, the idea persisted — and rumors percolated. After a 2004 New York Times article quoted "a person who has detailed knowledge of the company's business" saying a browser was in the works, Schmidt had to publicly deny it.
But behind the scenes, the subject remained a running argument between Schmidt and the founders. As a kind of compromise, Google assembled a team to work on improvements for the open source browser Firefox, spearheaded by browser wizards Ben Goodger and Fisher. (Both had worked with Mozilla, the nonprofit organization behind Firefox.) Another hiring coup came when Linus Upson, a 37-year-old engineer whose pedigree includes a stint at NeXT, signed up as a director of engineering. "This was very clever on Larry and Sergey's part," Schmidt says, "because, of course, these people doing Firefox extensions are perfectly capable of doing a great browser."
Sure enough, in the spring of 2006, the Firefox group began talking among themselves about designing a new app. They loved Firefox — but they recognized a flaw in all current browsers.

Google browser takes advantage of Apple Software

Google browser takes advantage of Apple Software

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California (Reuters) - Google Inc's new browser software is designed to work "invisibly" and will run any application that runs on Apple Inc's Safari Web browser, company officials said on Tuesday.

The company said the new Web browser, dubbed Google Chrome -- a long-anticipated move to compete with Microsoft Corp, Mozilla Firefox and other browsers -- would be available for users to download on Tuesday at 3:00 p.m. EDT.

The public trial of the Google browser will be available in 43 languages in 100 countries, Sundar Pichai, Google's vice president of product management said at a news conference at the company's Mountain View, California headquarters.

"If you are Webmaster, and your site works in Apple Safari then it will work very well in Google Chrome," Pichai said.

Google Chrome relies on Apple's WebKit software for rendering Web pages, he said. It also has taken advantage of features of community developed browser Firefox from Mozilla Corp. Google is a primary financial backer of Mozilla. Google officials said Chrome's code would be fully available for other developers to enhance.

Why Amazon’s EBS Should Worry Data Centers

Why Amazon’s EBS Should Worry Data Centers
Om Malik, Thursday, August 21, 2008 at 5:30 AM PT Comments (7)
Related Stories

* Persistent Storage Boosts Amazon Web Services; Enterprise Ambitions
* Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO
* The Cloud Grows Up

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Amazon has announced Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), a persistent storage offering that can be used in tandem with applications using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). With this move, it is turning up the heat on everyone from storage area network vendors, server companies and of course data center operators. Don’t be surprised if the company starts attracting corporations using its suite of web services.

With EBS, developers can deploy scalable solutions including relational databases, distributed file systems and Hadoop processing clusters. EBS is more adept for working with databases, as well apps that require a file system. You can now start and stop just like you would on a traditional physical server. This is a play for larger, corporate customers, a move that is long time coming.

First, some facts about the service:

* EBS volumes can be anwhere from 1 GB up to 1 TB.
* As a beta customer, you can create 20 EBS volumes with a total of 20 Terabytes.
* EBS costs storage plus I/O requests: $0.10 per GB per month & $0.10 per million I/O requests.
* EBS functionality is available via EC2 API using any number of tools, including command line and Elasticfox.

A great addition to Amazon EC2.

Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) - Bring Us Your Data

A few months ago I talked about our plans to offer a persistent storage feature for Amazon EC2. At that time I indicated that the service was in a limited alpha release with a small number of customers. Since then the alpha testers have been putting the service to good use and have provided us with a lot of very helpful feedback.

As of today, the Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is now open and available to all EC2 users.
EBS gives you persistent, high-performance, high-availability block-level storage which you can attach to a running instance of EC2. You can format it and mount it as a file system, or you can access the raw storage directly. You can, of course, host a database on an EBS volume. In fact, Eric Hammond has already written an article, Running MySQL on Amazon EC2 with Elastic Block Store.

Welcome! - TinEye

Welcome! - TinEye: "TinEye is an image search engine built by Id�e currently in beta. Give it an image and it will tell you where the image appears on the web."

tap tap tap ~ (Semi)Final numbers for July

We’ve finally received our financial reports for the month. At this time, we’re still missing some territories, such as Canada, but overall the US overwhelmingly makes up the bulk of the sales (>90%) so the final-final numbers won’t vary by much.

Where To?

• what it is: makes your iPhone behave more like a real GPS device by helping you find points of interest around you
• price: $2.99
• number sold: 24,094
• gross sales: $72,041.06
• net sales: $50,597.40
• more info: at the App Store

Tipulator

• what it is: the tip calculator that’s actually fun to use
• price: 99¢
• number sold: 3,168
• gross sales: $3,136.32
• net sales: $2,217.60
• more info: at the App Store

So the total sales for the month was $75,177.38 and after Apple’s cut, we ended up with a grand total of $52,815.

The sales are reported for the period of June 29th to August 2nd. But because the App Store opened July 10th, the period is actually 24 days. So over the course of those days we took in an average of around $2,200 per day.

Six Reasons iPhone Delivers Where Android Won t - Webmonkey

Six Reasons iPhone Delivers Where Android Won t - Webmonkey

While we wait, the question remains: is the operating system any good? You can bet Google’s existing mobile applications, like Maps, will work in parity with iPhone, Blackberry and Symbian equivalents (Even better, in some instances; The SDK includes a version of Google’s streetview feature unavailable in current software versions on other platforms). We’re pretty sure the thing will make a decent phone call. The browser looks to work just like a desktop browser, with all the typical mobile Safari-like zooms and taps. But can it compete with other current mobile software?

We’ve talked before about what Android might have that the iPhone won’t. Since Android has become a (semi) reality, let’s flip the script for a moment and take a look at what the iPhone has now which Android may be missing.

Apple: A better stock than Google? � mathewingram.com/work |

Apple: A better stock than Google? � mathewingram.com/work |

It’s become so commonplace now to think of Apple as a consumer products star — given the success of the iPod, iTunes and the iPhone — that I think we sometimes forget how far this company has come in just the past four or five years. Google has grown a phenomenal amount in that same span of time, with a share price that has increased five-fold, going from $100 to the current $500 level, and revenues that are now at $20-billion. Apple, however, makes Google’s growth look almost anemic by comparison: its shares have grown 10-fold, from about $16 to more than $170 at their current level, and revenue is at $30-billion.

ongoing � REST Questions

ongoing � REST Questions: "My goodness, there’s certainly a lot of REST talk these days. I’m partly responsible; Paul Krill and I had a long talk at OSCON and he chose to pull out my dissing WS-* for his title: Sun technologist: SOAP stack a ‘failure’. This led to an incredibly long discussion thread on Yahoo Groups’ (irritatingly-named) “service-orientated-architecture” forum. Damien Katz was another provocateur, firing off REST, I just don't get it and “The web is built on REST. Therefore REST is good” Bullshit. This provoked Dare Obsanjo to a burst of restrained pedagogy in Explaining REST to Damien Katz. Let me stir this pot with a few questions, some vaguely heretical in flavor."

Better than Photoshop & GIMP

Better than Photoshop & GIMP: "The new art program from microsoft brings revolutionary innovation and ease of use absolutely free!"

Robot Exclusion Protocol (Ftrain.com)

Robot Exclusion Protocol (Ftrain.com)

This is quite old (circa 2002) but astonishingly prescient.

I took off my clothes and stepped into the shower to find another one sitting near the drain. It was about 2 feet tall and made of metal, with bright camera-lens eyes and a few dozen gripping arms. Worse than the Jehovah's Witnesses.

“Hi! I'm from Google. I'm a Googlebot! I will not kill you.”

Information and energy at John Quiggin

Information vs Energy: "According to the US Internet Industry Association, the volume of information transmitted over the Internet backbone rose from 1.5 million GB (petabytes) in 1995 to 700 petabytes in 2006, or roughly a factor of 500 in 10 years. In comments, Ikonoklast reports a five-fold increase in global energy use over 50 years. Over the same period, Brad Delong estimates a tenfold increase in global output. That is, the rate of growth of information greatly exceeds (and leads) the rate of economic growth, while energy use has declined relative to output. This is unsurprising, given that no fundamentally new energy technology (except for the so-far unsuccessful nuclear power industry) has emerged in this time, while information technology has been repeatedly revolutionised."

Steve Jobs Admits MobileMe Launch Was A Failure : iSmashPhone

Steve Jobs Admits MobileMe Launch Was A Failure : iSmashPhone: "'It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store,' he says. 'We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.'

'The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services,' Jobs says. 'And learn we will. The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious, and we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year.'"

tap tap tap ~ Donkeys and Pickaxes

tap tap tap ~ Donkeys and Pickaxes: "We’ve gotten our sales reports from Apple for the iPhone App Store. And we’re going to take a fairly bold step and share our numbers with you.

But first I want to give you a little background about me and why I decided to do this…"

Paris Hilton responds to McCain's Obama "Celebrity" ad

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

Drizzle plans to wash away DBMS past | The Register

Drizzle plans to wash away DBMS past | The Register: "A new database management system (DBMS) designed for web applications and cloud computing could be the start of a new direction in DBMS development and, indeed, in software as a whole."

Handling Flash Crowds from your Garage

Excellent paper by Jeremy Elson and Jon Howell
of Microsoft Research

Handling Flash Crowds from your Garage: "The garage innovator creates new web applications which may rocket to popular success - or sink when the flash crowd that arrives melts the web server. In the web context, utility computing provides a path by which the innovator can, with minimal capital, prepare for overwhelming popularity. Many components required for web computing have recently become available as utilities.

We analyze the design space of building a load-balanced system in the context of garage innovation. We present six experiments that inform this analysis by highlighting limitations of each approach. We report our experience with three services we deployed in ``garage'' style, and with the flash crowds that each drew."

RConversation: Silicon Valley's benevolent dictatorship

great article this:

RConversation: Silicon Valley's benevolent dictatorship: "The guys running Google, Apple, Microsoft, and many other companies represented at the Fortune Brainstorm are the benevolent dictators of the global information and communications system. But can we assume they will always be benevolent?"