- 12 Months with MongoDB (Worknik) — every type of retrieval got faster than their old MySQL store, and there are some other benefits too. They note that the admin tools aren’t really there for MongoDB, so “there is a blurry hand-off between IT Ops and Engineering.” (via Hacker News)
- Dawn of a New Day — Ray Ozzie’s farewell note to Microsoft. Clear definition of the challenges to come: At first blush, this world of continuous services and connected devices doesn’t seem very different than today. But those who build, deploy and manage today’s websites understand viscerally that fielding a truly continuous service is incredibly difficult and is only achieved by the most sophisticated high-scale consumer websites. And those who build and deploy application fabrics targeting connected devices understand how challenging it can be to simply & reliably just ‘sync’ or ‘stream’. To achieve these seemingly simple objectives will require dramatic innovation in human interface, hardware, software and services. (via Tim O’Reilly on Twitter)
- A Civic Hacktivism Abecedary — good ideas matched with exquisite quotes and language. My favourite: Kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight. (via Francis Irving on Twitter)
- UI Guidelines for Mobile and Web Programming — collection of pointers to official UI guidelines from Nokia, Apple, Microsoft, MeeGo, and more.
"cloud computing" entries
Four short links: 26 October 2010
NoSQL Experience, Connected Future, Hacktivism, and Mobile UI Guidelines
ECPA reform: Why digital due process matters
The shift to cloud computing puts Electronic Communications Privacy Act reform in the spotlight.
Academics, technology companies, and privacy and civil liberties advocates are in agreement: the laws governing electronic privacy need an update. In these video interviews, four professors and the ACLU counsel reflect on "digital due process."
"Spontaneous collaboration" and other lessons from the private sector
Padmasree Warrior on the tools and technology governments should harness.
In this wide-ranging interview, Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior weighs in on smart cities, how the signal-to-noise ratio of social media can be managed, and why open government — if done right — can improve the speed and quality of decisions.
Mobile, desktop or cloud: Where does the future of open source lie?
Stormy Peters on her biggest cloud concerns and how mobile will shape open source.
In this Q&A, OSCON speaker and GNOME foundation executive director Stormy Peters discusses the risks of cloud computing, the continued importance of desktop computing, and the interesting relationship between new mobile form factors and free software adoption.
On the performance of clouds
A study ran cloud providers through four tests. Here's some of the results.
Bitcurrent and Webmetrics ran five cloud providers through a series of tests: a small object, a large object, a million calculations, and a 500,000-row table scan. Here's some of the results and lessons learned.
Cloud computing saves L.A. millions in IT costs
Los Angeles CTO Randi Levin on why her city moved into Google's cloud.
Nobody will end up with a completely SaaS model, says Randi Levin, at least not in the next couple of years. "What I do see is that most organizations are going to end up in a hybrid world where you have some on-site infrastructure; you have some hosted infrastructure, and you have some SaaS."
White House moves Recovery.gov to Amazon's cloud
Recovery.gov will be the first government website to be hosted within Amazon.com's public cloud.
Big Data shakes up the Speech Industry
I spent a few hours at the Mobile Voice conference and left with an appreciation of Google's impact on the speech industry. Google's speech offerings loomed over the few sessions I attended. Some of that was probably due to Michael Cohen's keynote1 describing Google's philosophy and approach, but clearly Google has the attention of all the speech vendors. Tim's recent…
Four short links: 12 April 2010
Cloud Privacy, Copyright Quirks, Checklist Mania, and Phone Phacts
- Freedom in the Cloud — great talk by Eben Moglen on privacy and freedom in an age of networked services with centralised logs. What do we need? We need a really good webserver you can put in your pocket and plug in any place. In other words, it shouldn’t be any larger than the charger for your cell phone and you should be able to plug it in to any power jack in the world and any wire near it or sync it up to any wifi router that happens to be in its neighborhood. It should have a couple of USB ports that attach it to things. It should know how to bring itself up. It should know how to start its web server, how to collect all your stuff out of the social networking places where you’ve got it. It should know how to send an encrypted backup of everything to your friends’ servers. It should know how to microblog. It should know how to make some noise that’s like tweet but not going to infringe anybody’s trademark. In other words, it should know how to be you …oh excuse me I need to use a dangerous word – avatar – in a free net that works for you and keeps the logs. You can always tell what’s happening in your server and if anybody wants to know what’s happening in your server they can get a search warrant.
- An Observation on the Copyright Battles — this line from a comment on that blog is very good: What a pity international governments don’t seem to be able to make an agreement to ration finite resources like tuna, atmospheric carbon or fossil fuels, but instead devote their time to making an international agreement enforcing controls over something that costs no resources to copy. (via Glynn Moody)
- Definitive PHP Security Checklist — I’ve been in love with checklists since reading Atul Gawande’s fantastic essay on the subject (now a book) . Now I’m seeing them everywhere.
- Small, Cheap, and Not American (NY Times) — article about the future of the phone, pointing to the flowering powerful applications in the developing world; applications that the US does not have. Notable mainly for this factoid: The number of mobile subscriptions in the world is expected to pass five billion this year, according to the International Telecommunication Union, a trade group. That would mean more human beings today have access to a cellphone than the United Nations says have access to a clean toilet. (via the wonderful BoingBoing)
Imagine a world that has moved entirely to cloud computing
For April Fools Day: a short story about a rare skill: Hardware
Guy.