The battle for the cloud

Andy Kessler has a great op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, The War for the Web:

Microsoft was smart to walk away (for now) from its $44 billion bid for Yahoo. It's never good to overpay. But the software giant - whose stock has flatlined for eight years - was onto the right strategy in looking to the Web for growth....

With the Microsoft/Yahoo deal breakdown, everyone assumes Google walks away with the prize. Not so fast. This contest is just starting. For Microsoft or Google or anyone else to win, they need four key elements of an end-to-end strategy:

- The Cloud. The desktop computer isn't going away. But as bandwidth speeds increase, more and more computing can be done in the network of computers sitting in data centers - aka the "cloud."...

- The Edge. The cloud is nothing without devices, browsers and users to feed it....

- Speed. - Speed. Once you build the cloud, it's all about network operations....

- Platform. ...Having a fast cloud is nothing if you keep it closed. The trick is to open it up as a platform for every new business idea to run on, charging appropriate fees as necessary....

Andy's analysis is all in those ellipses. Succinct, on-point, and refreshingly insightful about the true drivers of Web 2.0. And I can't help pointing out that the Wall Street Journal has now noticed the fundamental premise of our Velocity conference: "Once you build the cloud, it's all about network operations."

If Velocity were a movie, don't you think that quote might be on the movie poster?

Fermi's Paradox and the End of Cheap Oil

I've been thinking of Fermi's Paradox since I saw the documentary film A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash, with its dire predictions of the wars and disruptions that could occur on the downward slope of the Hubbert curve. While I remain an optimist about the power of human ingenuity to surmount enormous challenges, I have enough sense of history to know that catastrophes do happen, that societies fail to make the right choices, and that civilizations fail.

What if the answer to Fermi's paradox is not the absence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, but merely the absence of high technology? The movie makes the case that the extraordinary flowering of our society has been driven by our profligate use of oil as an incredibly cheap energy resource -- and one that won't last. With haunting images of once vibrant oil fields that are now ghost towns, the movie is a thought-provoking counterpoint to An Inconvenient Truth. If the movie's contentions are correct, we're truly caught between Scylla and Charybdis. Either global warming or peak oil will lead to an urgent transformation of civilization as we know it, or our failure to transform quickly enough might well lead to the end of civilization as we know it. And if indeed cheap oil is a prerequisite to the first flowering of technological civilization, might a Roman-Empire-style collapse due to some future disaster make it difficult to rebuild to spaceflight-capable levels due to lack of said resource the next time around? Many of the large scale energy technologies that we imagine replacing oil are energy intensive to build. They are, in a sense, themselves dependent on oil.

The idea that peak oil is far from a fringe idea was brought home by a recent NY Times story, For Exxon Mobil, $10.9 Billion Profit Disappoints:

...even as it posted the second-most profitable quarter in its history, Exxon’s earnings managed to disappoint investors because of a drop in oil production. Shares closed down $3.37, to $89.70, on a day the Dow industrial average rose 189.87 points.... Record oil prices have lifted corporate profits to new heights throughout the industry but they are also masking an increasingly tough business environment for international oil companies, marked chiefly by rising development costs and stagnating hydrocarbon production.

The connection between the idea of Peak Oil and Fermi's paradox came back to mind after I read Nick Bostrom's piece in Technology Review, Why I hope the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing.

...the evolutionary path to life-forms capable of space colonization leads through a "Great Filter," which can be thought of as a probability barrier. (I borrow this term from Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University.) The filter consists of one or more evolutionary transitions or steps that must be traversed at great odds in order for an Earth-like planet to produce a civilization capable of exploring distant solar systems. You start with billions and billions of potential germination points for life, and you end up with a sum total of zero extraterrestrial civilizations that we can observe. The Great Filter must therefore be sufficiently powerful--which is to say, passing the critical points must be sufficiently improbable--that even with many billions of rolls of the dice, one ends up with nothing: no aliens, no spacecraft, no signals. At least, none that we can detect in our neck of the woods.

Now, just where might this Great Filter be located? There are two possibilities: It might be behind us, somewhere in our distant past. Or it might be ahead of us, somewhere in the decades, centuries, or millennia to come.

Bostrom's provocative thesis is this: once we find evidence of primitive life elsewhere, we've narrowed the likelihood that the Great Filter is behind us, and increased the likelihood that it is still ahead of us, in some unknown disaster to come:

The other possibility is that the Great Filter is still ahead of us. This would mean that some great improbability prevents almost all civilizations at our current stage of technological development from progressing to the point where they engage in large-scale space colonization. For example, it might be that any sufficiently advanced civilization discovers some technology--perhaps some very powerful weapons tech nology--that causes its extinction.

Bostrom speculates about everything from nuclear war to gray goo to germ warfare to asteroid strikes as the locus of possible Great Filters. While diminished access to readily available natural resources after a crash of civilization is, like all of these other scenarios, merely food for thought, it seems to be a thought worth sharing. In any event, I recommend the movie.

Missed Twitter Questions from Jonathan Schwartz Interview at Web 2.0 Expo

In the Jonathan Schwartz interview at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco yesterday, I screwed up. After learning we weren't set up for audience Q&A with microphones, I thought, "well then, I'll just suggest to the audience that they twitter questions @timoreilly, and I'll check my phone during the interview." I kept checking, but no questions. Bummer. Not till I heard complaints afterwards that I hadn't asked any of the questions did I do a little digging, and discover that I had twitter set to show me only @ replies from people I'm following. Bad idea.

To all of you in the audience, a big apology for the screwup.

However, I did collect all the questions after the fact, and forward them on to Jonathan to answer by email. The questions and Jonathan's answers are below. I've presented it as if it were a twitter interview, snarfing up the questions from tweetscan, and then getting Jonathan's twitter image from his own feed. [Another big oops: that isn't really Jonathan's twitter feed. Will take out links till I get the correct one. Thanks to Scott Ruthfield for the heads up.] But in reality, he answered the questions by email, after I sent him the whole group in one email message.

triplebsoul : question for Sun " how is sun planning to balance environmental issues with scaling computing needs (power consumption, etc) "
2008-04-25 12:32:48

JonathanSchwartz: Sun's going to stretch the limits of engineering and our collective imagination to make the world's most efficient datacenter infrastructure - from OpenSolaris power management, to Blackbox datacenters. And although that's obviously important to our business, and to the planet, what matters most in managing environmental risk is the world's appetite for power - if that continues along the pace it is, we can slow the growth of power demand through datacenter innovation, but I doubt we can stop it. Every 100,000,000 new PC's in the world creates the need for many, many, many megawatt power plants.

cynthiagentry : ask JIS about the role of academia in the future of Sun, and in the future of Web 2.0
2008-04-25 12:32:46

JonathanSchwartz: It's hugely important. The majority of the world's change agents, media consumers and entrepreneurs graduate from universities every year. There's a reason Sun stands for "Stanford University Network." That's the world from which we spawned, that's the world we focus on with open source technology (you might remember we just concluded an agreement with the People's Republic of China's Ministry of Education to build a national curriculum around OpenSPARC and OpenSolaris - made possible by our IP being free and open...).

Sierralog : Question to Jonathan: Did you ever assess the success of you corporate blogging in terms of "ROI" and if so, how? Thx
2008-04-25 12:31:51

JonathanSchwartz: No. It just seemed like an IQ test. If I talk, people that are interested listen. If I don't speak up, they have nothing to hear.
 

amitc : Q for Jon: Beyond MySQL, Sun boxes and Java, what else does Sun has to offer Web Devs, PMs & Entrepreneurs?
2008-04-25 12:29:44

JonathanSchwartz: Um - that's certainly a good start, isn't it? :) I guess the majority of our focus within the next twelve months will be around our data management and storage offerings - starting with ZFS, and the potential of dual-licensing it under the GPL to see its growth within the Linux environment (alongside MySQL). As you'll see with our rolling out of network.com services, we plan on offering a ton of developer infrastructure as a service, as well.

buildakicker : How can this web2.0 help out or even work within the government?
2008-04-25 12:29:29
 

JonathanSchwartz: Hm - that's up to the government, no? We serve a lot of government customers, and they're very, very interested in network computing. Governments exist to serve the people. The people have internet connections. Put two and two together - you get governments interested in the web.

JesseStay : does he anticipate a fallout of original MySQL users or fork in the mysql code and how will they handle that if it does happen?
2008-04-25 12:26:30

JonathanSchwartz: I'm not anticipating a fork - Marten Mickos (SVP, Database Group at Sun, former CEO, MySQL) made some comments saying he was considering making available certain MySQL add-ons to MySQL Enterprise subscribers only - and as I said on stage, leaders at Sun have the autonomy to do what they think is right to maximize their business value - so long as they remember their responsibility to the corporation and all of its communities (from shareholders to developers). Not just their silo.

I think Marten got some fairly direct and immediate feedback saying the idea was a bad one - and we have no plans whatever of "hiding the ball," of keeping any technology from the community. Everything Sun delivers will be freely available, via a free and open license (either GPL, LGPL or Mozilla/CDDL), to the community.

Everything.

No exception.

coogle : One question I have for him is how the Sun acquisition of MySQL is going to impact the open source space and Sun long-term?
2008-04-25 11:12:36

JonathanSchwartz: It's going to open a flurry of doors for MySQL, and it's going to open a flurry of doors for Sun. It already has - as I said, the MySQL team just closed the single largest deal in the history of MySQL, a $10m deal to a global technology company. I'm pleased as punch with the progress we're making there, and we're deluged with inquiries from traditional enterprises (vs. Web 2.0 companies) wanting to know how to get enterprise support for a product they've used in development, but have, until now, not felt comfortable putting into commercial deployment. Now they feel comfortable deploying it - and we're right there with them to help make it happen.

And we're investing heavily to build a whole spectrum of products optimized for MySQL - stay tuned, you'll start seeing some amazing stuff.

rghanbari : For Jonathan Schwartz: What does Google app engine mean for Sun? Programming/deployment model makes Sun platforms irrelevant
2008-04-25 11:07:50

JonathanSchwartz: You know, one wonders how we can generate nearly $14,000,000,000 in revenue when I keep hearing technology x, y or z makes Sun irrelevant. Microsoft tells me MSN Search makes Google irrelevant. Not sure I buy that. OpenOffice doesn't make Microsoft Office irrelevant, either, it creates competition (that's why we have about 100,000,000 users!).

Competition's a good thing, it creates choice. Rumor has it developers like, and value, choice. Throw a sheep at me when that stops being true.

andrewsavikas : EC2 and AppEngine get a lot more attention that sun's grid (cloud) offerings. why is that? who's using sun's grid?
2008-04-25 11:05:47

JonathanSchwartz: Tons of high performance computing customers use our grid - we never targeted the mass developer. But stay tuned, you're going to see a lot more about network.com within the next 6 months.

GraemeThickins: Please ask Schwartz how much time he spends/day writing for his blog & how that's changed over past year; also, does he Twitter?
2008-04-25 11:03:33

JonathanSchwartz: Yes, I Twitter. No I won't tell you my user ID.

And the amount of time I spent writing my blog depends upon what I have to say, and what's going on in our business. It varies dramatically, unlike the amount of pressure I feel from the imaginary editor that sits on my shoulder telling me it's been two weeks since I've posted anything pithy.

mkrigsman: Ask Jonathan Schwatrz why IT departments are so scared of web 2.0 proliferation. Awkward question for him, but he's a big boy.
2008-04-25 11:02:10

JonathanSchwartz: The companies I talk to aren't scared of innovation, they're in love with it - it's a source of business value and competitive advantage. Companies scared of IT are likely to be buried by their competitors that aren't.

Sun's customers, bluntly put, are those that see IT as a weapon. Those that see it simply as a cost... good news, they'll be able to reduce their costs, given clouds and free services and labor arbitrage, to near zero. But we'll be far more focused on those delivering the network services to them that make that transition possible.

It reminds me of a discussion I had with the CIO of an oil company. He started the meeting by telling me "I don't understand why Sun's still around, IT's a commodity to me, who cares?" Until I reminded him his business just delivered more in quarterly profit than we delivered in annual revenue. And his business was built upon selling a...

Commodity. In his case, oil.

Commodities are where are all the money is, just ask Google, Verizon, Goldman, Sachs or Exxon. But commoidities also require R&D - those that couple the two, R&D and an ability to navigate commodity markets, tend to do rather well.

timoreilly: Thanks a lot for agreeing to take all these extra questions, Jonathan!
 
 

JonathanSchwartz Thanks, again, Tim - it's always a pleasure to hang out.

Bezos on innovation, customer-focus and long-term thinking

Business Week has a great interview with Jeff Bezos as part of their innovation issue. The interview is entitled How Frugality Drives Innovation, but Jeff talks about far more than frugality. Here's my favorite bit:

Q: Every company claims to be customer-focused. Why do you think so few are able to pull it off?
A: Companies get skills-focused, instead of customer-needs focused. When [companies] think about extending their business into some new area, the first question is "why should we do that—we don't have any skills in that area." That approach puts a finite lifetime on a company, because the world changes, and what used to be cutting-edge skills have turned into something your customers may not need anymore. A much more stable strategy is to start with "what do my customers need?" Then do an inventory of the gaps in your skills. Kindle is a great example. If we set our strategy by what our skills happen to be rather than by what our customers need, we never would have done it. We had to go out and hire people who know how to build hardware devices and create a whole new competency for the company.

Well worth a read. Another great line: "The key is to pick things that you think are really iimportant, and then focus on them." It seems obvious, but so few of us do it as consistently as we should!

Nice Slashdot Review of Programming Collective Intelligence

Checking the Amazon bestseller list recently, I was delighted to see Toby Segaran's Programming Collective Intelligence back among the top ten computer books on Amazon's Computer and Internet bestseller list. The book made it as high as #2 or #3 when it was published last year, but it's great to see it hitting the top of the charts again.

Turns out the jump was the result of a new Slashdot review of the book. (Publishers call this "the slashdot effect," as it continues to dwarf the impact of a review in any other publication, including such stalwarts as the New York Times, in driving book sales at Amazon.)

From the review:

Among the chief ideological mandates of the Church of Web 2.0 is that users need not click around to locate information when that information can be brought to the users. This is achieved by leveraging 'collective intelligence,' that is, in terms of recommendations systems, by computationally analyzing statistical patterns of past users to make as-accurate-as-possible guesses about the desires of present users....

Programming Collective Intelligence is far more than a guide to building recommendation systems. Author Toby Segaran is not a commercial product vendor, but a director of software development for a computational biology firm, doing data-mining and algorithm design (so apparently there is more to these 'algorithms' than just their usefulness in recommending movies?). Segaran takes us on a friendly and detailed tour through the field's toolchest, covering the following topics in some depth:

Recommendation Systems
Discovering Groups
Searching and Ranking
Document Filtering
Decision Trees
Price Models
Genetic Programming
... and a lot more

As you can see, the subject matter stretches into the higher levels of mathematics and academia, but Segaran successfully keeps the book intelligible to most software developers and examples are written in the easy-to-follow Python language. Further chapters cover more advanced topics, like optimization techniques and many of the more complex algorithms are deferred to the appendix.

I'm particularly pleased to see this book do so well, because it shows that there is still real demand for books on substantial technology topics rather than just new releases of popular consumer products that increasingly dominate the Amazon lists. It's also a great reminder to people that Web 2.0 as a technology means far more than just lightweight consumer apps funded by advertising -- a theme that we'll be hitting hard at next week's Web 2.0 Expo.

Nice Take on Web 2.0 Expo from Information Week

It's among the most satisfying part of my job to seed new ideas, see them spread, take root, and eventually flower. In the process, they often morph into something unexpected, hopefully richer and better than originally imagined. But sometimes they take disappointing side-turns. So, for example, seeing Eric Schmidt equate web 2.0 to Ajax was disappointing. Especially since he went on to describe "Web 3.0" as small applications loosely connected and distributed virally, with data in the cloud, able to run on any device (my "software above the level of a single device") -- all things I'd originally described in my What is Web 2.0? paper. But it's great to see a media story get it right.

In Information Week'sWeb 2.0 Expo preview, Thomas Claburn got it just right:

The Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2008, which runs April 22 through April 25 comes at an inflection point in this rapidly growing arena. Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), one of the major players in the Web 2.0 space, stands on the brink of being acquired by Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT). Meanwhile, the U.S. economy is sluggish, which limits the capital available to Web 2.0 startups. Indeed, four years after the term "Web 2.0" entered the industry vernacular, many forward-looking innovators are focused on mobile services and Web 3.0, also called the Semantic Web.

Nevertheless, the conceptual underpinnings of Web 2.0, the Web as a platform, have proven to be sound. It might even be fair to say that Web 2.0 has won.Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Microsoft, and Yahoo are busy building upon the Web as a platform, along with thousands of startups and other large companies like Adobe (NSDQ: ADBE), IBM (NYSE: IBM), Oracle (NSDQ: ORCL), and Sun.

Yet there remains a need to explore Web 2.0 in a conference format because some of its major issues remain unresolved...

The article goes on to outline some of those big, unresolved issues covered in the conference: user control of data, privacy, security, the nature of "open" in an always-on and connected world, the importance of integrating new mobile and semantic web applications, business models beyond advertising, especially in a world in which Web 2.0 platforms are becoming serious business infrastructure. Good stuff. This should be the best Web 2.0 conference yet.

Precisely because we're getting through the giddy stage of "everything ajax, everything advertising," and returning to an understanding that the internet as platform means far more than that, there is more innovation today than there was last year, even as some of the froth seems to abate. Web 2.0 is becoming real for mainstream business in a way that was unthinkable only a few years ago. As Claburn said, "Web 2.0 has won." Everyone understands that this is the new game, not just something for consumer startups. Everyone in the computer industry, everyone in mainstream business, needs to learn the new rules, exploit the new opportunities, and help to invent the future.

This is a better time to be an internet entrepreneur than in the giddiest moments of 2006 and 2007. More real work is getting done, more real problems solved, than at any time since we first called out the resurgence of the Web in 2003/2004 with the name Web 2.0.

Publishers Beware: Amazon has you in their sights

While I was wrong the other day about Google's AppEngine being a lock-in play (see the comments on that post), I don't think I'm wrong that Amazon has serious plans for vertical integration of the publishing industry. Having got retailers on the ropes, they now are aiming at publishers. From a Publisher's Weekly article entitled As Amazon soars, bookstores creep:

With Amazon's growing power in book sales, it's understandable that publishers may be a bit anxious on learning that in Amazon's 10-k filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company lists among its many competitors not just bookstores but also publishers.

Amazon has seemingly embarked on a number of strategies to lock-in both consumers and publishers.

It is a free-market economy, and competition is the name of the game. But as Amazon's market power increases, it needs to be mindful of whether its moves, even those that may be good for the company in the short term, are ultimately destructive of the ecosystem on which they depend. I believe that they are heading in that direction, and if they succeed with some of their initiatives, they will wake up one day to discover that they've sown the seeds of their own destruction, just as Microsoft did in the 1990s.

At O'Reilly, we have a motto: "Create more value than you capture." It's a wise motto for companies far bigger than we are to adopt. If you do that, you ensure a healthy ecosystem. If you capture more value than you create, watch out, because stagnation is on the way.

Amazon has, so far, created huge value for the publishing ecosystem. Now, as they become more powerful, they need to be especially watchful that they don't irreparably damage an industry on which they too depend.

Is Google App Engine a Lock-in Play?

Venture capitalist Brad Feld just put up an intriguing post comparing Google App Engine to Amazon EC2. The meat of the entry is from an analysis by Brad's friend Scott Moody. Here are the juiciest bits, pro and con:

With EC2, you still have to set-up load balancers, configure multiple replicated database servers, implement scalability hacks if things grow too fast (such as distributed caching of data via memcached), keep distros and apps up-to-date, etc. Bottom Line: EC2-based companies still require sys admins, AppEngine companies don't. That will certainly change as more companies begin offering EC2 server management services.

Google provides a non-relational datastore and that's the only datastore available (no traditional file system, no relational databases). With EC2, people generally use MySQL or Postgresql. Amazon offers a non-relational datastore called SimpleDB, but it's a bit *too* simple. For example, it does not support sorting of results sets. Huh? That makes it non-workable in my opinion. There's also an issue with using EC2 virtual machines for your database servers -- Amazon says that when a virtual machine crashes, all the data managed by it disappears, so virtual machine crash = hard drive crash.

With EC2, programmers can use any (non-Microsoft) language to develop their apps. AppEngine users must code in Python. Also, Google does not support sockets at this time. All cross-app communication must be done via HTTP.

At *this* moment in time, it would be difficult to move apps off of AppEngine. Doing that in EC2 is trivial. This, to me, is the biggest issue, as I believe it could make startups less-interesting from an acquisition perspective by anyone other than Google. This will most likely change as people develop compatibility layers. However, Google has yet to provide any information about how to migrate data from their datastore the best I can tell. If you have a substantial amount of data, you can't just write code to dump it because they will only let any request run for a short period before they terminate it.

This last point is really very serious. I've been warning for some time that the first phase of Web 2.0 is the acquisition of critical mass via network effects, but that once companies achieve that critical mass, they will be tempted to consolidate their position, leading ultimately to a replay of the personal computer industry's sad decline from an open, energetic marketplace to a controlled economy.

Now it may be that this is a temporary oversight, and that Google does intend, long term, to make it easy for developers to export their applications. After all, Eric Schmidt says he reminds his employees all the time, "Don't fight the internet." But it's also possible that this is one more sign that one of the big guys is forgetting the principles -- the internet as a platform (not "my company as a platform"), harnessing the power of user contribution (which as John Musser pointed out means that you always "pay the user first"), small pieces loosely joined-- that brought their success in the first place.

Keeping the internet as an open platform is a choice. We didn't understand what was happening to the PC ecosystem, but we've seen this movie before, so we should recognize and fight this plot line when we see it happen on the internet. We need to keep our cloud services vendors honest, and tell them we want an open, interoperable platform, not one based on lock-in.

Of course, as some wag said, "the only thing we learn from history is that people don't learn from history."

P.S. There's some further good discussion on the lock-in issue in a Q&A about AppEngine put together by Stephen O'Grady.

Worldwide Social Network Market Share

Via Azeem Azaar's twitter feed, a great visualization of worldwide social network market share, from Le Monde:

Getting the iPhone Open Source Tool Chain Up and Running

Tomorrow at 10 am pacific time, oreilly.com is hosting a free webcast with Jonathan A. Zdziarski, one of the original hackers of the iPhone and author of iPhone Open Application Development. From the announcement:

Jonathan will demonstrate how you can use the iPhone open source tool chain to design third-party software that will run on on both today's iPhones, and on iPhones that will soon be running Apple's next version of firmware based on the official SDK. Jonathan will demonstrate on a Mac running Leopard.

Introducing Jonathan will be Brian Jepson, executive editor for Make Magazine's Make:Books series, co-author of Mac OS X Tiger for Unix Geeks and a number of other geeky books, and iPhone hacker at large.

This is your opportunity to hear expert advice on building applications for the iPhone and ask questions of the experts themselves.

Attendance is limited, so register now. We'll send you a reminder before the webcast.

Date: Thursday, April 3 at 10am PDT (17:00 GMT)
Cost: Free
Duration: 30-45 minutes
Meeting link: oreilly.com/go/webcast-iphone
Teleconference dial-in:
(select the number that is closest to your location)
East Coast US: +1 617 231-0350 and pin 8136507
West Coast US: +1 213-455-0500 and pin 8136507

Some people might wonder why we published a book on the open source toolchain when an official SDK has already been announced. (I wondered that myself :-) We started the book before Apple had learned from the first hackers that people wanted more out of the phone and announced the open API. But why didn't we just hold off on publishing it, modify it for the official API, and release it when the time comes (supposedly sometime in June) when the official API is open for business? The answer is threefold.

1. We believe strongly that hackers mark off the natural paths that official developer programs later pave over and make safe for the less adventurous. Smart companies know this, and pay attention to their hackers. (Google Maps is a great case in point. It became the mapping platform of choice because, rather than shutting down the early mashup hackers, it quickly figured how to pour fuel on the fire that they'd started.) We think that despite the official disapproval, Apple knows that the hacker interest in the iPhone is a great boost to their program and their goals. (Witness the fact that the Apple store in Cambridge MA allowed Jonathan to present on open iPhone development in a meeting at the store.)

2. The open API has a great deal of overlap with the official API. So getting up and running with the open toolchain will help developers get a head start. But it's also more powerful than the official toolchain, and will let developers continue to push Apple in interesting new directions. Jonathan wrote:

   With the introduction of the Apple SDK, developers gauged its functionality based on a comparison to the unofficial, open source SDK released last August. In the process of building this custom, open source compiler for the iPhone, the development community exposed the many low-level APIs (application programming interfaces) available on the device. Using tools such as class-dump, nm, and just plain old trial-and-error gave developers access to the full breadth of functionality available deep within the iPhone's frameworks. It was used to write applications that could look and act just like Apple's preloaded software, so when Apple announced that their SDK was "the same set of tools," many expected that it would look and feel like the open tool chain. Very few had anticipated the many restrictions they've come to find in the official SDK. While roughly 75% of the two SDKs do overlap, the remaining 25% has shown to be very restrictive, removing the developer's ability to do "the real fun stuff" with their application.

3. The demand was there. The number of slots in the official API program is far smaller than the apparent demand. We published the book, and it sold out immediately, indicating that we were right. We do plan to update the book with information about the official API as soon as the Apple NDA is lifted, but for now, we are eager to fuel the fire, since we believe that the iPhone is one of the most important new platforms in the market today, and one that developers should be exploring as deeply (and as soon) as possible.

See also Jonathan's article on the O'Reilly Network about open API development for the iPhone for more information about the difference between the two APIs, and why developers need to know about both. We're also planning to have a strong open mobile development track at OScon.

MySQL User Conference Registration Up 32%

I was interested to note that as of this morning, attendee registration numbers for the MySQL User Conference (which O'Reilly co-produces with MySQL) are up 32% over the same period last year. This seems to be a good sign that the community is energized by MySQL's acquisition by Sun.

The conference takes place April 14-17 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. Among other things, we'll be hearing from Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun, about Sun's open source strategy (presumably including their plans for MySQL), as well as a deep technical program with tracks including Storage Engine Development and Optimization, MySQL Cluster and High Availability, Replication and Scale-Out, Security and Database Administration, Performance Tuning and Benchmarks, Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence, Web 2.0, Ajax, and Emerging Technologies, MySQL on .Net and Windows, and of course, MySQL and PHP.

It's shaping up to be a great conference.

Wattzon.org - How much energy we consume and what to do about it

Saul Griffith has published a version of his talk at ETech as a website, wattzon.org.

Saul's key points: Solving global warming is an engineering problem. We know the connection between greenhouse gases and global warming, and can determine just how much carbon we're allowed to put into the atmosphere to give us the temperature we can live with. The answer isn't pretty. He looks at it from both a personal point of view (how do I need to change my lifestyle to use only my fair share of the global carbon allowance) and from a global policy point of view (what are the available sources of clean energy, how big are they, and what is the scale of the industrialization effort required to harness them?)

From Wattzon:

The average American uses 11400 Watts of power continuously. This is the equivalent of burning 114 x100 Watt light bulbs, all the time. The average person globally uses 2255 Watts of power, or a little less than 23 x100 Watt light bulbs.

What are the consequences of us all using this much power?

What is the implied challenge of global warming in terms of how we produce power?

What are the things we do as individuals in terms of using power that we might change?

Wattzon.org hosts a document that gives us a framework for thinking about these challenges, and how we might change our behaviours as individuals as well as our collective behaviour as societies and global citizens, if we are to meet the great challenge of the 21st century - how to live in a world where we increasingly understand the resources to be finite, and the consequences of our actions complex & inter-twined.

What temperature do we set climate change at? What CO2 concentration does this imply we need to aim at? How much power can we get from fossil fuels while still meeting this goal? How much power do we need to install and produce from non-carbon technologies? What does this mean for countries, corporations, and individuals?

Click a lightbulb to continue.

(See also Ethan Zuckerman's great summary of Saul's talk and the video interview done by TechwebTV.)

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• Shelly Farnham on What Makes Facebook Apps Work on March 14, 2008
• Perl mailing lists added to Markmail archive on March 13, 2008
• Laptop penetration in Brazil, rising developer count in China on March 12, 2008
• Fabulous Eulogy for Gary Gygax on March 10, 2008
• Nice Visualization of Candidates' Speeches on March 9, 2008
• Why I Love Hackers on March 7, 2008
• Neuroscience and Epistemology at ETech on March 7, 2008
• ETech 2008 Coverage Roundup on March 6, 2008
• A big spike for The Big Switch on March 5, 2008
• Online Advertising Undervalued? on February 21, 2008
• Take the Money and Run? I think not. on February 20, 2008
• Thomas Jefferson as Inventor and Maker on February 18, 2008