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| XML, web and software in general |
RSS Feed URL : http://www.novak.com/weblog/categories/xmlTech/rss.xml
Category : Developer News
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The Globus Consortium Journal: Overview of Virtualization Technology in Distributed Computing workshop. "Among the highlights was an interesting paper from Intel dissecting the
performance of Xen networking. A wonderful adoption scenario was
represented in the work from the University of Marburg where
suspend/resume properties of VMs are being used to improve backfill
strategies in the local scheduler - computations running in VMs are
simply suspended when a large parallel job is scheduled to run and
resumed afterwards. The remarkable part of this work was that it was
very much requirement-driven and has been voted into production by
users. Another interesting talk came from the Australian Partnership
for Advanced Computing (APAC) described their experiences using virtual
machines in production Grids for a couple of years now."
The endowment effect, the 9X problem and collaboration: Nice summary from HBS. "the "endowment effect" [is when] we value items in our possession more than prospective items that could be in our possession, especially if the prospective item is a proposed substitute. We mentally compare having the prospective item to giving up what we already have (our 'endowment'), but because we're loss averse giving up what we already have (our reference point) looms large.
And Gourville points out three factors that make the situation worse for product developers who want their offerings to succeed. First is timing: adopters have to give up their endowment immediately, and only get benefits sometime in the future. Second, these benefits are not certain; the new product might not work as promised. Third, benefits are usually qualitative, making them difficult to enumerate and compare. ..
Because of all of the above, Gourville talks about the '9X problem' -- "a mismatch of 9 to 1 between what innovators think consumers want and what consumers actually want."1 The 9X problem goes a long way to explaining the tech industry folk wisdom that to spread like wildfire a new product has to offer a tenfold improvement over what's currently out there...
Email is a channel technology. It creates a private conduit between the sender and receiver. Other parties don't know that the email was sent, and can't consult its contents. Wikis, del.icio.us, Flickr, Myspace, Facebook, and YouTube, on the other hand, are all platform technologies. They accumulate content over time and make it visible and accessible to all community members. [They also foster emergence, where structure emerges rather than being imposed by "groupware" products.] .. So the new tools are not direct substitutes for email; instead, they're intended to provide capabilities that email can't. Will they succeed? It depends heavily, I believe, on whether companies and their managers want technology platforms for collaboration. This desire will be an important factor in solving email's 9X problem. "
How To Tell The Open Source Winners From The Losers: A 9-point checklist for evaluating open source solutions:
- "A thriving community: A handful of lead developers, a large body of contributors, and a substantial--or at least motivated--user group offering ideas.
- Disruptive goals:Does something notably better than commercial code. Free isn't enough.
- A benevolent dictator: Leader who can inspire and guide developers, asking the right questions and letting only the right code in.
- Transparency: Decisions are made openly, with threads of discussion, active mailing list, and negative and positive comments aired.
- Civility: Strong forums police against personal attacks or niggling issues, focus on big goals.
- Documentation: What good's a project that can't be implemented by those outside its development?
- Employed developers: The key developers need to work on it full time.
- A clear license: Some are very business friendly, others clear as mud.
- Commercial support: Companies need more than e-mail support from volunteers. Is there a solid company employing people you can call? "
Eleven Emerging Ideas for SOA Architects in 2007: Good listing of how web services are actually succeeding today. "This is where the World Wide Web continues to teach us effective techniques for service consumption and adoption. .. This is using the basic Web formats and protocols such as HTTP, XML, REST, and JSON as the "Unix Pipe of the Web" -- to quote a colorful phrase of Ray Ozzie's -- as the fundamental glue between systems. This allows widgets, Ajax applications, and mashups to be wired together so quickly it can almost be done in real-time with the latest tools."
d y n e : b o l i c -- a free multimedia studio in a GNU/Linux live CD: "You don't need to install anything, you don't even need an harddisk .. Download the ISO-image, burn your own CD, reboot your machine and you'll get back true love ;^)
dyne:bolic is shaped on the needs of media activists, artists and creatives as a practical tool for multimedia production: you can manipulate and broadcast both sound and video with tools to record, edit, encode and stream, having automatically recognized most device and peripherals: audio, video, TV, network cards, firewire, usb and more; all using only free software ..
It is optimized to run on slower computers, turning them into a full media stations: the minimum you need is a pentium1 or k5 PC 64Mb RAM and IDE CD-ROM, or a modded XBOX game console - and if you have more than one, you can easily do clusters.
dyne:bolic is RASTA software released free under the GNU General Public License. This software is about Digital Resistance ina babylon world which tries to control the way we communicate, we share our interests and knowledge." Integrating many multimedia tools, running with minimal system installation, doing automatic clustering for quick render farms: sounds real interesting.
Amazon S3 vs DreamHost: Good comparison of cheap generic hosting versus Amazon's robust storage service. The reader comments make many excellent points.
Web Applications 1.0: A framework for rich applications enabled by javascript in the browser. I'm told it's backed by Google, Apple, Mozilla, and Opera, among others.
SSH for Java: Lots of implementations of SSH clients in Java, under proprietary, GPL, or BSD lisences.
Wind Blade Technology: I started looking into sustainable energy in 2001, and found an active community that was open to sharing its findings and that was starting to use the internet to communicate. As I learned about RSS and weblogs, I thought that this area, like many in the IT world, would see weblogs grow, and with them a spontaneous division of labor to speed the spread of new developments would emerge. Blogs from universities, corporations, development institutions, non-profits, and from motivated independents would identify and highlight findings that mattered in specialized areas, and others who would otherwise search original sources would save time and effort by reading their blogs.
In the last 12 months, that dynamic has taken hold in sustainable energy. Starting in 2001, I kept a blog collecting important results I discovered in emerging energy technologies and developing country energy options, but now I find others are keeping close track and I can just follow their investigations. They include venture capitalists, investment companies, and independent engineers.
The Wind Blade blog (above) from six employees of Owens-Corning is an advanced example. They work in different countries, but all concentrate on the materials from which the blades of wind turbines are built. They write: "We accept the value of renewable wind energy as a given and we are
committed to helping it become more cost competitive and widely used." They work in a specialized but critical technology. Why? Well, the output of a wind turbine is proportional to the area swept by its blades, which is the square of the length, so even small increases in blade length matter. Longer blades need materials that are strong, light, and rigid enough to turn in moderate winds while flexible enough to bend rather than break in strong winds. New materials for blades continue to make wind power more economically compelling every year.
It will be interesting to see if these bloggers find an audience among other engineers, and if they retain their corporate backing.
Jyve Pro: "Everyone's an expert at something .. How to make money by talking on Skype." Service that integrates billing and directory listing for voice-based services, like translation, coaching, computer help desk, etc. Via Skype Journal. I wonder if Nuance's latest, well-reviewed Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 software could be integrated for some services as well. (NaturallySpeaking 9 is the first version of any voice recognition program that seems to get good results without having to train the program to each user's voice.)
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