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CellNode M100 is a unique WiFi device which enables providers to securely deploy wireless mesh networks. Every CellNode features two radio transceivers that support the 802.11a/g/b standards. The first radio usually serves local wireless subscribers (downlink) at 2.4Ghz, while the second radio is used to connect to the infrastructure backbone (uplink) at 5Ghz.

The structure of a BOOK would look like this: …BOOK/ ……index.html ……images/ ………cover.png ……css/ ………base.css ………skins/ …………modern.css …………classic.css …………nouveau.css ……scripts/ ………prototype.js ………base.js ………extensions.js

As for the Javascript, it’s based on the ECMAScript standard, which has evolved into a strongly-typed, object-oriented programming language and is one of the few web “standards” which really is a standard. BOOK authors will welcome the addition of a scripting language, as it is NOT currently supported in the IDPF specifications. In fact, it’s forbidden for .epub reading systems to execute scripts. It’s also forbidden for them to display a file called index.html without first loading and parsing several other files.

Live Mesh is supposed to be a common framework to enable cross-device interoperability. It also includes a bunch of shared services that can be used from any Mesh-compatible device, such as network storage space and photo-sharing services, among others (others likely include many of the “Live” properties) . This makes sense given the direction that the world is moving in, with an ever-growing proliferation of computing devices both on one’s person and within the home that, currently, are too much like islands of processing power. A true mesh platform that standardized cross-device communication and synchronization in the same way HTML / CSS / Javascript has standardized user interfaces on the web would surely be a step forward from an IT evolutionary standpoint. Perhaps it was a Freudian slip, but I think the use of the term “standard” was the essential part of the previous sentence. Microsoft won’t get anywhere if they tried to peddle a closed-protocol environment to developers in 2008.

Watching the grand convergence of the desktop, the server, devices, and the Web. Topics addressed include events and emerging trends in universal interoperability, standards development, SOA, Clouds, Web-Stacks, RIA run-times, etc.

Watching the grand convergence of the desktop, the server, devices, and the Web. Topics addressed include events and emerging trends in universal interoperability, standards development, SOA, Clouds, Web-Stacks, RIA run-times, etc.

simply: Microsoft is launching a synchronization platform that the company claims is technology-agnostic. That absolutely is not true. Live Mesh is Microsoft's attempt to turn operating system and proprietary services platforms into hubs that replace the Web. It's the most anti-Web 2.0 technology yet released by any company. Microsoft is building a services-based operating system that transcends and extends Windows and also the function of Web browsers. It's bold, brilliant and downright scary. Microsoft has identified the right problem, synchronization, but applied a self-serving solution.

The services platform doesn't seek to keep the Web as the hub, but replace it with something else. The white paper is wonderfully misleading, by implying that Microsoft supports the Web as the hub. Live Mesh is the hub.

Live Mesh is competitively important to Microsoft because of companies like Google, whose services shift computational and informational relevancy from desktop software to the Web. But there is something missing as data spreads out across the Web platform to millions of devices: simple synchronization.

Live Mesh brings that to life, as product director Mike Zintel explains on the brand new Live Mesh blog: “[It] blend[s] the web, Windows and other computing endpoints in a way that preserves the ‘it just works’ feel of the web with seamless integration into my common workflows. The coolest thing about Live Mesh is how it smashes the abrupt mental switch that I have to make today as I move between being ‘on the web’ and ‘in an application’.” At first glance, that may seem a perfectly reasonable and innocuous statement — and indeed it is, if you take a Web-centric view of the world — but coming out of Microsoft, it’s dynamite. Instead of seeing the Web as an extension of the desktop, it includes the desktop as part of the continuum of the Web. Where then does the application sit? Not on the desktop, or on any identifiable server machine, but simply in the mesh. In other words, it becomes a service, capable of running anywhere in the cloud, including on the desktop.

“The core philosophy is to make it easy to manage information in a world where people have multiple computing experiences (i.e. PCs and applications, web sites, phones, video games, music and video devices) that they use in the context of different communities (i.e. myself, family, work, organizations) …” “At the core of Mesh is [the] concept of a customer’s mesh, or collection of devices, applications and data that an individual owns or regularly uses.

Office Live will bring Office to the web, and the web to Office. We will deliver new and expanded productivity experiences that build upon the device mesh vision to extend productivity scenarios seamlessly across the PC, the web, and mobile devices. Individuals will seamlessly enjoy the benefits of each - the rich, dynamic editing of the PC, the mobility of the phone, and the work-anywhere ubiquity of the web. Office Live will also extend the PC-based Office into the social mesh, expanding the classic notion of "personal productivity" into the realm of the "inter-personal" through the linking, sharing and tagging of documents. Individuals will have a productivity centric web presence where they can work and productively interact with others. This broadly extended vision of Office is being realized today through Office Mobile and Office Live Workspace on the web, augmented by SharePoint, Exchange, and OCS for the connected enterprise.

The "race to the bottom" is a familiar phenomenon that occurs when multiple standards compete for acceptance. In this environment, the most lenient standard usually attracts the greatest support (acceptance, usage, and so on), leading to a competition among standards to be less stringent. This also tends to drive competing standards toward the minimum possible level of quality. One key prerequisite for a race to the bottom is an unregulated market because regulators mandate a minimum acceptable quality for standards and sanction those who don't comply.1,2 In examining current HTML standards, we've come to suspect that a race to the bottom could, in fact, be occurring because so many competing versions of HTML exist. At this time, some nine different versions of HTML (including its successor, XHTML) are supported as W3C standards, with the most up-to-date being XHTML 1.1. Although some versions are very old and lack some of the newer versions' capabilities, others are reasonably contemporaneous. In particular, HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 both have "transitional" and "strict" versions. Clearly, the W3C's intent is to provide a pathway to move from HTML 4.01 to XHTML 1.1, and the transitional versions are steps on that path. It also aims to develop XHTML standards that support device independence (everything from desktops to cell phones), accessibility, and internationalization. As part of this effort, HTML 4.01's presentational elements (used to adjust the appearance of a page for older browsers that don't support style sheets) are eliminated in XHTML 1.1. Our concern is that Web site designers might decline to follow the newer versions' more stringent formatting requirements and will instead keep using transitional versions. To determine if this is likely, we surveyed the top 100,000 most popular Web sites to discover what versions of HTML are in widespread use.

Cloud providers and mainstay enterprise software vendors could make sweeter WOA plus SOA music together. They may not have a choice. If Microsoft acquires Yahoo!, there will be a huge push for Microsoft Oriented Architecture that will double-down on “software plus services.” And MSFT combined with Yahoo would have an awful lot in place to work from — from the device and PC client, to the server farm, business applications, developer tools and communities, and ramp-up of global cloud/content/user metadata resources. I think Microsoft already understands the power of WOA plus SOA.

The cloud that can manage data in way that allows both user-level and process-level access, with granular permissioning — and allows CXOs to feel good about it all — gets the gold ring. The cloud business is a 50-year business.

OM MALIK: You outlined Microsoft’s software-plus-services strategy, but what I want to know about is the changing role of the desktop in this service’s future. RAY OZZIE: I think the real question is (that) if you were going to design an OS today, what would it look like? The OS that we’re using today is kind of in the model of a ’70s or ’80s vintage workstation. It was designed for a LAN, it’s got this great display, and a mouse, and all this stuff, but it’s not inherently designed for the Internet. The Internet is this resource in the back end that you can design things to take advantage of. You can use it to synchronize stuff, and communicate stuff amongst these devices at the edge. A student today or a web startup, they don’t actually start at the desktop. They start at the web, they start building web solutions, and immediately deploy that to a browser. So from that perspective, what programming models can I give these folks that they can extend that functionality out to the edge? In the cases where they want mobility, where they want a rich dynamic experience as a piece of their solution, how can I make it incremental for them to extend those things, as opposed to learning the desktop world from scratch?

Imagine (not for long will it be ephemeral) an information bus that orchestrates the signaling of text, rich media, calendar, communications, transaction, and group location status under a social graph umbrella based in part on user-controlled behavior aggregation (gestures). Now imagine what Google needs to do to match this architecture and its overwhelming lead in connectors to existing hardware via Windows. Google’s answer for now is no. There’s no need to attack Mesh directly, but rather continue to iterate on Officenomics while retaining its dominant leads in user credibility and advertiser cloud. But Microsoft can efficiently hybridize Google and other microbig services with the Mesh layer added, creating information bus fail-over to multiple streams (virtual devices) to insure enterprise levels of reliability and security.

The web as we knew it in 1995 has already largely died. Out of the ashes has arisen a second incarnation and we are currently on the verge of a new reality, Web 2.0. While there is no one definition, Web 2.0 is perhaps best described as the migration to the web as a platform spanning all connected devices, coupled with a specific set of patterns. Web 2.0 has many components, but it is generally associated with a class of web applications that harness the intelligence, data, and actions of their users to create value (iconic Web 2.0 applications include Flickr, YouTube, and Amazon). While many are looking to Web 2.0 to solve the problems of yesteryear, the mass migration is creating a new set of problems that must be addressed. This article is divided into three parts: an analysis of the web today, an analysis of what has already died or is dying, and a look forward at aspects of Web 2.0 that are creating problems and will likely die in the next five years.