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Gary Edwards

SXSW: Big Browsers Butt Heads - AppScout - 0 views

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    From AppScout: ... "For the third year in a row, leading minds from the major browsers got together at SXSW Interactive to spar with one another over issues like Web standards and openness. As in years past, Mozilla's Brendan Eich, Microsoft's Chris Wilson, Opera's Charles McCathieNevile, and moderator Arun Ranganathan (also from Mozilla) were present, and this year they were joined by Google's Darin Fisher.

    As always, Apple was absent from the panel. Wilson told me that Apple is active in the standards discussion, but the company's famously closed corporate policy prevents Apple reps from participating in panels like this (almost every laptop I saw in the room was a Mac, so apparently the policy hasn't hurt them much). In any case, Safari's WebKit was represented by Chrome (Fisher), which is also built on WebKit....."

    AppScout does a great job of collecting some of the best snippets to come out of this panel discussion. Really though, how can anyone have a browser discussion without edge of the Web WebKit device browsers? And then there's this: the discussions today isn't about "browsers". It's about RiA platforms and how browsers are used to launch rich internet applications. Microsoft has XAML-Silverlight. Adobe has AiR-WebKit-SWF. And the Open Web has WebKit-HTML+. That's the battle!
Paul Merrell

The Cover Pages: Alfresco and Joomla Provide Integration Based on CMIS - 0 views

  • Alfresco Software and Joomlatools today announced the first integration based on Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS). The Alfresco:Joomla! integration module was built using the draft CMIS REST API to allow organizations running Joomla-based web sites to access Alfresco's robust open source content management repository.
  • The integration, built using the CMIS REST API, will enable millions of Joomla web sites to access the powerful back-end content repository services of Alfresco, ensuring security, compliance, and auditability. Users will be able to more effectively manage, preview and track increasing volumes of content and digital assets on collaborative Joomla web sites using Alfresco's content library. Similarly Alfresco users will be able to search, publish, share, download, and edit content directly on Joomla sites.
  • The proposed CMIS standard is currently being advanced by an OASIS technical committee and will enable anyone to develop content applications on open source Alfresco and deploy them on SharePoint, EMC, IBM, or OpenText. In September 2008, Alfresco released the industry's first draft implementation of the CMIS specification. The company has also recently made available the CMIS Developer Toolbox, which includes a working implementation and contains resources to assist developers in the CMIS community to start creating portable content applications, based on the draft specification.
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    Hey, maybe web apps will after all be able to hold two-way conversations some day? :-)
Gary Edwards

P&G Flirts with Google Apps and Scares the Bejesus Out of Microsoft | Advice and Opinion - 0 views

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    .. So MS CIO Turner flew to P&G's headquarters in Cincinnati in July, spent a day wooing P&G CIO Filippo Passerini, and left with a three-year contract, according to the Bloomberg article. How'd Turner do it? He "kept the contract by giving Passerini an early look at plans for Web-based systems and promising P&G the flexibility to shift between those and standard applications," ... Note that MS kept the contract with P&G by focusing on the ease of transitioning between MSOffice desktop apps and their new Web-based systems. Google Apps is ALL Web, and lack this transitional bridge to legacy desktops.
Gary Edwards

Microsoft's Quest for Interoperability and Open Standards - 0 views

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    Interesting article discussing the many ways Microsoft is using to improve the public perception that they are serious about interoperability and open formats, protocols and interfaces. Rocketman attended the recent ISO SC34 meeting in Prague and agrees that Microsoft has indeed put on a new public face filled with cooperation, compliance and unheard of sincerity.

    He also says, "Don't be fooled!!!"

    There is a big difference between participation in vendor consortia and government sponsored public standards efforts, and, actual implementation at the product level. Looking at how Microsoft products implement open standards, my take is that they have decided on a policy of end user choice. Their applications offer on the one hand the choice of aging, near irrelevant and often crippled open standards. And on the other, the option of very rich and feature filled but proprietary formats, protocols and interfaces that integrate across the entire Microsoft platform of desktop, devices and servers. For instance; IE8 supports 1998 HTML-CSS, but not the advanced ACiD-3 "HTML+" used by WebKit, Firefox, Opera and near every device or smartphone operating at the edge of the Web. (HTML+ = HTML5, CSS4, SVG/Canvas, JS, JS Libs).

    But they do offer advanced .NET-WPF proprietary alternative to Open Web HTML+. These include XAML, Silverlight, XPS, LINQ, Smart Tags, and OOXML. Very nice.

    "When an open source advocate, open standards advocate, or, well, pretty much anyone that competes with Microsoft (news, site) sees an extended hand from the software giant toward better interoperability, they tend to look and see if the other hand's holding a spiked club.

    Even so, the Redmond, WA company continues to push the message that it has seen the light regarding open standards and interoperability...."

Paul Merrell

US judge slams surveillance requests as "repugnant to the Fourth Amendment" - World Soc... - 0 views

  • Federal Magistrate Judge John M. Facciola denied a US government request earlier this month for a search and seizure warrant, targeting electronic data stored on Apple Inc. property. Facciola’s order, issued on March 7, 2014, rejected what it described as only the latest in a series of “overbroad search and seizure requests,” and “unconstitutional warrant applications” submitted by the US government to the US District Court for the District of Columbia. Facciola referred to the virtually unlimited warrant request submitted by the Justice Department as “repugnant to the Fourth Amendment.” The surveillance request sought information in relation to a “kickback investigation” of a defense contractor, details about which remain secret. It is significant, however, that the surveillance request denied by Facciola relates to a criminal investigation, unrelated to terrorism. This demonstrates that the use by the Obama administration of blanket warrants enabling them to seize all information on a person's Internet accounts is not limited to terrorism, as is frequently claimed, but is part of a program of general mass illegal spying on the American people.
  • Facciola’s ruling states in no uncertain terms that the Obama administration has aggressively and repeatedly sought expansive, unconstitutional warrants, ignoring the court’s insistence for specific, narrowly targeted surveillance requests. “The government continues to submit overly broad warrants and makes no effort to balance the law enforcement interest against the obvious expectation of privacy email account holders have in their communications…The government continues to ask for all electronically stored information in email accounts, irrespective of the relevance to the investigation,” wrote Judge Facciola. As stated in the ruling, the surveillance requests submitted to the court by the US government sought the following comprehensive, virtually limitless list of information about the target: “All records or other information stored by an individual using each account, including address books, contact and buddy lists, pictures, and files… All records or other information regarding the identification of the accounts, to include full name, physical address, telephone numbers and other identifies, records of session times and durations, the date on which each account was created, the length of service, the types of service utilized, the Internet Protocol (IP) address used to register each account, log-in IP addresses associated with session times and dates, account status, alternative email addresses provided during registration, methods of connecting, log files, and means of payment (including any credit or bank account number).”
  • Responding to these all-encompassing warrant requests, Judge Facciola ruled that evidence of probable cause was necessary for each specific item sought by the government. “This Court is increasingly concerned about the government’s applications for search warrants for electronic data. In essence, its applications ask for the entire universe of information tied to a particular account, even if it has established probable cause only for certain information,” Facciola wrote. “It is the Court’s duty to reject any applications for search warrants where the standard of probable cause has not been met… To follow the dictates of the Fourth Amendment and to avoid issuing a general warrant, a court must be careful to ensure that probable cause exists to seize each item specified in the warrant application… Any search of an electronic source has the potential to unearth tens or hundreds of thousands of individual documents, pictures, movies, or other constitutionally protected content.” Facciola also noted in the ruling that the government never reported the length of time it would keep the data, or whether it planned to destroy the data at any point.
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  • Facciola’s ruling represents a reversal from a previous ruling, in which a Kansas judge allowed the government to conduct such unlimited searches of Yahoo accounts.
  • In testimony, De and his deputy Brad Wiegmann rejected the privacy board’s advice that the agency limit its data mining to specific targets approved by specific warrants. “If you have to go back to court every time you look at the information in your custody, you can imagine that would be quite burdensome,” said Wiegmann. De further said on the topic, “That information is at the government’s disposal to review in the first instance.” As these statements indicate, the intelligence establishment rejects any restrictions on their prerogative to spy on every aspect of citizens lives at will, even the entirely cosmetic regulations proposed by the Obama administration-appointed PCLOB.
Gary Edwards

Can C.E.O. Satya Nadella Save Microsoft? | Vanity Fair - 0 views

  • he new world of computing is a radical break from the past. That’s because of the growth of mobile devices and cloud computing. In the old world, corporations owned and ran Windows P.C.’s and Window servers in their own facilities, with the necessary software installed on them. Everyone used Windows, so everything was developed for Windows. It was a virtuous circle for Microsoft.
  • Now the processing power is in the cloud, and very sophisticated applications, from e-mail to tools you need to run a business, can be run by logging onto a Web site, not from pre-installed software. In addition, the way we work (and play) has shifted from P.C.’s to mobile devices—where Android and Apple’s iOS each outsell Windows by more than 10 to 1. Why develop software to run on Windows if no one is using Windows? Why use Windows if nothing you want can run on it? The virtuous circle has turned vicious.
  • Part of why Microsoft failed with devices is that competitors upended its business model. Google doesn’t charge for the operating system. That’s because Google makes its money on search. Apple can charge high prices because of the beauty and elegance of its devices, where the software and hardware are integrated in one gorgeous package. Meanwhile, Microsoft continued to force outside manufacturers, whose products simply weren’t as compelling as Apple’s, to pay for a license for Windows. And it didn’t allow Office to be used on non-Windows phones and tablets. “The whole philosophy of the company was Windows first,” says Heather Bellini, an analyst at Goldman Sachs. Of course it was: that’s how Microsoft had always made its money.
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  • Right now, Windows itself is fragmented: applications developed for one Windows device, say a P.C., don’t even necessarily work on another Windows device. And if Microsoft develops a new killer application, it almost has to be released for Android and Apple phones, given their market dominance, thereby strengthening those eco-systems, too.
  • At its core, Azure uses Windows server technology. That helps existing Windows applications run seamlessly on Azure. Technologists sometimes call what Microsoft has done a “hybrid cloud” because companies can use Azure alongside their pre-existing on-site Windows servers. At the same time, Nadella also to some extent has embraced open-source software—free code that doesn’t require a license from Microsoft—so that someone could develop something using non-Microsoft technology, and it would run on Azure. That broadens Azure’s appeal.
  • “In some ways the way people think about Bill and Steve is almost a Rorschach test.” For those who romanticize the Gates era, Microsoft’s current predicament will always be Ballmer’s fault. For others, it’s not so clear. “He left Steve holding a big bag of shit,” the former executive says of Gates. In the year Ballmer officially took over, Microsoft was found to be a predatory monopolist by the U.S. government and was ordered to split into two; the cost of that to Gates and his company can never be calculated. In addition, the dotcom bubble had burst, causing Microsoft stock to collapse, which resulted in a simmering tension between longtime employees, whom the company had made rich, and newer ones, who had missed the gravy train.
  • Nadella lived this dilemma because his job at Microsoft included figuring out the cloud-based future while maintaining the highly profitable Windows server business. And so he did a bunch of things that were totally un-Microsoft-like. He went to talk to start-ups to find out why they weren’t using Microsoft. He put massive research-and-development dollars behind Azure, a cloud-based platform that Microsoft had developed in Skunk Works fashion, which by definition took resources away from the highly profitable existing business.
  • They even have a catchphrase: “Re-inventing productivity.”
  • Microsoft’s historical reluctance to open Windows and Office is why it was such a big deal when in late March, less than two months after becoming C.E.O., Nadella announced that Microsoft would offer Office for Apple’s iPad. A team at the company had been working on it for about a year. Ballmer says he would have released it eventually, but Nadella did it immediately. Nadella also announced that Windows would be free for devices smaller than nine inches, meaning phones and small tablets. “Now that we have 30 million users on the iPad using it, that is 30 million people who never used Office before [on an iPad,]” he says. “And to me that’s what really drives us.” These are small moves in some ways, and yet they are also big. “It’s the first time I have listened to a senior Microsoft executive admit that they are behind,” says one institutional investor. “The fact that they are giving away Windows, their bread and butter for 25 years—it is quite a fundamental change.”
  • And whoever does the best job of building the right software experiences to give both organizations and individuals time back so that they can get more out of their time, that’s the core of this company—that’s the soul. That’s what Bill started this company with. That’s the Office franchise. That’s the Windows franchise. We have to re-invent them. . . . That’s where this notion of re-inventing productivity comes from.”
  • Ballmer might be a complicated character, but he has nothing on Gates, whose contradictions have long fascinated Microsoft-watchers. He is someone who has no problem humiliating individuals—he might not even notice—but who genuinely cares deeply about entire populations and is deeply loyal. He is generous in the biggest ways imaginable, and yet in small things, like picking up a lunch tab, he can be shockingly cheap. He can’t make small talk and can come across as totally lacking in E.Q. “The rules of human life that allow you to get along are not complicated,” says one person who knows Gates. “He could write a book on it, but he can’t do it!”
  • At the Microsoft board meeting in late June 2013, Ballmer announced he had a handshake deal with Nokia’s management to buy the company, pending the Microsoft board’s approval, according to a source close to the events. Ballmer thought he had it and left before the post-board-meeting dinner to attend his son’s middle-school graduation. When he came back the next day, he found that the board had pulled a coup: they informed him they weren’t doing the deal, and it wasn’t up for discussion. For Ballmer, it seems, the unforgivable thing was that Gates had been part of the coup, which Ballmer saw as the ultimate betrayal.
  • what is scarce in all of this abundance is human attention
  • And the original idea of having great software people and broad software products and Office being the primary tool that people look to across all these devices, that’ s as true today and as strong as ever.”
  • Meeting Room Plus
  • But he combines that with flashes of insight and humor that leave some wondering whether he can’t do it or simply chooses not to, or both. His most pronounced characteristic shouldn’t be simply labeled a competitive streak, because it is really a fierce, deep need to win. The dislike it bred among his peers in the industry is well known—“Silicon Bully” was the title of an infamous magazine story about him. And yet he left Microsoft for the philanthropic world, where there was no one to bully, only intractable problems to solve.
  • “The Irrelevance of Microsoft” is actually the title of a blog post by an analyst named Benedict Evans, who works at the Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. On his blog, Evans pointed out that Microsoft’s share of all computing devices that we use to connect to the Internet, including P.C.’s, phones, and tablets, has plunged from 90 percent in 2009 to just around 20 percent today. This staggering drop occurred not because Microsoft lost ground in personal computers, on which its software still dominates, but rather because it has failed to adapt its products to smartphones, where all the growth is, and tablets.
  • The board told Ballmer they wanted him to stay, he says, and they did eventually agree to a slightly different version of the deal. In September, Microsoft announced it was buying Nokia’s devices-and-services business for $7.2 billion. Why? The board finally realized the downside: without Nokia, Microsoft was effectively done in the smartphone business. But, for Ballmer, the damage was done, in more ways than one. He now says it became clear to him that despite the lack of a new C.E.O. he couldn’t stay. Cultural change, he decided, required a change at the top, and, he says,“there was too much water under the bridge with this board.” The feeling was mutual. As a source close to Microsoft says, no one, including Gates, tried to stop him from quitting.
  • in Wall Street’s eyes, Nadella can do no wrong. Microsoft’s stock has risen 30 percent since he became C.E.O., increasing its market value by $87 billion. “It’s interesting with Satya,” says one person who observes him with investors. “He is not a business guy or a financial analyst, but he finds a common language with investors, and in his short tenure, they leave going, Wow.” But the honeymoon is the easy part.
  • “He was so publicly and so early in life defined as the brilliant guy,” says a person who has observed him. “Anything that threatens that, he becomes narcissistic and defensive.” Or as another person puts it, “He throws hissy fits when he doesn’t get his way.”
  • round three-quarters of Microsoft’s profits come from the two fabulously successful products on which the company was built: the Windows operating system, which essentially makes personal computers run, and Office, the suite of applications that includes Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Financially speaking, Microsoft is still extraordinarily powerful. In the last 12 months the company reported sales of $86.83 billion and earnings of $22.07 billion; it has $85.7 billion of cash on its balance sheet. But the company is facing a confluence of threats that is all the more staggering given Microsoft’s sheer size. Competitors such as Google and Apple have upended Microsoft’s business model, making it unclear where Windows will fit in the world, and even challenging Office. In the Valley, there are two sayings that everyone regards as truth. One is that profits follow relevance. The other is that there’s a difference between strategic position and financial position. “It’s easy to be in denial and think the financials reflect the current reality,” says a close observer of technology firms. “They do not.”
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    Awesome article describing the history of Microsoft as seen through the lives of it's three CEO's: Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and Satya Nadella
Paul Merrell

XForms for HTML: W3C Working Draft 19 December 2008 - 0 views

  • AbstractXForms for HTML provides a set of attributes and script methods that can be used by the tags or elements of an HTML or XHTML web page to simplify the integration of data-intensive interactive processing capabilities from XForms. The semantics of the attributes are mapped to the rich XForms model-view-controller-connector architecture, thereby allowing web application authors a smoother, selective migration path to the higher-order behaviors available from the full element markup available in modules of XForms.
  • This document describes XForms for HTML, which provides a set of attributes and script methods encompassing a useful subset of XForms functionality and mapping that functionality to syntactic constructs that are familiar to authors of HTML and XHTML web pages. The intent of this module is to simplify the means by which web page authors gain access to the rich functionality available from the hybrid execution model of XForms, which combines declarative constructs with event-driven imperative processing. These attributes and script methods increase the initial consumability of XForms by allowing injection of rich semantics directly into the host language markup. In turn, the behaviors of the attributes and script methods are mapped to the XForms model-view-controller-connector architecture so that applications manifest behaviors consistent with having used XForms markup elements. This allows authors to gradually address greater application complexity as it arises in the software lifecycle by opportunistically, i.e. as the need arises, switching from the attributes and script methods of this specification to the corresponding XForms markup elements. This gradual adoption strategy is being further supported by the modularization of XForms into components that can be consumed incrementally by authors and implementers.
Gary Edwards

Adamac Attack!: Evolution Revolution - 0 views

  • HTTP as a universal calling convention is pretty interesting. We already have tons of web services in the cloud using HTTP to communicate with one another - why not extend this to include local code talking with other components. The iPhone already supports a form of this IPC using the URL handlers, basically turning your application into a web server. BugLabs exposes interfaces to its various embedded device modules through web services. It has even been suggested in the literature that every object could embed a web server. Why not use this mechanism for calling that object's methods?
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    Given the increasing number of platforms supporting Javascript + HTTP + HTML5, it's not inconceivable that "write-once, run anywhere" might come closer to fruition with this combo than Java ever achieved. Here's how this architecture plays out in my mind. Javascript is the core programming language. Using a HTTP transport and JSON data format, components in different processes can perform RPCs to one another. HTML5 features like local storage and the application cache allow for an offline story (the latest build of Safari on iPhone supports this). And of course, HTML + CSS allows for a common UI platform.
Paul Merrell

W3C Public Newsletter, 2008-11-03 from W3C Newsletter on 2008-11-03 (w3c-announce@w3.or... - 0 views

  • The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group has published the "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0" as a Proposed Recommendation, and published updated Working Drafts of "Understanding WCAG 2.0," "Techniques for WCAG 2.0," and How to Meet WCAG 2.0. WCAG defines how to make Web sites, Web applications, and other Web content accessible to people with disabilities. Comments are welcome through 2 December 2008. Read the announcement, Overview of WCAG 2.0 Documents, and about the Web Accessibility Initiative. http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/ http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/PR-WCAG20-20081103/ http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/CR-UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20-20081103/ http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/CR-WCAG20-TECHS-20081103/ http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref/ http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/2008OctDec/0091 http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag20.php http://www.w3.org/WAI/
Gary Edwards

Is the Apps Marketplace just playing catchup to Microsoft? | Googling Google | ZDNet.com - 2 views

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Take the basic communication, calendaring, and documentation enabled for free by Apps Standard Edition, add a few slick applications from the Marketplace and the sky was the limit. Or at least the clouds were.
  • He also pointed to all of the applications in the Marketplace that seek to improve connectivity with Microsoft Office.
  • Payne predicted that we would see Microsoft accelerate ahead of Google in terms of productivity in the cloud while Google is still trying to achieve more desktop-application-style fidelity.
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  • Where Payne saw the Apps Marketplace as a validation of Microsoft’s dominance in the enterprise, Chris Vander Mey saw it as a validation of the open Web (and Google’s applications) as a powerful platform for development.
  • Microsoft is pushing hard to extend its productivity and enterprise dominance into the cloud while Google is looking to leverage its extensive, native web platforms.
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Project Maelstrom - 0 views

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    "Project Maelstrom aims on resolving this by attempting to create an open network of data sources, authentication methods, and applications. Unlike many other competing services, Maelstrom aims to create a comprehensive network of anything required for an individual web application to integrate with the internet as a whole. Just the connections, nothing more. We'll create the network; it'll be up to you to use it. We don't want to get in your way by attempting to compete. "
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Solid - 1 views

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    "Solid is an exciting new project led by Prof. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, taking place at MIT and the Qatar Computing Research Institute. The project aims to radically change the way Web applications work today, resulting in true data ownership as well as improved privacy. "
Gary Edwards

A Simpler Approach To SOA -- Web-Oriented Architecture -- InformationWeek - 1 views

  • Expanding the Influence of Content Management with Business Service Management Breaking down the silos: from change process to release automation
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    "Web-oriented architectures are easier to implement and offer a similar flexibility to SOA." Lengthy discussion concerning the WOA approach for the quick implementation of Web Application and Data bound services. Think the Comcast OpenSTack model :)
Paul Merrell

HTML 5 Draft Recommendation - 0 views

  • Draft Recommendation — 29 May 2008
  • Abstract This specification evolves HTML and its related APIs to ease the authoring of Web-based applications. Additions include the context menus, a direct-mode graphics canvas, inline popup windows, and server-sent events. Heavy emphasis is placed on keeping the language backwards compatible with existing legacy user agents and on keeping user agents backwards compatible with existing legacy documents.
    • Paul Merrell
       
      HTML 5 may "ease the authoring of Web-based applications," but has nothing to offer web app developers or users in the way of the interoperable interchange of web app page or sub-page content.
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Gary Edwards

Olympics set the stage for Web tech fight | Tech News on ZDNet - 0 views

  • Microsoft is approaching Silverlight from the opposite direction. It plans to take advantage of its legions of outside developers experienced in writing for its ubiquitous Windows operating system. The next version of Silverlight, being tested now and due later this year, will support Microsoft's .NET framework -- tools used by developers to create desktop applications that work on Windows.
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    Adobe vs. Microsoft Gartner analyst Ray Valdes said 90 percent of the top global 1,000 companies have yet to deploy any sort of RIA, while 90 percent of the top 100 consumer Web sites have already done so using the nonproprietary and more simple AJAX format. That opportunity has Microsoft eyeing current leader Adobe for business that extends beyond Silverlight and into the sale of design tools along with server and database software to enable these new applications.
Gary Edwards

Sun pitches new cloud as 'Open Platform' * - 0 views

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    Sun takes on the problem of interoperability and portability of applications in a world where there will be many many clouds. At the roll out of the Sun Cloud, key executives explain Sun's implementation of Open Cloud API's and what they see as a pressing need for management tools that will allow some standardization across clouds.

    Sun's Open Cloud API plan is a clean reuse of existing Open Web API's.

    "..... The underpinning of the Open Cloud Platform that Sun will be pitching to developers is a set of cloud APIs, the creation of which is focused under Project Kenai and which has been released under a Community Commons open source license. Sun wants lots of feedback on the APIs and wants these APIs to become a standard too, hence the open license. These APIs describes how virtual elements in a cloud are created, started, stopped, and hibernated using HTTP commands such as GET, PUT, and POST...."

    "...... The upshot is that these APIs will allow programmatic access to virtual infrastructure from Java, PHP, Python, and Ruby and that means system admins can script how virtual resources are deployed. The APIs, as co-creator Tim Bray explains in his blog, are written in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), not XML. The Q-Layer software is a graphical representation of what is going on down in the APIs, and you can moving virtual resources into the cloud with a click of a mouse using the dashboard or programmatically using the APIs from those four programming languages listed above. (PHP support is not yet available, but will be)....."
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    I can see why Sun picked those four languages first. Can I assume that with a bit of work, this API will be usable from any language with a C "foreign function interface", such as Perl, Common Lisp, Bourne shell, Squeak Smalltalk, and others that your server application might be written in?
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    I read this comment that largely answers my question at: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2009/03/16/Sun-Cloud "So right now JSON out of a shell tool is not so good. More things like this will create pressure for development of tools to change that, but years of widespread XML/HTML deployment have only produced a few oddly maintained tools. Perhaps that's because you can scrape quite a bit of the web with a couple sed passes, and if I were to have to deal with the mentioned tools, that's probably the route I'd take." (seth w. klein) In other words, with a bit of work, _anything_ that can talk text over HTTP can do this with a bit of work, but an object-oriented is likely to be more at home with JSON (JavaScript Object Notation)
Paul Merrell

Microsoft Pitches Technology That Can Read Facial Expressions at Political Rallies - 1 views

  • On the 21st floor of a high-rise hotel in Cleveland, in a room full of political operatives, Microsoft’s Research Division was advertising a technology that could read each facial expression in a massive crowd, analyze the emotions, and report back in real time. “You could use this at a Trump rally,” a sales representative told me. At both the Republican and Democratic conventions, Microsoft sponsored event spaces for the news outlet Politico. Politico, in turn, hosted a series of Microsoft-sponsored discussions about the use of data technology in political campaigns. And throughout Politico’s spaces in both Philadelphia and Cleveland, Microsoft advertised an array of products from “Microsoft Cognitive Services,” its artificial intelligence and cloud computing division. At one exhibit, titled “Realtime Crowd Insights,” a small camera scanned the room, while a monitor displayed the captured image. Every five seconds, a new image would appear with data annotated for each face — an assigned serial number, gender, estimated age, and any emotions detected in the facial expression. When I approached, the machine labeled me “b2ff” and correctly identified me as a 23-year-old male.
  • “Realtime Crowd Insights” is an Application Programming Interface (API), or a software tool that connects web applications to Microsoft’s cloud computing services. Through Microsoft’s emotional analysis API — a component of Realtime Crowd Insights — applications send an image to Microsoft’s servers. Microsoft’s servers then analyze the faces and return emotional profiles for each one. In a November blog post, Microsoft said that the emotional analysis could detect “anger, contempt, fear, disgust, happiness, neutral, sadness or surprise.” Microsoft’s sales representatives told me that political campaigns could use the technology to measure the emotional impact of different talking points — and political scientists could use it to study crowd response at rallies.
  • Facial recognition technology — the identification of faces by name — is already widely used in secret by law enforcement, sports stadiums, retail stores, and even churches, despite being of questionable legality. As early as 2002, facial recognition technology was used at the Super Bowl to cross-reference the 100,000 attendees to a database of the faces of known criminals. The technology is controversial enough that in 2013, Google tried to ban the use of facial recognition apps in its Google glass system. But “Realtime Crowd Insights” is not true facial recognition — it could not identify me by name, only as “b2ff.” It did, however, store enough data on each face that it could continuously identify it with the same serial number, even hours later. The display demonstrated that capability by distinguishing between the number of total faces it had seen, and the number of unique serial numbers. Photo: Alex Emmons
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  • Instead, “Realtime Crowd Insights” is an example of facial characterization technology — where computers analyze faces without necessarily identifying them. Facial characterization has many positive applications — it has been tested in the classroom, as a tool for spotting struggling students, and Microsoft has boasted that the tool will even help blind people read the faces around them. But facial characterization can also be used to assemble and store large profiles of information on individuals, even anonymously.
  • Alvaro Bedoya, a professor at Georgetown Law School and expert on privacy and facial recognition, has hailed that code of conduct as evidence that Microsoft is trying to do the right thing. But he pointed out that it leaves a number of questions unanswered — as illustrated in Cleveland and Philadelphia. “It’s interesting that the app being shown at the convention ‘remembered’ the faces of the people who walked by. That would seem to suggest that their faces were being stored and processed without the consent that Microsoft’s policy requires,” Bedoya said. “You have to wonder: What happened to the face templates of the people who walked by that booth? Were they deleted? Or are they still in the system?” Microsoft officials declined to comment on exactly what information is collected on each face and what data is retained or stored, instead referring me to their privacy policy, which does not address the question. Bedoya also pointed out that Microsoft’s marketing did not seem to match the consent policy. “It’s difficult to envision how companies will obtain consent from people in large crowds or rallies.”
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    But nobody is saying that the output of this technology can't be combined with the output of facial recognition technology to let them monitor you individually AND track your emotions. Fortunately, others are fighting back with knowledge and tech to block facial recognition. http://goo.gl/JMQM2W
Paul Merrell

'Let's Encrypt' Project Strives To Make Encryption Simple - Slashdot - 0 views

  • As part of an effort to make encryption a standard component of every application, the Linux Foundation has launched the Let's Encrypt project (announcement) and stated its intention to provide access to a free certificate management service. Jim Zemlin, executive director for the Linux Foundation, says the goal for the project is nothing less than universal adoption of encryption to disrupt a multi-billion dollar hacker economy. While there may never be such a thing as perfect security, Zemlin says it's just too easy to steal data that is not encrypted. In its current form, encryption is difficult to implement and a lot of cost and overhead is associated with managing encryption keys. Zemlin claims the Let's Encrypt project will reduce the effort it takes to encrypt data in an application down to two simple commands. The project is being hosted by the Linux Foundation, but the actual project is being managed by the Internet Security Research Group. This work is sponsored by Akamai, Cisco, EFF, Mozilla, IdenTrust, and Automattic, which all are Linux Foundation patrons. Visit Let's Encrypt official website to get involved.
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    The blurb is a bit misleading. This is a project that's been under way since last year; what's new is that they're moving under the Linux Foundation umbrella for various non-technical suoport purposes. By sometime this summer, encrypting web site data and broadcasting it over https is  slated to become a two-click process. Or on the linux command line: $ sudo apt-get install lets-encrypt $ lets-encrypt example.com This is a project that grew out of public disgust with NSA surveillance, designed to flood the NSA (and other bad actors) with so much encrypted data that they will be able to decrypt only a tiny fraction (decryption without the decryption key takes gobs of computer cycles).  The other half of the solution is already available, the HTTPS Everywhere extension for the Chrome, FIrefox, and Opera web browsers by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the TOR Project that translates your every request for a http address into an effort to connect to an https address preferentially before establishing an http connection if https is not available. HTTPS Everywhere is fast and does not noticeably add to your page loading time. If you'd like to effortlessly imoprove your online security and help burden NSA, install HTTPS Everywhere. Get it at https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Paul Merrell

Closing CDF WG, Publishing Specs as Notes from Doug Schepers on 2010-07-12 (public-cdf@... - 0 views

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    This event speaks loudly to how little interest browser developershave in interoperable web solutions. One-way compatibility wins and the ability of web applications to round-trip data loses. For those that did not realize it, the Compound Document by Reference Framework not only allowes but requires that more featureful implementations round-trip the output of less featureful implementations without data loss. See http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/CR-CDR-20070718/#conformance ("A conformant user agent of a superset profile specification must process subset profile content as if it were the superset profile content"). 
Gary Edwards

Silicon Valley Veteran Bill Coleman on The Business Of Disruption . . . - 0 views

  • Cloud computing doesn't need government incentives because it is a disruptive technolo
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    Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher interviews Bill Coleman of VisiCorp-Sun-BEA fame with questions about the economy and disruptive technologies. Coleman references noted business guru Peter Drucker when he claims that a platform ill be successful if it has three characteristics. First, it has to be able to commoditize a market. Secondly, it has to obey the 10x better/cheaper rule - providing at least ten times the value of what it's displacing. And thirdly, a platform must allow you to add value with custom additions.

    In the interview, Coleman backs up his assertions with bullseye examples. Clearly his passion is for Cloud Computing, especially the next generation.

    ......"As the cloud computing platform becomes more sophisticated, he predicts that there will be an acceleration in the use of the cloud driven by a "quadruple conversion." Video, audio, and IT data all become IP based, and productivity applications become integrated with social networks.

    "As we move forward from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, all your productivity tools become integrated with your social networking, which becomes your business networking. Your mobile life and your online life will become the same. So now the client moves into the cloud and that's when we'll see a dramatic change in the cost structure of computing and of the capabilities you can have."....

    Good interview. I hope Tom publishes the rest of the session soon.
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