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Paul Merrell

Bloomberg.com: News - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...news

antitrust antitrust policy U.S. Google Microsoft

shared by Paul Merrell on 18 Feb 09 - Cached
  • Christine A. Varney, nominated by President Barack Obama to be the U.S.’s next antitrust chief, has described Google Inc. as a monopolist that will dominate online computing services the way Microsoft Corp. ruled software.
  • Varney, 53, lobbied the Clinton administration on behalf of Netscape Communications Corp. to urge antitrust enforcers to sue Microsoft.
  • Still, Google is “quickly gathering market power in what I would call an online computing environment in the clouds,” she said, using a software industry term for software that is based on the Internet rather than in individual personal computers. “When all our enterprises move to computing in the clouds and there is a single firm that is offering a comprehensive solution,” Varney said, “you are going to see the same repeat of Microsoft.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • As in the Microsoft case, “there will be companies that will begin to allege that Google is discriminating” against them by “not allowing their products to interoperate with Google’s products,” Varney said.
Paul Merrell

HTML 5 differences from HTML 4 - 0 views

www.w3.org/...WD-html5-diff-20090212

W3C html 5 html 4 changelog

shared by Paul Merrell on 18 Feb 09 - Cached
  • W3C Working Draft 12 February 2009
  • HTML 5 defines the fifth major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web, HTML. "HTML 5 differences from HTML 4" describes the differences between HTML 4 and HTML 5 and provides some of the rationale for the changes. This document may not provide accurate information as the HTML 5 specification is still actively in development. When in doubt, always check the HTML 5 specification itself. [HTML5]
Paul Merrell

EurActiv.com - EU to oblige Microsoft to offer competitors' browsers | EU - European In... - 0 views

www.euractiv.com/...article-179602

antitrust remedies Microsoft DG Competition browsers

shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Feb 09 - Cached
  • "If the Commission's preliminary conclusions as outlined in the recent statement of objections were confirmed, the Commission would intend to impose remedies that enabled users and manufacturers to make an unbiased choice between Internet Explorer and competing third party web browsers," Jonathan Todd, spokesperson for EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes, told EurActiv.
  • This line stems from the mistakes the Commission recognised it had made by imposing remedies on Microsoft in the Media Player case (see background). Indeed, although Microsoft is now obliged to offer a version of Windows without Media Player, for the most part, users are opting for the readily available bundled offer, which provides extra software at the same price. "That remedy was rubbish," acknowledged an official in the Commission's competition department. 
Gary Edwards

Wolfram Alpha is Coming -- and It Could be as Important as Google | Twine - 0 views

www.twine.com/...ould-be-as-important-as-google

stephen-wolfram wolfram-alpha google-killer

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Mar 09 - Cached
  • The first question was could (or even should) Wolfram Alpha be built using the Semantic Web in some manner, rather than (or as well as) the Mathematica engine it is currently built on. Is anything missed by not building it with Semantic Web's languages (RDF, OWL, Sparql, etc.)? The answer is that there is no reason that one MUST use the Semantic Web stack to build something like Wolfram Alpha. In fact, in my opinion it would be far too difficult to try to explicitly represent everything Wolfram Alpha knows and can compute using OWL ontologies. It is too wide a range of human knowledge and giant OWL ontologies are just too difficult to build and curate.
  • However for the internal knowledge representation and reasoning that takes places in the system, it appears Wolfram has found a pragmatic and efficient representation of his own, and I don't think he needs the Semantic Web at that level. It seems to be doing just fine without it. Wolfram Alpha is built on hand-curated knowledge and expertise. Wolfram and his team have somehow figured out a way to make that practical where all others who have tried this have failed to achieve their goals. The task is gargantuan -- there is just so much diverse knowledge in the world. Representing even a small segment of it formally turns out to be extremely difficult and time-consuming.
  • It has generally not been considered feasible for any one group to hand-curate all knowledge about every subject. This is why the Semantic Web was invented -- by enabling everyone to curate their own knowledge about their own documents and topics in parallel, in principle at least, more knowledge could be represented and shared in less time by more people -- in an interoperable manner. At least that is the vision of the Semantic Web.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Where Google is a system for FINDING things that we as a civilization collectively publish, Wolfram Alpha is for ANSWERING questions about what we as a civilization collectively know. It's the next step in the distribution of knowledge and intelligence around the world -- a new leap in the intelligence of our collective "Global Brain." And like any big next-step, Wolfram Alpha works in a new way -- it computes answers instead of just looking them up.
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Mar 09
     
    A Computational Knowledge Engine for the Web In a nutshell, Wolfram and his team have built what he calls a "computational knowledge engine" for the Web. OK, so what does that really mean? Basically it means that you can ask it factual questions and it computes answers for you. It doesn't simply return documents that (might) contain the answers, like Google does, and it isn't just a giant database of knowledge, like the Wikipedia. It doesn't simply parse natural language and then use that to retrieve documents, like Powerset, for example. Instead, Wolfram Alpha actually computes the answers to a wide range of questions -- like questions that have factual answers such as "What country is Timbuktu in?" or "How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?" or "What is the average rainfall in Seattle this month?," "What is the 300th digit of Pi?," "where is the ISS?" or "When was GOOG worth more than $300?" Think about that for a minute. It computes the answers. Wolfram Alpha doesn't simply contain huge amounts of manually entered pairs of questions and answers, nor does it search for answers in a database of facts. Instead, it understands and then computes answers to certain kinds of questions.
Gary Edwards

Google and the Linux desktop - Stephen Vaughn-Nicols responds to DavidCoursey: Gooogle... - 0 views

blogs.computerworld.com/google_and_the_linux_desktop

android windows webkit

shared by Gary Edwards on 11 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Google's goal? To set up a cloud-based set of Windows file-compatible applications that will work hand-in-glove with Google Linux-powered desktops. Google already has the applications: Google Docs, GMail, Google Calendar, etc. etc. Now, just add an operating system where they, and not the boys from Redmond, call the shots, and they're in business.
  • Gary Edwards on 11 Mar 09
     
    Google's goal? To set up a cloud-based set of Windows file-compatible applications that will work hand-in-glove with Google Linux-powered desktops. Google already has the applications: Google Docs, GMail, Google Calendar, etc. etc. Now, just add an operating system where they, and not the boys from Redmond, call the shots, and they're in business.
Gary Edwards

When You're a WebKit Hammer, Everything Looks Like an Open Web Nail ... As it should! - 0 views

weblog.infoworld.com/...taking_ajax_lit.html

webkit web-applications web-design Safari Chrome Tom-yager Ajax JavaScript

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Mar 09 - Cached
  • You’re still waiting for me to explain what I meant when I referred to JavaScript as a last resort. I hinted at it in the preceding paragraph. Not the part on JavaScript debugging, but my reference to CSS and HTML. These do a lot more than paint screens. They are a browser's client-side framework. Everything they do is handled as native code. In other words, they're fast. CSS3 and HTML5 are too inconsistently implemented (if at all) across browsers to design to unless you're specifically targeting Safari, iPhone, or other WebKit-based browsers.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 12 Mar 09
       
      Tom makes the point that the use of AJAX JavaScript breaks Web interoperability. He further points out that HTML is a static layout language, where CSS is dynamic and adaptive. (Use HTML5/DOM for document structure, and CSS4 for presentation - layout, formatting and visual interface).

      It is the consistency of the WebKit document model across all WebKit browsers that makes for an interoperable Open Web future. I would not however discount the importance of Firefox and Opera embracing the WebKit document model (HTML5, CSS4, SVG/Canvas, JavaScript, DOM2). That's our guarantee that the future of the Open Web will actually be open.

      Tom goes on to suggest that instead of "AJAX", developers would be better off thinking in terms of "ACHJAX": Asynchronous CSS4 - HTML5 - JavaScript and XML ..... with the focus on getting as much done in CSS4 as possible.
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Mar 09
     
    InfoWorld's Tom Yager makes the case for the WebKit visual document model over AJAX. The problem with AJAX as he sees it is that it's JavaScript heavy. And that breaks precious Web interoperability. He makes the point that if something can be done in CSS, it should. He also argues that WebKit is the best tool because the document model is that of advanced HTML5 and CSS3.

    "... These [WebKit] browsers also share a stellar accelerated JavaScript interpreter that makes the edit/run/debug cycle go faster. They are also the only browsers that deliver on CSS4 and HTML5 standards (with some elements that are proposed to the W3C standards body). Sites that are visually rich may start sprouting "best viewed with Safari" banners until other browsers catch up. The banner would also let users know that your site is optimized for iPhone....."

    Humm. Did you catch that? CSS4!!! I guess he's referring to the WebKit penchant for putting advanced graphical transitions and animations into CSS instead of relying on a device specific or OS specific API.

    Placing the visual interface instructions in the documents presentation layer (CSS4) is a revolutionary idea. The WebKit model will go a long way towards creating a global interoperability layer that rides above lower device, OS, browser and application specifics. So yes, by all means let's go with CSS4 :)

Gary Edwards

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

www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/...thought_leader_6.php

Tom-foremski bill-coleman Cloud-Computing disruptive-technologies

shared by Gary Edwards on 22 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Cloud computing doesn't need government incentives because it is a disruptive technolo
  • Gary Edwards on 22 Mar 09
     
    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.
Paul Merrell

Cesar de la Torre - BLOG : Microsoft Azure Services Platform - 0 views

blogs.msdn.com/...t-azure-services-platform.aspx

Microsoft Sun Windows Server cloud computing Microsoft cloud

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Windows Azure, previously known as “Red Dog”, is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management  environment for the Azure Services Platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage Internet or cloud applications.
  • Keep in mind that Windows Azure is really a 'cloud layer' over many Windows Servers (hundreds/thousands) situated in Microsoft's data centers, and those servers are really internally running Windows Server 2008 and HyperV. So, Windows Azure is not a new real/classic operating system. It is "Windows in the cloud".
  • Paul Merrell on 24 Mar 09
     
    Acknowledgment from a Microsoft software architect that Microsoft's Azure cloud service is running atop "hundreds/thousands" of Windows Server 2008 and Hyper V instances, in other words, that Windows does not scale into the cloud. But no mention that Windows Server runs atop Solaris in the Microsoft data centers, although that was the point of the 2004 Technology Sharing Agreement with Sun.
Matteo Spreafico

SAP Network Blogs - 0 views

www.sdn.sap.com/...weblogs

BusinessProcess collaboration future wave google sap

shared by Matteo Spreafico on 29 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Gravity is a prototype developed by SAP Research in Brisbane, Australia and SAP NetWeaver Development providing real-time, cloud-based collaborative business process modelling within Google Wave.
  • Leveraging the collaborative features of Google Wave, all business process modelling activities get propagated in near real-time to all other participants of the Wave. In addition, participants of the Wave can use all other features provided by Google and its developer community to enrich the collaborative modelling experience.
  • In addition to the near real-time propagation of model content to all participants of a Wave, various features of true real-time collaboration are shown, such as different colour-coding for each individual modeller, history of a model, asynchronous and synchronous editing, and more. The demo also shows how robots (automated components that act as Wave participants) can be leveraged in order to syntactically correct the model on the fly. In the end, we will see how models are exported using BPMN 2.0 XML. They will then be imported into SAP Netweaver BPM for further refinement and execution.
Matteo Spreafico

Yahoo! Search BOSS - YDN - 0 views

developer.yahoo.com/boss

Clouds soa searchengine MashUp

shared by Matteo Spreafico on 29 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Yahoo! Search BOSS BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is Yahoo!'s open search web services platform. The goal of BOSS is simple: to foster innovation in the search industry. Developers, start-ups, and large Internet companies can use BOSS to build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index.
Matteo Spreafico

Biggest cloud of all: Amazon EC2 makes about $220 million a year - 0 views

blogs.zdnet.com/service-oriented

Clouds Services soa Amazon WebServices

shared by Matteo Spreafico on 04 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Randy Bias just published estimates that AWS is pulling in about $220 million annually for its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offerings.
  • He also estimates that AWS runs about 40,000 servers to support the service.  EC2 probably grew at a rate of 10% from year to year, Randy believes.
  • Amazon has really effectively leveraged the capacity from its retail business to offer services to the rest of the market. Is this something other companies with large IT infrastructures can contemplate?
Matteo Spreafico

How Social Media is Upending the Enterprise - 0 views

www.fastcompany.com/...cial-media-upending-enterprise

socialmedia customer future

shared by Matteo Spreafico on 07 Oct 09 - Cached
  • The long-held notion that companies control the conversation is being challenged by social media.
  • In a world where any customer can, in seconds, tweet or post to Facebook a pithy product review or share an experience they had with a brand, companies are forced to entirely rethink how they interact with their customers. Step one, probably the hardest step, is realizing they are no longer in control. The power of social media has empowered the consumer to reach literally hundreds or thousands of people in seconds. And because we know a consumer’s closest friends are three to five times more likely to share the same preferences for products and brands, this newfound power is not to be underestimated.
  • Get Satisfaction has a fantastic manifesto, or “Company-Customer Pact," which defines a new relationship between a brand and its customers, encouraging public dialog, warts and all, but expecting productive discussion in return for the company’s helpful engagement.
Paul Merrell

FCC Chairman: Spectrum deficit could set wireless data back 50 years | Wireless News - ... - 0 views

www.betanews.com/...1255023656

FCC mobile devices spectrum bandwidth

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Oct 09 - Cached
  • "We are fast entering a world where mass-market mobile devices consume thousands of megabytes each month," FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski warned at CTIA Wireless yesterday. "So we must ask: what happens when every mobile user has an iPhone, a Palm Pre, a BlackBerry Tour, or whatever the next device is? What happens when we quadruple the number of subscribers with mobile broadband on their laptops or netbooks?"The short answer: We will need a lot more spectrum."
Paul Merrell

Universities reject Kindle over inaccessibility for the blind | Crave - CNET - 0 views

news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10396177-1.html

Amazon Kindle accessibility

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Nov 09 - Cached
  • The National Federation of the Blind is applauding the decisions of Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison not to Amazon.com's Kindle DX as a textbook replacement.
  • ity of Wisconsin-Madison not to Amazon.com's Kindle DX as a textbook replacement. Kindle DX (Credit: Amazon) The universities cited the Kindle's inaccessibility to the blind as the problem.
  • "The big disappointment was learning that the Kindle DX is not accessible to the blind," Ken Frazier, the University of Wisconsin-Madison director of libraries, said in a statement. "Advancements in text-to-speech technology have created a market opportunity for an e-book reading device that is fully accessible for everyone. This version of the Kindle e-book reader missed the mark."
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Nov 09
     
    The hazards of developers treating accessibility as an optional feature rather than the foundation of software. Bad publicity; lost business.
Matteo Spreafico

Google Redefines Disruption: The "Less Than Free" Business Model - 0 views

abovethecrowd.com/...n-free%E2%80%9D-business-model

google android map future Trends mobile

shared by Matteo Spreafico on 16 Nov 09 - Cached
  • In the summer of 2007, excitement regarding the criticality of map data (specifically turn-by-turn navigation data) reached a fever pitch.  On July 23, 2007, TomTom, the leading portable GPS device maker, agreed to buy Tele Atlas for US$2.7 billion. Shortly thereafter, on October 1, Nokia agreed to buy NavTeq for a cool US$8.1 billion. Meanwhile Google was still evolving its strategy and no longer wanted to be limited by the terms of its two contracts. As such, they informed Tele Atlas and NavTeq that they wanted to modify their license terms to allow more liberty with respect to syndication and proliferation. NavTeq balked, and in September of 2008 Google quietly dropped NavTeq, moving to just one partner for its core mapping data. Tele Atlas eventually agreed to the term modifications, but perhaps they should have sensed something bigger at play.
  • Rumors abound about just how many cars Google has on the roads building it own turn-by-turn mapping data as well as its unique “Google Streetview” database. Whatever it is, it must be huge. This October 13th, just over one year after dropping NavTeq, the other shoe dropped as well. Google disconnected from Tele Atlas and began to offer maps that were free and clear of either license. These maps are based on a combination of their own data as well as freely available data. Two weeks after this, Google announces free turn-by-turn directions for all Android phones. This couldn’t have been a great day for the deal teams that worked on the respective Tele Atlas and NavTeq acquisitions.
  • Google’s free navigation feature announcement dealt a crushing blow to the GPS stocks. Garmin fell 16%. TomTom fell 21%. Imagine trying to maintain high royalty rates against this strategic move by Google. Android is not only a phone OS, it’s a CE OS. If Ford or BMW want to build an in-dash Android GPS, guess what? Google will give it to them for free.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • I then asked my friend, “so why would they ever use the Google (non open source) license version.”  (EDIT: One of the commenters below pointed out that all Android is open source, and the Google apps pack, including the GPS, is licensed on top.  Doesn’t change the argument, but wanted the correct data included here.)  Here was the big punch line – because Google will give you ad splits on search if you use that version!  That’s right; Google will pay you to use their mobile OS. I like to call this the “less than free” business model.
  • “Less than free” may not stop with the mobile phone. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has been quite outspoken about his support for the Google Chrome OS. And there is no reason to believe that the “less than free” business model will not be used here as well. If Sony or HP or Dell builds a netbook based on Chrome OS, they will make money on every search each user initiates. Google, eager to protect its search share and market volume, will gladly pay the ad splits. Microsoft, who was already forced to lower Windows netbook pricing to fend off Linux, will be dancing with a business model inversion of epic proportion – from “you pay me” to “I pay you.”  It’s really hard to build a compensation package for your sales team on those economics.
Paul Merrell

Exploring HTML 5's Audio/Video Multimedia Support - 0 views

www.devx.com/43324

HTML 5 audio video multimedia

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Because HTML 4.0 essentially was a "frozen" version, the specific mechanism for displaying content has been very much format dependent (e.g., Apple QuickTime Movies and Flash video) and usually relies upon tags with varying parameters for passing the relevant information to the server. As a result, video and audio embedding on web pages has become something of a black art . Its perhaps not surprising then that the <audio> and <video> tags were among the first features to be added to the HTML 5 specification, and these seem to be the first elements of the HTML 5 specification that browser vendors implemented. These particular elements are intended to enable the browser to work with both types of media in an easy-to-use manner. An included support API gives users finer-grained control.
  • Theoretically, the <video> and <audio> elements should be able to handle most of the codecs currently in use. In practice, however, the browsers that do currently support these elements do so only for the open source Ogg Vorbis and Theora standards.
Paul Merrell

WG Review: Internet Wideband Audio Codec (codec) - 0 views

www.ietf.org/...msg06848.html

IETF wideband audio codec

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Jan 10 - Cached
  • According to reports from developers of Internet audio applications and operators of Internet audio services, there are no standardized, high-quality audio codecs that meet all of the following three conditions: 1. Are optimized for use in interactive Internet applications. 2. Are published by a recognized standards development organization (SDO) and therefore subject to clear change control. 3. Can be widely implemented and easily distributed among application developers, service operators, and end users. There exist codecs that provide high quality encoding of audio information, but that are not optimized for the actual conditions of the Internet; according to reports, this mismatch between design and deployment has hindered adoption of such codecs in interactive Internet applications.
  • The goal of this working group is to develop a single high-quality audio codec that is optimized for use over the Internet and that can be widely implemented and easily distributed among application developers, service operators, and end users. Core technical considerations include, but are not necessarily limited to, the following: 1. Designing for use in interactive applications (examples include, but are not limited to, point-to-point voice calls, multi-party voice conferencing, telepresence, teleoperation, in-game voice chat, and live music performance) 2. Addressing the real transport conditions of the Internet as identified and prioritized by the working group 3. Ensuring interoperability with the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP), including secure transport via SRTP 4. Ensuring interoperability with Internet signaling technologies such as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), Session Description Protocol (SDP), and Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP); however, the result should not depend on the details of any particular signaling technology
Paul Merrell

Open letter to Google: free VP8, and use it on YouTube - Free Software Foundation - 0 views

www.fsf.org/...oogle-free-on2-vp8-for-youtube

Google FSF Flash DRM VP8 open codecs

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Paul Merrell on 20 Feb 10
     
    With your purchase of On2, you now own both the world's largest video site (YouTube) and all the patents behind a new high performance video codec -- VP8. Just think what you can achieve by releasing the VP8 codec under an irrevocable royalty-free license and pushing it out to users on YouTube? You can end the web's dependence on patent-encumbered video formats and proprietary software (Flash). This ability to offer a free format on YouTube, however, is only a tiny fraction of your real leverage. The real party starts when you begin to encourage users' browsers to support free formats. There are lots of ways to do this. Our favorite would be for YouTube to switch from Flash to free formats and HTML, offering users with obsolete browsers a plugin or a new browser (free software, of course). Apple has had the mettle to ditch Flash on the iPhone and the iPad -- albeit for suspect reasons and using abhorrent methods (DRM) -- and this has pushed web developers to make Flash-free alternatives of their pages. You could do the same with YouTube, for better reasons, and it would be a death-blow to Flash's dominance in web video. If you care about free software and the free web (a movement and medium to which you owe your success) you must take bold action to replace Flash with free standards and free formats. Patented video codecs have already done untold harm to the web and its users, and this will continue until we stop it. Because patent-encumbered formats were costly to incorporate into browsers, a bloated, ill-suited piece of proprietary software (Flash) became the de facto standard for online video. Until we move to free formats, the threat of patent lawsuits and licensing fees hangs over every software developer, video creator, hardware maker, web site and corporation -- including you. You can use your purchase of On2 merely as a bargaining chip to achieve your own private solution to the problem, but that's both a cop-out and a strategic mistake. Without making VP
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