Open Web

Good stuff going on at Acko.net! Excerpt: Sometimes, you need to see what a technology can do before you can fully appreciate it. Take, for instance, CSS 3D and Three.js. It's one thing to hear about doing 3D elements for Web sites, and another to see them integrated into a well-designed site. Take, for example, Steven Wittens' Acko.net redesign. Visit Acko.net using a current release of Firefox, and you'll see a nice clean site with a nice header image that demonstrates two-point perspective nicely. But hit the site using a WebKit browser, and you're in for a real treat.

Steven Witten pushes the envelope using CSS 3D instead of WebGL.  He explains why, arguing parralax, GPUs and his own brand of technofetishism.  Great stuff.  Awesome must read adventure in the future of the Web.

Ever wonder why it's so difficult to send a document over the Internet, to a land line Fax machine?  Or how about sending a document through Google Voice to a land line Fax machine?   Since our congress critters still rely on snail mail and land line Fax machines, i'm very interested in improving my Fax productivity.  This Web page has the best answers to my questions, but the solution is elusive.  Good background though. Covers T.37, T.38, why Web-Fax operations use the VOIP channel to Fax, and how eMail gateways can be used instead of that VOIP channel.  Good explanations.

HTML5 app development resource and advice site.  Same people who did the excellent CSS3 Please site.

Interesting, but lightweight interview with Ray Ozzie.  Look at the productivity comment in particular.  He also mentions "social productivity" as being an aspect of "communications".  My guess is that his new startup, Cocomo, will gear up towards a Cloud Productivity Platform where this new capability of integrated web communications is woven deep into collaborative productivity applications.  With enough juice to blow the legacy Windows - MSOffice Productivity environment out of the water.  We shall see. excerpt: When he joined Microsoft he thought it had a "tremendous history," he said, with great technology assets and people. But it was a company struggling to adjust to changes in the PC and server markets, he said. "I tried my best to communicate with various groups what their purpose in life was," he said. For instance, he tried to convince the Office group that it should focus on selling productivity, as opposed to selling PC-based productivity products, and the Xbox group that it should sell entertainment, not boxes or discs.

The 454 Take on DropBox and the sync-share-store phenomenon.  Kathleen Reidy

Interesting, but do they have a plan to implement ODBC at the Cloud level?  It's one thing to provide connectivity, exploration and analysis to non Cloud data and transaction servers.  And another to connect the data feeds into next generation compound documents.  Seems to me this is an effective first step, but the value remains elusive.  Left a comment on this page. exerpt: The startup's offering, which has not been released yet, will connect to data stored in databases as well as the web and other sources, and adds a visual discovery component to make it easy for users to parse through this data and make sense of the information. The beauty of ClearStory is that it allows businesses to analyze internal and publicly available data at the same time and make this data easy for the masses to understand.

new startup, looking to be a contender in the mobile sync-share-store content sector.  Not sure what separates them from the Dropbox sector though.  big time funding.  Sandhill road.

Microsoft announces a new plan, "Microsoft Dynamics", to accelerate the transition to replace their traditional / conventional software systems with cloud-ready infrastructure. Dynamics also serves as a migration guide, providing "seamless integration" of services from old IT to new Cloud. Competitors mentioned include SalesForce.com, SAP and Oracle. Lots of focus on integrating CRM into the full line of business applications. This is somewhat similar to the Visual Productivity challenge of integrating gMail into a working productivity system based on the Google Apps platform. Embedding the full range of Visual Web Communications into productivity apps and services is the key at all levels. One thing to consider in this article is that the only Cloud - Productivity - Business systems contenders are SalesForce, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft. Google Apps isn't mentioned. Nor is Amazon, RackSpace or VMware. Apple, Cisco, HP and Facebook are also left out.

Interesting chart describes the massive transition of small and medium sized businesses to the Cloud.  Cloud based eMail and messaging leads the way.  Top two reasons for the great transition?  Cost reduction and productivity improvement. Unfortunately this article fails to describe what this great transition to the Cloud means to legacy productivity systems - most of which are provided and provisioned by Microsoft.  What happens to desktop and workgroup based business systems when the local data and transaction processing server systems are moved to the Cloud?  How are desktop and workgroup systems re written or migrated? Another factor missing from this article is any discussion of what happens to productivity when communications, content and collaborative computing are interoperably entwined throughout the application layer?  We know that the legacy Windows productivity platform seriously lacked communications capabilities.  This fact greatly reduced expected productivity gains.   excerpt: Microsoft commissioned the study of 3,000 small and medium sized businesses in 13 countries. The survey was conducted by Wayland, Mass.-based research firm Edge Strategies. The most commonly used cloud services are email, instant messaging, voice communications, and backup. Edge also looked at SMB cloud plans over the next three years and the same cloud services also are in the IT plans of those embracing the cloud. From this data, it certainly could be argued that SMBs seem to be quick to embrace the cloud in order to enhance communication. It makes sense: in small business, communication is key to ensure rapid growth. The biggest motivators for migration to the cloud among SMBs is to save money (54 percent), followed by increases in productivity. Decision makers also mentioned flexibility as a fairly common response. Of those already using the cloud, 59 percent reported productivity increases as a result. SMB cloud adoption begins to acclerate, study finds http:/

Very informative article.  Kudos to Marbux.  Explains how warrantless (illegal) surveillance by Government works, including the un-Constitutional strong arm tactics they use on Internet Service Providers to access your Web communications and activities.  Marbux has it right about the Calyx Project; "Where do i sign up?" Good read! excerpt: Nicholas Merrill is planning to revolutionize online privacy with a concept as simple as it is ingenious: a telecommunications provider designed from its inception to shield its customers from surveillance. Merrill, 39, who previously ran a New York-based Internet provider, told CNET that he's raising funds to launch a national "non-profit telecommunications provider dedicated to privacy, using ubiquitous encryption" that will sell mobile phone service and, for as little as $20 a month, Internet connectivity. The ISP would not merely employ every technological means at its disposal, including encryption and limited logging, to protect its customers. It would also -- and in practice this is likely more important -- challenge government surveillance demands of dubious legality or constitutionality.

The more i learn about the Governments illegal and un-Constitutional surveillance activities, the worse it gets.  As i read this article i couldn't help but wonder why the Government would want to disclose the warrantless activities as evidence in court?  Clearly the Government wants to have their violations of carefully enumerated Constitutional protections of individual rights validated by the nations courts.  Scary stuff. excerpt: A recent court case provides a rare glimpse into how some federal agents deal with encryption: by breaking into a suspect's home or office, implanting keystroke-logging software, and spying on what happens from afar. An agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration persuaded a federal judge to authorize him to sneak into an Escondido, Calif., office believed to be a front for manufacturing the drug MDMA, or Ecstasy. The DEA received permission to copy the hard drives' contents and inject a keystroke logger into the computers. That was necessary, according to DEA Agent Greg Coffey, because the suspects were using PGP and the encrypted Web e-mail service Hushmail.com. Coffey asserted that the DEA needed "real-time and meaningful access" to "monitor the keystrokes" for PGP and Hushmail passphrases. The aggressive surveillance techniques employed by the DEA were part of a case that resulted in a ruling on Friday (PDF) by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which primarily dealt with Internet surveillance through a wiretap conducted on a PacBell (now AT&T) business DSL line used by the defendants.

MDOffice and Windows Apps served up from the Cloud.  Very interesting!

Excellent legal piece explaining the options and methods of how software programs use licensed and copyrighted third party libraries through an API. Finally, some clear thinking about Google Android and the Oracle Java Law Suit.
excerpt: Another option for a developer is to do what Google did when it created Android, and create replacement code libraries that are compatible with the existing code libraries, but which are new copyrighted works. Being "compatible" in this context means that the new libraries are called in the same way that the old libraries are--that is, using the same APIs. But the actual copyrighted code that is being called is a new work. As long as the new developer didn't actually copy code from the original libraries, the new libraries are not infringing. It does not infringe on the copyright of a piece of software to create a new piece of software that works the same way; copyright protects the actual expression (lines of code) but not the functionality of a program. The functionality of a program is protected by patent, or not at all.
In the Oracle/Google case, no one is arguing that code libraries themselves are not copyrightable. Of course they are and this is why the Google/Oracle dispute has no bearing on the enforceability of the GPL. Instead, the argument is about whether the method of using a code library, the APIs, is subject to a copyright that is independent of the copyright of the code itself. If the argument that APIs are not copyrightable prevails, programs that are created by statically-linking GPL'd code libraries will still be considered derivative works of the code libraries and will still have to be released under the GPL.
Though irrelevant to the enforceability of the GPL, the Oracle/Google dispute is still interesting. Oracle is claiming that Google, by creating compatible, replacement code libraries that are "called" in the same way as Oracle's code libraries (that is, using the same APIs), infringed

Excellent Hadoop/Hive explanation.  Hat tip to Matt Asay for the link.  I eft a comment on Matt's blog questioning the consequences of the Oracle vs. Google Android lawsuit, and the possible enforcement of the Java API copyright claim against Hadoop/Hive.  Based on this explanation of Hadoop/Hive, i'm wondering if Oracle is making a move to claim the entire era of Big Data Cloud Computing?  To understand why, it's first necessary to read Matt the Hadoople's explanation.   kill shot excerpt: "You've built your Hadoop job, and have successfully processed the data. You've generated some structured output, and that resides on HDFS. Naturally you want to run some reports, so you load your data into a MySQL or an Oracle database. Problem is, the data is large. In fact it's so large that when you try to run a query against the table you've just created, your database begins to cry. If you listen to its sobs, you'll probably hear "I was built to process Megabytes, maybe Gigabytes of data. Not Terabytes. Not Perabytes. That's not my job. I was built in the 80's and 90's, back when floppy drives were used. Just leave me alone". "This is where Hive comes to the rescue. Hive lets you run an SQL statement against structured data stored on HDFS. When you issue an SQL query, it parses it, and translates it into a Java Map/Reduce job, which is then executed on your data. Although Hive does some optimizations, in general it just goes record by record against all your data. This means that it's relatively slow - a typical Hive query takes 5 or 10 minutes to complete, depending on how much data you have. However, that's what makes it effective. Unlike a relational database, you don't waste time on query optimization, adding indexes, etc. Instead, what keeps the processing time down is the fact that the query is run on all machines in your Hadoop cluster, and the scalability is taken care of for you." "Hive is extremely useful in data-warehousing kind of scenarios. You would

Nice catch by Jason.  The lesson learned is one we've seen time and again.  excerpt: Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of something brand new from nothing but an idea. This is the story of a wonderful idea. Something that had never been done before, a moment of change that shaped the Internet we know today. This is the story of Flickr. And how Yahoo bought it and murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way. Do you remember Flickr's tag line? It reads "almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world." It was an epic humble brag, a momentously tongue in cheek understatement. Because until three years ago, of course Flickr was the best photo sharing service in the world. Nothing else could touch it. If you cared about digital photography, or wanted to share photos with friends, you were on Flickr. Yet today, that tagline simply sounds like delusional posturing. The photo service that was once poised to take on the the world has now become an afterthought. Want to share photos on the Web? That's what Facebook is for. Want to look at the pictures your friends are snapping on the go? Fire up Instagram.