This sure looks like a growth area for qualified developers. An audience poll at the Gartner Data Center conference in Las Vegas in November found that just 17 percent of attendees felt their developers are prepared for coding multi-core applications, compared to 64 percent who say they will need to train or hire developers for parallel processing. "We believe a minority of developers have the skills to write parallel code," said Gartner analyst Carl Claunch. I take the Gartner stuff with a grain of salt, but the audience poll was interesting.
McColl's blog is pretty interesting. He only recently started writing regularly again. High Scalability is another worthwhile resource in this area.
Interesting. EnterpriseDB was also in the news today for its partnership with Elastra, a startup that announced a "cloud server" that lets companies quickly create database applications on Amazon's utility computing platform. "In the future, enterprises will view massive capital investment in on-premise server infrastructure to support database applications as entirely optional," said Bob Zurek, chief technology officer of EnterpriseDB, which uses Elastra to run its EnterpriseDB Cloud Edition. Maybe all that IBM money has their head in the clouds.
According to Wired, Cogent felt Telia didn't provide "fat enough pipes." The capacity of peering connections is becoming a point of tension in a growing number of peering relationships. Video traffic is driving strong demand for 10 gigabit Ethernet connections for peering, but some major ISPs are apparently reluctant to upgrade, asserting that the financial benefits of big-pipe peering don't offset the short-term expense of network upgrades needed to support 10gigE. The economics of peering is a tricky business sometimes, and video traffic is complicating the equation.
If Wikipedia agreed to take ads, it could get much more money than most people think. All they'd have to do is use Microsoft as leverage. Wales and Company can open discussions with Microsoft about using MSFT as its ad provider, and Google would counter with an offer that would be much more lucrative than a direct Google-Wikipedia negotiation.
The Google-Wikipedia relationship is interesting. A huge chunk of Wikipedia's traffic comes from Google, where a Wikipedia entry is the number one entry in many searches. But Google has also announced Google Knol, a service that appears designed to leverage some Wiki-magic to make some ad bucks for Google. In the wake of Microsoft's bid for Yahoo, Google would almost certainly be willing to pay a big premium to monetize millions of pages of targeted high-traffic content, particularly if it could screw Microsoft in the process.
Microsoft is partnering with Limelight to build its own CDN network. They're probably the biggest of Limelight's 1,150 customers, but there are plenty of other big companies using Limelight. If the judge issues an injunction, they might have tough decisions, as Limelight has said an injunction might force them to shut down their CDN. Appeals would stretch things out, but customers don't like uncertainty.
One of Google's motivations for the Trans-Pacific capacity bandwidth is to support the new data centers it will be building in Asia, as discussed here on Slashdot last month and updated today at Data Center Knowledge. In recent months there have been reports that Google has been scouting multiple locations around the Pacific Rim for new facilities, and it could easily have one or more ready by the time the undersea cable is completed in 2010. Google likes strong connectivity between its data centers. The plan isn't to have a Google data center in California serve data more quickly to China and Japan, but to have the Google data centers in California and Asia sync the index, and have the Asian facility deliver lightning-fast results to China and Japan.
Better technical explanations of the event are available from the Renesys blog and Data Center Knowledge. The erroneous IP assignments spread across the net within 1 minute, 45 seconds of its announcement by Pakistan Telecom, according to a timeline by Renesys. It took about 80 minutes for YouTube to inform its providers that the route had been hijacked. YouTube says it is "investigating and working with others in the Internet community to prevent this from happening again."
Yahoo's move is the inevitable endgame in an ongoing arms race between major shared hosting firms, who have been super-sizing the disk space and data transfer on their accounts for two years. Here's the larger question: Is this just a marketing gimmick; a bright shiny "UNLIMITED" bauble to dangle in front of small business folk? Or is it an effective way to attract customers from HostGator who find that 1,000 gigs of disk space is simply not enough? Almost nobody needs this, but some might be influenced by it.
A consolidation of the Microsoft and Yahoo networks could shift a massive amount of infrastructure from open source technologies to Microsoft platforms.Microsoft said that "eliminating redundant infrastructure and duplicative operating costs will improve the financial performance of the combined entity." Yahoo has been a major player in several open soruce projects. Most of Yahoo's infrastructure runs on FreeBSD, and the lead developer of PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf, works as an engineer at Yahoo. Yahoo has also been a major contributor to Hadoop, an open source technology for distributed computing. Data Center Knowledge has more on the infrastructure implications.
According to the NANOG list (North American Network operators Group), Comcast has been discarding emails that include a link created using EasyURL, one of many services designed to provide shortened URLs for email links. This could be an anti-spam policy, as URL forwarding through these services is sometimes used by phishing scams to obscure the link's true destination.
Some cloud-based services could become so vital that they become candidates for government regulation, according to panelists at the event... "Everyone who is trying to get into utility computing is getting big fast," said Jesse Robbins (of O"Reilly Radar). "They're all trying to get as big as they can as fast as they can to win the platform play, and this is going to create lock-in. The big companies are going to be viewed as either monopolies or utilities, both of which are regulated."
Princeton's Ed Felten: "Possession of data implies control, and control implies power. Whomever owns the systems on which data resides has the ultimate control of how that data is retained and who has access."
Fans of Alton Brown, the host of Iron Chef America, will be pelased to know that he has just signed a three-year contract extension with the Food Network. More Alton!
If HP paid Staples $100 million, they sure didn't get their money's worth. Staples sells a wide range of cartridge refills for non-HP printers. That includes cartridges that work with Dell printers, providing an alternative to ordering online via Dell - which is interesting since Staples is now selling Dell computers in their stores.
In reality, these kind of attacks have been happening for years. Netcraft first reported on banner network hijacking more than three years ago, in August 2004, and cited similar attacks that may go back as far as 2001. High-profile sites that have been affected almost from the start. In November 2004, the web sites of The Register, NBC/Universal, The Golf Channel, The A&E Network and Sony Pictures Digital were used to distribute malware.
Back in 2001 Roberts insisted, in the midst of the technology industry's nuclear winter, that the Internet was growing faster then ever. He had a company selling gear at that time (presumably a different company than the one being promoted today), so that was a convenient prediction. Funny how this guy's visionary thinking always aligns with a business model for a company he's backing.
The report addresses virtualization only indirectly when it refers to electric utilities offering incentive programs. PG&E offers financial incentives to encourage the use of virtualization in data center consolidations, with qualifying customers able to earn a rebate of up to $4 million per project site. Other utilities are looking at adapting similar incentives based on virtualization.
I'm not sure EPA is the right party to be advocating virtualization. The EnergyStar ratings and utility-level programs are more up their alley.
eBay no longer handles gold game trading (see earlier discussion on this topic). But there are several peer-to-peer exchanges for games, including the venture-backed Sparter and a more modest effort called Iron Prairie. These services allow buyers and sellers to trade directly with one another, providing the opportunity to cut out middlemen like IGE. In the early going, it looks like a lot of the inventory in these exchanges is supplied by IGE resellers and other aggregators, but there's some individual sellers as well.
On April 15 a disgruntled tech hit the Emergency Power Off button at the data center controlling the California power grid, knocking it offline for seven hours. Power industry officials said that if had happened on a weekday instead of late on a Sunday night, much of the Western US might have gone dark.
While it's hard to prevent that kind of deliberate sabotage, a recent session at Data Center World focused on strategies to mitigate the risk of EPO disasters. The bottom line: put a cover on the button, make it well-marked, and have separate buttons or switches for power distribution units, UPS power and HVAC (the code often allows this). And as a deterrent, have video surveillance of the exit area where the button is placed.
It's very hard to create a new top-level domain and effectively limit use to a specific type of individual or business. It was attempted with the.pro TLD, which was supposed to be reserved exclusively for licensed doctors, attorneys, and certified public accountants. The domain business is populated with folks who can exploit a grey area for a buck, and that's what happened with the.pro names. One of the registrars, an outfit called EnCirca, began "leasing" the names instead of "selling" them, thus opening the TLD up for anyone to register a.pro domain without showing any credentials. The goal was to sell the primo keywords in the.pro extension, and it worked. ICANN did nothing.
Is it possible to structure a banking-specific top-level domain that would be immune to this sort of domainer horseplay? Even if you could, how do you force banks and their customers to use a domain that's obscure? The customers will simply continue to type "mybank.com."
The Internet Security Alliance has been talking openly about an overhaul of core protocols since 2004.
"What needs to happen is a profound change in protocols and in implementation," ISA Chairman Bill Hancock said in that 2004 interview. "Getting people to talk about it isn't hard. I've talked to the geeks, I've talked to the executives, I've talked to everyone. It's a total issue of money. The realistic approach is to look at the economic impetus.... We need some strong, highly-secure protocols, and they've got to be able to last a long time. The problem is that we have 655 million or so users of the Internet right now. Deploying security enhancements to that many users at once is a non-trivial matter. The problem is complex, big and will take a while to solve"
Domain valuations are usually based on whether the domain has traffic or has attributes that will help it rank well in Google search engine results pages (SERPs). Here are some key factors in valuations:
1. Existing traffic - Domain parking services can convert visits into revenue.
2. Backlinks from other relevant sites in your niche. Google values these in their rankings.
3. Age of the Domain: Google's algorithm gives greater authority to established sites, so domains that have been on the web for a few years will generally fetch more in a sale than a newer site with equivalent traffic and backlinks.
4. PageRank, a Google scoring system developed by Larry Page. It's a 1 to 10 scale, the higher the better. This used to be more highly valued, but Google sometimes resets the PageRank when it figures out a domain has changed hands, diluting its value as a sales metric.
URL Trends is a service that provides a quick, free analysis of a domain's PageRank, backlinks and Alexa rank (which has some usefulness in assessing broader traffic trends). URL Trends shows that the submitter's domain, radicaltrust (we assume that means dot-com), has a PageRank of 0, and just one incoming link, but decent age (online since 2001, according to Archive.org). $400 seems like a pretty good offer. The buyer must be motivated by a specific need for that domain, and there's little in the stats to suggest you'd get more in an auction.
I can picture the release from Sungard: "A recent discussion at a major web destination shows that Americans are concerned about being struck by frozen turds plummenting from the skies. Our research confirms that flying frozen turds could cause serious disruption to corporate IT operations (assuming they strike the support staff walking back from lunch at Taco Bell). Don't be caught unprepared! Sungard is pleased to announce a new Flying Frozen Turd Business Continuity Service, which can safeguard your mission-critical operations in scenarios up to and including a Category Five major shitstorm."
Slashdot Mirror
This sure looks like a growth area for qualified developers. An audience poll at the Gartner Data Center conference in Las Vegas in November found that just 17 percent of attendees felt their developers are prepared for coding multi-core applications, compared to 64 percent who say they will need to train or hire developers for parallel processing. "We believe a minority of developers have the skills to write parallel code," said Gartner analyst Carl Claunch. I take the Gartner stuff with a grain of salt, but the audience poll was interesting.
McColl's blog is pretty interesting. He only recently started writing regularly again. High Scalability is another worthwhile resource in this area.
Interesting. EnterpriseDB was also in the news today for its partnership with Elastra, a startup that announced a "cloud server" that lets companies quickly create database applications on Amazon's utility computing platform. "In the future, enterprises will view massive capital investment in on-premise server infrastructure to support database applications as entirely optional," said Bob Zurek, chief technology officer of EnterpriseDB, which uses Elastra to run its EnterpriseDB Cloud Edition. Maybe all that IBM money has their head in the clouds.
According to Wired, Cogent felt Telia didn't provide "fat enough pipes." The capacity of peering connections is becoming a point of tension in a growing number of peering relationships. Video traffic is driving strong demand for 10 gigabit Ethernet connections for peering, but some major ISPs are apparently reluctant to upgrade, asserting that the financial benefits of big-pipe peering don't offset the short-term expense of network upgrades needed to support 10gigE. The economics of peering is a tricky business sometimes, and video traffic is complicating the equation.
I'd like to see Cookie Monster eat a vegetarian.
The Google-Wikipedia relationship is interesting. A huge chunk of Wikipedia's traffic comes from Google, where a Wikipedia entry is the number one entry in many searches. But Google has also announced Google Knol, a service that appears designed to leverage some Wiki-magic to make some ad bucks for Google. In the wake of Microsoft's bid for Yahoo, Google would almost certainly be willing to pay a big premium to monetize millions of pages of targeted high-traffic content, particularly if it could screw Microsoft in the process.
Microsoft is partnering with Limelight to build its own CDN network. They're probably the biggest of Limelight's 1,150 customers, but there are plenty of other big companies using Limelight. If the judge issues an injunction, they might have tough decisions, as Limelight has said an injunction might force them to shut down their CDN. Appeals would stretch things out, but customers don't like uncertainty.
One of Google's motivations for the Trans-Pacific capacity bandwidth is to support the new data centers it will be building in Asia, as discussed here on Slashdot last month and updated today at Data Center Knowledge. In recent months there have been reports that Google has been scouting multiple locations around the Pacific Rim for new facilities, and it could easily have one or more ready by the time the undersea cable is completed in 2010. Google likes strong connectivity between its data centers. The plan isn't to have a Google data center in California serve data more quickly to China and Japan, but to have the Google data centers in California and Asia sync the index, and have the Asian facility deliver lightning-fast results to China and Japan.
Better technical explanations of the event are available from the Renesys blog and Data Center Knowledge. The erroneous IP assignments spread across the net within 1 minute, 45 seconds of its announcement by Pakistan Telecom, according to a timeline by Renesys. It took about 80 minutes for YouTube to inform its providers that the route had been hijacked. YouTube says it is "investigating and working with others in the Internet community to prevent this from happening again."
Yahoo's move is the inevitable endgame in an ongoing arms race between major shared hosting firms, who have been super-sizing the disk space and data transfer on their accounts for two years. Here's the larger question: Is this just a marketing gimmick; a bright shiny "UNLIMITED" bauble to dangle in front of small business folk? Or is it an effective way to attract customers from HostGator who find that 1,000 gigs of disk space is simply not enough? Almost nobody needs this, but some might be influenced by it.
A consolidation of the Microsoft and Yahoo networks could shift a massive amount of infrastructure from open source technologies to Microsoft platforms.Microsoft said that "eliminating redundant infrastructure and duplicative operating costs will improve the financial performance of the combined entity." Yahoo has been a major player in several open soruce projects. Most of Yahoo's infrastructure runs on FreeBSD, and the lead developer of PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf, works as an engineer at Yahoo. Yahoo has also been a major contributor to Hadoop, an open source technology for distributed computing. Data Center Knowledge has more on the infrastructure implications.
According to the NANOG list (North American Network operators Group), Comcast has been discarding emails that include a link created using EasyURL, one of many services designed to provide shortened URLs for email links. This could be an anti-spam policy, as URL forwarding through these services is sometimes used by phishing scams to obscure the link's true destination.
From Data Center Knowledge:
Some cloud-based services could become so vital that they become candidates for government regulation, according to panelists at the event ... "Everyone who is trying to get into utility computing is getting big fast," said Jesse Robbins (of O"Reilly Radar). "They're all trying to get as big as they can as fast as they can to win the platform play, and this is going to create lock-in. The big companies are going to be viewed as either monopolies or utilities, both of which are regulated."
From Data Center Links:
Princeton's Ed Felten: "Possession of data implies control, and control implies power. Whomever owns the systems on which data resides has the ultimate control of how that data is retained and who has access."
Fans of Alton Brown, the host of Iron Chef America, will be pelased to know that he has just signed a three-year contract extension with the Food Network. More Alton!
But at least Wikia Search is hosted in a cool underground nuke-proof data bunker in the middle of Iowa.
If HP paid Staples $100 million, they sure didn't get their money's worth. Staples sells a wide range of cartridge refills for non-HP printers. That includes cartridges that work with Dell printers, providing an alternative to ordering online via Dell - which is interesting since Staples is now selling Dell computers in their stores.
In reality, these kind of attacks have been happening for years. Netcraft first reported on banner network hijacking more than three years ago, in August 2004, and cited similar attacks that may go back as far as 2001. High-profile sites that have been affected almost from the start. In November 2004, the web sites of The Register, NBC/Universal, The Golf Channel, The A&E Network and Sony Pictures Digital were used to distribute malware.
Back in 2001 Roberts insisted, in the midst of the technology industry's nuclear winter, that the Internet was growing faster then ever. He had a company selling gear at that time (presumably a different company than the one being promoted today), so that was a convenient prediction. Funny how this guy's visionary thinking always aligns with a business model for a company he's backing.
I'm not sure EPA is the right party to be advocating virtualization. The EnergyStar ratings and utility-level programs are more up their alley.
While it's hard to prevent that kind of deliberate sabotage, a recent session at Data Center World focused on strategies to mitigate the risk of EPO disasters. The bottom line: put a cover on the button, make it well-marked, and have separate buttons or switches for power distribution units, UPS power and HVAC (the code often allows this). And as a deterrent, have video surveillance of the exit area where the button is placed.
Is it possible to structure a banking-specific top-level domain that would be immune to this sort of domainer horseplay? Even if you could, how do you force banks and their customers to use a domain that's obscure? The customers will simply continue to type "mybank.com."
"What needs to happen is a profound change in protocols and in implementation," ISA Chairman Bill Hancock said in that 2004 interview. "Getting people to talk about it isn't hard. I've talked to the geeks, I've talked to the executives, I've talked to everyone. It's a total issue of money. The realistic approach is to look at the economic impetus. ... We need some strong, highly-secure protocols, and they've got to be able to last a long time. The problem is that we have 655 million or so users of the Internet right now. Deploying security enhancements to that many users at once is a non-trivial matter. The problem is complex, big and will take a while to solve"
1. Existing traffic - Domain parking services can convert visits into revenue.
2. Backlinks from other relevant sites in your niche. Google values these in their rankings.
3. Age of the Domain: Google's algorithm gives greater authority to established sites, so domains that have been on the web for a few years will generally fetch more in a sale than a newer site with equivalent traffic and backlinks.
4. PageRank, a Google scoring system developed by Larry Page. It's a 1 to 10 scale, the higher the better. This used to be more highly valued, but Google sometimes resets the PageRank when it figures out a domain has changed hands, diluting its value as a sales metric.
URL Trends is a service that provides a quick, free analysis of a domain's PageRank, backlinks and Alexa rank (which has some usefulness in assessing broader traffic trends). URL Trends shows that the submitter's domain, radicaltrust (we assume that means dot-com), has a PageRank of 0, and just one incoming link, but decent age (online since 2001, according to Archive.org). $400 seems like a pretty good offer. The buyer must be motivated by a specific need for that domain, and there's little in the stats to suggest you'd get more in an auction.
I can picture the release from Sungard: "A recent discussion at a major web destination shows that Americans are concerned about being struck by frozen turds plummenting from the skies. Our research confirms that flying frozen turds could cause serious disruption to corporate IT operations (assuming they strike the support staff walking back from lunch at Taco Bell). Don't be caught unprepared! Sungard is pleased to announce a new Flying Frozen Turd Business Continuity Service, which can safeguard your mission-critical operations in scenarios up to and including a Category Five major shitstorm."
Doesn't UO allow real-money trading? It looks like eBay was barring UO sales: http://www.brokentoys.org/2007/01/25/ebay-yanking- rmt-auctions/