The Digital Decade, as addressed by Bill Gates on October 2001 is a vision of making PC the platform to supersede TV. In the Digital Decade, you’ll no longer think of the PC as a tool you use only to carry out specific tasks, it will become something you come to rely on all the time.
How true is the above statement in the beginning of 2007? As Bill Gates addressed the crowds in CES 2007 in Las Vegas, “Over 40 percent of U.S. homes now have multiple personal computers. And if you look at young people, the new generation, they actually spend more time on their Windows PC than they spend watching TV. Now that’s a pretty dramatic change.” In other words, the market is ready for Digital Decade.
The hurdles of realizing Digital Decade had always been PC was not the focal point of a family - it was television. PC was first for scientific calculations and later business spreadsheets. When multimedia finally arrived with the launch of Intel Pentium processor, there was not much to play except encyclopedia contents.
Long gone the history of having microprocessor, memory or graphics card as the bottlenecks of PC performance. It is now the hard drive, the only mechanical device left inside a PC. The traditional way of improving a hard drive includes making the disks rotate faster, increasing storage density per platter as well as putting a much large buffer for cache miss.
As software gets larger in size such improvements are marginal at best. The room for improvements is bounded by the physical characteristic of mechanical drive. Hard drive makers have to look beyond mechanical and jump to electronics drive.
With the proliferation of USB thumb drive, the NAND flash memory drops price quick enough to make it worthwhile to build a flash hard drives (essentially a bigger thumb drives in tens of gigabytes). SanDisk is going to unveil a 32 GB, 1.8-inch solid-state drive (SSD) as an alternative to the magnetic hard disk on next week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. It is tightly coupled with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) that enables storage in the cloud. Amazon EC2 is under limited beta right now with the limitation of 20 running instances.
At first look, the new service is easily confused with traditional web/application hosting services. However, the key difference is the elasticity of capacity. Traditional hosting service has various plans for different hosting capacity. As the demand grows, you will always face the problem of migrating to higher capacity hosting. Amazon EC2 claims to solve the problem by offering elastic capacity hosting.
Continue reading ‘Run a Google-scale Web Site with Amazon EC2′
PayPal and Google Checkout are few of the many online payment services that offer web service payment integration.
PayPal
PayPal is the most popular P2P (Person-to-Person) payment service online. PayPal web service payment is only available in Website Payment Pro. A site owner can leverage the Direct Payment API to accept credit card payments without any redirection to PayPal web site. PayPal remains invisible throughout the customer experience.
Microsoft Excel is a powerful business tool with many advanced charting, graphing, and algorithmic/statistical capabilities, making it a favorite among business users. It has been estimated that 50% of the world’s business logic is contained within Excel spreadsheets.
Traditional data integration into Excel usually takes the form of
- Hand entry of data from a paper source
- Data imported from another file (database, spreadsheet, delimited text file, etc.)
- Date pulled by an intermediate program from another source (Visual Basic, macro, etc.)
Jini and Universal Plug & Play are the prominent device coordination frameworks for information appliances. These architectures are essentially coordination frameworks that propose certain ways and means of device interaction with the ultimate aim of simple, seamless and scalable device interoperability.
Device coordination provide a subset of the following capabilities to a device:
- Ability to announce its presence to the network
- Automatic discovery of devices in the neighborhood and even those located remotely
- Ability to describe its capabilities as well as query/understand the capabilities of other devices
- Self configuration without administrative intervention
- Seamless interoperability with other devices wherever meaningful
Web 1.0 was about building websites to publish contents in HTML and sell things. Search engines are the single point of access for most web users. The higher the hit rate a website has, the higher the value it has.
Web 2.0 is about using the Web collaboratively — sharing and mixing up information and resources. The whole content pool is being analyzed by millions of talented web users. Users can consume or create contents in a personalized way either through blogs or wiki.
Search engines provide ad-hoc searching for unorganized contents as well as channels to deliver targeted contents. The playing field is spending money inside the Web to promote websites by creating as much links as possible. The higher the number of links a website has, the higher the value it can generate.
O’Reilly gives as examples: eBay, craigslist, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Skype and Adsense