Technology Effect

Despite the recent devastating floods in Australia, the open source community is converging on Brisbane this week for the annual linux.conf.au (LCA). The LCA team “encourages everyone to still come to Brisbane and support local business and the community - we need your support.” Monday during the introductory session at LCA, Carol Smith , member of the Google Open Source Programs Office, proudly announced Google Summer of Code 2011. This will be the 7th year for Google Summer of Code , an innovative program dedicated to introducing students from colleges and universities around the world to open source software development. The program offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects with the help of mentoring organizations from all around the globe. Over the past 6 years Google Summer of Code has had 4,500 students from over 85 countries complete the program. We are excited to announce that we will extend the scope of the program thi...

We love simplifying access to Google Analytics data though our API. So today we’re happy to introduce a new ActionScript 3 Client Lib rary built by our fri end s in Russia, DENIVIP Media , for our Data Export API. This library provides a simple way to access your Analytics Data from both AIR Applications and Flash Player (though a proxy). The library was initially built to power DENIVIP Media’s new TiViCon application, which you can read more about on DENIVIP’s blog . “Given the potential value of this library to many other developers, we decided to make it freely available along with its source code,” says Denis Bulichenko, Director of Business Development at DENIVIP. So now you have a simple way to access all your data in ActionScript 3. You can get the open source ActionScript 3 library , a really nice quick start guide , and a sample application all from their website. Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API Team

Balancing security, speed, and scalability is easy if you have the right infrastructure. A dynamic infrastructure. All the talk about “reusing” and “sharing” resources in highly virtualized and cloud computing environments makes it sound as if IT has never before understood how to leverage dynamic, on-demand services before. After all, while Infrastructure 2.0 (dynamic infrastructure) may only have been given its moniker since the advent of cloud computing, it’s not as if it didn’t exist before then and organizations weren’t taking advantage of its flexibility. It’s a lot like devops: we’ve been talking about bridging that gap between operations and development for years now – we just never had a way to describe it so succinctly until devops came along. The ability to dynamically choose delivery profiles – whether it be those associated with acceleration and optimization or those associated with security – is an important facet of application delivery solutions in tod...

This year cloud computing went mainstream, and the conversations moved beyond "this is a way to cut costs" to "this is a better way to run my business." While many IT vendors have now adopted (or co-opted) the term “cloud computing” to describe a wide variety of technologies, most don’t deliver on the true promise of the cloud. Hosting single-tenant server products in a data center is not cloud computing. Nor is requiring customers to install thick client software. These solutions lock-in customers to multi-year release cycles, leave them with the significant costs of managing client software, and expose sensitive data on insecure devices. In 2011, we are committed to moving beyond the current notion of cloud computing to bring customers to a world we call 100% web. 100% web In a 100% web world, business applications are delivered over the Internet and accessed in a web browser. The applications and the data are stored centrally and are designed...

Update 8:24AM: Turns out this is a download from October 2010.  I had a new story pop up in my TechNet feed about the SP1 RC1 release and thought we were getting an updated download.  With all the recent leaks, screenshots, etc. I thought this was that update. I missed it and apologize for the confusion.  I am going to leave the story posted of course because it does provide links to an official download which I recommend you try rather than a rogue download somewhere off the Internet. —– There is now an official source to download and try out the Windows 7 Service Pack 1 Release Candidate.  In the past few weeks there have been a lot of stories about leaks for the new service pack but none of them were from official sources so it was buyer beware of course. Well now you can try out the collection of fixes and updates for yourself and know that your downloading it from an official source instead of a leaked site. Windows 7 Service Pack 1 i...

  IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS stand for Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Software as a Service respectively.  But what exactly is the context & definition of each of these acronyms?  The simple definitions I have included below. IaaS – A service provided by a company, group, community, or government that provides basic computer networking, load balancing, content delivery networks, routing, commodity data storage, and virtualized operating system hosting. PaaS – A service provided by a company, group, community, or government that provides a platform in which to develop software applications, usually web based, with immediate abstractions of the underlying infrastructure. SaaS – A service provided by a company, group, community, or government that provides a software solution to the system clients.  The software may be internal to a business, delivered by other means, or most commonly delivered over the Internet. IaaS, PaaS, and S...

Nintendo recently showed off the 3DS to press in New York, revealing almost everything there is to know about the latest handheld from the world leader in mobile gaming. Now, however, they are making a huge mistake with the 3DS, and the company is doomed to failure for five very important reasons: 1. Nobody wants 3D .  You don’t want it, I don’t want it, and according to most data out there on the subject, nobody really cares about 3D. Not 3D movies, not 3DTV, not 3D sports, and not 3D gaming. It’s a novelty at best, and an eye-straining , vision-ruining epidemic at worst. Furthermore, 3D content is currently so limited in film and 3DS gaming that anyone could store all the trailers and videos they want on the included 2GB SD card. Heck, there isn’t even going to be a way to realistically view 3D photos or videos taken on the 3DS except on the handheld. So who cares? 2. Software: It’s serious business.   As much as we complain about hardware, it’s software ...