Crumbs from Google's Bigtable

For a company that is so big and important, Google is remarkably opaque to the outside world (blogs? - we don't need no stinkin' blogs.) Any info-morsels that drop from the Big Table are always welcome - which makes this downright gobbet of stuff about Bigtable particularly, er, meaty:

Bigtable is a distributed storage system for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size: petabytes of data across thousands of commodity servers. Many projects at Google store data in Bigtable, including web indexing, Google Earth, and Google Finance.

Get some while it's hot (and hasn't been taken down by the Google Thought Police.)

The Other Planet Solaris

Since Solaris is one of my favourite planets, and since I was less than generous the last time I wrote about OpenSolaris, I feel duty-bound to pass on the information that there is another Planet Solaris - Planet OpenSolaris, to be precise. (Via SunMink.)

The Problems of a Synthetic Biology Commons

Here's a fascinating paper:

Novel artificial genetic systems with twelve bases instead of four. Bacteria that can be programmed to take photographs or form visible patterns. Cells that can count the number of times they divide. A live polio virus "created from scratch using mail-order segments of DNA and a viral genome map that is freely available on the Internet." These are some of the remarkable, and occasionally disturbing, fruits of "synthetic biology," the attempt to construct life starting at the genetic level.

All good stuff, but there's a problem that may be of interest to readers of these posts:

synthetic biology raises with remarkable clarity an issue that has seemed of only theoretical interest until now. It points out a tension between different methods of creating "openness". On the one hand, we have intellectual property law’s insistence that certain types of material remain in the public domain, outside the world of property. On the other, we have the attempt by individuals to use intellectual property rights to create a "commons," just as developers of free and open source software use the leverage of software copyrights to impose requirements of openness on future programmers, requirements greater than those attaching to a public domain work. Intellectual property policy, at least in the United States, specifies things that cannot be covered by intellectual property rights, such as abstract ideas or compilations of unoriginal facts, precisely to leave them "open" to all – the public roads of the intellect. Yet many of the techniques of open source require property rights so that future users and third parties will be bound by the terms of the license. Should we rethink the boundary lines between intellectual property and the public domain as a result?

Why Sun Mobilised the GPL Now....

Here's a fascinating analysis of why Sun went for the GPL and why now:

In summary, Sun opensourcing Java is all driven by mobile. The timing came from mobile. The license is due to mobile. Motorola, in my opinion, was the target, not IBM. I am a Java fan and I always will be. They were clearly late but maybe not too late. Let's see what happens next. This market is moving so fast, it will be interesting to watch... Once again, though, one thing is clear to me: mobile open source is king and it is gaining momentum every day.

Do read Fabrizio Capobianco's full post - it makes a lot of sense.

King Coal Rides Again

The greed and cynicism of some is simply beyond words:

Whatever the cost to the ecosystem, it could be an immensely profitable bet. Company executives say the plants will provide cheap electricity for Texas, make lots of money for shareholders, conserve more valuable natural gas and reduce the pollutants that make smog.

"Whatever the cost to the ecosystem": that's us, people.

Trouble 't Mill - No, Really

This is not good - although it would be interesting to know what exactly went wrong. It may just be that the old GNU/Linux desktop just wasn't ready for what they wanted. (Via LXer.)

Google: Is That the Sound of Crying?

Google search is useful - my day revolves around it. But you'd be hard-pushed to claim it was cool anymore. On the contrary, it's archetypally a tool that you use and forget about.

But this is cool:

OWL multimedia has launched an audio similarity search engine stocked with 10,444 CC-licensed tracks from ccMixter and Magnatune, with many more to come from other CC supporting sound repositories.

You can search OWL via search.creativecommons.org but its real power is finding new music through music. Drag an mp3 into the OWL interface and you will be shown tracks that sound similar to the mp3 you provided. You can select a segment of a track to search on and of course you can limit your search to tracks with licenses that permit uses you require, e.g., commercial or derivative use.

Google, are you listening?

Is Sun Trying Too Hard to Be Good?

Not content with GPL'ing Java (for which they have my unalloyed admiration), Sun has now also given some dosh to Creative Commons.

What are they after - the Nobel Peace Prize?

Copycat: I Say "Tomato", and You Say "Tomato"

Ha!

MA Ma-Madness

Talking of lightning, I can't believe that the curse of Massachusetts has struck twice in the same place, but apparently it has:

In (another) sad day in Massachusetts, State CIO Louis Gutierrez submitted his resignation today to the Romney administration. Like his predecessor, Peter Quinn, Louis is a man of principle. And, like Peter, he is taking the high road by using his resignation to inform the citizens of Massachusetts of a regrettable lapse on the part of their elected representatives.

I suppose the only consolation is that if ODF succeeds here, with everything ranged against it, it will succeed anywhere.

Microfinancing Goes Open

Microfinancing - making small loans to many people, especially those traditionally unable to obtain loans - is about decomposing money: breaking it up into smaller bits for more efficient use. The same could be said about the distributed development technique employed by open source. So it's good to see the two coming together:

A Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization has sparked the creation of an open source project to help build technology infrastructures for non-profit microfinance institutions. In developing countries around the world, these institutions loan small amounts of money to women who want to start businesses and create a better life for themselves and their families. The Mifos Software Initiative debuts this week at the Global Micro-Credit Summit in Halifax.

The Mifos Software Initiative has been created by the Grameen Foundation:

to address the microfinance industry’s information management challenge. The Mifos Initiative delivers an open source information management system for the global microfinance industry via a collaborative development and support community.

The Mifos Initiative is a new approach to technology that puts the control of technology in the hands of the MFI [microfinance institution]. The open source framework allows microfinance institutions to select locally based development and support services to assist with customization of their software, maintenance and implementation support services. Previously, this level of control could be met only by building and maintaining their own system, which is extremely expensive and therefore not accessible for most MFIs.

Feast of the Behemoths

There's no doubt that the three giants of the online world are Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. What they get up to matters, so tracking what they're doing in terms of acquisitions, say - and who they're doing - is a fruitful activity. The problem, is keeping track. Enter this rather nice draggable timeline, which shows who did what, when and to whom. (Via John Battelle's Searchblog.)

Top500 Supercomputers: Guess Who's Top?

The Top500 Supercomputer list is always fun, not least because it shows us where we will all be in a few years' time. There are all sorts of cuts of the main data, but the one you'll really be interested in is here; it shows that GNU/Linux ran a cool 75% of the Top500, and that a certain other operating system's share is so nugatory it's not even mentioned by name.

How Green Was My PC?

Not very, it seems.

This report contrasts the amount of electricity consumed, and carbon dioxide generated, by two approaches to school computing: one based on conventional PCs, the other on thin clients running open source. The difference is startling:

The Green Model therefore represents a 89% saving in the cost of electricity and a 78% reduction carbon dioxide emissions when compared to the Conventional Model.

And it's going to get worse:

The stated aim of many authorities is to have one computer per child. In addition the exponential growth of the interactive whiteboard in all education sectors is set to achieve one in every classroom.

Bearing in mind that an interactive board runs from a conventional PC with a 600w projector and that there are over 50,000 primary schools in the UK we can predict a ten fold increase in power consumption with concomitant carbon increases over the next five years.

Serious stuff that merits thought and action, quickly.

Will Lightning Strike OpenOffice.org?

I've written elsewhere about what I call the FOOGL concept - Firefox, OpenOffice.org and GNU/Linux. Basically, the idea is that once everyone is using Firefox and OpenOffice.org on Windows, it's much easier to slip them across to GNU/Linux, because nobody really cares about platforms if the apps are the same.

The only fly in the ointment in this argument is that you need a good email client. Thunderbird, I here you say: to which I reply, OK, but what about the calendaring? If you're going to replace Outlook, you need to match its basic functionality, and for businesses that means calendaring.

Enter Lightning, an add-in to Thunderbird that brings it up (down?) to Outlook's level. Here's an interesting interview with the Engineering Director at Sun Microsystems, Michael Bemmer, on this very subject. What's particularly significant is that it hints at a day when Lightning will be more closely integrated with OpenOffice.org too.

Now that would be seriously fooglicious.

Legal Commons vs. Social Commons

Interesting distinction, fascinating examples.

Science Commons - the Conference

To late to go to this, of course, but it's interesting to see the science commons meme spreading. And there's always some yummy papers to console.

Google+Open Access = Health

Doctors in doubt about a patient's ailment could use Google to help them reach a diagnosis, researchers said today.

Two Australian doctors have found that entering the symptoms of a tricky case into the internet search engine often results in accurately diagnosing the illness.

This story has an interesting implication. One easy way to improve the quality of the results - and hence the quality of the diagnosis and subsequent therapy - would be to release more medical literature as open access. Then, by definition, it would be picked up by Google, which would feed through the results to the medics.

Open access: you know it makes sense.

The Opens.mp3

If you really have absolutely nothing better to do, you could always listen to me wittering on about the opens at the British Computer Society a couple of weeks back. You can even read the book of the mp3 at the same, for double delight.

Tagging Second Life

Tags have proved one of the most powerful Web 2.0 ideas. They let everyone add their pebble to the cairn of taxonomy, creating a rich tapestry of knowledge that would be impossible to match using automated means (well, with the current state of AI, at least).

Tags are a kind of signpost in semantic space, so an obvious extension would be to tag other kinds of space - for example, the virtual one of Second Life. Enter the LandRing, which lets you do exactly that. It's another product of the fertile mind of Timeless Prototype, and it's being made available through the Multi Gadget - here are the details.

Towards a Trillion Trees

I'm a big fan of trees, especially for helping to address the world's environmental problems. So this sounds like a jolly good wheeze:

The Nobel peace laureate Wangari Maathai launched a campaign today to plant a billion trees next year - 32 every second - to highlight the need to tackle global warming.

Mind you, in the light of the fact that

Over the past decade 130m hectares of trees have been destroyed, according to the UN. Reforesting such an area would require 140bn trees to be planted.

I think we should be more ambitious: how about a trillion trees? Has a nice ring to it, don't you think?

Zeroing in on Abundance

A characteristically deep post from Techdirt about the intertwinings of copyright, economics and abundance.

Thinking about Thinkature

I like Thinkature for four reasons.

First, it's about real-time, online, visual collaboration.

Second, it doesn't use Flash (unlike one of its rivals).

Third, it's free.

Fourth, it's got a great name.

(Via TechCrunch.)

Wikipolitics, Or, The Power of the Many

Nothing new here, but it bears underlining, since it's why collaborative openness will prevail:

when news of Donald Rumsfeld's resignation from his position as Secretary of Defense came across the wires I was not necessarily surprised to see that a Google search for his nominated replacement Robert Gates returned Gates' Wikipedia page as the first search result. Wikipedia content places very high in many Google search results, not only its articles but its user profiles as well. But the key factor was that his bio had been updated to include dozens of useful new edits from several sources within hours of his announced nomination - including information and links about the nomination itself.

Tapping into the Digital Tipping Point

For some reason, the idea of open source film is one that exerts a strong fascination on people. I've written about it before, and here's another one:

The Digital Tipping Point film project is an open source film project about the big changes that open source software will bring to our world. Like the printing press before it, open source software will empower average people to create an immense wave of new literature, art, and science.

...


The first DTP film will follow my individual personal growth from being an attorney who feared computer technology to being a community activist who picks up technology tips while shooting this movie, and brings that technology back to a local public school.

So far, so dull, you might think. But more interestingly:

We will make as many films as the open source film community would like to make. The DTP project will actually be many, many films made about free open source software. We are giving away our footage under a Creative Commons license on the Internet Archive's Digital Tipping Point Video Collection.

There's another aspect to this. The 300 or so hours of interviews that have been conducted for this film will form an invaluable record of some of the key people in the open source world, a resource that future historians will be able to tap.

Which reminds me: I really must put online the hundreds of hours of interviews that I did for Rebel Code six years ago: it would make an interesting foil to the present material.