A few interesting articles from ReadWriteWeb published in the last week or two:
Related to Google Chrome:
Also of interest, from Google’s Chromium Blog:
On Ars Technica, Dave Moyer writes:
Recently published Market Share statistics show the browser down almost 7% from the beginning of last year, continuing to slide down as time goes on. On the other hand, open source browsers such as Firefox and Google Chrome are constantly increasing.
This isn’t exactly news, and IE still has nearly 70% of the market, but it’s a positive sign. Serious competition between Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, and others will not only force Microsoft to fix IE’s problems, but serve to promote innovation, rather than stagnation, in the whole browser marketplace.
Yesterday, Alex Payne (API lead at Twitter) tweeted about the security issues that reared their ugly heads on Twitter a week or so ago:
PROTIP: if you don’t take the time to do periodic security reviews, you WILL get called out by Bruce Schneier. http://bit.ly/DwGr
He later tweeted a link to his blog post on the subject:
The Thing About Security: http://bit.ly/3gwR
Twitter user bonsai (Keith Williams) responded to Alex’s blog post:
@al3x It’s preposterous to think that your threat model didn’t include auth/msg-bot issues unless you simply didn’t have ANY models at all.
Alex replied:
@bonsai Indeed, we’ve never talked about threat models in a holistic way here. It’s gotta change.
No kidding. The moral of the story is: If you have no internal or external security policy whatsoever and enforce no minimum password strength (i.e., allow admin users to set their passwords to dictionary words), and allow unlimited login attempts, your system WILL be breached; it’s simply a matter of time.
Via social|median, ZDNet’s Phil Wainewright notes an uptick in attacks on Web-based software (Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS):
I welcomed Harry Debes’ outburst against SaaS last summer, because being attacked is always better than being ignored. After years of indifference to SaaS, the conventional software world has suddenly woken up to the threat and started attacking it in the hope it will all go away. …
[T]he harder these holdouts rage against SaaS, the more steadily it advances. Today, Evans Data released the results of a developer survey that found almost a third of developers in North America are already working on SaaS projects, and more than half worldwide expect they’ll be doing so in 2009. …
Faced with such a relentless surge, the anti-SaaS chorus is hitting ever more frenetic notes. …
When the attacks become this desperate, you know you’re onto a winner.
Well, we at redPear certainly hope we’re onto a winner — namely, our new SaaS CRM application, redPear|Core. Core is the first in a line of SaaS applications to come.
My sense is that this is only the beginning of the end for old, dinosaur, legacy software and media. Those Old Software and Old Media companies who are capable of changing, of adapting to and embracing this New Software and New (+Social) Media environment, are those who will survive. Those who are only capable of desperately clinging to the Old models and launching baseless attacks on the New will not.
From Wikipedia (h/t Alex Payne):
The Fallacies of Distributed Computing are a set of common but flawed assumptions made by programmers when first developing distributed applications. The fallacies are summarized as follows [1]:
- The network is reliable.
- Latency is zero.
- Bandwidth is infinite.
- The network is secure.
- Topology doesn’t change.
- There is one administrator.
- Transport cost is zero.
- The network is homogeneous.
You mean to tell me that none of these things are true?!?! Dang, thanks for the heads up, Wikipedia authors! File under “Good to Know.” (also, add to “To Do” list: “Completely Re-Think Approach to App Development.”)
What is the best integrated development environment (IDE) out there for Ajax application development? Among the choices:
No doubt there are others, but I shall have to investigate these and report my findings.
European citizens are now living in a world of “pervasive computing”, where virtually every object has a processing power. Undoubtedly, computing devices are more ubiquitous and interconnected than ever, fulfilling the most varied tasks with little human intervention.
The size of these “pervasive computing” networks is significantly increasing, as well as the variety of the computing devices, both at chip (multicore and reconfigurable architectures) and system level (distributed processing). As their scope of application broadens, processing resources require greater flexibility and scalability to meet the various needs of users.
By the year 2020, embedded computing architectures will be far more complex, due mainly to the convergence of High Performance Computing and Embedded Computing technologies, the emergence of new hardware technologies and finally, the multiplication of heterogeneous computing devices.
Perhaps the greatest advantage of the new microprocessor architecture was its inherent ability to network, on instant demand, with any other similar microprocessor family based system. The code that ran the microprocessor was modular, with different program modules able to be written for different hardware, and the seamless integration of all parts under one operating system was a technological breakthrough…
UPDATE:
From plot summary of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003):
There is no Skynet core; Skynet is software running on thousands of computers throughout the world, making Judgment Day unavoidable. Skynet launches nuclear missiles, starting the war against humans.
From description of “Crystal Peak“:
Skynet, being distributed computing, never had a control center or system core that could be shut down.
by “The Network is the Computer“?
On-demand grid computing/supercomputing == Cloud Computing?
Articles:
Of course, “the wild blue yonder” is a much more common phrase in the American lexicon, referring to flight and aviation.
Articles:
Book:
Song:
Film:
I keep coming back to the title I’ve chosen for this blog, the meaning behind it, and related concepts and ideas that come to mind upon hearing or reading it. Well, here are a few more thoughts on the subject.
Frances FitzGerald (who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam) wrote a book in 2000 about my favorite president, entitled Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War. It was a Finalist for the Pulitzer in 2001.
Also, a few articles (with interesting titles, at least) on “cloud computing”:
Essentially, what I hope to focus on in this space is that ever-changing “New Frontier” — the idea of always pressing outward, expanding the boundaries of human knowledge, capability, and existence — and how we are getting there.
On the computing frontier, before too long, we will all be “living” (working, operating) “in the cloud(s)” or “in the ether” (on the Internet). It is that Wild Blue Ether, that we are even now in the process of taming, that is the subject of this blog.