Tag: flickr

Categories
Cloud Cyberinfrastructure Education Google Innovation Network OpenSource Technology

Latest read: The Art of Capacity Planning

The impact of cloud computing on O’Reilly’s 2008 Art of Capacity Planning has shifted quite a bit to say the least. Its still a great resource and well worth the read for any web administrator, manager or director.

The Art of Capacity PlanningMy interest in revisiting is remembering Chapter 4: Predicting Trends. This touches two important factors today: cloud and procurement.

While in 2008 it was possible to ramp up a cloud, today a very high capacity cloud can be deployed in less than 10 minutes.

At the time of the book’s publication (2008) AWS pricing looked competitive. Yet today those prices are considered somewhat excessively high.

The Art of Capacity Planning now is all looking at cloud solutions by Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure has kept Amazon’s EC2 busy in releasing new services and even more aggressive pricing models. Under AWS users get free access to CentOS, LAMP stack, Git and WordPress.

But the Art of Capacity Planning touches on the very important component of Procurement. Procurement and Cloud contract solutions taught by UCLA has been very beneficial to my cloud projects.

Continue reading “Latest read: The Art of Capacity Planning”
Categories
Design Education Network OpenSource Rich media Technology

Adobe’s PowerPoint killer ?

Billed as a collaborative slideware application Adobe Labs has launched Presentations.  Yet after building a series of prezos and testing the waters I must admit: I was expecting a lot more with Adobe’s online reputation.

adobe_presentations
adobe presentations

At first glance you may ask is this Adobe’s PowerPoint Killer?  Actually the real competition is with SlideRocket, a strong online presentation tool that has been online for a couple of years and gathering high praise. Both Keynote and SlideRocket take a strong visual approach to authoring slide presentations.

Look at Photoshop.com to see how powerful visual tools can be migrated from the desktop to the internet.  In the end desktop competitors PowerPoint and Keynote along with online competitor SlideRocket are much more robust presentation tools.

Continue reading “Adobe’s PowerPoint killer ?”
Categories
Education Globalization Network Rich media Technology

Yahoo Music closing

I continue to be amazed that consumers are being held hostage to failed business practices regarding digital products sold on the internet and requiring a connection to “use” your product.
If you buy a book, read it and then move to a new house, you take the book with you right.  Sure.  Simple and not even something to think about.

But if you purchased digital music from Yahoo and move that music to a new computer or external drive, you cannot take it with you.  Yahoo’s underperforming music store has announced they are closing their doors (and also taking down their DRM technology keys) stitched into your downloaded music.

This means the music you paid for will not play anymore.  If you purchased Yahoo music you are simply SOL. Actually Yahoo tells a better story:
After September 30, 2008, you will not be able to transfer songs to unauthorized computers or re-license these songs after changing operating systems. Please note that your purchased tracks will generally continue to play on your existing authorized computers unless there is a change to the computer’s operating system.

This should serve fair warning to all the music etailers to abandon DRM.  The customer is always right and today’s teenage market has a powerful voice and the tools (like Digg) to flex their collective financial muscles….so don’t piss them off.

Continue reading “Yahoo Music closing”