Sunday 25 April 2010

Cloud Servers 2.

I've just been checking out a recent cloud computer provider, Elastic Host .com. While that the
configurator is simple enough, it doesn't offer you a cloud of a computers, its the other way round, you get a single computer, vitually hosting many smaller simulated computers, and at quite an expensive price, £28.80 per/month for 1GB of disk . Plus it doesn't actually scale beyond the matchine i'm currently running, 8*2.4GHz core, and 16GB RAM, there best is 20000MHz and 8GB RAM. Now I thought that cloud meant on demand access to supercomputer level machine for render that are to much for a small company to manage, or being able to update all the computers in your Internet Cafe at the same time. But Elastic are selling access to ordinary servers at high prices, the machine is divided by accounting and virtual host as usual I think. I think I'll stick to co-locating a custom built server myself, for the moment.

Its also interesting that a hosting company, uses Youtube (free hosting), to host its demo. Isn't amazing how some some services come for free, and some come very expensive.

Friday 23 April 2010

Blank

Internet Past: Fucked Company Gone

I regularly used to check the IT industry status down
at fucked company.com, sadly this site itself died.
This happens, sometime the owner just can't afford
to operated any more, or else, decided is that his own
website was bad taste. It happens there are several
stages of a company, and many reason for success or
failure. It important to know the warning signs. There
are plenty of chat rooms for floated companies, and
sometimes you get news about them.

Wednesday 21 April 2010

Turkish Yogurt

I've loved this story from the BBC today. A Greek man, Minas Karaztoglu who had is picture used without his permission on pot of Turkish Yoghurt, is suing the maker on the Yogurt for 6.9 million Euros. The companies defence, we brought the picture clip art company, in good faith. The clip art company has not put up a defence yet. Its going to need one from Yogurt makers tries to recoup the 6.9 Million it all pay, the old man, who has spirit and maybe not to many years, and I'd like to see have a equivalent to a lottery win, (even enough to pay an extra penny on Yogurt for, and people do pay for packaging, where they like it or not, that Yogurt put that reaches the shopping basket in the one that catch the eye, unless you have time to scan all the items for price, quantity (please divide) and flavor. (semi-Interestingly choices in Flavours often get there prices differences driven down to zero).
Turks and Greek of course don't get on too well in most cases, the Island of Cyprus is divided politically because of this.

There's three morals in this story.
  1. Check where your clip art comes from.
  2. Get your picture known
  3. Learn to tell a greek from turk

Saturday 17 April 2010

Google Result: Internet Advertising

Yes, from the Google results, advertising revenues are up 27% year on year, and since half of a last year was no growth at all, we can say that Internet Advertising is growing at about 25% for the last two quarters. Those of you, who fund there website by advertising can now expect continuing growth again in the future.

Sunday 11 April 2010

Internet Advertising back for 2010?

The quickest way to see that size and growth of the Internet advertising industry, is to head over to Google Investor relations, and have a look at there ad revenues for each year or quarter. Since Google own the lions share of the internet advertising market, there figures alone are enough to gauge how well the Internet is doing. As you can see, 2009 was pretty poor year of growth, just 9%, compared with 56% growth in 2007. Well 2009 was a recession year. Can we see an improvement for 2010?, the last quarter of 2009 was looking upwards 17% growth. We'll find out the state of industry when Goggle reports in the 15th of April.

Thursday 8 April 2010

Computerized Driving

A recent new scientist article predicted that computer assisted driving in we a feature of new cars
by 2015, in such vehicles the both the cars acceleration braking and steering can be taken over by the computer at short notice to avoid accidents. It might take a bit longer for cars that completely computer controlled, but when this happens, jobs in the delivery and haulage industry are gone forever. For those with little education, driving is a steady job that will be hard to replace. I wonder if our economy could handle that many job losses. Comments please.

Cloud Servers

I don't know if you seen that latest free ubuntu operating system. Probably not if your not very technical, but what it contains is a cloud computing setup, with either enterprise or local setup. This means it can either copy the configuration of new a machine, from a network host, or be configured remotely, over the web. Personally I don't think it will be that easy. When my server broke this weak, i had a drive down to the data center to get it fixed. If you've got the wrong IP address for the host, thats it, its down. If your apache isn't set up just right, the network stays down. There is a circle of interdependence here, we need the internet to download the extra software to configure modern servers. No doubt they'll be lots of problems with cloud serving starting, until both the technicians installing servers, and programmers making the operating system, have learned all the listens about what can do wrong setting servers up.

Despite the problems, though, being with the money and the problem that needs compute power to solve, ready to need a new server (cloud or otherwise), is a very happy place to be, for a company. Here an example lets say a bioinformatics company has decided to compute (quantum ab-inito) the possible interactions between every protein in the human genome and any other protein (starting another in the genome). That is a problem which requires immense about a computer power. Once they've got the money, they need to buy in the computers. In the amazon cloud module, the company though doesn't have to own or manage a single own of these. And neither do they need to hire the technicians to build and manage the computers. So its made life a little easier.

Thats the model for cloud copmputing, and it means and end to having most companies owning there own servers and employing system administrators, servicing engineers and many other jobs.

Monday 5 April 2010

IPad comes out

So Apples new tablet come out, i've mixed feelings on it, on the plus side its a major new platform with chance to experiment with a whole range of user interaction for touch screens, seeing what works there. But on the other hand, it take the lock down of iphone from the security want on a phone, onto a computer. Apple has the control both of what applications you can place on your iPad, and what application might can be devoloped its very much not a free in the political sense of free platform. We've yet to see weather it will be successful, and with apples marketing might, i'm sure many will be sold, the question is how large the niche will be for the apple ipad.

Saturday 3 April 2010

The effect of google payment on webpages.

The google dole post, below of course, was just an april fool day joke. In reality though between Google search delivering the readers and Google adsense delivering payment just for readership (that clicks though), Google does by now in a very algorithmic way control what content get payed for on the web. This meant the Search Engine Optimising, link droping, etc has gone all across the internet, filling up places with content as advertising, in hope of getting rich. In fact though the average blogger content isn't going to make them money. Only a top writer with enough popularity is going to make money. In fact this isn't that much of a change from the print industry. The difference is, previously the publisher had to believe in the Author, and choose to print and advertise it. On the web, it depend on how much google rank, you get. Hence the SEO games, and an industry that tries to game under google algorithm, to get its content to the top of your browser. Sometimes the SEO is payed for, and sometimes its in interconnecting web of popularity. With Facebook now the top way of passing links around, this introdes into friendships, meetings, (e.g. Blogger meet up groups, which is actually gets enough sponsership to pay for some of the nights out, the content is sadly demised by the alcohol, and i even make an arsehole of myself at one), the idea of that the spoonser gets the bloggers to write about there event. Even grass root publishing seems to monetised, by link droping. One thing that i think hasn't been undermined in the day job. The just isn't enough money in blogging for that to happen.