ycChew

Skype may getting some sticks due to its popularity as some universities are already/considering ban skype usage in campus. One of the latest ban happened in San Jose State University.

Howerver, in the hardware market there are more and more skype devices selling on the street. The latest gadget is from Buffalo. The Japan based company recently released a wonderful Skype Keyboards which have a built-in headset or the Skype Phone.







The keyboards connect to the regular USB port of the computer using just one cable so you save the wiring hassles of connecting a separate Skype phone.

You can even use it as a speakerphone to keep typing while making phone calls.

Logitech has a similar product - Logitech Easycall desktop - for making Internet phone calls though it comes with a stereo headphones with mic set and the keyboard provides one click access to launching IM programs or managing voice calls.

SOURCE: Digital Inspiration

While i didn't use all of the services, it is still good to know what others view on today Web 2.0. More important, find out what other think that make a good or bad web 2.0 services.

Winners:

Flickr: A picture is worth 1,000 tags.

I've known for a long time that if you want to demonstrate what tagging is all about to somebody who's new to Web 2.0, just send them to Flickr. The photo-sharing site has the best application of semantic categorization on the web. This is because they ask a question that invites creativity: What words would you use to describe a photo? The setup also makes searching the site a breeze.

Other things Flickr gets right: enhancing the community through pools, clusters and groups; options to preserve rights through Creative Commons; free and pro accounts; the open API.

Odeo: Listen up.

When podcasting arrived, everyone wanted in on the game. All you needed to get started was a microphone, some audio editing software, a web server, knowledge of peak limiting, compression, EQ techniques ... Ouch. Then Odeo breezed in and de-mystified the podcast.

Odeo allows users to record and share audio using simple, browser-based tools. A browser with Flash installed, an internet connection and a microphone are all you need to start podcasting. The site has tools for sharing and managing audio feeds, an extensive podcast directory and a contact manager that facilitates sharing audio between friends. The company even offers a component that gives mobile users the ability to record a podcast from their mobile phone.

Writely: Who needs MS Word?

The big, groundbreaking idea behind Web 2.0 is that the web should and will take over application hosting duties from the desktop. In other words, all of your documents, contacts, lists, e-mails and -- most importantly -- your office productivity tools live on the internet. They're all available no matter where you are or whose computer you're using.

Writely is a word processor that runs in the browser. It offers everything you'd expect from a word processor, including spell check, extensive formatting capability and support for dropping in images. Writely also makes it easy to collaborate with others. Your colleagues can log in and edit a document you started. Users can also collaborate over e-mail, and then publish the results to a blog when they're done. And, yep, it's free.

del.icio.us: Where'd I put that link?

Without del.icio.us, I'd be drowning in a morass of bookmark clutter. Seriously, drowning. Every article I've saved for later, every YouTube video I've earmarked for repeat viewing, every cache of free MP3s, every (ahem) NSFW page I come across. It all gets posted to del.icio.us. It's truly a lifesaver.

Del.icio.us takes a while to catch on with some people (what is "social bookmark sharing" anyway?) but once they get the hang of it, they're hooked. One-click posting from the browser bookmark bar, the ability to peek at what your friends are reading and the crazy stuff you find by running tag searches all add up to a truly useful web app. Not to mention the API that gives you RSS feeds, blog posting functionality and import/export capability between del.icio.us and your browser. I'll never lose a webpage again.

NetVibes: Start here.

Remember start pages? Those portal-riffic pages that displayed local weather, news, daily horoscopes and sports scores were last seen in vast numbers circa 1999. But with the explosion of RSS and Ajax, a smarter breed of start page has emerged -- and the king of the hill is NetVibes. The Parisian company has created an aggregation tool that lets each user create a personalized page that pulls news feeds and data from web services into modular boxes. The boxes update automatically, and their display options are totally customizable.

NetVibes is built for nine languages. Users can pull in any RSS feed on the web, as well as Flickr photos, Alexa charts, to-do lists, Writely documents and shared calendars. There are even interfaces for webmail services like Gmail and Yahoo Mail. And, unless you want to access your personalized start page from another computer, no user registration is required. Très bon.

Losers

MySpace: No thanks for the ad.

They say 100 million users can't be wrong. Well, can't they? Regardless of how popular MySpace is or how many bands, web celebs or stalkers it continues to empower and enable, the social networking site is about as pleasant to look at as last week's cat vomit. The user interface is clunky and counterintuitive. Advertising is ubiquitous and invasive. The garish backgrounds and animated images seem sucked from some terrible time portal that leads straight to the nascent web of 1995. Oh, and auto-launching audio widgets and video players? Don't get me started.

Unfortunately, MySpace is going to be around for a while, so we'd better all get used to it -- or build something better and get everyone to switch.

Squidoo: Advice 5 cents.

If you're an expert on some obscure topic, you should be able to use that knowledge to gain fame and notoriety -- and maybe make a little bit of dough in the process. That's the idea behind Squidoo. It's a community site that encourages experts create a "lens," or a page that concentrates on a single topic.

The Lensmasters, as they are known, point curious users to resources on the web about their topic of expertise, giving topical search a more human touch. The Lensmasters earn royalties in the process through Squidoo's revenue sharing program. Sounds pretty revolutionary, except that the Lensmasters don't point you to anything that you can't find on Google. Some of the Lensmasters do a good job, but a number of the lenses are just glorified ads and many are bogged down by opinionated writing.

The bulk of the lenses on Squidoo are made up a few sentences written by the Lensmaster, followed by a dozen or so ads for books and CDs from Amazon. And, as TechCrunch points out, the best Lensmasters are only receiving about $30 per month for their work, much less than they could be making if they started their own blog and pulled in AdSense ads.

Browzar: Huckzter.

Upon its release in late August 2006, this new web browser promised the most secure browsing experience possible. Browzar purportedly kept your browsing secret by covering all of your tracks. The application wouldn't keep a history or cache, it deleted cookies and didn't record form or search data, according to Freeserve founder Ajaz Ahmed, Browzar's creator.

The blogosphere gave Browzar a glowing review, even though it was a little clunky and only worked in Windows. Then, a few days later, reports started showing up about Browzar's inability to completely delete page caches or browsing history. It was a lemon. And just in case that wasn't enough, it pushed users to its own branded search page full of contextual ads. No cookie for you, Browzar.

Fo.rtuito.us: Gimme.a.break

Fo.rtuito.us turns the social networking model on its head. Instead of relying on the traditional social software experience where you connect with people you already know or bond with strangers over common interests, Fo.rtuito.us delivers a total stranger, chosen at random, to your virtual doorstep.

You interact with that person for four days, discussing interests, sharing ideas and generally getting to know them. Then, you decide whether you have enough in common to actually be their friend and offer them the prize of adding them to your network.

It's an interesting idea, but it never took off. Even if you ignore the silly del.icio.us rip-off URL, you can't ignore the fact that traffic to the site has almost totally flatlined. What good is a social network that nobody uses?

Friendster: Tipped scalability.

Friendster was the original social networking golden child. When it first arrived, it was the coolest thing in the universe -- everyone just had to run to the site and set up a page. In fact, everyone did, and Friendster wasn't ready for its newfound popularity.

As the site's traffic grew and grew, page loads ground to a halt. People stopped going to Friendster, but they had already tasted the joys of online social networks. So, when the new kid on the block (MySpace) showed up and offered them a site with the same functionality that didn't timeout during the login process, the masses bailed. And the rest is history.

SOURCE: wired.com


IMPORTANT: Please check another 2 interesting articles on Web 2.0's Good and Bad.

Some say it's easy to see. Others think it's difficult-maybe even impossible. How about you. Can you tell the different?

This game will show you a series of 18 pictures of CJKs. Select which country each is from and see your score.

I only scored 7 out of 18, that is pretty hard for me :(

Google seems eager to become the front door to the open source industry. For Google China, however, open source holds an even greater importance to the company.

"Why does Google use open source? The reason is very simple -- we must take our fate into our own hands. To China, the situation is just the same," said president of Google China, Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, during a talk at the 2006 Open Source China Conference held in Beijing on August 24 and 25.

In his speech, Lee said that Google owes much to open source. Without it, he said, Google would have spent more than $100 million on development. "But there are more important reasons why Google chose open source," he said.

For example, open source gives Google a freedom it would not have if it used proprietary software products. "We have so many servers in the world and we always need to revise the software. If we buy software from other companies, it may take several weeks, sometimes even several years, to make any change. But now we can make it by ourselves right away," Lee said.

Open source software affords Google the flexibility it needs to be able to respond to market demands. Since Google can redesign its software anytime, it can follow market changes quickly.

Open source also gives Google better control over sensitive business information. "If we buy software from other companies, they can tell how many servers we have from how many we pay. Now, that's only our own business," Lee said.

Lee's speech resonated with that of his counterpart in the conference, Ni Guangnan, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, who also expressed a similar opinion of "taking our fate into our own hands." Ni says that China is promoting open source as part of its strategy of being an innovative country, for national information security, and to solve the software pirate problem. He estimates China's open source industry will boom in upcoming years.

SOURCE: NewsForge

The open community model of Wikipedia.org and open source software has worked well so far for those venues, now there is a new comer of Wiki into the filed ... patent!

A new service called Wikipatents, now in beta, has end users serving as the quality control mechanism for tracking a patent scene that has become increasingly trickier to navigate as enterprises incorporate more and more open source software into the data center.

Case in point: the rise of patent lawsuits like the one filed by FireStar Software Inc. in July regarding a tool called Hibernate. The lawsuit alleges that JBoss' Hibernate 3.0 infringes on a FireStar patent for linking relational databases with object-oriented software. Hibernate is an object-relational mapping tool for Java that's part of the JBoss Enterprise Middleware System.

Similar WikiPatents.com services already exist from Waltham, Mass.-based Black Duck Inc. and San Francisco-based Palamida Inc.. But wikipatents.com forgoes professional services from a vendor in lieu of a will-of-the-people approach that many in the open source community might find appealing, especially given cases like Hibernate and the now infamous SCO/IBM trial that has continued to make headlines since it was filed in 2003.

"[The announcement] from wikipatents.com further illustrates the growing recognition in the marketplace that the patent system has become overloaded and is being abused in the process," said Clay Ryder, president of The Sageza Group Inc., in Union City, Calif.

"The patent process has become burdened by an onslaught of new innovations, some mired in deep technological black magic, some contested and some flat-out silly. Patent examiners, and the economy as whole, need new tools to assist in providing the valuable service of patent registration and examination," he said.

And while some of the most popular patents on the site might be for "mid-grip high-power pistols" -- reflecting a universal approach to all patents and not just technology-based ones -- Ryder said the wiki-based nature was another example of how third parties have created discussion points for which they can aggregate comments and supporting documentation regarding current patents.

The wikipatents.com model can be seen as an unofficial extension of the Open Source Software as Prior Art efforts, which was launched in January as a project supported by the Open Source Development Labs, IBM, Novell Inc., Red Hat Inc. and SourceForge.net. However, wikipatents.com is not limited to a discussion of open source prior art, but rather the much broader scope of patents in general, Ryder said.

In that regard, the site gives users the ability to search by patent number, read/write a patent's description in laypersons' terms, rate a patent's technical accuracy, vote on a reasonable royalty value and provide licensing information and/or availability all in a wiki-based format.

Ryder did have a few qualms about the star-based ratings system of wikipatents.com. "While such a visual representation can be helpful in quickly gleaning relevant information, it does not in and of itself come near the depth of technical review warranted in the patent-granting process."

Whatever the merits of wikipatents.com's ratings system, at least the open source and wiki-based communities are becoming aware of the patent process, Ryder said.

"The more eyes out there viewing patents the better," Ryder said. "The higher the awareness and the higher the participation by the community at large means a higher likelihood of patent process reform, and thus the higher overall value of the patents themselves."

SOURCE: SearchOpenSource.com

UniLang is an on-line Language Community, uniting language lovers from all corners and cultures of the world on our website. We offer a huge amount of on-line language resources, made by our members and freely offered to all of our members and visitors. In addition, we provide the means of communication, in whatever language, between those who share the same passion for language, linguistics, translation, or any aspect thereof. Together we can learn and teach a vast amount of languages!

Added to Language Observatory's Links.

Krugle makes it easy for developers to find source code and technical information - fast!

It enables you to:

Quickly find and review source code;

Find code related technical information;

Save, annotate and share your codes with others.

A 5-minutes krugle demo can be view here.

Krugle's home

Samsung Electronics Co. on Monday unveiled a new type of memory chip that it said will allow digital devices to work faster by saving new data more quickly.

The phase-change random access memory, or PRAM, chip is nonvolatile, meaning it will retain data even when an electronic device is turned off, and is about 30 times faster than conventional flash memory, Samsung said.

It is expected to be available in 2008, Samsung said. A 512-megabit prototype PRAM device was unveiled at a news conference in Seoul on Monday.

Currently, two types of nonvolatile flash memory chips _ NOR and NAND _ are widely used in electronic devices.

NOR chips are suitable for running software directly, but are slower and are more expensive to manufacture, while NAND chips are easier to make in larger capacities but are more suitable for large data files, such as MP3 music.

Samsung said the PRAM chips use vertical diodes and a three-dimensional transistor structure to create a small cell size. Unlike NOR and NAND chips, they don't need to first erase any old data in a separate step before storing any new data, it said.

Samsung also unveiled on Monday a 32-gigabit NAND flash memory chip based on finer 40-nanometer process technology _ the size of the smallest circuit elements on the chip. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter.

Currently, the bulk of Samsung's flash memory chips are produced using 70-nanometer process technology.

Using finer process technology allows more to be fit on a semiconductor chip and reduces power requirements.

Flash memory chips are used extensively in digital music devices, digital cameras and mobile phones.

Samsung is the world's largest memory chip maker and a top producer of consumer electronics, including flat-screen televisions, mobile phones, MP3 players and laptop computers.

The company, based in Suwon, South Korea, recorded a net profit of 7.64 trillion won ($8 billion) on sales of 57.46 trillion won ($60 billion) in 2005.

SOURCE: THE WASHINGTON POST

There are 2 interesting parts in this article, first is interesting to know, second is good to learm from.

South Korea will try to tackle one of its lingering problems--a chaotic street and address system. The Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs has formed a team to normalize the country's street addresses, and then create a database around the information. In the end, the country hopes to have an address and digital mapping system that conforms to international standards.

The project, which will continue through 2009, is expected to cost $3.7 million in 2006 and $4.5 million in 2007.

The South Korean address system can be, to residents and visitors, confusing. Addresses often combine street numbers and land lot numbers. Rather than using addresses, most people rely on maps generated by computers, in-car navigation systems and cell phone calls to people at the intended destination to figure out where to go. The confusion contributes to the omnipresent gridlock in Seoul.

Another confusing wrinkle in the current system is that the street name and street number often are not part of the address. Instead, the neighborhood, building and/or block are listed. For instance, the current address for KEPCO, the Korea Electric Power Corporation, is 167 Samsung-dong, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, Korea. In the future, it will be 11 Youngdong Street, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, Korea. ZDNet Korea is now at Sungdo Venture Tower 4F, 165-2 Samsung-dong, Kangnam-gu, Seoul, Korea. In the future, the address will be 22 Hanjeon buk Street, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, Korea.

The new system will also allow fire stations and police officers to react more rapidly to emergencies.

Currently, the team is assessing the scope of the project and database standardization. From 2007 through 2009, it will update data and add new regions and streets.

The project will be based on open-source software, which the government has long supported. Earlier, South Korea built a National Education Information System on Linux servers. The Ministry of Information and Communication is in the midst of a program to shift a substantial number of PCs and servers at universities and government agencies to Linux.

"We chose Linux because of lower cost in setup and maintenance, free licensing fees and its ability to respond to security breaches rapidly," said Doo-soo Kim, who is heading up the project.

If the re-mapping project is successful, it could lead to another export industry for the country. S. Korea has a history of turning its own problems into exports. After the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, the government invested billions into building out a national broadband network. Since then, Korean companies have begun to export things like online games and broadband consulting services.

SOURCE: ZDNET KOREA

The diction and style tools put a GNU face on an old Unix feature. These tools read text input, either from a file or the standard input. diction checks the input at the sentence level, and marks wordy and trite phrases, cliches, and the like, while style works on the overall document, giving a summary of the writing style with a number of readability tests.

Years ago these tools came with AT&T Unix, packaged in a utility set that included similar tools and was called the Writers' Workbench (WWB). They fell by the wayside and were generally forgotten, but in recent years the tools were rewritten for Linux by Michael Haardt, and eventually became part of the GNU Project.

The GNU versions of these tools are not clones of the old AT&T originals, but they are very similar -- and with new innovations, they keep getting better. The GNU versions work in the English and German languages, and some of the new features in the 1.10 series include support for British English and recognition of nested sentences inside quoting.

Checking your choice of words

The diction tool will analyze its input and display any doubled words, cliches, and potentially incorrect wording or phrases enclosed in brackets like [this]. Not everything that diction marks will actually be wrong, per se -- for example, since writers sometimes confuse the words "desert" and "dessert," these words are always marked -- but you can use its output as a guide to double-check your writing for common errors.

By default, diction expects its input to be in American English; to specify a language, specify it as an argument to the -L option, according to this table:

en American English
en_GB British English
de German

Among the tool's newer features is the -b (or --beginner) option, which looks for errors commonly made by inexperienced writers, such as confusing "will" and "shall":

$ echo "How will the company best utilize it's resources?"| ./diction -b
(stdin):1: How [will] the company best [utilize] [it's] resources?

3 phrases in 1 sentence found.
$

Normally, diction only encloses suspect words and phrases in brackets, and it's up to you to figure out what might (or might not) be wrong with the marked text. To output the marked text with diction's suggestions for improvement, use the -s option:

$ echo "How will the company best utilize it's resources?"| ./diction -s
(stdin):1: How will the company best [utilize -> use] [it's -> = "it is" or "its"?] resources?

2 phrases in 1 sentence found.
$

To only search for a particular sort of error, use the -s option and then use grep to filter out the lines that match the suggestion text you're looking for. To get a list of sentences containing doubled words, for instance, use the -s option and filter out the lines containing "Doubled word":

$ diction -s termpaper.txt | grep "Doubled word"

The doubled word search is better than a plain grep solution because diction works on sentences, not lines -- it catches doubled words even if there's a newline character in between them. What it won't match are doubles whose case is different, or a double where the first word is the end of one sentence and the next word is the beginning of the following sentence.

If you give the -d (or --ignore-doubled-words) option, diction will do every check except for the doubled-word check.

With a little customization, diction is an excellent tool for checking documents against local style guides. You can create your own style guide by using as a model the default phrase database file, which is normally stored in either the /usr/share/diction/ or /usr/local/share/diction directories. It's simply a table where each line contains a target word or phrase followed by a tab character and the suggestion, warning, comment, or suggested replacement text to display for that target. Begin a suggestion with an equals sign followed by a word or phrase to use the suggestion of the latter. Here are a few example lines from the American English database:

a majority of most
accomplished did
desert "Desert" and "dessert" are sometimes confused, to the delight of the masses.
dessert = desert
easier said than done (cliche, avoid)
it is apparent that apparently

Use your custom style file by calling its name with the -f option; diction will use your file in conjunction with the default file, unless you turn the latter off with the -n (--no-default-file) option:

diction -n -f /usr/local/share/diction/house.style submission.txt

At this time diction only comes with stock phrase files for its three supported languages, but it would be an interesting free software project to build up style files for checking text against the most popular and the better style guides -- the Chicago and AP style manuals and Fowler's Modern English Usage would be great places to start.

Checking your overall document style

Complementing diction, the style tool analyzes all of the sentences in a given document and outputs some facts about its overall readability: the document's score for a number of readability tests (many developed by the US military), plus sentence counts and word usage information.

The sentence count is like a super wc, showing the number of characters, sentences, and paragraphs, the average word and sentence lengths, the number of short sentences (9 words or less), long sentences (24 words or more), questions, and passive sentences, and which two sentences were the longest and shortest.

The word usage summary tells the number of verbs, with a breakdown by type, and a breakdown on types of sentence beginnings: pronoun, interrogative pronoun, article, subordinating conjunction, conjunction, and preposition.

Regular usage is straightforward. Pipe some text to style or give a file name as an argument. Like diction, you can change the language with the -L option (it currently supports the same three languages), and there are a few other options you can use to get extra output that will display before the report summary (see sidebar).

For example, here's the command to output sentences with an ARI of 25 or higher and get a style summary on a document written in British English:

$ style -r 25 -L en_GB london.report

Check more than just text

GNU diction and style won't work on rough notes or other unpolished material that isn't properly capitalized. But while they only take plain text input, they come in handy for other kinds of documents, too -- just convert the document in question to text, and send the output over to the tool. For instance, you can check the style of a Web page by dumping the text output of lynx:

lynx -dump -nolist http://localhost/mypage.html | style

Other tools for converting documents to text include deroff , detex , and dehtml .

SOURCE: LINUX.COM

Grid computing is a critical shift in thinking about how to maximize the value of computing resources. The technology is still fairly nascent, but here at the developerWorks grid computing zone, we're publishing a steady stream of new articles, tutorials, resources, and tools to bring developers up to speed on this important cutting-edge technology.

Introduction to grid computing

Many visitors interested in grid computing are asking some very basic questions:

* Where do we start?
* What do we do with all of this stuff?
* How do the pieces fit together?
* Does what I want to do fit in grid computing?
* Are there existing grids I can join?

This is your guide to start learning about the exciting benefits grid computing can offer. Here, we highlight the basics of grid computing in their proper context, and we tie together relevant developerWorks articles, tutorials and tips, IBM® learning services education programs, workshops, and IBM products for further investigation. We place information about grid computing into an intuitive framework, tying the pieces together and highlighting the important details.

If it appears that the grid story isn't quite finished yet, you're right. Grid technology is evolving rapidly. Grid computing has its roots in academia and has been steadily moving toward commercial adoption. Standards, frameworks, implementations, and applications are changing constantly. The state of grid computing today might remind you of the early days of the Web, or even of the emergence of XML and Web services, where things began slowly. But much like those technology areas, once solid standards and tools appear and coalesce, we predict there will be tremendous interest and growth in grid computing. We offer this guide so you can get in on the ground floor.

What is grid computing?

Because it is an emerging technology, grid computing can mean different things to different people. But here is a simple, serviceable definition for the concept of grid computing:

Grid computing allows you to unite pools of servers, storage systems, and networks into a single large system so you can deliver the power of multiple-systems resources to a single user point for a specific purpose. To a user, data file, or an application, the system appears to be a single enormous virtual computing system.

Grid computing is the next logical step in distributed networking. Just as the Internet allows users to share ideas and files as the seeds of projects, grid computing lets us share the resources of disparate computer systems so people can actually start working on those projects. Grid computing takes the ability for computers (and their users) to communicate a step further: With grid computing, you can reach out and use computational or storage resources on machines other than your own.

With grid computing, an organization can transform its distributed and difficult-to-manage systems into a large virtual computer that can be set loose on problems and processes too complex for a single computer to handle efficiently. The problems to be solved can involve data processing, network bandwidth, or data storage. The systems linked in a grid might be in the same room or distributed around the world. They might be running different operating systems on many hardware platforms. They might even be owned by different organizations. Regardless of the depth of a grid's resources, all the grid user experiences is the processing resources of a very large virtual computer.

The major purpose of a grid is to virtualize resources to solve problems. The main resources grid computing is designed to give access to include, but are not limited to:

* Computing/processing power
* Data storage/networked file systems
* Communications and bandwidth
* Application software

Since the concept of putting grids into real-world practice is still relatively new, another good way to describe a grid is to describe what it isn't. The following are not grids:

* Clusters
* Network-attached storage devices
* Scientific instruments
* Networks

Each might be an important component of a grid, but by itself, doesn't constitute a grid. Being able to tie together several million computers -- clusters, workstations, desktop PCs, supercomputers -- with data storage, instruments, visualization devices is the dream grid computing strives to achieve and the reality of grid computing could be revolutionary to science and industry.

So, what does it take to make the vision of the grid computing concept a reality? It requires standard and seamless, open general-purpose protocols and interfaces, all of which are being defined now and are similar to those that enable access to information from the Web.

Why is grid computing important?

Grid computing is about getting computers to work together. Almost every organization is sitting atop enormous unused computing capacity that is widely distributed. UNIX® servers are actually "serving" something less than 10 percent of the time. And most PCs do nothing for 95 percent of a typical day. Imagine an airline with 90 percent of its fleet on the ground, an automaker with 40 percent of its assembly plants idle, a hotel chain with 95 percent of its rooms unoccupied.

Virtualization of the computing environment -- or grid computing -- is a key component of the IBM on demand strategy. Virtualization allows organizations to:

* Use otherwise idle computer resources to accelerate business processes.
* Speed applications so that processing time decreases, driving faster time to market.
* Enable the development of new and more productive applications.
* Drive down the costs of developing new applications.
* Increase collaboration and productivity capabilities.
* Maximize the resources available to users.
* Increase the resiliency and utilization of the IT environment.

Administrators and developers benefit from grid computing because it allows them to:

* Optimize the infrastructure to balance workloads and provide extra capacity for high-demand applications.
* Improve access to data, and support collaboration across disciplines, organizations, and businesses.
* Provide a more resilient infrastructure.

Businesses benefit from grid computing because it allows them to:

* Increase productivity by providing users the resources they need on demand.
* Use existing resources more efficiently.
* Respond quickly to changing business and market demands.
* Enable collaboration among dispersed entities.
* Create virtual organizations that can share resources and data.

One of the most important issues grid computing addresses for businesses is the utilization of existing resources. Companies have made significant investments in computing capacity, but much of it sits idle up to 90 percent of the time. Grid computing can help these businesses connect those under-utilized assets, harness their collective power, and manage them like a single large computer.

What can I do with grid computing?

The concept of grid computing sprang from the research and academic communities, much like that of the Internet, but business has recently started to catch on to the benefits grid computing can provide, such as enabling new types of financial and business models like the following examples:

* In the financial services industry, grid computing can be used to speed trade transactions, crunch huge volumes of data, and provide a more stable IT environment in a mission-critical environment that doesn't tolerate much downtime.
* Government agencies can use grids to pool, secure, and integrate vast stockpiles of data. Many civilian and military agencies need the capabilities of cross-agency collaboration, data integrity and security, and lightning-fast information access across thousands of data repositories.
* Companies involved in the life sciences, such as those that do genome research and pharmaceutical development, can use parallel and grid computing to process, cleanse, cross-tabulate, and compare massive amounts of data. Faster processing means getting to market faster, and in those industries, a slight edge can be the deciding factor.

Not only can these new grid-oriented business models be implemented, some already have.

What are the key components to grid computing?

There are six major components to grid computing:

1. Security
2. User interface
3. Workload management
4. Scheduler
5. Data management
6. Resource management

Computers on a grid are networked and running applications. They can also be handling sensitive or extremely valuable data, so the security component of grid computing is of paramount concern. This component includes elements such as encryption, authentication, and authorization.

Accessing information on the grid is also quite important, and the user interface component handles this task for the user. It often comes in one of two ways:

* An interface provided by an application that the user is running
* An interface provided by the grid administrator, much like a Web portal that provides access to the applications and resources available on the grid in a single virtual space

The portal-style interface is also important because it can be the help space for users to learn how to query the grid.

Applications a user wants to run on a grid must be aware of the resources available. This is where a workload management service comes in handy. An application can communicate with the workload manager to discover the available resources and their status.

A scheduler is needed to locate the computers on which to run an application and to assign the jobs required. This can be as simple as taking the next available resource, but this task often involves prioritizing job queues, managing the load, finding workarounds when encountering reserved resources, and monitoring progress.

If an application is running on a system that doesn't hold the data the application needs, a secure, reliable data management facility takes care of moving that data to the right place across various machines, encountering various protocols.

To handle such core tasks as launching jobs with specific resources, monitoring the status of those jobs, and retrieving results, a resource management facility is necessary.

It's important to remember that grid computing doesn't operate in a vacuum. Just the opposite: It potentially involves every protocol and computer technology in operation today. With that in mind, we've provided links to other technologies and standards you might need to understand to fully appreciate the scope of grid computing's power.

What standards are associated with grid computing?

To better understand the evolving standards for grid computing, you need to understand how the grid architecture is defined. To do that, allow us to give you a bit of information about the definition of the architecture from the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA), developed by members of the Global Grid Forum (GGF), now known as the Open Grid Forum (OGF).

The architecture -- OGSA defines what grid services are, and the overall structure and services to be provided in grid environments. Building on existing Web services standards, OGSA defines a grid service as a Web service that conforms to a particular set of conventions. For example, grid services are defined in terms of standard Web Services Definition Language (WSDL) with minor extensions.

Why is this important? Because it gives us a common and open standards-based set of techniques to access various grid services using existing standards, such as SOAP, XML, and WS-Security. With this base, we can add and integrate additional services (such as life-cycle management) in a seamless manner. It provides a standard method to find, identify, and utilize new grid services as they become available.

And as an added benefit, OGSA will provide for interoperability between grids that might have been built using different underlying tools.

The specifications -- Grid specifications are evolving. Working groups in organizations like GGF and OASIS are busy defining an array of grid standards in areas like:

* Applications and programming models
* Architecture
* Data management
* Security
* Performance
* Scheduling and resource management

As you read through many of the standards, you will probably see reference to Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI), which was published by GGF as a a formal specification and infrastructure layer for OGSA. But OGSA is now obsolete and has been superseded by the Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF). The goal of WSRF is to evolve the grid architecture in a way that's more clearly aligned with the general evolution of Web services. Instead of defining a new type of grid service, these specifications will allow the services specified in the OGSA to be based completely on standard Web services.

How much do you need to know about the evolving grid standards? It depends. IBM® and other industry leaders, plus researchers and representatives from many grid software vendors, are actively involved in the work to define grid standards. Are you a corporate software developer? If so, you'll use the grid tools and products that will be based on the new standards as they unfold. You'll want to know about the standards and be generally aware of the work that's going on.

Can I build a grid today?

Sure. You can use both open source and vendors' proprietary tools and products to build a grid right this minute. Over time, as the grid standards solidify, you can expect vendors to enable their tools to comply with the new standards, making it easier to combine components that will work together.

What technologies are fundamental for building grids? Services are essential in grid computing. The services include:

* Job scheduling
* Data and storage management
* Data queries
* Processor requests
* Workload balancing
* Workflow management
* Bandwidth allocation

These services are called grid services. Some computers host grid services, and other computers run applications that contract grid services as clients. Grid services are essentially Web services with additional functionality. Web services are an essential concept valuable in understanding grid computing today.

Web services -- groups of application functions that can be invoked over a network -- allow applications to communicate with each other, regardless of the platforms or programming languages involved.

To build a grid, you need tools. Grid tools fall into these general categories:

* Infrastructure components include file systems, schedulers and resource managers, messaging systems, security applications, certificate authorities, and file-transfer mechanisms, such as GridFTP.
* Systems on a grid must be able to discover what services are available to them. They must be able to define (and monitor) a grid's topology in order to share and collaborate. To do this, there are grid directory services implementations based on such existing successful models as LDAP, DNS, network management protocols, and indexing services.
* One of the main benefits of a grid is the ability to maximize efficiency. This is done through schedulers and load balancers. Schedulers ensure that jobs are completed in some order (such as priority, deadline, urgency, etc.), and load balancers distribute tasks and data management across systems to decrease the chance of bottlenecks.
* Developer tools for grid developers focus on different niches (file transfer, communications, environment control) and range from utilities to full-blown APIs.
* Security in a grid environment can mean authentication and authorization -- controlling who or what can access a grid's resources -- but it can also mean such crucial issues as message integrity and confidentiality.

To build a grid today, a good place to start is to download the Globus Toolkit. Developed by The Globus Project, a research and development project that focuses on enabling the application of grid concepts to scientific and engineering computing, the tool kit is a set of services and software libraries designed to support grids and grid applications.

Built on top of the basic grid computing concepts are Commodity Grid Kits (CoG), which provide access to grid services through a particular framework, including Java™ technology and Python.

How do I enable my applications for grid?

It takes some planning.

Start by considering the basic structure of your grid and the services it provides. You have to understand how the infrastructure components fit together, including security, resource management, information services, and data management, which can affect the application architecture, design, and deployment.

Are there existing production grids I can join?

Yes, but it depends on what you what kind of applications you have and what you intend to do on the grid. Joining an existing grid can be extremely useful, but it is helpful to prepare your application ahead of time and have realistic ideas as to what you want to accomplish. The best thing to do is familiarize yourself with the current production grids out there and see if they will meet your needs.

What can I do next?

As you can see, building a grid and porting applications to the grid is a complicated process. There are many components that need to be dealt with -- including resource management and data management -- when putting a grid together. The next thing you can do do is explore building higher-level services for grid users by simplifying and consolidating access. An example of these higher-level services is Web portals, which offer a simplified, clear, and concise Web interface to complicated grid computing functionality.

FULL ARTICLE WITH EXTERNAL RESOURCES/LINKS from IBM Developerworks.

According to a newly released IDC study, open source isn't just hype; it's now the way most developers make software.

The study, entitled "Open Source in Global Software: Market Impact, Disruption, and Business Models," wasn't just of open-source-friendly companies like IBM, Novell, Red Hat, and Sun. It also checked in on the open-source business models and developers of Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, CA, AOL, Amazon, and Perot Systems. The results? One way or the other, open-source methods and software are used almost everywhere.

IDC surveys from over 5,000 developers in 116 countries in the spring of 2006, found that developers worldwide are increasing their use of open source. IDC found that open source-software is being used by 71 percent of the developers in the world and is in production at 54 percent of their organizations. In addition, half of the global developers claim that the use of open source is increasing in their organizations.

Open source is so pervasive that IDC declares in this study that open-source software represents the most significant all-encompassing and long-term trend that the software industry has seen since the early 1980s.

IDC also believes that despite all the hullabaloo over GPL 2 vs. GPL 3 and other open-source licenses, business models are what are really going to matter in open source's future. For all practical purposes, there will be only three business models that matter: the software revenue model, such as in SugarCRM; the public collective model, such as in Ubuntu or Apache; and the service broker model, which Novell and Red Hat have adopted.

"The use of open source beyond Linux is pervasive, used by almost three-quarters of organizations and spanning hundreds of thousands of projects," said Dr. Anthony Picardi, IDC's senior vice president of global software research in a statement.

"As business requirements shift from acquiring new customers to sustaining existing ones, the competitive landscape will move towards costs savings and serving up sustaining innovations to savvy customers, along with providing mainstream software to new market segments that are willing to pay only a fraction of conventional software license fees," Picardi added. "Open source software is ultimately a resource for sustaining innovators."

FULL ARTICLE click here.