Avoiding Egypt: Where Cables Fear to Dredge

Posted on by

New cables are finding other ways to connect Europe and the Middle East. The Europe-Persia Express Gateway (EPEG), a terrestrial cable that routes from Frankfurt to Oman via Ukraine and Iran, is built “away from the known trouble areas,” says Gavin Tait, director of Asia network planning for Cable & Wireless Worldwide plc (London: CW), now part of the Vodafone Group plc (NYSE: VOD). “Obviously it doesn’t go anywhere near the Red Sea,” he adds. (See Euronews: Vodafone Gets the Nod on C&WW, Vodafone Appoints C&WW Execs and ancotel Provides EPEG Connection Point.)

via Light Reading Asia – Optical Networking – Avoiding Egypt: Where Cables Fear to Dredge – Telecom News Analysis.

Meanwhile, Singapore’s popularity as a network destination is making it hard to land cables there, says Genaro Sanchez, Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) vice-president of network planning and engineering. “The corridor in Singapore is narrow, it’s getting crowded, [and] it’s getting more difficult to work with cables.”

W3C announces plan to deliver HTML 5 by 2014, HTML 5.1 in 2016

Posted on by

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the group that manages development of the main specifications used by the Web, has proposed a new plan that would see the HTML 5 spec positioned as a Recommendation—which in W3C’s lingo represents a complete, finished standard—by the end of 2014. The group plans a follow-up, HTML 5.1, for the end of 2016.

via W3C announces plan to deliver HTML 5 by 2014, HTML 5.1 in 2016 | Ars Technica.

The new HTML 5.1 will be smaller as a number of technologies (such as Web Workers and WebSockets) were once under the HTML 5 umbrella but have now been broken out into separate specifications. It will also have less stringent testing requirements.

Facebook: snitchgate!

Posted on by

A story about Facebook went around twitter last night that provoked quite a reaction in privacy advocates like me: Facebook, it seems, is experimenting with getting people to ‘snitch’ on any of their friends who don’t use their real names. Take a look at this:

via Facebook: snitchgate! « Paul Bernal’s Blog.

People in my field have known about this for a long time – it’s been the cause of a few ‘high profile’ events such as when Salman Rushdie had his account suspended because they didn’t believe that he was who he said he was – but few people had taken it very seriously for anyone other than the famous. Everyone knows ‘fake’ names and ‘fake’ accounts – my sister’s dog has a Facebook account – so few believed that Facebook was going to bother enforcing it, except for obvious trolls and so forth. Now, however, that appears to be changing.

Australian researchers create world’s first working quantum bit

Posted on by

This enabled them to form a quantum bit or “qubit”, the basic unit of data for quantum computers, which promise to solve complex problems “that are currently impossible on even the world’s largest supercomputers,” according to team leader Dr Andrea Morello.

via Australian researchers create world’s first working quantum bit – Professor Andrew Dzurak, Dr Andrea Morello, university of new south wales, quantum bit, quantum computing – CIO.

The paper’s lead author, UNSW PhD student Jarryd Pla, said researchers had been able to “isolate, measure and control an electron belonging to a single atom, all using a device that was made in a very similar way to everyday silicon computer chips.”

Future Software Will Look Like Facebook

Posted on by

“I think all software is going to look like Facebook,” he said. “Everyone is going to have to rewrite to have a feed-based platform.” If people can collaborate on tagging a photo, he added, they could easily do the same with a product or business problem.

Salesforce’s software, of course, integrates many of the social-networking tropes that Facebook and Twitter helped establish, including profiles and real-time collaboration.

via Salesforce CEO Benioff: Future Software Will Look Like Facebook.

In addition to Salesforce Touch, Salesforce is using the conference to push new initiatives such as its Marketing Cloud, which allows companies to manage their presence across social channels; Work.com, a cloud-based performance-management platform for Human Resources divisions; Chatter Communities for Partners, which lets companies create multiple private communities; and Data.com Social Key, which combines social data such as Tweets with “traditional” business information such as phone numbers.

Bazaar

Posted on by

Bazaar is a version control system that helps you track project history over time and to collaborate easily with others. Whether you’re a single developer, a co-located team or a community of developers scattered across the world, Bazaar scales and adapts to meet your needs. Part of the GNU Project, Bazaar is free software sponsored by Canonical. For a closer look, see ten reasons to switch to Bazaar.

via Bazaar.

Patent Trolls: Make Them Pay!

Posted on by

Rackspace has been subjected to yet another patent lawsuit by a patent troll looking for a settlement. In this case, the plaintiff is called PersonalWeb Technologies. This particular lawsuit is not much different than the others, except that it highlights why software patent litigation suppresses innovation, and why Congress and the courts need to improve the system. If it wasn’t such a serious issue we might want to laugh at the irony of it all.

via The Official Rackspace Blog – Patent Trolls: Make Them Pay!.

In fact, GitHub is a perfect example of a company that is built to foster and enhance innovation. The GitHub repository service for software development projects has achieved legendary status among open source developers all over the world. GitHub has over 2.1 million users hosting over 3.7 million repositories. They are a paragon of innovation. Yet PersonalWeb has the audacity to file a lawsuit which alleges that “Rackspace Cloud Servers and GitHub Code Hosting Service” infringe some obscure patent from 1999 that has nothing to do with Rackspace and GitHub. Who is truly innovating here, PersonalWeb or Rackspace and GitHub?

Here‘s a list of their patents.  My favorite:

8,099,420 Accessing Data In A Data Processing System

Study urges CIOs to choose open source first

Posted on by

The study includes a checklist for customers making the transition. It advises CIOs, for example, not to separate current support teams from new development teams, “or you’ll be consigning your business as usual team to the scrap heap,” Norton said.

via Study urges CIOs to choose open source first – Software – Technology – News – iTnews.com.au.

“In many respects, the public cloud is an immature business. Business processes will eventually catch up with the technology, but they are not there yet.

“I would expect you would make greater cost savings by using open source internally without using a cloud-based solution.”

Startups and Patent Trolls by Colleen Chien

Posted on by

I find that although large companies tend to dominate patent headlines, most unique defendants to troll suits are small. Companies with less than $100M annual revenue represent at least 66% of unique defendants and 55% of unique defendants in PAE suits make under $10M per year. Suing small companies appears distinguish PAEs from operating companies, who sued companies with less than $10M per year of revenue only 16% of the time, based on unique defendants. Based on survey responses, the smaller the company, the more likely it was to report a significant operational impact. A large percentage of responders reported a “significant operational impact”: delayed hiring or achievement of another milestone, change in the product, a pivot in business strategy, shutting down a business line or the entire business, and/or lost valuation. To the extent patent demands tax innovation, then, they appear to do so regressively, with small companies targeted more as unique defendants , and paying more in time, money and operational impact, relative to their size, than large firms.

via Startups and Patent Trolls by Colleen Chien :: SSRN.