Google Inc. is planning to hit Microsoft Corp. where it hurts by challenging the software giant’s dominance in the world of computer operating systems.

The search firm said late Tuesday that it will begin offering its own operating system, called Chrome, in the second half of 2010.

There’s a much larger post here about how the OS is getting commoditized – how the real innovation now is in cross-platform software like Web apps and Adobe Air apps, etc.  But, I’m on vacation, so I’ll hit that up another time.

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It will also require at least 65 megawatts of power — about the same amount used by every home in Salt Lake City combined. A separate power substation will have to be built at Camp Williams to sustain that demand, […]

[…] In 2006, the Baltimore Sun reported that the NSA — Baltimore Gas & Electric’s biggest customer — had maxed out the local grid and could not bring online several supercomputers it needed to expand its operations.

So, essentially, they’ve run Maryland out of power.  Electricity is cheap in Utah, and data centers are insanely power-intensive.  Read this NY Times article from a couple weeks ago for more on this.  Within a couple years, server purchase costs get dwarfed by the cost required to power them.

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Like the Patriots, who rebelled against Britain’s heavy taxes, NoSQLers came to share how they had overthrown the tyranny of slow, expensive relational databases in favor of more efficient and cheaper ways of managing data.

“Relational databases give you too much. They force you to twist your object data to fit a RDBMS [relational database management system],” said Jon Travis […]  NoSQL-based alternatives “just give you what you need,” Travis said.

In Chicago, the big vibe I got was that content management in general is moving away from relational databases and towards XML databases, like Xindice, eXist, Mark Logic, etc.  It’s weird, and will take some getting used to, but there are some huge advantages to it.

Here’s another article along the same lines: Should you go Beyond Relational Databases? It covers things like CouchDB, MapReduce, BigTable, etc.

And if you’re really in for something funky, I present you with Caravel, a CMS that uses LDAP (a key-value store, at heart) as its storage mechanism.

Even if you swear you’re never giving up your relational database, read these articles for some perspective.

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Below sea level is where the content lives. The more complex the site and/or the amount of content there is, the greater the need to model the content. Content modelling is the process of creating and maintaining a content model. A content model is a representation of your information. This could be a diagram on a whiteboard, a pile of cards describing your products and services, an excel spreadsheet, or a fancy content modelling tool. All or none of them may be appropriate for your particular situation.

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Over a few weeks, I rediscovered my ability to simply read the book or article I had punched up in the first place. (Just like—gasp!—old-fashioned printed matter.) It’s particularly enjoyable when reading a newspaper or magazine—enough so that I’ve been routinely purchasing some of these publications when I could have grabbed my laptop and read them for free on the web. In effect, I’m paying for the lack of distraction.

See these earlier posts for the same general message – it’s easier to read when nothing else is fighting for your attention.

• The Printed Blog and the Difference Between Exploration and Consumption
• Reading Print Publications Electronically (my thought on the general concept is towards the end)

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Joost, an early pioneer in bringing popular TV shows and movies to the Web, is dropping its consumer service, cutting jobs and losing its high-profile chief executive as it struggles to find revenue to survive.

The company said Tuesday it is changing strategy to serve as a white label video platform for media companies such as cable and satellite providers, as well as broadcasters. This moves it away from being primarily a consumer website.

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The idea of a knowledge exchange, running the same software as Stack Overflow, can be applied to just about any subject matter. With StackExchange™, you can run a site with all the same features that made Stack Overflow successful.

Prices start at $129 a month.

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Joshua Davis (born June 13, 1971) is an American web designer, author and artist in new media. He was an early pioneer in the use of Macromedia Flash.

Of course, not just any designer.  Joshua Davis was with Kioken, one of the most awesome firms back in the late 1990s.  I wrote about them here, and Davis even came along and commented some time later.

It’s interesting to read about how things worked at the higher levels back in the day.

A proficient illustrator and painter with a passion for technology, Davis’ work brought an entirely new dimension to art. Utilizing randomization in controlled environments, or Chaos Theory, Davis established a new and unique perspective on visual communication and creative expression, pioneering an area previously unexplored in graphic design.

In January 2001, as part of issue #100 of K10k.net, Davis posted an autobiography — a revealing look at his personal life in the New York City art/club scene in the early 1990s, his drug addiction, and his ability to overcome it to pursue his goal of being a full-time artist.

Perhaps some day there will be a Wikipedia page about me. “Content management visionary” has a nice ring to it…

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Among other things, Foxconn produces the Mac mini, the iPod and the iPhone for Apple Inc.; Intel-branded motherboards for Intel Corp.; various orders for American computer retailers Dell, Inc. and Hewlett Packard; the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 for Sony; the Wii for Nintendo;the Xbox 360 for Microsoft, cell phones for Motorola, and the Amazon Kindle.

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In response, Gwynne Raskind from the core PHP team, responds with:

[…] all of the advice in it is completely incorrect. We at the PHP team would like to offer some thoughts aimed at debunking these claims, which the author has clearly not verified.

Gwynne then proceeds to debunk Google’s article, piece by piece.

The example the author gives results in absolutely no significant use of extra memory […] This is exactly the opposite of correct advice. […] this piece of advice is total nonsense […]  We also urge the author to consider the troubling security implications of his examples, at least one of which suggests an extremely dangerous coding style.

Awkward (said in a happy sing-song tone).

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Amnesty International has installed a new anti-domestic-abuse ad fixture in Hamburg, Germany which is equal parts clever and shocking: when you look at the photo, it’s a smiling couple; when you look away, it’s a dude punchin’ a lady.

The billboard works by scanning its proximity with an eye-tracking camera, which triggers an image switch on the display panel when it senses someone looking at it. The change only occurs after a brief delay, so that observers understand what’s going on, and get the message.

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Melody is an open source content management system for bloggers and publishers where its community of users and contributors is its most important feature. We believe that a vibrant community is the foundation on which all successful products and services are built today.

I think is probably a pretty friendly fork, however.

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The open-source education software developed for the “$100 laptop” can now be loaded onto a $5 USB stick to run aging PCs and Macs with a new interface and custom educational software.

“What we are doing is taking a bunch of old machines that barely run Windows 2000, and turning them into something interesting and useful for essentially zero cost,” says Walter Bender, former president of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project. “It becomes a whole new computer running off the USB key; we can breathe new life into millions of decrepit old machines.”

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At any rate, let’s assume $100,000 is a reasonable ballpark for the monster server Markus purchased. It is the very definition of scaling up — a seriously big iron single server.

But what if you scaled out, instead — Hadoop or MapReduce style, across lots and lots of inexpensive servers?

His numbers are interesting.  I tended to think that scaling out would be cheaper, but it’s not when you throw in software licensing and power consumption.  In those two areas, the single, monster server wins by a mile.

The other thing that I don’t see Atwood discuss is getting a bunch of low-level servers to all play together nicely.  He gives the example that he could buy 83 smaller servers for the cost of one monster.  But now you have 83 servers to manage, instead of just one.  Of course, you have a crapload of fault tolerance now, so is this better?

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This is why evaluating the content modeling facilities of a CMS is so important before buying it (emphasis mine):

The reason why I find this topic so important (aside from the fact that I am a recovering DBA myself) is that content modeling capability is one of those difficult to change characteristics of a content management system. It is what I call a “load bearing wall” in the customization of a CMS. That is, while it may be possible to remediate a content modeling limitation, all the buttressing required may make such an effort impractical. Content modeling architecture is so difficult to change, in fact, that the products themselves tend to live with what they have and change very little in this area

I forgive him for stealing the term “load-bearing wall” in relation to content management.

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