Archive for Grids
Amazon Drops Message Service Pricing 10,000%!
No that’s not a typo and although few will actually get a 10,000% reduction, most Amazon SQS customers will probably see costs drop by 1000%. This is another very significant precursor to the coming boom.
Open Simulator
The Second Life open source movement is producing tangible results:
Out of the box, the OpenSim can be used to create a Second Life like environment, able to run in a standalone mode or connected to other OpenSim instances through built in grid technology. It can also easily be extended to produce more specialized 3D interactive applications.Main Page – OpenSim
It’s early, but there are operational grids, at least one of which is already advertising virtual property for sale. This supports my assertion that Second Life will be around for a while and is more evidence of the coming boom.
More on the Evolution of Second Life
In Standards of Avatar Portability reBang provides updates and new thoughts on some interesting topics touched on here in the MJ
Mind Mesh
In Gear Mesh I said
Google Gears will eventually make a dramatic change in the economics of the web – probably in ways Google may not have really anticipated. … Now that the genie is out of the bottle people will look to deploy other database servers locally …
David Van Couvering meshes these thoughts up with a fascinating scenario in which local storage combined with iTunes/Bonjour based zero-configuration networking enables people
…to build and use massive, secure, Internet-based data collaboration applications and services without ever putting a single byte of their data on Google’s servers.
Ouch.
Google GearsMore Google Gears Tech
I think Albert Ip provides some reasonable definitions of the terms peer-to-peer and mesh networking but as with a forest(especially a rainforest) precise definitions of trees, to degree they can be said to exist, tend to obscure the forestness of the tree. Explaining how the Internet evolved and why peer-to-peer and client-server aren’t mutually exclusive, Tim O’Reilly said:
Centralization and decentralization are never so clearly separable as anyone fixated on buzzwords might like.
Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies
Genie Gears Up
Commenting on my recent Gear Mesh post, Albert Ip of Random Walk In Learning agrees that Google Gears has the potential to increase the capacity of a collaborative system but thinks I’ve gone too far in pushing it to include “mesh” and “peers”. He raises concerns about security and implementation difficulties that are valid, but for which solutions either exist or are being developed. The Meshverse Journal is not a tech space so I won’t go too far down this path but one or two examples seem appropriate for the tech-oriented readers(I am … umm gearing up to provide a companion meshverse implementation blog). Regarding security, in Firefox 2.0 trusted extensions can already use SQLite storage to share information. The security page for Google Gears clearly states that:
Sometimes web applications on different origins may want to share resources. We are investigating ideas for granting permissions across origins.
so we can expect that Google Gears will provide this capability as well. While getting disparate local apps and servers all working together and connecting to the internet safely does add some complications, there are compelling reasons to tackle them and LOTS of idle machine cycles available to do so. Besides, now that this more potent genie has followed Jini out of the bottle, there won’t be any turning back.
Gear Mesh: Power To The Peers
There’s broad recognition that the Google Gears announcement is one of high impact, but I haven’t seen anyone getting close to just how big. Yes, working offline is important, but it’s not new. As Dave Winer points out, the Radio blogging system was doing it in 2001. It actually goes back further than that as I’ll show shortly, but what is new is that Google Gears builds on open standards and has potential to become a very widely adopted standard itself – they’ve already got Adobe as a partner:
Adobe chief software architect Kevin Lynch says his company is happy to be working with Google to create “a standard cross-platform, cross-browser local storage capability.”
The idea that a Google Gears standard could make cookies obsolete is a big deal too, but none of the above even begin to scratch the surface of what it will mean to have a standardized database server running on hundreds of millions of machines – that is key to answering the $64Billion Dollar Question about how the meshverse will grow to support tens of millions of simultaneously collaborating participants. Google Gears will eventually make a dramatic change in the economics of the web – probably in ways Google may not have really anticipated.
