Internet Archive Partners With 150 Libraries to Launch an E-Book Lending Program. The Internet Archive, in conjunction with 150 libraries, has rolled out a new 80,000 e-book lending collection today on OpenLibrary.org. This means that library patrons with an OpenLibrary account can check out any of these e-books. The hope is that this effort will help libraries make the move to digital book lending. "As readers go digital, so are our libraries," says Brewster Kahle, founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive. This new digital lending system will allow library patrons to borrow up to 5 e-books at a time for up to 2 weeks.
Lending e-books has proven to be quite complicated, for both individual book owners but certainly for libraries. The publishers participating in this OpenLibrary project, including Cursor and OR Books, have a very different take on the future of libraries, publishing, and lending. Cloud computing: the latest chapter in an epic journey.
This blog post is a version of Eric’s talk at our Chrome event on Tuesday, December 7, 2010. You can watch his talk on YouTube. - Ed. On Tuesday, we announced a number of updates to Chrome and Chrome OS. For me, these announcements were among the most important of my working life—demonstrating the real power of computer science to transform people’s lives. It’s extraordinary how very complex platforms can produce beautifully simple solutions like Chrome and Chrome OS, which anyone can use from the get-go—as long as you get it right. And that’s very, very hard indeed as history has taught. In 1983, I worked on a team at Sun that was very proud to announce the 3M machines.
With hindsight, why has this been so hard? So why did it fail, and why will things be different this time around? Chrome and Chrome OS are possible today for several reasons. So all of a sudden you had a client combined with a back-end that were powerful enough to sustain a new programming model. 5 Cloud Shake-Ups This Week - ReadWriteCloud. This was a busy week for the cloud. The biggest news was Amazon.com's entry into the platform-as-a-service business with its Elastic Beanstalk. But there were several other big announcements as well: a Dell employee confirmed that Dell will get into the infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service businesses, GoGrid announced a new service, Rackspace opened its first European data center and more.
Dell to Get into the Public Cloud Business Logan McLeod, director of cloud at Dell, tweeted on Wednesday: "Dell as a public cloud end-to-end service provider? Yes. IaaS & PaaS. The Register notes that following Dell's acquisition of Perot Services it now operates 36 data centers world-wide. GoGrid Launches Hosted Private Cloud What's a "hosted private cloud"?
The advantage over a public cloud is that none of your data is "touching" that of another customer. It's an interesting compromise. Rackspace Opens Its First Data Center in Europe Joyent Updating Its Cloud Operating System. Top 10 Cloud Computing Services for 2010 - ReadWriteCloud. We chose our top 10 services based upon what trends bubbled in 2010 and the companies and organizations that responded or even set the tone for the overall market.
We looked at the entire landscape but with a particular focus on platforms. Platforms provide infrastructure and serve as developer ecosystems. Platforms are where apps are created and served. The platform ecosystem is a lot like a coral reef, an analogy we borrow from Dave Winer on occasion. It's through that lens that we picked our top 10. github The github services is a code repository that has skyrocketed in popularity. OpenStack This year's new wonder of the open-source community originates from the folks at Rackspace and NASA who teamed up to build an open-source cloud development platform. OpenStack has awesome potential but the pressure is on to attract more partners and further grow the community. VMware VMware defines a trend in the market for virtualized infrastructures as a standard way to access the cloud. Heroku Twilio. OpenStack: An Open Cloud Initiative Makes its 1st Release - ReadWriteCloud.
It's official. Open Stackhas made its first release. It's a major moment for the nascent open cloud initiative, a service that combines the Rackspace object storage capabilities with NASA's Nebula, the open computing effort from the U.S federal space agency. It feels like the start of something, doesn't it? Just writing "U.S. federal space agency," gives us a sense of what makes this exciting for the cloud computing movement. OpenStack is split into two projects: OpenStack Object Storage and OpenStack Compute.
OpenStack Object Storage This is the storage environment that Rackspace turned over to OpenStack. Dell community evangelist Barton George did this interview with project lead Will Reese: From the OpenStack site: "Because OpenStack uses software logic to ensure data replication and distribution across different devices, inexpensive commodity hard drives and servers can be used in lieu of more expensive equipment Storing media libraries (photos, music, videos, etc.) OpenStack Compute. Dataflytt i molnet standardiseras. Idag blev den första standarden för lagringstjänster i molnet klar. Den klubbades igenom idag av SNIA, Storage Network Industry Association på kongressen Storage Networking World i Orlando. Standarden kallas Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) och ska göra det lättare att hantera information som lagras i molntjänster.
Ett av huvudsyftena med standarden är att underlätta förflyttningar av information mellan olika molntjänster, bland annat genom att se till att informationens metadata behålls. Den är nödvändig för en effektiv och säker hantering. Metadata används bland annat för att att kunna styra hur länge informationen ska lagras och hur många kopior som ska finnas. CDMI innehåller även andra delar, bland annat för att underlätta debitering för nyttjandet av lagringstjänsterna. SNIA påpekar att debitering även kan användas internt i företag då privata moln används.
SNIA själva kallar standarden för en milsten.