David Chappell Not too long ago, I spoke at a Gartner event where the keynote speaker posed a question to the audience. "How many of you work for a company that once had a large-scale object reuse program?" he asked. In a room with several hundred IT managers from the largest American firms, nearly every hand went up. He then made a follow-up request: "Please keep your hand up if your firm still has a large-scale object reuse program". Only one hand remained in the air. Google Answers Returns, But Only in Russia After closing Google Answers last year, Google launched a new version of the service, this time only in Russian (here's the English translation, powered by Google Translate). Unlike the original Google Answers, there are no hired experts and people don't have to pay to ask questions. Instead, you use your points to "pay" for a question and you earn points by posting answers or rating other people's answers. If your answer gets bad ratings, you lose points. When you start to type a question, Google shows related questions in a sidebar to prevent the problem of duplication.
Exclusive: Google App Engine ported to Amazon's EC2 One of the biggest criticisms of Google's App Engine have been cries of lock-in, that the applications developed for the platform won't be portable to any other service. This morning, Chris Anderson, the Portland-based cofounder of the Grabb.it MP3 blog service, just released AppDrop — an elegant hack proving that's not true. AppDrop is a container for applications developed with the Google App Engine SDK, running entirely on Amazon's EC2 infrastructure.
Security Dutch Police Crush Big 'Botnet,' Arrest Trio October 10, 2005 Dutch police arrested three men for creating a botnet of more than 100,000 compromised PCs, authorities in the Netherlands said Friday. They allege the botnet was used in an attempt to extort a U.S. company, to steal PayPal and eBay accounts, and to install adware and spyware. The pinch is among the biggest botnet scores ever for law enforcement, Dutch authorities said. "With 100,000 infected computers, the dismantled botnet is one of the largest ever seen," the Public Prosecution Service (Openbaar Ministerie, or OM) said in a statement.
Blogging is all fun and games, until the boss finds out - Feb. 15, 2005 NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Mark Jen landed a dream job with Google Inc. in January. He was fired less than a month later. His infraction? elemental links: Office 2.0 Podcast Jam "Transcript": Friday, I was visiting an enterprise client to review their architectural plan and discuss a business architecture initiative. During our conversation, we touched on the need for business users to simulate a proposed business change, without a big IT effort to provision the information and provide a front-end. In this scenario, a flexible front-end is crucial, because the business users are really experimenting with different models. This got us to talking about Excel, and as luck would have it, I had just recorded a related podcast for Anne's excellent Office 2.0 Podcast Jam .
Google Russian Translator Google Translate added a new language: Russian. Now you can translate text from English to Russian or from Russian to English. Google uses its statistical machine translation system that won many prizes. Google News Russia has also been launched. enterprisesocialgraph - Google Code Use the current Google hosted version of ESS here A simple, open source GAE project to allow enterprise users to maintain one single social graph. The goal is to explore and learn how Google App Engine can enable enterprise cloud computing. All work will belong to the community that contributes to this project. This application will be developed and hosted in Google App Engine and the source will be kept here. It will allow users to maintain one master social graph across their various enterprise and personal applications.
On Copyright Law and Myopia: Corante > Copyfight > January 31, 2005 On Copyright Law and Myopia Posted by Donna Wentworth Seth Schoen has a nice exercise in reductio ad absurdum, pointing out that the only argument the Business Software Alliance (BSA) makes in its recent legislative agenda to refute the notion that copying is beneficial to society is that restricting copying will make the software industry larger and more profitable. Says Seth, "The idea that helping a business sector get larger and richer is a primary duty of legislators or of the public is so peculiar that it bears trying to come up with a few parallel arguments." For example, BSA asserts:
Live from webMethods - Fabric 7 - The New Face of BPM I am attending webMethods Integration World this week (ebizQ is a media sponsor) and blogging live from the sessions. Next up for me was Susan Ganeshan of webMethods talking about the Business Process Management capabilities of Fabric 7. Processes have evolved over time with lots of patchwork systems with data and process steps moving around between systems creating a "Patchwork Process". Lots of different kinds of processes with wide variation between them in terms of what kind of data is involved, people to people v system to system etc. However, almost always has both people and systems interacting in processes.
Gary Colet- The State of Knowledge Ma My trip was in order to spend a fascinating 2 days in Moscow with fellow speakers Jerry Ash, Chris Collison and Richard Cross at the very first Knowledge Management conference in Russia. Attendees were all private sector organizations (now I think about it, where were the public sector?), about half of whom also presented on their knowledge management activities. The question I know you want answered is “what is happening in knowledge management in Russia?” Based on what I heard, the answer is “a lot”. Service-Oriented Architecture in Healthcare: The End of Hierarchy I have posted previous notes about the federated model in healthcare computing. Drs. Balis and Routbort recently lectured on the relevance of this model, closely linked to service-oriented architecture (SOA), at Lab InfoTech Summit 2008 (see: The Value of a Federated Architecture in Pathology: Test Order Entry;The Value of a Federated Architecture in Pathology: Test Result Reporting). For me, the most appealing aspect of this approach to healthcare computing is that it eliminates hierarchy among systems.