~w00t~

With LL chasing the Enterprise and now using Jive as their web platform lets look at the larger question - how will they complete with MS Sharepoint and IBM Lotus

Look at the latest report in this area made by Forrester “Forrester Wave(TM): Collaboration Platform Q3 2009“.

According to the Forrester, the following functional areas considered as primary criteria to include vendors into their research:

• Collaborative workspace capabilities. This includes the ability to store and manage multiple artifacts with the space, not just the ability to share content over a network.
• Basic content management capabilities. These capabilities allow users to access a single copy of an artifact through the network.
• The ability to customize the space for specific business purposes. Personalized dashboards, workspace templates, and workflow capability are examples of customizability.
• Enterprise capabilities for security and authentication. Access-control lists (ACLs), single-sign on through Active Directory or LDAP support, and enterprise rights management
  capabilities (ERM) are some of the key components for enterprise security and authentication offered by these vendors.
• A development environment for building custom collaboration applications. The evaluated vendors provide development options for firms with very specific internal needs or for power users who want to self-provision custom applications.

From the standpoint of Product Lifecycle Management and Collaborative Product Development, I can see a lot of things are missing in this list to allow designers and engineers to collaborate. However, mentioned above capabilities fit very well too.

Special interest, in my view, also need to be done on the latest focus of collaborative platforms on the intersection between a content creation, traditional collaboration and social elements.

So, what is my intermediate conclusion? Collaborative platform’s evolution brings them more and more in the space of traditional product design and development collaboration.  Is it relevant and make sense to marry them, or we are just talking about “yet another collaborative buzzworks”? Is there overlap in platforms and functionality

via: www.forrester.com/rb/Research & plmtwine.com

Watching OGPX & VWRAP - MXP & SCTP

From: Joshua Bell <josh@lindenlab.com>
To: ogpx@ietf.org
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:23:43 -0700
Subject: Re: [ogpx] Tourist use case

On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 12:29 AM, Morgaine <morgaine.dinova@googlemail.com> wrote:

This directly implies that asset services must be quite separate from ADs.  Although we haven’t spelled it out, clients must have access to an arbitrary list of asset services, because as agents travel around the VWRAP-compatible metaverse, the regions they visit will contain objects from an arbitrary number of asset service providers.

Without access to these asset services, the visited regions would not be visualizable at all.  And denying visualization is no business of the AD’s. This makes it clear that access to asset services should not be mediated by the AD at all —- the AD’s role should be limited to allowing or denying entrance to a region.  Once inside a region, it is the region that offers capabilities for access to the asset services of assets within the region.

After reading this a few times, I agree with the high level sentiment - but be careful regarding the terminology, as specific wording tripped me up the first few times through.

In the SL protocol today, clients only ever communicate with a region. It’s the region’s responsibility to provide the data for what the agent sees. This occurs both for items that would be considered aspects of the region (chairs, buildings, trees, waterfalls) and “transient” items (other avatars with attachments). The region exposes a data source (today, the byte-efficient but fairly grotesque family of UDP packets) of the description of objects (prims, textures, sourds, animations, …) which the client consumes.

Behind the scenes, the region may be pulling those object definitions from an asset service, or they may be present in the region definition itself. The client is unaware of this - it’s hidden behind the services the region exposes.

Now for the terminology bit: we can call the services the region is exposing “asset services” but these could be quite distinct from the sorts of things present in an agent’s inventory. One phrase that’s potentially confusing is “the regions they visit will contain objects from an arbitrary number of asset service providers” - while I agree with the high-level interpretation of that statement, I think it paints a picture that as you’re exploring a region, the client is *necessarily* going off and making connections to a variety of asset servers to fetch the data.

I don’t think VWRAP should *preclude* that (I imagine it’s only sensible for things like textures to be referenced by URLs which could be coming off of any old place), but my initial reading of your text was that the client would necessarily be fetching things from external asset services. For example, if I buy a chair on FooGrid and drop it on BarGrid, when you visit BarGrid you’re having to ask FooGrid’s asset service for the description. Again, I think that’s *conceivable*, but shouldn’t be *necessary*. (And I don’t think you’re claiming that - but my first read-through came away with that impression.)

And, of course, one can conceive of clients that implement a policy of not trusting FooGrid for anything and wouldn’t make such a connection - FooGrid could be blacklisted by some large search company, my ISP, or perhaps my AD.

Indeed, but fortunately it hasn’t been proposed that asset services be part of the agent service in VWRAP.  The legacy SL model of assets and inventories clearly doesn’t apply in our extended scenarios, and the OGP documents never covered asset services at all, so we’re defining the asset services and inventory model of VWRAP as we speak. :-)

Be careful about blurring the use of “asset services” between “stuff in regions” and “stuff I have”. I think there is a big intersection - and may have the same characteristics and/or protocols, but I also think they are are distinct. I would guess that there will be asset services associated with both agents and regions - off the top of my head:

Uses of an agent-associated “asset” service:
* content to client app (inspect your inventory)
* content from client app (upload/import to inventory)
* content to region (rez something)
* content from region (buy/take something)
* content to agent (give something)
* content from agent (receive something)

Uses of an region-associated “asset” service:
* content to client app (see the world)
* content from client app (upload/import to region)
* content to region (during teleport/region crossing)
* content from region (during teleport/region crossing)
* content to agent (buy/take something)
* content from agent (rez something)

I’m using “asset” in quotes since that term may be overloaded. “Content” might be a better term.

via:ogpx Digest, Vol 6, Issue 85

Xerox develops silver ink for wearable or throwaway electronics

October 26, 2009

Xerox researchers have invented a kind of ink that can conduct electricity and be used to put electronic circuits on top of plastics, film, and textiles. That means in the coming years we’ll be able to wear or bend our electronics. You could even print out your electronic gadget on plastic sheets, as if you were printing a document.

Via: http://venturebeat.disqus.com/?url=http://digital.venturebeat.com/2009/10/26/xerox-developers-a-silver-ink-that-can-be-used-to-wearable-or-throwaway-electronics/

Embedding Youtube

Build your own custom video playlist at embedr.com

Michelle

Open Source Hardware

The open source concept has traditionally been applied to software, but open source hardware is rapidly gaining ground

via: Wired & Liquidware Antipasto

Chrome - 10 years ago to Now

Steve Jobs once quoted Picasso

Via: http://news.cnet.com/ March 26, 1999

Easing browser interface development

Browser developers currently rely on standard, interpretive Web languages such as HTML and CSS to render content in a browser window, and programming languages such as C to create the graphical user interface, or “chrome.” Chrome refers to the hard-coded features on the periphery of the browser window, including menu items, buttons, and the address bar.

XUL: via: https://developer.mozilla.org/En/XUL

XUL (XML User Interface Language) is Mozilla’s XML-based language that lets you build feature-rich cross platform applications that can run connected or disconnected from the Internet. These applications are easily customized with alternative text, graphics and layout so they can be readily branded or localized for various markets. Web developers already familiar with Dynamic HTML (DHTML) will learn XUL quickly and can start building applications right away. Open XUL Periodic Table in Firefox or another Gecko-based browser to see some XUL demos.

Via:Wikipedia

Qt (pronounced as the English word “cute”^[2]) is a cross-platform application development framework, widely used for the development of GUI programs (in which case it is known as a widget toolkit), and also used for developing non-GUI programs such as console tools and servers. Qt is most notably used in KDE, Google Earth, Skype, Qt Extended, Adobe Photoshop Album, VirtualBox and OPIE. It is produced by Nokia’s Qt Development Frameworks division, which came into being after Nokia’s acquisition of the Norwegian company Trolltech, the original producer of Qt, on June 17, 2008

Fast Forward: via: http://www.reuters.com

Google, Microsoft, Palm rev up smartphone race

Tue Oct 6, 2009

According to research firm IDC, smartphones running Microsoft software accounted for 11 percent of the worldwide market in the first half of 2009, compared to 11.7 percent share for Apple’s iPhone and 19.9 percent share for Research in Motion’s Blackberry.

Nokia’s Symbian operating system had the largest share with 46.4 percent share.

IPHONE THE ONE TO BEAT

But analysts say that Apple’s iPhone, despite its modest share of the market, is the product to beat.

How to Steal a Botnet and What Can Happen When You Do

Google Tech Talk
September 10, 2009

ABSTRACT

Presented by Richard A. Kemmerer.

Botnets, which are networks of malware-infected machines that are controlled by an adversary, are the root cause of a large number of security threats on the Internet. A particularly sophisticated and insidious type of bot is Torpig, which is a malware program that is designed to harvest sensitive information (such as bank account and credit card data) from its victims. In this talk, we report on our efforts to take control of the Torpig botnet for ten days. Over this period, we observed more than 180 thousand infections and recorded more than 70 GB of data that the bots collected.

While botnets have been hijacked before, the Torpig botnet exhibits certain properties that make the analysis of the data particularly interesting. First, it is possible (with reasonable accuracy) to identify unique bot infections and relate that number to the more than 1.2 million IP addresses that contacted our command and control server during the ten day period. This
shows that botnet estimates that are based on IP addresses are likely to report inflated numbers. Second, the Torpig botnet is large, targets a variety of applications, and gathers a rich and diverse set of information from the infected victims. This allowed us to perform interesting data analysis that goes well beyond simply counting the number of stolen credit cards. In this talk we will discuss the analysis that we performed on the data collected and the lessons learned from the analysis, as well as from the process of obtaining (and losing) the botnet.

Tech News This week

Google Sticks it to Microsoft

Google Chrome Frame, which is a plugin for IE that “seamlessly brings Google Chrome’s open web technologies and speedy JavaScript engine to Internet Explorer.

IE6 doesn’t have JavaScript and HTML5 support to handle Google Wave. Apparently the team tried but is going to give up on providing support for the rival browser. In their words:

“Google Wave depends on strong JS and DOM rendering performance to provide a desktop-like experience in the browser. HTML5’s offline storage and web workers will enable us to add great features without having to compromise on performance. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer still used by the majority of the Web’s users, has not kept up with such fairly recent developments in Web technology. Compared with other browsers, the JavaScript performance is many times slower and HTML5 support is still far behind. Likewise, the many different versions of IE still in use — each with its own set of CSS quirks and layout limitations — further complicates building rich Web applications.

In the past, the Google Wave team has spent countless hours solely on improving the experience of running Google Wave in Internet Explorer. We could continue in this fashion, but using Google Chrome Frame instead lets us invest all that engineering time in more features for all our users, without leaving Internet Explorer users behind.”

Via: Mashable

The New AMD/ATI HD5870 GPU

The AMD HD5870 GPU, codenamed “Cypress” and the ATI Radeon graphics block, just took the “fastest GPU chip” crown away from Nvidia’s GT200b in the GeForce GTX285.

This new 2.15 billion transistor GPU has 1,600 shaders and 4.8GHz GDDR5 memory throughput, which is also the first non-classified chip of any kind to deliver 2.7TFLOPS in floating point single precision and over 500GFLOPS in double precision. Oh yes, it’s true, but you’ve got to code under AMD Stream or OpenCL to get anywhere close to these figures, though.

Via AMD & theinquirer.net