Want to express your authority over a certain topic - use KNOL (and hopefully you can earn some money too)
Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects. Knol is made available to everyone by search and advertising world’s supreme power - GOOGLE .
Knol will encourage people having good knowledge on a particular topic to contribute their knowledge online and make it accessible to everyone.
The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It’s their knol, their voice, their opinion.
With Knol, Google is introducing a new method for authors to work together that Google calls “moderated collaboration.” With this feature, any reader can make suggested edits to a knol which the author may then choose to accept, reject, or modify before these contributions become visible to the public. This allows authors to accept suggestions from everyone in the world while remaining in control of their content.
Knols include strong community tools which allow for many modes of interaction between readers and authors. People can submit comments, rate, or write a review of a knol. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads from Google’s AdSense program. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with a revenue share from the proceeds of those ad placements.
Here is the URL in case you want to give this a try - knol.google.com
Microsoft survey - WIll Instant On OS concept be part of Windows 7 (or Windows Vienna)?
In what might be a glimpse of things to come in Windows 7, Microsoft is asking customers whether they would be interested in a new ‘Instant-on’ version of Windows. ‘We would like your feedback on a new concept,‘ the Microsoft survey states.
This survey sent out to select users has us wondering what on Earth the mega-corp is planning to do next, and judging by the looks of things, it has everything to do with Instant On. We’ve seen a number of these lightning-fast boot applications, with the most recent being ASUS’ Splashtop OS and the iteration loaded onto Dell’s freshest Latitudes.
The survey makes mention that the “Instant On experience is different from ‘Full Windows’ because it limits what activities you can do and what applications you have access to.” The survey also asks about which applications would be most important to have quick access to, and it very plainly states that in this “scenario,” your PC would “be usable in eight seconds.” So, is Instant On coming to Windows?
Who knows, but it’s clear someone at Redmond is giving it some thought.
Instant ON OS concept survey questions.
What does Microsoft survey suggest - WIll Instant On OS concept be part of Windows 7 (or Windows Vienna)?
Facebook released “Scribe” to open source community
Facebook is known for playing safe and not being much of an open source supporter. But in recent months, the company has been quite vocal about its commitment to open source and rightly so on Friday, Facebook announced that a piece of internally created software, called “Scribe,” would be released back to the open source community.
So what is Scribe? Well, per a post on Facebook’s blog, it’s been instrumental in helping Facebook handle the enormous amounts of data that come through its servers. As the page for Scribe says, “If you use the site, you’ve used Scribe.” More specifically, it’s a “server for aggregating log data streamed in real time from a large number of servers…designed to be scalable, extensible without client-side modification, and robust to failure of the network or any specific machine,” which means that the average Facebook user won’t have much use for the newly open-sourced product.
According to Facebook - they were collecting a few billion messages a day (which seemed like a lot at the time) for everything from access logs to performance statistics to actions that went to News Feed. Facebook used a variety of different technologies for the different use cases, and all of them were bursting at the seams. So they decided to build a unified system (called Scribe) to handle all of these cases.
The Scribe servers are arranged in a directed graph, but each server only knows about the next server in the graph. This flexible topology allows for things like adding an extra layer of fan-in if the system grows too large, and batching messages before sending them between datacenters, but without having any code that explicitly needs to understand datacenter topology, only a simple configuration.
When you’re building something that looks like a logging system there are a lot of things people expect: logging levels and rules about when they get sent, timestamping and ordering of messages, schemas for common messages, etc. Facebook decided that this was a can of worms that shouldn’t be mixed up with the asynchronous and mostly reliable delivery of data, so they made the data model very simple. A message is two strings: a category and the actual message. The category is the description of what the message is about, and the expectation is that messages of the same category end up in the same place. The message is the actual data to be logged. Facebook also don’t have any a priori list of categories that must be maintained. If you create a new category it shows up at a new file. This is following the Unix philosophy of doing exactly one thing and doing it well, and it has definitely paid off in ease of use and development. They started with four or five use cases in mind and now they have hundreds, but they didn’t have to modify the Scribe source for any of them.
What’s particularly interesting to me about Scribe is the fact that it was built using another open source tool developed by Facebook called Thrift. According to Facebook, Thrift is its a software framework for scalable cross-language services development.
The release of Scribe is also, in a sense, a message to some of the critics who’ve been skeptical of Facebook’s ability to keep its infrastructure humming along at a reasonable cost now that it has more than 100 million active users sending messages and uploading photos around the clock. By releasing Scribe as open source, Facebook is effectively saying, “Not only can we come up with something to run our site efficiently, we’ll let you see it, too.”
I am not really sure how helpful it will be for us developers. Hopefully Facebook will have more open source releases in the coming months.
Windows 7 (Windows Vienna) - coming soon to a computer near you
On October 28, 2008 Microsoft unveiled its work on Windows 7, the successor to Vista, to a crowd at its Professional Developers Conference. I will give you a tour through what I think are potentially the 6 most popular, professional IT oriented features in Windows 7.
You can get a more detailed look at Windows 7, also called Windows Vienna by clicking here - http://www.windowsvienna.com/
Here are some of the more professional IT related features that I really liked -
Federated search and enterprise search scopes
One of the big themes in Windows 7 for the corporate user is allowing easier access to information no matter where it’s located. The big push here is for a unified interface for any given search, with results brought in from a variety of locations into one convenient window. Out of the box, Windows 7 allows users to search beyond their own computers.
Some of the nice features here include one-click auto preview, the ability to search within specific “libraries” of information (libraries being a defined set of resources or locations to narrow the scope of a search) and integrated results presentation from SharePoint sites and beyond.
DirectAccess
This is one of the coolest features of Windows 7. Imagine the virtues of being connected to a VPN, access to your corporate network, file shares, intranet, seamless authentication with company resources and so on. Now imagine not having to create that expensive, giant tunnel through which these resources are accessed. That’s DirectAccess.
It requires deploying IPv6 and IPsec — no small tasks by any means, though they should be on your radar already. With DirectAccess, you can have essentially an “always managed” infrastructure, so you as the administrator can ensure that updates are distributed, that Group Policy is applied and that your known machines are trusted, anywhere, all the time.
BranchCache
BranchCache extends some of the improvements made in Windows Server 2003 R2 and Windows Server 2008 by caching downloaded information from the Web and intranet sites within a branch office the first time it is requested. Since branch offices often operate on lower-speed Internet links, user productivity is improved as the day goes on because more and more files are present within the cache. In a demo, a document was downloaded over a 512Kbit/sec. connection, taking about 30 to 45 seconds. After the cache, when another user in the same site requested that information, the transfer was nearly instantaneous. BranchCache works not only with a branch office server but also on a peer-to-peer basis among Windows 7 clients in the same location.
VHD Boot
VHD Boot works with a virtualized desktop infrastructure to ensure image consistency among client computers. If you have an environment employing strong Group Policy configuration, folder redirection, roaming profiles and the like, then you can feasibly boot from a virtual image. For example, the image used by a customer support team that works remotely could be the same one used on physical PCs for those users who require access to discrete hardware.
Windows Troubleshooting Platform
The Windows Troubleshooting Platform is a new, comprehensive approach to solving end user problems via troubleshooting packs that can be applied to PCs throughout the environment. And the Windows Troubleshooting Toolkit allows you as the administrator to create your own troubleshooting packs when you identify specific problems within your own infrastructure. Also, a separate new tool called Problem Steps Recorder allows an end user to record the steps he takes leading up to a problem and then capture those steps into automatically created screen grabs, and e-mail them to an administrator or help desk representative for easier problem resolution.
Windows Powershell Integrated Scripting Environment and Powershell Remoting
Because of PowerShell’s popularity, Microsoft has introduced into Windows 7 a graphical interface for PowerShell that makes it very easy to learn the scripting language and use it in a color-coded, easy-to-read environment. Developing, debugging and running the scripts in this new environment is much easier than it was with the previous single-command-prompt method.
Also new to PowerShell is support for the WS-Management protocol that allows you to remotely run commands on client PCs. You can use this capability on a one-to-one basis, say for specific requests in response to help desk calls, or you can fan out with one-to-many remoting and run cmdlets on multiple PCs from within the Windows PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment.
