NEWS: online psycho

You want to have an idea what's an online psycho? Take the time to read the full story published by Russel Beattie.

I find the comment of vowe particularly interesting:

There are three options to deal with these kind of trolls:

1. Ignore them.

That is the worst punishment of all. They so want to recognized. Ignoring however does not work really well, because there is always someone around to feed the troll.

2. Disagree with them.

That will usually drive them up the wall. And they will make a complete idiot of themselves. Before you mentioned the case here, I did not connect the dots. Now I have, and I can safely ignore all messages from this source. Expect other folks in the mobile space to do the same.

3. Confront them.

These kind of people are only bold as long as they are in front of a screen. Maybe someone from Poland reads this and wants to help him get back into real life.

Whatever you chose to do, don't worry. Idiots become known idiots very quickly by their own actions. You can speed this up by writing a documentary.

MUSIC: Mercedes Mixed Tape 04

After Mixed Tape 03, Mercedes just released the Mercedes Mixed Tape 04. Really great! Great concept and idea, the quality and coherence of choosen artists and tracks are marvelous.

Mixed Tape 04 is now online - 15 free tracks from all over the globe!

With Mixed Tape 04 Mercedes-Benz continues its successful compilation series - until the 24th of January 2005 you are free to explore, download and enjoy your personal favourites at http://www.mercedes-benz.com/mixedtape.

To give you the best of cutting edge music we have again scoured the world for 15 exclusive, future hits - from French cult star Sébastien Tellier and first-rate indie pop (The Dalles) via Latin-inspired improvisation (Nachttierhaus) and the latest new labels (Melodyfarm) to the "electro-acoustic reality alternatives" of a young Brit (Ux), this compilation features a plethora of intelligent tracks for the perfect groove wherever you are.

Nevertheless, to keep up with the ever-changing music scene, Mixed Tape, too, stays on the move: after nine weeks at the above-mentioned URL Mixed Tape 04 will be replaced by its successor, featuring our latest new discoveries.

Enjoy the mix!

BLOG: difficult :-)

Not very *online* the last days. I was two days in Vienna - Austria for some interesting business discussions and...a huge "Wiener Schnitzel" at the most famous place to eat this Viennese speciality - Figlmüller (Bäckerstrasse).



The plate was definitely too small (for the insiders - these guys are crazy, they serve this gigantic great Wiener Schnitzel without French fries, bloody hell):



Then, one *very good* business dinner with my colleagues from hp Switzerland at the Conti restaurant in Zürich. I got the chance to have a marvelous soup with white truffles. Business is sometimes very hard :-)

BUSINESS: IBM and Business Process Outsourcing

Another great article from Knowledge@Wharton - "Can Big Blue Succeed In BPO?".

After decades of specializing as a computer manufacturer and provider of computer-related services, Big Blue in the past year or two has been heading into some not-terribly-technical fields. Today's IBM processes thousands of insurance claims, ensures that Procter & Gamble employees get paid, and takes charge of repairing televisions and CD players sold by Philips Consumer Electronics.

Taking on tasks such as customer service and human resources management is part of a broader shift among traditional information technology companies to get into what's often called business process outsourcing (BPO). [...]

BPO is a fertile market, expected to grow from about $405 billion last year to $682.5 billion in 2008, according to research firm IDC. Interest in such operations - and especially in their migration to countries such as India - continues to ride high. [...]

In essence, the new Big Blue sees big bucks in focusing on the "B" in International Business Machines. But the strategy carries some risks. They include competing against new foes, handling novel tasks and explaining a grandiose vision to customers. What's more, the business process push requires a thorough understanding of different industries. Staying on top of specific industries and their changing trends should be a challenge for IBM. [...]

IBM combined the roughly 30,000 employees from PwC Consulting with about 30,000 IBM workers to form a new division called Business Consulting Services. The idea behind the acquisition and new unit was to generate revenue by joining IBM's technology prowess with PwC Consulting's business expertise. Analysts say the PwC Consulting deal has helped IBM compete in the BPO arena. [...]

A more recent acquisition further demonstrated IBM's commitment to business process services. Earlier this year Big Blue snapped up Daksh, an Indian BPO provider with 6,000 employees. Daksh, which also has a facility in the Philippines, gives IBM an army of lower-wage employees ready to handle services such as telemarketing and transaction processing. [...]

MUSIC: On heavy rotation

I got the last U2 this afternoon - How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. What about you?

TOOLS: MSN Web Messenger

As a lot of companies are blocking the usage of MSN Messenger and other identical real-time communication applications (the port ranges are blocked in the firewalls), it could be very interesting to use the exclusively web-based version of MSN Messenger called MSN Web Messenger. Really no client software installion required, only a browser with a web-navigator. Good idea! And it's working very well with Firefox ;-)

You must have the following to use MSN Web Messenger:

• A web browser: Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 or later, Netscape 7.1 or later, or Mozilla 1.6 or later, running in Microsoft Windows.


• An Internet connection (56 Kbps or faster recommended)


• A Microsoft® .NET Passport. If you have a hotmail.com or msn.com account, you already have a Passport.


• Popups enabled for this web site if you are using popup blocker software like the MSN Toolbar

What is the difference between Web Messenger and Messenger?
MSN Messenger is a fully featured instant messaging program that you install on your own computer or one you have permission to install on. MSN Web Messenger enables you to quickly and easily use basic instant messaging features on a web browser on any computer without installing any software.

NEWS: incredible illusion!

[via vowe]

This illusion is *really* great. Both square A and B have the same color.



I have to admit that I couldn't believe it. So I erased all the parts of the image (also the A and B), excepted both squares. It looks like this.



Amazing :-)

TOOLS: Raxco PerfectDisk v7.0 released

Raxco released its new version 7.0 (free evaluation) of PerfectDisk, a great disk defragmenter. Already tested the version 6.0 of PerfectDisk here.

Great tool, very strange interface....

What's new in PerfectDisk V7.0?

• Faster defragmentation times. PerfectDisk V7's performance has been increased more than 20%.


• Reduction in system resource usage. PerfectDisk V7 uses 20% less system resources than PerfectDisk V6.


• New look and feel. A more intuitive and Windows XP style interface makes using PerfectDisk even easier.


• Support for mount points (drives that have no drive letter assigned to them)


• Tighter integration with Active Directory Group Policy allows for easy software deployment, updating, configuration and scheduling of PerfectDisk.


• Certification for Windows. PerfectDisk V7 has been certified by Microsoft for Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003.

What Windows platforms are supported for PerfectDisk?

• Windows Server 2003


• Windows 2000 Professional and Server


• Windows XP Home and Professional


• Terminal Server (Windows 2003/2000 based)


• MS Cluster Servers (Windows 2003/2000 based)


• All levels of RAID

Does PerfectDisk defragment safely?

Yes. Windows has exposed APIs that can be used to safely defragment most files online, while Windows is running. These APIs safely move (defragment) files on both the NTFS and FAT file systems. The APIs on Windows 2003, XP and Windows 2000 also support moving files on FAT32. These APIs are a part of the native Windows file systems and have been coded, tested and certified by Microsoft to ensure that no data loss or corruption occurs when a file is moved. These APIs are fully synchronized with all file I/O and memory management functions of Windows. You can even safely defragment files that are open and currently being modified.

BUSINESS: Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences

Interesting article from Knowledge@Wharton called "What's Behind Edward C. Prescott's Nobel Prize?". Great macroeconomics discussions!

Last month Edward C. Prescott and Finn E. Kydland won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for two important papers they coauthored that advanced the field of dynamic macroeconomics. [...]

Prescott and Kydland have long been respected for successfully combining theory and applied economics. Their work together has focused on the interaction between theory and a society's aggregate statistics such as the level of unemployment, inflation and productivity. Prescott, an economics professor at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, has been a research adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis for 23 years. Kydland is an economics professor at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California, Santa Barbara. Kydland was initially a graduate student of Prescott's at Carnegie Mellon. [...]

"I love creating models and coming up with explicit structures I can play with," says Edward C. Prescott. "Economists create their own worlds. We're like little gods with our artificial economics, wanting to see what happens." [...]

"I liked that general equilibrium language - with models and people, with substitution and thinking about what these people are doing in their environments, with borrowing and lending and knowing that there's somebody on each side of any exchange or contract," says Prescott.

(A general equilibrium model refers to a model of the economy that takes into account all aspects of that economy, and in which individuals, companies and institutions like the central bank make decisions they consider the smartest and most appropriate at the time. Substitution refers to the decisions individuals make such as the decision to spend money now or save it for the future.) [...]

In "Rules Rather Than Discretion," their 1977 paper, Prescott and Kydland established that a monetary authority's policy decisions are often time-inconsistent. This means that monetary policy changes intended to remedy an immediate problem such as unemployment will often have unintended ramifications that work against the stated goal of reducing unemployment.

When a government announces a remedy to a short-term problem, individuals and companies adjust their behavior and make new decisions based on that information. Those decisions change the economic landscape, reducing the incentives the government had in the first place for wanting to institute the policy changes. [...]

[Richard Rogerson] points out that parents who threaten to punish their children often display a time-inconsistency problem. A parent who wants to produce a certain behavior may tell a child not to do something or he will punish the child. "The hope is to influence behavior," says Rogerson. "But the kid figures out that the parent doesn't want to punish him, so he knows that if he does it again he won't be punished. The parent thus has a time-inconsistent policy and cannot achieve what he wants." [...]

The second influential paper by Prescott and Kydland mentioned in the Nobel citation was "Time to Build and Aggregate Fluctuations." This paper turned Keynesian theory upside down by finding that business cycles were caused by supply-side shocks rather than shocks to a society's aggregate demand. [...]

Prescott and Kydland's business cycles paper showed that real, supply-side shocks - such as a hike in the price of oil or hurricanes hitting Florida or the invention of a new technology - by and large account for the business cycles in a well-functioning economy. "Business cycles are therefore not the result of a malfunctioning economy," says Rogerson. "It's the economy responding to shocks that hit it - and policymakers must therefore think differently about business cycles." [...]

PRIVATE: mark this day :-)

I cannot say anything yet (Non Disclosure) but I would like to mark this particular day (yesterday) with a post, to be able to find this milestone in the near future. So, Thursday, November 18 2004, was surely one of the most important day of my professional life :-) More about this in some weeks!

TECHNOLOGY: PageRank and number of Backlinks

Again, a very interesting article from Olivier Duffez (this time, in English too ;-) about the relationship between the PageRank and the number of Backlinks, and the evolution of this relationship. I've already talked about the blog of Olivier here.

Results
The results are presented in the following table. For example the cell corresponding to column 5/2004 and row PR5 shows that in May 2004, an average of 104 backlinks was required to get a PR5.



Conclusion

• With a few exceptions, whatever the PR is, more backlinks than the month before are required every month to get a given PR.
  
• As expected, one needs far more backlinks in order to get a high PR than a low one. Even if there may be exceptions, because the study deals with a good number of data, it gives experimental support to the theoretical hypotheses or ideas never proved before but only discussed in forums.
  
• During this summer (2004), Google changed the behaviour of the link: command which now includes low PR pages. Only PR4 or higher PR pages used to be listed by this command. Conversely since this summer you can also list the low PR pages backlinks, which you can see in the table.

TECHNOLOGY: AMD Opteron vs. Intel Xeon (database test)

Interesting comparison and database performance test from AnandTech between AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon.

Over a year and half has passed since AMD announced their K8 architecture to the world, and what has changed? Well, "a heck of a lot" is the answer. The Opteron has proven itself as a worthy competitor to the infamous Intel Xeon line-up of processors, and Intel has been following AMD for a change, something no one could have predicted a few years ago. Dual-core processors are on the horizon; AMD demonstrated theirs with Hewlett Packard just a few weeks ago, and Intel demonstrated theirs at the Intel Developers Conference in September, 2004.

NEWS: global warming

[via Joy Ito]

[...] Global warming and the risk did not seem like some sort of disputed theory as some politicians seem to lead us to believe. All of the scientists involved in energy and ecology that I heard speaking seemed to believe that our earth was immediately at risk and that we had to act now. The combination of the increase in population and our addiction to energy would not allow us to stabilize at any sustainable equilibrium without drastic changes in the way we make and use energy.

NEWS: Canada wants to help

Canada wants to help :-)

Ladies and gentlemen, drop your borders
Now that George W. Bush has been officially elected, single, sexy, American liberals - already a threatened species - will be desperate to escape.
These lonely, afraid (did we mention really hot?) progressives will need a safe haven.
You can help. Open your heart, and your home. Marry an American. Legions of Canadians have already pledged to sacrifice their singlehood to save our southern neighbours from four more years of cowboy conservatism.

Cowboy conservatism? Great definition!

NEWS: MSN search

As you perhaps already know, Microsoft launched a beta version of its search engine called MSN search. Their Program Managers launched a blog at the same time:

As you all know we have decided to join the fray and we have been listening to what you've had to say about our TechPreview. We've decided to start our own blog so that we can keep you all up-to-date on what's happening with our product, our team and our industry.
Keep watching this space for updates.

I played a bit with this search engine and I was quite impressed by the quality of the responses. Worth a try! It is great to see that Microsoft is positively developping its communication strategy, the posts seem to be quite open and transparent, and they are also talking about problems (avaibility, etc.). Interesting. Their blogroll also mentions the blogs of their....direct competitors (Google, Yahoo, etc.). Again, interesting!

PS: the now famous query with the word "the" in MSN search is returning 2.6 billion pages indexed by the Microsoft search engine, in comparison with the more than 8 billion pages indexed by Google.

TOOLS: Konfabulator for Windows 1.8

Ultimate tool for geek - Part II

For about 2 weeks and thanks to vowe, I tested Kapsules, a desktop widget engine for Microsoft Windows. A widget is like a miniature application which rests on your desktop. Kapsules is great but quite limited concerning the number of widgets.

The leader in this field is Konfabulator. This tool is coming from the MacOS world and the first Windows (XP, 2000) version was released last week. You can download the version 1.8 here, this standard version integrates some standard widgets. The stability is ok (no crash in 5 days of intensive usage), the memory foorprint is more or less ok - about 10 MB per widget. I installed it, tested it and....switched definitely to Konfabulator.



Konfabulator is doing about the same things as Kapsules. The main difference, as already mentionned, is the number of widgets. Kapsules is quite an "old" (first release in February 2003 ;-) program on the MacOS, and now, a lot of widgets are compatible for both platforms (MacOS and Windows).

Konfabulator is a JavaScript runtime engine that lets you run little files called Widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want them to. Widgets can be alarm clocks, calculators, can tell you your AirPort signal strength, will fetch the latest stock quotes for your preferred symbols, and even give your current local weather. What sets it apart from other scripting applications is that it takes full advantage of Apple's Quartz rendering. This allows Widgets to blend fluidly into your desktop without the constraints of traditional window borders. Toss in some sliding and fading, and these little guys are right at home.

I am using four widgets: The Weather (standard package), What to do (standard package), Battery (standard package) and a mini Calendar. How does this look like?



A tool for geek, I told you :-)

PS: to be able to have two instances of a widget runnning at the same time (as for me with the weather in Male, Maldives and Mulhouse, France), just make a copy of the corresponding file (.widget) with another name!

BUSINESS: Shame on AOL - Winamp is going to die

Shame on AOL, shame on AOL, shame on AOL.

I had already almost no respect for this company, its services and products (I'm speaking about AOL, not Winamp ;-), but THIS.... BetaNews published yesterday an interesting article - Death Knell Sounds for Nullsoft, Winamp - about the catastrophic integration of Winamp in AOL. As a quite fanatic user of Winamp since years, this article sounds desperate concerning the future of this great tool. Again, a very bad example of an integration of a little structure (Winamp) with its own history, people and efficient way of working, in a big and fat monster (AOL), as usual with the same consequences: no values generated for the monster, no future for the people of the little structure, and a VERY BAD SERVICE for the customer!!

The last members of the original Winamp team have said goodbye to AOL and the door has all but shut on the Nullsoft era, BetaNews has learned.

Only a few employees remain to prop up the once-ubiquitous digital audio player with minor updates, but no further improvements to Winamp are expected.

Winamp's abandonment comes as no surprise to those close to the company who say the software has been on life support since the resignation of Nullsoft founder and Winamp creator Justin Frankel last January.

The marriage of Nullsoft and AOL was always one of discontent. After AOL acquired the small company in 1999 for around $100 million, the young team of Winamp developers was assimilated into a strict corporate culture that begged for rebellion. Although Nullsoft was initially given a long leash by AOL, It wasn't long until the two ideologies collided.

Frankel and his team were accustomed to simply brainstorming ideas over coffee and bringing them to the masses without approval. So when Frankel and fellow Nullsoft developer Tom Pepper devised a decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing system, dubbed Gnutella, parent AOL was left in the dark.

Despite the somber farewell, Nullsoft's former masterminds are proud of their accomplishments. Winamp helped start a digital audio revolution and boasts an incredible 60 million users per month.

After a disappointing Winamp3, Nullsoft developers returned to the drawing board and completed long-standing goals with the release of Winamp 5.0 in late 2003.

[...] Without those who poured their heart and soul into building the software, Winamp seems destined to meet a fate similar to fellow audio player Sonique, after Lycos saw the departure of its development team. Sonique has stagnated for years, and development ceased altogether last March.

NEWS: Google index

So, Google declares to index more than 8 billion pages. Have a look at the Google's homepage:



Bill Coughran, VP Engineering at Google, posted on this subject:

You probably never notice the large number that appears in tiny type at the bottom of the Google home page, but I do. It's a measure of how many pages we have in our index and gives an indication of how broadly we search to find the information you're looking for. Today that number nearly doubled to more than 8 billion pages. That made me smile.

Comprehensiveness is not the only important factor in evaluating a search engine, but it's invaluable for queries that only return a few results.

Now, another interesting thing: you know that one of the best way to test the Google's index is to search the word "the". I did that yesterday and Google showed more than 9.5 billion pages:



I did the same search for about 10 minutes and it seems that Google corrected the number of pages returned by this well-known query...It's now exactly 8 billion!!

BLOG: Test with AdSense over

I just de-activated AdSense on my blog. As I mentionned here, it was a test, nothing more. This online contextual ad program is very easy to activate, to integrate and to manage. It works really very smooth. On the other hand, I have (still) no need to "finance" my blog :-) It costs time, not really money!

I don't know how it's by you: about 50% of my overall traffic is coming directly from accesses on my feed (atom.xml), about 20% from accesses on my webiste (www.didierbeck.net). So, all in all, about 3/4 of my traffic is not relevant for this AdSense program. Not really adapted!

NEWS: Skype

Great summary from Jeff Clavier concerning two interviews (Endgadget and silicon.com) of Niklas Zennström, CEO of Skype.

New feature - SkypeIn

Amongst other things (voicemail, video-conference, etc.), Zennström mentions that Skype is going to roll-out a SkypeIn capability (at some point during the winter) allowing regular telephone users to reach a Skype user. This supposedly means that Skype users will be assigned a telephone number, and that Skype will become a full blown VOIP service.

Some little issues

[...]I have noticed recently that the quality of international calls tended to degrade compared to a few months ago ("ransom of success").
More problematic seems to be the chronic issue that Skype is having with SkypeOut and its credit card processing function.

I have also heard a lot of complaints about their their online support: always very nice and polite, but of very limited usefulness (which is kinda problematic).

Nice conclusion from Jeff

Unlike so many other startups, their problem is that they can't take the money people want to pay for their service ;-)

Now some facts & figures

• Skype was founded on August 29, 2003


• 70 employees (locations: London, Estonia, Luxembourg)


• 13 million users worldwide in 200 countries (!)


• 80'000 new users daily (!)


• 500'000 simultaneous users connected, peak > 1 million simultaneous users


• average call time: 6 minutes


• 295'000 SkypeOut customers


• 2.4 billion minutes with SkypeOut (Vonage has 170'000 customers, passed the biliion minutes served in 2004)


• VC financing of Skype: $19M

We are using Sype professionally very intensively since months with a lot of good experience. For example: last week, some of us had to coordinate a very complexe "move-to-production" process (2 guys in France, 1 in Switzerland) during about 5 hours. Thanks to the exclusive usage of Skype for the telephone conversations, I saved about 650 euros in one time (cell phones costs, including the roaming costs). GREAT :-)

NEWS: Mozilla Firefox v1.0 released

Firefox v1.0 is out :-) As usual, some of the themes and extensions are not compatible anymore with this new version...

BUSINESS: Entrepreneurial thoughts

[via @rgumente]

1. Take action. Don't put it off till tomorrow. Too many good ideas are lost because no one implements, no one takes action
2. Ignore "that's a bad idea." When you start a company, lots of people will tell you it's a bad idea. Ignore them!
3. Never give up. Failure is good -- it's a great teacher. Better to try 10 times and only to succeed once than not to try at all.

My corollary to this, somehow #2 rephrased, is know yourself and your limitations very well, always believe stubornly in yourself and your ideas while being open to adapt to whatever makes a positive impact in your belief system.

NEWS: Supercomputers

[via MIT Technology Review]

IBM Corp.'s still-incomplete Blue Gene/L system, which will be installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, achieved a sustained performance of 70.72 trillion calculations per second using a standard test program, the Department of Energy said Thursday.
The world's current official leader, Japan's Earth Simulator, can sustain 35.86 trillion calculations per second using the same software.

Last week, NASA announced that a system built by Silicon Graphics Inc. had topped that by sustaining 42 trillion calculations per second.

Blue Gene [...] is just a quarter of its final planned size. When finished, it will exceed Earth Simulator's performance by a factor of nine but require just a fraction of the electricity used by the Japanese machine.

MUSIC: On heavy rotation

I haven't listenned to this CD for a while, wow! And not just because of the name ;-) This album, as a very few others, is a milestone in the music history. It was interesting for me to read the different reviews you can find online: on one side, very disapointed people, on the other side, very exciting ones... The latters are usually musicians, surely also a lot of guitarists. All this to mention that this album is not a easy one.

It was released in 1989 and won the Grammy of the "Best Instrumental Rock" album the same year. Terry Bozzio as a drummer and Tony Hymas as keyboard player joined Jeff Beck on this album. Each of them is a part of Music with a big "M": Beck was, among others, the guitarist of the Yardbirds in the 60's. Terry was the drummer of Frank Zappa and he is one the best technician and one the more innovative drummer since years. A kind of extraterrestrial, specially in the field of coordination. Have a look at his set:



So, a very uncommon set of musicians - trio guitar, keyboard and drums - who play quite a complicated music. BUT, to my mind, it definitely rocks. Have a try.

TOOLS: Mega Codec Pack v1.16

New version 1.16 of the K-Lite Mega Codec Pack released here. And it is free!

Mega Codec Pack includes everything needed to play online and offline computer media. This pack is from the makers of the K-lite codec pack. This version includes the Full K-lite codec pack as well as Quicktime and Realplayer codecs, and BS Player. This Pack includes codecs for the most popular compressions like Divx and Xvid as well as some of the less popular but still necesary codecs. This is your one stop codec resource.

BUSINESS: Software revenue components and licensing models

We can identify five revenue-generating components for software companies. These components have a deep impact on the business model and costs structure of this kind of companies:

• Product new license revenue: the initial fee, typically one-time charge, based on different factors: number of seats, of processors, of MIPS, of instances in memory, of granted simultaneous accesses, one-location license (eg: per data-center), company-license (eg: right-of-use within one holding, including all its subsidiaries), clustering-type, etc. The license-fee can be linked with the number of stages (integration, test, production). It works differently for the development frameworks, tools, utilities, etc. (number of developers, of simultaneous uses, etc.)


• Product update / upgrade license revenue: fee paid usually annually for having the right to install all software updates and updgrades. A percentage of the initial license fee (product update + technical support = about 15% of the initial fee). Differenciation between major and minor updates and upgrades


• Technical support revenue: usually an annual fee, also a percentage of the initial license fee. Included telephone support, access to a knowledge-base, web-based support, typically no on-site support.


• Services, training and consulting revenue: one-time charge, time & material (T&M). Daily rates, with or without expenses and infrastructure.


• Hosting revenue (optional): for all-in-one solution where the software company proposes also the application hosting to its client (eg: salesforce.com, groove). The revenue model is typically linked with the actual usage of the application (number of business transactions) and volume discounts, which drives to a quite linear and well-known development of the costs.

There are furthermore four software licensing models, which differ from each others because of the integration or not of technical support and update/upgrade and because of the length of time for the validity of the license:

• Perpetual license: about 90% of the licensing model worldwide, usually not included updates/upgrades and technical support or just for the first year.


• Term license: also called lease license or rental license.


• Subscription license: generally two types are possible: in-house installation or hosted application (eg: salesforce.com, groove)


• Appliance license: application sold with a specific hardware (eg: firewalls)

License type matrix


Typical software business models

NEWS: American election - desolation - part II

[via Joi Ito]

Joi said: "The people of America have failed us today". I must correct: "52% of America have failed us today"... His analysis is *so* true, I totally agree:

[...]It's unlikely that any sort of recount or technicality will change the fact that today, the people of the United States of America have voted for George Bush. It was close, but the Americans have chosen Bush. It's a sad day, but in a democracy, you get the politicians you deserve/vote for. This was their chance to change their leader and they have failed. For awhile, many of us thought that they had been conned into voting for Bush - that they didn't know he wanted to be a War President. Many people didn't equate the US policies with the people of America. We thought they had made a mistake. Now US policies = US Citizens. You Americans have my sympathies, but it's still your fault.

NEWS: American election - desolation...

Oh no.......four more years.

I'm wide awake
I'm wide awake
Wide awake
I'm not sleeping
Oh, no, no, no [...]

This desparation
Dislocation
Separation
Condemnation
Revelation
In temptation
Isolation
Desolation
Let it go

U2 - Bad

NEWS: Google's infrastructure

[via Web Rank Info - in French]

Web Rank Info, one of the most interesting and active French website / forum specialized in Search Engines (Google, Yahoo!, etc), published a summary of a presentation made by Jeff Dean, a Google engineer who gave some inputs about the Google's infrastructure during a colloquium at the University of Washington. You can also have a look at the entire video presentation (about 1 hour).

• Among the 4 billion indexed pages by Google, the average size of each page is 10KB


• On the other side, there are perhaps more than 4 billion indexed pages. Have a look at the Google's request which seems to give back the highest results value (search of the word "the") => today more than 6 billion!


• Based on the 4 billion pages forecast and the 10KB per page, Google has to manage and index an incredible volume of raw data, about 40 TB, again fully indexed


• About the costs: Google chose to use low-costs servers, i.e. a lot of low-end servers instead of some costly high-end servers. A forecast example how the business case should work:
  
  
  • Serveur IBM eServer xSeries 440
  
  
  • 8 processors Xeon 2 GHz
  
  
  • 65 GB RAM
  
  
  • 8 TB HD
  
  
  • Estimated price: 758'000$
  
  
  • Rack of 88 smaller servers
  
  
  • 176 processors Xeon 2 GHz (88 x 2)
  
  
  • 176 GB RAM (88 x 2)
  
  
  • 7 TB HD
  
  
  • Estimated price: 278'000$
  
  You got it? You have a factor 2.7 between both estimations, with a huge difference in the delivered power, if the software architecture is able to use this distributed infrastructure correctly.


• Response time is very important for Google, it should not exceed 0.5s. For this reason, Google has to deploy some servers everywhere around the world, in order to be "nearer" to the clients.


• On average, each search request will use about 1'000 servers, with an average response time of 0.25s.


• Google manages on average 250 million search requests per day.

Really impressive! And a good confirmation of the competitive advantage Google built with its infrastructure and platform (see my article about the Google's platform)

NEWS: American Election - hope?

Last polling forecast for the American Election from a great blog called "Cahier des Amériques" (in French) from G. Bouchez (journalist). It gives some hope. Let's see tomorrow....

NEWS: return of the browser wars

Good article from the MIT Technology Review about the launch of the Mozilla Foundation's browser - Firefox v1.0 - on November 9, 2004.

Of course, the open-source community is masterful at the art of hyperbole. But it’s also pretty masterful at building products that users—not companies—demand. That’s due in large part to the fact that it’s the users—not companies—that build the products.

Firefox brings innovations to browser software that haven’t been since, well, since Microsoft and Netscape were trying to out-feature each other back in 1997. From little things like a local weather-related icon sitting in the page status space to the concept of tabbed pages, which make it possible to open multiple Web pages in the same window. This feature feels like a natural evolution in browsing—the ability to jump between pages within the same browser window (as opposed to opening multiple windows or continually hitting the back button).

BLOG: 1st comment spam....

Very "proud" to announce you that I received my first comment spam yesterday evening :-( Only positive thing: I could test the comment admin tool which is integrated in blogkomm from Holger. As usual, very nice!