Open Source Wins Against the Global Economy
December 28, 2012
The global recession has been bad news for most areas of the global economy, with few industries proving to be immune or at least capable of weathering the storm. However, recessions can also provide a needed adjustment to the economy, getting rid of unproductive and dying industries that produce no true value. The recession that started roughly in 2008, has only fortified the open source industry, leaving experts to believe that open source is here to stay. Read a full report by Open Source Insider in, “Global Economy 0 – Open Source 1.”
The article begins:
“James Falkner is community manager for free and open source enterprise portal company Liferay and he contends that the future of open source has been shaped by external circumstances like the economic crisis. Falkner suggests that owing to the economic recession (which forced a re-think of budgets and investments) and the advances made over the last decade in web development that led to successful open source business models, open source has become a “de facto standard” in most of the world.”
If open source is here to stay, and we believe it is, consider ensuring that your organization has the right open source search solution to increase productivity and efficiency. LucidWorks has two great solutions, LucidWorks Search and LucidWorks Big Data, both of which provide excellent out-of-the-box usability.
Emily Rae Aldridge, December 28, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Yahoo Reveals Our Curiosities
December 28, 2012
It is time once again for Yahoo’s annual Year in Review report, in which the company shares the most popular searches performed with its engine during the preceding year. Search Engine Land gives us the lowdown in “2012 Yahoo Year in Review: Over 500 Top Searches in 50+ Categories.”
Writer Elisabeth Osmeloski emphasizes the role of Vera Chan, Yahoo’s senior editor and Web trend analyst, who has been compiling these lists since 2005:
“[Ms. Chan] clearly enjoys looking for the ‘why’ behind some of these popular search trends. Every year, Ms. Chan hosts a press conference call to share insights and give some context around these searcher behaviors, as she explains that we now live in a ‘Freakonomics’ world — and people like Nate Silver are bringing new meaning to number crunching — she’s clearly one of the people making sense of ‘big data’ at Yahoo.”
So, how do they do it? The company describes its methodology:
“To develop the Yahoo! Year in Review, Yahoo’s editors analyze Yahoo! Search queries based on a number of factors, including absolute volume and the growth from previous periods, to see which themes and trends bubble to the surface. Individuals and their Search queries always remain anonymous. Top searched refers to searches with the highest volume. Spiking refers to searches with the greatest change from one year to the next.”
It looks like users spent 2012 focused on some pretty highbrow topics. Ha, just kidding! While we did look up important stuff like elections and the Colorado wildfires, there are also top-rankers like “honey boo boo,” “gangnam style,” and “Jackson family fight.” It really is an interesting compilation, and you could spend a lot of time perusing the results.
Yahoo breaks popular searches into categories, and this year there are more classifications than ever. There is, of course, Top Searches Overall (not surprisingly, “election” won first place). Some other interesting categories include Top Obsessions (“iphone5”), Top Searched Memes (“kony 2012”), and Top Job Searches (“work from home jobs”). Check out the article for more curious groupings. Or groupings of the curious, if you will.
Cynthia Murrell, December 28, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Amazon Cloud Cost Comparison Revealed
December 28, 2012
Deep Value, purveyor of respected stock-trading algorithms, is dissatisfied with its Amazon Cloud Services investment. The company’s blog declares, “EC2 is 380% More Expensive than Internal Cluster.” Deep Value was using Amazon’s EC2 cluster with Hadoop to run simulations, but the bill kept increasing month by month. Their managing director of technology, Paul Haefele, says he performed some “back of the envelope” calculations that suggested there was a better way. He writes:
“Tiger Direct will sell you a Seagate 3 terabyte drive for $154. For the same storage on S3 for 2 years, I would pay (1,000 * 0.125 + 2,000 * 0.11) * 12 mths * 2 yrs1 = $8,232 at the standard rates. Buying our own drive was 2% of the cost of using EC2, so this certainly seemed worth investigating.”
Haefele’s team deployed a Hadoop cluster with the data-center company Telx, whose rates they found reasonable. They invested in 20 Linux servers running the open-source CentOS and a couple of switches. They factored in hosting costs, then ran some simulations. See the article for the technical details; Haefele summarizes his conclusions:
“If we compared just on what we are getting in terms of compute and storage, our cluster is costing us $12,700 per month versus $48,564 (33,599+15,965) for EC2.
“EC2 is thus costing us over 3.8 time more per month.
“Whatever way we slice this, either by storage cost or by compute, it seems clear that using your own data center rather than EC2 makes sense for us. For one-off peaks EC2 makes sense, but given the ongoing nature of our simulated analysis, moving to our own datacenter is a very clear winner.”
So, sometimes DIY is worth the effort, as this extreme example shows. Thanks to Deep Value for sharing this important information. I wonder—how many businesses will take advantage of it?
Cynthia Murrell, December 28, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Spokeo the Electronic Private Investigator
December 28, 2012
Anyone looking to dig up dirt on a budget might want to turn to Spokeo, whose site introduces itself with, “Is He Cheating on You?” Lovely.
Despite the salacious headline, Spokeo could actually be useful for those of us not fit for the Jerry Springer show. It can help find long lost friends and family, for example, or. . . well, that’s the only white-hat example I have. The service has you enter a name, phone number, address, email, or username, then collates every scrap of related data it can find. Naturally, though, you have to pay to see most of what it uncovered. Via an auto-billed monthly subscription, no less.
The site’s FAQ page explains:
“While an individual could potentially locate a phone number or address by searching phone books, then redirect to a county tax assessor’s office to determine a home’s value, he or she would have to conduct hundreds of searches to discover all of the information available through just one search on Spokeo.
“Spokeo’s unique and powerful algorithms swiftly navigate and organize data that is spread across hundreds of locations. We synthesize that information in one convenient summary, delivering the most comprehensive snapshot of people-related, public data offered online to date. The search results provide a snapshot of the vast amounts of accessible information, offering invaluable insight about the individual being searched.”
The About page tells us that, in 2006, Spokeo emerged from the basement of Stanford University student Harrison Tang, who worked with classmates to develop the tool to better keep in touch with friends online. They assert that “Our mission is to help people find, learn about, and connect with others more easily than ever.” It is a slightly different tone than the attention-getter on the front page. I can’t say I really blame the entrepreneurs — they will almost certainly make more money this way.
Cynthia Murrell, December 28, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
IBM Returns to Pure Software Roots As Technology Evolves
December 27, 2012
Since IBM ceased their production of applications and reorganized into two organizations, Middleware and Solutions in 2011, they have been pumping out infrastructure software and the complementary integration components to go with it. These inner organizational changes have helped them determine the type of solutions they can offer to companies as the industry itself evolves.
Seeking Alpha’s article “So What Does IBM Mean When It Says It’s In The Solutions Business?” explains what type of solutions IBM will be providing in the future:
“It is not individual packaged products per se, but groups of related software products, services, and systems. And we know at very high level where IBM is going to focus its solutions efforts. IBM has always been about software, services, and systems – although in recent years the first two have taken front stage. The flip side is that some of these solutions areas are overly broad. Smarter Analytics is a catch-all covering the familiar areas of business intelligence and performance management, predictive analytics and analytical decision management, and analytic applications.”
The need for sustainable ROI in technology, it is unsurprising that IBM returned to their software roots. IBM seeks opportunities with best in class partners and their association with leading enterprise search companies such as Intrafind,is a relationship that seems to be paying off well. Intrafind was an early IBM Pure integrator and both sides seem to be making the best of the relationship.
Jennifer Shockley, December 27, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Bust Big Data Down to Size with PolySpot and Enable Unified Information Access
December 27, 2012
While undertaking a big data strategy is automatically an affordable option for a larger corporation or company, there has been much said on the subject of affordability and feasibility for small businesses. Small Business Labs reports some interesting data in their recent article, “Survey – How Small Businesses View Big Data.”
The facts they report stem from the Big Data for the Little Guy project by Intuit. This company surveyed 500 small business owners. Of course, small business owners see the potential value and unlimited opportunities within big data, but they do maintain concerns over whether or not the big data train is something they can hop on board. Reportedly, four in ten believe that it would be useful.
The article states:
71% of the respondents noted potential barriers, with the top being:
-15% felt big data might be too costly
-14% said they didn’t have the time for implementation
-10% said they didn’t understand it
-9% said they don’t have data
-8% said they lack the expertise required
-6% said they don’t have the tools
-6% said it’s too hard
The survey asked for their top reason, but I’m sure if they had been asked to list all the potential barriers most of these would be listed by most of the respondents.
There are many open source solutions that are priced affordably and are customizable and scalable to fit small businesses. A vital technology companies need to extract value from big data is something that deals in everything related to information access and delivery; for example, solutions from PolySpot are designed for this big data busting purpose.
Megan Feil, December 27, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Rackspace Unveils Cloud Database as a Service
December 27, 2012
Rackspace has made a name for itself providing Cloud infrastructure. The future is definitely in the Cloud, as security becomes less of an issue and price continues to drop. Rackspace’s newest offering is Cloudant, a Cloud database as service. Read the full details in the CRN.com story, “Rackspace Unveils Cloud Database as a Service with Cloudant.”
The article begins:
“Cloud infrastructure provider Rackspace is offering a database as a service for developers of Web and mobile applications in its Cloud Tools program. The NoSQL database as a service is provided by Cloudant through its Data Layer, a collection of database clusters hosted in Rackspace’s worldwide data centers. Cloudant’s Data Layer offers a CouchDB-compatible, RESTful JSON API; a MapReduce engine; and built-in full-text search, based on Apache Lucene, which is a Java-based, open-source information retrieval library.”
Apache Lucene is a powerful base on which to build. LucidWorks also uses the power of Lucene as its source. LucidWorks offers a different type of product, primarily search and Big Data solutions for the enterprise. The emergence of such popular and effective solutions based on open source infrastructure is proof that the future is in open source, and that organizations need to stay in tune with the latest technology in order to stay relevant and effective.
Emily Rae Aldridge, December 27, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Google Search Tools to Boost Efficiency
December 27, 2012
MakeUseOf has supplied a handy roundup of Google search mechanisms with “More Free Google Search Tools You Might Not Be Using So Much.” The accounting follows Google’s recent, less cluttered redesign. Filters that used to be on the left are now at the top, and the “More” menu supplies other search services (news, books, etc.) The Search Tools on the right can be used to fine-tune results.
Writer Saikat Basu explains his motivation for the article:
“Google Search alone is a maze and it takes quite something to use it in different ways to call oneself as a ‘power user’. Google Search operators and Advanced Search are just barrels of a multi-barreled canon.
Too confusing? No…look at it this way – each filter and operator on Google Search is designed to be a crosshair on a scope mounted on that ‘canon’. You need to use them appropriately for the relevant search result. So, I am advancing this article with the assumption that you don’t use most of the search tools as much as you should every day. Let’s explore a few neat search tools which we miss in the flurry of typing in the queries.”
Basu tells us how to use Google Search to find free stuff; who doesn’t love free stuff? More to the point, he describes in detail how to use filters to get (and only get) the results we need while saving time. For example, the Sites with Images filter gives information about each site that is not available with the regular Image Search. One feature I am sure to start using immediately is the “Verbatim” filter, which searches for exactly what you type, without consulting your browsing history, similar terms, or even spellcheck. This almost compensates for so brazenly taking away the “+” that I’ve missed since they launched Google+. Almost.
There’s a lot here that most searchers never take advantage of. Like anything else, a few minutes spent learning could repeatedly save time later. Check it out.
Cynthia Murrell, December 27, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Google Maneuvers in the Cloud
December 27, 2012
Google wants to be more like Amazon. InformationWeek reveals, “Google Adds Cloud Infrastructure Muscle vs. Amazon.” Let’s hope Google search does not emulate the aging A9 system.
Actually, Google is making several changes to its cloud services that it hopes will help it compete with Amazon’s successful Web Services. The beta version of Google’s Compute Engine was launched in June of this year, and has received good reviews, according to Google’s Shailesh Rao. There is no word on when, exactly, the product will be generally available. Writer Charles Babcock shares these details:
“The new server configurations come much closer to matching the wide variety of options found on Amazon Web Services, with virtual machines with more CPU power and larger random access memory. Google’s previous entry level — a ‘standard’ virtual server with one ‘core’ (equal to half a 2011 Intel Sandy Bridge CPU core), plus 3.75 GB of RAM and 420 GB of disk space — was priced at $0.145 an hour. With the price reduction, it’s now, $0.138 an hour.
“Rao said Google is trying to be competitive in its pricing, which appears to position a slightly heftier virtual server next to a similar Amazon offering at a slightly lower price.”
Google also offers options that supply much more memory and storage for users willing to pay the higher price. On the other end of the cost scale, low key users can opt for “reduced availability” at a reduced price. Then there’s the persistent disk snapshotting service, which can send snapshots to a customer-designated backup location. Of course, customers also get access to Google’s lightning-fast data centers.
The article notes that Google admits it will probably not win over existing Amazon customers at this time, but that it is really going after the startup market right now. Interesting move.
Cynthia Murrell, December 27, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Google Spanner Achieves the Impossible
December 27, 2012
Wired has posted a thorough article about a recent Google tech breakthrough in its “Exclusive: Inside Google Spanner, the Largest Single Database on Earth.” This database, like many other Googley projects, grew out of the company’s solution to an internal problem—collaborating between their scattered offices without being slowed down by the delay that usually plagues global communications and data sharing.
“Spanner is a creation so large, some have trouble wrapping their heads around it. But the end result is easily explained: With Spanner, Google can offer a web service to a worldwide audience, but still ensure that something happening on the service in one part of the world doesn’t contradict what’s happening in another. . . .
“Before Spanner was revealed, many didn’t even think it was possible. Yes, we had ‘NoSQL’ databases capable of storing information across multiple data centers, but they couldn’t do so while keeping that information ‘consistent’ — meaning that someone looking at the data on one side of the world sees the same thing as someone on the other side. The assumption was that consistency was barred by the inherent delays that come when sending information between data centers.”
Google’s engineers have found a way, though, one that involved creating its own time-keeping mechanism and ended up reducing costs in the bargain. It is well worth reading the article for the details.
What caught our eye most, though, is the hostility toward Google in some of the comments. I won’t reproduce them here, but we wonder: why the chip on the community’s shoulder?
We officially love Google.
Cynthia Murrell, December 27, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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