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Oracle Solaris and Oracle SPARC T4 Servers—Engineered Together for Enterprise Cloud Deployments
Oracle Solaris and the SPARC T4 processor have been engineered together to improve throughput, security, and resiliency throughout the application solution stack. Learn how this combination can maximise return on investment and help organisations manage costs for their existing infrastructures or for new enterprise cloud infrastructure design. Read more.
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Market Place
- US court fines EU spyware maker $500k and nabs source code
- BitDefender shows off 'Box', a home security device for the Internet of Things
- Use Uber? Snapchat? Google Maps? Now Twitter knows
- PoS malware also targeting ticket vending machines and electronic kiosks
- EU wants Google to apply 'right to be forgotten' delistings to global .com domain


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Unemployment rises with seasonal adjustments
by WILY/WRXX News Staff • December 12, 2013
The number of people seeking U.S. unemployment benefits rose 68,000 last week to a seasonally adjusted 368,000, the largest increase in more than a year. The surge in first-time applications could be a troubling sign if it lasts. But it likely reflects the difficulty adjusting for delays after the Thanksgiving holiday. The labor department...Read more →

subset: commoncrawl


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Colorado Teacher Refuses to Give Common-Core Tests
The elementary school literacy coach objects to the "onslaught" of common-core curricula and the increasing load of test preparation.
The elementary school literacy coach objects to the "onslaught" of common-core curricula and the increasing load of test preparation.
The latest piece of legislation that aims to cut back on testing would allow students in grades 3-8 to take only one test per year: English/language arts or mathematics.
A way of assessing progress toward deeper learning can help ensure that all students have opportunities for high-quality learning environments, says Kathleen Cushman.
Agreeing on what deeper learning looks like and how to assess progress toward it is an essential step in making it happen for students, says Kathleen Cushman.
This is the second straight year in which the number of schools failing to receive accreditation increased, a slide that began after the state enacted tougher assessments.
Technological problems were cited as the reason for dropping the diagnostic tests for the state's youngest children.
The state Board of Regents considers letting students swap one of the social studies exams for a test in career-technical education or the arts.
With concerns about testing time high on its radar, PARCC decides it needs more time to figure out how to standardize a portion of the test that is embedded in daily classroom instruction.
Motions to demand a halt to standardized testing and an opt-out policy for parents were passed to a legislative committee for possible presentation to state lawmakers.
Examples from high-performing schools show that student-centerd practices are effective for all students, particularly those who have been underserved.


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Status: Available | Condition:New | Edition:Franz Limited Edition Vases Fine Porcelain | Edition Size: Limited Edition of 2000 | Dim:7-1/4" x 5-1/2" x 14-5/8" | Franz Porcelain| Item #: FZ02724
Franz Porcelain Papillon Butterfly Porcelain Vase Limited Edition
Fine Porcelain
is eligible for layaway in 3 equal payments of $178.33 over 60 days.
11/22/2014 $178.33 1st payment
12/22/2014 $178.33 2nd payment
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As an option you may also pay for Franz Porcelain Papillon Butterfly Porcelain Vase Limited Edition Fine Porcelain using Paypal, or Amazon Payments. Please note that all orders must be delivered to a physical address verified by Paypal or Amazon. This PayPal/Amazon option is not applicable for orders to be delivered to Military or International destinations.
Papillon Butterfly Porcelain Vase Limited Edition Fine Porcelain by Franz Porcelain is a Limited Edition production by the Artist. Comes with a Certificate of Authenticity which affirms that this is an authentic Limited Edition production from Franz Porcelain.
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Franz Collection is the number one porcelain art designer and producer in Asia. With its headquarters in Taipei and factory in Jingdezhen (the porcelain capital of China), the company owns 200 retail stores in Asia and has marketed its functional art to several thousands of retailers in 56 countries, including prominent department stores such as Harrods, Bloomingdale's and Bergdorf Goodman. Franz Collection aims to revive Chinese porcelain heritage and integrates classical, contemporary, Western and Eastern aesthetics. Inspired by nature, the brand intends to interpret the perfection and harmony among Heaven, Earth and Mankind and deliver the eternal values of culture. The company is able to produce three-dimensional porcelain art with traditional handicraft and modern technology. Franz Collection has worked with different international partners, including the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the National Palace Museum in Taipei, the Palace Museum in Beijing and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the U.S. These museums have licensed the company to transform some of their important collections into porcelain art. Franz Collection did special shows in Europe's largest porcelain museum Porzellanikon Selb in Germany and French national porcelain museum Adrien Dubouche in Limoges in recognition of its global influence on this ancient art form. Featured in numerous media including the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal and Elle Décor, the company has also obtained academic recognition. The Harvard University Business School used Franz Collection as a case study in their publication. Franz Collection has won numerous awards, including "the Best in Gift" award from the New York International Gift Show, "The Best for Ceramic Gift" from the UK and "Seal of Excellence for Handicrafts" from UNESCO 5 years in a row. In 2012 the CEO of the company Mr. Franz Chen was chosen by Forbes as one of the "25 Influential Chinese in Global Fashion". He also won the award of "Entrepreneur of the Year 2012" and represented Taiwan in the World Entrepreneur contest. The former Chinese President Hu chose Franz as gifts for the American President Obama, British Prime Minister Brown and Russian President Putin while former American President Bush Senior picked Franz as Christmas gifts for his family and friends. The Taiwanese President Ma presented Franz as gifts for the new Pope Francis. Other celebrities that picked Franz as gifts or collect Franz include Barbara Streisand, Elton John, the Queen of Nepal, the Princess of Kuwait and the Prince of Morocco. With a style that is unique, inviting, stylish, cultural and artistic, the brand continues its innovative path, providing the world with perfect gifts, home décor and functional art.


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- Police arrest 16 people for alleged Remote Access Trojan hacking
- Why is Microsoft updating Windows PCs for a security bug on the server?
- Critical XSS flaws patched in WordPress and popular plug-in
- How CSOs Can Help CIOs Talk Security to the Board
- NotCompable sets new standards for mobile botnet sophistication
The Evolution of Business Resiliency Management
Business resilience management is the holistic management of the processes to help identify potential risks based on impacts that threaten an organisation. One of the most critical aspects of achieving business resilience, a strong BRM program, can help enable organisations to more rapidly adapt and respond to risks and opportunities in order to maintain continuous business operations, be a more trusted partner and enable growth. Read more.
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November 25, 2014
Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz wants his players focused on little more than football during fall camp. That's why fans get one chance to see what the Hawkeyes might look like when they open the season in two weeks.
Iowa's annual mid-camp open practice, held Saturday at Kinnick Stadium, was the only public glimpse of the Hawkeyes in August. It's also typically the only time Ferentz provides updates on the program.
Ferentz said fullback Adam Cox is out for the season after tearing a knee ligament. But he also praised the competition for starting spots and kicker and punter, even though Iowa's placekickers looked shaky on Saturday.
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An Unauthorized Boot Camp Woody! 6
91,621Added Sep 15, 2013Like78 LikesFavorite26 favorites
Three Guys Get Together To Jerk Off And Suck A Little Cock
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Corry Banks's TOP HIP HOP SINGLES
Savant (aka Stanstro) - "The Illest"
"Savant is ill. period. this joint is no exception. do your self a favor and peep anything you can find by this cat. this is just the tip of the iceberg."Corry Banks's Rating: Posted on Jan 12, 2013
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Discover the best new songs, videos, and albums added to the Booth.


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A big reason why discussions of "big data" get complicated — and policy-makers resort to vague hand-waving, as in the well-known White House executive office report — is that its ripple effects travel fast and far. Your purchase, when recorded by a data broker, affects not only the the ads and deals they offer you in the future, but the ones they offer innumerable people around the country that share some demographic with you.
Policy-making might be simple if data collectors or governments could say, "We'll collect certain kinds of data for certain purposes and no others" — but the impacts of data collection are rarely predictable. And if one did restrict big data that way, its value would be seriously reduced.
Data collection will explode as we learn how to connect you to different places you've been by the way you walk or to recognize certain kinds of diseases by your breath.
When such data exhaust is being collected, you can't evade consequences by paying cash and otherwise living off the grid. In fact, trying to do so may disadvantage you even more: people who lack access to sophisticated technologies leave fewer tracks and therefore may not be served by corporations or governments.
In a new book by Nathan Eagle and Kate Greene, Reality Mining: Using Big Data to Engineer a Better World, it looks like human beings are sitting ducks for investigation. Examples from the book include:
The authors point out that some data has to be collected at larger than ideal intervals because collecting data as often as they want would drain a cell phone's battery. As devices come on the market that recharge themselves by collecting ambient energy from their environments, this restriction will vanish. Becoming newly able to collect data at a granularity that makes intense analysis productive, we'll go wild tracking ourselves and everybody else.
Experimental computer scientists are trying to code up some cake that we can have and eat in comfort: preserving individuals' privacy while mining their data collectively. Two methods, synthetic data creation and differential queries, are promoted as ways to provide statistically accurate data sets without revealing information for any individual. They are two different ways of satisfying a constrained set of queries without revealing data on individuals.
Synthetic data is derived from records about fake individuals that, in the aggregate, match the attributes of the real data sets. For instance, synthetic and real data may show the same number of diabetic patients in each county, and the same number of people over 65. Synthetic data is valuable for researching well-known trends in public health. Its problem is that it won't yield new and unexpected relationships because those weren't baked into the manufactured data.
Differential queries are still mostly experimental. They offer a set of SQL or other queries that return data based on real data, but they're designed so that you can't isolate the information about any individual by cleverly issuing a series of slightly changed queries. Once again, they constrain researchers more than deidentified data does. (This short article nicely compares the strengths and weaknesses of deidentification, synthetic data, and differential queries.)
Many researchers are pushing ahead the frontiers of policy on big data. For instance, Jules Polonetsky and Omer Tene list benefits of data processing to individuals, communities, organizations, and society. For instance, with data gathered about their customers, "businesses can optimize distribution methods, efficiently allocate credit, and robustly combat fraud." And incidents that individuals report in their neighborhoods (such as through FixMyStreet) benefit the whole community.
But the rights of individuals still need to be balanced during data collection. An opening for more individual control is provided by the FTC in its regulation of "unfair" data practices, while the EU permits individuals to object to data uses (Article 14 of their directive). The web page with Polonetsky and Tene's article points to a series by multiple contributors covering rights in data collection.
In another article, Polonetsky and Tene propose opening up data to individuals (either their own data or aggregate data) and requiring organizations to state their decision-making processes. There are also technical solutions that hide private details about individuals while telling the institutions they deal with just enough to complete a transaction (for instance, that the individual is at least 18 years old).
A number of contributors in the web series want data collectors to ask the public more about how their data can be used. Ombudsmen systems might allow us to appeal the uses of data. Maybe we'll even arbitrate or go to court to halt its use.
Right now, one of the biggest global worries concerns the spread of communicable disease, and many hope that data processing can help predict outbreaks. Although disease-carrying critters are individually unsophisticated, they sometimes show more surprising trends. I wonder, for instance, whether an analysis of the spread of SARS in early 2003 would have predicted Toronto as the location of the only major outbreak outside East Asia.
According to Eagle and Greene, disease tracking started with public health records that go back as far as 1948. The book compares the relative value of Twitter and Google's Flu Tracker (which suffered a setback one year that should be correctable), both of which can identify the spread of annual influenza outbreaks quicker than official data reports.
Likewise, Facebook ads have been used to conduct a health survey. By asking members of the site whether they had taken the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, researchers tried to demonstrate that a campaign on Facebook could collect data not easily available to traditional public health authorities. Their success reminds us what makes social media so powerful: researchers could target ads at their desired population because members of Facebook tell it so many personal details (mostly about age and location). But the sample was characterized by several levels of self-selection–the choice to join Facebook, to click on the ad, to complete the survey–so there are reasons to doubt whether the study was valid, even though the researches cite other studies claiming that the samples were representative of the general population.
Eagle and Greene suggest that airline flight patterns could provide clues as to where diseases caught through casual contact will spread. For insect-borne diseases, shipping patterns may prove a better indicator than flights because mosquitos can easily hop on and off boats.
The book's focus on disease tracking turns out to be even more relevant than the authors may have thought, as shown by the growing Ebola crisis that broke out after the book's publication. We know that there are many undiagnosed cases of Ebola, and that health delivery systems are strained (including the deaths of many health care workers) in the regions where Ebola shows no regard for the jurisdictions separating various health care systems.
Mobile phone data is already being collected to try to predict areas at risk of the epidemic. Although hopes for a cure are in the news, data may do more than drugs to stem this crisis.
Ideally, we'll find some policy that lies at a sweet spot between, "Let anybody collect any data they can get their hands on" and "Let's regulate every little step taken by any institution." But we haven't gotten there. We just don't know who wins, who loses, and what ultimately will come down the stream amidst the flood of data.
This post is part of our on-going investigations into the perils of big data, the importance of building a data culture, and the value of applying techniques from design and social science to big data.
Cropped image on article and category pages by Jo Jakeman on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.]]>
Currently, only major health care institutions such as Geisinger, the Mayo Clinic, and Kaiser Permanente incorporate analytics into day-to-day decisions. Research facilities employ analytics teams for clinical research, but perhaps not so much for day-to-day operations. Large health care providers can afford departments of analysts, but most facilities — including those forming accountable care organizations — cannot.
Imagine that you are running a large hospital and are awake nights worrying about the Medicare penalty for readmitting patients within 30 days of their discharge. Now imagine you have access to analytics that can identify about 40 measures that combine to predict a readmission, and a convenient interface is available to tell clinicians in a simple way which patients are most at risk of readmission. Better still, the interface suggests specific interventions to reduce readmissions risk: giving the patient a 30-day supply of medication, arranging transportation to rehab appointments, etc.
A system of just this type was developed by the Carolinas HealthCare System, based on hundreds of thousands of patient experiences with the help of the analytics vendor Predixion. What's special is that Predixion is now offering this solution in a generalized way to other health care institutions.
Crucially, the solution is not a canned set of predictions based on old analytics. Although Carolinas HealthCare System uses Cerner to store patient data, the Predixion solution can integrate with whatever EHR its client uses and capture new data to update predictions. (Boston's readmissions risks differ from those in the Carolinas, and even the risks in the Carolinas differ from what they were two years ago.) Predixion can even host the data provided by the institution and run the analytics on its own cloud or using Salesforce's Wave analytics platform.
Nish Hartman, director of Healthcare Solutions at Predixion, told me they are working on new telehealth services as well. As they move into new health care markets, they encounter providers who are not as well integrated as Carolinas HealthCare System. Hospitals will need stronger bonds with primary care physicians, nursing homes, and other institutions who bear the responsibility for keeping patients out of the hospital once they are released.
I see this service as not just a lithe business move by Predixion and Salesforce, but a step toward the universal application of analytics that many reformers in the health care field have been waiting for. Medicare's 30-day rule is a useful prod to get the health care industry more concerned in general about long-term results. When analytics prove their value here, they can start to be applied to other hot spots and high-cost patient populations. Eventually, we could have off-the-shelf tools for all health care providers to manage patients intelligently — or even to provide individuals access to their own patient health records to manage themselves.]]>
Such decisions require the real-time collection of data from the particular user or device, along with others in the environment, and often need to be done on a per-person or per-event basis. For instance, leaderboarding (determining who is top candidate among a group of users, based on some criteria) requires a database that tracks all the relevant users. Such a database nowadays often resides in memory.
But the decisions often require historical data as well, such as credit histories or websites visited in the past. This information comes from a traditional database doing online analytical processing (OLAP), which does such tasks as prescoring users and segmenting populations.
I recently talked to Ryan Betts, CTO of VoltDB, an in-memory database system. The company was founded with the idea that traditional OLTP databases are inefficient and slow given advances in networking, hardware, and changes transaction processing workloads. In the current age of applications — an age of mobile devices connecting people everywhere, of high bandwidth, and of large repositories of information allowing personalization — the company found that a lot of customers needed a database that combines high performance transaction processing with ability to perform the types of real time analytics mentioned above.
The combination of OLAP, streaming data collection, analytics, and operations characterizes the complex and powerful applications with which we frequently interact — and that interact with the Internet of Things. Driven by the realization that VoltDB was participating in these applications, co-founder Scott Jarr wrote the report Fast Data and the New Enterprise Data Architecture.
This evolution doesn't mean that real-time analytics reproduce the advanced predictive analytics that might be done on the OLAP backend. The heavy processing was done beforehand. According to Betts, the pressure to produce real-time results requires application developers to keep the algorithms very simple: aggregates, counters, etc. The ability to combine the results of the OLAP analytics with the new data being produced on a near-instantaneous basis leads to an emerging generation of smart applications.
For the case of the overheating device, all the application might need to do is compare the current temperature with some threshold for that device obtained from the in-memory database. The key characteristic of the application is still audacious: to combine historical and real-time data in order to produce an immediate intervention into the surrounding world.
Fast Data and the New Enterprise Data Architecture describes the shift that has produced these new applications, the components of the systems that run the applications, the essential steps in data analysis, and the architecture required to develop the applications — download a free copy of the report here.
This post is part of a collaboration between O'Reilly and VoltDB exploring fast and big data. See our statement of editorial independence.]]>
Like all interactive systems, iOS notifies classes when something they care intensely about–a button press by a user, for instance–has occurred. To create a successfully responsive app, you certainly want to know as soon as a user has pressed a button. Unlike other user interfaces, iOS requires you to define a new class called a delegate to receive the all-important event telling you that the user has asked you for something. Sometimes you can define your original class as its own delegate, but you must in every case understand the concept of a "delegate" and define it to receive the critical event.
Apple enthusiasts like to present the delegate notion (I refuse to enshrine it through the term "pattern") as a nice division of responsibilities. I haven't seen any explanation why other systems, which also have to respond to user events, allow a class with the important user interface elements to respond to its own events. The delegate notion is an Apple oddity that survived the transition from Objective-C to Swift. Go along with it and learn to implement it.
A bit of history for those who are not too impatient. Objective-C was a mostly ignored language in the 1980s (those who wanted C to support objects turned to C++, which had its own dragons), but was implemented by the Free Software Foundation in its GNU compiler, a great advance over other C compilers at that time. Steve Jobs had a soft spot for the GNU compiler and therefore based his mostly forgotten NeXT computer on Objective-C.
This historical footnote seems to be the only reason the LLVM compiler and its well-supported Objective-C became the official iPhone language and thus, by some reckonings, why Objective-C went from one of the most irrelevant computer languages to one of the most critical ones to learn after the iPhone was released.
Thanks for your patience–now, what was I talking about? (Andy, check your heading. Memory management.) LLVM offers garbage collection, but Apple chose to reject its use in iOS, because it can slow down an app at a critical time. When you write your app using, say, Java, you never know when garbage collection will raise its head and take over the CPU to handle background logistics that have no interest to the user. So Apple eschewed LLVM's garbage collection, but instituted a fairly sophisticated memory management system of its own,
Please excuse another digression: why is memory management important? Well, C and C++ leave memory management up to the programmer, and the result is scads of apps that don't release memory when they should. I personally have experienced the slow-down and eventual hanging of my laptop due to memory leaks from poorly managed memory; I'm sure others have too. If you need to reboot your system every week or so, it's because some program depended on programmer-controlled memory management and introduced a bug that left a memory leak.
Memory management is hard because programs can't depend on the programming concept of scope to get rid of unwanted memory. Scope is supposed to protect you from memory leaks by removing the memory allocated to the data that a function or loop defines. But many functions return variables to their calling functions, and these variables must be kept in memory as long as they're used. When can they be released? What if no function has a clear ownership of a variable and no one ever releases it? You start allocating memory until you reach infinity.
What does Apple do to improve memory management? It understands that some variables are used only locally and should be released–good design–but assumes, by default, that variables shared with outside functions are allocated forever. You can specify, through the weak and unowned keywords, that variables should quietly go away when your function doesn't need them anymore. If you use these keywords correctly, you won't load down the user's device with fatal memory leaks.
It turns out that weak variables are critical to using delegates without introducing memory leaks. You need to learn to use delegates, so you need to learn iOS's memory managements system and weak variables. Bite the bullet.
Swift also preserved another oddity of the iOS runtime: the use of optional variables.
A typical optional variable is a pointer to some data allocated by your app. Suppose you try to retrieve an image or some other data, which may or may not exist. Success results in a variable pointing to the image or other data. Failure is conveniently indicated by an undefined variable, which points to a special term called nil.
Nil is hard to explain. It's kind of a lacuna in the universe. If you have a counter, for instance, it can reach zero, and you expect it to do so. A nil counter is very different–it means the counter has no meaning, could not possibly represent a value, and is invalid wherever you refer to it.
Relational databases allow NULL values, which don't indicate zero, but instead "This has no meaning." That's a very powerful concept, but one that easily leads to errors. For instance, if you use a relational database such as Oracle or MySQL and don't check for NULL values, you may get erroneous results.
The seminal C language, which has formed the context in which other modern languages grew and still is used for key infrastructure, has long struggled with NULL values. Dereferencing a NULL pointer is still one of the key errors in C, and programmers are advised to write code checking that their pointer is not NULL before looking for data there.
Fast-forward to iOS. It offers optional variables, which can either be nil or contain an actual value. (I'll spare you the pedantic discussion of the meaning of nil and NULL.) I know of only one other language that allows "optional" variables with nil values: the relatively little used OCaml.
Optional variables make sense in situations such as when you request a file or a resource over the Internet and you can't get access to it. If you fail, you get a nil. So you have to be constantly alert to the possibility that an optional variable might be nil. Swift provides the ? character to determine whether you're dealing with a real value, and the ! character to say, "Don't worry; I've checked this optional value and it has real information in it."
I see no reason to make a big deal over optional values, because if you check for something like:
if let theImage = image{ { /* process the image */ } else { println("No image available") }
the "if" statement returns false not only on nil, but on zero. Zero is treated as false, and so is a false value for a Boolean variable. The "if" statement doesn't know the difference between zero for a numerical value, a false Boolean value, or a reference to data that happens to be nil.
This heralds a theoretical weakness for optional variables (how can you distinguish the legitimate value of zero from nil?) but in practical terms will have no effect. You already know the difference between a counter and a value you retrieve from an outside source, such as a web page. You know when you are checking a counter, and know what to do when it reaches zero. You know, in contrast, when you are checking a value you retrieved from an Internet operation, where nil indicates some network failure. So your program will never be confused, even though a zero counter and a nil Internet value produce the same result for an "if" statement.
The bottom line is to understand optional values in Swift and to handle them respectfully. Few other languages or environments require this, although the concept of nil or NULL is nearly universal.
In this article, I've tried to highlight iOS oddities that might slow down programmers who have studied other modern languages. Much of Swift will be comfortable to programmers who who kept up to date with modern programming practices. A few such structures include:
Blocks, which Swift uses for closures and callbacks.
Parameterized arguments, which allow methods to be loaded down with optional arguments. The C language offers an equally versatile paradigm, which is to accept a struct as a single argument, but many modern language libraries prefer to string out separate arguments.
Immutable variables, which are most useful in functional programming contexts, but are offered by other languages as well.
Protocols, the Apple term for what Java calls interfaces.
If you feel comfortable with the concepts in this article, along with Apple's conventions for long-named functions, arguments, and data constants, Swift should not present a high hurdle.
Editor's note: Dive deeper into Swift with "Swift Development with Cocoa" by Paris Buttfield-Addison, Jonathon Manning, and Tim Nugent.
Public domain objective lens illustration courtesy of Internet Archive.]]>
Over the past decade, SSD drives (popularly known as Flash) have radically changed computing at both the consumer level — where USB sticks have effectively replaced CDs for transporting files — and the server level, where it offers a price/performance ratio radically different from both RAM and disk drives. But databases have just started to catch up during the past few years. Most still depend on internal data structures and storage management fine-tuned for spinning disks.
Citing price and performance, one author advised a wide range of database vendors to move to Flash. Certainly, a database administrator can speed up old databases just by swapping out disk drives and inserting Flash, but doing so captures just a sliver of the potential performance improvement promised by Flash. For this article, I asked several database experts — including representatives of Aerospike, Cassandra, FoundationDB, RethinkDB, and Tokutek — how Flash changes the design of storage engines for databases. The various ways these companies have responded to its promise in their database designs are instructive to readers designing applications and looking for the best storage solutions.
It's worth noting that most of the products discussed here would fit roughly into the category known as NoSQL, but that Tokutek's storage engine runs on MySQL, MariaDB, and Percona Server, as well as MongoDB; the RethinkDB engine was originally developed for MySQL; and many of the tools I cover support various features, such as transactions that are commonly associated with relational databases. But this article is not a description of any database product, much less a comparison — it is an exploration of Flash and its impact on databases.
We all know a few special traits of Flash — that it is fast, that its blocks wear out after a certain number of writes — but its details can have a profound effect on the performance of databases and applications. Furthermore, discussions of speed should be divided into throughput and latency, as with networks. The characteristics I talked to the database experts about included:
At the risk of oversimplifying, you could think of Flash as combining the convenient random access of main memory with the size and durability of disk, having access speeds between the two. Ideally, for performance, an application would run all in memory, and several database solutions were created as in-memory solutions (VoltDB, Oracle Times Ten, and the original version of MySQL Cluster known as NDB Cluster, come to mind). But as data sets grow, memory has become too expensive, and Flash arises as an attractive alternative.
Several of the products I researched replace the file system with their own storage algorithms, as many relational databases have also done. Locality, as we've seen, can affect the speed of reads. But it isn't crucial to strive for locality of data. The overhead of writing data in the "right" spot may override the trivial overhead of doing multiple reads when Flash makes throughput so high.
Aerospike is the first database product designed from the beginning with Flash in mind. Bulkowski says this choice was made when the founders noted that data too large or too expensive to fit in RAM is well suited for Flash.
Although it can run simply with RAM backed by rotational disks, Aerospike stores indexes in RAM and the rest of the data in Flash. This way, they can quickly look up the index in RAM and then retrieve data from multiple Flash drives in parallel. Because the indexes are updated in RAM, writes to Flash are greatly reduced. Monica Pal, chief marketing officer for Aerospike, comments that the new category of real-time, big data driven applications, striving to personalize the user experience, have a random read/write data access pattern. Therefore, many customers use Aerospike to replace the caching tier at a site.
Of the databases covered in this article, Cassandra is perhaps the most explicit in ordering data to achieve locality of reference. Its fundamental data structure is a log-structured merge-tree (LSM-tree), very different from the B-tree family found in most relational and NoSQL databases. An LSM-tree tries to keep data sorted into ordered sets, and regularly combines sets to make them as long as possible. Developed originally to minimize extra seeks on disk, LSM-trees later proved useful with Flash to dramatically reduce writes (although random reads become less efficient).
According to Jonathan Ellis, project chair of Apache Cassandra, the database takes on a lot of the defragmentation operations that most applications leave up to the file system, in order to maintain its LSM-trees efficiently. It also takes advantage of its knowledge of the data (for instance, which blocks belong to a single BLOB) to minimize the amount of garbage collection necessary.
Rosenthal, in contrast, says that the FoundationDB team counted on Flash controllers to solve the problem of fragmented writes. Just as sophisticated disk drives buffer and reorder writes to minimize seeks (such as with elevator algorithms), Flash drives started six or seven years ago to differentiate themselves in the market by offering controllers that could do what LSM does at the database engine level. Now, most Flash controllers offer these algorithms.
Tokutek offers a clustered database, keeping data with the index. They find clustering ideal for retrieving ranges of data, particularly when there are repeated values, as in denormalized NoSQL document stores like the MongoDB database that Tokutek supports. Compression also reduces read and write overhead, saving money on storage as well as time. Tokutek generally gets a compression ratio of 5 or 7 to 1 for MySQL and MariaDB. They do even better on MongoDB — perhaps 10 to 1 compression — because its document stores are denormalized compared to a relational database.
Aerospike, FoundationDB, RethinkDB, and Tokutek use MVCC or a similar concept to write new versions of data continuously and clean up old versions later, instead of directly replacing stored data with new values.
In general, a single write request by a database can turn into multiple writes because of the need to update the data as well as multiples indexes. But Bulkowski says that, by storing indexes in memory, Aerospike achieves a predictable write amplification of 2, whereas other applications often suffer from a factor of 10. He points out that this design choice, like many made by Aerospike, is always being reconsidered as they research the best ways to speed up and scale applications.
He is also not worried about the fabled problem of wear in Flash. They can actually last as long as the systems' sites normally expect to last — for instance, the blocks on an Intel S3700 SSD can last five years with 10 writes per day.
Both Aerospike and FoundationDB offer strict durability guarantees. All writes go to Flash and are synched.
Rosenthal says that the increased speed and parallelism of Flash — perhaps 100,000 operations per second, compared to 300 for typical disks — create the most change to database design. "The traditional design of relational databases, with one thread per connection, worked fine when disks were bottleneck," he says, "but now the threads become the bottleneck." FoundationDB internally uses its own light-weight processes, like Erlang does. Rosenthal says that the stagnation in latency improvement makes parallelism even more important.
Because of extensive parallelism, Bulkowski says that deep queues work better on Flash than rotational disks. Aerospike is particularly useful for personalization at real-time speeds, which is used by applications as diverse as ecommerce sites, web ad auctions (real-time bidding), the notoriously variable airline pricing, and even telecom routing. These applications combine a large number of small bits of information (from just gigabytes to more than 100TB) about pages, tickets, and products, as well as subscribers, customers or users, requiring a lot of little database transactions. The concurrency provided by Aerospike allows sites to complete these database operations consistently, 99% of the time, within a couple of milliseconds, and to scale cost effectively, on surprisingly small clusters.
These new database storage engine designs have clearly thrown many traditional decisions overboard. It is up to application developers now to review their database schemas and access pattern assumptions to take advantage of these developments.
Is Flash a part of your data strategy?
Aerospike and O'Reilly are conducting a survey to learn how data practitioners are putting Flash to use in their organizations. Share your thoughts.
Cropped image on content and category pages by Robert on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.
This post is part of a collaboration between O'Reilly and Aerospike. See our statement of editorial independence.]]>
It was the million comments filed at the FCC that dragged me out of the silence I've maintained for several years on the slippery controversy known as "network neutrality." The issue even came up during President Obama's address to the recent U.S.-Africa Business forum.
Most people who latch on to the term "network neutrality" (which was never favored by the experts I've worked with over the years to promote competitive Internet service) don't know the history that brought the Internet to its current state. Without this background, proposed policy changes will be ineffective. So, I'll try to fill in some pieces that help explain the complex cans of worms opened by the idea of network neutrality.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the chief concerns of Internet policy makers were, first, to bring basic network access to masses of people, and second, to achieve enough bandwidth for dazzling advances such as Voice over IP (and occasionally we even managed interactive video). Bandwidth constraints were a constant concern, and a good deal of advances in compression and protocols made the most of limited access. Many applications, such as FTP and rsync, also included restart options so that a file transfer could pick up where it left off when the dial-up line failed and then came up again.
Because there were always more ways to use the network than the available bandwidth allowed (in other words, networks were oversubscribed), we all understood that network administrators at every level, from the local campus to the Tier 1 provider, would throttle traffic to make the network fair to all users. After all, what is the purpose of TCP window scaling, which lies at the center of the main protocol that carries traffic on the Internet?
There's nothing new about complaints from Internet services about uneven access. When Tier 1 Internet providers stopped peering and started charging smaller providers for access, the outcry was long and loud (I wrote about it in December 2005) — but the Internet survived.
The hope that more competition would lead to more bandwidth at reasonable prices drove the Telecommunications Act of 1996. And in places with robust telecom competition — economically advanced countries in Europe and East Asia — people get much faster speeds than U.S. residents, at decent prices, with few worries about discrimination against content providers. A long history of obstruction and legal maneuvering has kept the U.S. down to one high-speed networking carrier in most markets.
Many people got complacent when they obtained always-on, high-speed connections. But new network capabilities always lead to more user demand, just as widening highways tends to lead to more congestion. Soon the peer-to-peer file sharing phenomenon pumped up the energy of Internet policy discussions again.
I remember a sense of pessimism setting in among Internet public policy advocates around the year 2000, as the cable and telephone companies carved up the Internet market and effectively excluded most of their competitors. But thanks to the competition between these two industries, at least, most Americans had always-on connections, even if many of them were ADSL. And that led to the next set of Internet infrastructure wars.
A lot of the new always-on Internet users, who had been making cassette tapes for friends and sharing music offline, decided they wanted music on their computers and started using the Internet to exchange files. The growth of peer-to-peer services can be attributed partly to the desire to evade copyright holders, but it had solid technical motivations as well.
Millions of downloads would put a great strain on servers. (Nobody outside Google knows how much it invests in YouTube servers, but the cost must be huge.) When a hot new item hits the Internet, the only way to efficiently disseminate it is to make each user share some upload bandwidth along with download bandwidth. The overhead of peer-to-peer systems like BitTorrent requires a modest amount more bandwidth usage than using central servers to distribute the same content, but it allows small Internet users to provide popular material without being overwhelmed by downloads.
Prices have always been different for different Internet users.And peer-to-peer has substantial non-infringing uses, generally ignored by vigilante bandwidth throttlers. On old networks, software developers had to undergo a complicated protocol requiring technical mastery in order to work on free software. A developer fixing a bug or adding an enhancement would isolate the lines of code he or she changed in a file. Other developers would download that tiny file, update their versions of the source code using the patch program, recompile, and reinstall. Peer-to-peer services made it convenient to just download a whole new binary and compare checksums to make sure it had not become corrupted.
I don't have to go over the agonizing history of the sudden worldwide mania for peer-to-peer file sharing or the alarmed reactions of music and movie studios. Suffice it to say that traffic shaping, which had always been key to fair network service, got buffeted from all directions by an unpropitious moral zeal. Some network neutrality advocates distrust all application-specific discrimination, and turgid debates arise over what is "legitimate." Many in the network neutrality movement were even angry at the FCC in 2010 when it created different rules for mobile and fiber networks, even though the bandwidth restraints on mobile networks are obvious.
Still, given that the music and movie industries have started to respond to consumer demand and offer legal streaming, peer-to-peer file sharing may no longer be a significant percentage of traffic that carriers have to worry about. Instead of Napster, they argue over Netflix. But the histrionic appeals that characterized both sides of the peer-to-peer debates — those who defended peer-to-peer, and those who deplored it — continued into the network neutrality controversy.
Many advocates who've latched onto the network neutrality idea suggest that up to now we've enjoyed some kind of golden age where anyone in a garage can compete with Internet giants. Things aren't so simple.
Prices have always been different for different Internet users because some places have fewer competitors, some places are more difficult to string wires through, and so on. Different service is also available for cold cash, so large users have routinely leased their own lines over the years or paid extra for routing over faster lines. Software traffic shaping is a simple technological extension, similar to the use of virtual circuits and software-defined networking technologies elsewhere, to discriminate among customers willing to pay.
Michael Powell, as chair of the FCC, famously cited different levels of access when he was asked about the digital divide and pointed out that he was on the wrong side of a Mercedes divide. It might not have been smart for an FCC chair to compare the information highway — which was already clearly becoming an economic, educational, and democratic necessity — with a luxury consumer item, but his essential point was correct.
Network access is only one of many resources innovators need in any case. Suppose I cooked up a service that could out-Google Google — one that could instantly deliver the exact information for which people were searching in a privacy-preserving manner — but dang it, I just lacked 18 million CPUs to run it on. Where's the neutrality?
The fact is that innovators — particularly in developing regions of the world, where more and more innovation is likely to arise — have always, always suffered from resource constraints that don't bedevil large incumbents. The key trick of innovation is to handle resource constraints and turn them into positives, as the early Internet users I mentioned at the beginning of this article did. I don't see why network speed and cost should face policy decisions any different from physical resources, access to technical and marketing expertise, geographical location, and other distinctions between people.
Net neutrality advocates have also seized on what they consider a simple fix: applying the legal regime known as Title II (PDF) (because of its place in the law) so that Internet carriers are regulated like letter carriers or railroads. One attraction of this solution is that it requires action only by the FCC, not by Congress.
As I have pointed out, the evolution of the current regime followed a historical logic that would be hard to unravel. If 99% of those one million comments (plus even more that are certain to roll in before the deadline) ask the FCC to reverse itself, they may do so. Congress could well reverse the reversal. But Title II contains booby traps as well: because networks can't treat all packets the same way, mandating them to do so will lead to endless technical arguments.
Telephone and cable company managers are not blind to what's going on. They have seen their services reduced to a commodity, while on the one side content producers continue to charge high fees and on the other side a handful of prominent Internet companies make headlines over stunning deals. (Of course, few companies can be WhatsApp.) The telephone companies spend days and nights plotting how to bring some of that luscious revenue into their own coffers.
Their answer, of course, is through oligopoly market power rather than through real innovation. That's why I focused this article on competition back at the start. The telephone companies want a direct line into those who build successful businesses on top of telco services, and they want those companies to cough up a higher share of the revenues. It's the same strategy pursued by Walmart when it forces down prices among its suppliers or by Amazon.com when it demands a higher share of publisher profits.
Tim O'Reilly, with whom I discussed this article, points out that the public is unable to determine what fair compensation is for the carriers because we aren't privy to the actual costs of providing service. And those costs are not just the costs for providing Internet infrastructure.
O'Reilly asks, "What are the costs, for example, of providing Netflix versus television? Which one is driving subscriber growth and ARPU? What is the real cost of the incremental infrastructure investment needed to provide high bandwidth services versus the prior cost of paying for content? How does this show up in the returns the telcos and cable companies are already getting?"
There are many forms of centralization I'd worry about before traffic shaping.While we are not privy to these cost numbers, he indicates that a quick look at the public financial reports of Comcast and Netflix provides some useful insight. If you look at the annual view of the data, you'll see that in the four years between 2010 and 2013, Netflix's revenues doubled (and with them, presumably their demands on the network doubled as well — perhaps even more, as a much larger proportion of Netflix revenue is likely driven by streaming today than it was in 2010). In that period, Netflix's pre-tax income dropped from about 12% of revenue to about 4%. In the same time period, Comcast's revenue also more than doubled (partly as a result of acquisition), and their profit margin rose from 16% to 17%. It's pretty clear that the rise of Netflix streaming has not had a negative impact on Comcast profits!
In short, is being a commodity provider really such a bad deal? Do Internet infrastructure providers really need to squeeze Internet content companies in order to fund their investments? While this level of analysis is at best indicative, and should not be applied naively to policy decisions, it suggests a productive avenue for further research.
O'Reilly also points out that customers are paying the carriers to provide Internet service — and to them, that service consists of access to sites like Facebook, YouTube, and, yes, Netflix. When the carriers ask the content providers to pay them as well, not only are they double-dipping, but they are conveniently forgetting to mention that in the "good old days," cable companies actually paid for the content they delivered to customers. Aren't they actually getting a free-ride when people spend their Internet time watching YouTube or Netflix instead?
So, at bottom, the moral rallying cry behind network neutrality offers a muddled way to discuss an economic battle between big companies as to how they will allocate profits between themselves.
Some net neutrality experts make no secret of their desire to drive the telephone companies and cable companies out of business or reduce them to regulated utilities. The problem with abandoning infrastructure to the status of a given is that innovation in wires and cell towers is by no means finished. I looked at the economic aspects of telecom infrastructure in my article "Who will upgrade the telecom foundation of the Internet?"
We still have recourse to preserve the open Internet without network neutrality:
I feel that network neutrality as a (vague) concept took hold of an important ongoing technical, social, and economic discussion and rechanneled it along ineffective lines. As this article has shown, technology as well as popular usage has continuously changed at the content or application level, and there are many forms of centralization I'd worry about before traffic shaping.
Furthermore, we should not give up on hopes for more competition in infrastructure. At that time, we could all have the equivalent of a Mercedes on the information highway.
Coax photo on home page by Michael Mol, used under a Creative Commons license.]]>
I had the chance to be enlightened about intelligent buildings through a conversation with Nicholas Gayeski, cofounder of KGS Buildings, and Mark Pacelle, an engineer with experience in building controls who has written for O'Reilly about the Internet of Things.
Energy monitoring is undergoing a rapid transition:
For most of the Age of Electricity and of central heating, no one tracked the consumption of a particular piece of equipment. Building automation now allows a facilities manager to control and monitor particular equipment and systems, automatically adjusting the timing and amount of heating delivered. Log files provide a view over time that can uncover degrading equipment.
KGS Buildings builds further on the services provided by building automation vendors. Running its Clockworks PaaS service on Azure, it analyzes data collected from building automation systems to detect and diagnosis faults and opportunities for efficiency. KGS applies a system drawing from a 40-year-plus history of learning on fault detection for heating and air conditioning.
Analysis can reveal a hidden problem in a valve that is not fully closing and thus causing excess heating or cooling — a problem that no one might notice because the temperature is still OK, as the system compensates for the flaw. The system can also find opportunities to improve control, such as detecting that heating systems are not operating at their most efficient condition and suggesting how to improve its control.
A system like KGS Buildings' can also go beyond adjustments to suggest new capital projects. For instance, it might suggest adding a variable speed drive to make cooling systems more efficient. These are classic examples of computerization maximizing human expertise: you can get quick results from automated analytics instead of waiting for a consultant to read through all the logs from your equipment. Overall, this allows knowledgeable engineers to spend less time identifying and more time fixing problems. The library of diagnostics can also be customized for individual buildings, which is important because every site is different and has very different constellations of equipment.
The raw data is available to KGS Buildings because they securely read from building automation systems and post that data to the Azure cloud for analytics. Building automation systems employ a wide variety of communication protocols, with predominant common standards such as BACnet, oBIX, OPC and Modbus. A few automation systems have proprietary interfaces that KGS Buildings has to code to directly.
Other companies in this space include SkyFoundry, SCIenergy, Ezenics.
Gayeski pointed out that monitoring can produce other benefits aside from more efficient energy use. It might also reduce maintenance time by supporting investigation and troubleshooting, increase occupant comfort, and help catch problems before they cause a failure. He lists the following potential outcomes from successful monitoring:
It's difficult to develop a company in this space because many building managers — and the financial decision makers controlling their budgets — are still not alert to the value of energy management, despite the enormous potential savings and public concern over carbon emissions. Perhaps the biggest hurdle is the division of responsibility for facilities among many managers and cost centers. The person responsible for maintaining the HVAC system may be different from the bean counter tasked with holding down costs. In many buildings, costs are divided among tenants, and no single tenant will save enough to make it worth their while to invest in automation and monitoring.
Currently, institutions showing interest in automated fault detection for buildings include health care providers, laboratories, large commercial real estate, and universities. K-12 schools, retail outlets, and hospitality are just beginning to dabble in it. Pacelle noted that energy utilities are getting interested in sophisticated analytics as part of their need to control demand. Many utilities already offer incentives to detect faults in order to drive energy efficiency.
Gayeski is looking forward to the increase in data that the Internet of Things will provide, enabling deeper and more informative analytics. At that point, the smart grid will reach out to individual home owners as well. The potential was highlighted in a recent White House expo on "cyber-physical systems." Consumer products can be seen in the stores, but are currently expensive, as one would expect in the phase before mass consumption.
Pacelle summed up the change in building management: "Value is now in the data, not the device. The ability to collect data from more devices (e.g. thermostats, occupancy sensors, etc.), and more building equipment (e.g. HVAC equipment, boilers, air handlers, etc.) will provide a higher resolution of information and an opportunity to see exactly how the building and its equipment is performing." Anyone wanting to manufacture or sell building equipment should think of ways to store data in the cloud and exploit it for better operations.]]>
These efforts have born fruit, and clinical trials have shown the value of many such games. Ben Sawyer, who founded the Games for Health conference more than 10 years ago, is watching all the pieces fall into place for the widespread adoption of games. Business plans, platforms, and the general environment for the acceptance of games (and other health-related apps) are coming together.
The recent announcement of Apple's HealthKit, quickly followed by Google's re-entry into the health space, and several other initiatives (Box also claims to offer a personal health record, for instance) promise to offer quasi-standard platforms that take a lot of the burden off of game and other app developers.
These platforms will define the data available to the users (and ultimately their doctors) regarding fitness, vital signs, and other health-related data. They also will provide storage and APIs for reading and writing data. In short, many logistical headaches that had to be handled previously by the app developer will turn into givens. Although the interfaces and (hopefully) easy-to-use apps will be the visible side of the new systems, they'll have an equally important role as "data platforms" that can unify each person's health information and keep it consistent. If the platforms take off, app developers will be able to focus on the central health-related functions provided by the app, the user experience, and adding value.
Of course, questions remain about the new ventures announced by Apple, Google, and others: will they evade whatever barriers — whether public indifference, doctors' resistance to patient-generated data, or closed electronic health records — that killed Google Health and still hold back use of Microsoft Health Vault? Will the providers of the new patient records trap data in their own systems, just adding new silos to the tiresome collection already in existence? Will patients entrust their data to the new repositories? Will device and app developers use the services? Can the business models of device and app developers thrive on the new platforms?
If the platforms are well-designed and open, they could make a crucial difference. Together with changes in government payments and insurers, which are increasingly expecting doctors to show results and not just charge for each procedure or visit, the platforms could cause games to flower and be embraced by players, doctors, and insurers.
The big question at Games for Health this year was how to create a sustainable, funded game — how to move from a research project to a successful company. The question was addressed in many of the sessions and came up repeatedly in break-out groups. Sawyer said that he encouraged this focus on making games practical, and set aside the first day of the conference (the Wednesday workshops) for all the issues that used to dominate Games for Health: research, the design of games, etc.
All app developers should look at Sesame Street's research because they are effectively training the next generation of computer users.I got a chance to attend one day of this conference. At a break-out session on games for youth, it turned out that nearly all games were still funded by grants. The goal of the developers, of course, was to move beyond grants and into building businesses, but this requires a full set of business skills that usually calls for a different kind of management.
There are other challenges for games as well. For instance, a lot of games seem to hold promise to ameliorate mental health problems without resorting to medications. Still, attendees reported that they have trouble reaching young people, pointing out that they tend to deny their problems, fail to surface their feelings, and refuse to identify with the issues that games address. Interestingly, games provide a sly route to engaging youth when more direct appeals fail. Games can provide metaphorical situations where the gamers can willingly engage with fantasy representations of the issues that bedevil them in real life.
I heard an interesting keynote by a group from Sesame Street engaged in developing games for health. They cover issues such as healthy eating that are worldwide concerns. But they are not afraid to deal with other serious problems affecting children, such as divorce, incarcerated parents, and the stresses on parents who are military veterans returning with mental and physical problems.
Sesame Street does extensive testing on their apps, both before deployment (formation research) and after deployment (summative research). They use all the capabilities of digital media for research: tracking how many people use a game and how long they're engaged, employing A/B testing on interface elements, matching content to the user's location, etc.
It occurred to me that all app developers should look at Sesame Street's research because they are effectively training the next generation of computer users how to interact with computer systems. What they find effective for the four- or five-year-olds who use their apps will be what these users expect from all apps as they grow into adults.
It was also nice to hear from the Centers for Disease Control, who reported on recent apps and challenges. Their 2013 Game Jam was the largest Game Jam ever held in the US, drawing more than 300 participants. By the end of the Game Jam, more than half the participants declared their interest in working on public health issues.
We all love games. Whether we love health- and behavior-changing games depends on many things beyond their quality, including buy-in by doctors and payers, proven effectiveness, and integration with health records and treatment plans. The next year will be a very interesting one to watch. Will the compelling research results, the boost given by new health platforms, the growing sophistication of health game developers, and the change in incentives promised by insurers bring games for health into the mainstream?]]>
Ted Nelson, inventor of the hyperlink, recognized the power of viewing life in graphs. After the implosion of his historic Xanadu project, he embarked on a graph database tool called ZigZag. The most modern instantiations of graphs–the Neo4j store and the Alchemy.js tool for interactively visualizing graphs–were well represented this year at O'Reilly's Open Source convention.
Both projects are growing impressively and finding users in domains they didn't expect. According to Huston Hedinger, Founder and CEO of Portland startup
GraphAlchemist, "Graph visualization can provide insight into information ranging from how communication flows across a social network to where vulnerabilities exist in a supply chain network."
Epidemiologists use graphs to trace or predict the flow of infections through populations. Similar techniques can be used by network administrators to determine which computer systems are most likely to be compromised by an intruder, a use case documented in the O'Reilly book Network Security Through Data Analysis. In Byron Ruth's presentation on ETL in health setting, Neo4j was used to store provenance data (sources and transformations applied to data).
Graphs are natural representations for the relationships encoded in web sites through RDF, as well as the more formal and intimidating Semantic Web. The RDF uses are echoed in a proposed Open Graph protocol to provide more meaningful links between web pages than the familiar <a> tags provide.
Social networks use graphs. That's how we get recommendations to add people whom they think we know. (When are the social networks going to realize that it is not in my best interest, or ultimately theirs, for me to make every person I know a "friend"?) And LinkedIn can tell me exactly how many degree separate me from another member–obviously the application of a graph.
Why don't the social networks go all the way and let us directly view our own graphs? It would be neat to find out how many people I know in common with my children or with the person I worked with ten years ago.
Perhaps the incumbent social networking services don't believe we could understand the graphs or use them without frustration. According to Neo4j's Product Designer, Andreas Kollegger, they would have a good point. He says that graph databases have not learned the means to expose the deep information they hold–that they won't catch on until their advanced features are as easy to use as spreadsheets.
Alchemy.js is a good start. It's a graph drawing engine built in d3 by Portland startup GraphAlchemist. You can ask it to color nodes and edges by attribute, and to cluster related nodes.
Graph architecture is simple–just two nodes connected by an edge, over and over and over again–but the fascination of graphs comes from the emergent properties such as connectedness, how easy it would be to sever parts of the database by removing nodes, etc. All of these things are calculated on the nodes and edges, but they are deeply associated with the graph, being characteristics or parts of the whole.
For balance, on Tuesday evening I attended the PostgreSQL birds-of-a-feather session. Leaders presented glowing visions of new features in the upcoming version (9.4) along with more cautious assessments of complex security enhancements. One new feature will eliminate the need to outsource work to a programming language, while another will take the place of NoSQL competition. By the time the presenters were done, I was convinced PostgreSQL 9.4 is so powerful that if you run it you won't even need a computer.
Like graph databases, advanced relational databases like PostgreSQL create higher-level metadata that can be retrieved directly from the database, and therefore represent hidden characteristics of the data.
Kollegger says, "An RDBMS and a graph database are equally expressive, allowing you to capture the same kinds of information, but allow you to ask different kinds of questions. Taking OSCON as a data set, you'd ask PostgreSQL questions like 'How many people attended' or 'What was the most popular session', then turn to a graph database to ask questions like 'Did people like me go to OSCON?' and 'What was the most popular sequence of sessions?'"
What would be great, in my view, would be a way for a graph database to provide key statistics such as connectedness (for instance, whether everybody tends to know everybody else in the database) and for Alchemy.js to display such characteristics.
Databases are advancing on all fronts. The mathematical rigor underlying relational databases continues to keep them appealing when you have to investigate many fixed relationships and not leave anybody out. The quite different complexity of graph databases will reveal a power of analysis that is yet to be fully explored.]]>
A major milestone was the creation of the OpenStack Foundation, which I reported on in 2011. This event successfully started the participants' engagement with the governance question, but it by no means resolved it. This past Monday, I attended some of the Open Cloud Day at O'Reilly's Open Source convention, and talked to a lot of people working for or alongside the OpenStack Foundation about getting contributors to work together successfully in an open community.
When software is no longer just the domain of inquisitive college students and such, but comes mostly from large corporations (as commits to the Linux kernel now do), the risk of fake openness grows. I got a lesson in fake openness an embarrassingly long time ago when I worked for a company that was part of the Open Software Foundation (OSF).
The OSF was formed by major computer vendors in the 1980s as a defensive move, in reaction to a partnership between AT&T (the owner of UNIX) and Sun Microsystems (the most successful minicomputer vendor). The half-dozen leading member companies in the OSF agreed to combine their most advanced technologies to create interoperable products. They defined openness as interoperability, with no intention of providing open software as we know it today.
The companies' actual strategy was to give the OSF a pile of crap (an appropriate technical term for the state of their software), take back the incompatible mess of overly ambitious components that the OSF created from the contributions, and then assiduously fix bugs internally without sharing fixes with other companies.
The OSF obviously could not survive this behavior. (Nor did most of its member companies.) The OSF merged with X/Open and still exists in some evolved form as the Open Group, but its main legacy is Microsoft's Component Object Model, which the company copied (in a largely compatible fashion) from a contribution to the OSF by Apollo Computer.
Fast forward to more contemporary actors. The OpenStack Foundation was formed by companies that understood openness as a business strategy and community value. It has truly open software as defined by the license and by a contribution process that follows four "Open" promises: open source, open design, open development, and open community. According to community manager Stefano Maffulli, however, more recent corporate members joined up in a rush from market pressure. These corporations may have had little time to learn and understand the open collaboration that makes OpenStack so different from most open source projects, and they risk reverting to zero-sum thinking, like the members of the old standards groups.
In a recent presentation, Maffulli says that "committed companies" are deeply involved in the decision making process, know how and with whom to communicate, help fix things when they break, etc. (slide 26 in Maffulli's presentation). In contrast "involved companies" are part of the Foundation for tactical reasons and their developed are "involved on the outskirts first" (slide 29).
To get the most from both groups, the Foundation is conducting an ongoing effort to sustain OpenStack's growth with more education in the values of open innovation. Before each OpenStack Summit, the Foundation offers a free two-day training session to teach developers the social skills required to successfully contribute new code. This upstream training teaches developers the values of collaboration across corporate boundaries, hoping they can explain to their managers that paying a fee to the Foundation qualifies them to be members but that successful collaboration requires more. The call for speakers at the next OpenStack Summit in Paris has a track on How to Contribute, designed to share best practices and success stories.
Contributing a driver or a plugin to an OpenStack component is as valuable as contributing a new core feature. "Where would Linux be without device drivers?" asks Maffulli. "And where would device manufacturers be without solid memory management and other core features of the kernel?" They're two sides of the same coin, but some people don't yet see that.
It's important to explain to companies that when they contribute a driver or some other small piece of code to any open source project, they are responsibility for the success of the whole. Dropping 10k lines of code at the periphery of a project with 2M lines of code means taking ownership of the whole 2M: it's a responsibility toward its customers not to repeat the mistakes of the Open Group.
Federico Lucifredi told me that OpenStack was at risk of spreading itself too thin by embracing too many new projects, a problem similar to the OSF's adoption of overly complex and immature technologies. In the case of OpenStack, many companies are pressing the community to embrace new modules that are addressing decidedly non-urgent requirements. This reached a zenith at the November 2013 Hong Kong summit, and a reaction set in among community leaders. The OpenStack Foundation is now working to identify the select Core modules that correspond to the use of the OpenStack trademark. Projects deemed worthy of support and recognition will continue to receive Incubator status, in a model similar to the Apache Foundation's.
At the Open Cloud Day, OpenStack's Release Manager, Thierry Carrez, was asked how the project could maintain forward momentum with a distributed, decentralized decision-making structure. He answered, "The benevolent dictator model is great if you can afford it," but few projects can find someone who functions over the long term as both technical lead and release manager as Linus Torvalds does. The OpenStack Foundation is trusting the community to restore balance through voluntary measures. Its experience is a case study in the blending of structure with letting a thousand flowers bloom on a massive scale for open source technologies.]]>


text:
This Is Sony's $800 Earbuds, The MDR-EX1000
Call us skeptical, but we don't think Sony's MDR-EX1000 EX-Monitor Earphones are worth $799.99. That's how much Audiocubes has the high end earbuds going for, which they say deliver a frequency range of between 3-30,000hz. Human hearing typically ranges between 20-20,000hz, and that's even a stretch, especially if you're old. For all that cash you'll receive 10 different sized silicone tips, a pair of 16mm drivers, a carrying case and an extension cord with a gold plated plug.
Christen Costa
Grew up back East, got sick of the cold and headed West. Since I was small I have been pushing buttons - both electronic and human. With an insatiable need for tech I thought "why not start a blog focusing on technology, and use my dislikes and likes to post on gadgets."
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Top by Cleobella, Pants by Eternal Sunshine Creations, Bracelet by Stella and Bow
Thankgiving weekend is a day away, I cant believe it is already time to kick off the holiday season again. These days sometimes families are spread across the country and sometimes gathering together is just not geographically possible even though I wish it always was. So you have the invite to friends giving or your friends families house and you can not show up empty handed. Just a bottle of wine does not feel like you are contributing to the festivities enough and you are just not that crafty in the kitchen. Well I feel the same, so this year I have you covered, myself and my friend Ryan of About a Boy pretested a simple 5 step recipe to the most tasty pumkin pie ever!
1. Go grocery shopping
2. Bake your pie crust which you can buy pre-made and they taste amazing
3. Make your pie filling
4. Bake it while listening to some good tunes
5. Try not to eat it immediately
2 refrigerated pie crusts
1 can pure pumpkin (not pumpkin pie filling)
1 can sweetened condensed milk
1 can evaporated milk (yes they are different)
4 large eggs
3 tsp cinnamon
2 tsp pumpkin pie spice
2 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp salt
Preheat oven to 425 degrees F.
Follow instructions on the packaging... so easy right! Set aside and make the filling.
Pie Filling
In a large bowl, whist together eggs.
Add pure pumpkin
Add condensed milk
Add 3/4 can of the evaporated milk
Stir well to combine
Add cinnamon
Add pumkpin pie spice
Add Vanilla and Salt
Carefully pour mixture into the pie shells. Place pies in your preheated oven and bake for 15 minutes at 425 degrees F, then reduce the temperature to 350 degrees. Bake for an additional 35-45 minutes or until a knife inserted into the center of the pie comes out clean. Remove from oven and allow to cool for 2 hours, (Which we did not do and it still tasted amazing) Recipe via pinterest with some of my own adjustments.
No empty hands and just impressed happy and full bellys this Thanksgiving. Enjoy!


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Search results
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SushiSushi (すし, 寿司, 鮨 is a Japanese food consisting of cooked vinegared rice (鮨飯, sushi-meshi combined with other ingredients (ネタ, neta?
- Directions. Place rice in fine-wire strainer. Rinse under cold running water, rubbing grains together with fingers to clean thoroughly. Continue rinsing and lifting ...
More images for sushi meshi
- japaneserecipes.wikia.com/wiki/Sushi_
meshiDescription Edit. Sushi meshi is sushi rice. Short grained rice with a vinegar and mirin mixture added to it while hot and mixed lightly until cool.
- mykitch3n.blogspot.com/2013/05/sushi-
rice-sushi-meshi...Sushi rice or vinegar-ed rice in English, 寿司飯 (read as sushi-meshi) or 舎利/シャリ (read as Shari) in Japanese, whatever you call it, they are all ...
- sushi-meshi recipe: short grain vinegar rice for sushi. short grain vinegar rice for sushi Add your review, photo or comments for sushi-meshi. Japanese Side Dish Rice
- dailyfoodporn.wordpress.com/tag/sushi-
meshiAre not visitors disappointed ? A food blog from Osaka with so few sushi… It's Japan, so we are supposed to eat some at every meal. That's not really the case ...
- www.meshi.com.arRestaurant de Sushi. ... MESHI ® Aristóbulo del Valle 1499 CF, TEL.4300-4446 firstname.lastname@example.com
- Sushi Meshi. Sushi Meshi is rice that has been cooked, and seasoned with Sushi-zu or Awasezu, so that it is ready to start using to make sushi from.
- www.globalgourmet.com/food/kgk/0999/
meshi.htmlRecipe: Making Sushi Rice, or Sushi Meshi. Kate's Global Kitchen features weekly updates, international recipes, cookbook profiles, food news, cooking tips, and ...
- Instructions. Thoroughly wash rice and drain well. Pour into heavy based saucepan and add water. Score kombu several times on one side to release flavour.


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The Global FlyFisher - The Largest and Best Place to go for Online Fly Fishing and Fly Tying
Search page
Search GFF
Find it all
Results 71-80, 642 total, on "tying leader" (0.84 seconds)
72. The art of tying a tarpon leader, shown by Kim (left) to Kenneth, who smiles in bewilderment over the complex process. (picture) - Leader tying - Where the sabalo grande - the big tarpon - roam - Global FlyFisher
73. The art of tying a tarpon leader, shown by Kim (left) to Kenneth, who smiles in bewilderment over the complex process. (picture) - Leader tying - Where the sabalo grande - the big tarpon - roam - Global FlyFisher
74. Oscar Lake outfitters - Click on the CC button in the vimeo timeline to see the subtitles.In search of action, we hit the road to Mauricie for a pike and lake trout fishing excursion. We packed the Hooké Van with big flies, steel leaders and solid rods before taking off for the Lake Oscar Outfitters. When we arrived, we met Donald Farrar. «Everything in yellow is a good spot » he told us while highlighting here and there on a map. And that's how we ended up following a big fat yellow line along the grassy bays of the Flamand River and the deep pools of lake Oscar in search of mean pikes and voracious lake trout. Music :https://soundcloud.com/odesza/memorieshttp://streetsoflaredo.bandcamp.com/track/im-livinghttp://www.oscar-farrar.comhttp://www.pourvoiries.com Click on the CC button in the vimeo timeline to see the subtitles. En quête d'action, on a pris le chemin de la Mauricie pour une excursion de pêche au brochet et à la truite grise. On a rempli la Hooké Van de grosses mouches, de fil d'acier et de cannes solides pi on a décollé vers la pourvoirie du lac Oscar. En arrivant, on a rencontré Donald Farrar. « Tout ce qui est en jaune, c'est bon! » qu'il nous a dit en beurrant de son marqueur un peu partout sur la carte qu'il venait de nous sortir. C'est comme ça qu'on s'est retrouvés à suivre une grosse ligne jaune le long des baies herbeuses de la rivière Flamand et des fosses profondes du lac Oscar, à la recherche de gros brochet et de voraces truites grises. Musique : https://soundcloud.com/odesza/memorieshttp://streetsoflaredo.bandcamp.com/track/im-livinghttp://www.oscar-farrar.com http://www.pourvoiries.com - fly fishing video channel - Global FlyFisher
75. Casting That Fly 1 - Basics - Release 1st of November 2013. Trailer. DVD or Video-on-Demand http://www.wideopen.dk. This is a movie for beginners.Master casting instructor, Lars Chr. Bentsen, guides you all the way through the movie. Lars Chr. Bentsen is a certified Master Instructor with the International Federation of Fly Fishers and is recognized internationally for his ability to teach fly casting. This movie is about casting a single hand fly rod.He shows how to put the gear together: Rod, fly reel, backing, fly line and leader.He shows you how easy it is to get started with your very first fly cast. We take a look at roll casting, overhead casting, double hauling and how to shoot line.But first and foremost, Lars Chr. Bentsen concentrates on the important basic elements of a good fly cast. Even though it is a movie for beginners, more experienced fly fishers will benefit from knowing the basics. Knowledge of the basics of fly casting makes it easier to correct your own faults.A good fly cast is easy and elegant, and this movie shows how to achieve just that. - fly fishing video channel - Global FlyFisher
76. Introduction to Wet Fly Fishing, Fishing Small Streams - This is my second instructional on wet fly fishing. This time I take a look at fishing in a small stream and cover issues like leader set up and how to approach a hole to fish. I hope these videos are helpful to you and if you like them please subscribe to my YouTube channel and like us on Facebook. As always please check out our website at http://holsingersflyshop.com for all your fly fishing needs. - fly fishing video channel - Global FlyFisher
77. Monsters Inc. - Fly fishing for chinooks ain't an easy task; these fishes won't take your fly easily and they are so violent, they were always breaking our leaders, bending our hooks and going down and up the river so fast that we didn't even have the time to exactly understand what the hell what actually happening at the end of our lines. The majority of the salmons you see in the video were the weakest ones, the ones that haven't destroyed our gear. So here you go, a not-so-serious video about fly fishing for chinook salmon in Lake Ontario Tributaries !! Enjoy ! - fly fishing video channel - Global FlyFisher
78. Cider Drinker - How to tie the Cider Drinker flyfishingpodcast.com (old rubber legs) Jigs are killing flies getting down to the river bed and inducing a take with the vertical rise or bounce techniques. Grayling love them as well as trout. The Tim's CD is designed to provide that little temptation to get fish to strike. A productive fly, a real killer that in small sizes works well with the presentation leader and french nymphing methods. Another nymph to have in your box. Whether it be white fish trout grayling or chub get down deep and in to the zone and let the legsgs do there work! See more at Instagam Flyfishingpodcast or Facebook Fly FIshing follow on twitter @flyfishingpcast and subscribe here or at iTunes to get podcasts and films. - fly fishing video channel - Global FlyFisher
79. Wide Receiver Streamer - This fly tying video will walk you through the steps on how to tie the Wide Receiver Streamer. Tied by Ryan Spillers - fly fishing video channel - Global FlyFisher
80. Twined or furled leaders - Step one - the concept - Global FlyFisher
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Miss Me Fleur Straight Stretch Jean
SALE $79.97 was $115.00 Item #57030JE6099T2
- Low rise zip fly stretch jean
- Slim fit that is straight through the hip and thigh
- 14" bottom opening
- Sequins and rhinestones on back pockets and yoke
- Hand sanding, tacking and grinding details
- Leather Miss Me label on back
- 98% Cotton, 2% Spandex.
- Machine wash separately in cold water. Wash inside out. Do not bleach. Tumble dry low. Remove promptly. Warm iron if needed.
- This quality denim has been hand finished for a unique, individual look. It will wear like your old favorite jeans, with each abrasion continuing to wear over time. We hope you love the vintage appearance and comfort of wearing jeans that have the look and feel of years of wear. Thanks for making the Buckle your denim destination.
- Made in China.
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Michael Levanduski from Performance Marketing Insider say's, "Yahoo has been working on building up the number of searches they are getting through their search engine for years, with little success. In the coming days, however, they may see a significant boost without really having to do a thing. This is because the worlds third most used browser, Firefox, has made a change to their default serach engine.
When FireFox users type something into the address bar, it has done a Google search automatically and display the results since 2004. Starting in December, however, all US users will have a search done through the Yahoo search engine. The browser is making adjustments to other regions as well. In Russia, for example, Firefox users will have a search done using Yandex, a popular option in that country. China will be using Baidu.
According to the announcement, this will impact more than 100 Billion searches each year.
This change is set to last for at least five years, according to the agreement between Yahoo and Firefox…"
[Read more…]


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What do you think of your Mother-in-Law?
Find a Conversation
|Wed, 10-13-2010 - 1:46pm
Did you know October 24th is Mother In-Law Day?
|Wed, 10-27-2010 - 9:02pm
I agree and I think children need other people in their lives, not just their own parents and they need more than their parents giving them a good, clean home.
|Wed, 10-27-2010 - 9:49pm
Well we don't usually see any of the grandparents for these holidays either.
|Wed, 10-27-2010 - 9:52pm
People who think that they and their children are entitled to things, typically walk around with a chip on their shoulders, and are easily offended b/c they often don't get what they think they deserve.
|Wed, 10-27-2010 - 9:55pm
mycherubs wrote:
To each his own.
We are out of sight out of mind. If the other grandchildren got nothing (even just a phone call), I would understand more. My children deserve just as much from her (again, not just material things but having a relationship with their grandmother, just a call on their bdays) as she gives her other grandchildren.
The part of your statement that I put in bold - this is the part that I am having a hard time understanding.
|Wed, 10-27-2010 - 9:59pm
Really? Why would you want you children to have a relationship with someone who treated you badly as you say you MIL did?
Family and extended family is very important to our family (we have 50ish relatives that we see each and every year), but my MIL and SIL were toxic as they didn't accept my adoptive sons as family. It was their right, but they lost all but minimal contact with my daughter (much loved by them) because of their behavior.
In my family, love and support is much more important than biology and it's never judged by birthday wishes or Christmas presents.
|Wed, 10-27-2010 - 10:01pm
I admit that my viewpoint is colored by the fact that my family lives in the same town as we do.
|Wed, 10-27-2010 - 10:02pm
you know, i think those most cold, black and white about relationships are those who either, take their own relationship with parent/grandparent for granted - or - two, have a cold, rotten relationship with them themselves.
i have a friend whose parents are both alive, she says the most gawd awful things about her mom, about her husband's mother all.
|Wed, 10-27-2010 - 10:07pm
Wow is all I can really say. Sounds like you don't have a very good relationship with your own family and find it ok for your children not to know them and that other older people are just as good a substitute for real, blood, family. Sorry about that.
No one is walking around with a chip on their shoulders but my children should be treated just like their cousins are and just because we are thousands of miles away does not mean you can't pick up the phone and call and say happy birthday. My children have always been slighted. My sil sat on the phone with me over an hour when I was pregnant with my 1st child asking me what I needed and told me she already started a huge box of things for the baby for my shower. The box would be coming soon. 12 years later.......I am not upset that I did not get anything but that I was lied to and not just a quick, I will be sending you some things but a full explanation of what she would be sending over an hour long conversation.


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Kennedy Rae Urban was first diagnosed with cancer when she was 18 months old, and the 2-year-old is still fighting. To help with her medical needs, the Paseo Club of Valencia is hosting a blood drive on Thursday, May 29.Read More »
Home » Tag Archives: Blood Drive
Blood Drive
2014 KHTS Home And Garden Show, Emergency Expo Starts Saturday
KHTS Home and Garden Show and Emergency Expo Starts SaturdayRead More »
Providence Blood Donor Center To Host Blood Drive At Bowman High School
The Providence Blood Donor Center is expected to host a blood drive at Bowman High School on Thursday, Oct. 17 from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.Read More »
Parents Of Young Cancer Patient Want To Raise Awareness
Kennedy Rae Urban was diagnosed with Stage 4 High-risk Neuroblastoma on July 30, when she was only 18 months old. As she undergoes treatment, her parents Kevin and Melissa Urban want to raise awareness about the effects of childhood cancer.Read More »
College Of The Canyons To Hold Blood Drive At Canyon Country Campus
College of the Canyons will be holding a blood drive sponsored by Associated Student Government and Providence Holy Cross Medical Center Sept. 9 at the Canyon Country Campus.Read More »