Summary of Powerset technology including Ruby on Rails

TechCrunchIT » Blog Archive » Next Year’s Headline: Microsoft fails to do anything significant with Powerset

Hadoop/Hbase	Requires Cgywin to run on Windows.
Ruby	Runs slow on Windows, good opportunity for Microsoft to put IronRuby to use?
Ruby on Rails	Will run anywhere Ruby will run. IronRuby reached the Rails singularity recently.
Merb	Same situation as Rails. No word yet on IronRuby capability.
God	Does not run on Windows period. Nor is Windows support planned. However, the good samaritan who wrote God happens to work for Powerset. Maybe they could beg him to make a Windows version.
Mongrel	Fully supported on Windows.
Mootools	Javascript- their battle is in the browser not the OS.
Erlang	Good Windows support!
YAWS	Erlang based, also works on Windows.
Memcached	There is an unofficial port for Windows that should not be used in production environments.

Techcrunch crashes itself | because of Twitter

Quite amusing … Mike just posted a twit indicating that news about Twitter is imminent. I went over to techcrunch.com as apparently did all 21,377 followers, and it is down.
UPDATE: it appeared after two minutes - people are excited for any news in this space!

S.F. officials locked out of computer network

This highlights a certain vulnerability that one person can do this.

S.F. officials locked out of computer network

A disgruntled city computer engineer has virtually commandeered San Francisco’s new multimillion-dollar computer network, altering it to deny access to top administrators even as he sits in jail on $5 million bail, authorities said Monday.

Sun To Shed Up To 2,500 Jobs In Strategic Move

hTechCrunchIT » Blog Archive » Sun To Shed Up To 2,500 Jobs In Strategic Move

With reports that up to 2,500 positions will be made redundant at Sun, with up to 60-70% of marketing and sales to go, Schwartz is definitely practicing what he preaches and is doing away with expensive and traditional enterprise sales and marketing. Instead, he is substituting it with a strategy based on acquiring customers through open source and free.

Another key early Facebook employee, Jeff Hammerbacher, is leaving the company

Another key departure from FaceBook, following other early employees including their CTO.

Another key early Facebook employee, Jeff Hammerbacher, is leaving the company » VentureBeat

A related reason is that the early employees are increasingly doubtful about the company’s shot at becoming a big business. Given the geeky, we’re-making-the-world-a-better-place sentiment at the company, I doubt this, although social networking skeptics most certainly won’t agree with me.

Protocol Buffers: Google’s Data Interchange Format

Google Open Source Blog: Protocol Buffers: Google’s Data Interchange Format

Instead, we developed Protocol Buffers. Protocol Buffers allow you to define simple data structures in a special definition language, then compile them to produce classes to represent those structures in the language of your choice. These classes come complete with heavily-optimized code to parse and serialize your message in an extremely compact format. Best of all, the classes are easy to use: each field has simple “get” and “set” methods, and once you’re ready, serializing the whole thing to – or parsing it from – a byte array or an I/O stream just takes a single method call.

VMWare | Economist

Interesting and surprising review of VMWare, and CEO Diane Greene.

UPDATE:
Diane Greene departed VMWare today, one day after my post. Big surprise here, and the replacement is ex EDS and with Microsoft connections.

Face value | Virtual competition | Economist.com

No wonder that the culture of VMware, which now employs over 6,000 people, is often described as open and collegiate. Where Ms Greene differs from the old school of high-tech bosses is how she sees the interplay between competition and co-operation. “I grew up playing Monopoly and Risk,” she says. “You have to collaborate to win these games—and compete when it is time to compete. But if you compete and break somebody’s trust you are going to lose the next time.” Maintaining trust means always being clear about what you are doing, she says, particularly since many of her firm’s partners are also rivals. What is more, Ms Greene argues, “With the internet, you can compete more effectively by being open.” When Microsoft tried to restrict how VMware’s customers could use its software with Windows, for instance, customers complained publicly and helped VMware prepare a white paper about Microsoft’s licensing practices that was posted online—after which the software giant relented

Google Apps is penetrating the enterprise market

A meme is developing around enterprises adopting Google Apps. This is not just small business, but large companies, with Taylor Woodrow being the latest. These companies are realising that the old concerns of information security in the [Google] cloud is outweighed by cost reduction, and simplicity.

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Taylor Woodrow Migrates 1,800 Users to Google Apps

Every day more than 3,000 businesses sign up for Google Apps and move to the cloud, and today we’d like to share one of those stories. Taylor Woodrow is a construction firm in the UK that recently migrated all of its 1,800 employees to Google Apps to introduce greater mobility and flexibility to the company’s communications.

Having said that I look forward [as a Google doc user in our company] to Google continuing to improve the functionality.

Diigo introduces webslides

Diigo have introduced webslides. Its a simple way to cycle through recent bookmarks. It is cached so very fast. I am so impressed by diigo, and this is way beyond the others in terms of rich functions, speed and usability. The diigo right click function is very powerful.

webslides

eBay odered to pay $61M in sale of counterfiets

Louis Vuitton has done a good job arguing something that few can disagree with. The brand names sold on eBay are disputable at best, and full of fake and dubious sales of ostensible brand names. I have no comment on the value of the court settlement, but the underlying problem is indisputable.

EBay Ordered to Pay $61 Million in Sale of Counterfeit Goods - NYTimes.com

LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, a maker of high-end goods and fashion and luxury products, successfully challenged eBay for a second time in the French court, arguing that 90 percent of the Louis Vuitton bags and Dior perfumes sold on eBay are fakes.