In the present era, where SAP companies are struggling to fuse the various heterogeneous environment in their organization and maintain a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Netweaver comes as a solution to all their problems. SAP Netweaver is the latest advancement in the SAP Technologies, which was developed as an Artificial Intelligence (AI) shell that accepts standard comments literally as they are spoken by domain experts.
Modularity is the unique feature of Netweaver that makes it stand o
Microsoft releases a preview of Version 2 of its ASP.NET MVC Web application development system.
– Microsoft on July 31 released a preview of Version 2 of its ASP.NET
MVC Web application development system.
In a blog post on the release, Scott
Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft .NET Developer Platform,
said the new ASP.NET MVC V2 preview works with .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1 and
Vi…
Microsoft has released an experimental enhanced version of .NET Framework 4 Beta 1 that enables software transactional memory for C# programmers, known as STM.NET.
– Microsoft has released an experimental enhanced version of .NET
Framework 4 Beta 1 that enables software transactional memory for C#
programmers, known as STM.NET.
In a blog post about the technology, S. quot;Soma quot; Somasegar, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Developer Division,
said, …
ASP.NET is a framework of web application that is developed by Microsoft; it allows programmers to generate dynamic web pages as well as websites and offers an edge to the particular site.
ComingSoon.net has your first look at Jackie Earle Haley as the horror genre’s favorite big screen dream slayer, charred child killer Freddy Krueger.
Freddy’s funky fedora, tattered sweater, and signature glove of knives will be slashing their way to the box office next spring in a blockbuster remake of the 1984 classic A Nightmare on Elm [...]
By Jonathan Fildes
Technology reporter, BBC News, Oxford
Crack teams of volunteers keep the net online and functioning, according to leading internet lawyer Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard University.
The way data is divided up and sent around the internet in many jumps makes it "delicate and vulnerable" to attacks or mistakes, he said.
However, he added, the "random acts of kindness" of these unsung heroes quietly keep the net in working order.
Professor Zittrain’s comments came at the TED Global conference in Oxford.
Incidents such as when the Pakistan government took YouTube offline in 2008 exposed the web’s underlying fragility, he explained.
But a team of volunteers – unpaid, unauthorised and largely unknown to most people – rolled into action and restored the service within hours.
"It’s like when the Bat signal goes up and Batman answers the call," Professor Zittrain told BBC News.
Blind faith
The fragility of the internet’s architecture was largely due to its origins, said Professor Zittrain.
He said it had been conceived with "one great limitation and with one great freedom".
"Their limitation was that they didn’t have any money," he told the TED audience in Oxford.
"It’s like dark matter in the universe. There’s a lot of it, you don’t see it but it has a huge impact on the physics of the place"
Professor Jonathan Zittrain
Harvard University
"But they had an amazing freedom, which was that they didn’t have to make any money from it.
"The internet has no business plan – never did – no CEO, no single firm responsible for building it. Instead it’s folks getting together to do something for fun, rather than because they were told to or because they were expecting to make money from it," he said.
That ethos, he suggested, had let to a network architecture that was completely unique.
"As late as 1992, IBM was known to say that you couldn’t build a corporate network using internet protocol."
Internet protocol (IP), the method used to send data around the internet, was first described by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in 1974. Data is broken into chunks – or packets – and sent around different parts of the network, often owned by different corporations and entities.
Professor Zittrain likened it to how a drink may be passed along a row of people at a sporting event.
"Your neighbourly duty is to pass the beer along – at risk to your own trousers – to get it to its destination."
"That’s precisely how packets move around the internet, sometimes in a many as 25 or 30 hops with the intervening entities passing the data around having no contractual or legal obligation to the original sender or to the receiver."
The route the data takes depends on the net’s addressing system, he said.
"It turns out there is no overall map of the internet. It is as if we are all sat together in a theatre but we can only see in the fog the people around us.
"So what do we do to figure out what is around us. We turn to the person on our right and tell them what we can see to the left and vice versa.
This method, he said, gives network operators a general sense of "what is where".
"This is a system that relies on kindness and trust, which also makes it very delicate and vulnerable," he said.
"In rare but striking instances, a lie told by a single entity within this honeycomb can lead to real trouble."
Bucket brigade
One example, he said, was an incident in 2008 when Pakistan Telecom accidentally took YouTube offline.
At the time, the Pakistan government asked Pakistan’s ISPs to block the site, reportedly because of a "blasphemous" video clip.
However, a network error caused a worldwide blackout of the site.
"This one ISP in Pakistan decided to [institute] the block for its subscribers in a highly unusual way," said Professor Zittrain.
"It advertised that … it had suddenly awakened to find it was YouTube."
Because of the way that the network spreads messages between neighbours, the announcement quickly reverberated around the world.
Within two minutes, YouTube was completely blocked.
"One of the most popular websites in the world, run by the most powerful company in the world, and there was nothing that YouTube or Google were particularly privileged to do about it," said Professor Zittrain.
However, he said, the problem was fixed within about two hours.
This was down to a largely unknown group known as the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG), he said.
NANOG is a forum for distributing technical information among computer and network engineers.
"They came together to help find a problem and fix it," he said.
Despite being unpaid volunteers they were able to put YouTube back on line, he said.
"It’s kind of like when your house catches on fire," he said.
"The bad news is there is no fire brigade. The good news is that random people appear from nowhere, put out the fire and leave without expecting payment or praise."
The same social structures – and in particular kindness and trust – are also responsible for websites such as Wikipedia, he said.
"It’s like dark matter in the universe. There’s a lot of it, you don’t see it but it has a huge impact on the physics of the place," he earlier told the BBC.
This year’s TED Global conference runs from 21 to 24 July.</p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Bill Thompson feels the pain of the digitally dispossessed.
I have just endured a week of limited connectivity and it has given me a salutary lesson in what life is like for the digitally dispossessed here in the UK and around the world.
I have been driven to searching for open wireless access points so that I can download my e-mail, sometimes wandering the beach looking for elusive 3G signals just to get my Facebook status updated.
It was my own fault, of course. I spent a few days on the Norfolk coast with my son and some of his friends in a wifi-less cottage in an area that had poor 3G coverage, though I was probably less frustrated with lack of connectivity than he was, as he wanted to keep in touch with his mates back home while I was mostly on holiday.
Then I spent the weekend at the lovely Latitude Festival in deepest Suffolk, there to represent Writers’ Centre Norwich as we had supported some of the poets in the Poetry Tent.
No wireless there, at least none that I could get connected to – there did seem to be a private network for the tech crew to use – and the phone networks were clearly swamped as text messages were taking two or three hours to be delivered while my 3G dongle repeatedly failed to connect.
Photos of the beach sat on my hard drive because I didn’t have the bandwidth to upload them to Flickr, while my ambitious plans to deluge the world with AudioBoos from Latitude came to naught after the first one took twenty minutes to upload over the slowest phone connection I have experienced for at least five years.
In between the Norfolk beach and the muddy fields of Latitude I had my third experience of life offline when I came into London to chair a conference organised by Arts Council England for arts organisations that want to explore the potential of new technologies to reach audiences or just work more effectively.
Network crash
"The real benefits of the online revolution will only come when net access is seamless, pervasive and guaranteed."
Bill Thompson
The conference took place in the Lilian Baylis Theatre at Sadler’s Wells, a wonderful space that works really well for conferences because the acoustics and lighting are designed for performance. Most conference centres are so soulless and dispiriting it takes all your energy to stand up at the lectern, so it was a pleasant contrast to be in an inspiring space.
We had wifi access inside the theatre as the conference included tutorials on social networks and online engagement, and the audience were encouraged to contribute questions online so they could be displayed on the screen behind the speakers.
Unfortunately the wifi stopped working about half-way through the first session of the day, and those of us with smartphones and laptop dongles were forced to resort to slower 3G connections.
It appeared that we had overwhelmed the capacity of the wireless network that the venue had set up for us. I talked to the IT support engineer and he asked me how many of us were trying to connect, and I told him I estimated that thirty to forty people were using laptops and probably the same number had wifi-enabled smartphones.
Wider lesson
After he had recovered from the shock he explained that the wifi router they had installed could only support twenty simultaneous connections and had crashed when we all tried to log on.
He was very efficient once he realised the problem and sorted out a second network and higher-capacity kit by lunchtime, but it was interesting that twenty network connections were originally seen as adequate to support one hundred and fifty people at a conference about technology.
I go to many technology events now where the ratio of online devices to people is greater than one, as many of us have a laptop and a phone or two, and conference organisers are going to have to adapt pretty fast to this new reality or they will quickly lose custom.
But I think there’s a wider lesson here.
Finding myself intermittently online this week was a mild inconvenience for me, and I managed to get connected when I needed to so that urgent business could be dealt with.
However slow, unreliable connections are a fact of life for millions of people in the UK, and most of the world’s internet-using population, and experiencing it again myself made me realise that the real benefits of the online revolution will only come when net access is seamless, pervasive and guaranteed.
Slow down
The rhythm of my life now depends on easy and fast online access in the way that the driving beat of drummer Suren de Saram supports the frenetic guitar sound of Bombay Bicycle Club – one of the best acts at Latitude, by the way.
I have grown accustomed to being able to respond quickly and easily to people, to having much of the world’s information at my fingertips, to being able to share my thoughts and observations with my online friends and those who have chosen to listen as I think out loud.
Without it I slow down. Things get lost or forgotten, ideas go nowhere and trains of thought are shuffled into the sidings and are neglected. An unreliable network is worse than no network at all, and forces me to limit my imagination to those things that don’t rely on being online all the time.
Although the recent Digital Britain report was criticised for proposing that we should aim to offer universal access to a relatively slow 2Mbps (megabits per second) network connection by 2012, on reflection I think that a reliable and pervasive two megabits might be enough to kick-start the next stage of the network revolution, because it will allow everyone to begin to embed online access into their lives.
Once we do that, then the demand for faster access will grow, but it will also be possible for commercial operators to see the benefits on offering next generation access, creating a virtuous circle that will benefit us all.
Being offline has been a learning experience, but it’s nice to be home to my twenty megabits. I just hope that there’s some connectivity at the Port Eliot festival, where I’ll be next weekend!
Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Product: Eee PC T91 “Touch” Manufacturer: AsusWired Rating: 5The company that essentially created the netbook phenomenon has hardly been one to rest on its laurels. And Asus, knowing a cash cow when it sees it, has been busily cranking out a ridiculous…
A third of young people regularly access Facebook and Twitter via their mobile, a new report has found.
The study, published by mobile research firm CCS Insight, found that access to social networking sites was driving the take-up of mobile internet services.
Facebook is more popular than Bebo, MySpace and Twitter combined, it found.
Its study – into mobile usage among 16 to 35 year olds – also found that the service most youngsters wanted on their phones was the BBC iPlayer.
The suggestion that Facebook is more popular than Twitter chimes with a recently published Morgan Stanley report on internet and mobile usage.
Compiled by a 15-year-old intern, the report said that teenagers favoured Facebook over Twitter.
"Teenagers do not use Twitter. They realise that no-one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless," Matthew Robson wrote in the report.
He echoes the words of CCS Insight analyst Paulo Pescatore.
"Forget music and video downloads, social networking is where it’s at and Facebook is king of the hill," he said.
Charging models
The 24-36 year-old age group are those most likely to buy content on their mobile phones, the report found.
The revelations will be good news to mobile operators, desperate to fill some of their revenue gaps with the money to be made on mobile internet usage.
One third of respondents said they would like to see the BBC’s iPlayer available on their mobile phones.
But people will expect charging models to be fair even when they are using bandwidth-hungry applications such as the iPlayer, said Mr Pescatore.
"The challenge operators face is balancing demand for these services with the bandwidth they consume. Networks are going to think carefully about how they charge for mobile internet access," he said.
There appears to be a gender divide when it comes to mobile internet usage with twice as many men as women accessing the web via their mobiles.
"It’s clear that the industry could a better job marketing to women. It needs more than pink paint to succeed," said Mr Pescatore.
In separate news, a report from research firm Juniper has revealed that the number of mobile application downloads will approach almost 20 billion per year by 2014.</p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
According to a pair of Capitol Hill sources, preliminary estimates from the Congressional Budget Office suggest that a strong public option–the kind that the House of Representatives is putting in its reform bill–should net somewhere in the …
The Digital Britain report offers a lot to work with, says Bill Thompson.
"We live in a largely digitised country, so in one sense the Digital Britain report is an exercise in ensuring that the legal and regulatory system catches up with the lived reality for most of the UK population rather than a visionary document describing a far-distant future.
As such it is a serious attempt to ensure that government makes the best possible use of the network in serving us all, and that businesses offering access to the internet or providing services and content over the network are regulated, rewarded and cajoled as necessary to ensure that the UK does not fall even further behind the rest of the industrialised world.
I criticised the interim report when it was published in January because it had been written behind closed doors and offered few opportunities for consultation and engagement for those outside the charmed circle of invited experts.
But it is clear that Stephen Carter and his team have listened to and taken notice of the extensive debate around their initial proposals. The result, though far from perfect, offers a good basis for work on the detail of implementation and legislation, and there are clear signs that those who want to engage will be able to do so.
There are suggestions on how to liberalise and improve access to wireless infrastructure, with potentially transformative proposals to shake up spectrum allocation to build a next generation mobile network offering 50Mpbs in cities and 5Mpbs in rural areas.
There is a confirmed commitment to delivering a universal 2Mbps (megabits per second) fixed-line broadband service to the whole country by 2012, and a six pound a year levy on existing copper telephone lines to pay for the ‘final third’ next generation coverage if the market cannot deliver. Two megabits per second is too slow for me, but universal service offers so many opportunities for engagement that it’s definitely worth having.
And there may even be ‘cultural tax relief’ for games developers and distributors, on the lines of the model that has made Canada such an attractive place for UK developers to move to.
The report comes on a day when the importance of the internet and the services it supports has been drawn to the attention of the whole world.
"Unfortunately the proposals to limit file-sharing are less well considered and seem to be hopelessly optimistic, or perhaps to betray a naivety about how the internet works. "
Bill Thompson
The protests over the election results in Iran have depended on Facebook, YouTube and of course Twitter to get their message to the world, put pressure on their own government and organise their activities.
Just last week the French Constitutional Council of France halted the government’s plans to give a new authority the ability to cut the network access of internet users accused of copyright violations because "the internet is a component of the freedom of expression".
In the UK the Prime Minister Gordon Brown wrote in the The Times today that "a fast internet connection is now seen by most of the public as an essential service, as indispensable as electricity, gas and water."
Locking content
The view of the network as a utility and as a tool for expression is a very different one from that put forward by the dominant players in the so-called ‘content industry’.
Record companies, film studios, newspapers and the TV broadcasters have all lobbied hard for the UK government to shape its internet policy around their interests.
They want copyright laws to be strengthened so they can lock up any and all content. They want anyone who dares to challenge their business to be kicked offline, fined and locked up. They want a world in which they control what can happen.
Fortunately that pressure seems largely to have been resisted, and the real thrust of the proposals is about getting everyone online and ensuring that the network is there to be used in ways that support creative expression, new forms of industry and new models of engagement.
Funding news
The Digital Britain of the report is one in which all have access, not one where we try to preserve old industrial models.
When it comes to newspapers the report notes that ‘Digital Britain is at the beginning of a new and possibly disruptive wave of local news, generated by communities for communities using free online media’. It recognises that ‘government and business will need collaboratively to devise new ways of funding the news’ without simply promising subsidies to the existing players who have failed to adapt to the network reality and have sought protection and subsidy.
The debate about the future of public service broadcasting includes many progressive ideas, and both the decision to make Channel 4 more than just a broadcaster but turn it into ‘the open new media authority providing the seed-corn for creative innovation in the multi-media world’, and the message to the BBC that the license fee does not belong to it are all good ones.
Unfortunately the proposals to limit file-sharing are less well considered and seem to be hopelessly optimistic, or perhaps to betray a naivety about how the internet works.
Ofcom is to be asked to oversee efforts by UK ISPs to reduce what they term ‘illegal file-sharing’ by 70%, initially through notifying those accused of downloading material or revealing their names and addresses to rights holders so that they can be prosecuted.
If this doesn’t work then Ofcom may then be granted power to oblige ISPs to limit bandwidth or block specific protocols, presumably in the hope that doing this will deter or stop downloads. But this proposal ignores the fact that work is already going on to develop new file sharing technologies that are encrypted or disguise addresses more effectively. Ofcom might well hit its 70% target just because everyone moves away from BitTorrent without actually reducing the number of files shared over the net.
However the fact that the BPI boss Geoff Taylor found it necessary to accuse the government of ‘digital dithering’ for refusing to allow rights holders to have internet users cut off – the same proposals that have just been thrown out in France – is a good sign indeed.
In the end public service broadcasting and the protection of the content industries matter far less than the promotion of universal access and the creation of tools and services that encourage everyone online to demonstrate their own creative potential.
Networked world
A digital Britain is not one in which we are all sitting glued to our screens watching the same sort of television programming that we could have had on a cathode-ray set in the 1970′s, downloading blockbuster movies or listening to more dull music made by rich popstars whose only real interest is their property portfolio.
It is one in which universal access allows us all to be fully-fledged citizens of a networked world that offers opportunities for creative expression and communication instead of the passive consumption of packaged content. There’s a glimpse of that world through the Digital Britain report, and it is one that those of us who already live a networked life need to clarify, share and work to build.
"
Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.</p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
