Archive for October, 2009
Vonage Offers Unlimited Calls to India : Back to 1 Month Free Offer
Recently Vonage started offering Unlimited Calls to India under its $24.99/m existing plan. Good thing is that the plan includes both landlines and cell phones all over India.
If you are already a Vonage subscriber, make sure you have Vonage World plan to get this great deal. Not sure whether it is automatically done. For me, I did convert to this plan explicitly.
If you are not a Vonage subscriber already, think about it. For $24.99 you get unlimited calling to India (and about 60 countries) and have a landline number to make unlimited calls within US.
Get ONE month FREE.
Vonage initially offered 2 months FREE when you sign up for this service. But now it is back to its original offer of ONE month FREE offer. Get ONE MONTH FREE if you signup by clicking on the image below. If you pay whole one year upfront, you may get an additional 20% off.
Its Funny, How Experts Are Made In America
Its funny how Experts are made in America. Rule No.1 : You can become an Expert on anything just by claiming you are already one. So much for dreaming big and believing in yourself.
And once you are an Expert (or rather once you claim) you will be treated like an Expert !!
BTW, an expert’s observation on Cloud Computing. It is really funny. Please read.
Microsoft’s Azure cloud is a place you go to in order to build your applications. In the process, you are very likely to use Visual Studio, the .Net Framework, SQL Server in the form of Azure SQL Services, and Microsoft SharePoint, then run the resulting cloud application in Azure itself.
So is Azure just a super sales site for Microsoft products? No, no more so than Google’s AppEngine is a sales site for PHP tools, even though you will write your application in PHP if you want to take advantage of the AppEngine.
- Charles Babcock at Information Week’s Cloud Computing Section
If you are wondering is cloud –> marketing jargon to promote tools that build them or when did Google App Engine started supporting PHP, you hit the nail right on the head.
I am not saying they are not experts on the cloud.
Remember Rule 1.
Buzz In The Cloud : Cloud Computing Is The New Web2.0
These days, not a single day goes by without talking, hearing or reading something about Cloud Computing. It appears, the whole cloud (I mean the world; don’t blame me for overusing the word ‘cloud’, I just want to make a point) is totally excited about ‘Cloud’ suddenly.
In a way, Cloud Computing is the new web2.0, in terms of hype, buzz and activity all around. Every business has something to offer ‘on cloud’. Every consultant is busy selling strategies to cash in on the cloud. And every analyst is preparing a report on the cloud. Every developer is trying to equip to engineer applications on the cloud.
Simply put ..
What is really Cloud computing is all about? Why not look up the definition of Cloud Computing by going to the Encyclopedia on the cloud (??), Wikipedia.
The term cloud is used as a metaphor for the Internet, based on how the Internet is depicted in computer network diagrams and is an abstraction of the underlying infrastructure it conceals. – Wikipedia
Cloud computing is an example of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. – Wikipedia
Though Cloud Computing could be everything for everybody (just like Web2.0), most stakeholders would agree to confine Cloud Computing in three forms.
Three Forms of Cloud Computing
1. Software-As-A-Service (SaaS)
Refers to Software Applications offered over the internet as a service. SalesForce.com is an excellent example and one of the most successful SaaS offerings. BaseCamp for Project Management, Google Apps are few other successful and well known SaaS offerings.
2. Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS)
Refers to Servers, Storage and Networks offered as a service over the internet. Most Internet hosting providers fall in to this space. Amazon ECS, Rackspace, AT&T, Akamai are very good examples. They offer servers, databases, storage area networks, networking gear, content delivery networks as a service.
3. Platform As A Service (PaaS)
These providers offer Infrastructure as a Service with a limitation or leverage (depends on what you are looking for) that all applications must be built and run on top of their often proprietary platforms or technology stacks. PaaS inherently include IaaS. Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure, SalesForce Force.com are fine examples for this service.
SaaS and IaaS have been offered in the market for a while. Though there are lots of advances in the technicalities of managing them and lot more new players in the market, these services are not entirely NEW.
What is new in Cloud Computing is the third service, Platform-As-A-Service (PaaS). Not only Infrastructure to run your Business applications but a full platform to develop those applications. It is quite unlikely that these PaaS offerings (at least initially) will not provide a smoother migration for Enterprises to adopt Cloud Computing as this means re-developing most of their business applications.
Easier Adoption Path for Enterprises
For most enterprises, the only option that make sense at this point is IaaS. Instead of running their own data centers, applications can be moved to a public Cloud or a private cloud or managed cloud with little to no impacts. Cost of migrating to a Cloud will be quite insignificant and offer the best level of cost savings, while not forcing a vendor lock-in as applications run on generic platforms. This is the best option.
Or Enterprises can migrate to SaaS offerings, if there are comparable applications are available. For instance, instead of running your own CRM solution on premises, can migrate to SalesForce.com. But it is a big question for how much generic application like SalesForce.com can offer unique capabilities for each organization, a primary reason why Enterprises developed their own software in the first place. Vendor + Application lock-in is implicit. All Employees and Customers need to be retrained in new sets of applications. Extensive customization is required.
The latest entry in to Cloud Computing, the PaaS is the most Unlikely path of migration of any Enterprise application to the cloud, as this needs re-architecture of their applications and Migration of application software as well along with data migration. And this would be quite expensive and time consuming for any non-trivial, uncommon business application. Vendor + Platform lock-in is implicit. Need to retrain Software Development groups and it could be quite extensive as the Platform could be significantly different from generic platform most software developers are comfortable with.
That’s my 2 cents on the Cloud. You can read a little more on the Wikipedia. Or anywhere on the Cloud (:-)).
Newsworthy News in Red October : Dow Jones & Tax Dodgers
Dow Jones Index crosses the symbolic 10000 figure.
U.S. stocks rallied, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average above 10,000 for the first time in a year, on better-than-estimated earnings at JPMorgan Chase & Co. andIntel Corp.
Bank of America Corp., American Express Co. and JPMorgan more than doubled since the Dow slid to a 12-year low on March 9 as global financial firms began recovering from $1.6 trillion in writedowns and credit losses. International Business Machines Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. jumped at least 54 percent since March 9 on signs the nation was recovering from the worst recession in seven decades.
Source: Bloomberg
And, about 7500 International Tax dodgers file for IRS Amnesty to avoid jail
Some 7,500 international tax dodgers have applied for an amnesty program that promises no jail time and reduced penalties for tax cheats who come forward, the Internal Revenue Service announced Wednesday.
…
The program is part of a larger effort by the Obama administration to crack down on Americans who evade U.S. taxes by hiding assets in overseas accounts. In August, the U.S. and Switzerland resolved a court case in which Swiss banking giant UBS AG agreed to turn over details on 4,450 accounts suspected of holding undeclared assets from American customers.
Source: AP News
Grady Booch : Why Engineering?
These are some of the most wonderful words ever said about the profession of Software Development. (I made some text in bold just to highlight)
Software is invisible to most of the world. Although individuals, organizations, and nations rely on a multitude of software-intensive systems every day, most software lives in the interstitial spaces of society, hidden from view except insofar as it does something tangible or useful.
Despite its transparency, as Bjarne Stroustrup has observed, “our civilization runs on software.” It is therefore a tremendous privilege as well as a deep responsibility to be a software developer. It is a privilege because what we do collectively as an industry has changed and will continue to change the world. It is a responsibility because the world in turn relies on the products of our labor in so many ways. In the context of that labor, software is perhaps the ultimate building material: it springs from pure thought and is intrinsically malleable, yet it can be made manifest in our hardware systems, limited only by our vision (and certain immutable laws of physics and software). As software professionals, we seek to develop and deploy useful systems of quality in a manner that reduces the distance from vision to execution. That the fruits of our labor are transparent to the world is as it should be: users want results and value, not more technology. For this reason, the primary challenge of every software development team is to engineer the illusion of simplicity in the face of essential complexity.
The following Video by Grady Booch & co discusses the above quote while explaining the essence of software development in the context of Engineering.
Isn’t it fair to say the characteristic of profound understanding is the expression of simplicity and elegance. Well, Grady Booch exemplifies that when it comes to Software development.
