VelociPeek

Song of The Day: The Way I Am - Artist: Eminem

As is typical on Thursday mornings, I headed for the WSJ Online and opened up the Personal Technology column of Walt Mossberg. I had expected something about Apple, about Google, about Microsoft, or about a new product gizmo, or something other than what I found: a complimentary review of AskJeeves.com, now renamed Ask.com!

Quote:

In college basketball this month, we’ve all been reminded that the superiority of champions can’t be taken for granted…George Mason University…That’s also true in high tech.

Every so often, an underestimated contender rises up to compete with a champion play for play, or even to beat the champ. Something like that is happening in the search business…Ask Jeeves, a largely failed search service, has…been overhauled and renamed Ask.com…

Ask’s search-results are richer and better organized than typical Google results, and they give greater priority to content over ads.

Wow. My first reaction was that AOL Search has similar enhancments with Snapshots, recently saved searches, and links to videos, audio, pictures, etc.; all this with Google as a foundation.

However, the above literary montage re-enforces one thing: one can never rest on laurels in the technology biz :). Just when someone or something is considered irrelevant at 2.3% market share according to
Nielsen (i.e., Mr. Mossberg must have reported 6% for Ask.com from comScore that includes other owned properties), a little ingenuity and hard work can go a long way.

We see this time and time again: Apple, Microsoft, Autodesk, AOL….

Inspirational Message (Angel harps in background): Keep chuggin’. You know Google will counter. Likewise, AOL will keep cooking things up as well. However, a few competitive nudges can be good for focus and motivation :).

Song of The Day: Wake Up - Artist: Rage Against The Machine

Web 2.0 Case Study: Grid Computing

Recently, Sun launched a grid computing system, called the Sun Grid Compute Utility, which allows folks to pay $1 for an hour of distributed processing power. Although distributed, parallel computing has been utilized by educational and corporate institutions since the early 80’s, this latest offering is a rather interesting one within the industry.

So what is grid computing? My layman definition is that grid computing is an architecture to distribute computing tasks across a network of networks. Utility computing draws comparisons from eletrical grids and costs associated with operating them.

Consumer interest in distributed, parallel computing peaked somewhat late in the 90’s with the launch of the SETI@home project. One could download the program, linking multiple workstations together into one big computer and the program would analyze radio signals from outer space. The purpose was to search for signs of extraterrestrial life and take the guess work out of solving Drake’s Equation: N = N * fp ne fl fi fc fL.

No one has hit the lottery on discovering life–yet–but projects like SETI@home and Sun’s Grid Compute Utility may provide further evidence of the notion…

…that the Web is evolving into a sophisticated distributed, computing platform. Various folks have written about the potential (e.g., IEEE’s Computer magazine and recent articles on grid computing), and the route may be patently obvious to some; however, I think there is still plenty of room for innovation and expansion in the area. For example, with most solutions, including Sun’s current one, one is bound to a particular platform or clustering software. I think this will evolve through time with more open standards like the Open Grid Services Architecture.

Perhaps O’Reilly should add this to a future list of old versus new trends on the Web:

Web 2.0: Sun Grid Compute Utility

Web 4.0: OGSA and Skynet

This may be a truly poor way of ending a post like this, but the urge is irresistible. Swartzenegger: movie star, governor, and Skynet, grid computing consultant.