The real-world implications of the rise of internet computing
EVEN when the sky is blue over Quincy, clouds hang in the air. The small town in the centre of the state of Washington is home to half a dozen huge warehouses that power the global “computing clouds” run by internet companies such as Yahoo! and Microsoft. The size of several football pitches, these data centres are filled with thousands of powerful computers and storage devices and are hooked up to the internet via fast fibre-optic links.
Yet even more intriguing than the buildings' size is their location. Quincy is literally in the middle of nowhere, three hours' drive from the nearest big city, Seattle. But it turns out to be a perfect location for data centres. As computing becomes a utility, with services that can be consumed from everywhere and on any device, ever more thought is being put into where to put the infrastructure it needs.
Gen Y is taking over. The generation of young adults that's composed of the children of Boomers, Generation Jones, and even some Gen X'ers, is the biggest generation since the Baby Boomers and three times the size of Gen X. As the Boomers fade into retirement and Gen Y takes root in the workplace, we're going to see some big changes ahead, not just at work, but on the web as a whole.
There's some contention over where exactly Gen Y starts and stops - some say those born 1983-1997, others think 1982-1997. In this week's Entertainment Weekly, Gen Y is defined as "current 13 to 31 year-olds" and BusinessWeek says they can be as young as five. Regardless, we know who they are - they're the young kids of today, the most digitally active generation yet, having been born plugged in.
The open-source WebKit HTML rendering engine is rapidly gaining ground on the Linux platform where it is increasingly being adopted by conventional desktop applications for content display. Ongoing efforts to facilitate tighter WebKit integration are opening the door for developing rich Internet applications on Linux with the open-source GTK and Qt development toolkits.
Die Warnung kam zu spät. Kaum hatten die Analysten von Gartner und Deutsche Bank Research in der vergangenen Woche vor den Risiken der virtuellen Welten gewarnt, da erschütterte eine Bankenpleite die Spielwelt Second Life. Ginko Financial, das vielleicht bekannteste Kreditinstitut in Avatarland, kann die Einlagen der Kontoinhaber nicht mehr auszahlen. Rund 200 Millionen der Spielwährung Linden-Dollar, im Gegenwert von immerhin fast 750.000 echten US-Dollar oder 540.000 Euro, sollen auf der Bank gelegen haben. Doch zuletzt wurden die Schlangen vor den virtuellen Geldautomaten immer länger, und irgendwann war das Geld dann alle.