At the recent Auckland CloudCamp event Gen-i strategy manager Paul Quickenden offered a provocative look at the proprietary vs open source debate in cloud computing.
The slides from this presentation are now available on SlideShare ??? check it out here.
As we reported last August, Open Compute could disrupt some of the largest enterprise tech companies in the world like IBM, HP, and Dell. It does for commercial hardware what open source did for commercial software???lets the users design what they want.
OCP has created a new type of server that costs less to build and operate. It uses fewer materials and causes less waste for the landfill when decommissioned, too.
This week, the project introduced new features that turn a computer server into a Lego-like assembly project where IT people can pick and choose all the components, right down to the CPU, and snap them together.
Plug and play down to the metal.
Standardised residential delivery has been wholly a grail for some time. Perhaps the decline of postal messaging and rise of tangible goods delivery will mean it gets some traction. Even without the autonomous drone (self-driving postie), it would be a neat idea and fit well with on-line, carbon footprint-reducing shopping.
- Liquid data
- Networked accountability
- Data as infrastructure
- Social coding
- Data commons
- Lean government
- Smart government
- Sharing economy
- Preemptive health care
- Predictive data analytics
- Algorithmic censorship and algorithmic transparency
- Personal data ownership
- Open journalism
- Automation, artificial intelligence and employment
Also Big, open and more networked than ever: 10 trends from 2012
When you see interesting data mash-ups today, they are often still using Flickr photos because Instagram’s meager metadata sucks, and the app is only reluctantly on the web at all. We get excuses about why we can’t search for old tweets or our own relevant Facebook content, though we got more comprehensive results from a Technorati search that was cobbled together on the feeble software platforms of its era. We get bullshit turf battles like Tumblr not being able to find your Twitter friends or Facebook not letting Instagram photos show up on Twitter because of giant companies pursuing their agendas instead of collaborating in a way that would serve users. And we get a generation of entrepreneurs encouraged to make more narrow-minded, web-hostile products like these because it continues to make a small number of wealthy people even more wealthy, instead of letting lots of people build innovative new opportunities for themselves on top of the web itself.
Open for all, closed for a few. Beneficiaries I mean.
And perhaps it’s just a matter of time before open source takes center stage in mobile. Today mobile developers are just trying to get work done in a highly fragmented market. As the industry settles on norms for the kinds of services and infrastructure one needs to build successful mobile experiences, I suspect we’ll see open source stake its claim to the market, similar to what happened in the server market 20 years ago.
Overview
Opus is a totally open, royalty-free, highly versatile audio codec. Opus is unmatched for interactive speech and music transmission over the Internet, but also intended for storage and streaming applications. It is standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as RFC 6716 which incorporated technology from Skype’s SILK codec and Xiph.Org’s CELT codec.
Technology
Opus can handle a wide range of audio applications, including Voice over IP, videoconferencing, in-game chat, and even remote live music performances. It can scale from low bit-rate narrowband speech to very high quality stereo music. Supported features are:
- Bit-rates from 6 kb/s to 510 kb/s
- Sampling rates from 8 kHz (narrowband) to 48 kHz (fullband)
- Frame sizes from 2.5 ms to 60 ms
- Support for both constant bit-rate (CBR) and variable bit-rate (VBR)
- Audio bandwidth from narrowband to full-band
- Support for speech and music
- Support for mono and stereo
- Support for up to 255 channels (multistream frames)
- Dynamically adjustable bitrate, audio bandwidth, and frame size
- Good loss robustness and packet loss concealment (PLC)
- Floating point and fixed-point implementation
You can read the full specification, including the reference implementation, in RFC 6716. An up-to-date implementation of the Opus standard is also available from the downloads page.
stand with us
On August 29th five leading global organizations jointly signed an agreement to affirm and adhere to a set of Principles in support of The Modern Paradigm for Standards; an open and collectively empowering model that will help radically improve the way people around the world develop new technologies and innovate for humanity.
THURSDAY 12 July 2012, 6pm-7pm at NetHui 2012, SkyCity Convention Centre
Creative Commons licences are an important aspect of wider movements facing our tertiary sector: Open Access to research outputs, and Open Education Resources. Academics have seen international tensions between the drive to make publicly funded research available to taxpayers, and the traditionally closed models of the publishing industry. There is also an urgent push to lower the cost of producing educational materials, and providing free access to them online for public consumption.
Hamish MacEwan 