Firefox v1.0 is out :-) As usual, some of the themes and extensions are not compatible anymore with this new version…

[via @rgumente]

1. Take action. Don’t put it off till tomorrow. Too many good ideas are lost because no one implements, no one takes action

2. Ignore “that’s a bad idea.” When you start a company, lots of people will tell you it’s a bad idea. Ignore them!

3. Never give up. Failure is good — it’s a great teacher. Better to try 10 times and only to succeed once than not to try at all.

My corollary to this, somehow #2 rephrased, is know yourself and your limitations very well, always believe stubornly in yourself and your ideas while being open to adapt to whatever makes a positive impact in your belief system.

[via MIT Technology Review]

IBM Corp.’s still-incomplete Blue Gene/L system, which will be installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, achieved a sustained performance of 70.72 trillion calculations per second using a standard test program, the Department of Energy said Thursday.

The world’s current official leader, Japan’s Earth Simulator, can sustain 35.86 trillion calculations per second using the same software.

Last week, NASA announced that a system built by Silicon Graphics Inc. had topped that by sustaining 42 trillion calculations per second.

Blue Gene […] is just a quarter of its final planned size. When finished, it will exceed Earth Simulator’s performance by a factor of nine but require just a fraction of the electricity used by the Japanese machine.

I haven’t listenned to this CD for a while, wow! And not just because of the name ;-) This album, as a very few others, is a milestone in the music history. It was interesting for me to read the different reviews you can find online: on one side, very disapointed people, on the other side, very exciting ones… The latters are usually musicians, surely also a lot of guitarists. All this to mention that this album is not a easy one.

It was released in 1989 and won the Grammy of the “Best Instrumental Rock” album the same year. Terry Bozzio as a drummer and Tony Hymas as keyboard player joined Jeff Beck on this album. Each of them is a part of Music with a big “M”: Beck was, among others, the guitarist of the Yardbirds in the 60’s. Terry was the drummer of Frank Zappa and he is one the best technician and one the more innovative drummer since years. A kind of extraterrestrial, specially in the field of coordination. Have a look at his set:

So, a very uncommon set of musicians – trio guitar, keyboard and drums – who play quite a complicated music. BUT, to my mind, it definitely rocks. Have a try.

New version 1.16 of the K-Lite Mega Codec Pack released here. And it is free!

Mega Codec Pack includes everything needed to play online and offline computer media. This pack is from the makers of the K-lite codec pack. This version includes the Full K-lite codec pack as well as Quicktime and Realplayer codecs, and BS Player. This Pack includes codecs for the most popular compressions like Divx and Xvid as well as some of the less popular but still necesary codecs. This is your one stop codec resource.

We can identify five revenue-generating components for software companies. These components have a deep impact on the business model and costs structure of this kind of companies:

• Product new license revenue: the initial fee, typically one-time charge, based on different factors: number of seats, of processors, of MIPS, of instances in memory, of granted simultaneous accesses, one-location license (eg: per data-center), company-license (eg: right-of-use within one holding, including all its subsidiaries), clustering-type, etc. The license-fee can be linked with the number of stages (integration, test, production). It works differently for the development frameworks, tools, utilities, etc. (number of developers, of simultaneous uses, etc.)
• Product update / upgrade license revenue: fee paid usually annually for having the right to install all software updates and updgrades. A percentage of the initial license fee (product update + technical support = about 15% of the initial fee). Differenciation between major and minor updates and upgrades
• Technical support revenue: usually an annual fee, also a percentage of the initial license fee. Included telephone support, access to a knowledge-base, web-based support, typically no on-site support.
• Services, training and consulting revenue: one-time charge, time & material (T&M;). Daily rates, with or without expenses and infrastructure.
• Hosting revenue (optional): for all-in-one solution where the software company proposes also the application hosting to its client (eg: salesforce.com, groove). The revenue model is typically linked with the actual usage of the application (number of business transactions) and volume discounts, which drives to a quite linear and well-known development of the costs.

There are furthermore four software licensing models, which differ from each others because of the integration or not of technical support and update/upgrade and because of the length of time for the validity of the license:

• Perpetual license: about 90% of the licensing model worldwide, usually not included updates/upgrades and technical support or just for the first year.
• Term license: also called lease license or rental license.
• Subscription license: generally two types are possible: in-house installation or hosted application (eg: salesforce.com, groove)
• Appliance license: application sold with a specific hardware (eg: firewalls)

License type matrix

Typical software business models

[via Joi Ito]

Joi said: “The people of America have failed us today”. I must correct: “52% of America have failed us today”… His analysis is *so* true, I totally agree:

[…]It’s unlikely that any sort of recount or technicality will change the fact that today, the people of the United States of America have voted for George Bush. It was close, but the Americans have chosen Bush. It’s a sad day, but in a democracy, you get the politicians you deserve/vote for. This was their chance to change their leader and they have failed. For awhile, many of us thought that they had been conned into voting for Bush – that they didn’t know he wanted to be a War President. Many people didn’t equate the US policies with the people of America. We thought they had made a mistake. Now US policies = US Citizens. You Americans have my sympathies, but it’s still your fault.

Oh no…….four more years.

I’m wide awake

I’m wide awake

Wide awake

I’m not sleeping

Oh, no, no, no […]

This desparation

Dislocation

Separation

Condemnation

Revelation

In temptation

Isolation

Desolation

Let it go

U2 – Bad

[via Web Rank Info – in French]

Web Rank Info, one of the most interesting and active French website / forum specialized in Search Engines (Google, Yahoo!, etc), published a summary of a presentation made by Jeff Dean, a Google engineer who gave some inputs about the Google’s infrastructure during a colloquium at the University of Washington. You can also have a look at the entire video presentation (about 1 hour).

• Among the 4 billion indexed pages by Google, the average size of each page is 10KB
• On the other side, there are perhaps more than 4 billion indexed pages. Have a look at the Google’s request which seems to give back the highest results value (search of the word “the”) => today more than 6 billion!
• Based on the 4 billion pages forecast and the 10KB per page, Google has to manage and index an incredible volume of raw data, about 40 TB, again fully indexed
• About the costs: Google chose to use low-costs servers, i.e. a lot of low-end servers instead of some costly high-end servers. A forecast example how the business case should work:
  • Serveur IBM eServer xSeries 440

  • 8 processors Xeon 2 GHz
  • 65 GB RAM
  • 8 TB HD
  • Estimated price: 758’000$

• Rack of 88 smaller servers

• 176 processors Xeon 2 GHz (88 x 2)
• 176 GB RAM (88 x 2)
• 7 TB HD
• Estimated price: 278’000$

You got it? You have a factor 2.7 between both estimations, with a huge difference in the delivered power, if the software architecture is able to use this distributed infrastructure correctly.

Really impressive! And a good confirmation of the competitive advantage Google built with its infrastructure and platform (see my article about the Google’s platform)

Last polling forecast for the American Election from a great blog called “Cahier des Amériques” (in French) from G. Bouchez (journalist). It gives some hope. Let’s see tomorrow….