Zzzoot

The July/August IEEE Software [paywall warning] is a special issue on software as business, which includes one article that is Open Source oriented, and one that is "code sharing" oriented. Here are the articles: Guest Editors' Introduction: Software as a Business Software Industry Business Models Matching Open Source Software Licenses with Corresponding Business Models Sharing Source Code with Clients: A Hybrid Business and Development Model Developing Cloud Business Models: A Case Study on Cloud Gaming

The Microsoft Research Faculty Summit 2008 included Publishing and Research Tools for Academics that allows for archival annotation and structuring of Microsoft software produced documents, as well as supporting PubMed Central format . Additional sessions of interest: The Cyberspace Connection – Impact on Individuals, Society, and Research New Developments in Scholarly Communication Reflections on Directions in Artificial Intelligence What Will Be the Impact of Cloud Services on Science? Spotlights on Interdisciplinary Artificial Intelligence Research AI, Sensing, and Optimized Information Gathering: Trends and Directions Ontological Myths: Reducing the Confusion Social Networking and Semantics Toward Situated Interaction Statistical Machine Translation Research at Microsoft Research Interactive Machine Learning: Challenges, Methods, and Applications Information Extraction from Documents and Queries Contexts in Computer Science Education The Future of Research Clouds REAssess: Resou...

I recently discovered and have been inspired by a real-world and non-trivial (in space and in time) application of Hadoop (Open Source implementation of Google's MapReduce ) combined with the Amazon Simple Storage Service ( Amazon S3 ) and the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud ( Amazon EC2 ). The project was to convert pre-1922 New York Times articles-as-scanned-TIFF-images into PDFs of the articles: Recipe: 4 TB of data loaded to S3 (TIFF images) + Hadoop (+ Java Advanced Imaging and various glue) + 100 EC2 instances + 24 hours = 11 million PDFs , 1.5 TB on S3 Unfortunately, the developer ( Derek Gottfrid ) did not say how much this cost the NYT. But here is my back-of-the-envelope calculation (using the Amazon S3/EC2 FAQ ): EC2: $0.10 per instance-hour x 100 instances x 24hrs = $240 S3 : $0.15 per GB-Month x 4500 GB x ~1.5/31 months = ~$33 + $0.10 per GB of data transferred in x 4000 GB = $400 + $0.13 per GB of data transferred out x 1500 GB = $195 Total: = ~$868 Not unre...