Entries tagged with services - Channel 10

More on Mesh: Running the Cloud

sarahintampa — Wed, 07 May 2008 14:14:00 GMT

Now that I'm learning more about Mesh, I'm surprised at what a big undertaking it is. For example, this recent post on the Live Mesh blog talks about how they run the cloud services, which offers some interesting insights into how Mesh's "services" part of their "Software + Services" works.

In Mesh, writes Alex Mallet, a dev lead on the Live Mesh team, cloud services can be grouped into four areas:

Feed & Data Sync
Authentication & Authorization
Maintaining & Fanning out the Transient State
Connectivity Services for Sync and Remote Desktop Access

Mesh's front-end services are accessible only via HTTPS. Back-end services use HTTPS and custom protocols layered on TCP. Most services are written in C# and all services sit on top of a common runtime library.

What's really interesting though (and funny!) is when Mallet describes building the full-scale datacenter deployment and management system: he says they "chose the lazy smart route" to do so. The Mesh team used the the Autopilot framework, which is currently used by the Windows Live Search team to manage tens of thousands of datacenter machines. Mesh isn't there yet, but hopes to be!

If learning more about the services part of Mesh is the sort of thing that interests you, go ask your question in the comments section of his post.

Is this the future of Software and Services? It could be...

MaxPowerhouse7 — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Other than jetpacks and freeze dried food, there may be some other things to look forward to in the future. OLED displays, surface computing, and of course a robot that walks your dog for you...

Some of us, however, believe there could be more to how technology progresses. Will new genres of devices emerge or will we continue to converge and overlap in capabilities? How will these devices work with each other? What will the interface be like?

Check out this video to catch a glimpse at what software and services could potentially lead to in the not so distant future...

New Zune colors and functions in the works, but also new consumption ideas

Jesse — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 22:35:00 GMT

Jason Reindorp, marketing director for Zune, made some waves today with his comments on the upcoming plans for the group. The noise made around Zune will only increase as the year marches on toward the next inevitable holiday buying season. More colors, marketing, and features can’t come Zune enough according to Jeremy at Ars Technica. However there is something far more interesting to consider, and to talk about it, we should start with mobile phones and cars (bear with us).

Cingular makes their money when people pay a recurring fee to use their cellular network (although in this case it’s actually Sprint’s network). As such they subsidize the cost of the hardware necessary for you to be connected to that network. City CarShare is a company in the Northern California that enables people to borrow cars. By paying monthly fees along with a small per-hour fee, members can drive shared cars whenever and wherever they choose. Though they are not without their individual downsides, both of these business models satisfy the needs of lots of us.

Why then, couldn’t the same idea be applied to listening to music? This is exactly what Kostas asks at Zune-Online: “Zune for free with a phone-like plan?” Anyone who watches the cost of computing power understands that the cost of hardware has and will always fall. In the future if a music player can be built for a low enough cost, and enough money can be made from the sale of or subscription to content, why not give the player away?

OpenID can solve the digital identity problem

Jesse — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 18:55:00 GMT

The proliferation of online services has created a huge problem of identity management. Every week there’s a new demand to create an account or profile, which means each of us has an ever-growing archipelago of disconnected personas. OpenID is an attempt to solve the problem by having one set of credentials that can is used by a growing number of sites.

Simon Willison’s screencast on How to use OpenID is very much worth the time. He explains the benefits and addresses the potential problems. Tom Coates is on about social whitelisting with OpenID, which takes the combines the advantages of social software with trusted identities. The idea sounds like a deceptively simple solution to the problem of comment spam that only seems to loom larger every day.