1.75 Billion wireless users by 2007 [infoSync]

Add more items, descriptions, time stamps, select your version of RSS, aggregate several feeds... Check out NewsIsFree's premium syndication services! (40) [IDG InfoWorld]

Kerberos is a network authentication protocol which has been around for some time. Its based on asymmetric key cryptography and it best used for intra-organizational authentication tasks. Kerberos was developed by MIT and is distributed under a copyright permission notice very similar to the one used for the BSD operating and X11 Windowing system. Kerberos, by the way, is the name of the three-headed dog who guards the entrance to Hades. [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]

In this two-part column, Preston Gralla looks at IBM's and Sun's visions for utility/grid computing. IBM uses web-services standards and protocols at the heart of its Globus Toolkit 3.0 (GT3). (See the Globus Alliance website.) But even IBM's Kerrie Holley believes "we may be five to ten years away from taking full advantage of powerful grids." In the meantime, "IBM will be using [web services] for workload management and control" perhaps as early as next year.

"In the words of Sun Software Chief Technology Officer, John Fowler, 'In the future, the management of the data center will move from managing boxes to managing services.'" He sees a three-stage process of enterprises moving toward the data center of the future:

1. Web services to express service interfaces to applications.
2. Identity systems, directories, and portals to describe the entire data center and all of its infrastructure.
3. Management technologies that let you change your data center on an as-needed basis.

Fowler says that "changes are already underway. A variety of enterprises are already at stages 1 and 2 of the process." [Source: The Web Services Advisor] [Blogarithms]

ZapThink's Ron Schmelzer writes that companies he meets with are under the impression that they should integrate their data, not their applications. In many ways, they're right in that in a well-designed loosely coupled SOA, the application should be invisible. "...users won't be required -- or even able -- to know if the data they are consuming originated in a database, an enterprise application, a file system, another company, or anywhere else for that matter. In fact, in a Web Services-based SOA, the data users consume are entirely decoupled from the source of the data."

But hiding the application isn't enough. One must also hide the internal structure of the data. "Developers often think not of the data itself but rather the structure of those data: schemas, data types, relational database constructs, file formats, and so forth...[but] these various data structure representations actually get in the way. How information is stored and represented interferes with the meaning of that information." [Blogarithms]

The recently-formed Peer-to-Peer filesharing trade association "P2P United", together with CxOs of larger P2P software developers, are expected to announce tomorrow the adoption of a "File-Sharing Industry Code of Conduct" at a gathering in Washington, DC. They're also expected to demand Congressional action to work out differences between the file-sharing public and the recording/film industries, and to halt the RIAA lawsuits. Link [Boing Boing Blog]

NEC Electronics has developed a new display driver that widens support to 10-bit RGB and this means it has the capability to handle just over a billion colors. With 10 bits, each of the three main colors--red, green and blue--can be defined to lie in a range between zero and 1024 rather than 8-bit processing's zero to 256. [Tomalak's Realm]

Vendors look to third-party IM management software to link disparate offerings. [eWEEK Technology News]

F5's new FirePass Controller delivers SSL as the alternative to IP Sec for client-side VPN access. [eWEEK Technology News]

1. Friends that are also great architects
2. Loyal associates that are great designers and programmers that will work with them no matter what the project is
3. Extensive experience on at least 3 platforms (mainframe, J2EE, .net, CORBA, TOGAF, etc.)
4. A bookshelf that is about to topple over and a mechanism for demoting bad books
5. 3 or more candidate architectures or software architecture documents (SAD's) on your hard drive
6. Your personal ontology of non-functional requirements
7. 'Success Patterns' - things you know which have worked on previous engagements

[Service Oriented Enterprise]

Oh, and Squatter's right, or Microsoft's right? (About MSN's decision to close down and start charging for chat rooms).

[The Scobleizer Weblog]

Weblogsinc.com says they are weblogs for business. Anyone know anything more about them?

[Robert Scoble: Scobleizer Weblog]

Joel of Joel-on-Software has just finished custom-building the new offices for his software company. Being a coder himself, he set out to design a non-cube-farm office, optimized for actually coding in.

1. Private offices with doors that close were absolutely required and not open to negotiation.

2. Programmers need lots of power outlets. They should be able to plug new gizmos in at desk height without crawling on the floor.

3. We need to be able to rewire any data lines (phone, LAN, cable TV, alarms, etc.) easily without opening any walls, ever.

4. It should be possible to do pair programming.

5. When you're working with a monitor all day, you need to rest your eyes by looking at something far away, so monitors should not be up against walls.

Link (Thanks, Zed!) [Boing Boing Blog]

Google File System paper. Three of Google's scientists have written a paper on the Google File System, the file-system custom-designed for Google's server-farm.

First, component failures are the norm rather than the exception. The ?le system consists of hundreds or even thousands of storage machines built from inexpensive commodity parts and is accessed by a comparable number of client machines. The quantity and quality of the components virtually guarantee that some are not functional at any given time and some will not recover from their current failures. We have seen problems caused by application bugs, operating system bugs, human errors, and the failures of disks, memory, connectors, networking, and power supplies. Therefore, constant monitoring, error detection, fault tolerance, and automatic recovery must be integral to the system.

272K PDF Link (via Hack the Planet) [Boing Boing Blog]

TeleSym Gets More Cash. TeleSym's second round of fund raising rakes in $12.5 million: The money comes from the Intel Communications Fund, Siemens Venture Capital, Thomas Weisel Venture Partners, Bay Partners and Northwest Venture Associates. Looks like these guys have high hopes for voice over Wi-Fi.... [Wi-Fi Networking News]