Thoughts? How can I improve this diagram?

The reason the bacterium works so well, Doyle finds, is that it is organized in much the same way as the Internet. Both the Internet and E. coli are conceptually organized like a bow tie, with a broad fan of incoming material flowing into a central knot and then flowing into another broad fan of outgoing material. On the Internet, the incoming fan is made up of data from a huge range of sources— e-mail, YouTube videos, Skype phone calls, and the like. In E. coli, the incoming fan is made up of the many sorts of food it eats. As information and food move into their respective bow ties, they get homogenized: E. coli breaks down its food into a few building blocks, while the Internet breaks down its motley incoming data streams into streams of standardized packets.

From the knot, both bow ties then fan out. E. coli turns its building blocks into DNA, proteins, membrane molecules, and any other special ingredient it needs. On the Internet, data packets reach a computer, where they can be reassembled into the original e-mail, YouTube videos, Skype telephone calls, and the like.

A bow-tie organization allows both the Internet and E. coli to run quickly and efficiently. If E. coli (like all bacteria, indeed like all living things) did not have a bow tie, it would have to use a different set of enzymes to make each of the thousands of different molecules it needs from each type of food. Rather than use such a huge, slow system, E. coli just points all its metabolic pathways into the same bow-tie knot, making everything from the same raw materials. Likewise, the Internet’s bow-tie architecture means that it doesn’t have different ways to handle, say, e-mail traffic and instant-message traffic. Everything passes through as the same types of data packets.

Fascinating.

On 8 June, 2011, Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Akamai and Limelight Networks will be amongst some of the major organisations that will offer their content over IPv6 for a 24-hour “test flight”. The goal of the Test Flight Day is to motivate organizations across the industry – Internet service providers, hardware makers, operating system vendors and web companies – to prepare their services for IPv6 to ensure a successful transition as IPv4 addresses run out.

Please join us for this test drive and help accelerate the momentum of IPv6 deployment.

How To Take Part

Interested in joining the other organisations that are taking part in this initiative? Select your type of organisation below and you’ll find everything you need to participate in World IPv6 Day:

• Website Owners
• Network Operators

Today is a big day for the Internet.

Microsoft will start to fail within six quarters. Blank put a timeline on Microsoft suffering the kind of huge loss that drove IBM to restructure itself back in 1993: six quarters from now. He thinks Steve Ballmer is a “miserable failure” and that the board should be blamed for not replacing him. He also suggests that buying Nokia and installing Stephen Elop as CEO might be a solution.

And Active Directory? Exchange? Office?

I’m not sure what he means by doomed.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

renting a server per hour (from small to huge)

Amazon Elastic MapReduce

renting a couple of servers per hour as an hadoop cluster (to crunch a lot of data)

Auto Scaling

renting just enough servers as necessary (using more with a lot of work, using less with less work)

Amazon CloudFront

something like Akamai offers (CDN, content distribution network) but for less money

Amazon SimpleDB

noSQL for key-value store. store huge lists of items consisting of attributes that are quickly searchable.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)

MySQL as a Service (maas :P ) one of the best services of AWS at this moment.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

infrastructure automation for java applications. works with tomcat, uses services like autoscaling. (turn-key solution, perfect for getting familiar with several AWS services.)

AWS CloudFormation

infrastructure orchestration. write recipes for different services you want to use, and how, and CloudFormation will do the rest.

Amazon Fulfillment Web Service (FWS)

have a shop? you can have Amazon manage your fulfillment. your suppliers ship to Amazon, and they ship to your customers.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)

‘first in, first out’ (in nature) messaging. perfect for jobs that should be processed asynchronously, more or less in order of arrival. think of video rendering or thumbnail generation.

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)

publish/subscribe mechanism. you create topics interested parties can subscribe to. sending a message to a topic, sends the message to all subscribers. (like a mailing list, but for software systems.)

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)

a service for sending mail. interesting is that you have to earn your quota with good behaviour. interesting way of minimizing spam.

Amazon CloudWatch

monitoring of many AWS assets, like instances (servers) and load balancers.

Amazon Route 53

DNS (really rocks)

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

extend your private network with ‘some cloud’.

Elastic Load Balancing

distributing traffic over one or more instances (servers).

Amazon Flexible Payments Service (FPS)

would like to use it, not available for everyone in the world.

Amazon DevPay

same here.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

the most revolutionary service in AWS. unlimited storage.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)

network disks for AWS. (attach a volume to an instance of your choice. you can’t share the disk between multiple instances.

AWS Import/Export

move large data in and out of S3

AWS Premium Support

supposed to help you out with problems for money.

Alexa Web Information Service

search, i thought.

Alexa Top Sites

don’t know.

Amazon Mechanical Turk

work by the task. you want to have 10,000 users visit your site and try to do something. put those tasks on mechanical turk (for $0.1 per task?) and any one can help you.

thanks, Mitch Garnaat for pointing out we missed:
Identity and Access Management (IAM)

which lets you provision users within your AWS account and grant them access to different services and resources.

There’s “no reliable way to verify identity online” at the moment, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said, citing the rising tide of security threats including malware and identity theft that have grown increasingly prevalent over the last few years. “Passwords just won’t cut it here.”

A 55-page document (PDF) released by the White House today adds a few more details to the proposal, which still remains mostly hazy and inchoate.

It offers examples of what the White House views as an “identity ecosystem,” including obtaining a digital ID from an Internet service provider that could be used to view your personal health information, or obtaining an ID linked to your cell phone that would let you log into IRS.gov to view payments and file taxes. The idea is to have multiple identity providers that are part of the same system.

Intriguing. Scary.

Hashify does not solve a problem, it poses a question: what becomes possible when one is able to store entire documents in URLs?

Document ↔ URL

Hashify is different from virtually every other site on the Web in that every URL contains the complete contents of the page.

The address bar updates with each keystroke as one types into the editor.