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Anna Liu, associate professor in services engineering at the University of New South Wales School of Computer Science led the study of Amazon’s EC2, Microsoft’s Azure and Google Apps. It simulated 2000 concurrent users and measured response times and performance indicators. The bottom line: “infrastructure-on-demand services offered by Amazon, Google and Microsoft suffer from regular performance and availability issues.”
- C|net
Yesterday Gavin Newsom, mayor of San Francisco, who is running for governor of California, announced a new website, datasf.orgthat offers datasets of all kinds about the city by the Bay. It’s a bit of a jumble, with data in several formats (and unlike data.gov, no option for .csv, shape or KML). Still it’s a start. I’m wondering if “peer pressure” from leading cities can push such an effort to grow across the U.S.?
- TechCrunch article by Newsom on the effort
The legislation was approved 106-0 Wednesday in the Michigan House and heads next to the state Senate.
- AP via Fox 28
—- original post 7/15/09———-
Michigan is challenged since it’s a “two part” state. The Upper Peninsula often get left off, or added to another state or province. So, Rep. Michael Lahti, a Democrat from Hancock in the U.P. has proposed legislation to be sure it’s included in all state produced maps. So far the bill passed a house committee.
- AP
MG Siegler at TechCrunch describes Map Maker as a “wiki style” Google Maps and that’s about right. The latest announcement from Google ups the number of countries in which people with accounts can add and make changes to the map database. These may or may not make it to the actual online maps.
More interesting is this tidbit, which Google reached out the Siegler to share - which seems to have gone unnoticed: Google is “extending our Kenya pilot and making the entire dataset of Africa fully available for download by non-profits, government agencies and individuals to create and enhance their own non-commercial map-related projects. More details are available on our download site.” It’s an interesting license but I’d still steer people to OpenStreetMap for a more open one.
The MapDiva blog announces the official launch of Ortelius, “map illustration software for Mac OS X.” A free trial is available and there’s a special price until Sept. 30. MapDiva was founded in 2008 by Graham Cox and Jill Saligoe-Simmel. Jill Saligoe-Simmel was Executive Director of the Indiana Geographic Information Council, Inc., and on the NSGIC board, which is why the name may be familiar.
