Google App Engine is out and the premise is clear: Google against Amazon and Google getting ready to battle Microsoft when the latter decides to enter into the game.

The Google App Engine has been seen in the same way Blogger was when introduced previously to Google buyout: The Easiest Solution and for the masses.  the question is if it works as it should?

It does but there is doubt if it can really be used to host big projects. and if big projects will be using it since unlike Amazon web services. you choose a whole predefined package and not only the parts you only need like in Amazon web services where you chose from 3 parts, being able to use just one or all 3.

The Promises of Google are:

“Leveraging Google App Engine, developers can:

• Write code once and deploy. Provisioning and configuring multiple machines for web serving and data storage can be expensive and time consuming. Google App Engine makes it easier to deploy web applications by dynamically providing computing resources as they are needed. Developers write the code, and Google App Engine takes care of the rest.
• Absorb spikes in traffic. When a web app surges in popularity, the sudden increase in traffic can be overwhelming for applications of all sizes, from startups to large companies that find themselves rearchitecting their databases and entire systems several times a year. With automatic replication and load balancing, Google App Engine makes it easier to scale from one user to one million by taking advantage of Bigtable and other components of Google’s scalable infrastructure.
• Easily integrate with other Google services. It’s unnecessary and inefficient for developers to write components like authentication and e-mail from scratch for each new application. Developers using Google App Engine can make use of built-in components and Google’s broader library of APIs that provide plug-and-play functionality for simple but important features. “

And the set of features is described as:

But as with everything Google, where all is half truth and half reality, the initial limitations are severe and cannot give a exact projection on when we will see the full service running as it was envisionaed and much less if it will run in such a way.

Via Google App Engine Blog and Techcrunch

Adobe is not exactly a company known as friendly to Linux users, but now that is finally changing with the recent annoucement that they will be joining the Linux Foundation and that the only reasons they had not added Linux support for AIR until now is because they needed to wait for development to Flash core components to end first. This recent news provides a triple punch making official that Adobe will be now supporting their most widespread technologies for Linux at par with the development done in Windows and the Mac because they are now part of the Linux Foundation, that Flash for linux is now up to date compared to the other platforms and that thanks to that they will now be providing Adobe AIR 1.0 for linux along with Flex Builder for everyone to use.

While this moves may look as good spirited. I think that is only about the PR boost they expect to receive in exchange what Adobe is interested and because they knew they needed the good PR to balance things with Microsoft recent moves in this area.

Anyway, still a win for the Linux Crowd that now can go and download a Alpha version of Adobe AIR 1.0 and should finally be blessed with a better experience while handling Flash content.

The university of Michigan have created the most insense laser in the world Intentionally named in all caps by University of Michigan gurus in order to highlight its awesomeness, said laser contains 300 terawatts of power (or 300 times the capacity of the entire US electricity grid) and could “help scientists develop better proton and electron beams for radiation treatment of cancer.” Check this picture below.

“If you could hold a giant magnifying glass in space and focus all the sunlight shining toward Earth onto one grain of sand, that concentrated ray would approach the intensity of [HERCULES].” Damn….

Via: Engadget & Physorg

When the news hit the market couple of weeks ago that Warner Bros. would be going Blu-Ray exclusive, it was quite suggestive that its distributors would follow the suit. The time has come now. National Geographic, a warner distributor has opted Blu-ray instead of HD-DVD for the release of some its new titles, though the Formal announcement hasn’t come yet. The National Geographic has chosen to release its upcoming release, SharkWater on Blu-Ray which will be seen on the shelves pretty soon. However, there isn’t any announcement made yet that they will be releasing all their Titles on blu-ray. The titles which are co-produced by National Geographic and distributed by other companies will remain unaffected and will not be released on Blu-Ray.

Now, let us keep our fingers crossed and see if BBC, the only remaining Warner distributed company, will follow the suit or not. If they do, then HD-DVD will lose another big distributor..