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Luiz Barroso talks about the concept of Energy Proportional computing and how he thinks DRAM and disk manufacturers could do a better job creating devices consume energy in proportion to the computing to perform. Barroso and Holzle analyzed 5000 servers at Google over six months and found the average CPU utilization was between 15-45% - the region in which a computer operates the least efficiently. At issue is the fact that most manufacturers maximize efficiency to SPECpower which assumes that the computer is running at 100% utilization.

Student Success Story: Last time the O'Reilly School of Technology highlighted Ingrid as Student of the Month, she was in the midst of taking our Web Programming Certificate Series. At this point, she has now completed fifteen courses, five Certificate Series, and is currently working on her sixth — the new PHP/SQL Programming Certificate Series.

Here's what she has to say:

"I truly enjoy my work more now that I have a better understanding and grasp of programming. I also get much more interesting work assignments and get more out of my work. [OST] courses are a challenge and so much fun to do!" —Ingrid Mifflin, Systems Librarian

During the month of July, enroll to get certified and SAVE 15%!

XSLT, Second Edition — After months of anticipation and delay, the W3C finally released the XSLT 2.0 standard in January 2007. The updated edition of this book offers practical, real-world examples that demonstrate how you can apply XSLT stylesheets to XML data using either the new specification, or the older XSLT 1.0 standard. Want to find out how the 2.0 specification improves on the old? This book will explain. Learn more.

Search engine indexers are aware of (X)HTML and know what to look for when indexing those documents, but if the indexers were tuned to look for RDFa and WAI-ARIA Roles, would the semantics of the document be quite so important? If arbitrary XML on the web is ever going to happen then machine-readable annotations will be an important driving factor for content indexing, and the explosion in client-side XSLT that will follow.

Success Factors: What traditional business really needs to know about Web 2.0 — Based on direct experience consulting in the field, and backed by O'Reilly's thought leadership on Web 2.0, this webcast is for the rest of us: executives and professionals working in "traditional" (non-Internet native) business trying to take advantage of new trends. We'll explore the underlying organizing principles and success factors in building and executing a Social Web strategy.

The webcast is live, free, and approximately 45 minutes. Join us Thursday, July 10 at 10am PDT (17:00 GMT). Attendance is limited, so register now.

Last weekend I started an Open Source project, pylesystem, that scratched an itch I had about having having an up to date API to the filesystem on linux in Python. There are really a few different things going on in my prototype and my plans for the eventual direction of the project.

Big Buck Bunny is 3d animated movie created entirely with open source software.

"Need Press? Repeat: 'Green,' 'Sex,' 'Cancer,' 'Secret,' 'Fat'" Joanne Kaufman's story in yesterday's New York Times reveals some of the tricks PR people use to get their stories noticed, including the strategic placement of certain words in their press release headlines—which immediately gave me the idea for the title of my latest press release...

Schema design may seem an odd candidate for consideration as an agile technology, yet with a slight change of emphasis (from agile "development" to agile "design") agile techniques can actually make schema development reasonable and even ... fun.

Brian Cox talks about the scientific and technical challenges as well as some of the LHC-related computing efforts. Cox makes the case for the importance of continued commitment to pure scientific research calling the LHC the Earth's "first Apollo Mission of the 21st Century". He compares life as a rock star to life as a high-energy physicist, and debunks some of the FUD surrounding the possible creation of black holes. The Large Hadron Collider will collide up to 600 million protons every second, and it will produce 2 GB of data every 10 seconds requiring a globally distributed network of petabyte-scale storage and thousands of CPUs.

If you've ever read a computer magazine, you know the idea behind "101 Tips." One gala issue, lots of first-rate contributors, lots of quality information. And lots and lots of pages. But when's the last time one lone guy tried to capture 101 tips in video? In just 5 minutes of video? Set to music? This is the realm of dekePod, the bi-weekly series from Deke McClelland. It's bold, it's brash, it's ridiculous. It's a podcast with serious issues. Enjoy.

Velocity: Transforming Web Operations from Cost Center to Competitive Advantage — In the Web 2.0 world, web operations has moved from IT support function to mission-critical competency. In an online business, the web site is inextricably bound to the product. This report lays out the three crucial high-level principles for succeeding with web operations and performance, identifies the eight business principles that should drive web operations strategy, and describes best practices for implementing that strategy. Learn more.

Official word on O'Reilly's upcoming ebook initiatives.Ebooks are certainly nothing new for us at O'Reilly. We've offered PDFs of hundreds of our titles for some time now, and until quite recently Safari Books Online, our online-publishing joint venture with Pearson, generated more revenue than was typically associated with the entire downloadable ebook business. But it's clear that things are changing...