Apple’s lossless audio format goes open source

Apple made its lossless audio format open source this week, allowing for others to view and change the code for use in their own software and tools.

As Daring Fireball notes, the format–which goes by the name, Apple Lossless Audio Codec (or ALAC)–adopted the Apache license yesterday.

ALAC was first introduced to Apple’s
Mac OS X Core Audio framework in 2004, where most users saw it as part of iTunes 4.5. It let users rip a CD into smaller compressed files without reduction in quality. Still, the resulting files are considerably larger than the more ubiquitous MP3, AAC and WMA formats, which compress music tracks even further at the expense of lower fidelity.

It also rivals the Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC), another lossless codec, that’s been open and royalty-free from the start, but is not supported on Apple’s portable devices.

ALAC-formatted audio tracks can be played back on software and hardware that support it, which for Apple included things like iTunes and QuickTime, along with the company’s
iPod–and later iOS–products, and AirPort Express hardware through AirPlay.

As Ars Technica notes, it took developers about a year to reverse engineer the technology to add support for ALAC files in their own software. That includes audio playback software like VLC, Boxee, and TapeDeck, which are now able to make use of the official code.

Top 10 benefits of DRUPAL

Drupal is an open-source rich with several resources that make it incrediblybest alternative amongst all available open source CMS (content management systems) applications. It makes the mission of web application development so unproblematic and picturesque that you can build Drupal based lovely website on your own. You even don’t need to be professionally solid for web designing or development.

Below are the top 10 benefits of Drupal:

1. Drupal Is An Open Source: Being an open source means Drupal doesn’t requireany license for selling any kind of development work made in Drupal neither it needs any royalty. Anyone can get into to the source-code of an application or program designed in Drupal. It doesn’t confine any program from being used in a firm or personal use.

2. User Friendly Content Management System: Drupal doesn’t require any mechanical dexterity for coding (like html coding). If you are not usual with programming and coding, even then you can make a website in drupal without problems. If you have entry to the admin panel you can create any kind of transforms on your website by simply using a web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, etc.) without problems. You can even copy and paste matter from MsWord or any other text editor as it is. As soon as you become familier with it you will be able to handle every module and node according to your requirement.

3. Search Engine‘s Favourite: It is designed completely from the purpose of search engine crawling and ranking. It endows with the modules for title tag, meta description tag, meta keywords tag, head tag, etc. Where you can put in content and text optimized for search engines. You can even epitomize a dynamic URL of your website’s page as a static one. That is why search engines adore the websites created in Drupal.

4. Market Capture: Drupal has incarcerated a immense market in web development. You can see thousands of well knownand fashionable websites have been designed in drupal. Such as:The White House’s website, Britney Spears’ website, Popular Science website, etc.

5. High Elasticity: Modules in Drupal such as: user administration, publishing workflow, news aggregation, meta-data functionality, etc. are fully ready for all vital future requirements. Extra resources like blogs, forums, e-commerce and calendars can undoubtedly be put into action any time in the future. Additionally, multitudes of third party modules can be selected from to enlarge Drupal.

6. Amazing Themes: Whether it is personal interest or a big transnational website Drupal based themes are rage at the present time. Drupal presentsthousands thematic default website templates absolutely for free. Additionally, you can get thousands of paid and free templates with Drupal theme by doing a easy search online. You can even use up a modified one into Drupal theme.

7. Incredible Worth: Drupal adds ab Incredible Worth to your website with thousands of sections, modules, mambots, etc. You can make any mode of website with Drupal, there are no boundaries. You can make from a unfussy static website, personal homepage to firm website, dating website, weblog, Myspace-like website, all depends on your vision and requirement.

8. Basic Quality: Drupal endows with astonishing flexibility because of which it is extremely congruent with PHP, MySQL or PostgreSQL, etc. Its largeattuned ability with jQuery, LAMP, mature API libraries and complete choice of modules are swiftly making it a great requirement for the core functionality of a framework.

9. Cross-Browser Comparision: Drupal is also very much congruent with most of the all fashionable browsers like; Mozzila, IE, Chrome, Safari and many more. It allows a website’s design and functionality to perform in the same way on all the browsers.

10. Fantastic Support: This is an open-source CMS so you will get plentiful experienced and connoisseur Drupal themers and developers out there on the internet. They are always keen to assist youfrom installation to accomplishment of a module. So you are never going to stuck with Drupal.

Microsoft announces Open source based cloud services

We see press releases go by all the time and most of them deserve the yawn they get. But, one caught my interest yesterday. At the PASS Summit conference Microsoft Vice President Ted Kummert announced that Microsoft will be offering a big data solution based upon Hadoop as part of SQL Azure. From the Microsoft press release, “Kummert also announced new investments to help customers manage big data, including an Apache Hadoop-based distribution for Windows Server and Windows Azure and a strategic partnership with Hortonworks Inc.”

Clearly this is a major win for the early startup Hortonworks. Hortonworks is a spin out of Yahoo! and includes many of the core contributors to the Apache Hadoop distribution: Hortonwoks Taking Hadoop to Next Level.

This announcement is also a big win for the MapReduce processing model. First invented at Google and published in MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters. The Apache Hadoop distribution is an open source implementation of MapReduce. Hadoop is incredibly widely used with Yahoo! running more than 40,000 nodes of Hadoop with their biggest single cluster now at 4,500 servers. Facebook runs a 1,100 node cluster and a second 300 node cluster. Linked in runs many clusters including deployments of 1,200, 580, and 120 nodes. See the Hadoop Powered By Page for many more examples.

In the cloud, AWS began offering Elastic MapReduce back in early 2009 and has been expanding the features supported by this offering steadily over the last couple of years adding support for Reserved Instances, Spot Instances, and Cluster Compute instances (on a 10Gb non-oversubscribed network – MapReduces just loves high bandwidth inter-node connectivity)and support for more regions with EMR available in Northern Virginia, Northern California, Ireland, Singapore, and Tokyo.

Microsoft expects to have a pre-production (what they refer to as a "community technology Preview") version of a Hadoop service available by the “end of 2011”. This is interesting for a variety of reasons. First, its more evidence of the broad acceptance and applicability of the MapReduce model. What is even more surprising is that Microsoft has decided in this case to base their MapReduce offering upon open source Hadoop rather than the Microsoft internally developed MapReduce service called Cosmos which is used heavily by the Bing search and advertising teams. The What is Dryad blog entry provides a good description of Cosmos and some of the infrastructure build upon the Cosmos core including Dryad, DryadLINQ, and SCOPE.

As surprising as it is to see Microsoft planning to offer MapReduce based upon open source rather than upon the internally developed and heavily used Cosmos platform, it’s even more surprising that they hope to contribute changes back to the open source community saying “Microsoft will work closely with the Hadoop community and propose contributions back to the Apache Software Foundation and the Hadoop project.”