Thank you so much. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here, even though here is a very strange sort of virtual kind of thing these days. So my name is Isaraskan. I am the co-founder for the Center for Humane Technology, as well as the co-founder for the Earth Species Project and most recently MakeSpace Foundation. Broadly, my work fits into sort of two buckets. And the first is Center for Humane Technology, looking at the way that technology is impacting how we relate to ourselves, how we relate to each other, and how our societies work. Most recently we, in collaboration with with Exposure Labs and Jeff Orlowski, put out the film The Social Dilemma, which Netflix says in the first 28 days was watched by 38 million households, which means roughly 50 million people. And what it explores is the way that technology, and in particular our information intermediation technologies, the thing that sits in between us and how we know what's happening in the world, is affecting us all. And in particular, let's see, I'm just going to move this a little bit because it turns out watching myself in slight delay is remarkably distracting. Actually, that sort of reminds me of these tiny changes in the way that we relate to ourselves can have massive impacts. Zoom is a great example of this.  And that's of course exactly what Zoom does to us all. Imagine now being a teenager and being forced to watch yourself. What would that do to your ability to concentrate? We often talk about social media and these social sites as just networks, social networks, apps, and that really hides their true nature. These things are in fact immense digital habitats in which post COVID, we are spending over half of our waking lives. And the shapes of our environment have drastic impacts on who we are as people, how we have relationships, and how we structure ourselves. If there is such a thing as human empathy, right, that connects us, what technology does is it makes a small conduit for us to interact with each other. And the shape of that conduit has massive implications. So I want to talk a little bit about the way that technology is affecting us and what we can do about it. The interdependence of humans. And then I want to talk at the end about the Earth Species Project and the work that we're doing now about interdependence of the species of Earth and using AI and advanced machine learning to translate animal language. So I'm excited about both of these things. The first half is going to feel, well, it's going to match the experience of being in the world right now. We're going to go down and then the end we're going to come back up. So I think it's really important to ask this question, where are we as a species when it comes to our technology? Because it's easy to get caught up in sort of the Facebook did this, Twitter did that. And I want to zoom us out so we can really see at scale where we are. If you imagine a line and this line up here is human strengths. And then this line up here is the power of technology to overwhelm us. Like the strength of technology, the ability for technology to cognitively dominate us. Techno pop and cultural fixation is always on the point where technology starts to surpass the things that human beings are best at, right? This is when computers can outthink us, outwrite us, they take our jobs. This is the singularity. And what I want to argue is that's the wrong place to be focusing on. Because if up here is human strengths, then down here are human vulnerabilities or human weakness. And the thing to notice is that technology starts to surpass the things that we're weakest at, undermines our vulnerabilities much before it overwhelms the things we're best at. And at some point when enough of our vulnerabilities are undermined, we lose control. And what we call the singularity is actually the second singularity. And it's sort of irrelevant because we're going to hit this point, the human limit singularity first. And I think this is a this is a big idea. And it's honestly hard for us as human beings to see this at center blind spot because we do not like to admit that we have vulnerabilities, that there are certain things given to us by evolution that are limits to our abilities. So where are we on the spectrum? How close are we to this point of the human limit singularity? Well, we first started to feel our limits being overwhelmed with information overload, right? The inability to handle the intense amount of information that's coming in, right? There are certain clock rates, the ergonomics of the human mind for how much information we can take in over time, for a unit amount of time. And when that gets overwritten, we feel anxious, we feel lost, we feel like we're always behind, we feel like we should be working harder. We get that sense of like we read an article, and we don't really remember all the things we just read, but we're left with that feeling of anxiety. So information overload was the first way we felt technology starting to dominate our cognitive abilities. Then what happened? Well, technology starts to find the soft animal underbelly of the human mind. And we felt this in the form of digital addiction or tech addiction. We're moving up that line, and it overwhelms our ability to self-regulate. In the US, more than 50% of kids say that they cannot get enough time with their parents because their parents are addicted to the thing. And it's important to note, it isn't just that technology is getting us to use it, addicting us, it's actually doing something much deeper. It's changing our values. These immense digital habitats, where Facebook, there are more people living in Facebook's habitat than there are in India and China combined. That these digital habitats, what we program into them, ends up being imprinted on our culture. So it isn't just enough to get us to use the technology. It's needing to get us to be addicted to needing attention itself. We live in an attention economy where it is our attention, which is the most valuable resource. I think this is a great example of the kinds of decisions we build into our digital habitats, creating the conditions in which our culture fundamentally shifts. That more than 50% of kids in the US now, when they're asked, what do you want to be when you grow up? They no longer say things like astronauts or firemen or nurses or doctors. They say they want to be a YouTube influencer or a vlogger. The objective functions, the things we put into our digital habitats, have their hand now on the pen of culture, changing how we value ourselves. 55% of plastic surgeons in the US now report having seen at least one patient that comes in asking to look like their Snapchat filter. This is the shape of technology pushing itself into what we value and what we care about. As we continue up this graph, we start to see that more and more of human's ability to make sense of the world and decide for ourselves gets overwritten. The next thing is the bots influence campaigns. We view the world through the lens of context, through how our friends see the world, through the consensus of those around us. That makes sense because when we were in smaller groups and tribes, it's really valuable to know what the people around you think to be able to make decisions. Is there a snake? Is that very poisonous to eat? But this hypertrophies and gets overloaded so that whoever can control a media ecosystem, if you can make it trend, you make it true, as Renee DeResta likes to say. And what comes after that? Well, we start to have things like deep fakes, which are overwhelming our ability as human beings to determine what is real and what is fake. That is just like we used to have something called the uncanny valley, which is the ability to generate images and text, which looks sort of right, but something in the back of your brain says, that's not quite right. Well, we are transitioning from living in the uncanny valley to living in the synthetic valley, where we cannot tell when something is fake or real synthetic or not yet more of what our human limits are are getting overwritten. And so this leads us to a very interesting question, which is, when we as human beings can no longer trust what we think or what we feel from our lived experience, how can we possibly govern ourselves? And this is a very deep point. Because, you know, let me give an example of this. There's a technology called style transfer. Style transfer is an AI technology. And it, it lets you point an AI at one image, like say a chagall, and it learns the style of chagall, and then you can apply it to another image like a portrait. Now you can just walk around and you can walk around, you can turn any image into the style of chagall. So that's interesting. But the same kind of analogy is now being applied to text, where you can point an AI at a body of text, learn its style, and then immediately apply it to another body of text. So what does this mean you can do?  That's sort of terrifying. It can also look at all of the, the, the emails that you've responded quickly to, or positively to, and learn the style, which is uniquely persuasive to you. And there is nothing in the human mind that gives you an antibody against this kind of persuasion.  And microtargeting goes from being microtargeted about, you know, perceived personality traits like Cambridge Analytica did to exactly tailored to you. But this will continue going. TikTok is essentially an AI recommendation system that's learning your preferences. It's why it's so fundamentally addicting. If you've ever played with it, even friends of mine who meditate, who spend incredible amounts of time like doing deep work have gotten sucked into TikTok for days at a time, because it's learning your preferences. And where is this going? Well, the obvious next step, and we are just at the cusp of this capability now, is to start to not just recommend specific videos that you will like, but generate videos that you will like. It'll learn the perfect thing that attracts you, whether it's your perfect type of man or woman that you're attracted to, or the perfect kind of truck. This is a kind of attack against the human, because technology is learning how to know us better than we know ourselves. And yet more examples of this, well, let me let me say where this is going, where we're starting to see companies now spring up that offer like virtual mates. So Chow Ice, which is a Microsoft chatbot deployed to over 600 million people has been tuned for long term engagement. And what does that mean? That means it's not optimizing to keep you on the site right now. It's trying to develop a long term emotional connection with you. And it's gotten pretty good at it. People will use it. And after around six weeks of use, because it's always available, knows all of you is always kind. People start to after nine weeks, turn to these bots, before they turn to their actual friends, because human beings are messy. And these bots are not. It said, in fact, 10% of the users of Chow Ice say that they love their bot. They have said the phrase, I love you to to their bot. And now imagine, as we as we start to generate the images of that person, videos of that person, humans generally prefer the sweeter, easier thing, our pre-occurrent cortex is all about letting us do the harder, more right thing. And technology, as it continues to cognitively dominate us, becomes better and better at sort of like spearfishing exactly the things that will that will capture us. There, you know, when I think about virtual reality, there's sort of two ways of making virtual reality. One is that you make the virtual world more real. So that's things like VR and Oculus. You know, we've sort of largely failed at that so far, just the experience isn't quite that good. We we think that we are putting on these goggles so we can be somebody other than ourselves to escape. And then we're sort of disappointed when we discovered that it's that it's still us inside. But the other way is by making the real world more virtual. And that's exactly what's been happening. It's not so hard to beat the Turing test on Twitter, because Twitter takes all of that which is human and squishes it down into, you know, 280 characters. So in order for us to get past this kind of dilemma, get past the sort of human limit singularity, we have to have a major philosophical change. And that philosophical change is that, hey, we are human beings, one creature among many, that has real limits, just as we have real brilliance. And we need to design our technology to wrap around and protect us. Because the world we're moving into, we do not have the appropriate antibodies for, and we will continue to design technology that filters us into little bubbles for engagement, and then have each person live in their own perfectly tailored micro reality, and create the super colliders that smashes those micro realities together. Because that's what creates maximum engagement. And that's sort of the point of the social dilemma is where all of these things are going is they destabilize our sense of what's real, and what's not. And democracies fundamentally cannot stand when there is not a sense of shared reality. We cannot self govern, if there is no such thing as true. And so I think we're going to have to see major changes across regulation, because the companies have shown they will not regulate themselves around how we design, so that we acknowledge that humans are fundamentally limited as well as we are brilliant, so that we can protect them, we must study the ergonomics of the human mind, so that our technology can be considerate of our weaknesses, and supportive of our brilliances. So that's sort of on one side, and hopefully that's not too terribly scary. But honestly, it should be. So that we can like rediscover like the ways in which we can interact with each other. And on the other side, I want to talk a little bit about about our species project, which, as I said before, is like, you know, it's easy for people to listen to the conversation we have about technology and be like, Well, I guess they're just anti technology. But technology is incredible, right? Like a paintbrush is technology. A cello is technology. These are things that extend the parts of us which are most brilliant, and let us express them into the world. And in the very best way, technology can act almost like hyper empathy, it can let us understand the world at greater scope and more granularity than we ever have before. So the Earth Species Project. Really, it got started in the core of the idea started in 2013, when was listening to an NPR piece on gelato monkeys, which are these incredible monkeys with like huge patches on their chest. And and mains, and they live in large groups of 1000 to 2000, fish and fusion societies. And, you know, the the researcher came on and said that they had the largest vocabulary for any primate. And we have no idea what they're saying. And they're out there with like hand transcribers, hand recorders to try to figure it out. Like, well, why don't we have? Why don't we start using machine learning and massive microarrays. But the problem was, it was impossible to transit a language without having a Rosetta stone without first knowing what was being said. And so every year, we would check back in 2014, 2015. Was it now possible? And the answer was always no until 2017, when there were two papers that came out back to back October 30th and 31st that showed you could now translate between two human languages without any examples of how to translate without a Rosetta stone or without a dictionary. And the technique I think is beautiful, as it is profound. You can ask an AI system to generate a shape that represents a language. So that is, imagine a galaxy, a cloud where every point is a word. And the way the points are arranged is that words that mean similar things are near each other. And geometrically, the way they are arranged is that words that share relationships share geometric structure. So it's a little abstract. Let me give an example. King is to man as woman is to queen. So in this shape, king is the same distance and direction to man as woman is to queen. And that just means you can do a arithmetic to do analogy. So king minus man is this sort of vector, you add it to woman, and it just equals the point which is queen. It's pretty cool. First thing I tried when I got my hands on this data set was like a hipster, minus authenticity, plus conservative, and that's just equal to like electability. Or you can do like, okay, how about book minus tome? And you know, tome is sort of the fancy word for book. And so that gives you, let's say a direction and distance for pretentiousness. And you can just add that to smelly and illegal malodorous, or you add it to clever and illegal adroit. There's an old saying, which is a JR Firth saying, which is you shall know a word by the company that it keeps. And essentially what these AI systems do is they they're solving these these massive sort of like logic puzzles to figure out which words relate to which other words and build a shape. So it's that analogies take geometric form. So that's, that's beautiful. It's cool. How does it help you translate? This was the insight. You could take the shape, which is German, and the shape, which is Japanese, and you rotate one shape on top of the other, until they matched. And if you did that, the point, which is dog in Japanese ends up overlaying and being the same point, which is dog in German. I just think this is beautiful, because naively, we would have all thought, I certainly thought, that the difference in history and context in culture between different languages and the way we see the world would be so different, you couldn't possibly just match shape to shape to do a translation. And yet the answer is you can. And not only Japanese and German, but Finnish and Turkish and Russian and Greek, human languages seem to share a kind of fundamental universal shape. And especially in this time of deep division, I think that's something which is incredibly beautiful. As it shows that there are the ways that we see the world are so similar that the computer can discover these underlying patterns. And of course, the next question becomes, can we do this for animal language? If we collect 10,000 hours, 1,000 hours of dolphin or humpback whale, or killer whale, or orangutan, or gelata monkey, can we build the shape? The answer is of course you can build the shape, but it takes a lot of work. Real data is very hard. It's noisy. And once you build that shape, does it fit anywhere into the human meaning shape? This is an unknown question. We don't know. Maybe there is enough similarity in the way that other conscious beings see the world that there will be an overlap. Like whales have dialects. They have cultures that pass down on our top. They have family units. They need to eat. They need to reproduce. They have predators. There is a lot of their experience, which is shared with our own. And maybe there's some kind of overlap. And that will be deeply interesting to discover. Because then if there is, you can start to build yourself a Rosetta stone. But I'm not sure which is actually more interesting. Is it going to be more interesting that there is an overlap? Or that there's a big portion of the way they communicate which isn't overlapped, where we can see structure that isn't directly translatable. And isn't that where deep wisdom may reside in an experience of the world that we cannot directly translate but know is there and start to piece apart? I think it's exceptionally exciting. And I think this is where technology can bring us in the best possible world. Is that as technology to know a better, it can serve us better. It can help us understand the world more deeply, right? Like deep learning and AI in some sense is the microscope times the telescope of our era because it lets us see at much greater granularity and much broader scope than we've ever been able to see before. And what I'm hoping is that these technologies instead of being used to sort of surround us and confuse us and to cognitively dominate us and undermine our weakness, that instead they can be used to change our own perspective of ourselves. That they can help us look into a mirror and see ourselves more clearly, that they will be able to just like the telescope let us look at the patterns of the universe and discover that just like the telescope did that Earth is not at the center of the universe that these tools will teach us that humanity is not at the center of the universe. And I think that change to human ego can have a profound effect on our perspective of ourselves. You know, I think about the moments when we've had huge shifts in culture, when we've really changed as a species. And two moments come to mind. One is Roger Payne and Katie Payne releasing songs of the humpback whale, which was a LP, a record of whales singing. And it was the first time we as Western society had really heard the voices of the animals of the deep. And that record went on Voyager 1 as the very first thing after human greetings representing not just humanity but all of Earth. It created Star Trek 4, most importantly perhaps, is in play in front of the UN General Assembly and was sort of the catalyzing driver for the ban of deep sea whaling. And I also think about those moments where there is a human being in the space race standing on Earth, or standing on the moon. And it was during those years when humans went to Earth and can see ourselves from the outside. See Earth rise and the blue marble photo, which are still the most viewed photos in the history of humanity. And it was during those years that we learned how to protect ourselves better. The EPA came into existence. NOAA was born. The modern environmental movement was born. Earth Day got started. The Clean Air Acts was passed. And I think now as we start to see the effects of wiring up all of humanity to itself, with maximum virality, sort of like taking a brain and connecting every neuron to every other neuron, you get what do you expect but epileptic seizure. That as we can see the way that our technology is affecting us, we can get that ability to step outside of ourselves and ask what do we want to do about it. So thank you. So thanks. Thanks, Asa, for this interesting presentation. I have two different questions. So the first one is about the future. It's how you foresee human humanity in the future and of course the relation we have with technology. I think it's, I know it's quite difficult to talk about the future, especially nowadays, but how you foresee this future? How do you foresee the relation we will have as a species with technology? Yeah, we are in the process of reverse engineering ourselves as a species. That is, being able to sort of reach into our own scalps and pull on the puppet strings of our own minds. And if we do not figure out a way in which to do that with care, with protection, what is this kind of thing? You end up in a feedback loop, right?  This, that when you have a system whose output is plugged back into your input, that's how you get the conditions for in math chaos. But I think this is really important. With chaos, initial conditions matter and that's worth fighting for. Last question, the last question. Do you think or do you mean that we'll be able to translate what my duck, my own duck, is telling us to English, to Spanish? Is this something that we will get? If that's something that we will get early? What's your opinion on this? Yeah, I mean I think dogs are an incredible example, these companion animals, of like we know how much that they communicate to us. Whether dogs have something as complex as language, don't know. They certainly communicate incredible mount gesturally and it's probably things more like whales, orangutans, all the cetaceans that have like a deep sort of rich communication structure that might resemble language. But yeah, I think what we're going to discover is that the world around us communicates much more than we expect. I'll give one example that just sort of like really opened my mind. This is research out of University of Tel Aviv and they're like, okay, so nature, if there's a signal it'll use it. So do flowers, can they hear the approach of an oncoming bee? And so they played a flower, primrose in particular, different frequencies, like high pitch frequencies, low pitch frequencies and the frequencies which bees pollinate at. Or the like pollinators like buzz at. And only when they played sort of the frequencies of a pollinator of a bee, the primrose responded by producing more and sweeter nectar. And so here's an example of like, do flowers hear? Do they listen? Do they respond to sound? And only really in the last year or two have we been able to say actually they do. And that to me just says there is so much more to discover. Yeah, it's amazing because at the end of the day we as human we can communicate with our planet and that's something amazing for the future. Because probably we should redefine our relation with the planet. So it's, I think that's, we are living and we will live for sure amazing times. So thanks so much Asa for being with us. Thank you so much for having me. Take care, thank you. All right, ciao.


Prices for PC components like GPUs and CPUs and memory starting to finally come down, you may wanna upgrade your PC. So we thought we'd check in with Will about where to start. Is Windows 11 compatibility for your parts something that's worth paying attention to? Is that a good guide? So anything you buy today is gonna have Windows 11 compatibility at this point. Like unless you're going to eBay and buying old hardware from 10 years ago, your new components, anything you've bought realistically in the last three or four years is gonna be Windows 11 compatible. And then there's a larger question about whether you wanna upgrade to Windows 11. Like would I build a new machine today to have a Windows 11? Would I replace a perfectly good Windows 10 machine just to get Windows 11? Probably not. Windows 11 is great. I'm using it day to day. It's a much better OS now than it was when it launched. Is it a necessity? Absolutely not.


So, we start the second session, where we look at some aspects of modern applications and also get an introduction to the performance issues. Specifically, as I mentioned, we look at the multi-tier architecture, we look at enterprise applications. For example, many of you would be looking at currently specific subsets of your enterprise applications. Front-end system, somebody may be looking at data warehouse, somebody may be looking at operational data stores, somebody may be looking at web portal, but they are all or somebody may be doing something in HRMS, somebody in investment. All of these applications need to actually integrate with each other and towards that, we will talk about enterprise application integration and in that context, we will very briefly look at the service oriented architecture. Towards the end, as I said, we will introduce the performance model. So, here is the basics of multi-tier application. First of all, you are familiar with back-end database now and you are familiar with front-end client. That's exactly the environment that you have been using so far. From the front-end client, you connect to the back-end database and execute whatever queries you have, what are database offers? The application logic in such cases is usually split between the two. So, there is some application logic which is coded in the database in terms of procedures, triggers, whatever you may have in terms of basic validation which are buried into your, what you call constraints, something which is not solvable by constraint, you will write some procedure there. There will be some logic which will be put into the front-end. For example, simple validations. So, some codes that you have used and the code tables are small, parameter tables are small, you would like to do the validation locally itself. There may be some logic which is built into the application software which is running on the front. Say, a COBOL program is running on the front-end, then it will validate if you have, let's say, 150 different tables, not the database tables but your tables kind. So, you might want to keep a prescription of those tables in the program itself and that kind of validation can be done locally from the front-end. You don't need to go to the database. However, there are always occasions where frequently you will have to go back to the database. So, some validation may have to be done using the back-end database. So, you will have to read the database. You will have to put something in the database. In general, in a two-tier application, typically you need to hold a connection to the database. So, that is what you call logging on to a database. Right? A connection to a database is actually a slightly costly thing in the sense that whenever you connect to a database, the database server needs to create a context for you as a user. It is not uncommon to require, let's say, 2 to 4 megabytes of memory space for keeping that context alive. More importantly, it is that physical connection, a logical connection that needs to be retained for you. The number of such connections that can be made to the database are often limited. For example, if you have an oracle back-end database, typically you would connect directly to a database to the tune of 8 to 10,000 users. What if you have 20,000 users? What if you have 100,000 users? The database may give up. So, these are some of the problems which do not permit easy scale-up if you continue with this architecture. In that case, what you do is you do some kind of a connection pooling. So, that means you put some intermediate layer before the database to which multiple users log on. So, there are maybe 100 users here. Now, that intermediate layer may maintain only 10 connections to the back-end database. Those 10 connections are maintained full-time and any one of those connections is used to satisfy queries which are executed by any one of the 100 users. So, this connection pooling ordinarily would have to be done artificially by introducing an intermediate layer. As we shall see, in a three-tier architecture, this job is also done by the third tier which is now introduced not merely to take care of connections. In fact, that is not the purpose at all, but the purpose is to take the entire application logic and put it in this additional tier. So, a three-tier architecture separates out the application logic in a tier called application tier. Now, this logic which consists of all the executable programs which do no reading, writing to the disk and which do no user interaction. These things only do computations, calculations, processing, logic. This job is dedicated now to the application server which is not necessarily a physical server, but it is a logical server. It could run on the same physical box as the database server runs. In fact, if you have a high-end PC today, you can actually implement a three-tier application by creating a database layer within the same PC, by creating an application layer and running an app server. Appache is one example of another. There are many app servers, WebSphere or no, sorry, not WebSphere. WebSphere is an app server which can actually take your code for application logic and run it there. The advantage of this additional tier is that you can actually run multiple instances of these servers either on separate physical boxes or even on the same physical boxes. The load which any software can take is not dependent only on the hardware which it runs on. It is also dependent on the certain inherent architecture of that program itself. So, if you try to run 20 users by the same program, there could be problems. If you try to run 2000 users, there could be many more problems. But if the programs are identical, you can actually put a configuration of such programs running on multiple instances and then you can say these 100 users connect to this app server, these 200 users connect to this app server. All may be doing the same. The advantage is that even if one app server instance dies, you can automatically reconnect those users to another app server and the activity can continue with of course break in that particular transaction or particular activity that you have. Further, a lot of load balancing is possible. So, if you have 20 app server instances, then if one particular app server gets loaded more, it is possible to detect that automatically and transfer a few users or some load from this app server to another. Such load balancer software is also available routinely now along with the app server. The biggest advantage of application services is that they can scale horizontally. That means physically you can deploy 20 more physical servers and put app servers onto them and suddenly you can handle more number of user process or more number of data. A database even today typically scales only vertically. So, the database can exploit parallel resources, but within a single environment. So, you have a large database server which may have let us say 16 nodes or 16 processors, 32 processors, 64 processors. So, all of these can actually be enhancing the performance of the database, but it is generally not easy to have 20 different systems connected together, pulled together to enhance the capability of the database performance for transaction processing. For query processing such parallel distribution is possible and that is why you will find that most of the data warehouse implementations use a notion of database distributed a parallel database which is actually physically split on multiple nodes. Such a architecture is called shared nothing architecture for databases. Talking about the app server then, app server can also do the pooling of db connections which I mentioned. In fact in modern applications it is almost mandated that this is the kind of architecture you should construct. You should have the front end user related logic in your front end application which runs on the front end. You should have the complete application logic only in the app server and you should have any data management related activities only in the database. Consequently the app servers will be connecting to the back end database using odbc or jdbc drivers which you would have seen depending on which programming language you use for maintaining app.  So for example today in cobalt you have to run a cobalt program on the end users machine or on a server where the screens etcetera which are displayed to the end user are actually managed by that cobalt application. Your cobalt application is doing two things it is managing the front end user screen it is also reading and writing to files and it is also doing computations and processing pertaining to your application. So today you have actually a single tier application software. Our job is subsequently to move to a multi tier architecture like this. These are particularly important in the context of web enabled applications. You see these instances every now and then applications which basically exploit the web, which exploit the internet connectivity, which exploit the ability to access websites, which exploit the ability to use search engines like Google Yahoo and so on. So a complete branch of applications called e-commerce applications that you would be familiar with have come out because of the web enablement. The e-commerce is nothing but commercial activities conducted electronically. Here are some examples of web enabled applications. Simple advertisements of production services. This particular thing is relevant for our discussion of service oriented architecture so we shall see that later. But executing transactions on web. You can do information collection on web like form filling, registration. You can do payment on the network, credit card payment for insurance premium, any general banking transaction. Many of you would have been doing this. Typically there are multi-party transactions. So multi-party transaction means take a railway or airlines reservation. It's amazing in India today by the way you can actually do a railway reservation and get your ticket printed at your internet. Now look at how this application will be working. If it were only to connect to a railway backend database server, it's one way. So you log in sort of and connect to the backend database server and get. But railway has to collect payment and railway does not have any direct method of collecting payment. So railway will collect payment through your credit card which will be authenticated from your bank. So there is a bank application which must be running at that time. And the bank application, your front end and the railway reservation server or this railway reservation application all must talk to each other in a synchronous fashion or in an apparently synchronous fashion. Synchronous and asynchronous are two very, very important paradigms in life. And synchronous is fastest but asynchronous is more workable. Both are required in life. The comparable thing is a telephone call. So if I call you on a phone and you talk to me, it's a synchronous connection. The problem with the synchronous connection is when I call you, you must be available. If you are not available, then I have to keep trying arbitrary whereas an email is asynchronous. I send you an email. I'm not waiting for response. I'm waiting, but I don't have to wait online. So I can go do my work, come back and whenever you get time, you look at that email and respond. If the asynchronous mechanism is made almost synchronous, in this example, it would be like chat. So chat is my message is going there. But I need not wait for the return message to come. I can read my book. I can do something else. But if that person is online, so online does not necessarily mean that a connection between you and me is occupied always. It is still messaging which is a synchronous mechanism. But messaging done very quickly almost amounts to online real time kind of in general for the railway airline reservations, you require a user, you require the reservation server and you require a payment gateway. Whenever such multiple entities are involved, there are multiple applications. Please note that the payment gateway application might be written in Java and back end database. The railway reservation application might be returned. Guess what? In FORTRAN. Do you know that railway reservation in India was first implemented using FORTRAN programming language? That particular FORTRAN called VAX FORTRAN actually had index files and relative files implemented in FORTRAN, which they use.  And then they found out that the cobalt did not run well on the VAX machines at all. But FORTRAN ran as much as five times faster. So they use FORTRAN. That is of course old times. Now things are different. What I meant was that you could have completely disparate software environments on these different servers. And yet the end user must be given to believe that there is no difference whatsoever. He is using a single access point. There are new issues, however, even when connectivity is guaranteed. Connectivity itself is a problem. You can see now that how do you maintain, for example, a two-phase commit or even a normal commit, a transaction, acid property. I got a reservation, but I have not yet paid. Or I have paid, but I did not get my ticket. Now these problems will have to be resolved. Apart from your database crashes and other things, now the network disconnectivity becomes an additional problem. So you need to provide persistence at every stage for the information that you have already collected and ensure that it is connected by the end result. And then only you get rid of it. Otherwise you must have a mechanism of undoing a transaction or whatever. Transactions in physical space have certain advantages.  So I can know generally that you are my customer or I can have other ways of identifying. I can authenticate you because you are ordinarily paying cash and the exchange of cash and goods happens simultaneously. In e-commerce, sometimes the order is placed for say some e-book, let us say or some electronic content to be obtained by, let us say I am purchasing software, which is all computer readable material. So I place an order, after sometime the order is verified and that fellow sends me the software, which I start using. What if I pay him and he does not send me the software? What if he sends me the software and I don't pay him? What if I place an order and later on when he sends me the software, I tell him I never place this order? What if I have arranged for an electronic payment through an account transfer through a bank, where I have said that I am giving an equivalent of bank guarantee. You give me these goods, after I certify that you have given the goods, the bank will give you the money. So after I get the goods, because the goods are electronic, I start using them and later on I say that no, no, no, this was a mistake, I never committed to pay you this much money or whatever. So a whole lot of issues like repudiation, security, authentication, they crop up in a completely different way than they do in normal system that we, even in LIC you can see that the security notion that most of you have in your programs is very minimal, because physical security is guaranteed. Only those people in a branch can access that server, nobody has ordinary. Now you have a wide area network, you have additional security problem. Now you have a portal where extra people can come in, you would have additional problem. All these issues are issues which come into the transactions when they are executed in a digital space. So you have authorization for which you have firewalls, the conventional authorization will not be sufficient. You know excess, you have this password and therefore you can get into my database, it is not sufficient. Confidentiality is to be ensured by encryption. There are two typical encryption algorithms, one called the symmetric key algorithms, these are DES or triple DES, digital encryption standard, triple DES standard and there is a famous RSA algorithm for asymmetric key. I, India by the way is one of the few countries in the world which has through its information act guarantees that if you have a public key encrypted document or a digital signature verified document then that document electronic form is a legal tender in any court of law. It is a major step, many other countries have not yet done it. Going forward then these things will become important. Non-repudiation merely means that the proof has originated from you and you only. Suppose I send my resignation later because I have a fight with someone and tomorrow I say no I did not send this later. There should be a mechanism with my boss to say no this digital signature allocated to you verifies that you have sent it at this time at this date from this machine end of the matter. In general web enabled applications take different forms and they are characterized by funny acronyms. The whole field is full of acronyms so B2B means business to business. Any inter-bank transaction or any transaction between an ancillary supplier to an automobile industry would fall under the B2B. A G2B means government to business so corporate tax returns, company filings, a number of things that you can think of will fall under government to business. G2C a government to citizen or B2C from business to citizen are of course the more important parts of the more predominant and more widely used parts. For example you permit me to get a insurance policy on web and you are actually permitting a business transaction to a end consumer. It's a B2C kind of application. Distributed applications that means an application which is partly working here partly working there partly working there is not new. What we talked about earlier were distributed applications where one part of the application was with one organization another part was with another organization but within the same organization also you could have applications which will work at different places different. In real world organizations will have multiple applications and organizations will have multiple sites each one of which will be nearly autonomous. Consider LIC situation today exactly like that. Each branch is nearly autonomous entity. It has its own server it has its own transactions it carries out. It reports to you of course it gives you all the data etcetera. But if somebody else wants to control those transactions then that access will have to be given. The access that we give through a semi-centralized mode today you do a transaction on web then I take that transaction and somehow post it into the branch or I collect the branch transaction information and post it into ODS. These applications not only exchange data with each other they exchange they will in coming years will have to exchange data with other organizations as well. In our case take regulatory information required. So you are required to interact with the regulator who might have a different set of application. You might be required to interact with other countries in which the information is exchanged in a different form. For all of this the notion of distributed databases has evolved. There is another beautiful book on distributed databases also fairly old book in the context of time for the computers. The authors are Ceri and Palaghati or Ceri and Palaghati C-E-R-I and Palaghati the Italian people. The book on distributed databases is a beautiful book opens up a Pandora's box and the issues. Very briefly a distributed database will have a single logical schema but the data may be spread across servers at different locations. So you might have part of the data in Madras, part of the data in Kolkata, part of the data in Pune, wherever. You can actually do this schema partitioning either horizontally or vertically for storing the data. So you might decide that certain rows of this table will be in Chennai, certain rows in Kolkata etc. In a way if you consider the LIC's present application very very crudely it maps into a distributed application where data slides horizontally. So you have data pertaining to customers of a particular region in one branch, data pertaining to customers of another region and another branch. But the schema is identical across. So if you just merge all the rows of all the tables you get a master table for the country. That is what in fact makes it relatively easier to integrate your branch information into a single operational data store today. Life need not be that simple. For example even in the branch system today you might have certain branch specific tables, certain parameters etc which are specific to that branch only, which are loaded in that branch. Combining all of them together will not be very easy. So there that is an example where the partitioning is not unnecessarily horizontal. There is a particular table which exists only in three branches and not in the remaining 1900 whatever. Then you have done actually vertical part. In general a distributed database can have both vertical and horizontal parts. Why you, what you have today is not a distributed database is you don't have a database at all. You don't have a logical schema. The schema is buried in your COBOL program. But going forward when you have the schema even if you implement that schema in a branch keep in mind to have a single logical schema for the whole organization. So that tomorrow when you centralize the operations it should it should be just a automatic shift without having to do anything. If we don't take that care now and since we have 2000 branches we could have a lot of job in just integrating all the data from various places. In general when I have a distributed database and not autonomous 2000 systems like we have but a truly distributed database then I also want to ensure that if one of the site fails I should have some availability of data. Because if particularly if I have some data in one site some data in other site some data in third site typically this problem is solved through data replication. So you replicate data. You say that the data for this particular table will be stored at Kolkata and Chennai. The data for this will be stored at Delhi and Nagpur. So even if one place the site is not accessible exactly the same replicated data is available at other place. Data replication is also the preferred mode of ensuring what is known as business continuity through a disaster recovery site. So if you have a main site you have a disaster recovery site. You can regard disaster recovery site in the main site to together constitute a distributed database. Here the database is at both the places it is replicated. So it is identical thing replicated at both the places. But whenever you have replication the issue is of maintaining consistency that to a one table replicated at five places how do you ensure that a change happens in one table in let's say Kolkata it must happen in all the five places. The problem is not as simple or trivial as you might imagine. For example you might say alright the transaction which is updating my Kolkata database in the same transaction I will write SQL carry open database in Chennai and update it. The problem is if it is a single part of a transaction that you make then two things will happen. A the transaction will take longer now. They will have to go to Chennai also and update. B if for some reason even the link to Chennai is down the original Kolkata transaction will not go through because all of this is part of the same time. So replication cannot be handled in a synchronous fashion and therefore to guarantee replication in an asynchronous way where the link may be down etc etc is a non-trivial task. Of course there are very good pieces of both the technology and methodology to resolve this problem. I am just mentioning that it is a problem to ensure consistency in replicated database. Then there are multiple applications as I mentioned which must talk to each other preferably in real time online. Let me give you this example of the academic institution we are this problem here. If you come as a student and register in the academic office you give all your information name, hostel number, address whatever whatever whatever and you pay the fees. Next day you go to the library to issue books. The library has a different system that application is written in our case the application in the main building was I think in Kobal and the application in library was in Foxspace, Foxpro. So these two applications did not talk to each other. So the Foxpro fellow had a complete design for capturing of user information etc. So poor me would go to the library again fill up another form again they will capture the data. We had a separate system in the accounts office also. We realized the problem when one of our professors late Professor K.C. Mukherjee whose son was studying here. He wrote a letter to me I was in charge of the application cell then saying Professor Fatak my son who is a student here has his name spelled in three different ways in three of your applications all three of which are wrong. The Mukherjee was spelled by him in a very peculiar way and Mukherjee can be spelled in a number of ways. So these three applications had picked up three different piece of this inconsistency. More important than that the trouble to the end user. End user everywhere has to register him. So what would you like to have? You would like to say that the moment the person registers in the academic office that information should be made available to that library application either instantaneously which may be difficult because I might have this problem of breakdown and things like that. But as early as possible at least at the end of the day. End of the day kind of reconciliation many of you would have done. Lot of information your case would come in files at the end of the day from branch to your place which you sort of absorb. But ideally if you could do a distributed transaction which is executed in a non synchronous fashion. There are pieces of middle layer that we shall talk about for the application integration where you have persistent messaging through which you can ensure that even if the connectivity is lost whenever it comes up without losing any data the transaction will be updated at the other place. All this is part of the enterprise application integration which is the fundamental nomenclature for considering all issues of making multiple applications talk to each other. An ERP is an example of an integrated application which is integrated right at the definition point. However no organization in the world can survive only with an ERP package because now the ERP package has to interface with this application that application that application etc. In general integrating application functionality is a is a important problem. The enterprise application integration is usually built around a middle layer framework. A middle layer is like an intermediate. You have application one on that place, application two on this side, both people have to talk to each other and talking to each other is difficult. Why talking to each other is difficult because if you have to basically call one program from other place. Now that program may be written in a language for which I have no environment here. So I can't call it by writing a program. So I have to do what is known as a remote procedure call. Now how do I do that remote procedure call? I have to know all parameters, how to call that program everything here. Same thing for the other field. In general if two applications have to talk to each other there has to be a communication between the builders of these two applications and this communication will lead to understanding of each other's program and building of an interface which is peculiar to application when an application. Consider there are three applications. How many such communications and work will have to be done? One to two, two to three, three to one, three. So three times problem. Two applications, one problem. Three applications, three problems. What about four? If you have four applications, one to two, one to three, one to four. Two to one you are counted. So two to two, two to three, two to four. Sorry, two to three, two to four and then three to four and then what about if you have ten applications? You will soon realize that the problem increases factorial. That is an exponential increase. So if you have n problems in general the communication is equivalent to what we call a connected graph. You have n nodes. Each node is connected to every other node. Each line represents the problem that you have to face in integrating that. So it's a factorial n problem and that is nonsense. To resolve this factorial n problem what people said is why not I prepare a central framework. It's like a ring road. So all applications are sitting separately. No application will talk directly to any other application. Every application will talk to that ring road. The interface between ring road and that application I am defining. So if the application wants to execute something and give data it must tell that ring road how that data is being given. If the application wants to execute somebody else's program it will find from that ring road how that application is going to be executed. It will give the data in its own form converted to the ring road format. The ring road will give back the data in the same format. The ring road in turn may collect the data in a different format from some other application and convert it here. This ring road conceptually is nothing but the middleware framework. So this middleware framework can either work on what we call remote procedure calls or it can work on what we call persistent messaging. Meaning even if the connection breaks it can actually maintain things. Korba was one of the earliest such piece of middleware, what we call distributed objects. Tuxedo was a system which was built on this. There are many pieces of good middleware that you see today. MQ series is one of them. Tipco is another. We are all using Tipco. So there are multiple pieces of middleware which are available now which permit you to connect to different things. Whenever you use a middleware, the legacy applications which means old applications, they are required to be integrated with new applications, they will be integrated with middleware. So take our own case. We have let's say an operational data store which is on Oracle, right? So it is a Oracle database and the data must go into it. The data that goes in of course is our own domain date. But the data has to come from branches which run COBOL systems. If suppose somebody from a portal does a registration, the data first comes to ODS and it has to go to the branch. So they are clear case of two completely different applications running on different platforms having to talk to each other. So what we have done? We have connected or integrated the Tipco middleware with our COBOL programs and we have connected the Tipco middleware with our database. Once the COBOL programs have been connected to the middleware, today it is for the purpose of feeding into the ODS. But tomorrow if that same similar kind of thing is to be fed into some other application, you don't have to do much more additional Godagiri. Where the fundamental in what should I say contact points in your program have already been exposed through Tipco. Which contact point should be exposed is the then a requirement during design phase going forward. You would have exposed only those interfaces of your COBOL programs which are relevant for feeding data into ODS or collecting data from ODS or updating transaction on some other remote branch etc. But going forward you may discover additional interfaces which may be required. What is guaranteed however once you use a middleware is you build an interface only to the intermediate middleware and nothing else. Applications across businesses pose more problems. Why? In this case for LIC the people who wrote the programs for branch and the people who wrote the programs for ODS are either the same team or they are controlled by the organizers. Complete information is available about the software. But your railway reservation system wants to influence how the bank payment gateway should affect by transaction. It has no control over the bank. The bank will say go fly a kite. Suppose railway reservation system says give me some information about your application they will say no it's confidential. So the problem is much greater there and the people who intermediate between these different organizations for integrating applications across organization have a much greater task. Traditionally this is not a new problem by the way. Traditionally this problem has been solved using enterprise data interchange or EDI. I am talking about times when nothing like middleware or anything existed and the only way was to make that factorial n kind of corresponding. So the EDI vendors made a lot of money because they were required factorial n times. So for every pair of applications they will look at this data, they will look at this data. Somehow some standardization emerged in this EDI. In fact the standardization emerges whenever you see disparate systems wanting to share similar data. One of the best examples of this standardization coming out not as a part of software system but as a part of data standardization is the mechanism of SWIFT. Have you heard SWIFT? SWIFT is the messaging system that is used by all banks in the world for any interbank transfer across borders. So dollars have to be remitted from New York to Delhi or marks have to be remitted from Kolkata to Germany. All of these transactions between different banks happens through a messaging standard called SWIFT. All security transactions that is transfer of shares, purchase of shares, sale of shares, they all happen through SWIFT. The SWIFT handbook defines message formats are hundreds of types. The appropriate message is to be used for a appropriate activity. So when somebody sends money from Europe or Australia to an old mother in India that money invariably comes through the SWIFT messaging system. SWIFT is actually a cooperative sort of the banking system itself but they are an independent commercial organization. Curiously, although the SWIFT was designed to be an interface between different banks across the world, banks within a country also find it easier to use the same SWIFT messaging to exchange information. So for securities that is stocks there is a separate manual. Today you will notice there are two depositories in India NSDL and CSDL. Between NSDL and CSDL whenever they have to exchange information they use the same SWIFT standard messaging. This is important because we are going to say that whatever is relevant for integrating applications across organizations should also be relevant for integrating applications within the organization and that is how use of the new standards will be relevant to us. The proprietary formats and protocols which existed earlier in case of EDI for example are giving rise to generalized standardized protocols which are openly available. And the culmination of this effort particularly which goes much beyond just standardization of message formats etc to the level of software standardization or software interface standardization is coming out today in the form of what we call the web-based application development standards. The service-oriented architecture notion that we had comes out of this. The new standards are XML, WSDL, UDDI we shall see these very briefly very soon. Here is quickly an example of a future transaction just to illustrate what kind of transactions you will have to plan for even though you are only LIC. This is a rather funny example but interesting to read so let's go through that. There is one fellow called Anand Deep Singh Pannu who lives in Ludhiana is a high net worth client of a stock brokerage firm. High net worth client means what? Very rich man. Anand wishes to sell 12,000 shares of Infosys on national stock exchange. Now you know why he is rich right? A lot of shares. And wants to purchase 1,000 shares of Siemens AG on Berlin exchange and 5,000 shares of Cisco on Nasdaq. He'll still be left with a lot of money agreed? So he further wants the remains of the proceeds to be disposed of as follows. So you understood this transaction that he wants. This looks like a pay from the bank and get a ticket kind of thing. So sell 12,000 shares here by 5,000, 10,000 there but he also wants the following to be done. His daughter studies in IIT Bombay so he wants to credit 50,000 rupees in her account in State Bank of India. His son is in New York and papa he has said give me some money and he wants to transfer $1,500 to his son's bank account. His wife suddenly announces that no no no I feel very uncomfortable with my daughter in Mumbai. I'm going to Mumbai so send me a whole lot of luggage and send me to Mumbai. So he has to book a wagon to transfer some of the household goods and we presume that by that time wagons can be booked online. He also wants to pay annual premium for a life policy at LIC Ludhiana. He also wants to pay a car policy premium for New India assurance in Delhi branch and if any amount still remains and I hope lot of it remains he wants to transfer it to a charitable trust to his alma mater. Naturally this Arun Deep Singh Pandu belongs to IIT Bombay so this is what he wants to do. There is nothing new in this by the way. High net worth individuals have been doing these kind of things for ages okay even five hundred years ago also people did that but people did each of these activities as a separate transaction. You sell shares in Mumbai you collect money from Mumbai. You send somebody to Berlin to buy those shares. You send a check to your daughter which she deposits in State Bank of India. That check goes back to the clearing to Ludhiana after one month she gets one. You want to book a wagon you send somebody to railway station get into haggle with that station master whatever then you book a wagon. So you did all of these things independent. What Anand Deep Singh Pandu is asking all of you is look that was old times but you guys are smart programmers. You understand modern technology. Please do something so that I can do all of this as a single transaction. After all the world has given me a single transaction the purchase of a railway ticket you're also permitting me to get a life insurance policy so permitting me to pay premium from my bank account so I can't you do all this. Realize that all of this requires integration of applications running at various places. Now suppose tomorrow netcorp comes to you and says that look I need your interface to pay the premium for one of my clients I'm not paying my premium for one of my clients through a transaction which I am going to control. Can you say no no no this is not permitted you have to enter data in this form and then only we'll take it. Then what if we do he will get go to Bajaj Allianz or somebody else. Five years ago he could have said okay I do it because there's nobody else doing it. So this is what the competition will force us to permit all of these and in fact to permit these proactively means we'll get more. But that's the business side look at the technology side that means that I must I do not know what other applications in the world would like to access me online I have to be prepared for it and in turn I have to be prepared to extract useful information from other applications which are written by others whom I do not know and which are running somewhere else. Not only that each of these applications could have an implication on my own activity which earlier I had not thought of for example imagine the netcorp has a customer relationship management system which has to automatically evaluate the portfolio net asset value of that Anand Deep Singh Pannu and is required to inform implications to Anand's car loan provided.  They always take a loan from a bank to buy a car only the middle class people purchase things from one savings you know the rich people purchase things from future man anyway that's a separate philosophy however that Mercedes which cost let's say crore rupees has been given to Anand Deep Singh Pannu against that car loan because he's supposed to have this net network. Suppose he sells 10,000 shares of infosys and that's the only thing he had then he is not solvent anymore. Now that information has to be automatically updated by the netcorp internal system and that NAV has to be informed as a standing instruction to the car loan provider and preferably this should happen automatically online at least this is something which can happen tomorrow. Okay this guy will not fall down. Look at other implications look at the trust that IIT Bombay it has to execute a standing instruction to forward different percentages of the donation for identifying activities also copying the action to relevant professors and deeds. Let me explain why such a thing is necessary. Suppose I have a donation account and from that donation account I give scholarships to people I support research or whatever and let's say I had met Anand six months ago and I told him that look I have these five bright research scholars okay but they want some support because their parents are saying there's no fun in doing PhD at this miserable stipend you better do a job. So we have a scheme by which if external donor supports will give them as much scholarship as they get in salary outside. So would you please help me you'll ask me how much do you require is about sixty thousand sixty lakh rupees or something like that. So all right Fadak I don't have money now but whenever I get it I will give it to you and we forget that. Six months later when he executes this transaction okay he knows that he has transferred money to Bombay suppose he calls me in the night or whatever saying so Fadak are you happy now and suppose I have no clue about it what will I tell him depending upon whether I have had fights with my wife that day or not I will say I'm happy or I'm not happy but I will have no clue about when I tell him that I'm completely ignorant on what he is talking about do you think he will be interested in coming back to IIT Bombay in future. So what should IIT Bombay have? IIT Bombay should have a linkage that whenever that netcorp application running transfer the funds to IIT Bombay system the IIT Bombay system automatically executes some kind of a stored procedure or it triggers an event which says okay this is the money that has come out of these 2.5 crores which have come to IIT 60 lakhs are meant for Professor Fadak students it should send me an email it should send me an SMS what should that SMS contain not just information that Anand 60 lakhs are like it should say these are the five students who are eligible to receive the extra stipend and this is Anand's mobile number what is the purpose I should call Anand proactively and I should say Anand thank you he may not even realize because he's not sure his transaction has executed he will ask me why I said well you have done such a great thing 60 lakh rupees have come incidentally these are the five students who are going to be eternally indebted to you how how nice you will feel this kind of action and triggering of action has to happen with modern applications so when you talk of a multi-tier distributed application you are actually talking about ensuring not only seamless integration with external applications but ensuring a richer functionality within take this Alice's case there's a payment made in Lodhiana he's a high net worth individual probably buying a five crore policy is a huge chunk of premium that he has paid how long does it take for that information to come to your treasury today for investment decision today's 48 hours for 48 hours loss of interest on the investment how much is the money and sigma that 48 hours is a generic thing so it moves throughout the time interval so throughout the year you take the total sum that you have invested you are lost interest for two days on the total sum so humongous waste no foreign investment department of these multinational's permit that so typical what should be the mechanism the money comes there to close up is a whatever you have a filter saying anything about this whatever the system automatically calculates this money comes there the information doesn't go only for accounting purposes there is a filter which calculates that out of this premium so much money is investable and that information goes to the trading section in your treasury department in exactly five seconds flat so the money is invested on the same day this may not happen even tomorrow because this conceptualization is not happening even today so you realize how you have to prepare your application functionality for tomorrow by thinking ahead of time okay I hope you appreciate this point just an example but a very very real example the web services model forms the crux of system integration today the application integration and the background for these web services model is the normal services which are provided consider this I want to buy some sorry for my wife or furniture for home or a television or something like that how do I discover where these things are available typically I discover these through advertisement or by looking at yellow pages or by looking at notices okay who gives these advertisements who makes entries into yellow pages or who makes these notices the service providers who are the service provider those who sell the goods people who sell TVs advertise those who sell TVs advertise in yellow pages also so my my address shop address is this I put this this this kind of TV that's the first information about the service so I can know what is the contact point I can know what is the modus operandi what time to time that what morning to evening that fellow is available which day is holiday I know what the pricing is all the information related to that service I am discovering without talking to that person and I am discovering it through the announcements that has been made on the yellow pages or something what are yellow pages yellow pages are nothing but something like an intermediate broker you can think it is like a registry so imagine that all service providers or good providers are going to that registry and registering with them I sell TV I sell pins I sell whatever computers I sell televisions whatever one so they all register all the end users who want to use these services they don't go hunting around individual they go to the registry saying do you have any TV fellow do you have any this fellow do you have any this fellow if he is there how do I use that service if such a registry is extremely useful in conventional life why can't we build a model for interaction between applications around the same notion what is the notion the provider publishes in the directory and user subscribes to that direct I am subscriber of yellow pages so every time I'll get a number so publishing and subscribing are two fundamentally important thing somebody publishes others use users will subscribe the users now have a discovery mechanism so when the user discovers a service that user wants he will send a request to the provider and the services provided by the so please notice that the registry is not doing anything about execution of a transaction between the registry is providing information ultimately is the end user who goes to the provider as for service gets the sun if this model the simple and elegant model works so well across the world for many services why can't I use it for my actual application integration this is what has resulted into three standards which together comprise the backbone of service oriented architecture the first one is called UDDI or universal description discovery and integration UDDI is a new standard that has emerged it's a platform independent XML based registry for businesses worldwide to list themselves on the internet and this is designed specifically designed to manage business and service related information there's a taxonomy or a classification of the service just like you have yellow green and white pages you have yellow pages green pages white pages so UDDI now is emerging as a standard for registry of your applications what functionality applications have so imagine your cobalt programs in the front end okay publish or register in a registry saying I offer these services it is not sufficient to say I can collect premium I can print receipt or I can update this data for this customer it is also important to say how I do it that information is not directly available in the registry registry will only say this service is provided so you have another standard for that this is some more information about UDDI by the way there are public registries which are run by IBM Microsoft and X methods these are public registries are being closed down but private registries for use amongst a close user group so there are UDDI nodes across the world or you can have them across the organization these nodes excess and manipulate only UDDI data and each node has a set of application programmer interfaces so for any application I know how to register my service or my my program with that particular registry so this is basically for inter UDDI communication also there are API as a fairly advanced state now accepted as a standard word over we talked about service being registered but we also need to describe that service in which way my customer address could be changed in which way my payment transaction for premium could be received and updated this information I don't want him to call my cobalt program that I will do but what information is required for me to call that cobalt program and how he could invoke it without my personal intervention is to be described this description comes out of WSDL is another standard is actually web services description language so this is a service description language this is a XML description on how the service is created the service is described service is registered how the services discovered and how the service is invoked in fact you will use WSDL to prepare specification for creation of the service describing the service and registering it with UDDI also once you register with UDDI any user of that service will invoke that service using the description that you are given in the invocation how that user discovers is also described here fairly comprehensive standard and in a very mature state already typical XML elements of this WDL we have not discussed XML I presume that you will be familiar with it you are all familiar with HTML okay so HTML is about a markup language which describes how the how a document will appear on the screen XML or extended markup language is about semantics of what appears so in an HTML if some strings are there some picture is there some values are there the program is unaware of the significance of those values for example if somewhere you say Fartex policy premium 1,252 rupees 1,252 will appear as a number but HTML will not be able to understand that this is premium for policy XML goes one step further and describes the semantics of the contents of your document so is an extended markup language it has now become absolutely the medium of exchange of information between two disparate system in fact if I want to send some data to you and I have a cobalt program data you have completely different fox pro or database whatever whatever I actually take my data out convert it into XML send it to you once I give it in XML you are able to decipher which field means what and you are able to put it in the reformatted in the way that you want and use it so XML has become something like a middle where for data something like a middle where for data and XML is now further extended many schemas are defined using XML and so on so forth suffice it to say that web services description language is an important standard which has emerged which is used to do all of these okay so there are these are there are special XML elements even if you don't know the XML you can see what all WSDL permits you to define it can it can define types messages operations port is actually a notion in a network paradigm so you do programming for network that when you have to write something onto a server which is at a remote place you actually open a socket and socket has two ports this is a programming convention those of you have done network programming would know that but you can define port type you can define binding give the port number and give the service specific and it's an extensive set again there are very good textbooks actually available on this there's one very good book written by some researcher in the Infosys set labs in fact that book may be very nice for you to have let's see next course when we do you might want to have that book this is a book on web service and the example he gives is a large mainframe cobalt legacy application and how in that application web services have been used and described using these standards and how they can be connected to a completely different new front-end system


Hey guys, welcome back to coming in TV the only place on YouTube where all key culture collides I'm Shannon and today on the show. We're gonna be taking a look at a Ghostbusters haul Today I went to my local Walmart picked up this Ghostbusters 35th anniversary box It's a mystery box as you can see here. I Also got in the mail today Ghostbusters the original novelization of one and two I've heard people on the Ghostbusters fan groups Say that this incorporates the supernatural spectacular the Ghostbusters novelization rather than the actual original movie adaptation The supernatural spit spooktacular included deleted scenes that weren't incorporated into the film itself Went into more depth on The back stories of the Ghostbusters and whatnot But anyway, I got this in the mail brand new It actually came a day early, which I'm very surprised about can't wait to read it There's the synopsis All right Now let's dig into this box As you can see I have already opened it, but I've left everything Packaged inside it is very similar to the other Mystery box which came with the proton pack statue And stay puff marshmallow man and the water bottle and all that However, it is smaller. This is only $20 at Walmart. And As you can see already it comes with Ghostbusters socks Very nice Can't wait to try them on it comes with Ghostbusters coaster set Open this up Winston Egon and Venkman As you can see these are done in the same style as the Photo print which came with the other Ghostbusters mystery box Exactly the same. I believe the pictures are even the exact same size too So that's pretty cool Good Put these back in here for right now. It is cork as you can see these are glass coasters drinking cup Coasters whatever you want to call we have an ecto one air freshener Pretty cool.  It's pretty cool. I could I could use some some Vegetation in this office We'll see Fill it up with dirt maybe put some I don't know something in there Then Go and lower this down so you guys can get more of a straight-on view now normally I do put review videos Collectible reviews on the come again collectibles channel However, I'm starting to second-guess myself about creating those channels. I come again collectibles and come again vinyls Because if it weren't for those two channels, which really don't have very many subscribers right now I Would be able to put out content for you guys On a more regular basis Let me know in the comments below if you like me doing reviews on this channel or if you'd like to keep them separated and And put over on the other channel again, that's come again collectibles and Come again vinyls or Bunko pops and whatnot So yeah, let me know that in the comments below Anyway, let's go ahead and take a look I mean headed It's made out of a plastic not bad can't wait to figure out where I'm gonna put them So yeah, something else and I got a while back that I haven't been able to Film Really as you know, I got the the other 35th anniversary set Which came with this proton pack statue Says it's made out of vinyl, but it doesn't feel like vinyl it feels solid And then you guys saw the picture and it came with this Slimer water bottle pretty cool And yes, that is me as a kid It also came with a state of marshmallow man stuffed Goal can't remember what else it came with guys It did come with I think this is the one it came with This lunchbox insulated it looks like a ghost trap And then something I got separately Was this one I Had actually got before I got the box set which my wife actually got me for my birthday And this is just like a shaving bag. I've got some stuff in here now some Paracord and whatnot But I got this at Game stop on sale Because that game stops is going out of business pretty cool as you guys saw the Film adaptation It's in pretty rough shape but There's that Comes with Pictures from the movie. It's pretty cool Photo Make good poster As well as this I thought this was the novelization for Ghostbusters 2. It was not It was a kid's book basically As you can see here, it's still a nice interesting collectible. So there's that and It also came with That other box that came with this Notepad You can see It's got the a gozer kind of design goes there's a palace or whatever you want to call it pretty cool and then Something else I got separately Which we're gonna we're gonna raise this back up so I can show you Is and my kids and I have been playing This one Ghostbusters the board game So it's really cool actually it plays a lot like the Aliens board game Which It's currently out of print but I've shown us playing it on this channel before Pretty cool. I usually play as bankman. I do plan on eventually painting the at least the Ghostbuster pieces and stay puffed because As you can see The Ghostbusters are just a solid color Venkman is red Ray is yellow Winston purple and Egon is orange So there's that And it's a really fun game I'm glad I got it we have not managed to We have not been playing the other two yet. Here's the instruction book for the first one Field manual whatever you want to call it for the second one and For the blackout sex Here's blackout This is an expansion pack for the first one. I believe maybe it's An expansion pack for the whole thing. I can't remember. We have not began playing that yet. So pretty cool and I Know the first one only came with the original for Ghostbusters However This one Actually, I think this one is kind of a standalone kind of an expansion pack because it comes with the IDW Ghostbusters all of them all eight So that's cool. I Don't want to say because there's more of them the rookie. I don't think was included in this And I don't think that came with the actual Figure pieces either But here's two Which comes with? Vigo a ton of others. I think this one even came with Louis Tully in Ghostbusters Uniform, but I could be wrong So yeah, there's that maybe one of these days If you guys want us to we'll film game sessions For Ghostbusters or Ghostbusters 2 or blackout we do eventually plan on getting all of the Ghostbusters board games So, yeah, let me know in the comments below if you want If you want me to keep putting Review videos on here or if you want to keep them separate Let me know the only reason I did transfer The review videos over to their own channel was because I was worried that review if you guys saw too many review videos getting uploaded that it turned you off turn the Subscribers off that came because of my history and organs videos so yeah, let me know in the comments below and Talk to you guys again real soon. Take care If you enjoyed that video, make sure you hit the subscribe button right there So you stay up to date on all things geek culture Also, go ahead and check out one of these two playlists on the side for more videos just like the one you just watched I'm Shannon for Comic-Con TV the only place on YouTube where all geek culture collides. Take care geeks


What's going on everyone? Joe for Jaspies. Doing a recap video for 2023, Tops Chrome, Baseball, 8-Box Jumbo, Pick Your Team 2 on Fanatics Live on Tuesday, August the 15th. Thanks everybody for making this happen, appreciate you. I think this ended up, this was a Jason and Michael night and I think from what I heard from the other studio, I think this turned out to be a really nice break. So here are the parallels first. Nice Michael Brantley Pink to $3.99. A Speedster Eschewary Ruiz, Black Girl, Casas Refractor, Carol Volpe, Kunya Jr. The Gunner Henderson's a Refractor, Russian Kunya Jr. Refractor, nice. They're doing that MVP buyback program again, nice Outman. Two Outman Refractors, he had a rip tonight. There's that Otani, he's been hitting well. Nolan Gorman, more Akunya Juniors, more Rushmans, Yoshitas, Volpe's, Akunya's, Carol's, Volpe Refractor, Riley Green Refractor, James Outman Prism. Yeah a lot of great stuff here. Here are the autos. I think the autos are even better. Should I do some YouTube clickbaiting? Stick around till the end. You won't believe what we pulled in this jumbo case break. There's Bryce Turing, 250, Miguel Vargas to 50, the Relic, Alex Bregman, Caleb Hamilton, Jeremy Pena Future Stars, Corbin Carroll, Purple, Speckle to 299. But wait, another Corbin Carroll autograph, 16 out of 50, Gold Wave and another rib for the Dodgers. Outman just scored. What a break. There you go gang, that's the recap video for jumbo case. Pick your team two on Fanatics Live on a Tuesday, the 15th. We'll see you next week. Break on Fanatics Live seven nights a week. Check us out.


Construction that's how you know you're still alive thing. You can count on in life. There's actually two.  I've no construction.  Why did I signal for that? I signaled to go into them. Whatever better safe than sorry At least they use my signals Why not? Let's just keep up the north of the city now This is how we seven headed north still a four lane divided here because of the Stony Mountain Pories tons of gravel trucks tons of gravel trucks coming down here. Huh speak of the devil here comes to right now You got a catch me first, but got a catch me first shouldn't be too hard I'm governed at a hundred kilometers an hour.  It's not my fault. It's not my choice This guy can go a little faster than me and these guys are the reason there's a four lane divided here Four lane divided goes all the way up to the where they turn off to go into Stonewall the quarries there And there's always just tons and tons of dump trucks going down here And then it goes to a two-lane right after that and traffic gets cut like he's got those fancy lift axles So two of his axles on that trailer fancy I took the motorcycle to work today. It was a little bit of a chilly ride a nice ride this afternoon It's not supposed to get too hot today only like 17 Celsius. So it's It's really weird it's like July and August switched weather for this year usually we have you know Cooling in July and then August is our dry month But since we're on the drought this year all of July There was barely one drop of rain and now August is here and suddenly now the weather's like, okay Now I want to rain now that all the farmers are already harvesting now. It's time to rain So the stuff I am picking up here is going to Norristown Pennsylvania any of you from Norristown, Pennsylvania Man, I miss going to see all those places. How you guys doing out there? Pennsylvania was always fun to go trucking through such a beautiful state You just have to be very careful. Don't get lost and don't end up on one of those windy twisty two-lane roads in Pennsylvania Chances are you're not getting out Once you're in there, you're gone There's no place to turn around. There's probably a low bridge and there's tons of traffic So you can't back up So find yourself on one of those roads just throw in the towel. It was good and start walking home I'm just kidding, but seriously, you don't want to get lost in Pennsylvania Make sure you know your route if you have to deliver down these little two-lane roads and stuff Go over your route on Google Maps. I'm sure all of you do this already, right? Sometimes I run into these truckers that they ask me these questions about like, you know finding an address Questions that can easily be answered on their own if they just take their smartphone and type in the address into Google Maps So I guess there's still people out there that don't realize how handy that tool can be So go on Google Maps go on Bing Maps, whatever maps you want to use your GPS and Double-check the route like pull over stop and take a close look at the route where you're going You don't want to end up on a dead-end road or on a two-lane road where you can't turn around And then when you do go down these narrow roads to get to your customer your shipper or your receiver You definitely don't want to miss your turn because if you miss your turn It might be an hour before you can find somewhere to turn around if at all it might happen. Who knows? I remember that clearly so Go and make sure you know where your turn is look at it on Google Maps go on Google Street view take a look around Zoom in so you can see what the buildings look like around where your turn is and then look at the driveway Where you're gonna turn into so that when you go and see it actually in real life, and you actually get there You already recognize it, and you don't miss your turn Pennsylvania always makes me think of these narrow tiny little windy roads and Always make sure you know where you're going But Pennsylvania great beautiful state One of these days I'm gonna ask them if I can pull one of these loads out myself You know so I'm going to Norristown, Pennsylvania if I could just do one trip every now and then you know Just to get that that highway bug Satisfied I have the itch to hit the highway all the time, and I just I can't do it full-time And I can't constantly be gone. We're trying to start a family, and I really like this position where I'm in right now It's working out really well for me. I'm very happy But every once in a while, you know, I just want to hit the road of that I'd love to go to Norristown, Pennsylvania, but it won't be me this time coming out there But you can keep an eye out for our roll tight. It'll be coming there. It's a green roll tight It's actually a rental, but We're picking it up today. It delivers Sometime next week who knows when The highway hours and 43 minutes of remaining drive time. Well, thank you. I didn't ask but thank you for the information I didn't ask for Bossy Let's get this roll tight open so they can load it we are Brakes just in here though Oh, no, I did that last time too It's kind of picky and finicky. I'll load it up here.  All right, so the faster we get this freight back to the yard The faster we can combine it with whatever else it's going with It's going to Pennsylvania and it needs to go now. I don't know if it needs to go now I don't really know when it's due there. That's but I need to get it back as fast as possible. Obviously Good to know. Thank you very much. I didn't ask See it's kicked me into driving now It knows it knows when you're sleeping. It knows when you're awake It knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.   Sorry better view. Well, I'm on the bike I don't want the camera to go It was supposed to be 17. Oh, it's 18 here now Yeah, it sure doesn't feel like 18 that way. I don't have to have those you're seeing right here Money is the host trailer that I was in here Hey guys, you ever did you miss me? How about you Frank you feeling better?