It’s just extraordinary to me what a boon the PS3 is to the scientific community.
“Overall, a single PS3 performs better than the highest-end desktops available and compares to as many as 25 nodes of an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. And there is still tremendous scope left for extracting more performance through further optimization. More on that soon.”
http://gravity.phy.umassd.edu/ps3.html
Tags: ps3, cluster computing, gravity
Just to add to the confusion:
“On Standard-Def DVD, there are essentially only two competing sound formats to choose from: Dolby Digital or DTS.[...]The reality of the situation is that both Dolby Digital and DTS are capable of delivering very good, sometimes even exceptional sound quality on DVD.[...]The advent of Blu-ray and HD DVD has brought a dramatic increase in picture quality from Standard Definition to High Definition.[...]High Definition video deserves High Definition audio to go with it.”
And thus begins the litany of the seven different options for audio tracks on HD discs, and how they’re supported on HD DVD vs. Blu-ray.
It is simply great. Post after post is just captivating, interesting, and relevant if you have anything to do with tech these days.
Go read that for a while:
Tags: marc andreessen, technology, blogs
“This work began on the day when we had made a extra big candy like a bowling ball by ourselves.
Since that day, we had been licking the candy day after day for about six months.’
I’m extremely proud of the Confabb site, and it’s nice to see it evolving past the limited feature set we were able to squeeze in before launch. There’s a LOT more great stuff coming. The development team has been working very hard for the past few months, and a bunch of new social networking features went live today.
From the press release:
New Logged-in Homepage
Log in and check out ‘your new homepage.’ Above ‘your conferences’ is the new ‘your network,’ a bird’s-eye view of bulletin board messages from within your network (more on that below), your online Confabb connections and any messages sent to you by those within the Confabb community. Click on ‘My Account’ to see the full range of search and connection possibilities. Post your own messages for everyone to see on “your bulletin board,” which will be broadcast globally—Confabb pings no fewer than 68 of the major alerting services—or have a one-on-one discussion with other Confabb members. You can also see what others are talking about and invite new people, either from within or outside of Confabb, to join your network.
New Search!
There are two new forms of search on the site (you’ll all remember that the search function was Confabb’s Achilles Heel when we launched). There is now an advanced search for conferences which drills down into multiple parameters such as location, keyword, location, category and when the show date starts and stops. That nullifies one of the biggest knocks we got at launch. People will love it. We’ve also added a “User Search” which lets Confabb users search for and connect with other Confabb community members. Of course that sets us up for connecting people within the community and that’s the best part.
MY Connections (or “buddy lists”)
Just as you keep a list of people with home you correspond daily, the “My Connections” tab is your gateway to the personal contacts you’ve made within the Confabb community–people with whom you’ve connected before and want to stay in touch with going forward. This is your personal network; friends, colleagues and other contacts whose whereabouts and doings you want to follow as they prepare for and an attend events. Attendees can view a list of other conference participants, check out their profiles, invite them into their personal network and email them directly through Confabb’s personal messaging feature.
Personal Messaging
This is the Confabb community’s personal email service. We respect everyone’s right to privacy so messaging within the community is handled by us; simply use the “contact” link to jot a note to the person of your choice and we’ll send the message to the email that person has registered within our system. Responses are handled by us as well so your information is never revealed unless you choose to do that outside of the community.
Media
This is cool. “Media” is just that: everything that interests you from across the web, from text-based articles and links to photos, RSS feeds for breaking information and even full blown videos. The content comes from the web’s leading sources of open information, including Technorati, Google and Yahoo!, Feedster, Flickr and YouTube. Simply click the “Media” tab at the top of the navigation bar and find information on just about anything by searching for the subject’s name or the subject’s tag in the desired content source. The Media tab lets you experience the conference through everyone else’s eyes, and they experience it through content you create, find and share with them.
Bulletin Boards
Confabb now provides all of its users with their own personal blogs, or bulletin boards, from which they can share their thoughts, opinions on the issues and experiences. This is the community member’s space; it’s intensely individual, consisting of the member’s content and comments from their readers. People can also read the musing of others within their network by clicking on the “Bulletin Board Posts within My Network” tab, which shows what others within their network are saying too.
Each board–the individual blog and the personal network bulletin board–are completely searchable by the major search engines. You will build traffic from within the community as well as anyone from around the globe with an interest in what you have to say!
Tags: confabb, social networking, conferences
Well, that’s a nice start. Good for them.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/03/google_to_anony.html
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/taking-steps-to-further-improve-our.html
http://216.239.57.110/blog_resources/google_log_retention_policy_faq.pdf
Exciting! — Confabb is hosting the site for Personal Democracy Forum 2007.
The science of politics is changing, and these are the people who are doing interesting things about it.
You can browse information about the conference (news, events, sessions, speakers, and more), and register from the site. You can use your existing Confabb login, if you have one (OpenID is coming, but not yet).
(Disclosure: I’m one of the co-founders of Confabb.)
Tags: pdf2007, personal democracy forum, politics, pdf, confabb
Congress changed Daylight Savings Time, and the changes take effect this weekend.
Most Windows and Mac machines will auto update if allowed to do so. If you have a unix box, you probably already know about this.
Don’t forget to also update your Palm and other handhelds that are DST-aware.
If you have a network-aware Palm device, you can do this over the air, with this:
http://www.palm.com/us/support/downloads/dst_palmos.html#ota
Tags: dst, daylightsavings, palm
I’m probably a bit behind in hearing about this, but very cool nonetheless.
http://themachackers.com/2006/12/19/zfs-on-mac-os-x-105-a-closer-look/
Tags: apple, leopard, filesystem, zfs
Jim Gray, an influential computer scientist, is missing at sea. Amazon has provided satellite imagery and is using the distributed Amazon Mechanical Turk system to enlist the public to sift through the massive amounts of data to help find him.
This is pretty extraordinary.
Tags: jim gray, amazon mechanical turk, lost
This is a NYT article about an Iraqi show which seems to be called “Hurry Up, He’s Dead”.
The description is painful to read, a horrible ironic reminder of the awfulness:
“In a recent episode, the host, Saad Khalifa, reported that Iraq’s Ministry of Water and Sewage had decided to change its name to simply the Ministry of Sewage — because it had given up on the water part.”
“Mr. Sudani, the writer, said he has lost hope for his country. Iraq’s leaders are incompetent, he said. He fears that services will never be restored. The American experiment in democracy, he said, was born dead.
All anyone can do, he said, is laugh.”
Via Perry Metzger:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/24/world/middleeast/24show.html?ex=1319342400&en=1bf22396b7ede7a3&ei=5090&
partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
Tags: iraq, daily show, awful, nyt, humor
This looks VERY promsing.
Open source, cross-platform, extensible media player based on Mozilla to browse, collect, and play web and local media files. Sure.
With an open source monitoring program - Dorgem.
http://www.simplehelp.net/2006/09/27/how-to-use-your-pc-and-webcam-as-a-motion-detecting-and-recording-s
ecurity-camera/
Tags: warrantless wiretapping
Bravo.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1869074,00.html
Tags: shaming search engines, wikipedia, china, censoring, not
Aaron Swartz, as part of his bid to join the Wikimedia board, has done some fascinating research into the posting habits of Wikipedia users. He’s come up with some patterns of how entries get created:
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia
Tags: aaronsw, wikipedia, social dynamics
‘Please consider releasing eight to twelve core fonts into the public domain. The amount of revenue lost from a small core set of fonts surely can’t have a significant impact on Adobe’s bottom line. And the gesture of releasing such a set into the public domain would have many positive ripple effects for years to come.’
http://www.designbyfire.com/?p=30
Tags: typography, open source, john warnock, adobe
[Update: I've been informed that John Warnock is no longer the CEO of Adobe.]
This is a serious breach of user privacy, and I can’t imagine there won’t be lawsuits over this.
Either they didn’t think this through, or this is the best way they could think of to raise a public outrage.
http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200608/msg00027.html
Tags: privacy. data security, search, aol
From Eve Felder, CIA dean, someone who’s spent time actually feeding the ducks.
“It was an extremely gentle and intimate experience. The animal does not have a gag reflex. They always waddled away perfectly happy and full and ready for a nap.”
This is a great video of the ZDNet Executive Editor explaining what’s wrong with DRM.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKI_w_VBoTQ&search=d.r.m.%20crap
There’s something really important in here about designing community.
And also, it’s about Snakes on a Plane.
http://www.esquire.com/features/articles/2006/060706_mfe_August_06_Klosterman.html
Tags: snakes on a plane, populism, community
“This is a HOWTO that describes how to take a stock RedHat9 system and convert it to Gentoo, remotely over ssh and while it is running.”
http://www.darkridge.com/~jpr5/doc/rh-gentoo.html
Tags: gentoo, redhat, conversion, badass
Seems like a useful article from Popular Mechanics on some common things that can go wrong with HD.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/television/2826881.html
Tags: troubleshoot, HD, popular mechanics
A Chinese company is claiming to have produced software that will seamlessly integrate with Skype.
http://www.voipwiki.com/blog/?p=16
Gliffy is an online diagram maker (a la Visio).
You all know how I feel about diagrams. This rocks!
Cory Doctorow switches to Ubuntu, following Mark Pilgrim:
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/06/29/mark_pilgrims_list_o.html
Tags: cory doctorow, apple, linux, mark pilgrim, ubuntu, switch
Not just a luminary in science fiction, but also a guiding light on free ebooks.
John Gruber has written this great piece analyzing the rationale behind Mark Pilgrim’s switch from OSX to Linux and the critics of the argument.
There are some truths in there:
“Telling Pilgrim that he’s making a mistake because Ubuntu doesn’t have as refined or cohesive a UI as Mac OS X is like telling someone who is switching from a Chevy Tahoe to a Toyota Prius that he’s not going to have as much cargo room. He knows it.”
“If your reaction to Pilgrim’s announcement was a snap judgment that he’s lost it, or that he’s being an asshole who’s just looking for attention as the guy who switched away from the Mac just at the time when it (the Mac) seems poised to become more popular than ever, or that he’s an open source fanatic who just can’t be reasoned with or trusted — are you sure that the zealotry at play is his?”
“I’m deeply suspicious of Mac users who claim to be perfectly happy with Mac OS X. Real Mac users, to me, are people with much higher standards, impossibly high standards, and who use Macs not because they’re great, but because they suck less than everything else. Pilgrim, to me, is a quintessential Mac user in that regard; and what he’s doing is wondering if maybe things might suck less somewhere else.”
I find myself thinking the same thoughts often as I struggle with switching my desktop away from Windows to Linux. I’ve done it in the past, but the simple fact is that there are things on Windows that need in order to get my work done that don’t exist on Linux yet. Someday. I highly recommend reading the whole thing.
http://daringfireball.net/2006/06/and_oranges
Tags: mark pilgrim, john gruber, switch, linux, ubuntu, mac, osx
Instead of corporate logos, they leave behind pretty floral patterns.
http://www.gnr8.biz/product_info.php?products_id=182
Tags: coffee, cups, coffee cups, rings, logos, floral, pattern, lucent
A while back, I started a Flickr group called “The Shot Behind the Shot”. There aren’t many photos in it, but I like them all.
These are the rules for pictures in the group:
Every photograph tells a story. Some photographs capture a photographer trying to tell a story, and in doing so tell a completely different story.
This group is for those different stories.
Please be encouraged to add comments about why you felt compelled to capture the photographer capturing something else and what that means to you.
All shots must 1) have another photographer in the shot, 2) also include at least some of the subject of that photographer’s shot (no pictures of just photographers, and no pictures where you are the other photographer’s subject unless they otherwise meet the qualifications), and 3) tell a story different from the one that the photographer is telling. If the shot does not show what the other photographer is taking a picture of, this is the wrong group for it. Gratuitous pictures of public asses and/or nudity are acceptable, if they meet these qualifications. However, pictures may be arbitrarily deleted from the pool without comment at the discretion of the admins. Keep it tasteful and interesting. You have been warned.
Some sort of canonical list of bad 80s videos on YouTube.
http://www.milinkito.com/los80.php
Tags: 80s, videos, iwantmymtv, youtube, totally