LastFM increases its coolness and raises the bar with charts you can make from your account to put into your site, like this:
pulled right from my profile, and available in many different flavours:
Cool-ness!
There was a report on the radio this morning about a European (read EU blighted) search engine ‘Quaero’ to be set up as an alternative to Google. After googling around I found, typically for BBQ, that this was old news dressed up in mouton clothing.
Anyway, the idea of an EU-centric search engine to rival google almost made me choke on my breakfast – until recently the EU website had the single worst search tool I’ve ever seen online (It is now marginally better, and almost useful).
The reason why there is not a ‘Google equivalent’ is that whereas US taxes, financial regulations and competitive research programmes have not discriminated against startup companies almost every equivalent piece of work/employment legislation coming from the EU runs counter to small and new companies. All the blustering of Chirac (whose announcement it was that BBQ relayed) will not change this if he adheres to the typical EU top down imposing of ‘solutions’.
The DaytonaTM data management system is used by AT&T to solve a wide spectrum of data management problems. For example, Daytona is managing over 312 terabytes of data in a 7×24 production data warehouse whose largest table contains over 743 billion rows as of Sept 2005. Indeed, for this database, Daytona is managing over 1.924 trillion rows; it could easily manage more but we ran out of data.
Daytona’s architecture is based on translating its high-level query language CymbalTM (which includes SQL as a subset) completely into C and then compiling that C into object code. The system resulting from this architecture is fast, powerful, easy to use and administer, reliable and open to UNIX tools. In particular, two forms of data compression plus robust horizontal partitioning and effective SPMD parallelization enable Daytona to handle terabytes with ease. Fast, large-scale in-memory operations are supported by in-memory tables and scalar and tuple-valued multi-dimensional associative arrays.
Daytona offers all the essentials of data management including a high-level query language, data dictionary, B-tree indexing, locking, transactions, logging, and recovery. Users are pleased with Daytona’s speed, its powerful query language, its ability to easily manage large amounts of data in minimal space, its simplicity, its ease of administration, and its openness to other tools. In particular, Daytona supports SQL, Perl DBI, and JDBC.
[…]
http://www.research.att.com/projects/daytona/
Astonishing. None of this is ‘secret’ as such; they say their largest single table has 743 Billion rows. What they fail to disclose is what is in those tables. They leave it to you to ask (or not) just what the hell are you keeping in those tables?
And who prompted the NSA that this data was being kept and could be used as a ‘security’ asset? Did AT&T hint that they would be willing to sell access to this treasure trove to the NSA?
Have they made a mysqlhotcopy of this database for other agencies to sift through?
What other telecoms companies have this type of facility?
A friend brought this preview of a game to my attention that has blown me away and considering that I’m not really much of a games player, thats saying alot.
The basis of the game is evolution [oh yes, the ID crowd will love this!!]. You begin as a single cell lifeform, eating bits of food until you reach the stage where you can reproduce and lay an ‘egg’. At this stage you can select what direction to evolve by choosing body parts which determine what you can eat, how you can defend yourself when attacked by foes, kill your prey or increase mobility, thus opening different paths to evolve throughout the game. The game enviroment also evolves according to the choices you make. Pure emergent game play.
This really excites me as I don’t like the main stratergies of what most games are built on: you hold a gun and kill everything in sight or you organise armies on an overview level to conquer and kill everything in sight.
What I also like about this game is that it is a different mental challenge and so will create and reinforce different neural pathways in the minds of the people who play it. For too long, the vast majority of games have been about annihilation and so instill/install that the best method to respond to a situation is ‘KILL! KILL! KILL!’. It is only games like The Sims, et al, that through emergent based gaming systems, that provoke a different mental response to situations. Build, sustain and evolve rather than destroy and conquer.
I’m tingling through the thought of how software programming has evolved so that games like this are now a possibility. I have been since reading Steven Johnson’s book ‘Emergence’. (thanks for that one Anthony!).
There is this 30 minute preview video with running commentary describing gameplay and possibilties of evolution, etc on video.google. The official site is here:
Did I say I was excited about this?
I had a phone interview with Google today. I took notes; some of the questions they asked were interesting. We were allowed to ask questions. The interviewer didn’t ask many questions in response to my answers, except to occasionally say “interesting”. There’s almost certainly more than one answer to each of these, and a few are probably wrong answers or could be improved in some way; I only include my answers for comparison. Any intermediate questions that I asked for clarification or otherwise have been omitted.
Without further ado, a few of the more interesting ones:
Q: “You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?”
(my answer): Take off all my clothes, wedge them between the blades and the floor to prevent it from turning. Back up against the edge of the blender until the electric motor overheats and burns out. Using the notches etched in the side for measuring, climb out. If there are no such notches or they’re too far apart, retrieve clothes and make a rope to hurl myself out.
My answer: go down to the base of the blades and duck. Mixer blades in blenders normally have a gap underneath them, and in some blenders, the blades are curved. You could survive for a long time crouched down there. With your fingers in your ears.
Q: “How would you find out if a machine’s stack grows up or down in memory?”
(my answer): Instantiate a local variable. Call another function with a local. Look at the address of that function and then compare. If the function’s local is higher, the stack grows away from address location 0; if the function’s local is lower, the stack grows towards address location 0. (If they’re the same, you did something wrong!)
My answer: The last time I programmed in Assembler was 1979.
Q: “Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.”
(my answer): A database is a way of organizing information. It’s like a genie who knows where every toy in your room is. Instead of hunting for certain toys yourself and searching the whole room, you can ask the genie to find all your toy soldiers, or only X-Men action figures, or only race cars — anything you want.
My answer: A database is like a pack of Top Trumps in its plastic box. Instead of Gumball Cars, Fast Boats or other Top Trumps stuff, you can make up your own deck. You can then do all kinds of Top Trump like things, comparing cards and stuff like that.
Q: “How many gas stations would you say there are in the United States?”
(my answer): A business doesn’t stick around for long unless it makes a profit. Let’s assume that all gas stations in the US are making at least some profit over the long run. Assume that the number of people who own more than one car is negligibly small relative to the total American population. Figure that 20% of people are too young to drive a car, another 10% can’t drive because of disability or old age, 5% of people use public transportation or carpool, another 5% choose not to drive, and another 5% of the cars are inventory sitting in lots or warehouses that a dealership owns but which no one drives.
There’s about 280 million people in the US; subtracting 50%, that means there’s about 140 million automobiles and 140 million drivers for them. The busiest city or interstate gas stations probably get a customer pulling in about twice a minute, or about 120 customers per hour; a slower gas station out in an agrarian area probably sees a customer once every 10 or 15 minutes, or about 4 customers per hour. Let’s take a weighted average and suppose there’s about one customer every 90 seconds, or about 40 customers an hour. Figuring a fourteen-hour business day (staying open from 7 AM to 9 PM), that’s about 560 customers a day.
If the average gas station services 560 customers a day, then there are 250,000 gas stations in the US. This number slightly overstates the true number of gas stations because some people are serviced by more than one gas station. [Actual number in 2003, according to the Journal of Petroleum Marketing: 237,284, an error of about 5%.]
My answer: There are too many gas stations and too many cars in the United States of America.
[…]
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=299692
Take a look at http://wink.com
Where you can look at people’s collections of related links; for example:
This is SandervanderHeide’s Search Guide. You can look at SandervanderHeide’s tags, check out the newest links, or add the favorite “Collections” to your private page. This is a great way to stay updated on the things you care about from people you trust.
If you look at this users page, you can see, for example, all of his links that are to do with the NSA’s domestic spying.
You will remember that Higher Though works (heh, will work) by users manually linking together URLs that are related to each other, so that you will be able to browse them as collections of semantically linked pages, or images or any other type of object that can be accessed with a URL.
Wink doesn’t do this however; it merely allows people to collect related links together in a static list. To make it more like HT, they would need to allow you to go to another related link from any link, instead of the links only available destination being straight to the article.
HT works better than tagging. For example, on this users page, he has a colection of URLS all tagged witht the word ‘citizen’. Now, this tag essentially sits between any two URLS as a semantic mediator. The word ‘citizen’ doesn’t in and of itself contain the meaning of the two links, so if I click on any of these tags in his list, in the Wink results, I get a wildly different set of links, all tagged with this same word.
Higher Thought eliminates the semantic ambiguity of tags, by directly linking two URLS; the urls themselvs are the tags. Since the URL has the meaning of its content ‘encoded’ into it, if the HT connection is made correctly, once you jump into the HT stream of linked tags, each one will relate to the next without ambiguity. The objects a URL represents have very subtle meanings; this is why you have to use multiple tags to pin down the category of a blog post or news article. By linking URLS together directly, you eliminate the need for multiple tags, and allow the meaning of the information to organize itself.
Think of HT as a way of implimenting ‘fractional tagging‘, in the same way that an imaginary object in fractal geometry has a demensionaltiy that is between two whole numbers, the beauty of HT lies in the subtle graduations of meaning that single, one dimensional words can’t convey very well.
Obviously, we can build a moderation system so that bad users links (noise) are pushed out of site. Once we have a critical mass of users, good users links will all connect to each other, and the broken bridges between clusters of HT links cause by bad uers will be eliminated.
It would become a self organizing, semantically correct cloud of all objects with urls, with entry points at each url, from which you will be able to surf from one node to another, viewing semantically linked collections and lines of related urls.
I made a buzzword….
‘fractional tagging‘
‘fractal tagging‘
‘fractagging‘
‘fraagging‘
My sister is emigrating to Australia in a few months… Can anyone recommend a video camera setup for keeping in touch? I’ve read mixed reviews of the iSight, and am not convinved by Apple peripherals in general. Mac this end, PC hers.
Merci beau.
Slashdot is dying, and this is another example of why.
I just posted ATs amazing link to the BBQ Newsblight admission that filesharing is not theft, a great link, no doubt about it.
I posted it on Digg; 1 hour, 36 minutes later, its on the front page, blasting BBQ with a Diggstorm of traffic. I submitted the same story to Slashdot:
It’s Official: “File sharing is not theft.”
Wed March 01, 04:24 PM Rejected
And there you have it.
Why should anyone bother to submit stories to Slashdot, when they are going to be rejected, no matter how hot they are? And now with Digg’s new and superb commenting system coming online soon, there will be no reason to visit slashdot ever again. All the teenage trolls will dissapear from view, you can get cool stories on the frontpage guaranteed – as long as they really are cool – and be guaranteed that no one else’s cool stories are being rejected and kept from your view.
UPDATE: here is a torrent of the Newsblight item.
Have you ever logged into a remote iTunes share to find a whole bunch of sloppy, mistagged files, and wished that you could right click on them and correct them, or even >>gasp<< amend the image file associated with them? Even if you have access rights machine where the files are hosted, there is no way to do this with vanilla iTunes. Until now that is. With this new plugin for iTunes, you can authenticate yourself to the hosting machine, and edit the entries on the hosting system. Its about time; now I can edit all my bad entries, and whats more, all the trusted users on my network can do the same, meaning that I have many hands on the task, and my collection will be in perfect order in no time. I can specify groups of files that are unediable, by genre, artist album ets so that only the wrong or unsorted entries are open to be fixed. Its very good indeed.
http://dynamism.com/idisk-diamond/main.shtml
Although USB thumb drives have become popular as convenient way to have your favorite files available anytime, there still resistance amongst people who don’t want anymore bulk to carry–or who already have too many domicile and automobile keys crammed on their keychain. Solid Alliance has come the rescue with the truly tiny idisk Diamond. This 128MB USB drive is the size of a fingertip, and has a loop so that it can fit completely unobtrusively on any keychain (or in any crevice of a billfold). Now there’s no reason not to have your favorite pictures or files available to share with anyone. […]
I dont have a need for this, but…I want one!
With a spare 5 minutes, I decided to try and run some X programmes on my G4 over our network from our Fedora box. All i had to do is run a simple command:
ssh -X username@domain.com
fron inside an xterm and when I started, forexample, Gedit, from the command line, a full GUI instance of Gedit popped up in my OSX session.
Oh My Word….
and I am writing this post in an instance of Mozilla, started from that same command line.
Everyone is quacking about Dvorak and his article about how Apple will dump OSX and start to sell windows becacuse it is a hardware company and it wants to sell more hardware. There has even been talk of them selling a skinned version of windows that looks and acts like OSX, but which will run all windoze apps because its ….windoze.
I can think of no worse nightmare. The end of the best operating system ever written, dumped for the worst operating system written by the worst company ever. Apple, relinquishing control of the platform upon which it delivers its apps, meaning giving up complete access to APIs so that they can make things work perfectly.
That will (should) NEVER happen.
Even if M$ promises to allow them full access to all the Vista APIs, Apple cannot trust them to allow this forever. It will mean the end of Apple as a maker of computers worth buying – for any reason. We will be left with building our own boxen and running some future version of Gnome, whicih would be nice, but now that we have OSX, why on earth should we want go back to un-slick Linux as our sole environment? I run Fedora Core 4 to do all my heavy lifting, and run OSX for ‘UNIX with finesse’. Should this happy situation end, I would be a very unhappy person indeed.
This idea is so offensive, so wrong, so dumb it beggars belief that someone would even come up with it….unless …. its possible.
If it came with the gift of the open sourcing of OSX, the display layer and everything else…that might make it more tolerable. This would mean that OSX could continue to exist separate from Apple, and it would probably spread like wildfire, with millions of people dual booting. Sadly, it might mean that all the big players would stop all new development for OSX, and pour all of their effort into this abomnible skinned Vista. The whole thing does’nt bear thinking about.
I am personally responsible for the sale of 8 OSX running macs. All these people, who have switched to Mac are over the moon with it. Clearly they couldnt give a fuck wether its a frankenstinian version of Vista skinned to look and act like OSX, but that doesnt make it right; Apple can increase its market share without thnking about doing this. And also it needs to be said; why do they want to increase their market share at all costs?.
All this from one speculative article….
And back to what made me start this, UNIX, X, OSX are just so cool, so perfect, look at what you can DO with it, especially now that Apple are in the mix. To give this up, to relinquish control to M$, and break the UNIX bonds…
That would be a sin.
Who could possibly be upset with the Mozilla Foundation for giving away its Firefox browser?
One of my roles at the Mozilla Foundation relates to copyright licensing. I’m responsible for making sure that the software we distribute respects the conditions of the free software licences of the underlying code. I’m also the first point of contact for licensing questions.
Most of the time, this job involves helping people who want to use our code in their own products understand the terms, or advising project members who want to integrate code from another project into our codebase. Occasionally, however, something a little more unusual comes along.
A little while ago, I received an e-mail from a lady in the Trading Standards department of a large northern town. They had encountered businesses which were selling copies of Firefox, and wanted to confirm that this was in violation of our licence agreements before taking action against them.
I wrote back, politely explaining the principles of copyleft – that the software was free, both as in speech and as in price, and that people copying and redistributing it was a feature, not a bug. I said that selling verbatim copies of Firefox on physical media was absolutely fine with us, and we would like her to return any confiscated CDs and allow us to continue with our plan for world domination (or words to that effect).
Unfortunately, this was not well received. Her reply was incredulous:
“I can’t believe that your company would allow people to make money from something that you allow people to have free access to. Is this really the case?” she asked.
“If Mozilla permit the sale of copied versions of its software, it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation, as it is difficult for us to give general advice to businesses over what is/is not permitted.”
I felt somewhat unnerved at being held responsible for the disintegration of the UK anti-piracy system. Who would have thought giving away software could cause such difficulties?
However, given that the free software movement is unlikely collectively to decide to go proprietary in order to make her life easier, I had another go, using examples like Linux and the OpenOffice office suite to show that it’s not just Firefox which is throwing a spanner in the works.
She then asked me to identify myself, so that she could confirm that I was authorised to speak for the Mozilla Foundation on this matter. I wondered if she was imagining nefarious copyright-infringing street traders taking a few moments off from shouting about the price of bananas to pop into an internet cafe, crack a router and intercept her e-mail. […]
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9075-2051196,00.html
And there you have it!!!!!!
…certainly if you are interested in guitar synths…which is probably only me, I know, but anyway, here it is
http://www.hagstrom.org.uk/Patch2000SS.htm
1977 guitar synth demo from a shop in sweden. My favourite bit is about 3.24 seconds in, not least as you can see his shoes quite clearly there.
from here.
MeasureIt is brilliant.
