O'Reilly Radar

Where Innovation Lives

July 20, 2013 - 12:32pm

I sat down with Jon Bruner in New York City this week to talk about where innovation happens. Concentration still seems to matter, even in a networked world, but concentration of what? Minds, money, markets, or manufacturing know-how?

People we mention in this episode include Brady Forrest, Kipp Bradford and Alistair Croll.

Links for things we mention:

• Highway One, hardware incubator.
• WeChat, fast growing voice chat application from Tencent.
• International Startup Festival

By the way, we clearly aren’t the only ones making comparisons between Silicon Valley and Detroit. Seems to be entering the zeitgeist. However, if you are interested in Detroit as a model for the unraveling of a dominant concentration of innovation, pick up a copy of the classic American Odyssey by Robert Conot or the more recent Detroit: An American Autopsy by Charlie LeDuff.

You can subscribe to the O’Reilly Radar podcast through iTunes or SoundCloud, or directly through our podcast’s RSS feed.

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Four short links: 19 July 2013

July 19, 2013 - 1:06am

1. Operative Design — A catalogue of spatial verbs. (via Adafruit)
2. Open Source Malaria — open science drug discovery.
3. Surviving Being (Senior) Tech Management (Kellan Elliott-McCrea) — Perspective is the thin line between a challenging but manageable problem, and chittering balled up in the corner.
4. Disposable UAVs Inspired by Paper Planes (DIY Drones) — The first design, modeled after a paper plane, is created from a cellulose sheet that has electronic circuits ink-jet printed directly onto its body. Once the circuits have been laid on the plane’s frame, the craft is exposed to a UV curing process, turning the planes body into a flexible circuit board. These circuits are then connected to the planes “avionics system”, two elevons attached to the rear of the craft, which give the UAV the ability to steer itself to its destination.

Categories: Tech: General Technology

The Stories I Enjoyed Most in Last Week’s Sunday New York Times

July 18, 2013 - 8:16am

I used to read two print newspapers every morning. Now, I get most of my news online, but I still treasure my Sunday New York Times in print. This week, due to travel, I didn’t get a chance to catch up with it till a plane flight on Friday. The news was dated, and I’d seen some of it online, but there was still so much of interest that I would otherwise have missed. The Sunday Times is a gathering of fascinating minds reflecting on the issues of the moment; it’s a conversation well worth being a part of.

Normally, you see a flood of tweets from me on Sunday as I share my favorite articles. This week, on a plane without wifi and nearly a week late, I still have the impulse to share, but this time, I’m going to gang up the list of my favorite articles into a single post.

Here are some of the things from last week’s Sunday Times that I think you too might enjoy reading. (Note that the titles online don’t necessarily match the titles from the print edition, which I use below.)

The Joy of Old Age. This is a lovely reflection by neurologist and author Oliver Sacks on life as he looks toward his eightieth birthday. The last paragraphs are particularly moving. I’m 59, not 79, but even now I can see many of the changes – both positive and negative – that Sacks talks about so eloquently.

A Hidden Consensus on Health Care. Ross Douthat makes the case that there are two types of consensus on health care reform – the political consensus, which resulted in Obamacare’s preservation of the broken system of employer-provided healthcare, and the policy consensus, that “the status quo is actually the problem.” While I think there is a lot to like in Obamacare, I totally agree that we could do way better if we scrapped the current system in favor of more profound change. Too bad politicians are so lacking in courage, and have such a hard time actually enacting sensible policies! But what I found most useful in this article is the very notion of the “political consensus” vs. the “policy consensus” as a way to understand what is most broken about Washington.

35 Big Steps to Accountability. I have a big interest in reforming corporate governance. There is a myth that public corporations are managed for the benefit of their shareholders; the reality is that they are most often managed for the benefit of insiders. I wasn’t aware of the Harvard Law School’s Shareholder Rights project, which is tacking this issue. One of their projects, as Gretchen Morgenstern explains, is to get rid of staggered board elections, which tend to insulate companies from shareholder-driven accountability.

In Cargo Delivery, The Three-Wheelers That Could. Claire Martin takes us into the world of Portland’s electric bicycle-powered delivery vans. This is an idea (and a business) worth spreading to other cities. We need fresh approaches to making our world more livable.

Has ‘Caucasian’ Lost Its Meaning?  I had no idea where the term “Caucasian” came from. It’s bizarre origin will quickly convince you that this euphemism for “white” exists to make racism a little less obvious. The article is thought provoking – the kind of piece that stretches your mind in the way that physical exercises can stretch and strengthen your body. And it’s accompanied by a fascinating photo montage showing the many different shades of “white” skin.

Why I Donated My Stool. We’re increasingly understanding the role of the microbiome (the ecology of the bacteria in our gut, on our skin, and in other parts of our body) in human health, leading to powerful treatments that once would have seemed utterly beyond the pale. Apart from the pioneering researchers who first proposed the idea as early as 1958, who would have thought a decade ago that transplanting material (yes, that material!) from the bowels of one individual to another could cure seemingly intractable diseases?

Letting Go of Our Nukes.  The case for the US to unilaterally reduce the number of nuclear weapons in our arsenal. It makes a lot of sense to me. As they used to say, “How many times do we have to make the rubble bounce?”

Austerity Won’t Work if the Roof is Leaking. Robert Frank makes a powerful case for investing in infrastructure, pointing out that Germany, the champion of austerity, is driving down its unemployment rate by making massive investment in repairing and upgrading its infrastructure. As for the US, “No one in Congress seriously proposes that we just abandon our crumbling roads and bridges, and everyone agrees that the repair cost will grow sharply the longer we wait.” So why aren’t we doing anything? (See note above about the difference between policy consensus and political consensus.) I found the arguments for acting now, while the economy isn’t at full capacity, to be particularly compelling. Costs will be lower, in addition to the stimulus effect.

Ireland, North by North-Westeros. Lovely photographs of sites from Northern Ireland used in Game of Thrones, and an account of how to find them (as well as many other sites in Northern Ireland.) I love Ireland, and encourage all of you to visit, both the North and the South. (My own family is from Killarney, and it too has been the evocative, romantic backdrop for many an movie scene.)

Hans Hass, 94, Early Explorer of the World Beneath the Sea. A great reminder of why it’s good to read the Obituaries section (and a perfect bookend to the Oliver Sacks piece.) I had never heard of Hans Hasse and his wife Lotte, who pioneered undersea photography and published books and films of the undersea world a few years before Jacques Cousteau appeared on the scene. He made a lovely comment when asked if he was bitter about Cousteau’s greater renown: “No, why should I be bitter? The sea is so big.” (Though Hass couldn’t help remarking on Cousteau’s self-promotion and lack of recognition for others in the field.)

Hans and Lotte Hasse

I particularly loved the photo of Hans and Lotte in scuba gear on the deck of a boat. The picture could have been shot this year, instead of the 50 or 60 years ago it must have been taken. There’s something about portraits that offer a unique window through time, showing us other lives so like our own but so unreachable. (This is why portraits, from Fayum sarcophagi and Roman busts through European masterworks of painting, through photography (Alfred Steiglitz’s portraits of Georgia O’Keefe!), are my favorite type of art. My gosh, we can look into the eyes of people from centuries, even millennia ago, share in their humanity, imagine their lives, so different yet with so many common threads!)

While Twitter and Facebook and Google+ can also introduce you to unexpected ideas and accounts of other lives, there is something special about the curation of a great newspaper, the very constraint that assembles such dissimilar content into a single frame.

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Four short links: 18 July 2013

July 17, 2013 - 6:45pm

1. Ten Rules of the Internet (Anil Dash) — they’re all candidates for becoming “Dash’s Law”. I like this one the most: When a company or industry is facing changes to its business due to technology, it will argue against the need for change based on the moral importance of its work, rather than trying to understand the social underpinnings.
2. Data Storage by Vertical (Quartz) — The US alone is home to 898 exabytes (1 EB = 1 billion gigabytes)—nearly a third of the global total. By contrast, Western Europe has 19% and China has 13%. Legally, much of that data itself is property of the consumers or companies who generate it, and licensed to companies that are responsible for it. And in the US—a digital universe of 898 exabytes (1 EB = 1 billion gigabytes)—companies have some kind of liability or responsibility for 77% of all that data.
3. x-OSC — a wireless I/O board that provides just about any software with access to 32 high-performance analogue/digital channels via OSC messages over WiFi. There is no user programmable firmware and no software or drivers to install making x-OSC immediately compatible with any WiFi-enabled platform. All internal settings can be adjusted using any web browser.
4. Google Experimenting with Encrypting Google Drive (CNet) — If that’s the case, a government agency serving a search warrant or subpoena on Google would be unable to obtain the unencrypted plain text of customer files. But the government might be able to convince a judge to grant a wiretap order, forcing Google to intercept and divulge the user’s login information the next time the user types it in. Advertising depends on the service provider being able to read your data. Either your Drive’s contents aren’t valuable to Google advertising, or it won’t be a host-resistant encryption process.

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Four short links: 17 July 2013

July 16, 2013 - 11:47pm

1. Hideout — augmented reality books. (via Hacker News)
2. Patterns and Practices for Open Source Software Success (Stephen Walli) — Successful FOSS projects grow their communities outward to drive contribution to the core project. To build that community, a project needs to develop three onramps for software users, developers, and contributors, and ultimately commercial contributors.
3. How to Act on LKML — Linus’s tantrums are called out by one of the kernel developers in a clear and positive way.
4. Beyond the Coming Age of Networked Matter (BoingBoing) — Bruce Sterling’s speculative short story, written for the Institute For The Future. “Stephen Wolfram was right about everything. Wolfram is the greatest physicist since Isaac Newton. Since Plato, even. Our meager, blind physics is just a subset of Wolfram’s new-kind-of- science metaphysics. He deserves fifty Nobels.” “How many people have read that Wolfram book?” I asked him. “I hear that his book is, like, huge, cranky, occult, and it drives readers mad.” “I read the forbidden book,” said Crawferd.

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Four short links: 16 July 2013

July 16, 2013 - 12:25am

1. Pete Warden on Sensors — We’re all carrying little networked laboratories in our pockets. You see a photo. I see millions of light-sensor readings at an exact coordinate on the earth’s surface with a time resolution down to the millisecond. The future is combining all these signals into new ways of understanding the world, like this real-time stream of atmospheric measurements.
2. Quine Relay — This is a Ruby program that generates Scala program that generates Scheme program that generates …(through 50 languages)… REXX program that generates the original Ruby code again.
3. Cello — a GNU99 C library which brings higher level programming to C. Interfaces allow for structured design, Duck Typing allows for generic functions, Exceptions control error handling, Constructors/Destructors aid memory management, Syntactic Sugar increases readability.
4. The Meeting (John Birmingham) — satirising the Wall Street Journal’s meeting checklist advice.

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Four short links: 15 July 2013

July 14, 2013 - 11:26pm

1. Product Strategy Means Saying No — a resource for strength in saying ‘no’ to unplanned features and direction changes. My favourite illustration is for “but my cousin’s neighbour said”. Yes, this.
2. git-imerge — incremental merge for git.
3. The Paranoid #! Security Guide — Networked-Evil-Maid-Attacks (Attacker steals the actual SED and replaces it with another containing a tojanized OS. On bootup victim enters it’s password which is subsequently send to the attacker via network/local attacker hot-spot. Different method: Replacing a laptop with a similar model [at e.g. airport/hotel etc.] and the attacker’s phone# printed on the bottom of the machine. Victim boots up enters “wrong” password which is send to the attacker via network. Victim discovers that his laptop has been misplaced, calls attacker who now copies the content and gives the “misplaced” laptop back to the owner.)
4. Why Mobile Web Apps Are Slow — long analysis. Just to be clear: is possible to do real-time collaboration on on a mobile device. It just isn’t possible to do it in JavaScript. The performance gap between native and web apps is comparable to the performance gap between FireFox and IE8, which is too large a gap for serious work. (via Slashdot)

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Podcast: George Church on genomics

July 12, 2013 - 2:51pm

A few weeks ago some of my colleagues and I recorded a conversation with George Church, a Harvard University geneticist and one of the founders of modern genomics. In the resulting podcast, you’ll hear Church offer his thoughts on the coming transformation of medicine, whether genes should be patentable, and whether the public is prepared to deal with genetic data.

Here’s how Church characterizes the state of genomics:

It’s kind of like ’93 on the Web. In fact, in a certain sense, it’s more sophisticated than electronics because we have inherited three billion years of amazing technology that was just like a spaceship that was parked in our back yard and we’re just reverse-engineering and probably not fully utilizing even the stuff that we’ve discovered so far.

A few other helpful links:

• George’s book, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves
• CRISPR technology, which might find applications in a handful of sub-fields of bioengineering
• The Supreme Court’s 9-0 decision in Association for Molecular Pathology vs. Myriad Genetics, Inc. held that “A naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated, but cDNA is patent eligible because it is not naturally occurring.”
• Church founded PersonalGenomes.org to make genomic and health-record data freely available

On this podcast from O’Reilly Media: Tim O’Reilly, Roger Magoulas, Jim Stogdill, Mike Loukides, and Jon Bruner. Subscribe to the O’Reilly Radar podcast through iTunes or SoundCloud, or directly through our podcast’s RSS feed.

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Four short links: 12 July 2013

July 12, 2013 - 1:45am

1. How Well Does Name Analysis Work? (Pete Warden) — explanation of how those “turn a name into gender/ethnicity/etc” routines work, and how accurate they are. Age has the weakest correlation with names. There are actually some strong patterns by time of birth, with certain names widely recognized as old-fashioned or trendy, but those tend to be swamped by class and ethnicity-based differences in the popularity of names.
2. Old Interfaces — a lazy-scrolling interface to Andy Baio’s collection of faux UIs from movies. (via Andy Baio)
3. Pidder — browser-crypto’d social network, address book, messaging, RSS reader, and more.
4. What I Learned From Researching Almost Every Single Smart Watch That Has Been Rumoured or Announced (Quartz) — interesting roundup of the different display technologies used in each of the smartwatches.

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Four short links: 11 July 2013

July 11, 2013 - 11:16am

1. Sifted — 7 minute animation set in a point cloud world, using photogrammetry in film-making. My brilliant cousin Ben wrote the software behind it. See this newspaper article and tv report for more.
2. Vehicle Tech Out of Sync with Drivers’ Devices — Ford Motor Co. has its own system. Apple Inc. is working with one set of automakers to design an interface that works better with its iPhone line. Some of the same car companies and others have joined the Car Connectivity Consortium, which is working with the major Android phone brands to develop a different interface. FFS. “… you are changing your phone every other year, and the top-of-mind apps are continuously changing.” That’s why Chevrolet, Mini and some other automakers are starting to offer screens that mirror apps from a smartphone.
3. Incentives in Notice and Takedown (PDF) — findings summarised in Blocking and Removing Illegal Child Sexual Content: Analysis from a Technical and Legal Perspective: financial institutions seemed to be relatively successful at removing phishing websites while it took on average 150 times longer to remove child pornography.
4. OpenCV for Processing (Github) — OpenCV for Processing is based on the official OpenCV Java bindings. Therefore, in addition to a suite of friendly functions for all the basics, you can also do anything that OpenCV can do. And a book from O’Reilly, and it’ll be CC-licensed. All is win. (via Greg Borenstein)

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Four short links: 10 July 2013

July 9, 2013 - 7:17pm

1. 6 Technical Things I Learned About Bitcoin (Rusty Russell) — Anonymity is hard, but I was surprised to see blockchain.info’s page about my donation to Unfilter correctly geolocated to my home town! Perhaps it’s a fluke, but I was taken aback by how clear it was. Interesting collection of technical observations about the workings of Bitcoin.
2. NIFTY: News Information Flow Tracking, Yay! — watch how news stories mutate and change over time. (via Stijn Debrouwere
3. EO Wilson’s Advice for Future Scientists (NPR) — the ideal scientist thinks like a poet and works like a bookkeeper. (via Courtney Johnston)
4. Healthcare.gov New Web Model for Government (The Atlantic) — The new site has been built in public for months, iteratively created on Github using cutting edge open-source technologies. Healthcare.gov is the rarest of birds: a next-generation website that also happens to be a .gov.

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Four short links: 9 July 2013

July 9, 2013 - 12:45am

1. Autonomous Intersection Management Project — a scalable, safe, and efficient multiagent framework for managing autonomous vehicles at intersections. (via How Driverless Cars Could Reshape Cities)
2. Quantum Information (New Scientist) — a gentle romp through the possible and the actual for those who are new to the subject.
3. Ambient Backscatter (PDF) — a new communication primitive where devices communicate by backscattering ambient RF signals. Our design avoids the expensive process of generating radio waves; backscatter communication is orders of magnitude more power-efficient than traditional radio communication. (via Hacker News)
4. Top Free-to-Play Monetization Tricks (Gamasutra) — amazingly evil ways that free games lure you into paying. At this point the user must choose to either spend about $1 or lose their rewards, lose their stamina (which they could get back for another $1), and lose their progress. To the brain this is not just a loss of time. If I spend an hour writing a paper and then something happens and my writing gets erased, this is much more painful to me than the loss of an hour. The same type of achievement loss is in effect here. Note that in this model the player could be defeated multiple times in the boss battle and in getting to the boss battle, thus spending several dollars per dungeon.

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Four short links: 5 July 2013

July 8, 2013 - 3:58pm

1. Quantitative Analysis of the Full Bitcoin Transaction Graph (PDF) — We analyzed all these large transactions by following in detail the way these sums were accumulated and the way they were dispersed, and realized that almost all these large transactions were descendants of a single transaction which was carried out in November 2010. Finally, we noted that the subgraph which contains these large transactions along with their neighborhood has many strange looking structures which could be an attempt to conceal the existence and relationship between these transactions, but such an attempt can be foiled by following the money trail in a succinctly persistent way. (via Alex Dong)
2. Majority of Gamers Today Can’t Finish Level 1 of Super Mario Bros — Nintendo test, and the President of Nintendo said in a talk, We watched the replay videos of how the gamers performed and saw that many did not understand simple concepts like bottomless pits. Around 70 percent died to the first Goomba. Another 50 percent died twice. Many thought the coins were enemies and tried to avoid them. Also, most of them did not use the run button. There were many other depressing things we noted but I can not remember them at the moment. (via Beta Knowledge)
3. Bloat-Aware Design for Big Data Applications (PDF) — (1) merging and organizing related small data record objects into few large objects (e.g., byte buffers) instead of representing them explicitly as one-object-per-record, and (2) manipulating data by directly accessing buffers (e.g., at the byte chunk level as opposed to the object level). The central goal of this design paradigm is to bound the number of objects in the application, instead of making it grow proportionally with the cardinality of the input data. (via Ben Lorica)
4. Poderopedia (Github) — originally designed for investigative journalists, the open src software allows you to create and manage entity profile pages that include: short bio or summary, sheet of connections, long newsworthy profiles, maps of connections of an entity, documents related to the entity, sources of all the information and news river with external news about the entity. See the announcement and website.

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Four short links: 8 July 2013

July 8, 2013 - 1:03am

1. QCL: A Language for Quantum Computing — QCL is a high level, architecture independent programming language for quantum computers, with a syntax derived from classical procedural languages like C or Pascal. This allows for the complete implementation and simulation of quantum algorithms (including classical components) in one consistent formalism.. (Will not run on D-Wave, which is annealing rather a general purpose quantum computer)
2. Quipper — a functional quantum programming language.
3. How Copyright Makes Books Disappear — Amazon and YouTube data showing exponential growth in available content until copyright term is entered, at which point there’s a massive drop-off in availability. Graph is stunning. (via BoingBoing)
4. Immersion — a people-centric view of your email life using only your metadata. Horrifyingly revealing.

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Context Aware Programming

July 5, 2013 - 8:25am

I’m increasingly realizing that many of my gripes about applications these days are triggered by their failure to understand my context in the way that they can and should. For example:

• Unruly apps on my Android phone, like gmail or twitter, update messages in the background as soon as I wake up my phone, slowing the phone to a crawl and making me wait to get to the app I really want. This is particularly irritating when I’m trying to place a phone call or write a text, but it can get in the way in the most surprising places. (It’s not clear to me if this is the application writers’ fault, or due to a fundamental flaw in the Android OS.)
• Accuweather for Android, otherwise a great app, lets you set up multiple locations, which seems like it would be very handy for frequent travelers, but it inexplicably defaults to whichever location you set up first, regardless of where you are. Not only does it ignore the location sensor in the phone, it doesn’t even bother to remember the last location I chose.
• The WMATA app (Washington Metro transit app) I just downloaded lets you specify and save up to twelve bus stops for which it will report next bus arrival times. Why on earth doesn’t it just detect what bus stop you are actually standing at?
• And it’s not just mobile apps. Tweetdeck for Mac lets you schedule tweets for later in the day or on future dates, yet it defaults to the date that you last used the feature rather than today’s date!  How frustrating is it to set the time of the tweet for the afternoon, only to be told “Cannot schedule a tweet for the past”, because you didn’t manually update the date to today!

In each of these cases, programmers seemingly have failed to understand that devices have senses, and that consulting those senses is the first step in making the application more intelligent. It’s as if a human, on awaking, blundered down to breakfast without opening his or her eyes!

By contrast, consider how some modern apps have used context awareness to create brilliant, transformative user experiences:

• Uber, recognizing both where you are and where the nearest driver is, gives you an estimated time of pickup, connects the two of you, and lets you track progress towards that pickup.
• Square Register notices anyone running Square Wallet entering the store, and pops up their name, face, and stored payment credentials on the register, creating a delightful in-store checkout experience.
• Apps like FourSquare and Yelp are like an augmentation that adds GPS as a human sixth sense, letting you find restaurants and other attractions nearby. Google Maps does all that and more. (Even Google Maps sometimes loses the plot, though. For example, yesterday afternoon, I was on my way to Mount Vernon. Despite the fact that I was in Virginia, a search unadorned with the state name gave me as a first result Mount Vernon WA, rather than Mount Vernon VA. I’ve never understood how an app that can, and does, suggest the correct street name nearby before I’ve finished typing the building number can sometimes go so wrong.)
• Google Now, while still a work in progress, does an ambitious job of intuiting things you might want to know about your environment. It understands your schedule, your location, the weather, the time, and things you have asked Google to remember on your behalf. It sometimes suggests things that you don’t care about, but I’d far rather than than an idiot application that requires me to use keystrokes or screen taps to tell the app things that my phone already knows.

Just as the switch from the command line to the GUI required new UI skills and sensibilities, mobile and sensor-based programming creates new opportunities to innovate, to surprise and delight the user, or, in failing to use the new capabilities, the opportunity to create frustration and anger.  The bar has been raised. Developers who fail to embrace context-aware programming will eventually be left behind.

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Four short links: 4 July 2013

July 4, 2013 - 1:19am

1. ansible — Model-driven configuration management, multi-node deployment/orchestration, and remote task execution system. Uses SSH by default, so no special software has to be installed on the nodes you manage. Ansible can be extended in any language.
2. The Golden Age of RSS — One of the things I expected least to see in 2013 was that this year would mark the greatest flourishing of RSS reader applications in the decade since it first came to prominence on the web.
3. JSONiq: the JSON Query Language — expressive and highly optimizable language to query and update NoSQL stores. It enables developers to leverage the same productive high-level language across a variety of NoSQL products. Implemented in Zorba, an Apache-licensed virtual machine for JSONiq and XQuery queries.
4. Bret Victor on Doug Engelbart — If you attempt to make sense of Engelbart’s design by drawing correspondences to our present-day systems, you will miss the point, because our present-day systems do not embody Engelbart’s intent. Engelbart hated our present-day systems. Poetic, articulate, and bang on the money.

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Four short links: 3 July 2013

July 2, 2013 - 6:12pm

1. Mobile Email Numbers (Luke Wroblewski) — 79% use their smartphone for reading email, a higher percentage than those who used it for making calls and in Feb ’12, mobile email overtook webmail client use.
2. ProperSSL — a series of best practices for establishing SSL connections between clients and servers.
3. How We Are Losing the War for the Free and Open Internet (Sue Gardner) — The internet is evolving into a private-sector space that is primarily accountable to corporate shareholders rather than citizens. It’s constantly trying to sell you stuff. It does whatever it wants with your personal information. And as it begins to be regulated or to regulate itself, it often happens in a clumsy and harmful way, hurting the internet’s ability to function for the benefit of the public.
4. The Amazingly Low Cost of PRISM — breaks down costs to store and analyse the data gathered from major Internet companies. Total hardware cost per year for 3.75 EB of data storage: €168M

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Four short links: 2 July 2013

July 1, 2013 - 11:39pm

1. How to Make Help Microvideos For Your Site (Alex Holovaty) — Instead of one monolithic video, we decided to make dozens of tiny, five-second videos separately demonstrating features.
2. How Google is Killing Organic Search — 13% of the real estate is organic results in a search for “auto mechanic”, 7% for “italian restaurant”, 0% if searching on an iPhone where organic results are four page scrolls away. SEO Book did an extensive analysis of just how important the top left of the page, previously occupied by organic results actually is to visitors. That portion of the page is now all Google. (via Alex Dong)
3. Church — probabilistic programming language from MIT, with tutorials. (via Edd Dumbill)
4. mesos — a cluster manager that provides efficient resource isolation and sharing across distributed applications, or frameworks. It can run Hadoop, MPI, Hypertable, Spark (a new framework for low-latency interactive and iterative jobs), and other applications. Mesos is open source in the Apache Incubator. (via Ben Lorica)

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Four short links: 1 July 2013

July 1, 2013 - 2:07am

1. Web Traffic Visualization — Dots enter when transactions start and exit when completed. Their speed is proportional to client’s response time while their size reflects the server’s contribution to total time. Color comes from the specific request. (via Nelson Minar)
2. Complete Guide to Being Interviewed on TV (Quartz) — good preparation for everyone who runs the risk of being quoted for 15 seconds.
3. Harlan (GitHub) — new language for GPU programming. Simple examples in the announcement. (via Michael Bernstein)
4. Open Fit — open source software that investigates several approaches to generating custom tailored pants patterns. Open Fit Lab is an attempt to use this software for on-the-spot generation and creation of custom clothes. (via Kaitlin Thaney)

Categories: Tech: General Technology

Four short links: 28 June 2013

June 28, 2013 - 12:51am

1. Huxley vs Orwell — buy Amusing Ourselves to Death if this rings true. The future is here, it’s just not evenly surveilled. (via rone)
2. KeyMe — keys in the cloud. (Digital designs as backups for physical objects)
3. Motorola Advanced Technology and Products Group — The philosophy behind Motorola ATAP is to create an organization with the same level of appetite for technology advancement as DARPA, but with a consumer focus. It is a pretty interesting place to be. And they hired the excellent Johnny Chung Lee.
4. Internet Credit Union — Internet Archive starts a Credit Union. Can’t wait to see memes on debit cards.

Categories: Tech: General Technology