Four short links: 8 February 2010
Nat Torkington
@gnat
2010-02-08
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Nat Torkington
@gnat
2010-02-08
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Roberta Cairney
2010-02-08
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The US government filed its Statement of Interest regarding the revised Google settlement yesterday with the District Court in New York. While the statement was signed by an attorney from the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department, several agencies including the Copyright Office reportedly contributed to it. The judge has scheduled a hearing for February 18 in his Manhattan courtroom. It is very unlikely that the judge will approve this version of the settlement. Also, he may once again decide postpone a full-fledged fairness hearing-although the many objectors, large and small, are eager to have their day in court. Because the parties withdrew the proposed settlement before the originally scheduled fairness hearing occurred in October 2009, the judge has not yet formally considered the many objections filed to date on the revised settlement and filed in anticipation of the fairness hearing cancelled last October. |
Mac Slocum
@macslocum
2010-02-06
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There's plenty of enthusiasm for local / hyperlocal projects, but the sweepstakes has yet to be won. PaperG CEO Victor Wong digs in to some of the missed opportunities in a paidContent.org guest column. I found this excerpt intriguing: How useful would it be to know when local used-car dealerships have a large increase in inventory (and thus are probably more willing to sell at a lower price)? Other data like new-car listings could show what the local population is buying by examining what is posted and taken down by the dealers. Publishers can even create new content by encouraging users to input data about what sorts of deals and treatment they got, which would be useful for other local buyers and could be turned into a local car-buying guide.
So many of these local efforts rely on traditional information delivery through news articles or databases. That material has use, no doubt. Yet few projects take the extra step and put that data into context. They don't explain why the information is important. They don't connect the dots. A lot of this reminds me of web analytics. It's easy to grant access to traffic data, and the access itself has a low level of value. But the insight that guides decisions comes from deeper analysis. You need to know why a particular keyword or topic is resonating. |
Nat Torkington
@gnat
2010-02-05
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2010-02-05
2010年3月3日星期三晚上19:30,春节假期过后,让我们相聚在北京奇遇花园咖啡馆,喝着啤酒,分享神奇的想法、黑客秘籍,经验和教训,以及“精彩的故事”,每个人都有故事,对吧。
点燃之夜起源于2006年12月份的西雅图。当时是O'Reilly的Brady Forrest和Bre Pettis的个人项目。他们希望能有一个活动大家喝着啤酒分享各自的想法。于是12月7日200位同样梦想着有个“极客联谊的有趣夜晚”的极客涌进Capitol Hill附近的一个酒吧。他们找到了啤酒,但远不止这些。
浓缩在一句点燃之夜的座右铭就是:“给我灵感,一定要快!”您可以观看点燃之夜的视频来体会Ignite的激情,预热自己。
欢迎您参加活动。免费,我们为您准备了啤酒和食物。唯一需要您做的就是展现激情!
您有兴趣在活动上展现自己?没问题,说一声!
3月3日如果您在北京让我们相会在北京点燃之夜。@ignitebeijing有最新消息。
Andy Oram
@praxagora
2010-02-05
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I was talking recently with Bob Frankston, who has a distinguished history in computing that goes back to work on Multics, VisiCalc, and Lotus Notes. We were discussing some of the dreams of the Internet visionaries, such as total decentralization (no mobile-system walls, no DNS) and bandwidth too cheap to meter. While these seem impossibly far off, I realized that computing and networking have come a long way already, making things normal that not too far in the past would have seemed utopian.
I won't even start to summarize Frankston's own writings, which start with premises so far from what the Internet is like today that you won't be able to make complete sense of any one article on its own. I'd recommend the mind-blowing Sidewalks: Paying by the Stroll if you want to venture into his world. But I'll mention one sign of Frankston's optimism: he reminded me that in the early 1990s, technologists were agonizing over arcane quality-of-service systems in the hope of permitting VoIP over ordinary phone connections. Now we take VoIP for granted and are heading toward ubiquitous video. Why? Two things happened in parallel: the technologists figured out much more efficient encodings, and normal demand led to faster transmission technologies even over copper. We didn't need QoS and all the noxious control and overhead it entails. More generally, it's impossible to determine where progress will come from or how fast it can happen. |
Mac Slocum
@macslocum
2010-02-04
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Remember when Wired's fancy tablet demo made the rounds a few months ago? That Adobe Air-driven prototype certainly stoked the fires of iPad enthusiasm.
Leander Kahney at Cult of Mac explains why: Apple has rejected Adobe technologies like Flash and Air — with extreme prejudice. No one at Condé Nast appears to have seen that coming, even though the iPhone OS hasn’t supported Flash since its launch in 2007.
Update 2/5: Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson notes in the comments, and in a follow-up piece at Cult of Mac, that the iPad's Flash limitations were known from the start. Wired will be available on the iPad, as well as Android and Windows. Time Inc. ran into a similar problem just before the iPad's launch. Its Sports Illustrated tablet prototype was constructed around a wish list, not tech specs. This is the first sign I've seen that the Apple vs. Adobe spat is spilling beyond the tech space. Content creators accustomed to the Adobe toolset -- particularly Air and Flash -- will have to recalibrate if they want to be on the iPad (and really, who doesn't want to be on that thing?). That means more development and a longer wait for consumers. |
Nat Torkington
@gnat
2010-02-04
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Mac Slocum
@macslocum
2010-02-03
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Facebook says it wants to share that efficiency -- and presumably influence a few things along the way -- so it's setting HipHop loose as an open source project. I asked Kevin Tatroe, co-author of O'Reilly's Programming PHP, to weigh in on HipHop's functionality and its broader applications. Mac Slocum: How will HipHop help programmers? Kevin Tatroe: One of PHP's greatest strengths is its expansive leniency. But for very large code bases, it can also be somewhat problematic. For example, while you can change the type of data stored in a variable mid-script, I'd wager that the vast majority of the time, it's a mistake. Those are the kinds of things HipHop's analysis and type inference steps will find. For that reason, I can even see running sites through HipHop that don't need footprint savings, just as a sanity check. MS: How about businesses that rely on PHP. Does HipHop offer them any utility? KT: Certainly. At its best, PHP scales very well by running on teeming hordes of cheap servers. As great as that strategy has turned out to be, running on half as many teeming hordes of cheap servers has clear benefits in deployment costs and costs to maintain. There's also benefits at the other end of the scale. I've seen more companies than I can count stick with one deployment server when they really ought to be scaling up to two or three. There's a "leap of faith" barrier there. Companies say: "Obviously, we can't deploy on zero servers, so one seems fine. But two? We're just a small operation. Can't you make your code work better?" MS: Facebook calls HipHop a "source code transformer." In plain terms, what is that? KT: It takes the PHP code written by PHP programmers and converts it to C++ code, which is then compiled by g++ into machine code. In doing so, it has to disallow certain PHP language features, like eval(). And it runs a pass to determine what type each variable in your PHP code should be in C++. PHP does not require you to state up front what kind of data you're going to store in a variable. It lets you change the type of data stored in a given variable willy-nilly, which is not necessarily the best idea. MS: Facebook says HipHop reduced CPU load on its servers by about 50 percent. Any idea how it does that? KT: Running native, compiled C++ takes less processing effort to run than PHP's scripts via an opcode virtual machine (such as using Zend Engine). That's because it's skipping the virtual machine entirely. It's telling that Facebook didn't mention any HipHop speed increases. It'd be surprising if there weren't any measurable speed improvements, but their primary focus seems to be: use less cheap hardware to run the same site. MS: How easy -- or hard -- do you think it will be for other companies to take advantage of HipHop? KT: This all depends on the tools. Certainly, any organization with deployments large enough to really notice much out of this will have devs comfortable with the more traditional "write, compile, test, deploy" cycle. PHP also attracts a large percentage of folks who've never had to compile anything in their lives. But these same people aren't necessarily afraid of the command line. If the tools are simple enough that people aren't scared off, it should be pretty simple to get a site up and running using HipHop. Note: Kevin's comments were condensed and edited from a longer interview. |
Nat Torkington
@gnat
2010-02-03
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Mac Slocum
@macslocum
2010-02-02
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There's considerable chatter about a seismic shift in search. A lot of it's overblown, but the central idea is intriguing: Google's biggest problem -- the one that keeps company execs up at night -- isn't Bing or Ask or traditional search. The real threat is social search. Or so the thinking goes ...
Earlier today, I ran across a data point in Aardvark's new social search report that I find way more interesting than Google's theoretical downfall. It's not whether social search will displace Google. It's how -- and where -- social search can actually be useful TechCrunch's breakdown of the Aardvark report includes this bit of analysis: [Aardvark's] average query volume was 3,167.2 questions per day, with the median active user asking 3.1 questions per month. Interestingly, mobile users are more active than desktop users. The Aardvark team attributes this to users wanting quick, short answers on their phones without having to dig for anything. They also think people are more used to using more natural language patterns on their phones. [Emphasis added.] The real seismic shift in social search will come from its commingling with mobile applications. Why? Because mobile is a different animal than the desktop. No one wants to fumble around for queries. People on the go don't have time to scan listings. The screens are too small, and the input mechanisms -- improved as they are -- are way too clunky. Mobile search has to be concise and targeted. Results that emanate from a trusted network of friends and associates certainly fit that bill. Toss in more geolocation features and improved speech recognition, and the utility of mobile-based social search could get really interesting. |
Nat Torkington
@gnat
2010-02-02
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