technology

Low-Cost Supercomputer Is Among World's Fastest It is common wisdom these days that because of economies of scale Linux running on cheap Intel boxes is much cheaper than dot com era Sun Hardware. The Big Mac, clustered Apple G5 supercomputer is the world's third fastest and makes government supercomputers look like a colossal waste of money. But it uses chips that are a tenth of the price of equivalent Intel processors, so doesn't this make those Intel boxes look like a waste of money? Does OS X on PowerPC 970 mean that Apple has a real chance at the server market? "The IBM processors in Apple's G5 Macs cost one-tenth as much as Intel's Itanium 2 processor and also less than a 64-bit chip from Advanced Micro Devices"

Kendall Grant Clark: A Web of Rules “if the Semantic Web is to happen, it will be because of a loosely coupled collaboration between three communities: the academics, the industrialists, and the hackers. This view gives me some pain, however, since the hacker community (by which I mean people who develop open source software for fun and for profit) is perhaps the one least engaged in the Semantic Web effort.” “There are some obvious inflection points at which hackers are engaged with the Semantic Web; these points include FOAF, RDF, RSS 1.0, and n3. By and large, however, the hackers are not engaged with the Semantic Web effort and, more to the point, it hasn’t yet generally ignited their technical imagination.” Even if the “hackers” aren’t involved in the formal semantic web effort, my guess is that this is where it will evolve in a ‘survival of the fittest’ fashion…

Cory Doctorow points out the real story on Broadcast Flag: “it makes a whole class of general-purpose open source software illegal, including code that’s already in the market, and that it will give the companies who called home taping and peeing during commercials theft a veto over the design over DTV devices, including parts of your PC.” Copying digital media will always be possible since human beings respond to analogue signals, whether they are air-pressure fluctuations or lights that shine on our retina. Any hi-fidelity analog signal can be reconverted to digital without copy protection. However… as more and more protection schemes are embedded in the devices we use to manipulate and transfer digital files I wonder whether there will be a market for obsolete uncompromised hardware in the future. Ebay in ten years: “Clean” PC from 2003.

Web fosters prolific product reviewers: “I’m rethinking things,” says the prolific 43-year-old Epinions.com free-lance writer. “I’ve written 664 reviews. It’s a book, and I didn’t really get paid for producing it. I should really be getting royalties for all that work.” If product reviewers all had weblogs, and a weblog tool that had forms for posting information specifically for product reviews that syndicated review metadata, then you would have the same functionality as Epinions, in decentralized form. The difference would be that traffic would go back to the reviewers’ site where they could control things like ad revenue. Weblogs allow all the social advantages of a distributed system: control over individual identity, branding and revenue. Pings to central servers and metadata enriched RSS syndication allow for all the technological advantages of a centralized system – real-time updated search and structured querying. Isn’t this decentralizing of publishing and centralizing of aggregation,…

PC Advisor has an interesting use of text ads – certain keywords are green, underlined and show text ad boxes when moused over. Rather like the defunct MS Office contextual links system but for paid for links. This would be very interesting in the blog context as it would allow ads that are correspond to individual posts. On the downside it breaks the church and state separation of ads and content. PC Advisor

PC Advisor: “Apple looks set to introduce its long-awaited iTunes music download service for Windows users on 16 October at a special event in San Francisco”.

Article in the Guardian on the use of RFid in the UK. “in the early summer, at its superstore in Newmarket Road, Cambridge, Tesco began the world’s first trial of a so-called “smart shelf”. Razor blades are one of the most frequently shoplifted items. Small but relatively expensive, they can be slipped into a pocket. The smart shelf was designed to house packets of Gillette Mach 3 razor blades, each augmented with a tiny RFid tag. The shelf contained a reader and – controversially – a small CCTV camera. Each time a pack of razors was removed, the tag triggered the camera and a picture was taken. Tesco began the trial without much fuss but within weeks, a determined knot of protestors appeared outside the store…” Labour Member of Parliament Tom Watson (who has a weblog) “has applied for a parliamentary debate on the use of RFid. What he will…

A few weeks ago I posted a piece on the threats of a software monoculture, a New York Times journalist saw the post and interviewed me: ‘Was I an expert? Er – no, its not a new idea and its kind of obvious if you look at argriculture’. Thankfully the CCIA then published a report which levelled the same argument but from a much more authoritative stance. Michael Gartenberg, a Jupiter analyst, posts that the monoculture threat is groundless. His argument: “The fallacy is that diverse systems will not have security issues or holes”. Nobody has claimed that diverse systems would not have flaws, but diverse environments are not prone to the same catastrophic failures that monocultures are susceptible to. Thankfully Gartenberg is a Jupiter analyst and not a farmer.

A new report by Perseus has some interesting statistics: Weblogs updated less than once every two months: 66% Weblogs updated once a day: 1.2% Active blogs (as defined as those which are updated more than once every two months) are updated on average every 14 days. 26% percent of weblogs created are never used more than once. Weblog freshness, like weblog linkedness, follows a power law, something that is important when designing a weblog aggregator, see: ‘Blog Metrics’.

The BBC outlines a project to create a website with photos from 16,146 confluences of latitude and longitude in order to create a unique picture of the world. To do: Afghanistan (64) Bangladesh (15) Bolivia (93) DR Congo (189) Ecuador (32) Kyrgyzstan (18) Libya (155) Madagascar (60) Paraguay (35) Reunion (7) Seychelles (4) Svalbard (71) Turkmenistan (53) Yemen (48)

I don’t think I’ve been at a conference lately where someone hasn’t mentioned the words ‘Dave Winer’ within 10 minutes. Even those who may not always agree with Dave have to admit that he is one of the prime connectors in the tech. world, and therefore organizing a conference is something that he is a natural for. I can’t make it to BloggerCon, but I’m sure it will be a success and that as a result there will be others. Blogger Con: Blogroll for BloggerCon