Paul Ramsey: Open source is not free (as in beer) ... Paul Ramsey: Open source is not free (as in beer) ... Last week, I took the time to ridicule a post at the PBBI blog on open source, which really boiled down to a critique of the very flimsy open source argument "open source is free (as in beer) so it's a budget panacea! ". I hope not many open source advocates are retailing that one, but I'm sure one or two of us still are. In my idealistic younger days I read a lot of Chomsky, and one of the general principles I took away from him is the idea that as citizens we have a duty to critique and criticize our own governments first and foremost. Beating our chests about the behaviour of some despot on the other side of an ocean might be cathartic, but if we're really interested in improving the commonweal it is our job as citizens of democratic societies to make our own governments better first.
(Like, why does Canada sell asbestos as a building supply to third world countries when back home we recognize that it's too dangerous for our own buildings?) So, first the counterargument. Services rule!
#itec #security #privacy #transparency || 02myItecManual02. #itec || #law #loi #Recht || 02myItecManual06_03. Heello Echoes Twitter, But Adds Group Messaging - Jo Soup. Heello ("HE-low"), a dead ringer for Twitter created by TwitPic founder Noah Everett, just opened to the public. The project was announced a year ago, but it has been silent for most of that time. The original blog post announcing it has been removed (dead link). In fact, the blog link just takes you back to the homepage. Nevertheless, without declaring its intentions, the new Heello has arrived, and it is just like Twitter with one distinguishing feature: group private messaging. Sponsor You get a user name with an @ sign, and you @ mention people. When Everett first talked about Heello, it sounded like it would be something new. So what gives? On August first, the Heello Twitter account posted this ambiguous message: The "new Heello" sure looks like the old Twitter.
It's worth remarking that the launch of this Twitter clone coincides with Twitter's launch of its native photo-sharing service. Currently, it's a Web-only app, which is limiting. Why does this exist? Discuss. Cloud Computing News - StorageRoom Wants to Be Your Cloud-based Mobile Content Management System - Sigalon's Scoop.it Soup. On Bitly Buying Twitterfeed - Jo Soup. Twitterfeed, the popular tool for publishing links automatically to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, has been acquired by URL shortener Bitly. Both are loosely associated projects of seed investor and web tech incubator Betaworks, part of what Betaworks CEO John Borthwick calls a "glorious connected ecosystem of things we have going on here.
" For Twitterfeed to move in-house with the analytics provider that is the basis of so much of its value makes sense. Twitterfeed itself has steadily added features in recent months though, from geocoding published messages to publishing into LinkedIn. Is it a good idea to automate publishing of links into social networks?
Sponsor Yesterday we wrote about a new WordPress.com feature that enables automated publishing to Facebook Pages and questioned whether this was a good idea. Asked about this question, Betaworks CEO John Borthwick told us: "There isn't one answer to fit all here -- most publishers/users mix auto posting with manual posting. Si - Visualising Sorting Algorithms. Update See sortvis.org for many more visualisations! I dislike animatedsorting algorithm visualisations - there's too much of an air of hocus-pocus about them. Something impressive and complicated happens on screen, but more often than not the audience is left mystified.
I think their creators must also know that they have precious little explanatory value, because the better ones are sexed up with play-by-play doodles, added, one feels, as an apologetic afterthought by some particularly dorky sportscaster. Nevertheless I've been unable to find a single attempt to visualise a sorting algorithm statically (if you know of any, please drop me a line).
So, presented below are the results of a pleasant evening with some nice Scotch and the third volume of Knuth. I think these simple static visualisations are much clearer than most animated attempts - and they have the added benefit of also being, to my not entirely unbiased eye, rather beautiful. Right - enough prattling! Visualise.py . #Media & digital #History & #Utopia - 02myCondHum_201108-no05. #manual soz #Bewegungen & soc #Media - 02mySocMed_201109_no02. IBM Research's synaptic modelled chips. brain on a chip, sts. IN EN: IBM on dier Hardware for a Cognitive Computer. Two Key Advances Bring Quantum Computers Closer to Reality Than Ever. Researchers on two continents are reporting two big breakthroughs in quantum computing today — a quantum system built on the familiar von Neumann processor-memory architecture, and a working digital quantum simulator built on a quantum-computer platform. Although these developments are still constrained to the lab, they’re yet another sign that a quantum leap in computing may be just around the corner.
In the first study, researchers at the University of California-Santa Barbara say they’ve built the first working quantum computer chip based on the von Neumann system. Named for the engineer who designed the concept, the von Neumann architecture combines processors and memory, and it’s the basis for every computer out there. (With one notable recent exception.) This quantum CPU (quCPU?) Is a big breakthrough, because quantum computers by definition are difficult to design. Researchers at UCSB super-chilled their quCPU to near absolute zero and performed a few calculations. Two Key Advances Bring Quantum Computers Closer to Reality Than Ever. Researchers on two continents are reporting two big breakthroughs in quantum computing today — a quantum system built on the familiar von Neumann processor-memory architecture, and a working digital quantum simulator built on a quantum-computer platform.
Although these developments are still constrained to the lab, they're yet another sign that a quantum leap in computing may be just around the corner. In the first study, researchers at the University of California-Santa Barbara say they've built the first working quantum computer chip based on the von Neumann system. Named for the engineer who designed the concept, the von Neumann architecture combines processors and memory, and it's the basis for every computer out there. (With one notable recent exception.) This quantum CPU (quCPU?) Researchers at UCSB super-chilled their quCPU to near absolute zero and performed a few calculations. Given breakthroughs like these, quantum computers may be closer than ever. [Science, Physics World] Strata Week: Twitter's coming Storm, data and maps from the London riots. Here are a few of the data stories that caught my attention this week: Twitter's coming Storm In a blog post late last week, Twitter announced that it plans to open source Storm, its Hadoop-like data processing tool.
Storm was developed by BackType, the social media analytics company that Twitter acquired last month. Several of BackType's other technologies, including ElephantDB, have already been open sourced, and Storm will join them this fall, according to Nathan Marz, formerly of BackType now of Twitter. Marz's post digs into how Storm works as well as how it can be applied. Touting the technology's ease-of-use, Marz lists the following complexities "under the hood: guaranteed message processing, robust process management, fault detection and automatic reassignment, efficient message passing, and local mode and distributed mode. Mapping the London riots Using real-time social streams and mapping tools in a crisis situation is hardly new.
When data disappears Got data news? Strata Week: Twitter's coming Storm, data and maps from the London riots. Here are a few of the data stories that caught my attention this week: Twitter’s coming Storm In a blog post late last week, Twitter announced that it plans to open source Storm, its Hadoop-like data processing tool. Storm was developed by BackType, the social media analytics company that Twitter acquired last month. Several of BackType’s other technologies, including ElephantDB, have already been open sourced, and Storm will join them this fall, according to Nathan Marz, formerly of BackType now of Twitter.
Marz’s post digs into how Storm works as well as how it can be applied. He notes that a Storm cluster is only “superficially similar” to a Hadoop cluster. Touting the technology’s ease-of-use, Marz lists the following complexities “under the hood: guaranteed message processing, robust process management, fault detection and automatic reassignment, efficient message passing, and local mode and distributed mode. Mapping the London riots When data disappears Got data news? Send me an email. Transliteracy - information literacy and transliteracy… how do they relate? » virtually a librarian. About recent web developments and its challanges - 4 articles on cloud computing, balkanization and federation - radar.oreilly.com - mondaynote.com - newscientist.com.
I/O 2010. Google+ is the social backbone. The launch of Google+ is the beginning of a fundamental change on the web. A change that will tear down silos, empower users and create opportunities to take software and collaboration to new levels. Social features will become pervasive, and fundamental to our interaction with networked services. Collaboration from within applications will be as natural to us as searching for answers on the web is today. It’s not just about Google vs Facebook Much attention has focused on Google+ as a Facebook competitor, but to view the system solely within that context is short-sighted.
Google+ is the rapidly growing seed of a web-wide social backbone, and the catalyst for the ultimate uniting of the social graph. As web search connects people to documents across the web, the social backbone connects people to each other directly, across the full span of web-wide activity. Search removed the need to remember domain names and URLs. It’s time for the social layer to become a commodity Why not Facebook? Catching the Cloud. When it comes to contracting for a computer service, there is little choice but hoping for the best. Small or mid-size companies, especially those located outside the United States, are betting they’ll never have to go to court – usually one located 11,000km and thousands of dollars in legal fees away. Let’s face it: contracting with a large American company is a jump into the unknown.
Agreements are written in an obscure form of English, often presented in PDF format, transparently implying modifications are out of question. Should you consider litigating, be prepared to make your case before a judge located on the West Coast of the United States. The not-so-subliminal reading of such contracts: ‘Sue me…’, with a grin. The Cloud’s rise to prominence makes things worse.
European lawyers are beginning to look at better ways to protect their clients’ interests. The CVML partner then laid out six critical elements to be implemented in European legislation. 1 / Transparency. Balkanizing the Web. Creeping Balkanization is the internet’s worst enemy. As worldwide literacy grows exponentially, for the web, such expansion results in increasing pressure from corporate interests and regulatory nationalisms.
Rising from its arcane beginnings as a DARPA research project, the net has become a symbol of borderless communication between individuals and of unlimited access to knowledge. Unfortunately, the net is about to become a heavily controlled environment, serving two classes of citizens: a dominant class that sets the rules (technological, legal and commercial) and the underclass of citizens and consumers. Consider these two macro trends: The first one stems from the world’s linguistic evolution. As of today, there are about one billion English-speaking people worldwide, half of which are native speakers. This latter proportion keeps growing as education improves; this growth reinforces the prevalence of English as the main internet lingua.
Mobile internet? #1 Technological control. Welcome to the age of the splinternet - tech - 20 July 2011. Read full article Continue reading page |1|2|3 Editorial: "The rise of the splinternet" Openness is the internet's great strength – and weakness. With powerful forces carving it up, is its golden age coming to an end? How quickly the world changes. In August 1991 Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, posted a message to a discussion forum detailing a new method for sharing information between networked computers.
Today, most of us in the developed world and elsewhere take the internet for granted. Though it was the World Wide Web that opened the internet to the world, the underlying structure dates back much further. For Baran's plan to work, every message would be broken up into small packets of digital information, each of which would be relayed from router to router, handed over like hot potatoes. These basic ingredients - openness, trust and decentralisation - were baked into the internet at its inception. More From New Scientist More from the web Recommended by. Social network analysis isn't just for social networks. Social networking has become a pervasive part of our everyday online experience, and by extension, that means the analysis and application of social data is an essential component of business. In the following interview, "Social Network Analysis for Startups" co-author Maksim Tsvetovat (@maksim2042) offers a primer on social network analysis (SNA) and how it has relevance beyond social-networking services.
What is social network analysis (SNA)? Maksim Tsvetovat: Social network analysis is an offshoot of the social sciences — sociology, political science, psychology, anthropology and others — that studies human interactions by using graph-theoretic approaches rather then traditional statistics. It's a scientific methodology for data analysis and also a collection of theories about how and why people interact — and how these interaction patterns change and affect our lives as individuals or societies. How does SNA relate to startups? Social network analysis isn't just for social networks. Social networking has become a pervasive part of our everyday online experience, and by extension, that means the analysis and application of social data is an essential component of business.
In the following interview, “Social Network Analysis for Startups” co-author Maksim Tsvetovat (@maksim2042) offers a primer on social network analysis (SNA) and how it has relevance beyond social-networking services. What is social network analysis (SNA)? Maksim Tsvetovat: Social network analysis is an offshoot of the social sciences — sociology, political science, psychology, anthropology and others — that studies human interactions by using graph-theoretic approaches rather then traditional statistics. It’s a scientific methodology for data analysis and also a collection of theories about how and why people interact — and how these interaction patterns change and affect our lives as individuals or societies.
How does SNA relate to startups? QRiousCODE - Art Comes Alive with Microsoft Tags - Sigalon's Scoop.it Soup. QR code generator. Create your QR codes for free on uQR.me.