Microsoft's Cracked Windows: How The World's Technology Juggernaut Lost Its Buzz And Became The 'Underdog' Facebook's chief executive Mark Zuckerberg recently took the stage at a joint press conference alongside another large technology company. He described his partner using a once-unthinkable designation. "The thing that makes Microsoft a great partner for us is that they really are the underdog," Zuckerberg said. "Because of that, they're in a structural position where they're incentivized to just go all out and innovate. " Microsoft as underdog. At the beginning of this decade, this description would have been ridiculous, like referring to the Yankees as an unsung, longshot baseball club. "Back in the 80s and 90s, Microsoft was seen as invulnerable," says Howard Anderson, a senior lecturer at MIT's Sloan School of Management. How did such a seemingly indomitable enterprise lose its formidable grip on the marketplace?
To be sure, Microsoft remains huge and powerful. For Microsoft, failures and missed opportunities have recently come to outshine its many successes. The Found Decade? Osborne 1 celebrates its 30th birthday, and that of the portable computing revolution. E-Books: The New Frontier for Content Farms. Recent changes to Google's search algorithm have sought to reduce the rankings of what Google has described as "low quality" and "low value add" sites.
And while some of these websites have seen a significant drop in traffic, we may find that content farms aren't eradicated. Rather, they're relocating. Impact Media's Mike Essex suggests their new destination may be e-books. On the Internet, many content farms are full of unoriginal content, often scraped from other sites, and republished under different headlines. Essex contends there are several things about the blossoming e-book and self-publishing industry that make this an obvious choice for spammers and scammers looking to continue their practices beyond the "prying eyes of Google. " There is Little Copyright Detection Science fiction author John Scalzi complained about this last month when he found that a search for his name on Barnes & Noble unearthed a number of books that had been scraped together from various Wikipedia articles. “Condor” Supercomputer Made Of 1,716 PS3s Now Online.
Supercomputers are expensive to make no matter how you look at it. But if you use a whole bunch of PS3s, you can save over 10x the cost compared to this guy. The Condor project is a supercomputer made up of 1,716 PS3s for the Air Force’s image processing tasks and is considered one of the top forty fastest computers in the world. Its big task involves monitoring 15 square miles 24/7, but not in the way you think. Because the PS3 is really good at image processing, the Air Force hopes it will solve their problem of processing images from all their recent aerial photo gathering.
With all the satellites they have, it has become pretty easy to snap loads of photos, but figuring what parts are important is difficult. What’s crazy about Condor is that users will be able to move cameras around like you’re playing Starcraft. Let’s hope that Condor is used for military analysis and not tuning in on our daily activities. [via Hot Hardware; image credit: John Berry / The Post-Standard] Dot Obits: First Woman to Design Computer.
Betty Jean Jennings Bartik, one of the first women in the IT industry, has passed away at the age of 86. Bartik was on the team that programmed and de-bugged the first general-purpose computer, the ENIAC, or Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. She was one of the female mathematicians, known as "computers," recruited by the United States military during World War II to test ballistics. They soon moved into the electronics program. Jean, left Jennings Bartik was born in December of 1924 and was raised on a farm near Stanberry in Missouri. ENIAC began in July of 1943, in secret, at the University of Pennsylvania's engineering school under the code name Project PX. Jennings Bartik later went on to program the BINAC and UNIVAC, Here's the thing. Hrmmm. Bartik photo from Computer History Museum | ENIAC photo Wikimedia Commons | other sources: TechEye | Northwest Missouri State University.
The Great Language Land Grab. Microsoft is suing Apple, and Apple is suing Amazon, all over the right to use a simple two-word phrase: “app store.” Apple got there first, introducing its App Store in July 2008 as a marketplace for mobile applications. In January, Microsoft disputed Apple’s trademark claim, arguing that “app store” had already become a generic expression. And last week, Amazon announced its own “Appstore” for Google’s Android devices, prompting an infringement suit from Apple.
It’s not the first time the tech industry has claimed commonplace language as its own. Facebook has been notorious in this regard, filing trademarks on an array of common four-letter words: “like,” “wall,” “poke” and, naturally, “face” and “book.” Last year, two small Internet start-ups, the travel site Placebook and the educational site Teachbook, learned the danger of using “book” for online services when Facebook’s lawyers came calling. (Placebook renamed itself, while Teachbook continues to fight it out.)
Advanced SimpleNote: Collaborating, Blog posts, and Advanced Applications. Beyond the Basics of SimpleNote By this point you should be pretty comfortable using SimpleNote and the various apps that you can use it with. The last post on SimpleNote focused on more personal tasks—taking notes and keeping a task list—this post is about working with other people, other applications, and other ways to publish your notes. As a bonus tip, I’ll throw in some tips on how to format your notes with bold, italics, links, even headings, but still keeping everything in nice, simple plain text. Let’s start off with collaboration, a new feature that I think could prove to be one of SimpleNote’s most powerful tools Sharing your notes, with a twist One of the newer features in SimpleNote for iOS is the ability to share notes with other people.
Sure you could do a one off share before—sending a note to someone via email or as a web link—but now you can share a note with another person on SimpleNote so they can edit the note with you as a collaborative document. Mostly. Report: Playstation Phone Is Based On the PSPgo, Will Go On Sale This Spring. We’ve spent quite a few posts on Sony’s Playstation Phone in the last few months, and today the Asahi Shimbun (one of Japan’s biggest newspapers) is reporting [JP] that the device will be released in spring next year. Not a big surprise, but what’s interesting is that it will hit Europe and the US first, if the report is to be believed. The Asahi says that Japan will probably get the device, too. Technically, the phone will be based on the PSPgo but will have a smaller form factor. The PSPgo is sized at 69 mm (2.7 in) x 128 mm (5.0 in) x 16.5 mm (0.65 in). Much like with Sony’s unpopular portable game system, owners will be able to download games through built-in Wi-Fi.
Sony also plans to offer music, movies and manga for download. According to the report, the Playstation Phone will be manufactured by Sony Ericsson, and there is a “strong possibility” that the handset/game system hybrid will use Android as the OS. Kin Studio Closing On January 31st: Kin Will Really Die Now. Is Yahoo Shutting Down Del.icio.us? [Update: Yes] For a couple of days now, we’ve been hearing rumors that the Yahoo layoffs included the entire Delicious team. Now Former Yahoo employee and Upcoming founder Andy Baio has tweeted out the above Yahoo! Product team meeting slide that seems to show that Yahoo! Is either closing or merging the social bookmarking service as well as Upcoming, Fire Eagle, MyBlogLog and others. In some kind of weird founder solidarity, the slide was originally posted on Twitter by MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier. Listed under the ominous “Sunset” are: Delicious, Altavista, MyBlogLog, Yahoo!
Bookmarks, Yahoo! Picks Under “Merge” are: Upcoming, FoxyTunes, Sideline, FireEagle, Yahoo Events and Yahoo People Search. It also looks like sundry Yahoo properties like Yahoo Deals and Yahoo Calendar will be made into features. I have emailed Yahoo for more information and verification and will update this post when I hear back. The official response from Yahoo: For the few of you unaware this is PR speak for, “We confirm.” Technology Review: How to Hack the Power Grid for Fun and Profit.
The decades-old technology used to manage the power grid is vulnerable to manipulation or sabotage, according to a study revealed this week. Attackers could manipulate power-grid data by breaking into substations and intercepting communications between substations, grid operators, and electricity suppliers. This data is used by grid operators to set prices for electricity and to balance supply and demand, the researchers say. Grid hackers could make millions of dollars at the expense of electricity consumers by influencing electricity markets.
They could also make the grid unstable, causing blackouts. The attacks would be difficult to trace, according to Le Xie, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Texas A&M University, speaking at the IEEE SmartGridComm2010 conference in Gaithersburg, Maryland, this week. Electric-grid operators forecast supply and demand a day ahead of time, and set prices for customers in different places in accordance. Windows Phone Newsroom: Live Press Conference. HP Buying Palm for $1.2 Billion - Palm - Gizmodo. Smarter grids, appliances, and consumers. More and more utilities are beginning to realize that building large power plants just to handle peak daily and seasonal demand is a very costly way of managing an electricity system. Existing electricity grids are typically a patchwork of local grids that are simultaneously inefficient, wasteful, and dysfunctional in that they often are unable, for example, to move electricity surpluses to areas of shortages.
The U.S. electricity grid today resembles the roads and highways of the mid-twentieth century before the interstate highway system was built. What is needed today is the electricity equivalent of the interstate highway system. The inability to move low-cost electricity to consumers because of congestion on transmission lines brings with it costs similar to those associated with traffic congestion. The lack of transmission capacity in the eastern United States is estimated to cost consumers $16 billion a year in this region alone. PC Perspective - The #1 Choice for PC Hardware Reviews and Infor. Ars Technica. Flaws in Tor anonymity network spotlighted. At the Chaos Computer Club Congress in Berlin, Germany on Monday, researchers from the University of Regensburg delivered a new warning about the Tor anonymizer network, a system aimed at hiding details of a computer user’s online activity from spying eyes.
The attack doesn’t quite make a surfer’s activity an open book, but offers the ability for someone on the same local network—a Wi-Fi network provider, or an ISP working at law enforcement (or a regime’s) request, for example—to gain a potentially good idea of sites an anonymous surfer is viewing. “Developers have to be aware of this kind of attack, and develop countermeasures,” said Dominik Herrmann, a Regensburg PhD student studying profiling and fingerprinting attacks. “But that proves to be very difficult.” Tor is essentially an online mask, rather than a tool that hides the fact or content of communication itself. Herrmann and his fellow researchers say there’s a partial flaw in this arrangement, however.
ZDNet: Tech News, Blogs and White Papers for IT Professionals.
The End Of Hand Crafted Content. Old media loves nothing quite so much as writing about their own impending death. And we always enjoy adding our own two cents – the AP not knowing what YouTube is, the NYTimes guys reading TechCrunch every day, etc. Speaking broadly, I like what Reuters, Rupert Murdoch and Eric Schmidt are saying: the industry is in crisis, and the daring innovators will prevail. Personally, I still think the best way forward for the best journalists, if not the brands they currently work for, is to leave those brands and do their own thing.
But as one of the innovators in the last go round, I think there’s a much bigger problem lurking on the horizon than a bunch of blogs and aggregators disrupting old media business models that needed disrupting anyway. The rise of fast food content is upon us, and it’s going to get ugly. Old media frets over blogs and aggregators that summarize content and link back to the original source. But even then, companies like ours can find a way to compete. The Revolution Will Not Be Intermediated. So I just followed this tweet by Chris Messina to Mike Arrington‘s The End of Hand Crafted Content. The tweet-bite: “The rise of fast food content is upon us, and it’s going to get ugly.” Meaning that FFC “will surely, over time, destroy the mom and pop operations that hand craft their content today. It’s the rise of cheap, disposable content on a mass scale, force fed to us by the portals and search engines.” Just as an aside, I’ve been hand-crafting (actually just typing) my “content” for about twenty years now, and I haven’t been destroyed by a damn thing.
Mike explains, “On one end you have AOL and their Toyota Strategy of building thousand of niche content sites via the work of cast-offs from old media. His penultimate point: My advice to readers is just this — get ready for it, because you’ll be reading McDonalds five times a day in the near future. Good advice. Mike concludes, “Forget fair and unfair, right and wrong. Well, no. Inventor of Frisbee Dies at 90 - Fred Morrison - Gizmodo. Scobleizer/Tech News Brands... Technology: The data deluge. EIGHTEEN months ago, Li & Fung, a firm that manages supply chains for retailers, saw 100 gigabytes of information flow through its network each day. Now the amount has increased tenfold. During 2009, American drone aircraft flying over Iraq and Afghanistan sent back around 24 years' worth of video footage.
New models being deployed this year will produce ten times as many data streams as their predecessors, and those in 2011 will produce 30 times as many. Everywhere you look, the quantity of information in the world is soaring. Plucking the diamond from the waste A few industries have led the way in their ability to gather and exploit data. Mobile-phone operators, meanwhile, analyse subscribers' calling patterns to determine, for example, whether most of their frequent contacts are on a rival network. There's much further to go. Now for the bad news But the data deluge also poses risks. The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators. I keep hearing people throw around the word “curation” at various conferences, most recently at SXSW. The thing is most of the time when I dig into what they are saying they usually have no clue about what curation really is or how it could be applied to the real-time world.
So, over the past few months I’ve been talking to tons of entrepreneurs about the tools that curators actually need and I’ve identified seven things. First, who does curation? Bloggers, of course, but blogging is curation for Web 1.0. Look at this post here, I can link to Tweets, and point out good ones, right? That’s curation. But NONE of the real time tools/systems like Google Buzz, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, give curators the tools that they need to do their work efficiently. As you read these things they were ordered (curated) in this order for a reason. This is a guide for how we can build “info molecules” that have a lot more value than the atomic world we live in now. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 1. 1.