Technology Blogs
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's Cracked Windows: How The World's Technology Juggernaut Lost Its Buzz And Became The 'Underdog'
Osborne 1 celebrates its 30th birthday, and that of the portable computing revolution
On April 3rd, 1981 -- thirty years ago today -- Adam Osborne unveiled the Osborne 1 at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. It had a 4 MHz Zilog Z80 CPU, two single-sided floppy drives, 64K of RAM, and a five-inch monochrome CRT display. Nothing particularly special there, even back in the day.“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.
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.
Dot Obits: First Woman to Design Computer
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.”
The Great Language Land Grab
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
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).
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!
Is Yahoo Shutting Down Del.icio.us? [Update: Yes]
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.
Flaws in Tor anonymity network spotlighted
Linux
The End Of Hand Crafted Content
Old media loves nothing quite so much as writing about their own impending death.
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.<a href="//ad.doubleclick.net/jump/teg.fmsq/pfw6/a;subs=n;wsub=n;sdn=n;!c=15579717;dcopt=ist;pos=ldr_top;sz=728x90,970x90,970x250;tile=1;ord=950872566?" target="_blank"><img src="//ad.doubleclick.net/ad/teg.fmsq/pfw6/a;subs=n;wsub=n;sdn=n;!
Technology: The data deluge
The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators
I keep hearing people throw around the word “curation” at various conferences, most recently at SXSW.Mac