pure AJAX audio formats now a reality (2)
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Lucas Gonze (5)
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Lucas Gonze' blog (5)
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The best hack I’ve seen since Brad Neuberg did AMASS in 2005: Arek Korbik implements Vorbis in Flash, with no dedicated Vorbis support provided by Adobe as part of Flash. It’s a god-level piece of hacking. What Arek’s hack means is that new sound formats can now be implemented in pure AJAX and deployed with browser-borne technology. This breaks the logjam at MP3, where new audio formats could never reach wide deployment because the only ...
Scaling Hadoop to 4000 nodes at Yahoo! (8)
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6 days, 1 hour
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We recently ran Hadoop on what we believe is the single largest Hadoop installation, ever: • 4000 nodes • 2 quad core Xeons @ 2.5ghz per node • 4x1TB SATA disks per node • 8G RAM per node • 1 gigabit ethernet on each node • 40 nodes per rack • 4 gigabit ethernet uplinks from each rack to the core (unfortunately a misconfiguration, we usually do 8 uplinks) • Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS ...
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cb160 said:
Nice to see this testing info in the public domain.
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Pat said:
amazing
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John said:
Pretty cool stuff.
Living through Interesting Times (17)
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Charlie Stross (77)
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Charlie's Diary (79)
1 week, 2 days
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We are living in interesting times; in fact, they're so interesting that it is not currently possible to write near-future SF. I don't believe this is an over-generalization. It takes time — weeks at a minimum, more usually months — for even a short story to work its way from your desktop to a magazine or a website. Novels are far worse, for book publishers run a production cycle that expects a novel to take ...
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tlockney said:
Interesting times indeed...
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Dayvan Cowboy said:
Este é o blog do autor do fantástico romance "Accelerando", disponível em www.accelerando.org ; aqui, ele diz que está praticamente impossível escrever sci-fi nos dias de hoje
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Don said:
excellent post
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Chuck LeDuc said:
Would it have a monumental fiscal collapse, on the same scale as 1929? Would it have Taikonauts space-walking overhead while the chairman of the Federal Reserve is on his knees? Would it have more mobile phones than people, a revenant remilitarized Russia, and global warming?
The spammers have found Youtube. (4)
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jwz@jwz.org (54)
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jwz (71)
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I hesitate to link to a spam page, but check this shit out! Apparently the spammers are now taking the title of one (real) Youtube post, the description of another, and the video from a third -- then pre-pending some textual spam bullshit to the front of the video itself and re-uploading it. (And I'm seeing lots of these because they keep mentioning DNA Lounge.) It's hard to imagine a more wasteful form of spam. ...
How smart *is* the Genius? (4)
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plamere (17)
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Duke Listens! (17)
3 weeks, 6 days
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Here's a first look at the new Genius feature of iTunes 8. First of all, there have been a few reports that the Genius feature will be 'Pandora-like.' This is not true - the iTunes recommendations seem to be rather run-of-the-mill collaborative filtering recommendations based upon the wisdom of the crowds - as compared to the core technology behind Pandora which uses a detailed content-analysis of the music (by a trained staff of musicians) to ...
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Ade said:
"The iTunes Genius is just a run-of-the-mill collaborative filtering recommender - the recommendations are nothing special - there's no advanced content analysis like you get from MusicIP. There's no deep analysis of content and context like The Echo Nest. There's no social community or tags like at Last.fm. There's no transparency in the recommendations like at Pandora. - the Genius just gives rather pedestrian recommendations and playlists."
Identity Farming (21)
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schneier (207)
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Schneier on Security (256)
4 weeks
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Let me start off by saying that I'm making this whole thing up. Imagine you're in charge of infiltrating sleeper agents into the United States. The year is 1983, and the proliferation of identity databases is making it increasingly difficult to create fake credentials. Ten years ago, someone could have just shown up in the country and gotten a driver's...
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Vhata said:
Bruce says: "Do you actually have to show up for any part of your life?"Photo IDs, yes, but do you NEED those?
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Eater said:
When did Schneier start losing his mind?
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Denubis said:
I need to figure out how to address this in my dissertation
Picasa Web Albums - Branimir - Hic Rhodus, hic salta! (1)
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1 month
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This is officially my favourite photo ever
The Omnigoogle (31)
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nick (72)
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Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog (53)
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“Some say Google is God,” Sergey Brin once said. “Others say Google is Satan.” The confusion about Google’s identity may not be quite that Manichean, but it does run deep. The company, which today celebrates the tenth anniversary of its incorporation, remains an enigma despite the Everest-sized pile of press coverage that has been mounded around it. People can’t even agree what industry it’s in. The many businesses that see the young company as an...
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Jan said:
Good piece that makes a point I've been making for some time now - Google is actually quite simple at its heart, and spreads its tentacles out of a desire to feed its core business, not to dominate adjacent markets (though that may be a side effect). Which is why I think telcos should be less worried about Google than they appear to be
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tom said:
Google’s protean appearance is not a reflection of its core business. Rather, it stems from the vast number of complements to its core business. Complements are, to put it simply, any products or services that tend be consumed together. Think hot dogs and mustard, or houses and mortgages. For Google, literally everything that happens on the Internet is a complement to its main business. The more things that people and companies do online, the more ads they see and the more money Google makes. In addition, as Internet activity increases, Google collects more data on consumers’ needs and behavior and can tailor its ads more precisely, strengthening its competitive advantage and further increasing its income. As more and more products and services are delivered digitally over computer networks — entertainment, news, software programs, financial transactions — Google’s range of complements expands into ever more industry sectors. That's why cute little Google has morphed into The Omnigoogle...Google faces far less risk in product development than the usual business does. It routinely introduces half-finished products and services as online “betas” because it knows that, even if the offerings fail to win a big share of the market, they will still tend to produce attractive returns by generating advertising revenue and producing valuable data on customer behavior. For most companies, a failed launch of a new product is very costly. For Google, in general, it’s not. Failure is cheap.But while Google has an odd business model, it's not an unprecedented one. The company it most resembles is, ironically, its archrival, Microsoft. Just as Google controls the central money-making engine of the Internet economy (the search engine), Microsoft controlled the central money-making engine of the personal computer economy (the PC operating system). In the PC world, Microsoft had nearly as many complements as Google now has in the Internet world, and Microsoft, too, expanded into a vast number of software and other PC-related businesses - not necessarily to make money directly but to expand PC usage. Microsoft didn't take a cut of every dollar spent in the PC economy, but it took a cut of a lot of them. In the same way, Google takes a cut of many of the dollars that flow through the Net economy. The goal, then, is to keep expanding the economy...Google differs from Microsoft in at least one very important way. The ends that Microsoft has pursued are commercial ends. It's been in it for the money. Google, by contrast, has a strong messianic bent. The Omnigoogle is not just out to make oodles of money; it's on a crusade - to liberate information for the masses - and is convinced of its righteousness in pursuing its cause. Depending on your point of view as you look forward to the next ten years, you'll find that either comforting or not.
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phil.gs said:
Very good overview of Google's business plan and m.o.
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