Domain: tnl.net
Stories and comments across the archive that link to tnl.net.
Comments · 20
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Re:Boy did Nokia bet on the wrong "partner"
There have been articles recently about Apple possibly buying Nokia, both for the phone hardware and patents, and for the navteq mapping company that nokia owns.
http://www.tnl.net/blog/2012/10/06/why-apple-should-acquire-nokia/
Even if apple didn't buy Nokia outright, it would still make more sense for the next iphone to be made by someone other than their current ally/enemy Samsung, and apple could license the Navteq maps like the stand-alone GPS makers already do.
Patents aren't worth THAT much hassle, and it's far cheaper for them to just use contract manufacturers as they always have. If they really wanted in-house factories, there are plenty of no-brand contract manufacturers (such as Foxconn and their ilk) they could buy instead.
Apple's main contractor (foxconn) has to put up safety nets to keep the employees from killing themselves, and Apple's other contractor (samsung) is currently fighting them in quite a few lawsuits.
Unless nokia has been farming out all their manufacturing to foxconn as well, then nokia has at least some manufacturing capacity to offer to apple, and unlike samsung and HTC, they aren't currently trying to sue each other to death.
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Re:Boy did Nokia bet on the wrong "partner"
There have been articles recently about Apple possibly buying Nokia, both for the phone hardware and patents, and for the navteq mapping company that nokia owns.
http://www.tnl.net/blog/2012/10/06/why-apple-should-acquire-nokia/
Even if apple didn't buy Nokia outright, it would still make more sense for the next iphone to be made by someone other than their current ally/enemy Samsung, and apple could license the Navteq maps like the stand-alone GPS makers already do.
I don't buy that rumour. I just can't fathom a reason why Apple (hugely profitable phone maker with cast iron brand) would buy Nokia (hugely loss-making, wedded almost inexorably to one of Apple's biggest rivals). For a handful of patents and some factories? Patents aren't worth THAT much hassle, and it's far cheaper for them to just use contract manufacturers as they always have. If they really wanted in-house factories, there are plenty of no-brand contract manufacturers (such as Foxconn and their ilk) they could buy instead.
Someone like HTC buying Nokia seems more plausible. HTC make Windows phones, and lack a strong global brand like Nokia's. They also have a lot of money to play with, but aren't making much profit and will be grasping for a change of strategy to turn things around. That or someone like Dell or Lenovo- Windows shops which have never managed to break into mobile phones under their own steam.
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Re:Boy did Nokia bet on the wrong "partner"
There have been articles recently about Apple possibly buying Nokia, both for the phone hardware and patents, and for the navteq mapping company that nokia owns.
http://www.tnl.net/blog/2012/10/06/why-apple-should-acquire-nokia/
Even if apple didn't buy Nokia outright, it would still make more sense for the next iphone to be made by someone other than their current ally/enemy Samsung, and apple could license the Navteq maps like the stand-alone GPS makers already do.
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Re:NOOOOOO
You can also read the article to understand the points why buying Nokia would be good for Apple. http://www.tnl.net/blog/2012/10/06/why-apple-should-acquire-nokia/
No one is talking a merger between Nokia and Apple, just purchasing technology and patents that Nokia has to benefit Apple. You'd understand that if you had bothered to read the article. -
Google
There doesn't seem to be any mention of the GoogleNet. While it may not be used for figuring out sums and what-not, it does have an estimated 126 terraflops of computing power. I'd say that's notable. I bet at least half those terraflops are devoted to advertising aswell.
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Re:Formula For Success?
A better comparison is: http://www.tnl.net/blog/entry/MacBook_Pro_Compari
s on_Charts
Any google search will yield a 750 off coupon for the Dell as well.
For example, you could have gotten something like this:
http://www.slickdeals.net/?fromMonth=12&fromDay=31 &fromYear=2005&toMonth=1&toDay=7&toYear=2006&site= slickdeals&pastdeals=Go#p6930
Any person savvy enough to shop online is hopefully savvy enough to check for deals, and not just buy the first price they see on the website. -
... but could there be some benefits?
While I am sure the privacy concerns are going to continue, I'm also trying to look at it from another angle. Google may be trying to set itself up as an infrastructure play so it can start indexing the Deep Web.
Shameless self-promotion link: I've posted an entry on this on my site last night. -
Re:Consolidation
I was wondering the same thing so I started looking at the product lines and blogged my thoughts on this. I suspect all the web stuff stays on the Macromedia side but all the non-web products are wins for Adobe. As far as anyone interested in picking a fight with Adobe, how about Microsoft? They could, sometimes in the future...
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Human Intelligence is More than SpeedOne of the landmarks we needed to pass in order for computers to approximate Human intelligence is the processing speed.
Estimates are that the Human brain computes somewhere between 100 Teraflops and 1000 Teraflops,
and Google was performing somewhere between 100 and 300 Teraflops. in late 2004.P.S. Since doing that bit of research, every time Google checks my spelling and responds with "did you mean..." the hair stands on the back of my neck
:)But it's more than processing speed. It needs to have the software to do things like decision making, analysis, reasoning, evaluating, judging, information-organizing, learning, logic etc. which would normally require a human to perform.
We're not far off though...
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Potential ValueI think 5% it's a good estimate of the extent to which we have tapped the power of our communications networks, but, I agree with susano that the potential value of a perfectly connected communications network is nSquared. The utility of a communications network is simply limited by software. The potential is there waiting to be tapped.
The linked article refers to the actual useage we draw from a network as an example of it's value. But clearly there is far more value to be tapped. Look at Neural Nets. With only a few nodes, they can actually learn.
Consider the untapped power of the connected masses. The potential computational power of all connected home desktops in North America is far greater than the most powerful supercomputer. Even Google, which has an estimated computational capacity surpassing the most powerful supercomputer and approaching that of the human brain.
Estimates are that
the Human brain computes somewhere between 100 TERAflops and 1000 Teraflops,
and Google performs somwhere between 100 and 300 teraflops.
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Let's assume Google is acting rationallyThey might want Rob Pike for other reasons, several have been suggested elsewhere in this discussion.
On the other hand, they may actually want him to develop an operating system. That is one of the things he's done before, and one of the things he's well known for.
Why on earth should Google want to develop a new (or highly modified) operating system? What strengths would Dr Pike bring to that project?
Google have a very large number of servers. They won't reveal how many they have, but admit to more than 10,000 servers, another another estimate suggests between 31 and 158 thousand servers. That's a lot of computing power. Presumably the people at Google are highly interested in getting as much work out of this hardware as they possibly can.
Enter Dr Pike. He's well known for Plan 9 "The Plan 9 system is based on the concept of distributed computing in a networked, client-server environment. The set of resources available to applications is transparently made accessible everywhere in the distributed system, so that it is irrelevant where the applications are actually running."
I have seen passing references that Plan 9 is strong on clustering and load balancing. Unfortunately I can't get google to give me a good citation, so this may be a myth.
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There are ways to mitigate the impact
I'm reproducing this article from my own site (all the links are on the site):
Capacity planning and RSS
September 9, 2004
Robert Scoble points to MSDN having issues with full entry RSS. What it comes down to is a capacity planning exercise.
In his note, he says that RSS is broken. I personally believe that at issue is not whether RSS is working or not. RSS is working but it has complicated the bandwidth issue. At issue is the fact that RSS feeds are generally generating more traffic to a site. Because RSS readers are polling the site to check if a feed has been updated, the traffic patterns change, with increased numbers of spikes on a hourly basis. This is similar to some of the issues network administrators started facing when Pointcast first appeared.
There are a number of ways to mitigate the issue.
HTTP Conditional GET for RSS
First of all, one of the things to consider when using RSS is to create conditional HTTP headers on RSS feeds. This helps mitigate some of the impact by ensuring that feeds are only served if the content has changed.
Feed Compression
The next item to think of is to use compression when serving feeds. By doing so, one reduces the size of the payload, which ends up being much better in terms of managing bandwidth. In my own experience, because RSS is primarily text, I've seen a reduction of 80% of the bandwidth when delivering RSS feeds in a compressed format. That represents a fairly large gain in bandwidth that can then accommodate more users.
Change the polling schedule
The RSS 2.0 specification already offers a number of optional elements to give RSS readers a better idea as to when to get content. For example, the pubDate element offers information as to when a feed was last published, as does the lastBuildDate one. ttl (aka. time to live) can also be used to indicate to the software that this feed should live for a certain amount of time. Finally, skipHours and skipDays offers more pointers as to when RSS reader software should not poll. With all those mechanisms in place, it looks like a lot of flexibility exists in the format to accommodate scalability.
When all else fails, reduce
If all of the above still fail, RSS publishers should look at reducing the size of their feeds. There are two ways you can do this. First, you can just say that you're not going to offer full-text feeds. This seems to be the option that Scoble hates. Another way to do things is to offer both abbreviated feeds and full-text feeds or offer more detailed feeds, as I do on TNL.net.
An important consideration when doing something like this is how to address them. By default, users who just use the RSS autodiscovery feature will only get the abbreviated feed. However, they still have the option to go and get the full-text version. The compromise here is that users who just want to subscribe quickly can do so at a lower bandwidth costs, while power users can seek out the fuller feed and subscribe to that. The result, in my experience, is that most people use the autodiscovery feature, grabbing the smaller feed. Some power users do seek out the fuller feed and subscribe to that instead (based on the numbers, I'm seeing a 5% usage of the full-text feed as opposed to the default abbreviated one. This is a compromise solution that seems to accomodate everyone involved to date.
Final considerations
When publishing RSS feeds, your audience grows, which results in traffic growth too. One of the thing to realize is that RSS feeds are generally stickier than the rest of a site. What this means is that, for every new subscriber you get, you will see an on-going increase in your overall site traffic stats. This is not a bad thing as messages emanating from your site do get a higher passive readership. One of the thing that new syndication standards should consider is a follow-up on this. While RSS publisher know how many feeds are being pushed out, there is littl -
NOT the fastest!
It seems to me that as long as multiprocessor machines qualify as supercomputers, then the Google cluster counts as the fastest right now, and will still count as the fastest long after this new DOE computer is built.
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But it's not the best thing to come out of HP
... today...
Has anyone checked out LightScribe. While the Apple deal is interesting, I think the LightScribe story should get more play... -
Re:boo.com
Boo.com did have many failure and, as a former employee, I am aware of many of the excesses but I think a lot of the picture was not fully painted (I've covered many of the accomplishments in an article for Business 2.0) but I have one thing to say about the google remark: Boo.com built up and failed before google became the dominant search engine. At the time, Yahoo was the king of search
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Could be good for Mozilla
I've just blogged this. The most interesting part is that:
Back when the patent was issued, Mike Doyle of EOLAS said in a message to www-talk, a W3C mailing list that:
Please note from our Web site that, in almost all cases, Eolas' Weblet-related technologies will be licensed free of charge for noncommercial use.
Well, looking at this, Mozilla could be in a very good position as the only browser currently not infringing. -
The #1 ArticleI've been following this for some time... People may remember the "Truth behind 911" video that is available via Bittorrent at Suprnova (search for Suprnova mirrors via Google)
Check out: http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmeri
c asDefenses.pdfThis has been quite disturbing to everyone I've talked to about it... My wife flat out refuses to talk to be about it because it makes so much sense and is so upsetting... This has gotten a lot of press lately. Check out:
911 and the Bush Administration
The GuardianThose with Weblogs should contribute to the weblog project mentioned on Metafilter about this:
WHO were you?Unfortunately, it just makes more sense that we provoked these arabic countries to either let us build a pipeline to feed China with Oil, or we would do it by force. "A carpet of Gold, or a carpet of Bombs..."
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Re:Dept. of Honest Mistakes
Aha, now I remember. Hatch's mistake wasn't so much the copyright issue, which really wasn't a big deal, probably wasn't his fault (since Hatch probably couldn't tell Java from a cup of coffee), and so on, and you're right that Hatch was no more guilty than Dean. It was more, as another poster mentioned, the "people in glass houses" effect. Since I haven't seen any evidence the campaign *was* aware of the issue, and since they stopped once they were made aware, I'd say they're innocent until proven guilty.
Other groups were also duped by the same "e-mail direct marketers", including companies like British Airways, HP, and New Line Cinema. -
There are a number of components to thisIt seems that our voice could become more important over the next year. I've written about this on my site. Basically, we are seeing a confluence of different interesting trends:
- Weblogs and blog software are making it easier for both geeks and non-geeks to post online
- Social networks like Friendster, Tribes.net, Ryze, etc... are making it easier to link to thousands of people very quickly. Look at how quickly flashmobs are getting organized
- A number of policies (PATRIOT Act, The Bono Act, etc...) are starting to affect us negatively
I suspect that we are going to see more and more action from geeks over the 2004 campaign. -
doctor^H^H^H^H^H^Husability guru ... heal thyself
Follow the links to his papers on usability and you end up at his site.
On that site, he sets his links as bold, with no decoration, and the same color as the rest of the body text. Though, some subheaders are also bold (but not links). Therefore, you can't always tell that links are links, and some things that aren't you think might be.
This isn't exactly the type of thing you like to see inside of a paper explaining how to make usability better by keeping things familiar for the user.