The Hyperion reactor would be more impressive if they had a prototype working. They're claiming much higher energy densities than any existing nuclear reactor.
It's not even close to being a "battery", by the way. It's a steam plant with a turbine. The turbine is separate from the reactor and connected to it by plumbing. So the reactor is not a "sealed unit".
Still, there are many uses for a small, reasonably safe nuclear power plant. It ought to be comparable to a Triga in safety, and there are about 60 Trigas in the world. That's a neat little General Atomic design from the 1950s, and it's inherently stable; the physics of the thing will shut it down if it overheads. That's' the key idea behind the Hyperion reactor.
There are ads that appear with search results, which are valuable to both advertiser and reader. And then there's everything else, which is merely annoying.
Search ads are valuable because they're presented when the user is looking for something and are relevant to the search. At that one moment in time, an ad isn't an interruption of other activity. That's why Google is so successful.
Even with a high-end noise-canceling Bluetooth headset and a phone with voice recognition, the interface sucks.
First, the Bluetooth headset has one button, which both originates and terminates calls. Pushing it generates a tone, but almost a full second after pushing the button. The same tone is used for connect and disconnect. Dumb.
Starting from the idle but synchronized state, pressing the button yields, after a few seconds, a tone, and then, after another five seconds, the message "Say a command". It's not clear why there's such a long delay before the voice prompt.
Then one says "Voice dial". After a few more seconds, "Say a name or number" comes back. Then one can attempt voice dialing.
The voice recognition is mediocre and slow. It takes another five seconds for a voice recognition cycle, which usually results in a confirmation prompt, or worse, "No match found".
Considering that hands-free operation is mandatory in California for phoning while driving, one would think this would be done better.
I expect that Google will shut down some of their money-losers in 2009. Google pulled the plug on Answers some time back. Google has Google Sites, their free hosting offering. It's probably not a moneymaker, even with ads, and it's not really related to their core
business. That might get cut.
There are really three tiers of SSL certs being sold:
"Domain control only validated" certs. This means the cert issuer got an answer from an e-mail sent to the domain. This is the "QuickSSL" tier.
"Location and business identiti validated" certs. What SSL certs were supposed to mean. The cert issuer actually checked out the business for existence.
At this tier, there's often a "relying party" guarantee.
"Extended validation" certs. The cert issuer had to meet some audited standards to issue the cert. Mostly used by banks.
Current browsers don't distinguish between #1 and #2. They should. "Domain control only validated" certs are enough to secure some social networking site or blog, but not good enough to send someone a credit card number. If they're taking your money, the cert should contain enough info to allow you to find and sue them.
Our SiteTruth system distinguishes between #1 and #2, because we're looking for business identity. It's a useful way to filter out the "bottom feeders".
The problems with bogus SSL cert issuance seem to be, so far, confined to the "Domain control only validated" certs. This is an additional good reason to distinguish between them and the better tiers.
We're at the beginning of the Second Great Depression. If you have a job that you think will survive the depression, keep it. Even if it sucks. Ten years ago, you could have
moved to a hot job at a fun dot-com in a week. Not now. Google just had a layoff. Microsoft is rumored to be laying off 17,000 people.
US manufacturing activity is now down to its lowest level since 1948. That's right, we've lost 60 years of growth. It's going to be a long recession. Japan's housing bubble popped in 1989, and twenty years later, Japan still hasn't recovered. The Nikkei index is around a quarter of its peak in the 1980s. That's what a crash in housing looks like. Japan also has a better "safety net" than the US does in the post-Reagan era.
If you're bored, code something in your spare time. Read books on dealing with dysfunctional organizations; over time, you might be able to improve the place.
Having done some work on automated driving, I have some misgivings about semi-automated driving. ABS, which is a huge advance in vehicle control, hasn't reduced accidents as much as it should. Driver overconfidence seems to increase in ABS-equipped vehicles. Merely adding automated braking, which has been around for years, may not help with passenger cars. It would probably encourage tailgating.
It's a big win for heavy trucks, but they have pro drivers. Those guys aren't aggressive drivers, mostly tired ones. Passenger car drivers aren't that consistent.
Tailgating may be acceptable if there's a comm link between the car ahead and the car behind. That's been demonstrated successfully; if anybody in the chain starts to brake, everybody behind them brakes too. It needs to be coupled with enough smarts that not too many vehicles become a tight group, and a vehicle can't close up behind something that can stop shorter than it can.
Studies of crashes by Mercedes indicate that 80% of accidents would have been avoided if braking started 500ms sooner. Those aren't the severe accidents, though.
Anyway, while radar-controlled automated braking has its uses, it's not an answer in itself.
Sony's payback comes when Playstation3 programmers learn to fully utilize the Cell architecture.
As someone else pointed out, if that was going to happen, it would have happened by now.
The fundamental problem with the Cell is that each SPU only has 256KB of RAM. (Not 256MB, 256KB.) Data can be moved in and out of main memory in the background with explicit DMA-like operations. Given that model, you have to turn your problem into a data-flow problem, where a data set is pumped sequentially through a Cell processor. The audio guys love this. It's useful for compression and decompression. It's a pain for everything else.
It's not good for graphics. There's not enough memory for a full frame, not enough
memory for textures, not enough memory for the geometry, and
not enough processors to divide the frame up into squares or bands. Sony had to hang a conventional nVidia GPU on the back to fix that.
It's useful for particle systems. If you need snow, or waves, or grenade fragments, the Cell is helpful, because that's a pipelineable problem.
There are some other special-purpose situations where a Cell SPU is useful. But not many.
If each SPU had, say, 16MB, the things might be more useful. But at 256KB, it's like having a DSP chip. The Cell part belongs in a cell phone tower, processing signal streams, not in a game machine. It's a great cryptanalysis engine, though. Cryptanalysis is all crunch, with little intercommunication, so that fits the Cell architecture.
We're back to a historical truth about multi-CPU architecture - there are only two things that work. Shared-memory multiprocessors ("multi-core" CPUs, or the Xbox 360) work; they're well understood and straightforward to program. Clusters, like Google/Amazon/any web farm, also work; each machine has enough resources to do its own work and can live with limited intercommunication. Everything in between those extremes has historically been a flop: SIMD machines (Illiac IV through Thinking Machines), dataflow machines (tried in the 1980s), and mesh machines (nCube, BBN Butterfly). The only exception to this are graphics processors and supercomputers derived from them. That, not the Cell, is cutting edge architecture.
I've met one of the architects of the Cell processor, and his attitude was "build it and they will come". They didn't.
It turns out that the Sony DVD player talks CEC (which Sony calls "Bravia"), and so does the display. But Sony CEC-compatible products refuse to talk to non-Sony products, purely as a form of consumer lock-in. There's a standard for interoperability, the hardware is there, and devices still won't interoperate. That's a stupid product.
Disconnect your Zune from USB and AC power sources.
Because the player is frozen, its battery will drain--this is good. Wait until the battery is empty and the screen goes black. If the battery was fully charged, this might take a couple of hours.
Wait until after noon GMT on January 1, 2009 (that's 7 a.m. Eastern or 4 a.m. Pacific time).
Connect your Zune to either a USB port on the back or your computer or to AC power using the Zune AC Adapter and let it charge.
Really. That's their fix.
If you have a Zune, but haven't used it today, don't turn it on before 0000 UT 01 JAN 2009.
There's a "fix", but
"This will delete EVERYTHING on your Zune, so be warned."
Microsoft now admits there is a problem: "Customers with 30gb Zune devices may experience issues when booting their Zune hardware. We're aware of the problem and are working to correct it. Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks for your patience!"
There's strong opposition to ads in the Wikipedia community. More important, though, is that Wales' attempt to run a wiki-based business is a flop.
Wikia, which was Jimbo Wales' attempt to monetize the Wikipedia concept, didn't really go anywhere. Wikia ended up as a free hosting service for fancruft, with wikis for Star [Wars|Trek|Gate|Craft] and such. There's also a "human powered search engine" on Wikia. They wanted to take on Google. The end result was a site with 1/10 the traffic of "ask.com". Wikia's current reach is about 0.2%. Wikia's traffic is dropping; Alexa says they peaked in May 2008, and they're down to half that. Wikia had a layoff in October.
As an ad-supported service, Wikia's demographic is terrible. The user base lives in their parents basement. So they can't even get much ad revenue from the users they have. Wikia
had a big chunk of venture capital when they started, but that's running out. They overexpanded, with offices
in New York, San Francisco, and Poland. Wales wanted to get a private jet; by now, he probably has to fly coach.
So that's what an ad-supported wiki run by Wales looks like.
Don't blame the customer. I have a Vizio 42" LCD display, a TV, really.
The display has a row of barely labeled buttons along the side of the display. They're all the same form factor, and the top one is on/off. But it's a badly implemented software-polled button. Even though it clicks when pushed, that doesn't necessarily mean the button push was read. The button needs to be held for half a second or so to get a reliable turn-on/off. And the turn-on event occurs about a second after the button is pushed.
There's no real excuse for that. Especially on a device which keeps its "Vizio" logo dimly lit when off, so it clearly doesn't have a hard power off.
The attached Sony DVD player has its own interface problems.
The tray open/close button takes several seconds to do anything, and isn't live during the 10-second or so power up sequence. The display is connected to a Sony DVD player via HDMI, and this is all late 2007 equipment, so the Consumer Electronics Control interface ought to be present and make the two devices coordinate on/off and volume controls. Doesn't work.
So-called "micromanagement" is fine in the early game, when a single less-than-optimal action could decide the game against the player, but later in the game it simply isn't practical, nor is it a reflection of reality: if the player represents an emperor or five-star general, such a figure would NOT be dealing with all that minutia personally at that point.
Hm. The way that ought to work is that the player gets to appoint "subordinates" to various jobs, each of whom has an identity and a back story. The subordinates all have different personalities and decision styles; some favor military action over negotiation; some don't. Some are bold generals; some overprepare on logistics. (Do you want Montgomery or Ike in charge?) The player has to monitor how they're doing, and be prepared to fire or move around subordinates.
This is what a CEO of a big organization really does. It's a good skill to teach.
The weakest trusted CA in the world compromises the entire public key infrastructure. What they've been able to do is not just create a phony SSL cert. They've been able to create a trusted but phony certificate authority root certificate which can be used to sign other certificates.
MD5 has to go. The PKI infrastructure already supports SHA-2, which is considered better; MD5 is only there for legacy certs. So an upgrade doesn't require end-user browser changes; it can all be done by CAs and web sites.
It's not that hard to do this attack, but it does take some resources. They used a farm of 200 Playstation 2 machines to attack MD5. This is well within the capabilities of, say, the Russian Business Network.
RapidSSL and FreeSSL seem to be the current weakest points in the system. "Out of the 30,000 certificates we collected, about 9,000 were signed using MD5, and 97% of those were issued by RapidSSL." Worse, those two issuers issue certs with ascending non-random serial numbers, so that, with careful timing, they can be induced to issue a cert with a known bit pattern, which is required for this attack. Probably, RapidSSL and FreeSSL's trusted root cert should be pulled from IE and Netscape, and all certs from those sources re-issued using SHA-2 hashes.
I don't think the RapidSSL and FreeSSL root certs are EV-enabled, so this specific attack probably can't be used to generate phony Extended Validation certs. Also, the EV standards require SHA-2 or better hashing, not MD5, which is more of a legacy hash algorithm. So the EV cert world is probably still secure.
Amazon's fulfilment business is up, but that doesn't mean Amazon itself is selling more. More and more, Amazon is doing order processing for others.
The fact that they're focusing on number of items shipped rather than revenue probably means revenue didn't go up.
Remember "grid computing"? Remember "application service providers"? Remember how that was supposed to change everything? Right.
The current appeal of "cloud computing" is that some companies are willing to give it away to get market share. That won't last. Google is cutting back on their freebies. The day is probably coming when "Google Apps" won't be free. Gmail is already a paid service for businesses. Google runs those services mostly to cost Microsoft money.
As a business, "cloud computing" looks a lot like shared web hosting. The price competition is fierce and the service levels aren't very good.
A few niche applications have been outsourced well, like "Salesforce.com". In fact, that's the leading commercial outsourced application. But Salesforce doesn't compete with Microsoft.
None of this looks like a real threat to Microsoft.
This isn't a big deal either way. The judge denied an "interlocutory appeal", one made regarding some legal point before the decision in the case was final. Such appeals are rarely tried and even more rarely successful. The issue can still be appealed, just not until the current case is finished.
The "Recording Industry vs. the People" site has become incredibly ad-heavy. It now has layer ads that won't dismiss, a link farm, and regular Google ads. This thing has advertising from services I've never even heard of, like "shareasale.com". Amusingly, it has ads for RIAA-controlled music, and even for the iTunes store.
Block "st.blogads.com" to make it at least tolerable.
Unknown to most of the people who've commented so far, freight rail in the US is making a big comeback. US rail traffic in ton-miles has doubled since 1980.
LA opened the Alameda Corridor a few years ago, with three tracks in a trench, like a freeway, across LA from the port to connections to the rest of the US. Most major railroads are upgrading capacity. The work often isn't highly visible, because the upgrades are heavier rail, better ballast, better signaling systems, better locomotives, and better rolling stock. But it's happening.
Chicago is the bottleneck in the US rail system. A deal is about to close under which Canadian National will take over U.S. Steel's old railroad and upgrade it to route traffic around downtown Chicago. Suburban residents are bitching.
Neat. There's some similarity to Matlab, and some to Renderman, and some of the syntax is borrowed from Haskell. The language is compilable to VHDL, so it's possible to generate hardware from the spec. The language is recursive and doesn't support iteration (there's no "for" statement) to make proof of correctness work easier.
This language might also be useful as a way to express compression algorithms. Reference implementations of the various "zip" algorithms in Cryptol would be useful, and ones for JPEG and MPEG compression, which are often implemented in hardware, even more useful. It's not clear how well Cryptol deals with memory-heavy problems like motion recognition or Hamming table building for compression, though.
Part of the problem is Wired, or "Tired", which has turned into a sort of Sharper Image catalog. (Sharper Image itself is defunct.) Wired doesn't really have reporters any more; just "editors" and ad reps. Hence their product orientation.
Cheap "netbook" computers. The price point in laptops is dropping.
Wind farms that are really big. The US has about 18 GW of installed wind capacity, more is going in at a rapid rate, and wind power companies are making money. At last, it's a serious source of power.
The Tesla car, first delivered in 2008. Yes, it's overpriced, but for the first time, the range and performance are there.
Those are all more significant than anything in Wired's list.
There's probably good stuff in the bio field too, but I don't follow that.
The journalistic institution with the most reporters is Bloomberg. They have more reporters than the Washington Post and The New York Times together.
Hard news is becoming the province of the weeklies. Time, Newsweek, and The Economist have real reporters out gathering news. The story quality is usually better than what's in the dailies; they're not as rushed. So nationally, we're doing OK.
As for local news, newspapers shot themselves in the foot with "fluff" sections - Food, Wine, Cars, Lifestyle, etc. that didn't require real reporting. On the advertising side, they ended up surviving on classifieds, real estate ads, car ads, and ads for local sales. The Internet does all those things better.
It's not clear who, if anybody, will pick up the slack with local news.
Slashdot Mirror
The Hyperion reactor would be more impressive if they had a prototype working. They're claiming much higher energy densities than any existing nuclear reactor.
It's not even close to being a "battery", by the way. It's a steam plant with a turbine. The turbine is separate from the reactor and connected to it by plumbing. So the reactor is not a "sealed unit".
Still, there are many uses for a small, reasonably safe nuclear power plant. It ought to be comparable to a Triga in safety, and there are about 60 Trigas in the world. That's a neat little General Atomic design from the 1950s, and it's inherently stable; the physics of the thing will shut it down if it overheads. That's' the key idea behind the Hyperion reactor.
Wikipedia has a good article on the technology. The site itself isn't that helpful.
There are ads that appear with search results, which are valuable to both advertiser and reader. And then there's everything else, which is merely annoying.
Search ads are valuable because they're presented when the user is looking for something and are relevant to the search. At that one moment in time, an ad isn't an interruption of other activity. That's why Google is so successful.
Google ads on other sites, though, are mostly noise. The overall quality of Google contextual advertisers is low. For most serious advertisers, opting out of the Google Content Network, but keeping the search ads, is a good move. Especially since the discovery that 10% of users generate 50% of the clicks, but don't buy much.
Online ads may bring in enough revenue to keep your blog running, but they won't keep your car dealership afloat.
Even with a high-end noise-canceling Bluetooth headset and a phone with voice recognition, the interface sucks.
First, the Bluetooth headset has one button, which both originates and terminates calls. Pushing it generates a tone, but almost a full second after pushing the button. The same tone is used for connect and disconnect. Dumb.
Starting from the idle but synchronized state, pressing the button yields, after a few seconds, a tone, and then, after another five seconds, the message "Say a command". It's not clear why there's such a long delay before the voice prompt.
Then one says "Voice dial". After a few more seconds, "Say a name or number" comes back. Then one can attempt voice dialing.
The voice recognition is mediocre and slow. It takes another five seconds for a voice recognition cycle, which usually results in a confirmation prompt, or worse, "No match found".
Considering that hands-free operation is mandatory in California for phoning while driving, one would think this would be done better.
I expect that Google will shut down some of their money-losers in 2009. Google pulled the plug on Answers some time back. Google has Google Sites, their free hosting offering. It's probably not a moneymaker, even with ads, and it's not really related to their core business. That might get cut.
There are really three tiers of SSL certs being sold:
Current browsers don't distinguish between #1 and #2. They should. "Domain control only validated" certs are enough to secure some social networking site or blog, but not good enough to send someone a credit card number. If they're taking your money, the cert should contain enough info to allow you to find and sue them.
Our SiteTruth system distinguishes between #1 and #2, because we're looking for business identity. It's a useful way to filter out the "bottom feeders".
The problems with bogus SSL cert issuance seem to be, so far, confined to the "Domain control only validated" certs. This is an additional good reason to distinguish between them and the better tiers.
We're at the beginning of the Second Great Depression. If you have a job that you think will survive the depression, keep it. Even if it sucks. Ten years ago, you could have moved to a hot job at a fun dot-com in a week. Not now. Google just had a layoff. Microsoft is rumored to be laying off 17,000 people.
US manufacturing activity is now down to its lowest level since 1948. That's right, we've lost 60 years of growth. It's going to be a long recession. Japan's housing bubble popped in 1989, and twenty years later, Japan still hasn't recovered. The Nikkei index is around a quarter of its peak in the 1980s. That's what a crash in housing looks like. Japan also has a better "safety net" than the US does in the post-Reagan era.
If you're bored, code something in your spare time. Read books on dealing with dysfunctional organizations; over time, you might be able to improve the place.
Having done some work on automated driving, I have some misgivings about semi-automated driving. ABS, which is a huge advance in vehicle control, hasn't reduced accidents as much as it should. Driver overconfidence seems to increase in ABS-equipped vehicles. Merely adding automated braking, which has been around for years, may not help with passenger cars. It would probably encourage tailgating. It's a big win for heavy trucks, but they have pro drivers. Those guys aren't aggressive drivers, mostly tired ones. Passenger car drivers aren't that consistent.
Tailgating may be acceptable if there's a comm link between the car ahead and the car behind. That's been demonstrated successfully; if anybody in the chain starts to brake, everybody behind them brakes too. It needs to be coupled with enough smarts that not too many vehicles become a tight group, and a vehicle can't close up behind something that can stop shorter than it can.
Studies of crashes by Mercedes indicate that 80% of accidents would have been avoided if braking started 500ms sooner. Those aren't the severe accidents, though.
Anyway, while radar-controlled automated braking has its uses, it's not an answer in itself.
Sony's payback comes when Playstation3 programmers learn to fully utilize the Cell architecture.
As someone else pointed out, if that was going to happen, it would have happened by now.
The fundamental problem with the Cell is that each SPU only has 256KB of RAM. (Not 256MB, 256KB.) Data can be moved in and out of main memory in the background with explicit DMA-like operations. Given that model, you have to turn your problem into a data-flow problem, where a data set is pumped sequentially through a Cell processor. The audio guys love this. It's useful for compression and decompression. It's a pain for everything else.
It's not good for graphics. There's not enough memory for a full frame, not enough memory for textures, not enough memory for the geometry, and not enough processors to divide the frame up into squares or bands. Sony had to hang a conventional nVidia GPU on the back to fix that. It's useful for particle systems. If you need snow, or waves, or grenade fragments, the Cell is helpful, because that's a pipelineable problem.
There are some other special-purpose situations where a Cell SPU is useful. But not many. If each SPU had, say, 16MB, the things might be more useful. But at 256KB, it's like having a DSP chip. The Cell part belongs in a cell phone tower, processing signal streams, not in a game machine. It's a great cryptanalysis engine, though. Cryptanalysis is all crunch, with little intercommunication, so that fits the Cell architecture.
We're back to a historical truth about multi-CPU architecture - there are only two things that work. Shared-memory multiprocessors ("multi-core" CPUs, or the Xbox 360) work; they're well understood and straightforward to program. Clusters, like Google/Amazon/any web farm, also work; each machine has enough resources to do its own work and can live with limited intercommunication. Everything in between those extremes has historically been a flop: SIMD machines (Illiac IV through Thinking Machines), dataflow machines (tried in the 1980s), and mesh machines (nCube, BBN Butterfly). The only exception to this are graphics processors and supercomputers derived from them. That, not the Cell, is cutting edge architecture.
I've met one of the architects of the Cell processor, and his attitude was "build it and they will come". They didn't.
It turns out that the Sony DVD player talks CEC (which Sony calls "Bravia"), and so does the display. But Sony CEC-compatible products refuse to talk to non-Sony products, purely as a form of consumer lock-in. There's a standard for interoperability, the hardware is there, and devices still won't interoperate. That's a stupid product.
Microsoft has announced their official fix:
Really. That's their fix.
If you have a Zune, but haven't used it today, don't turn it on before 0000 UT 01 JAN 2009.
There's a "fix", but "This will delete EVERYTHING on your Zune, so be warned."
Microsoft now admits there is a problem: "Customers with 30gb Zune devices may experience issues when booting their Zune hardware. We're aware of the problem and are working to correct it. Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks for your patience!"
There's strong opposition to ads in the Wikipedia community. More important, though, is that Wales' attempt to run a wiki-based business is a flop.
Wikia, which was Jimbo Wales' attempt to monetize the Wikipedia concept, didn't really go anywhere. Wikia ended up as a free hosting service for fancruft, with wikis for Star [Wars|Trek|Gate|Craft] and such. There's also a "human powered search engine" on Wikia. They wanted to take on Google. The end result was a site with 1/10 the traffic of "ask.com". Wikia's current reach is about 0.2%. Wikia's traffic is dropping; Alexa says they peaked in May 2008, and they're down to half that. Wikia had a layoff in October.
As an ad-supported service, Wikia's demographic is terrible. The user base lives in their parents basement. So they can't even get much ad revenue from the users they have. Wikia had a big chunk of venture capital when they started, but that's running out. They overexpanded, with offices in New York, San Francisco, and Poland. Wales wanted to get a private jet; by now, he probably has to fly coach.
So that's what an ad-supported wiki run by Wales looks like.
Google's ad engine selected "WI Portable Restrooms -- We Offer Portable Restrooms in Every Configuration & Price Range" for this page.
OK, back to the drawing board on product name.
Don't blame the customer. I have a Vizio 42" LCD display, a TV, really. The display has a row of barely labeled buttons along the side of the display. They're all the same form factor, and the top one is on/off. But it's a badly implemented software-polled button. Even though it clicks when pushed, that doesn't necessarily mean the button push was read. The button needs to be held for half a second or so to get a reliable turn-on/off. And the turn-on event occurs about a second after the button is pushed.
There's no real excuse for that. Especially on a device which keeps its "Vizio" logo dimly lit when off, so it clearly doesn't have a hard power off.
The attached Sony DVD player has its own interface problems. The tray open/close button takes several seconds to do anything, and isn't live during the 10-second or so power up sequence. The display is connected to a Sony DVD player via HDMI, and this is all late 2007 equipment, so the Consumer Electronics Control interface ought to be present and make the two devices coordinate on/off and volume controls. Doesn't work.
So-called "micromanagement" is fine in the early game, when a single less-than-optimal action could decide the game against the player, but later in the game it simply isn't practical, nor is it a reflection of reality: if the player represents an emperor or five-star general, such a figure would NOT be dealing with all that minutia personally at that point.
Hm. The way that ought to work is that the player gets to appoint "subordinates" to various jobs, each of whom has an identity and a back story. The subordinates all have different personalities and decision styles; some favor military action over negotiation; some don't. Some are bold generals; some overprepare on logistics. (Do you want Montgomery or Ike in charge?) The player has to monitor how they're doing, and be prepared to fire or move around subordinates.
This is what a CEO of a big organization really does. It's a good skill to teach.
That's a nice piece of work. I'm very impressed.
Practical conclusions:
Amazon's fulfilment business is up, but that doesn't mean Amazon itself is selling more. More and more, Amazon is doing order processing for others. The fact that they're focusing on number of items shipped rather than revenue probably means revenue didn't go up.
Remember "grid computing"? Remember "application service providers"? Remember how that was supposed to change everything? Right.
The current appeal of "cloud computing" is that some companies are willing to give it away to get market share. That won't last. Google is cutting back on their freebies. The day is probably coming when "Google Apps" won't be free. Gmail is already a paid service for businesses. Google runs those services mostly to cost Microsoft money.
As a business, "cloud computing" looks a lot like shared web hosting. The price competition is fierce and the service levels aren't very good.
A few niche applications have been outsourced well, like "Salesforce.com". In fact, that's the leading commercial outsourced application. But Salesforce doesn't compete with Microsoft.
None of this looks like a real threat to Microsoft.
This isn't a big deal either way. The judge denied an "interlocutory appeal", one made regarding some legal point before the decision in the case was final. Such appeals are rarely tried and even more rarely successful. The issue can still be appealed, just not until the current case is finished.
The "Recording Industry vs. the People" site has become incredibly ad-heavy. It now has layer ads that won't dismiss, a link farm, and regular Google ads. This thing has advertising from services I've never even heard of, like "shareasale.com". Amusingly, it has ads for RIAA-controlled music, and even for the iTunes store.
Block "st.blogads.com" to make it at least tolerable.
Unknown to most of the people who've commented so far, freight rail in the US is making a big comeback. US rail traffic in ton-miles has doubled since 1980. LA opened the Alameda Corridor a few years ago, with three tracks in a trench, like a freeway, across LA from the port to connections to the rest of the US. Most major railroads are upgrading capacity. The work often isn't highly visible, because the upgrades are heavier rail, better ballast, better signaling systems, better locomotives, and better rolling stock. But it's happening.
Chicago is the bottleneck in the US rail system. A deal is about to close under which Canadian National will take over U.S. Steel's old railroad and upgrade it to route traffic around downtown Chicago. Suburban residents are bitching.
Neat. There's some similarity to Matlab, and some to Renderman, and some of the syntax is borrowed from Haskell. The language is compilable to VHDL, so it's possible to generate hardware from the spec. The language is recursive and doesn't support iteration (there's no "for" statement) to make proof of correctness work easier.
This language might also be useful as a way to express compression algorithms. Reference implementations of the various "zip" algorithms in Cryptol would be useful, and ones for JPEG and MPEG compression, which are often implemented in hardware, even more useful. It's not clear how well Cryptol deals with memory-heavy problems like motion recognition or Hamming table building for compression, though.
Part of the problem is Wired, or "Tired", which has turned into a sort of Sharper Image catalog. (Sharper Image itself is defunct.) Wired doesn't really have reporters any more; just "editors" and ad reps. Hence their product orientation.
More significant tech events this year include:
Those are all more significant than anything in Wired's list.
There's probably good stuff in the bio field too, but I don't follow that.
The journalistic institution with the most reporters is Bloomberg. They have more reporters than the Washington Post and The New York Times together.
Hard news is becoming the province of the weeklies. Time, Newsweek, and The Economist have real reporters out gathering news. The story quality is usually better than what's in the dailies; they're not as rushed. So nationally, we're doing OK.
As for local news, newspapers shot themselves in the foot with "fluff" sections - Food, Wine, Cars, Lifestyle, etc. that didn't require real reporting. On the advertising side, they ended up surviving on classifieds, real estate ads, car ads, and ads for local sales. The Internet does all those things better.
It's not clear who, if anybody, will pick up the slack with local news.