13414994
submission
blackbearnh writes:
As more non-traditional programmers start playing around with embedded platforms like the Arduino, the limitations and complications of interrupt-driven event handling can become an annoying barrier to entry. Now a group of academics have ported the parallel-processing language Occam to the Arduino. In an interview on O'Reilly Answers, Matt Jadud of Allegheny College describes how Occam helps artists using the Arduino in their installations, and how the advent of low-cost computing platforms is changing the educational experience for proto-makers in school. "Basically, an artist or a tinkerer or a hacker has a goal. They don't really care about learning Occam. They don't care about how this language is different from C. They just want to make a cat door that keeps their cat out when the cat comes back with a mouse. Or they want to make some kind of installation piece. Trying to focus as much on the user and the possible goals they might have is what's motivating our work right now."
12377814
submission
blackbearnh writes:
Museums are all about the preservation and display of physical items. But like everything else, Web 2.0 and social media is changing the way that museums look at their collections, and how their visitors interact with them. With 137 million objects spread over 28 facilities, the Smithsonian Institution is certainly one of the largest, and Michael Edson is in charge of figuring out how to leverage these new technologies to increase access, not only to the items on active display, but to the entire collection and the researchers behind the scenes. In a recent interview, he talks about efforts underway to crowdsource categorization of artifacts, how the web may have more to offer about a piece on display than the sign on the wall, and many other topics. "A mobile platform that you can have in the museum with you that allows the curatorial team to say more about a work, or provide multiple perspectives, presents an incredibly seductive idea. We don't think anyone's really hit a home run with that yet. We realize people are bringing mobile devices with them. They have instant access to deep, broad content about the things in front of them that, in many cases, might surpass and be more relevant to that person's own learning journey than what we've chosen to silkscreen on a wall. The stuff we put on the walls is a seed that can grow into many different kinds of plants outside the walls of the institution."
12049332
submission
blackbearnh writes:
Carmen Medina, until recently, helped run the analysis side of the house at the CIA. She also ran the agency's think tank, The Center for the Study of Intelligence. A self-proclaimed heretic, she has a number of controversial views about how we gather intelligence and how technology is changing the game. She talked to O'Reilly Radar about this and other topics, including the possible ways that intelligence analysis could be crowd-sourced, why government technology procurement is so broken, and how the public may need to readjust their views on what things such as privacy mean. "Government is viewed as inefficient and wasteful by American citizens. I would argue that one of the reasons why that view has grown is that they're comparing the inefficiency of government to how they relate to their bank or to their airline. Interestingly enough, for private industry to provide that level of service, there are a lot of legacy privacy barriers that are being broken. Private industry is doing all sorts of analysis of you as a consumer to provide you better service and to let them make more profit. But the same consumer that's okay with private industry doing that is not okay, in a knee-jerk reaction, with government doing that. And yet, if government, because of this dynamic, continues not to be able to adopt modern transactional practices, then it's going to fall further behind the satisfaction curve."
11850944
submission
blackbearnh writes:
There's an interesting article up on O'Reilly Radar talking about how the US military is reacting to the increasing use of social media by soldiers in hostile territory. In an interview with Price Floyd, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, he talks about the trade-offs between operational security and allowing soldiers and the public to interact, and how social media has changed the way the DoD communicates with the public. "I think that we need to become much more comfortable with taking risk, much more comfortable with having multiple spokesmen out there, thousands of spokesmen in essence. But, for me, there's nothing more credible than the men and women who are out there on the front lines, fighting the wars that we're in, sending messages back to their family and friends."
11826008
submission
blackbearnh writes:
Every once in a while, you run across an article that begs the question, why the frack did anyone bother to do this? Such is the case with a recent piece in IT Expert Voice, in which the author details how he created a RAID 1 drive out of two 4GB USB sticks, and installed Windows 7 on it. Not surprisingly, what he ended up with is a software RAID slower than using the drive in a vanilla fashion. What's next? How to download movies using 110 baud modems?
11353478
submission
blackbearnh writes:
Usually, Gov 2.0 deals mainly with outward transparency of government to the citizens. But SeeClickFix is trying to drive data in the other direction, letting citizens report and track neighborhood problems as mundane as potholes, and as serious as drug dealers. In a recent interview, co-founder Jeff Blasius talked about how cities such as New Haven and Tucson are using SeeClickFix to involve their citizens in identifying and fixing problems with city infrastructure. "We have thousands of potholes fixed across the country, thousands of pieces of graffiti repaired, streetlights turned on, catch basins cleared, all of that basic, broken-windows kind of stuff. We've seen neighborhood groups form based around issues reported on the site. We've seen people get new streetlights for their neighborhood, pedestrian improvements in many different cities, and all-terrain vehicles taken off of city streets. There was also one case of an arrest. The New Haven Police Department attributed initial reports on SeeClickFix to a sting operation that led to an arrest of two drug dealers selling heroin in front of a grammar school."
11282000
submission
blackbearnh writes:
Brian Aker, former Sun MySQL guy, and current proponent of the Drizzle MySQL fork, gave O'Reilly Radar an update on where MySQL is at the moment. During the interview, he was asked to speculate on Oracle's original motives for acquiring Sun. "IBM has been moving their P Series systems into datacenter after datacenter, replacing Sun-based hardware. I believe that Oracle saw this and asked themselves 'What is the next thing that IBM is going to do?' That's easy. IBM is going to start pushing DB2 and the rest of their software stack into those environments. Now whether or not they'll be successful, I don't know. I suspect once Oracle reflected on their own need for hardware to scale up on, they saw a need to dive into the hardware business. I'm betting that they looked at Apple's margins on hardware, and saw potential in doing the same with Sun's hardware business. I'm sure everything else Sun owned looked nice and scrumptious, but Oracle bought Sun for the hardware."
10756282
submission
blackbearnh writes:
The popularity of non-SQL data stores such as Cassandra has roughly parallel the growth of social networking applications on the Internet. But according to former Digg architect Joe Stump, there may be more causality than mere correlation there. In an interview discussing the difficulties storing and using geolocation data, Stump ventures into a larger discussion of the merits of NoSQL. According to Stump: "f you draw a diagram and one circle is users and one circle is images, scaling out to a whole bunch of users and scaling out a whole bunch of pictures is not too difficult, because you run into the same thing, where I need to do a primary key look-up and then I need to cache in memcached because people don't edit their user's data that often. And once they upload a photo, they pretty much never change that.
The problem comes when you intersect those social objects. The intersection in that Venn diagram, which is a join in SQL, falls over pretty quickly. You don't need a very big dataset. Even for a fairly small website, MySQL tends to fall over pretty quickly on those big joins. And most of the NoSQL stuff that people are using, they've found that if you're just doing a primary key look up 99 percent of the time on some table, you don't need to use MySQL and worry about managing that, when you can stuff it into Cassandra or some other NoSQL DB because it's basically just a key value store."
10453058
submission
blackbearnh writes:
Before he moved on to start SimpleGeo, Joe Stump was the Chief Architect for Digg. He recently talked to O'Reilly Radar, and in the course of the interview, revealed a little of what he knows about Digg's future. If you've ever felt frustrated by the arbitrary gaming of what gets on Digg's front pages, you should like what Stump says, which is that the ubiquitous front page is likely to go away. "If all you're going to do is bury Palin stories or Obama stories, maybe the answer isn't to figure out that you're a Palin or an Obama hater and to not count your buries, but maybe the better answer is to give you a tool where you can say, 'Screw that Obama guy. I don't want to see anything about him.' Or, 'Screw Palin. I don't want to see anything about her.' I think that at some point in the future, you'll probably see where those negative votes carry a much more personal connotation as opposed to a group connotation."
9883398
submission
blackbearnh writes:
Imagine you had a near-real-time flow of data coming in, telling you what people were doing and where they were doing it, including pictures. What could you do with that kind of feed? Maybe you could infer which local bars were most likely to have friends of yours waiting, and served the kind of food you liked. Or where there might be a bad traffic jam. Or perhaps you could figure out where breaking news was occuring. Twitter's Raffi Krikorian recently talked to O'Reilly about what he sees as the future uses of increasingly geotagged tweets, as well as the privacy concerns they raise. "I think one of the dreams would be, not necessarily for Twitter but for someone out there, to be able to look at status update streams with geotagging on top of it and try to figure out what are the hot bars out there tonight, or be able to see cross-referencing with my foursquare check-in, for example. I want to be able to ask the service, 'What bar should I go to right now that my friends have liked that I think I'll probably like and have no line?' And you'd only do something like that kind of high-level query if you actually have some really good way, either to analyze data or to get structured data out of the system. "
9039224
submission
blackbearnh writes:
As newspapers struggle to survive and local broadcasts try to find a way to compete with cable news, more and more news outlets are banking on what people want to hear about, rather than what they need to hear. Thoughtful analysis of problems is being pushed out of the way to make room for more celebrity gossip. Electronic news guru Chris Lee thinks that as people get news increasingly tailored to their tastes, the overall knowledge of important issues is plummeting. "I think one of the observations about how consumers are behaving in the past five years that has surprised me the most is, again, this lack of feeling responsible for knowing the news of their country and their local government of that day. I don't think it's just a technology question. I think if you asked people now versus the same age group 20 years ago, I think they'd be stunningly less informed now about boring news, and tremendously more knowledgeable about bits of news that really interest them."
8787118
submission
blackbearnh writes:
At first glance, publishing e-book versions of banned books in the Arabic-reading world seems like an invitation to jail or worse. But Ramy Habeeb, who runs Kotobaradia, is doing just that. In an article on the state of e-books in Africa and the Middle East, Habeeb talks about the practical considerations involved in uncensored publishing in a very volatile area indeed. Not only does he face potential trouble from governments and religious leaders, but sometimes his own staff can get in the way. "We have these typists who were typing the books from A to Z, and then we have editors who will go in afterwards. It's common for a typist to miss a line or miss two lines, they're going so fast that their eyes just skip it. But this guy actually missed three pages, and when we looked closely at it, it was the three pages talking about the Virgin Mary effigy. And so when we questioned this guy about why these three pages were missing, he very innocently looked up at us and said, 'Oh, because it's not true so why write it?'" The article also talks to Arthur Attwell about how e-books are entering the African market.
7883140
submission
blackbearnh writes:
It's near the end of the near, which means it's not only time for the usual end-of-year best and worst lists, but since we're about to roll over the big odometer, we get to look back on the decade as well. Getting a jump on the crowd, O'Reilly has their own choices for what was hot and what was not. Big winners: AJAX, Maker Culture, WiFi, others. Not so lucky: SOAP, Scrum, Intellectual Property Wars, etc. Another entry on the winning side is Open Source: "Quick! Name 5 open source pieces of software you might have had on your computer in 1999. Don't worry I'll wait... How about today? Firefox is an easy candidate, as are Open Office, Chrome, Audacity, Eclipse (if you're a developer), Blender, VLC, and many others. Many netbooks now ship with Linux as the underlying OS. Open Source has gone from a rebel movement to part of the establishment, and when you combine increasing end user adoption with the massive amounts of FLOSS you find on the server side, it can be argued that it is the 800 pound Gorilla now. As Gandhi said, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." When even Microsoft is releasing Open Source code, you know that you're somewhere between the fight and win stages."
7787226
submission
blackbearnh writes:
As previous reported in Slashdot, PayPal has released a series of new APIs that allow developers to embed PayPal into their web sites and applications without having to have the user go to the PayPal web site to complete the transaction. To encourage developers to use these new APIs, PayPal is offering two prizes totally $150,000 for interesting new applications. The entry deadline for ideas is Dec 16th, and O'Reilly has an interview with the director of the PayPal Developer Network that covers the details of the contest. In it, Naveed Anwar talks about why PayPal is throwing money at developers. "When Facebook opened up their platform, it allowed people to work in that particular environment, in the Facebook environment. When the iPhone opened up their platform, they allowed people to work in their environment which was build the applications on the iPhone. When PayPal was looking at opening up its platform, we are not limited by one particular area. We go into the enterprises. We go into social networking. We go into all the places where payment as a solution is needed. And if we can actually reduce that barrier of entry — because at the end of the day, when anyone is building out a business and anyone is building out an application, they're looking at ways of monetizing it."
