Anthill inside

After the next major event it will be the twitter stream which will be subject to such analysis

I worked for a Data Warehousing company in the late nineties. We had a slew of deals near to close. We took space at a DW exhibition, and invited all those near to close prospects.
Microsoft took a stand, put an MS banner across the backdrop. They didn't send staff, they put no material on the stand.
All our deals went into 'suspend' as a result of that action.

“Texting is the closest thing to pure profit ever invented” – Sir Chris Gent, founder of Vodafone.

If I were going to try to understand how to analyse Twitter in real-time, then I would want a 'planted story' (and this seems like a perfectly reasonable candidate), and then I can read the firehose (later, *I* don't have to do it realtime) and from that start to develop programs that can help me understand the stream (realtime) in later cases of distributed crises, e.g. 9/11.

I worked for Shell UK in the late 70s, using Univac 1108 and 1110 machines.

They had rows and rows of drum store, each a 1/4 ton cylinder, maybe 1m diameter, rotating at 20,000 rpm. Fixed heads running in a strip down the side, a form of memory somewhere between main and disk, allowing full memory dumps during crash.

They used to take 3 hrs to power up, and Univac engineers used to describe how, if they came off their bearings the outcome was called 'creaming'.

Apparently one came off on a site and 'walked' out of the machine room, pausing only to stroll through a CAU (command Arithmetic Unit - a device as big as a wardrobe), another drilled down through a building.

And in shock news today, a significant proportion of Manhattan traffic crosses the 118 year old Brooklyn Bridge each day, rumours, as yet unconfirmed, suggest it even uses (shhhh...) rivets. We expect a number of the rising city engineers to press for abandonment of this obviously obsolete technology on the grounds that anything this old must be useless and, worst sin of all, uncool.

I am cynical as to the government's motives in issuing the apology (timing, it's cheap to do etc)

However

as of today, as a result of the apology, there are two outcomes I am delighted with, firstly, Turing's family have seen his name cleared, and secondly, an enormous number more Britons since yesterday are aware of the great man who we were fortunate to have, and a few bigots will have had their prejudices challenged by their possible recognition of their need for gratitude to a gay man.

It would be good for Tommy Flowers name to get its recognition too though, the apology we should make to him is 'sorry we made you scrap Colossus and pretend you never built it'.

We currentlly have marketing focus at postcode level, the id number will get it down to individual level. I am signed up to no2id and would be prepared to go to jail rather than carry an id card, fortunately there are so many like minded refuseniks that that is unlikely to be tested.

Jerry

I think it is generally recognised that the recovery cost for a bent platter would be huge.
The environment where this would be useful, e.g. a PC shop is going to have a large bucket of these bent drives.

The bad guy/gal with the mega budget is now going to have to staff the inside of the entire Hamalayas with white boiler suit clad minions to crack all of these on the off chance of finding the data pot of gold, or my facebook login.

The reality of the problem this addresses is the PC shop taking in customer PCs and not having the embarrassment of the customer's identity being cloned in Nigeria where the disk wound up.

"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."

Howard Aitken, Computer Scientist, (1900-1973)

Webapp vs cloudapp They are not the same. I think everything possible will go web technology app, the question is whether the server is in your business or google/ms/amazon/?? host it, which is a decision for each business. Maintaining desktops is an expensive business. Everything accessible through a browser is a very enticing proposition.

One of the attractions in the 'Crystal Palace' was the 'Alarm Bed' which tipped you out of bed.

I think the answer lies in the "I" in your question.

I believe there are millions of people out there (I teach a bunch of them for free on winter evenings) who only want a browser. They want to browse, email, skype and maybe upload their pictures to a picasa like environment. If they ever need word processing, google docs will be fine, if the connection is down, they'll happily wait. they don't want to think about viruses, malware, blackhats etc etc. They want an appliance, like their kettle or toaster, you switch it on, you use it (straight away).

The boot sequence, the wait while anti virus messes around, and windows updates, are all irrelevant to these people, to these people modern computers are as easy to drive as a Model T Ford http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxb5R4rSgxE .

You may quite understandably and reasonably, never use it or have use for it, but for a whole lot of people, this is just what they want.

I do it all the time,

I add a string key, e.g., AAA_BBB_CCC_DDD..... and alpha index it

To find all the offspring of AAA_BBB_CCC look for like 'AAA_BBB_CCC*'

To find all the siblings of AAA_BBB_CCC look for like 'AAA_BBB_%%%' where % is a single char wildcard.