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Very good point, I have some nearly 20 year old legos that fit with brand new ones like they were from the same batch. I suppose I took it for granted without really thinking how much work would go into this level of quality control.

In Canada in a place called crowleys ridge I came upon a truck sized super conductor based stabilizer used to connect the wind farm at that location to the power grid.

Not exactly mass market but definitely an application of superconduction.

The example they give is for a small set of data, and percentages vary more dramatically as sample sizes decrease.

We wanted to give an idea of the speed without trying to boast too much or look like we were directly challenging anyone. Of course every news outlet has chosen to highlight the speed comment -- including the numbers which were intended to be ballpark figures -- more than was intended, but I guess that isn't surprising.

I agree that the tiny "person" example is not a good benchmark case. It was intended as a usage example, not a speed example, but I stuck the speed numbers in there just meaning to give people a vague idea of the difference. The "20-100 times faster" comment is based on testing a variety of formats -- both unrealistic ones and real-life formats used in our search pipeline -- against programmatically generated XML equivalents (which may or may not themselves be realistic, though they contain the same data with the same structure). libxml2 was used for parsing XML. I don't really know how libxml2's speed compares to other XML parsers, but I didn't have a lot of time to investigate. The 20x faster number comes from the largest data set (~100k-ish) while the 100x number comes from a very small message. The most realistic case was about 50x. Sorry that I cannot provide exact details of the benchmark setup since many of the test cases were proprietary internal formats.

In any case, I'm hoping that some independent source conducts some tests because I think anything we produced would probably have unintentional biases in it. Of course, I'll update the numbers in the docs if they turn out to be wildly off-base.

This is just yet another way in which Google demonstrates that it is suffering from NIH syndrome. Instead of improving existing tools, they have to go off and re-invent all the bad mistakes of past, including non-relational databases, clunky binary encodings, and a bizarre non-POSIX filesystem.

Just imagine how far we ahead we would be today if Google had put the same effort into creating tools the rest of the SQL-writing, open(2)-using world could use.

...the tivo makers would switch to using BSD, or something else with a license that doesn't infringe freedom 2 (freedom to redistribute).

The GPL doesn't inhibit freedom 2 at all, unless you wish to use it to remove freedoms 0-n from everyone else.

What you're thinking about is freedom -1: The freedom to take someone else's work for free, modify it, and put onerous restrictions on everyone further along the distribution change. Or more succinctly put: the freedom to fuck your neighbour. Which yes, the GPL v2 tries to prevent, and the GPL v3 prevents more successfully.

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has released the specifications for the binary file formats used by pre-2007 Microsoft Office applications. They're accurate this time! Honest! While the documents are enormous (Word alone requires 533 pages; Excel runs over 1000 plus another 850 pages for the Office 2007 binary format), they hopefully will be useful to developers trying to create or extract information from Microsoft Office files (which despite their flaws, have been the de facto standard in many fields for some time now)."

Any software that was created in the past few years which vista 'broke' were most likely poorly designed or were associated with managing or doing the functions expected of the OS itself (with a few exceptions.)

Vista really isn't that 'buggy.' It is top heavy and uses way too much resources if you are only using it for limited things, but as a general purpose OS it really isn't that bad. I would still prefer Windows XP on new computers simply because I can get away with more power with a smaller investment in hardware, but I'm not necessarily 'against' Vista.

I hate it when people get this one wrong.

Windows 1.0 = Windows NT 3.1 (Microsoft's Marketing department called the first version of NT version 3.1 because that was the version of the old DOS based Windows they were selling at the time. NT was newer so it just couldn't start with a lower version number!)

Windows 1.5 = Windows NT 3.5.1

Windows 2.0 = Windows NT 4.0

Windows 3.0 = Windows 2000

Windows 3.1 = Windows XP

Windows 4.0 = Windows Vista

So the next version of Windows that people are calling Windows 7 is actually going to be Windows 4.1 since they say they are going to stick with the Vista architecture on the next version.

theodp writes "TIME interviews 21-year-old Taylor Leming, creator of the 600-member Facebook group I Text Message People While Driving and I Haven't Crashed Yet! While Alaska and Louisiana just became the latest states to pass laws banning text-messaging behind the wheel, Virginia resident Leming is still happily texting away while driving despite some near-accidents. 'Sometimes it just seems easier to text 'Be there in 5' instead of calling,' explains Taylor."

(I mean, judging from Microsoft's product lines for the last twenty years, it's what he really wants...)

Write a program that creates every possible 255x255px bitmap possible, and then right an algorithm to go through and figure out which ones are rubbish and which ones are actually recognizable pictures.

Logic dictates that one of the resulting pictures would have to be of John Lennon kicking George W Bush in the nuts, find that picture and post it on failblog.

Voila.

This exploit would also only be possible if the user turned on Remote Desktop Sharing which is disabled by default out of the box on 'ALL the Macs in the world'.

When you turn that service on, it warns you of the security risks and still requires additional configuration to actually allow a connection to actually execute code remotely.

Oooh, applescript! you have pwnt us again.

What a steaming pile of bullshit! First off, it hasn't really been ratified yet, ahem. Second, the draft that Microsoft submitted did not match the version used in Office 2007, before any changes were made.

I know you were trying to be funny, but it's quite sad that these things are taken for granted and put to waste. Please visit the following link for what I think to be the best use of your laptops: http://www.laptopgiving.org/en/index.php

Enleth writes "The fastest supercomputer of Central Europe (9th fastest in the whole Europe), dubbed "Galera" ("Galley") was unveiled on 3rd March at TASK Academic Computer Centre in Gdansk, Poland. "Galera" consists of 336 quad-CPU nodes running Debian Etch, connected together using InfiniBand. With 1344 2.3GHz quad-core Xeons, 5.3TB of main memory and almost 8km of cabling, it provides the processing power of over 50 teraflops. "Galera" will be used to help with research conducted at Gdansk University of Technology, including nautical and avionics simulations. Present at the official announcment was Intel CEO, Paul S. Otellini, among others.
Technical specifications and a press report are available, as of now, in Polish only."