- A History of the Future in 100 Objects (Kickstarter) — blog+podcast+video+book project, to have future historians tell the story of our century in 100 objects. The BBC show that inspired it was brilliant, and I rather suspect this will be too. It’s a clever way to tell a story of the future (his hardest problem will be creating a single coherent narrative for the 21st century). What are the 100 objects that future historians will use to sum up our century? ‘Smart drugs’ that change the way we think? A fragment from suitcase nuke detonated in Shanghai? A wedding ring between a human and an AI? The world’s most expensive glass of water, returned from a private mission to an asteroid? (via RIG London weekly notes)
- Entrepreneurs Who Create Value vs Entrepreneurs Who Lock Up Value (Andy Kessler) — distinguishes between “political entrepreneurs” who leverage their political power to own something and then overcharge or tax the crap out of the rest of us to use it vs “market entrepreneurs” who recognize the price-to-value gap and jump in. Ignoring legislation, they innovate, disintermediate, compete, stay up all night coding, and offer something better and cheaper until the market starts to shift. My attention was particularly caught by for every stroke of the pen, for every piece of legislation, for every paid-off congressman, there now exists a price umbrella that overvalues what he or any political entrepreneur is doing. (via Bryce Roberts)
- Harper-Collins Caps eBook Loans — The publisher wants to sell libraries DRMed ebooks that will self-destruct after 26 loans. Public libraries have always served and continue to serve those people who can’t access information on the purchase market. Jackass moves like these prevent libraries from serving those people in the future that we hope will come soon: the future where digital is default and print is premium. That premium may well be “the tentacles of soulless bottom-dwelling coprocephalic publishers can’t digitally destroy your purchase”. It’s worth noting that O’Reilly offers DRM-free PDFs of the books they publish, including mine. Own what you buy lest it own you. (via BoingBoing and many astonished library sources)
- MAD Lib — BSD-licensed open-source library for scalable in-database analytics. It provides data-parallel implementations of mathematical, statistical and machine learning methods for structured and unstructured data. (via Ted Leung)
"database" entries
Oracle’s NoSQL
Oracle's NoSQL Database is more than a product. It's also an acknowledgement.
Oracle's announcement of a NoSQL product isn't just a validation of key-value stores, but of the entire discussion of database architecture.
Oracle's NoSQL
Oracle's NoSQL Database is more than a product. It's also an acknowledgement.
Oracle's announcement of a NoSQL product isn't just a validation of key-value stores, but of the entire discussion of database architecture.
What CouchDB can do for HTML5, web apps and mobile
The utility of CouchApps and how CouchDB could shape mobile.
OSCON speaker Bradley Holt talks about what CouchDB offers web developers, how the database works with HTML5, and why CouchApps could catch on.
Four short links: 14 March 2011
Future Retrospective, Political Entrepreneurs, Library DRM, and In-Database Analytics
Hadoop: What it is, how it works, and what it can do
Cloudera CEO Mike Olson on Hadoop's architecture and its data applications.
Hadoop gets a lot of buzz in database circles, but some folks are still hazy about what it is and how it works. In this interview, Cloudera CEO and Strata speaker Mike Olson discusses Hadoop's background and its current utility.
Big data faster: A conversation with Bradford Stephens
The founder of Drawn to Scale explains how his database platform does simple things quickly.
Bradford Stephens, founder of of Drawn to Scale, discusses big data systems that work in "user time."
The growing importance of data journalism
Parsing the progress of open government data requires new tools and reliable information sources.
Data journalists now have huge volumes of accessible government data, but a recent panel discussion reveals that cultural roadblocks and "dirty" data still need to be addressed.
Strata Gems: Turn MySQL into blazing fast NoSQL
Bypass the SQL parser to use MySQL's raw speed
The HandlerSocket plugin for MySQL bypasses the query parser to deliver excellent NoSQL performance, rivaling that of memcache.
Strata Gems: Who needs disks anyway?
RethinkDB uses SSDs to their full advantage
Today's databases are designed for the spinning platter of the hard disk. As SSDs begin to enter data centers, it's time for a database that takes advantage of the new technology.
Four short links: 15 December 2010
Google Database, Text UI, Sustainable Education, Font Basics
- Dremel (PDF) — paper on the Dremel distributed nested column-store database developed at Google. Interesting beyond the technology is the list of uses, which includes tracking install data for applications on Android Market; crash reporting from Google products; OCR results from Google Books; spam analysis; debugging map tiles. (via Greg Linden)
- Conversational UI: A Short Reading List — it can be difficult to build a text user interface to a bot because there’s not a great body of useful literature around textual UIs the way there is around GUIs. This great list of pointers goes a long way to solving that problem.
- Sustainable Education (YouTube) — Watch this clip from the New Zealand Open Source Awards. Mark Osborne, Deputy Principal from Albany Senior High School, talks about the software choices at their school not because it’s right for technology but because it’s right for the students. Very powerful.
- What Font Should I Use? — design life support for the terminally tasteless like myself. (via Hacker News)