- Apple’s iPhone Wrecking the Cell Industry — bleat bleat. Andy Oram’s comment hits the mark: The music companies and AT&T were like travelers who refused to believe they were taking a long trip. They didn’t pack warm clothing, and therefore had to buy it at disadvantageous terms when they came to need it. Apple was more sophisticated about where all companies are going technologically, so they had what others needed.
- Fruux — a lightweight and convenient system preference pane, that syncs your Address Book, Calendars, Tasks and Bookmarks between different Macs. (via Daniel Raffel)
- Redflax — notable not just for art, but for the Maori quote: He toi whakaaro, he mana tangata – roughly translates: where there is creativity/artistic expression, there is human dignity/prowess.
- Google’s Chiller-less Data Center — Belgium has only 7 days (on average) when the ambient air temperature isn’t enough to cool the data center. Finally, a business model for unpleasantly-cold climates.
"datacenter" entries
Four short links: 20 July 2009
Four short links: 20 May 2009
Cognitive Surplus, Data Centers=Mainframes, Django Microframework, and a Visit To The Future
- Distributed Proofreaders Celebrates 15000th Title Posted To Project Gutenberg — a great use of our collective intelligence and cognitive surplus. If I say one more Clay Shirkyism, someone’s gonna call BINGO. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
- Datacenter is the New Mainframe (Greg Linden) — wrapup of a Google paper that looks at datacenters in the terms of mainframes: time-sharing, scheduling, renting compute cycles, etc. I love the subtitle, “An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines”.
- djng, a Django powered microframework — update from Simon Willison about the new take on Django he’s building. Microframeworks let you build an entire web application in a single file, usually with only one import statement. They are becoming increasingly popular for building small, self-contained applications that perform only one task—Service Oriented Architecture reborn as a combination of the Unix development philosophy and RESTful API design. I first saw this idea expressed in code by Anders Pearson and Ian Bicking back in 2005.
- Cute! (Dan Meyer) — photo from Dan Meyer’s classroom showing normal highschool students doing something that I assumed only geeks at conferences did. I love living in the future for all the little surprises like this.
Energy Savings, Strange Attractors, …
… the Intrinsic Cost of State Change, Orbiting Alien Voyeurs, and 200 Square Kilometers of Solar Panels Somewhere in Texas The Silicon Valley Leadership Group and Berkeley National Labs recently published the results of their first Data Center Demonstration Project (pdf). (Disclosure: My colleague Teresa Tung of Accenture R+D labs was the report's principal author). The study follows up on…
Bill Coleman to keynote Velocity
Bill Coleman has twice transformed our industry, and I'm excited to announce that he will keynote Velocity later this month. Bill is most famous for being the "B" in BEA and for leading the creation of Solaris while at Sun. He is now the CEO of his new startup, Cassatt, which "makes Data Centers more efficient". Bill is awesome and…
Special Purpose Computing Focuses on Energy Efficiency
Researchers turn to specialized hardware design to reduce supercomputer power consumption by an order of magnitude.