- The Shape of the Internet Has Changed — 98 percent of internet traffic now consists of content that can be stored on servers. 45% of Internet traffic today is from CDNs, and a handful of them at that, which makes CDNs like Artur Bergman’s fastly super-important. (via Donald Clark)
- Be a Good Dictator (Rowan Simpson) — There is no shortage of advice online about how to be a good designer or a good software developer. But what about advice for those who aspire to be good product dictators? Guidance seems pretty thin on the ground. [...] Being a deep expert in just one area is not enough for good dictators. You need to be a polymath living at an intersection.
- Hardware is Dead — 7-inch tablet, Wi-Fi only with all the attributes of a good tablet. Capacitive touchscreen. Snappy processor. Front facing camera. 4GB of internal memory and an expandable memory slot. for USD75. At these levels there is almost no profit margin left in the hardware business. A $45 tablet is cheap enough to be an impulse purchase at the check-out line in Best Buy. A $45 price puts tablets within reach of a whole host of other activities not traditionally associated with computers. (via Steve Bowbrick)
- Car Transmissions and Syncromesh (YouTube) — cheesy old Chevy educational movie that does a great job of explaining how manual transmissions work. Such videos were the screencasts for the auto DIY folks. (via Nat Friedman)
ENTRIES TAGGED "manufacturing"
Where will software and hardware meet?
Software is adding more and more value to machines. Could it completely commoditize them?
I’m a sucker for a good plant tour, and I had a really good one last week when Jim Stogdill and I visited K. Venkatesh Prasad at Ford Motor in Dearborn, Mich. I gave a seminar and we talked at length about Ford’s OpenXC program and its approach to building software platforms.
The highlight of the visit was seeing…
Investigating the growth and influence of professional Makers
We're exploring the Maker movement's role in manufacturing, business and the economy.
The growth of the Maker movement has been nothing if not amazing. We’ve had more than 100,000 people at Maker Faire in San Francisco, and more than 50,000 at the New York event, with mini-Maker Faires in many other cities. Arduino is almost a household word, along with Raspberry Pi. Now that O’Reilly has spun…
Listening for tired machinery
Cheap sensors and sophisticated software keep expensive machines running smoothly
Software is making its way into places where it hasn’t usually been before, like the cutting surfaces of very fast, ultra-precise machine tools.
A high-speed milling machine can run at 42,000 RPM as it fabricates high-quality machine components within tolerances of a few microns. Excessive wear in that environment can lead to a failure that ruins an expensive part, but…
Investigating the industrial Internet
We're working with GE to explore the coming internet of very big things.
Consumer networks have revolutionized the way companies understand and reach their customers, making possible intricate measurement and accurate prediction at every step of every transaction. The same revolution is underway in our infrastructure, where new generations of sensor-laden power plants, cars and medical devices will generate vast quantities of data that could bring about improvements in quality, reliability and…
Four short links: 20 September 2012
Distributing Content, Effective Project Dictatorship, Ubiquitous Hardware, Wheelcasts
Four short links: 24 July 2012
Big Data, Science Revealed, Web Security, and Everything's Getting Worse
- The Future of Big Data (Pew Internet) — A doubtful anonymous respondent observed, “Apparently this ‘Internet of Things’ idea is beginning to encourage yet another round of cow-eyed Utopian thinking. Big Data will yield some successes and a lot of failures, and most people will continue merely to muddle along, hoping not to be mugged too frequently by the well-intentioned (or not) entrepreneurs and bureaucrats who delight in trying to use this shiny new toy to fix the world.” Always easier to be negative than positive: if you’re wrong, nobody cares because the world is better; but if you’re right, you get to say “I told you so” as the world slides into chaos and ruin. Reminded of a politician in NZ who was said to have “predicted 8 of the last 4 recessions”. (via Jim Stogdill)
- Science in a Nutshell (Guardian) — it’s a book review, but Adam Rutherford nails the heart of science in just a few short paragraphs. (And I bought one of the books he was reviewing)
- Living with HTTPS — short rundown of the security considerations around HTTPS transported web pages.
- False Economy — it’s a political blog, but the interesting part is the table showing railway carriage mean-time-between-failures numbers for carriages bought in 1971, 1972, 1979, 1986, and 2011. Monotonically decreasing. In so many ways, they don’t make them like they used to.
Four short links: 26 June 2012
Post-Capture Zoom, Load Gen, Inventive Malware, and Manufactured Normalcy
- SnapItHD — camera captures full 360-degree panorama and users select and zoom regions afterward. (via Idealog)
- Iago (GitHub) — Twitter’s load-generation tool.
- AutoCAD Worm Stealing Blueprints — lovely, malware that targets inventions. The worm, known as ACAD/Medre.A, is spreading through infected AutoCAD templates and is sending tens of thousands of stolen documents to email addresses in China. This one has soured, but give the field time … anything that can be stolen digitally, will be. (via Slashdot)
- Designing For and Against the Manufactured Normalcy Field (Greg Borenstein) — Tim said this was one of his favourite sessions at this year’s Foo Camp: breaking the artificial normality than we try to cast over new experiences so as to make them safe and comfortable.
Foxconn and Ford, Emerson and Jobs
Considering the karmic implications of the assembly line.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay on "Compensation" was a source of inspiration for Henry Ford. It also affirms some of the cosmic truths Steve Jobs held dear.
Four short links: 26 August 2011
9/11 Footage, Finland's Schools, Javascript Presentations, and Hollowed-Out Manufacturing
- 911 Footage — the Internet Archive has published a great collection of video from Sep 11 2001. A tremendous boon to researchers.
- Why Are Finland’s Schools Successful? (Smithsonian Magazine) — not sure if why they’re successful is ever definitively anointed, but the article is fascinating reading.
- deck.js — Javascript presentation library.
- Why Amazon Can’t Make a Kindle in the USA (Forbes) — the progressive hollowing of manufacturing, driven by short-term gains, leading to long-term losses of industries and the corresponding areas to innovate. This is part of a series, and it’s well worth reading the whole series. (via Pinboard)
Four short links: 13 September 2010
Community Deconstructed, Sparklines Explained, NoSQL Navigated, and Foxconn Surveyed
- Open Source Community Types (Simon Phipps) — draws a distinction between extenders and deployers to take away the “who do you mean?” confusion that comes with the term “community”.
- Sparklines — Tufte’s coverage of sparkline graphs in Beautiful Evidence. (via Hacker News)
- Why NoSQL Matters (Heroku blog) — a very nice precis of the use cases for various NoSQL systems. Frequently-written, rarely read statistical data (for example, a web hit counter) should use an in-memory key/value store like Redis, or an update-in-place document store like MongoDB. I’m sure there are as many opinions as there are people, but I’d welcome a “if you want to do X, look at Y” guide to the NoSQL space. If you know of such a beast, please leave pointers in the comments. Thanks!
- The Man Who Makes Your iPhone (BusinessWeek) — a fascinating survey of Foxconn’s CEO, history, operations, culture, and plans. This line resonated for me: “I never think I am successful,” he says. “If I am successful, then I should be retired. If I am not retired, then that means I should still be working hard, keeping the company running.”
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