"multicore" entries

Four short links: 27 Feb 2009

Four short links: 27 Feb 2009

The Economist in Chinese, online news, concurrency, and community. Have a great weekend!

  1. Translating the Economist — Andy Baio reports on a Chinese electronic community that, each week, splits up and translates The Economist articles into Chinese. The DIY ethos here, “we want this, it’s not here yet, let’s make it happen”, is tremendous.
  2. Business Models of News — excellent insight into the travails of newspaper business. “In essence to secure the advertising for the print edition, they have in the past completely undermined the business they need to survive in the future. They have told every one of their advertisers that online adverts are not worth paying for.” (via Julie Starr)
  3. Embracing Concurrency — Ignite UK North talk on parallel coding, at a high and clear level, by Michael Sparks of BBC R&D, who is also author of Kamaelia.
  4. Things I’ve Learned From Hacker News — Paul Graham on social and community lessons from running Hacker News. “Probably the most important thing I’ve learned about dilution is that it’s measured more in behavior than users. It’s bad behavior you want to keep out more than bad people. User behavior turns out to be surprisingly malleable. If people are expected to behave well, they tend to; and vice versa.”
Four short links: 6 Jan 2009

Four short links: 6 Jan 2009

Four thought-provoking links from the worlds of disaster tech, multicore, bioengineering, and 17th century French nobility.

  1. Techies: Volunteering to Save the World – article on NGO work being the new black for technology. In particular, this caught my eye: “Earlier this year, IBM launched a program called Corporate Service Corps to send 100 employees to Romania, Turkey, Vietnam, the Philippines, Ghana and Tanzania to work on projects that combine economic development and IT. And the response was impressive: More than 5,000 employees applied to participate.”
  2. Laurence Livermore Lab releases Stack Trace Analysis Tool – debugging tool for code running over 20k processors. We need new tools like this to handle the complexity thrown up by a multicore world.
  3. Spinning Silkworm Cocoons into Biosensors – interesting article in MIT Technology Review about bioengineer Fiorenzo Omenetto who is using silk to build optical devices that can be used as sensors in the body. “In the devices that ­Omenetto and Kaplan are developing, proteins embedded in the optical material efficiently bind to a target such as oxygen or a bacterial protein; when they do, the light transmitted by the sensor changes color.”
  4. La Rochefoucauld Quotes – lots of thought-provoking quotes. For example, on the freemium business model: “What seems to be generosity is often no more than disguised ambition, which overlooks a small interest in order to secure a great one.” On Twitter: “As it is the characteristic of great wits to say much in few words, so small wits seem to have the gift of speaking much and saying nothing.” On social network sites: “However rare true love may be, it is less so than true friendship.” On Google/Microsoft/Apple/[insert big company here]: “There are heroes in evil as well as in good.