noteworthy wrote:
] ] If you are taken in by all the fanfare and hoopla
] ] that have attended Google's latest project, you would think
] ] Sergey and and Larry are well on their way to godliness.
] ]
] ] I do not share that opinion.

Nor do I, but for entirely different reasons then this author.

Google is getting a lot of attention for doing something that a lot of other people have been doing for years. Thats the point where you are too famous to be cool.

But this author seems to be confused about the greater point, which is that books and buildings full of them are rapidly going the way of the horse and carriage.

The old romance of books was always tied to the information that they contain. But as the information is moved online the romance continues, shucked of its meaning, and we see people who love what books are rather then what they do. These people are going to be very disappointed as time goes on.

Brewster Kahle, who ought to be celebrated by the mainstream, instead of Google, for this kind of work, gave a wonderful talk at the Library of Congress on monday which was carried on CSPAN under the heading "Digital Future" which I memed previously. (Search my memestream for "span" and you can probably watch the video online.)

The fact is that you can print a bounded book, and digital paper technologies mostly elminiate the need. Neither of these things are in widespread adoption, but they are available, and you'll have them soon. The ability to search, sort, organize, recontextualize, and recommend this information with computers will be a vast improvement on row after row of dusty, decaying stacks of paper that previously served as our information infrastructure. The ability to provide instant access to all of this information anywhere in the world will be a revolution in many quarters of the planet that have suffered for lack of knowledge. No longer will your social status prevent you from learning if you are sufficiently motivated, and the motivation to learn will be the greatest determining factor in the quality of one's life.

This is the potential of human knowledge coupled with information technology, and to oppose it for aesthetic reasons is despicable.

The reasonsable objection raised here is that of Intellectual Property. But what common sense cannot kill in a court room history will kill in the marketplace. People will use the information they have access to, and there is a lot of really valuable stuff which is unencumbered by copyright. As this change carries forward the information that matters will be the information that is free. The LA Times is not often blogged simply because it requires registration. By requiring registration they deminish their value in the blogosphere. The WSJ, a really good paper, is almost never blogged, because no one can afford to access it. Online, the WSJ doesn't matter.

There is a substantial need to pay people to produce information products full time. Figuring out how to do that in the context of the new technologies is hard. Our process thus far has consisted of a power struggle more then a dialog. Those who want to get paid have yet to feel particularly incented to present a reasonable way of doing so that doesn't skuttle the value of what they are being paid for. The changes I discuss here will press the issue further. Over the course of several decades the tables will turn, and those who make their living by keeping information bottled up will be forced to find an answer or become irrelevant and die.

RE: Google and God's Mind

Very cool ...

A matrix giving the traffic volumes between origin and destination in a network has tremendously potential utility for network capacity planning and management.

Unfortunately, traffic matrices are generally unavailable in large operational IP networks. On the other hand, link load measurements are readily available in IP networks.

In this paper, we propose a new method for practical and rapid inference of traffic matrices in IP networks from link load measurements, augmented by readily available network and routing configuration information.

We apply and validate the method by computing backbone-router to backbone-router traffic matrices on a large operational tier-1 IP network -- a problem an order of magnitude larger than any other comparable method has tackled. The results show that the method is remarkably fast and accurate, delivering the traffic matrix in under five seconds.

Fast Accurate Computation of Large-Scale IP Traffic Matrices from Link Loads

The battle is on for the swaying of hearts and minds of the Muslim masses. Its chief focus for now is the Middle East, but Pakistan and Afghanistan are very much on the radar screen of the Pentagon.

I thought this article was particularly interesting in that all of this military propaganda reminded me of how domestic political dialog has changed.

Odds are even in the 'information' war

noteworthy wrote:
] If I were an IBM board member, or anyone who cared about
] the long-term health of IBM or the US technology industry or
] the whole blooming US economy, I'd be unspeakably
] depressed.
]
] Know this for sure: Some company will build all this and more
] into a radically more powerful, radically simpler PC. Will it
] be an American company? Don't count on it.

I guess I violated the point of this blog by actually reading this article. Its silly. Everything this person asks for is software, which has nothing at all to do with selling PCs (and a lot of what this person asks for is incredibly naive).

There is little room for innovation in the PC market. These are standardized goods. Some companies are in it just because it generates a lot of revenue, at volume, but its not central to IBM's business. Its possible to make PCs poorly, and IBM does it well, but in their history they have tried several times to innovate in this market and they have failed consistently, because this market is about standardization and innovation makes you incompatible.

Outsourcing PC making to China is no more a threat to American competitiveness then the outsourcing of the manufacture of the components within, which has already moved to Asia.

The competitive markets in the PC world are media PCs, which are tied up by intellectual property issues and will most likely be dominated by consumer electronics firms, and mobile devices, which are also far removed from IBM's business. Both markets have significant American players, but neither is lead domestically.

A more significant threat to domestic leadership in technology comes from our technology adoption rate. Europeans and Japanese make good cellphones because people in those places buy them up more rapidly then we do. Japanese and Koreans are going to make more interesting internet media technologies because they have more bandwidth at home. On the other hand, we're going to do VOIP, because our vast country has a more immediate need for it.

On the whole, we're clearly going to pass the point where American know how gives us a technological edge. We're entering a period where the unique cultural identities of a nation impact the technologies they create. I don't think any one country is suited to dominate this. You can do some things with policy and funding to drive things, but only to an extent. Accidents of geography and perspective will have much greater effects.

RE: How to Build a Better PC, by David Gelernter

But it mostly exists to document the connections between people, many of which are not always obvious. A person's otherwise inexplicable behavior is often understood by examining the crowd that person has been hanging out with.

NNDB

] I guess technically they aren't robots, but mechanized
] mobility suits. The one of the left is called 'i-foot,'
] and is designed to help the disabled to get around and to
] climb up stairs, while the two on the right are called
] 'i-unit.' If I'm not mistaken, i-unit has two modes, one
] that puts the rider more upright, while the other is in
] an inclined position that looks more suitable for high
] speed maneuvers.

Wow...

Gizmodo : Toyoto i-foot and i-unit

Koders is a search engine for source code. It enables developers to easily search and browse source code in thousands of projects hosted at hundreds of open source repositories.

This could come in useful. Google is sometimes really helpful for dealing with technical things and sometimes really not helpful. In particular, mailing lists tend to get mirrored a lot and google as no way of aggregating the same email posting repeated in 1000 different places. They also tend to ignore punctuation in search terms. word1.word2 is often a very different search then "word1 word2"

Koders - Source Code Search Engine

] Each index server indexes only part of the Web, as the whole Web
] will not fit on a single machine -- certainly not the type of machines
] that Google uses. Google's index of the Web is distributed across
] many machines, and the query gets sent to many of them -- Google
] calls each on a shard (of the Web). Each one works on its part of the
] problem.

How Google scales.

The magic that makes Google tick: ZDNet Australia: Insight: Software

] "It's a premonition of things to come," Pike said. "It
] makes sense. These things have no family to write home
] to. They're fearless. You can put them places you'd have
] a hard time putting a soldier in."

Robots with rockets. Seriously.

Wired News: More Robot Grunts Ready for Duty

StankDawg wrote:
] 2) It is apparent by the way this was written that the author
] didn't even attend the conference or listen to the audio
] panels.

Wow... The ignorance displayed in this article is beyond the pale. This sort of attitude hasn't been commonplace in 10 years.

Welcome, new journalist, to the wonderful world of computer security. Here are the rules.

1. You don't know what you're talking about.
2. No, really, you don't know what you're talking about.
3. The first step to having a clue is to listen and do your homework. This means not firing off a rant based on your misinterpretation of a collection of three line summaries of conference discussions. Actually listening to the content of the discussions might help, but you are really just scratching the surface.
4. If you have reached the point in your analysis where you are comparing American high school computer nerds to Islamic terrorists, you need to take a step back, take a deep breath, and think about whether what you are saying actually makes any sense. Consider this a good rule of thumb whenever analogies to terrorists, Hitler, or the Mafia pop into your head.
5. People are not homogenius. Do not assume that the motivations or moral/ethical values presented by one person can be applied unilaterally to a larger group of people.
6. Teenagers like to think that they have a rebellious culture, which is intended to sound dangerous and makes cultural references that you are unlikely to get. If something seems strange, ask about it rather then inserting your own interpretation.
7. In order to do computer security you have to think about computer insecurity. I know this is hard for you to understand as there is no equivelent in the world of journalism. Try to think about football. How good would a football team be if they never considered how their opponent's playbook might look.
8. Sometimes creative people push social boundaries. Insurance underwriters, on the whole, aren't creative people. Please try to keep that in mind.
9. Talking about computer security is not illegal. However, making unfounded personal accusations against real people in print IS illegal. Please try to keep that in mind as well.

RE: Technology Decisions