Olinda is a prototype digital radio that has your social network built in, showing you the stations your friends are listening to. It’s customisable with modular hardware, and aims to provoke discussion on the future and design of radios for the home.

Olinda (Schulze & Webb)

The book is available to download under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 3.0 license: Download PDF.

– The book can be viewed in an experimental html format courtesy of Yale University Press and the futureofthebook.org people. Each paragraph can be annotated.

The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It

IT security and control firm Sophos has published its latest Security Threat Report, which looks at worldwide cybercrime during the first quarter of 2008. The findings show a dramatic increase in web-based threats compared to 2007 – the first three months of 2008 showed Sophos finding and blocking a new infected webpage every five seconds, compared with one every 14 seconds last year.

One new infected webpage found every five seconds, reveals latest Sophos Security Threat Report

A presentation from An Event Apart, held in New Orleans in April 2008.

Findability Bliss Through Web Standards

Here's a three-step process to create a Time Machine backup on a network-attached storage (NAS) unit.

Set up Time Machine on a NAS in three easy steps

Until recently, performance improvement was not difficult. Processors just kept getting faster. Waiting a year for the customer's hardware to be upgraded was a valid optimization strategy. Nowadays, however, individual processors don't get much faster; systems just get more of them.

Much comment has been made on coding paradigms to target multiple-processor cores, but the data-parallel paradigm is a newer approach that may just turn out to be easier to code to, and easier for processor manufacturers to implement.

Data-Parallel Computing

As the Web swells with more and more data, the predominant way of sifting through all of that data—keyword search—will one day break down in its ability to deliver the exact information we want at our fingertips. In fact, some argue that keyword search is already delivering diminishing returns.

Is Keyword Search About To Hit Its Breaking Point?

The Hadoop Summit brought together leaders from the Hadoop developer and user communities for the first time. Apache Hadoop, an open-source distributed computing project of the Apache Software Foundation, is a distributed file system and parallel execution environment that enables its users to process massive amounts of data. Slides and video from the presentations are available below.

Hadoop Summit and Data-Intensive Computing Symposium

Geoff Huston:

So the question is: Have we gone past end-to-end? Are we heading back to a world of bewilderingly complex and expensive networks?

The End of End to End?

Piotr Wozniak's quest for anonymity has been successful. Nobody along this string of little beach resorts recognizes him as the inventor of a technique to turn people into geniuses. A portion of this technique, embodied in a software program called SuperMemo, has enthusiastic users around the world. They apply it mainly to learning languages, and it's popular among people for whom fluency is a necessity — students from Poland or other poor countries aiming to score well enough on English-language exams to study abroad. A substantial number of them do not pay for it, and pirated copies are ubiquitous on software bulletin boards in China, where it competes with knockoffs like SugarMemo.

SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you've learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you've forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you're about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?

Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm