Newer posts are loading.
You are at the newest post.
Click here to check if anything new just came in.

April 10 2012

02mydafsoup-01

Four short links: 9 April 2012

  1. E-Reading/E-Books Data (Luke Wroblewski) -- This past January, paperbacks outsold e-books by less than 6 million units; if e-book market growth continues, it will have far outpaced paperbacks to become the number-one category for U.S. publishers. Combine that with only 21% of American adults having read a ebook, the signs are there that readers of ebooks buy many more books.
  2. Web 2.0 Ends with Data Monopolies (Bryce Roberts) -- in the context of Google Googles: So you’re able to track every website someone sees, every conversation they have, every Ukulele book they purchase and you’re not thinking about business models, eh? Bryce is looking at online businesses as increasingly about exclusive access to data. This is all to feed the advertising behemoth.
  3. Building and Implementing Single Sign On -- nice run-through of the system changes and APIs they built for single-sign on.
  4. How Big are Porn Site (ExtremeTech) -- porn sites cope with astronomical amounts of data. The only sites that really come close in term of raw bandwidth are YouTube or Hulu, but even then YouPorn is something like six times larger than Hulu.

Tags: bandwidth business data ebooks googlegoggles internet numbers programming publishing web20

March 22 2012

02mydafsoup-01

Four short links: 22 March 2012

  1. Stamen Watercolour Maps -- I saw a preview of this a week or two ago and was in awe. It is truly the most beautiful thing I've seen a computer do. It's not just a clever hack, it's art. Genius. And they're CC-licensed.
  2. Screens Up Close -- gorgeous microscope pictures of screens, showing how great the iPad's retina display is.
  3. Numbers API -- CUTE! Visit it, even if you're not a math head, it's fun.
  4. China Now Leads the World in New iOS and Android Device Activations (Flurry) -- interesting claim, but the graphs make me question their data. Why have device activations in the US plummeted in January and February even as Chinese activations grew? Is this an artifact of collection or is it real?

Tags: api art china fun hardware mapping math mobile numbers stamen ui

March 05 2012

02mydafsoup-01

Four short links: 5 March 2012

  1. Pirates Adopt H.264 -- no more XViD encoded avi files, now it's x264. I'm impressed by the rigid rules and structure of The Scene.
  2. YouTube's ContentID Disputes Are Judged By The Accuser (Andy Baio) -- the last couple years have seen a dramatic rise in Content ID abuse, using it for purposes that it was never intended. Scammers are using Content ID to steal ad revenue from YouTube video creators en masse, with some companies claiming content they don't own, deliberately or not. The inability to understand context and parody regularly leads to "fair use" videos getting blocked, muted or monetized.
  3. The Month of 50% in Mobile (Luke Wroblewski) -- 47.6% of mobile Internet users use native mobile apps and 47.5% use the Web browser on their devices. This is the first time (in ComScore data) native apps have had more use than the browser.
  4. Fake Unicode Consortium -- excellent collection of better names for Unicode characters. My favourite: U+0CA0: MONOCLE OF DISAPPROVAL. (via Tom Christiansen)

Tags: copyright fun law mobile numbers unicode video youtube

February 23 2012

02mydafsoup-01

Four short links: 23 February 2012

  1. Why Mobile Matters (Luke Wroblewski) -- great demonstration of the changes in desktop and mobile, the new power of Android, and the waning influence of old manufacturers.
  2. It's Called iBooks Author Not iMathTextbooks Author, And The Trouble That Results (Dan Meyer) -- It's curious that even though students own their iBooks forever (ie. they can't resell them or give them away), they can't write in them except in the most cursory ways. Even curiouser, these iBooks could all be wired to the Internet and wired to a classroom through iTunes U, but they'd still be invisible to each other. Your work on your iPad cannot benefit me on mine. At our school, we look for "software with holes in it"--software into which kids put their own answers, photos, stories.
  3. DepthCam -- It’s a live-streaming 3D point-cloud, carried over a binary WebSocket. It responds to movement in the scene by panning the (virtual) camera, and you can also pan and zoom around with the mouse. Very impressive hack with a Kinect! (via Pete Warden)
  4. Starting an Online Store is Not Easy in Greece -- At the health department, they were told that all the shareholders of the company would have to provide chest X-rays, and, in the most surreal demand of all, stool samples. Note to Greece: this is not how you check whether a business plan is full of shit. (via Hacker News)

Tags: danmeyer data ebooks economics education microsoftkinect mobile numbers startups

January 26 2012

02mydafsoup-01

Four short links: 26 January 2012

  1. Every Day, More iPhones Sold Than Babies Born -- Malthusian explosion of iPhones predicted once there's an iPhone-to-3D-printer dongle. (via Luke Wroblewski)
  2. No Safe Harbour -- a collection of political essays, texts, and discussions that help explain and educate about Pirate Party positions. Available for purchase or free download, natch. (via BoingBoing)
  3. Patagonia Roadtests New Sustainability Legal Status -- California has new corporation types: Flexible Purpose Corporations and Benefit Corporations, which are aimed at permitting directors to consider more than purely "maximizing shareholder value" (e.g., environmental impact, social consequences, etc.).
  4. Zynga Adds 15Tb/Day of Data (Dell) -- Zynga’s goal is to drive player actions that improve financial conversion (i.e. player paying real money for elements of the game) and player retention. To accomplish this Zynga uses the results of continuous data analyses of player actions to test, iterate, and fine tune features in their games. Don't bother clicking through--the rest of the post is basically PR for Dell's analytics partnerships. That data point is awe-inspiring, though.

Tags: bigdata book business copyright gaming iphone law numbers thepiratebay zynga

January 11 2012

02mydafsoup-01

Four short links: 11 January 2011

  1. Virtual Sweatshops Defeat CAPTCHAs -- I knew there was an industry around solving CAPTCHAs (to spam comments on blogs, sign up for millions of gmail accounts, etc.) but this is the first time I've seen how much you can be paid for it: employees can expect to earn between $0.35 to $1 for every thousand CAPTCHAs they solve [...] Most of our staff is from China, India, Pakistan and Vietnam. (via BoingBoing)
  2. Lockdown -- transcription of Cory Doctorow's excellent talk, "The Coming War on General-Purpose Computation". The entertainment industry is just the first belligerents to take up arms, and we tend to think of them as particularly successful. [...] But the reality is that copyright legislation gets as far as it does precisely because it's not taken seriously by politicians. [...] Regardless of whether you think these are real problems or hysterical fears, they are, nevertheless, the political currency of lobbies and interest groups far more influential than Hollywood and big content. Every one of them will arrive at the same place: "Can't you just make us a general-purpose computer that runs all the programs, except the ones that scare and anger us? Can't you just make us an Internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any two points, unless it upsets us?"
  3. Mobile Data Consumption Numbers (Luke Wroblewski) -- the most eye-catching statistic is 1% of bandwidth consumers account for half of all wireless traffic worldwide in the World. The top 10% of users are consuming 90% of wireless bandwidth. In my land of pay-through-the-nose-for-a-modicum-of-mobile-bandwidth, this was also of note: Voice recognition software Siri has prompted owners of the iPhone 4S to use almost twice as much data as iPhone 4 users.
  4. Monkigras -- event in London that looks interesting. The Redmonk chaps are fellow travellers on the O'Reilly storytelling path: they see many of the same interesting trends as we do, and their speakers cover everything from platform services to open source, startups, and alpha geeks (Biddulph, I'm looking at you). And, also, beer.

Tags: business copyright events law mobile numbers policy security sopa

January 03 2012

02mydafsoup-01

Four short links: 3 January 2012

  1. What the Sumerians Can Teach Us About Data (Pete Warden) -- money quote: Gathering data is not a neutral act, it will alter the power balance, usually in favor of the people collecting the information. I also loved the Sumerian boundary marker covered in the supernatural equivalent of "copying is a federal crime!" pre-roll DVD warnings.
  2. 2011 Holiday Shopping Mobile Numbers (Luke Wroblewski) -- iPad and iPhone shoppers account for 90% of all mobile purchases; spend 19% more per order than Android users. All these statistics are jaw-dropping.
  3. Fifteen Things I've Learned About Designing for Participation This Year (Nina Simon) -- most insightful to me "Make and share" is more powerful for many people than "make and take." Most people--including kids--want to display their creations, not keep them. . Most thought-provoking: People of all ages can use sledgehammers with minimal oversight. We had over 400 successful bangers with no injuries. The risk of liability was worth it.
  4. Porting MAME to Chrome -- This document describes how we ported MAME using tools on the Linux platform. The resulting code runs in the Google Chrome browser on all currently supported Native Client platforms (Windows, Mac, and Linux). Jaw-dropping part: The port of MAME was relatively challenging; combined with figuring out how to port SDL-based games and load resources in Native Client, the overall effort took us about 4 days to complete. (via Slashdot)

Tags: bigdata business design games googlechrome mame mobile numbers web

September 21 2011

02mydafsoup-01

Four short links: 21 September 2011

  1. Gun Part on Thingiverse -- we're used to thinking of the legal problems caused by cheap and decentralized copies of digital works. Now the problems we had with pipe bombs (designs are free on the net, the parts are cheap) are just as applicable to every type of restricted object (in this case, a gun). The difference between regulating speech (design of an object) and regulating possession of objects is blurring and it'll be interesting to see where this goes. (via Jesse Robbins)
  2. Mobile Data (Luke Wrobewski) -- Mobile data traffic is now outpacing fixed broadband traffic. Last year, it grew 4.2 times as fast. The entire list of interesting numbers repays reading.
  3. ERPnext -- open source (Python/Javascript) ERP system. Yet another example of open source climbing up the business stack.
  4. Technology Time Out (Slideshare) -- my presentation to employees embarking on a hackathon, about future trends, the role of software developers, and the need to work on meaningful stuff.

Tags: 3dprinting erp fabbing future futureofmanufacturing law mobile numbers opensource software technology trends

August 30 2011

02mydafsoup-01

Four short links: 30 August 2011

  1. Data Monday: From PC to Tablet (Luke Wroblewski) -- some great stats here. Sales of Apple's iPad pulled in 30% more than all of Dell's consumer PC business in just the first half of the year.
  2. Munki -- munki is a set of tools that, used together with a webserver-based repository of packages and package metadata, can be used by OS X administrators to manage software installs (and in many cases removals) on OS X client machines.
  3. Crustache (GitHub) -- a fast C implementation of the Mustache templating engine. (via Hacker News)
  4. Minecraft Cube in Real Life -- clever hardware hack with projection and Arduino sensing.

Tags: hardwarehacks minecraft mobile numbers opensource osx sysadmin tablet web

August 09 2011

02mydafsoup-01

Four short links: 9 August 2011

  1. DSLR Controller -- Android app that lets you remote-control your DSLR. Much being made of the fact that iOS devices aren't as easy to interface with. For more, see the Wired article. (via BoingBoing)
  2. Asymmetric Security Warfare -- I found this nugget buried in this photo shoot talking about the differences between Black Hat and DEFCON conferences: [Mudge, Peiter] Zatko found that it takes about 125 lines of code to create the typical piece of malware and it takes about 10 million lines of code to create sophisticated technologies to protect against it.
  3. Teaching Cooking in Google+ Hangouts (KQED) -- I love the many uses of hangouts. To my mind, they remain the unique value-add for G+.
  4. HTTP Benchmarking Rules -- Mark Nottingham lays down some guidelines for meaningful and effective benchmarking of HTTP services. Full of subtleties and wile: [P]retty much every server loses some capacity once you throw more work at it than it can handle. A better way to get an idea of capacity is to test your server at progressively higher loads, until it reaches capacity and then backs off; you should be able to graph it as a curve that peaks and then backs off. How much it backs off will indicate how well your server deals with overload.

Tags: android education google hardware http numbers performance security

July 26 2011

02mydafsoup-01

Four short links: 26 July 2011

  1. Google Keyword Advertising -- interesting infographic about the most lucrative advertising categories for Google. #20 is an eye-opener!
  2. Javascript Koans (GitHub) -- an interactive learning environment that uses failing tests to introduce students to aspects of JavaScript in a logical sequence. (via Javascript Weekly)
  3. Etsy AB (GitHub) -- Etsy's framework for A/B testing, feature ramp up, and more. (via Randy J. Hunt)
  4. Chosen (GitHub) -- a JavaScript plugin that makes long select boxes more wieldy. (via Steve Losh)

Tags: abtesting advertising design etsy google javascript numbers opensource search web

July 08 2011

02mydafsoup-01

Four short links: 8 July 2011

  1. OpenPCR Shipping -- A PCR machine is basically a copy machine for DNA. It is essential for most work with DNA, things like exposing fraud at a sushi restaurant, diagnosing diseases including HIV and H1N1, or exploring your own genome. The guy who discovered the PCR process earned a Nobel Prize in 1993, and OpenPCR is now the first open source PCR machine. The price of a traditional PCR machine is around $3,000. This one is $512 and would go well with Ben Krasnow's Scanning Electron Microscope. Biological tools get closer to hobbyist/hacker prices. (via Gabriella Coleman)
  2. Apple App Store Figures (Fast Company) -- 1 billion apps in a month, 200M iOS users, $2.5B revshare to developers so far (implying a further $5.8B revenue kept by Apple). Another reminder of the astonishing money to be made by riding the mainstreaming of tech: as we move from dumb phones to smart phones, the market for Apple's products and App Store sales will continue to rise. We're not at the fighting-for-market-share stage yet, it's still in the boom. (via Stephen Walli)
  3. Open Hardware Repository -- open source digital hardware projects, such as a tool for generating VHDL/Verilog cores which implement Wishbone bus slaves with certain registers, memory blocks, FIFOs and interrupts. CERN just approved an open license for hardware designs. (via CERN)
  4. Wingu -- SaaS startup to help scientists manage, analyze, and share data. Recently invested by Google, it's one of several startups for scientists, such as Macmillan's Digital Science which is run by Timo Hannay who is one of the convenors of Science Foo Camp. (via Alex Butler)

Tags: appstore bio business diy make numbers openhardware opensource science startups

June 01 2011

02mydafsoup-01

Four short links: 1 June 2011

  1. Putting Fair Use Forward (Chronicle of Higher Education) -- lawyer and academic collaborating on guidelines for academic fair use, intended to remove the chilling effect of the fear of being sued. Great quotes: People deal with fuzzy laws all the time, she argues. "Obscenity is impossible to define, and yet people have some idea of when they're committing an obscenity or not. You could walk through your life being haunted by the specter of litigation in every aspect of it. But people don't usually do this in their other free-speech rights." (via David Adler)
  2. Scrubbing Calculator -- clever UI for solving equations without needing to know how to solve equations. Imminent death of mathematics skill in the US predicted, film at 11. (via Dan Meyer)
  3. Startup Genome -- a report, written from research into 650 startups. Investors who provide hands-on help have little or no effect on the company's operational performance. But the right mentors significantly influence a company's performance and ability to raise money. (However, this does not mean that investors don't have a significant effect on valuations and M&A) Balanced teams with one technical founder and one business founder raise 30% more money, have 2.9x more user growth and are 19% less likely to scale prematurely than technical or business-heavy founding teams.
  4. Zanran -- search engine for graphs, charts, and data. (via Pia Waugh)

Tags: copyright data law math numbers research search startup ui

May 20 2011

02mydafsoup-01

Four short links: 20 May 2011

  1. BitCoin Watch -- news and market analysis for this artificial currency. (If you're outside the BitCoin world wondering wtf the fuss is all about try We Use Coins for a gentle primer and then Is BitCoin a Good Idea? for the case against) (via Andy Baio)
  2. Time Capsule -- send your Flickr photos from a year ago. I love that technology helps us connect not just with other people right now, but with ourselves in the future. Compare TwitShift and Foursquare and Seven Years Ago. (via Really Interesting Group)
  3. HTTP Archive Mobile -- mobile performance data. The top 100 web pages average out at 271kb vs 401kb for their desktop incarnations, which still seems unjustifiably high to me.
  4. Skype at Conferences -- The two editors of the book were due to lead the session but were at the wrong ends of a skype three way video conference which stuttered into a dalekian half life without really quite making the breakthrough into comprehensibility. After various attempts to rewire, reconfigure and reboot, we gave up and had what turned into a good conversation among the dozen people round the table in London. Conference organizers, take note: Skype at conferences is a recipe for fail.

Tags: bitcoin events history mobile money numbers ops skype socialsoftware web

April 25 2011

02mydafsoup-01

Four short links: 25 April 2011

  1. E-Referral Evaluation Interim Findings -- in general good, but note this: The outstanding system issues are an ongoing source of frustration and concern, including [...] automated data uptake from the GP [General Practitioner=family doctor] PMS [Patient Management System], that sometimes has clearly inaccurate or contradictory information. When you connect systems, you realize the limitations of the data in them.
  2. c64iphone (GitHub) -- the source to an iPhone/iPad app from the store, released under GPLv3. It incorporates the Frodo emulator. Sweet Freedom.
  3. mlpy -- machine learning Python library, a high-performance Python package for predictive modeling. It makes extensive use of NumPy to provide fast N-dimensional array manipulation and easy integration of C code. (via Joshua Schachter)
  4. What is The Truth Behind 9 Out of 10 Startups Fail? (Quora) -- some very interesting pointers and statistics, such as Hall and Woodward (2007) analyze a dataset of all VC-backed firms and show the highly skewed distribution of outcomes. VC revenue averages $5 million per VC-backed company. Founding team averages $9 million per VC-backed company (most from small probability of great success). The economically rational founding team would sell at time of VC funding for $900,000 to avoid the undiversified risk. (via Hacker News)

Tags: app c64 data gplv3 healthcare machinelearning numbers opensource python research retroemulator startups

March 15 2011

02mydafsoup-01

Four short links: 15 March 2011

  1. Twitter Numbers -- growing at half a million accounts a day (how many are spammers, d'ya think?), over 140M tweets sent each day.
  2. Online vs Newspaper News (Mashable) -- The Poynter Institute, a landmark of American journalism research, has determined that as of the end of 2010, more people get their news from the Internet than from newspapers — and more ad dollars went to online outlets than to newspapers, too. (via Sacha Judd)
  3. Blue Lacuna: Lessons Learned Writing the World's Longest Interactive Fiction (PDF) -- While I felt Progue was largely a success, the extreme complexity of the character's code made di*culties with him both intensely di*cult to diagnose and repair, and failures all the more mimesis-breaking for an engaged audience. In addition, the subtle text substitutions and altered behaviors provided in many cases too opaque a window into Progue's interior workings. From informal interviews and published reviews I gathered that players could often not tell which conversation responses might cause Progue to become more submissive, paternal, and so on. In many cases, the change was not noticeable at all, and did not successfully indicate to players that their actions had had an e*ect on the character. More mechanisms to let the player shape their relationship with Progue more directly might have created a stronger feeling of agency for players, and an increased ability to shape the story more to their liking. Lessons for people designing complex emotional states into their products. (via Zack Urlocker)
  4. From Head to Hand (Slate) -- I was searching for the place where someone, anyone, writes about that epiphany where you see what you have made and it is different from what you had conceived. I was searching for a description of how an object can displace a bit of the world. I was avid. I wanted someone to write a description of Homo faber, the maker of things. I wanted a story of making told without the penumbra of romanticising how hard it is, without nostalgia.

Tags: books design emotion interactivefiction journalism makers news numbers twitter

December 31 2010

02mydafsoup-01

Four short links: 31 December 2010

  1. The Joy of Stats -- Hans Rosling's BBC documentary on statistics, available to watch online.
  2. Best Tech Writing of 2010 -- I need a mass "add these to Instapaper" button. (via Hacker News)
  3. Google Shared Spaces: Why We Made It (Pamela Fox) -- came out of what people were trying to do with Google Wave.
  4. The Great Delicious Exodus -- traffic graph as experienced by pinboard.

Tags: bigdata bookmarking delicious googlewave journalism numbers pamelafox pinboard social statistics video visualizations

September 14 2010

02mydafsoup-01

Four short links: 14 September 2010

  1. ASB Bank's Facebook Virtual Branch -- the world's first Facebook branch of a bank, where you can live chat with tellers. (via Vaughn Davis)
  2. SciDB -- GPLv3 NoSQL database. In addition to being multi-dimensional and offering array based scaling from megabytes to petabytes and running on tens of thousands clustered nodes, SciDB's will be write once read many, allow bulk load rather than single road insert, provide parallel computation, be designed for automatic rather than manual administration, and work with R, Matlab, IDL, C++ and Python. (that from The Register) (via jsteeleeditor on Twitter)
  3. Twitter By The Numbers (Raffi Krikorian) -- given to answer the question "what's so hard about delivering 140 characters?". They hit a peak of 3283 inbound tweets/second. Every time Lady Gaga tweets, 6.1M people have to get it. (via Alex Russell)
  4. EmoKit -- an open source driver to the $300 Emotiv EPOC EEG headset. (via BoingBoing)

Tags: advertising brain business facebook nosql numbers opensource twitter

May 27 2010

02mydafsoup-01

Four short links: 27 May 2010

  1. Socorro: Mozilla's Crash Reporting System (Laura Thomson) -- We receive on our peak day each week 2.5 million crash reports, and process 15% of those, for a total of 50 GB. In total, we receive around 320Gb each day. Moving to a Hadoop-based system in the future, as they're limited by database and filesystem storage.
  2. DIY Atomic Force Microscopy -- use a 3D printer to make the parts so you can build a cheap and simple AFM head suitable for single molecule force spectroscopy. (via Vik Olliver)
  3. Elastic Lists -- open-sourced ActionScript for a clever faceted browsing system. (via Flowing Data)
  4. The Most IMPORTANT Video You'll Ever See (YouTube) -- a math lesson everyone should have. (via Hacker News)

Tags: 3dprinters business math mozilla numbers opensource science ui visualization

May 13 2010

02mydafsoup-01

Four short links: 13 May 2010

  1. Don't Simply Build a More Open Facebook, Build a Better One -- Most people don’t care so much about whether technology is “open” or “closed” so long as it works. (Case in point: iPhone.) Rather than starting your plans by picking which “open” standards you’ll use, start by designing a better social networking service and then determine how “open” specs will help you build that service. (via David Recordon)
  2. Internet Stats from Google -- very nice categorized factoids about internet use, technology, trends, etc. 64% of C-level executives conduct six or more searches per day to locate business information.
  3. Qualitative Methods for IS Research -- summary of qualitative methods (interviews, documents, observation data) as applied to IS. Written for academics, so you have to choke back passive voice vomit (sorry, "passive voice vomit must be choked back") but it's got lots of useful information on approaches and tools. (via johnny723 on Twitter)
  4. Social Signaling and Language Use -- turns out the stopwords like "to", "be", and "on" are the ones that indicate manager-subordinate relationships. In so many fields I see again and again that you keep data at each stage of transformation, because transforming for one use prevents others. (via terrycojones on Twitter)

Tags: datamining facebook internet interviews machinelearning numbers open research text
Older posts are this way If this message doesn't go away, click anywhere on the page to continue loading posts.
Could not load more posts
Maybe Soup is currently being updated? I'll try again automatically in a few seconds...
Just a second, loading more posts...
You've reached the end.