Study Says Oslo Is World’s Priciest City - Yahoo! News
Suck on that Tokyo!!
Google wasn’t the only one subpoenaed
AOL, MSN & Yahoo were all subpoenaed for search information as well. Unlike Google, they turned over some of their data (potentially setting a important preciendent). Some in the online community are now asking these companies to show us what they showed them.
Law students stand up to Alberto Gonzales
A couple of photos of law students making a symbolic stand against the Bush administration’s illegal and unauthorized surveillance on US citizens.
More on Google suit
John Battelle weighs in on the government’s attempts to gain access to Google’s query data. The government is not requesting some subset of data or even data about specific people. They are requesting ALL data from June & July of last year. This includes any and all searches (including yours).
So, search for anything about 6 months ago you’d rather the US Government not know about? Think about it.
Justice Department Seeks Searches from Google
Google is resisting an attempt by the Justice Department to gain access to “all queries entered on the company’s Web search system between June 1 and July 31 of last year.”
If this doesn’t disturb you, it should. Remember, Google knows who you are and every search you’ve ever performed. Fortunately, Google is fighting the motion. They have a policy of not being “evil”. Let’s see how this holds up against the Justice Department.
Dumbing of CS Degrees
Computer Science degrees do not mean what they used to apparently. A very interesting article about how US universities have quit teaching some of the more complex concepts in their computer science departments. Instead, they now focus on building the types of students the industry is supposedly trying to hire (accounting & IT management software for example). This means that concepts such as functional programming are simply no longer taught.
But, an example of how this is bad can be seen in Google’s MapReduce which is at the core of Google. Would not have been possible without some of the concepts now NOT being taught in CS departments. MapReduce basically allows for data to be torn apart and analyzed in a massively scalable way. More from Google on what’s going on here…
MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating large data sets. Users specify a map function that processes a key/value pair to generate a set of intermediate key/value pairs, and a reduce function that merges all intermediate values associated with the same intermediate key. Many real world tasks are expressible in this model, as shown in the paper.
Programs written in this functional style are automatically parallelized and executed on a large cluster of commodity machines. The run-time system takes care of the details of partitioning the input data, scheduling the program’s execution across a set of machines, handling machine failures, and managing the required inter-machine communication. This allows programmers without any experience with parallel and distributed systems to easily utilize the resources of a large distributed system.
“but, what does that mean?” you ask, well think about my article which you’re reading right now. What I’m doing is looking at his article and figuring out the important parts and putting them back into the same medium (the blogosphere). Now imagine someone else coming along and doing the same thing to my article. This creates a sort of “trail” of knowledge. Knowledge reducing knowledge. The knowledge is there, but you can easily decide how much of it you want to grok.
Interestingly, he also references The Terminator’s Skynet. Here’s a clip from that article…
In the first movie, The Terminator, Skynet is portrayed as a revolutionary neural net-based artificial intelligence built by Cyberdyne Systems. It was given control over the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal for reasons of efficiency, and programmed with a directive of defending the United States against all possible enemies. It started to learn at a geometrical rate, and soon concluded that the greatest threat is humanity itself. To neutralize this threat it initiated a nuclear war August 29th, 1997 (known as Judgment Day) between the United States, Russia, and China with the intent of killing as many humans as possible.
Point, Counterpoint I suppose…
The changing music industry
A great editorial about the Aspen Live music conference. A really interesting read on how the music industry is shifting and how Google is starting to play a role in that shift. This is apparently someone that knows the music industry pretty well and is extrememly excited about the future.
Google Earth for the Mac
Finally, after nearly a year, Google earth is out for the mac. I’m taking a look now… details to follow.
New iLife
While Apple’s release of new Intel-based laptops is grabbing all the press, there’s actually a nugget hidden in there that’s even more important in my opinion. The new GarageBand is designed for Podcasting. Podcasting is basically the ability to put a reoccuring radio show online. Since iTunes supports podcasting, anyone can register to hear your show and it will be automatically downloaded to their iPod.
The best way to record music on a Mac is now the best way to record podcasts. Podcasting in GarageBand 3 puts you in the control room of your own full-featured radio station. And new iWeb integration gets your voice on the Internet in minutes.
The revolution will not be televised. It is, however, being blogged and podcasted.
Link, Podcasting for Dummys