Listening to: Mumbai Theme Tune - Talvin Singh

Ars Technica have a wonderfully mind-opening article about the real questions that Intel have started asking now that they have jammed 80 cores onto one chip:

The picture that Sawicki painted is of a server-room-on-a-chip—a single piece of silicon that uses many cores and virtualization to do the kind of work that it currently takes multiple networked servers to do. Sawicki gave the example of a hypothetical multicore chip that can run a high-volume e-commerce solution on a single piece of silicon. Instead of web server box that takes orders and then sends them over the network to another machine for processing, you could use two separate cores for these tasks, with each core running a virtual server.

Problems might arise, however, when an order comes in through the virtual web server, and then order data has to be moved to another virtual server for processing. Ideally, you want the transaction data to move from virtual server to virtual server—and from core to core—without leaving the chip, Sawicki explained. It would be a waste to send those packets off the chip to a router to reach a destination that’s a few cores away.

A set of seriously cool questions to ask and answer!

Listening to: Alpha Male - Röyksopp

For my own notes: appletvhacks.net

Listening to: The Shadowlands - Ryan Adams

I have been working an as advisor to a very exciting company in Christchurch called VortexDNA. A small group of seriously smart people have been able to create an algorithm that allows a system to determine the relevance of data to an individual user. They currently provide a Firefox plugin that is used to increase the relevance, and therefore accuracy, of Google search results. The plugin is the first offering but plans are a foot to provide tools with a greater reach - ones that don’t have the limitations associated with software plugins.

The noise around Web 3.0 technologies is starting to grow, but VortexDNA is the first offering I have seen that is actually starting to deliver on the promise.

Keep an eye on their blog.

They also provide a REST based VortexDNA API for developers.

Listening to: From Yesterday - 30 Seconds to Mars

Excellent!

Chia and her buds build their treehouses in corporate ghost sites. That’s the difference. Interstitial. Gotta be interstitial.

Call me when you get it worked out. I’ll be on eBay.

Listening to: Breathing - Kate Bush

Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Too cool:

BILLUND, Denmark, March 5 /PRNewswire/ — The LEGO(R) Group today announced it has commenced a working relationship with NetDevil(R) to develop a massively multiplayer online gaming experience to further engage its dedicated and active community.

Listening to: I Am The Resurrection - The Stone Roses

Provoke has just taken wraps off their Fresh From the Oven project. Provoke has been doing some serious MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007) work over the past year (making them the most experience MOSS team in NZ) and they are deservedly showing off their skills.

Listening to: Mercy On The Boy - Icehouse

iTunes has a (deservedly) bad reputation for taking total control of your music and videos, including where they live on your computer. It wasn’t always easy to move your library in past versions of the software, but happily iTunes 7 makes relocating an existing media library pretty painless - that is, with a little know-how.

read more | digg story

Listening to: Centrefolds - Placebo

I’ve had a bit of a magic Flash afternoon and it’s all thanks to:

• SWFTools - for those “how do I convert to SWF?” moments
• Mono Slideshow - a really rich Flash image slideshow tool

The end result has left me grinning stupidly at my monitor.

Listening to: Annanas - Sascha Crnornja, Organic Grooves

Wharton Business School has just released a great article on the next steps in software business models.

…many wonder if the software business model that has made Microsoft so dominant for the last 20 years may begin to fade in the decade to come as new software business models — from open source to advertising supported — gain increasing traction.

The individual topics aren’t new for most of us (subscription, open source etc.) but they bring each element together really well. One of the points that really stuck out for me was the discussion about how lucrative the current model is for Microsoft. Particularly, how that “wealth spigot” has shaped their pursuit of new models.

If this sort of thing floats your boat I also recommend their podcast.

Listening to: Children of the Damned - Iron Maiden

John highlighted this little gem of a quote:

Web standards are there to take the randomness out of web development and not to act as a policing tool.