November, 2007

Overheard: Citizendium has more problems than just a difficult name to pronounce

“The question is whether there are multiple distinct niches that a single encyclopedia can’t serve simultaneously. If multiple niches existed, you might see different encyclopedias evolving to fill each niche. But I’m having a hard time imagining what those different niches might be. A single, comprehensive encyclopedia would seem to be more useful to almost everyone than multiple, smaller encyclopedias. If that’s true, then barring major screw-ups, Wikipedia will be the dominant wiki-based encyclopedia for the foreseeable future.” Tim Lee, quoted in Larry Sanger says “tipping point” approaching for expert-guided Citizendium wiki

More on Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica.

Overheard: Build a supercomputer for your home office

“A parallel supercomputer requires only two basic hardware components: a bunch of processors and a way for those processors to talk to one another and other private and shared resources.” Robert G. Brown, Building Your First Cluster

Want to build a super computer?

Joel Adams, Tim Brom, and Jeff Layton give you step-by-step directions for building a Beowulf cluster they’re calling Microwulf.  It’s small enough to sit on a desk, with a footprint similar to that of a traditional PC tower. The system plugs into a normal electrical outlet, and runs at room temperature without any special cooling beyond my normal office air conditioning.  Microwulf: Breaking the $100 $50/GFLOP Barrier

Overheard: Cisco getting ready for IP video shift

“If Cisco can manage and execute, they will drive new markets to feed their growth and drive the shift of video onto IP networks. All this stuff is here; it just needs a systems integrator. And guess what the heck Cisco does?” Rick Sizemore, Is Cisco becoming the IP video giant?

Overheard: November buzzword quiz

Are you the office Know-IT-all? Take this month’s buzzword quiz and find out!

1. What’s the name of the new ebook reader from Amazon?
answer

2. At what university did ali Rahimi conduct an empirical study on aluminum foil helmets?
answer

3. What’s the more common name for the Pareto Principle?
answer

4. What prominent IT company mysteriously fired their CIO for “rules breach” in November?
answer

5. What famous political cartoonist helped launch a military blog called “The Sandbox”?
answer

6. Which Buzzword is supposed to pose a serious threat to Microsoft Word because it’s web-based?
answer

7. What company is calling their distributed computing venture “Blue Cloud”?
answer

8. What is the Giant Global Graph?
answer

9. What social Web site got people all riled up about privacy this month?
answer

10. What telecommunications company is in federal court defending itself from allegations that it illegally installed secret
Internet spying rooms?
answer

Overheard: Need more electricity to power your datacenters? Make it yourself!

“Our goal is to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity that is cheaper than coal. We are optimistic this can be done in years, not decades. (One gigawatt can power a city the size of San Francisco.) If we meet this goal, and large-scale renewable deployments are cheaper than coal, the world will have the option to meet a substantial portion of electricity needs from renewable sources and significantly reduce carbon emissions. We expect this would be a good business for us as well.” Larry Page, Google’s Goal: Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal

Google’s putting a new slant on the phrase utility computing.

There should be a sexy word for “monetizing your infrastructure.”  Then we can call it the _______ Revolution and compare it to the Industrial Revolution.

Overheard: Google’s Larry Page is modern day Andrew Carnegie

But when I saw the icons I remembered a dinner with Larry Page at the Clinton Global Initiative in NYC last September when I asked him what he thought was the limits to growth of Google and much to my surprise he did not say servers, or people, but he said electricity. It turns out that Google is by now the largest owner of computers in the world and that computers are consuming more and more of the electricity that is used in the world. Therefore Google has the largest utility bill in the planet. And Larry is concerned about this. Martin Varsavsky, April 25 2006

I just finished a biography about Edith Roosevelt and when I heard about Google’s plan to make their own electricity yesterday, all I could think of was “How American!” It’s just like the turn of the last century with Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Need a reliable, cheap source of steel to build your railroad cars? Tired of being jerked around by market prices? Buy a steel plant and make the raw product yourself.

Overheard: Common Craft video explains Google docs in plain English

The challenge with this video was to drive home the idea that email attachments are a poor way of sharing digital documents. Lee LeFever, Video: Google Docs in Plain English

Overheard: Web 2.0 metrics

Page IQ (interactive quotient) is the number of unique visitors who take some action on a Web site (clicking, scrolling down, entering information) divided by the total number of visitors to the site.

Overheard: Microsoft in Siberia

Microsoft is discussing plans to build a data center in Irkutsk, one of the largest cities in Siberia. Microsoft Plans Data Center in Siberia

Cheap electricity and moving the datacenter someplace cold may prove to be a good solution until we have more efficient hardware. Or maybe Siberia is just where they’re sending the Vista developers.

Overheard: The network is the computer

When the network becomes as fast as the processor, the computer hollows out and spreads across the network. Eric Schmidt, 1993

Mr. Schmidt worked for Sun when he wrote that — now he works at Google.