This is a 17 minute talk from TED (Technology, Education, Design), an annual conference where speakers share their ideas with many important individuals.
This particular talk is by Jeff Bezos and outlines several analogies towards the internet, comparing it to the California Gold Rush and the beginnings of electricity. It is very interesting, but ultimately he comes to a conclusion that we are in the beginnings and things will only increase from here.
You can find hundreds of talks like this on TED.com.
Back in October, Hulu was launched as a joint venture between Fox and NBC. The site was to offer free, ad-supported videos of popular TV shows and movies. Back then and until a couple of days ago, it was still in private beta. I managed to get an invite a couple weeks ago, and I have been enjoying the service greatly (thanks again Alec.) Read the rest of this entry »
Previously, the researchers at Alcatel-Lucent have broken records in speed by sending data at a speed of 25.6Tbps. This transfer was only 50 miles long and the company is now looking for a distance record. They recently performed a great feat by sending data over a whopping 1584 mile link at 16.4Tbps. This was accomplished by bundling many 100 Gbps cables together at different wavelengths. The signals were then split at the receiving end (I hope by a hardware decoder, I have a feeling that using a computer to decode the signal might cause it to slow down.) The most recent trial required 164 different channels and updated transmitters and decoders.
I recently came across a site called Social Wallpapering. This site takes a Digg-like angle to wallpaper. All wallpaper is user-submitted, and members thumb-up or down the wallpaper so that the best climbs to the top. However, I have found that even going to the middle of their archive, the wallpaper is excellent. I have downloaded over 60 wallpapers from their site and am using WPchanger to cycle through them.
Their site features great web design, incorporating PHP, CSS, XHTML, and AJAX. It looks amazing and works seamlessly, with almost no load times. They have a great community of users and a forum community. You can also mass-download their wallpapers via bittorrent.
Firstly, a new development in the Middle East internet cable story has come in. Earlier this week, two cables were supposedly cut in the Mediterranean Sea by a boat anchor during a storm. The fact has now been revealed that those two cables were in a restricted area that no boats were allowed into. The cables are only 2 cm thick. It also seems that a third and possibly fourth cable has been cut and Iran had a short outage but is now operating at %40 capacity. Repair of the cables has been delayed so all traffic going through the Middle East and some of India will be significantly slowed.
EDIT: According to this article, a fifth internet cable has been cut.
Windows Vista SP1 has recieved an RTM status, which means that it is slated for a release in mid-March. Although it fixes some driver problems, it reportedly introduces some more, so Microsoft has made it a non-automatic update for those who have known errors. At least Microsoft knows that they have made mistakes. SP1 will increase operating speeds and should fix some other errors, but we’ll have to see once it comes out. Read the rest of this entry »
A recent report from a group of IT managers at over 2200 colleges and universities called EDUCAUSE has outlined an interesting plan. They propose that the government should support a program to roll out a fiber optic infrastructure across the U.S. that would allow for 100 megabits per second at any location.
The plan totals at a cost of $100 billion and would be supported over the next four years by the federal and state governments, each paying $8 billion (that’s a total combined contribution of $64 billion.) For comparison, the federal government could pay for this entire investment if they used the money currently used to support only 116 days of the Iraq war.The rest would be paid by the public or private-sector entity that would maintain and also construct the network. Read the rest of this entry »
It seems that the rumors of a formal investigation were true and less than 30 minutes ago, at time of posting, four of the owners of The Pirate Bay were ordered to pay over $180,000 dollars in copyright damages each. The four said that they knew this would happen eventually, so they made sure that The Pirate Bay’s servers were spread throughout the world. Read the rest of this entry »
Previously, the researchers at Alcatel-Lucent have broken records in speed by sending data at a speed of 25.6Tbps. This transfer was only 50 miles long and the company is now looking for a distance record. They recently performed a great feat by sending data over a whopping 1584 mile link at 16.4Tbps. This was accomplished by bundling many 100 Gbps cables together at different wavelengths. The signals were then split at the receiving end (I hope by a hardware decoder, I have a feeling that using a computer to decode the signal might cause it to slow down.) The most recent trial required 164 different channels and updated transmitters and decoders.
Windows Vista SP1 has recieved an RTM status, which means that it is slated for a release in mid-March. Although it fixes some driver problems, it reportedly introduces some more, so Microsoft has made it a non-automatic update for those who have known errors. At least Microsoft knows that they have made mistakes. SP1 will increase operating speeds and should fix some other errors, but we’ll have to see once it comes out. 
A recent report from a group of IT managers at over 2200 colleges and universities called EDUCAUSE has outlined an interesting plan. They propose that the government should support a program to roll out a fiber optic infrastructure across the U.S. that would allow for 100 megabits per second at any location.
It seems that the rumors of a formal investigation were true and less than 30 minutes ago, at time of posting, four of the owners of The Pirate Bay were ordered to pay over $180,000 dollars in copyright damages each. The four said that they knew this would happen eventually, so they made sure that The Pirate Bay’s servers were spread throughout the world. 