Month: April 2008

Hunger Instability

That anger is palpable across the globe. The food crisis is not only being felt among the poor but is also eroding the gains of the working and middle classes, sowing volatile levels of discontent and putting new pressures on fragile governments. In Cairo, the military is being put to work baking bread as rising food prices threaten to become the spark that ignites wider anger at a repressive government. In Burkina Faso and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, food riots are breaking out as never before. In reasonably prosperous Malaysia, the ruling coalition was nearly ousted by voters who cited food and fuel price increases as their main concerns.

we’ll see lots more of this sort with peak oil. time to scrap agricultural subsidies around the world. of course, governments will do the populist and wrong opposite.

Germany Clones

You haven’t arrived until your web application has a German clone, it seems. Web innovation in that country too often distills down to “copy/paste innovation.” And now, Freundfeed, which doesn’t appear to be a joke. Not only is it a ripoff of the FriendFeed name, they also use the same logo. The service hasn’t launched yet, but I’m willing to make an educated guess and say that it will likely rip off the rest of FriendFeed, too.

was ist los deutschland? kein eigener hirnschmalz? between the intellectual bankruptcy that spawns literary criticism about the “google master plan” and these copycats, what has germany ever done for the internet?

Construktiv, the company behind social bookmarking service Mister Wong and Lifestream.fm, has acquired FreundeNews, a German service blatantly modeled and designed after the example of FriendFeed (the startup was actually called FreundeFeed when it first launched in April 2008 but changed its name sometime after, most probably in fear of sparking a trademark dispute).

Search Engines are Hard

When you look at all these steps and all the complications, this process is rife with things that go can wrong. The hardest part about writing a search engine is that you’re going to process billions of URLS and serve millions, if not billions, of queries. This does not leave a lot of room for error. 1 super-linear algorithm applied over the wrong-sized list of items and you are sunk. 1 lock inside another lock and you are sunk. There will be no code paths not explored. All of those comments in your code, which print out errors like “This will never happen,” will happen. When you think that you are done, there is still the load balancing, the caching, the DNS servers, the ad service, the image servers, the update architecture, and (to take off on a familiar tune) a cartridge in a tape drive.

Fuel efficiency

Europe / Japan have higher standards today than the US is shooting for in 2020. all to prop up detroit. the best thing that could happen is for all of detroit to go bust.
2008-11-11:

Critics might more justifiably flay the Big 3 for failing long ago to seek a showdown with the UAW to break its labor monopoly. In truth, though, politicians have repeatedly intervened to prevent the crisis that would finally settle matters. Even better would be to dump CAFE altogether and replace it with an intellectually honest gas tax. Mr. Obama promised to transcend the old stalemates — let him begin with the 30-year-old fraud that our fuel-economy rules represent.

Nomads at last

The most wonderful thing about mobile technology today is that consumers can increasingly forget about how it works and simply take advantage of it. As Ms Canlas sips her Americano and dives into her e-mail in-box at the Nomad Café, she gives no thought to the specifications and standards that make her connection possible. It is the human connections that now take over. Since humans, as Sigmund Freud put it, must arbeiten und lieben, work and love, in order to find fulfilment, this report will start off by examining how they will work.

very good work as usual. coworking, weak ties, serendipity, locative, sensor web, the death of the suburb all make an appearance

KML in Live Maps

The CNET author comments that the map loads slowly in Live Maps. To compare I loaded the same KML file in Google Maps and it was indeed much quicker (15 seconds and 5 seconds respectively). But then I noticed something interesting – on Google Maps the polygons representing the parks didn’t load at all. Live Maps took longer as it was reading, parsing, and displaying the entire KML file. Its nice to see Live Map’s KML support coming along as quickly as it is!

ha. ms boasting how they do better with KML than we do on maps. that should get things fixed quickly, i presume