Gadgetopia

The “WiFi At Conferences” Problem : Spolsky complains about a pet-peeve of mine – the state of wireless at conferences.  It almost universally sucks, and you can just assume you’ll never get connected.

It’s almost getting boring to read the conference reports complaining about this. Almost every conference, even the ones put on by fancy tech companies, has trouble. I never assume WiFi is going to work whenever I’m in a room with that many techies.

The Web Content people solved it from 2008 to 2009 by moving the conference to the University of Chicago.  Connectivity at the 2009 shindig was stone-cold perfect.  (And, given that it was a college, all the desks in the lecture halls had power ports, which was uber-awesome…)

A friend called me the other day and asked to sit through a software demo for a new company.  I get these requests all the time, but I really trust this guy so I agreed.  I’m glad I did, because it blew my mind a little.

Go watch this video for Liaise.  This is an Outlook add-in (for now – there are integration plans for other platforms) that analyzes what you write in an email in real-time and creates tasks and follow-up items based on.

So, if you email Bob and say:

I need you to send me the tickets for the concert next Tuesday.

Liaise will – while you’re typing – create a task called “Send concert tickets,” assign it to Bob (the Bob you were emailing, because it recognizes the pronoun “you”), and put a due date on it by next Tuesday.  It’s really remarkable.

Go watch the video.  I was crazy impressed, and I get more and more cynical every day.

At the end of the day, my only reaction to these guys was, “You are so gonna get acquired…”  Seriously – Microsoft is going to snap these guys up in a heartbeat.  It’s that cool.

Parallels Starts Its Own Apple Switch Campaign - Bits Blog : Parallels is trying to get you to switch to a Mac.

But the heart of the switching software revolves around some more basic things. For one, Parallels has video tutorials on how to use a Mac and how to find Windows-type functions on a Mac. I’ve seen the videos in action, and they’re pretty slick as far as these types of tutorials go. The videos try to keep up with your learning curve by presenting fairly detailed menus that let you skip around to various parts of lessons.

Side-By-Side: Snow Leopard And Windows 7 : The buzz about Windows 7 is good.  The buzz about Snow Leopard…not so much.

Windows 7 may be the closest Microsoft has gotten to offering a desktop operating system as performance-nimble, aesthetically pleasing and, dare we say it, as potentially secure as Apple has delivered with OS X.

Microsoft backs long life for IE6: Don’t worry, folks — IE6 will be around for a long time to come.

Microsoft has underlined support for its Internet Explorer 6 web browser, despite acknowledging its flaws.

The software giant said it would support IE6 until 2014 - four years beyond the original deadline.

New battery could change world, one house at a time: If this is legitimate, it would be revolutionary.  Battery technology is the only thing holding renewable power back from its full potential.  The inability to buffer solar or wind is a huge limitation, and this battery would give us that ability.

The company calculates that the battery will cram 20 to 40 kilowatt hours of energy into a package about the size of a refrigerator, and operate below 90 degrees C.

[…] Ceramatec says its new generation of battery would deliver a continuous flow of 5 kilowatts of electricity over four hours, with 3,650 daily discharge/recharge cycles over 10 years. With the batteries expected to sell in the neighborhood of $2,000, that translates to less than 3 cents per kilowatt hour over the battery’s life. Conventional power from the grid typically costs in the neighborhood of 8 cents per kilowatt hour.

Re-read that last paragraph and let the information really sink in. Five kilowatts over four hours — how much is that? Imagine your trash compactor, food processor, vacuum cleaner, stereo, sewing machine, one surface unit of an electric range and thirty-three 60-watt light bulbs all running nonstop for four hours each day before the house battery runs out. That’s a pretty exciting place to live.

To give you an idea of the capacity, my house is above average in size and we’re not that energy conscious.  We used 1,600 kWh during the hottest month of this year so far.  That’s 51 kWh per day, which is a bit above this capacity.

However, I’ve been running an informal survey of other people’s electrical usage, and there are a lot of people well down in the triple-digits for monthly usage, which is 20 – 30 kWh per day, which this battery could fully power.

Web citizens trying to kill Internet Explorer 6: CNN is on the case, folks.  The end is near.

Some Web designers are staging an online revolt against an old version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser, which they say is hampering the ability of the Web to move forward in a cool and interactive way.

Foxconn: Just because their name is on it, doesn’t mean they actually make it.  In fact, it’s likely they don’t make it – Foxconn does.

Among other things, Foxconn produces the Mac mini, the iPod and the iPhone for Apple Inc.; Intel-branded motherboards for Intel Corp.; various orders for American computer retailers Dell, Inc. and Hewlett Packard; the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 for Sony; the Wii for Nintendo;the Xbox 360 for Microsoft, cell phones for Motorola, and the Amazon Kindle.

Melody: Community Powered Publishing: Now that Movable Type has gone open-source, it has forked.

Melody is an open source content management system for bloggers and publishers where its community of users and contributors is its most important feature. We believe that a vibrant community is the foundation on which all successful products and services are built today.

I think is probably a pretty friendly fork, however.

Coding Horror: Scaling Up vs. Scaling Out: Hidden Costs: Great post from Jeff Atwood comparing how much it costs to run your site on one massive server (scaling UP), against multiple smaller servers (scaling OUT).

At any rate, let’s assume $100,000 is a reasonable ballpark for the monster server Markus purchased. It is the very definition of scaling up — a seriously big iron single server.

But what if you scaled out, instead — Hadoop or MapReduce style, across lots and lots of inexpensive servers?

His numbers are interesting.  I tended to think that scaling out would be cheaper, but it’s not when you throw in software licensing and power consumption.  In those two areas, the single, monster server wins by a mile.

The other thing that I don’t see Atwood discuss is getting a bunch of low-level servers to all play together nicely.  He gives the example that he could buy 83 smaller servers for the cost of one monster.  But now you have 83 servers to manage, instead of just one.  Of course, you have a crapload of fault tolerance now, so is this better?

Outlook’s broken—Let’s fix it: Why would Microsoft do this?  It doesn’t make any sense.

Microsoft have confirmed they plan on using the Word rendering engine to display HTML emails in Outlook 2010.

This means for the next 5 years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS like float and position, no background images […]

Outlook 2010 is still in beta and Microsoft wants your feedback. It’s time to rally together and encourage Microsoft to embrace web standards before it’s too late.

If you don’t need any more information that what I’ve provided here, don’t click through.  The site consists of about a thousand Twitter profile pictures (and adds more in real-time).  Load times are not great.

The Architecture Issue - Data Center Overload: Article about the massive data centers that we all use and know exist, but never see.  They’re around, and they’re flippin’ huge it turns out.

The Tukwila data center happens to be one of the global homes of Microsoft’s Xbox Live: within those humming machines exists my imagined city of ether. Like most data centers, Tukwila comprises a sprawling array of servers, load balancers, routers, fire walls, tape-backup libraries and database machines, all resting on a raised floor of removable white tiles, beneath which run neatly arrayed bundles of power cabling. To help keep servers cool, Tukwila, like most data centers, has a system of what are known as hot and cold aisles: cold air that seeps from perforated tiles in front is sucked through the servers by fans, expelled into the space between the backs of the racks and then ventilated from above. The collective din suggests what it must be like to stick your head in a Dyson Airblade hand dryer.

One really interesting note: machines today are so power-hungry, that in 3-5 years, you’ll spend as much on electricity to power the server as you did to buy it.  That’s why data centers are moving to places where electricity costs are as low as possible.

A Virtual Bank With Real Woes: More Eve Online insanity.  They had a central bank and someone embezzled $200 billion in fake money…which he then sold off for $12,000 in real money.

Somewhere along the way Ebank’s top executive, who went by the online handle Ricdic, apparently got greedy. According to CCP, he made off with deposits, which he then sold for real cash to gamers on a sort of black-market exchange separate from Eve.

CCP kicked Ricdic out of the game. And Ebank has temporarily shut down while its board of directors (yes, it had one of those too) tries to sort out the mess. Depositors, meanwhile, appear to have pulled 5.5 trillion ISK of deposits.

Eve, remember, is a game where a real economy is not only tolerated, but encouraged.  So, anything fake is technically real, since it can be exchanged for real money in some form.

Kudo Tsunoda Demos Project Natal: This video is very cool.  I know this is probably vaporware at the moment, but I the driving game demo in the second half is way awesome.

Fallon’s show is getting a decent rep very demoing cool gadgets and stuff.

FUEL is named Biggest Console Game of All Time - Officially: Time to go exploring.

[new raging video game FUEL] boasts 5,560 square miles of accessible in-game terrain, making it officially the largest playable environment in a console game ever.

The accolade, presented to FUEL developers Asobo Studio, was confirmed by Guinness World Records, who have verified the record for inclusion in the next Guinness World Records Gamers Edition of the best-selling guide.