Very cool. MIT are using sixteen Playstation 3s rackmounted and setup as a cluster to do supercomputing.

The most famous blunder of all time, according to Vizzini from the Princess Bride, is “never get involved in a land war in Asia” but the most famous blunder, I think, for a geek is not to research fully the geek tech they are going to buy.

I treated myself to an 16Gb iPod Touch yesterday, I’ve been meaning to get an iPod for a few years and being a user of iTunes at home for my music collection it was a logical step. The iPod Touch is a great little device, not too heavy and has a great screen but hey you already know that because “we” geeks have read all the reviews, and if lucky enough to have a nearby Apple Store we’ve had a play with one.

So late yesterday afternoon I took a spin down Pitt Street here in Sydney to Next Bytes (Apple Reseller) and purchased my iPod Touch, I even bought a nice silicon protector for it. I resisted the urge to open it and play with it on the trip home and ripped the packaging off once I was in front of my PC.

(more…)

Although Australia’s electricity is amongst the dirtiest in the world,

[Richard Elkington] said there was genuine bipartisan support at state and federal level for the development of clean coal technology. “In the absence of nuclear, what is really the alternative?” he said.

What’s the alternative? Taking your hand off it for a start.

Wind. Tidal. Geothermal. Solar (not PV, that’s not economic). Coupled with hydro.

Sure, wind, tidal and solar are unsuitable for baseload generation. Geothermal would be fine for that, New Zealand has been running geothermal powerstations for more than thirty years -it’s a proven technology. Perhaps it’s too expensive to drill the necessary holes in Australia, we’re not on top of the ring of fire like NZ is.

There’s nothing stopping you pumping water back into a hydroelectric dam using the fluctuating power generated by wind, tidal and solar plants, and then using the potential energy of the water in that dam as an energy buffer to smooth out generation. For example, solar could pump water during the day, to run the dam at night. All proven, tested, real zero emission technolgies. Windmills have been around for hundreds of years, along with dams. Getting power out of them has been around for a hundred. We know how to do it, really efficiently.

No need for thirsty nuclear, or pixies-at-the-bottom-of-the-garden “clean” coal. “Clean” coal solutions require the rebuilding of power stations (at enormous cost) anyway, so why not build a windmill rather than a smokestack, if the environmental effect is going to be the same (note: “clean” coal still puts out CO₂).

It’s just a matter of the politicians pulling their fingers out and making it happen. Don’t expect that anytime soon.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the concept of SecondLife. And I know some people are really into it. But wandering around an empty virtual world is pretty underwhelming.

This article about the success of Facebook’s applications platform and its growing population got me thinking… with Facebook’s population booming, and SecondLife’s slumping, I reckon some of those organisations that spent a bundle setting up shop in Second Life must be wondering why they didn’t put their efforts into Facebook instead.

How much taxpayers’ money did the ABC waste building that island, for instance? We do know that a City of Melbourne project cost around $100,000.

It’s not surprising the ABC Island has had barely any visitors: some figures (from February) suggest there are only about 3000 Australians on SL. Compare that with almost 2 million on Facebook, and I know where I’d be building my applications. Do you want to potentially reach a tenth of the population (and growing) or 0.015% of it?

Now, if Facebook come up with a virtual meeting place to chat to your friends (and friends of friends), then I reckon they’d kill SecondLife stone dead.

• 6/9/2007: If SL is really becoming so deserted, I wonder if it has virtual tumbleweeds?

While some are suggesting Linden Labs is suffocating Second Life, and holding a meeting (in Second Life, of course) to discuss it, others are wondering (and I’m among them) why companies are marketing in Second Life given the tiny population and small numbers of sales for those who’ve tried it:

The virtual branded locations that sounded so impressive in the pages of BusinessWeek are basic and devoid of visitors. … American Apparel has all but given up on its virtual store, citing the criticism it has received and “insignificant” sales.

Is it like a Gold Rush, and they have to stake their claim before someone else gets it? Maybe, maybe not… but shouldn’t the priority of marketing people be to push their product where there’s an actual audience?

If SL is really becoming so deserted, I wonder if it has virtual tumbleweeds?

I know this one has done the rounds, but it’s pretty damn funny, as well as evidently giving a glimpse of what Kodak have been up to…

He alludes to Kodak’s chequered history with digital cameras… it turns out Kodak invented them in 1975, but didn’t start selling them until 2001.

Wait a minute, wait a minute… maybe I’m missing something… all this hype about Twitter, letting people know what you’re doing right now… Scoble posted how people on Twitter reported the Mexico quake first…

It’s just IRC with archives, a web frontend and a mobile phone interface, isn’t it?

Seriously, those of us on IRC during the first Gulf War back in 1990-91 would watch the Israelis posting about Scud Missiles raining down on their cities.

Real-time citizen reporting is not a great leap forwards. It’s been around for decades.

So what’s so different about Twitter? Or is it just another case of a new, shiny, evolving (but not revolutionary) thing getting all the hype?

Hot on the heels of a report that fast broadband was driving population and economic growth in Victorian regional cities (and conversely, those without good IT infrastructure are missing out), the government of New South Wales has announced plans to run free wifi in the Sydney CBD, North Sydney, Liverpool, Parramatta, Wollongong, Newcastle and Gosford.

So, obviously the NSW govt has finally figured out that they can boost IT activity and investment by providing such services. One would hope other city, regional and state governments aren’t far behind. Viva the Information Age!

(Oh, boy am I out of date. Apparently the Information Age finished in 1991, taken over by the Knowledge Economy, which lasted until 2002. Now we’ve got the Intangible Economy.)

In this one-hour (50 minutes, actually) documentary produced by the BBC in 1990, Douglas falls asleep in front of a television and dreams about future time when he may be allowed to play a more active role in the information he chooses to digest. A software agent, Tom (played by Tom Baker), guides Douglas around a multimedia information landscape, examining (then) cuttting-edge research by the SF Multimedia Lab and NASA Ames research center, and encountering hypermedia visionaries such as Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson. Looking back now, it’s interesting to see how much he got right and how much he didn’t: these days, no one’s heard of the SF Multimedia Lab, and his super-high-tech portrayal of VR in 2005 could be outdone by a modern PC with a 3D card. However, these are just minor niggles when you consider how much more popular the technologies in question have become than anyone could have predicted - for while Douglas was creating Hyperland, a student at CERN in Switzerland was working on a little hypertext project he called the World Wide Web…

LANGUAGE: English
PUBLISHER: BBC

Alex Encel is having another go at getting everybody in Australia a government-subsidised set top box. (See last time).

I like the idea, but I’m still not clear on who would pay for those who need antenna upgrades (or indeed how many/how much dosh is involved for this).

As he points out, so far they haven’t picked up the idea apparently due to ideological grounds rather than sound economic argument. But that’s typical of the current government — otherwise why would we have massive subsidies for private health insurance?

By the way, just to be pedantic for a moment, in Australian English, the word analogue has a ue on the end.

Professional archivists agonise about how digital archives should be stored, but it’s important for those of us further down the food chain consider it too. Many people are simply burning their most prized data onto CD or DVD, and shoving the discs into the bookshelf. But given known doubts about the lifespan of burnt discs, how will you feel if they reach for them in 5 or 10 years and find them unreadable? (Just like I recently found many of my old BBC Micro disks unreadable.)

Pressed discs seem to be no problem. I’ve got CDs that are close to 20 years old that are still going strong. But recent warnings have highlighted that burnt CDs might only last a few years (even taking great care in handling and storage).

It’s been suggested that magnetic tape is the way to go in the longer term, with a view to periodically migrating to newer technologies as they come along. I’m still not sure I want to invest in a tape drive…

The other issue is formats. What format should be used to ensure that when you or your descendants poke around in your files, they’ll be readable? It’s not just a matter of choosing formats that are ubiquitous now, but also those that will be common into the future.

Think back 20 years. What formats were popular in 1986 that are still around now?

I think, for example, that of all the formats, JPEG and PNG (for pictures), MPEG-1 or 2 (movies), and MP3 (sounds) are perhaps the formats that have such open, widespread support that they’re likely to still be readable in 20 or 30 years’ time.

For text documents? What’s practical probably depends on your source files. Obviously TXT is totally human-readable, but lacking formatting. HTML (with support from JPEG and PNG) is probably the most obvious choice for many documents, as long as you don’t try and do anything too clever with it. RTF also has widespread support via open-source products such as OpenOffice, Mac OSX TextEdit and while it’s owned by Microsoft, is arguably as human-readable as HTML, and arguably an easier conversion for many existing documents such as those in Word format (though I’m not sure it supports all of Word’s latest features).

For other more specialised file formats, I suppose it depends what is the easiest format to keep them in… Definitely more thought required.

(Of course if there’s any doubt, printing on paper is the ultimate in future-proof technology!)

Absolutely superb article in today’s Age.

The federal government wants to close down the analog TV signal. It can’t do that until enough people have digital TV receivers. People don’t particularly want to spend the time or money purchasing a digital TV set top box. So the government is going to have to spend a couple of billion dollars to continue broadcasting the analog signal for longer.

Sony have even suggested spending $200 million on consumer education, I guess to tell us why we should buy digital set-top boxes.

Alex Encel thinks we should just spend $150 million to give everyone a digital set top box for every TV they own.

What a brilliant solution! It’s not often you get to achieve your goals and also save a couple of billion dollars at the same time!