Carpet Bomberz Inc.

Month: September 2010

  • Personal data stores and pub/sub networks – O’Reilly Radar

    Now social streams have largely eclipsed RSS readers, and the feed reading service I’ve used for years — Bloglines — will soon go dark. Dave Winer thinks the RSS ecosystem could be rebooted, and argues for centralized subscription handling on the next turn of the crank. Of course definitions tend to blur when we talk about centralized versus decentralized services.

    via Personal data stores and pub/sub networks – O’Reilly Radar.

    Here now, more Uncertainty and Doubt surrounding RSS readers as the future of consuming web pages. I wouldn’t expect this from the one guy I most respect when it comes to future developments in computer technology. I have followed Jon Udell’s shining example each step of the way from Radio Userland to Bloglines. And I breathed deeply the religion of loosely coupled services tied together with ‘services’ like pub/sub or RSS feeds. The flexibility and robustness of not letting a single vendor or purveyor of a free services to me was obvious. However I have fallen prey to the siren song of social media, starting with Digg, Flickr, Google Reader, LinkedIn. Each one claiming some amount of market share, but none of them anticipating the wild popularity of Friendster, MySpace and now Facebook. I actively participate in Facebook to help keep everyone energized and to let them know someone is reading the stuff they post. I want this service to succeed. And by all accounts it’s succeeding beyond its wildest dreams, through advertising revenue.

    But who wants to be marketed to? Doc Searles argued rightly our personal information is ours, our ‘attention’ is ours. He wants something like a Vendor Relationship Management service where we keep our ‘profile’ information and dole out the absolute minimum necessary to participate online or do commerce. And Jon in this article uses the elmcity project as a sterling example of how many stovepipe social networks in which we participate. Jon’s work with elmcity is an ongoing attempt to have events be ‘subscribe-enabled’ the way blogs or online news websites are already. Each online calendar program has a web presence, but usually does not have a comparable publication/subscription service like RSS or iCalendar formats associated with them. To ‘really’ know what is going requires a network of event curators who can manage the data feeds that then get plugged into an information hub that aggregates all the events in a geographical region. It’s all loosely coupled and more robust than trying to get everyone to adopt a single calendar.

    Which brings us back to the online personal data store, why can’t we have a ‘hub’ that aggregates these ‘services’ we participate in but contain the single source of profile information that we manage and dole out? In that way I’m not hostage to End User Licenses and the attendant risks of letting someone else be my profile steward. Instead I can manage it and let the services subscribe to my hub, and all my ‘data stores’ can exist across all the social networks that exist or may exist. No Lock In. Think about this, I cannot export all the little write-ups and comments on made on headlines I posted in Bloglines. I could export my Blogroll though, using OPML (thanks Dave Winer!) Similarly I won’t ever be able export any of my numerous status updates in Facebook. In fact as near as I can tell there is no Export Button anywhere for anything. It’s like AOL, an internet cul-de-sac that we all willingly participate in, never considering consequences.

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  • Intel Debuts New Atom System-on-Chip Processor

    This is a an Altera Flex FPGA with 20,000 cell...
    Image via Wikipedia

    At an IDF keynote, Intel launched “Tunnel Creek,” a new Atom E600 SoC processor. One particular processor detailed is codenamed “Stellarton,” which consists of the Atom E600 processor paired with an Altera FPGA on a multi-chip package that provides additional flexibility for customers who want to incorporate proprietary I/O or acceleration.

    via Intel Debuts New Atom System-on-Chip Processor.

    Intel has announced a future product that pairs an Intel Atom processor with a Virtex FPGA. Now this is interesting, I just mentioned FPGA (field programmable gate array) chips and out of the blue Intel has summoned the same chip and married it to a little Atom core processor. They say it could be used as an accelerator of some sort. I’m wondering what specifically they had in mind (something very esoteric and niche like a TCP/IP offload processor). I would like to see some touting of its possible uses and not just say, “We want to see what happens.” Unfortunately the way the competition works in Consumer Electronics, you never tell people what’s inside. You let folks like iFixit do a teardown and put pictures up. You let industry websites research all the chips and what they cost, estimate the ones that are custom Integrated Circuits and report the cost to manufacture the device. That’s what they do with every Apple iPhone these days.

    It would be cool if Intel could also sell this as a development kit for Stellarton’s users. Keep the price high enough to prevent people from releasing product based just on the kit’s CPU, but low enough to get people to try out some interesting projects. I’m guessing it would be a great tool to use for video transcoding, Mux/DeMuxing for video streams, etc. If anyone does release a shipping product thought it would be cool if they put the “Stellarton Inside” logo, so we know that FPGAs are doing the heavy lifting. The other possibility Intel mentions is to use the FPGA as a proprietary I/O so possibly like an Infiniband network interface? I still have hopes it’s used in the Consumer Electronics world.

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  • Custom superchippery pulls 3D from 2D images like humans • The Register

    Computing brainboxes believe they have found a method which would allow robotic systems to perceive the 3D world around them by analysing 2D images as the human brain does – which would, among other things, allow the affordable development of cars able to drive themselves safely.

    via Custom superchippery pulls 3D from 2D images like humans • The Register.

    The beauty of this new work is they designed a custom CPU using a Virtex 6 FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). FPGA for those who don’t know is a computer chip that you can ‘re-wire’ through software to take on mathematical task you can dream up. In the old days this would have required a custom chip to be engineered, validated and manufactured at great cost. FPGAs require development kits and FPGA chips you need to program. With this you can optimize every step within the computer processor and speed things up much more than a general purpose computer processor (like the Intel chip that powers your Windows or Mac computer). In this example of the research being done the custom designed computer circuitry is using video images to decide where in the world a robot can safely drive as it maneuvers around on the ground. I know Hans Moravec has done a lot with it at Carnegie Mellon U. And it seems that this group is from Yale’s engineering dept. which is encouraging to see the techniques embraced and extended by another U.S. university. The low power of this processor and it’s facility for processing the video images in real-time is ahead of its time and hopefully will find some commercial application either in robotics or automotive safety controls. As for me I’m still hoping for a robot chauffeur.

  • The Ask.com Blog: Bloglines Update

    Image representing Steve Gillmor as depicted i...
    Steve Gilmor Image via CrunchBase

    As Steve Gillmor pointed out in TechCrunch last year , being locked in an RSS reader makes less and less sense to people as Twitter and Facebook dominate real-time information flow. Today RSS is the enabling technology – the infrastructure, the delivery system. RSS is a means to an end, not a consumer experience in and of itself. As a result, RSS aggregator usage has slowed significantly, and Bloglines isn’t the only service to feel the impact.. The writing is on the wall.

    via The Ask.com Blog: Bloglines Update.

    I don’t know if I agree with the conclusion RSS readers are a form of lock-in. I consider Facebook participation as a form of lock-in as all my quips, photos and posts in that social networking cul-de-sac will never be exported back out again. There’s no way to do it, never ever. With an RSS reader at least my blogroll can easily be exported and imported again using OPML formatted ASCII text. How cool is that in the era of proprietary binary formats (mp4, pdf, doc). No I would say RSS is kind of innately good in and of itself. Enabling technologies are like that and while RSS readers are not the only way to consume or create feeds I haven’t found one of them that couldn’t import my blogroll. Try doing that with Twitter or Facebook (click the don’t like button).