pinboarded

Everyone is talking about cloud services and much of the conversation centers on understanding them and how they are changing the landscape. Of course, cloud services are not one thing. I find it helpful to think about them as parts of a continuum. This seems useful regardless of the technical level of the people with whom I’m speaking. imageThe diagram to the right shows this continuum from infrastructure to platform to software. Brief definitions of these parts are: * Infrastructure includes provisioning of hardware or virtual computers on which one generally has control over the OS; therefore allowing the execution of arbitrary software. * Platform indicates a higher-level environment for which developers write custom applications. Generally the developer is accepting some restrictions on the type of software they can write in exchange for built-in application scalability. * Software (as a Service) indicates special-purpose software made available through the Internet.

Everyone is talking about cloud services and much of the conversation centers on understanding them and how they are changing the landscape. Of course, cloud services are not one thing. I find it helpful to think about them as parts of a continuum. Thi

iLovePhotos integrates facial detection and an intelligent platform to make sharing and organizing your photos a piece of cake. It will bring photos of people you care about back into your life.

I am reading my slow, marvellous way through the Yule-Cordier edition of The Travels of Marco Polo, armed with Google Maps, Google Images, Wikipedia and the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. It is stirring up an insatiable storm of Wanderlust, and so to expiate my guilt at not PhD-ing, I am sharing my vicarious armchair travelling. Marker by annotated marker, I’m filling in a map of Marco Polo’s cities and travels –

I am reading my slow, marvellous way through the Yule-Cordier edition of The Travels of Marco Polo, armed with Google Maps, Google Images, Wikipedia and the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. It is stirring up an insatiable storm of Wanderlust, and so to expia

It occurred to me that twitter, with its 140 character limit, its dialogue between people who may be rivals as well as friends, is a breeding ground for the rebirth of repartee and of the epigram. So I started keeping track of some of these sparks of wit. Some of these are actual rejoinders; others are simply clever insights.

New York Times writer Joe Nocera argues that the Windows operating system doesn't matter any more, because webapps are rendering all operating system irrelevant.

Deliver your messages and get a confirmation in 60 seconds or less. "Guaranteed." HeyCosmo is all about getting something done NOW! Can your friends hang out this afternoon? Where do they want to go? Find out NOW! • Are there Italian restaurants in San Francisco to accommodate me and my buddies at 6:00PM? Find out NOW! • Which Limo company is willing to take me to JFK airport NOW? for 30 bucks? • Did my boyfriend read my Text Msg.? pick-up my Voicemail? I want to know if he did NOW! • Our conference call was cancelled and I want to know if everyone is aware NOW! It’s absolutely free and no gimmicks. Get started now and you’ll thank us for making your life awesome.

It's pretty common, when reading discussion of Apple's “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads, to come across the comment: Sure, they're great ads but they don't work. John Hodgeman’s PC is far more likeable than Justin Long’s smug hipster Mac. This is missing the point.

It's pretty common, when reading discussion of Apple's “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads, to come across the comment: Sure, they're great ads but they don't work. John Hodgeman’s PC is far more likeable than Justin Long’s smug hipster Mac. This is missing t

This all began for me in about 1969, when I started teaching a film class in the University of Chicago's Fine Arts program. I knew a Chicago film critic, teacher and booker named John West, who lived in a wondrous apartment filled with film prints, projectors, books, posters and stills. "You know how football coaches use a stop-action 16mm projector to study game films?" he asked me. "You can use that approach to study films. Just pause the film and think about what you see. You ought to try it with your film class." I did. The results were beyond my imagination. I wasn't the teacher and my students weren't the audience, we were all in this together. The ground rules: Anybody could call out "stop!" and discuss what we were looking at, or whatever had just occurred to them.

I took John MCain's acceptance speech from last night's Republican convention and compared it to Barack Obama's acceptance speech from the Democratic convention and made wordles of each. John McCain's wordle is on top, Barack Obama's is on bottom.

I took John MCain's acceptance speech from last night's Republican convention and compared it to Barack Obama's acceptance speech from the Democratic convention and made wordles of each. John McCain's wordle is on top, Barack Obama's is on bottom.

That's the scenario that greets players in the forthcoming online game Superstruct, which is being run by the think tank Institute for the Future. Beginning on September 22nd, players will be invited to plunge into the troubled world of 2019, and to begin to work towards solutions that could buy our species a little more time on the planet. They're forced to cope with five "super-threats" that are wearing down our civilization, including devastating outbreaks of a pandemic respiratory disease, climate refugees who have fled homelands made unlivable by global warming, and legions of hackers who exult in bringing down global information networks.

Google's release today of a test version of its new open-source web browser, Chrome, marks an important moment in the ongoing shift of personal computing from the PC hard drive to the Internet "cloud." I distinctly remember when, back in 1988, Apple Computer added MultiFinder to its Macintosh operating system, allowing my beloved Mac Plus to run more than one application at a time. That was, for us Mac users, anyway, a very big deal. Chrome - if we can trust the comic book - promises a similar leap in the capacity of the cloud to run applications speedily, securely, and simultaneously. Indeed, it is the first browser built from the ground up with the idea of running applications rather than displaying pages. It takes the browser's file-tab metaphor, a metaphor reflecting the old idea of the web as a collection of pages, and repurposes it for application multitasking. Chrome is the first cloud browser.

Learn in the information linked here about new technology applications that are being moved into place to mitigate human crises. Mobile local information gathering and digital mapping are collaborating. A post at iRevolution titled Flood Warning, Mobile Phones and Dynamic Mapping of India describes the goals and methods being tried in the Monsoon Project.

Learn in the information linked here about new technology applications that are being moved into place to mitigate human crises. Mobile local information gathering and digital mapping are collaborating. A post at iRevolution titled Flood Warning, Mobile P

PhotoSoup is a visual word puzzle generator that allows users to create word search puzzles with tag-photo pairs taken from Flickr. The tag is hidden in the puzzle, and only the associated photo is shown as a clue. The objective is to find all hidden tags in the puzzle before you run out of time. To create and play a new puzzle, you have to provide a topic, such as "zoo". Alternatively, you can use your own username to generate a puzzle that shows your photos. Of course you can also check out the photos your friends have posted on Flickr. Keep in mind, that we only use public Flickr photos that have the Creative Commons Attribution license when generating a PhotoSoup puzzle.

PhotoSoup is a visual word puzzle generator that allows users to create word search puzzles with tag-photo pairs taken from Flickr. The tag is hidden in the puzzle, and only the associated photo is shown as a clue. The objective is to find all hidden tags

A network of concurring genes and proteins extends through the scientific literature touching on phenotypes, pathologies and gene function. iHOP provides this network as a natural way of accessing millions of PubMed abstracts. By using genes and proteins

Thanks to successful projects like Wikipedia or Wikitravel, wikis have quickly become a standard tool on the Internet, but in academia, the anonymity often associated with publishing in wikis is a key factor that works against them. Tracking down the exact history of changes in a wiki entry can be a convoluted process, yet being able to exactly attribute a certain statement to one writer is at the heart of the academic enterprise. Mememoir aims to provide a wiki that is heavily focused on authorship and can help to dispel the prejudices scientists have against publishing in a wiki-like format.

WikiGenes is the first wiki system to combine the collaborative and largely altruistic possibilities of wikis with explicit authorship. In view of the extraordinary success of Wikipedia there remains no doubt about the potential of collaborative publishing, yet its adoption in science has been limited. Here I discuss a dynamic collaborative knowledge base for the life sciences that provides authors with due credit and that can evolve via continual revision and traditional peer review into a rigorous scientific tool.

This book is a collaborative effort of students from universities in mainland China, Taiwan, Malaysia, and the United States all collaborating during the fall of 2007 on a book titled “Web 2.0 and Emerging Learning Technologies” (also known as the “WELT”). Anyone is welcome to join us in our efforts here.

Essentially, the purpose of Pillage is to be the be-all, end-all solution for CD ripping. I wrote Pillage originally just to rip my entire CD library. For DJ'ing, as well as for production use, I wanted to have my entire CD library immediately accessible, in perfect quality (mp3's can bite me). After seeing a need for this type of program online, I made Pillage publicly available. If you are an audio purist, a radio/production guy "vaulting" a load of CDs, or any other person who is creating a media center, Pillage is for you! Even if you are a novice, who wants to explore a world outside of inferior mp3 sound quality, try out Pillage.

This is the main distribution site for the Paranoia project libraries (Paranoia II and III) and the audio CD digital audio extraction application cdparanoia. Cdparanoia extracts audio from compact discs directly as data, with no analog step between, and writes the data to a file or pipe in WAV, AIFC, AIFC or raw 16 bit linear PCM.

This is the main distribution site for the Paranoia project libraries (Paranoia II and III) and the audio CD digital audio extraction application cdparanoia. Cdparanoia extracts audio from compact discs directly as data, with no analog step between, and w

Max is an application for creating high-quality audio files in various formats, from compact discs or files. When extracting audio from compact discs, Max offers the maximum in flexibility to ensure the true sound of your CD is faithfully extracted. For pristine discs, Max offers a high-speed ripper with no error correction. For damaged discs, Max can either use its built-in comparison ripper (for drives that cache audio) or the error-correcting power of cdparanoia. Once the audio is extracted, Max can generate audio in over 20 compressed and uncompressed formats including MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, AAC, Apple Lossless, Monkey's Audio, WavPack, Speex, AIFF, and WAVE.

Max is an application for creating high-quality audio files in various formats, from compact discs or files. When extracting audio from compact discs, Max offers the maximum in flexibility to ensure the true sound of your CD is faithfully extracted. For