February 20, 2006, 6:56 PM CT
Geography of the Internet: Networked Places
Chapter 7 was interesting in that Castells discussed the geography and architecture of the internet from a city planner's point of view. Castells addresses in detail the geography of the internet. Where is the bulk of users of the internet located , where is the majority of internet content providers located, and in what parts of the world is the number of internet users growing the fastest?

The United States has an overwhelming number of users of the internet compared to the rest of the word. This is very interesting for several reasons. One, if the majority of internet users and internet content providers are in the US, then isn't the information on the internet going to be biased towards an American's perspective? I think that the answer to this question is yes. I believe that a lot of the information on the internet is geared towards Americans. The top sites on the internet are made in America, but they are viewed regularly by people all over the world. Take for example the top three sites on the internet. Yahoo, MSN, and Google are all sites created in the United States, but have grown to be used by many people all over the world. This could be good, and definitely is related to what Castells discussed in an earlier chapter about that talked about culture and the internet. Because people all over the world are accessing the same websites, cultures are becoming mixed together, sometimes this is good and sometimes this is bad. But, with the percentage of internet users in the United States so high compared to the rest of the world, the number of users is growing at a much faster rate in other parts of the word. This means that in the near future, we are going to see a greater amount of internet content being produced by other countries in the world. Hopefully the internet will eventually become filled with content produced by many different countries, and this innovative web content will be used by everyone throughout the world.

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February 19, 2006, 2:44 PM CT
AllPeers is Coming; Exclusive Screenshots
Prague based Allpeers cofounder Matthew Gertner came by my house today to install the product and let me try it out. Allpeers is a Firefox extension that creates a simple, persistent buddy list in the browser. Initially, interaction with those buddies will be limited to discovering and sharing files - If you choose to, you can.....

Prague based Allpeers cofounder Matthew Gertner came by my house today to install the product and let me try it out.

Allpeers is a Firefox extension that creates a simple, persistent buddy list in the browser. Initially, interaction with those buddies will be limited to discovering and sharing files - If you choose to, you can share any file on your network with one or more of your friends. They will be able to see what files you choose to share (even getting an RSS feed of new files you include), and with a single click download it to their own hard drive.

See my original post on Allpeers for more information.

Matt took me through installation and setup of the product, and he shared a number of files with me. The interface for adding friends and sharing files is intuitive. Adding a file into Allpeers requires only dragging it from the hard drive into the browser, and sharing the file requires only a single click.

The service is not yet freely available, and Matt says that 35,000 people have requested to be notified by email when the service goes live.

As I wrote before, Allpeers is the “Killer App” for Firefox - Mozilla based Flock and Songbird should immediately be working to convert the basic Allpeers extension to work on their platforms as well.

Allpeers will be launching by the end of March 2006.

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February 19, 2006, 2:44 PM CT
Microsoft Office Live goes into Beta
Microsoft Office Live went into beta today. The service was first revealed at a Microsoft event last fall - you can see my post about it here. This is not an online version of Microsoft Office. It is a set of online tools for businesses to help them have a web and email presence at a.....

Microsoft Office Live went into beta today. The service was first revealed at a Microsoft event last fall - you can see my post about it here.

This is not an online version of Microsoft Office. It is a set of online tools for businesses to help them have a web and email presence at a very low cost (starting at free with ad support). The core tools are a free non-microsoft domain name, website and up to 50 email accounts with 2 GB of storage each.

For a small company needing a informational website, it will be great. Given that the domain name, website building, hosting and email will all be free, this will be very attractive to a small business.

For customers needing more, Microsoft will offer a suite of additional productivity applications - 22 in all were announced last fall. They will also support third party applications - ADP's payroll software was shown integrated into Office Live. A set of APIs will be available for third parties to add their application functionality into Office Live.

Among the additional applications is an office document collaboration tool. You can share an office document real time with others, allowing them to view and edit it. Impressive.

Office Live should become a starting point for small businesses wanting a web presence and a general platform to run their business operations.

If you are interested in participating in the beta, sign up at the main Office Live site. It is currently only open to U.S. businesses - the full service will launch later this year.

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February 19, 2006, 11:21 AM CT
SforceHerder

I've had this floating around on my machine for a couple of months, figured I should actually get around to posting a version of it. This is a simple .NET 2.0 winforms app that allows you to visually explorer the relationships in your salesforce.com schema.

Source and binaries are included in the download (I built it with Visual C# 2005 Express), and is released under a BSD license. the layout code could use some improvement on the views with lots of entities (not to overlap them), and the entity under inspection could be improved to show the details of the field types etc. I got frustrated with all the math needed to do the layout which is why I stopped working on it. I wonder if re-doing the UI portion in Avalon would make it any easier ?. One of the more interesting things it does is to use the async api provided by .NET to pre fetch the describes of the related objects in the background, so the UI should feel pretty snappy, it also takes advantage of the fact that .NET can support gzipped responses, so it turns that feature on as well.

Share and enjoy. sforceHerder.zip

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February 15, 2006, 7:21 AM CT

InfoCard To Increase Online Security

Microsoft is setting up a plan to increase the online security and is looking forward to a secure and safer online environment. Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates showed off a tool that could replace the need to manually enter usernames and passwords to unlock the doors of the Internet. Bill Gates said that this would increase its security of online transactions.

At this briefing Gates also broadly discussed Microsoft's efforts to improve security in its upcoming Windows Vista operating system and the tech industry's initiatives aimed at stopping malicious software, hackers and other dangers.

"We've all got a common challenge here, yet an amazing opportunity to let these digital systems be used in the broadest way," Gates said at the RSA computer security conference.

And this meeting Gates highlighted a technology dubbed InfoCard that will help computer users corral their identifying information without running the risk of losing it or having it stolen. Companies also may use this InfoCard as a way of granting access to their networks.........

Posted by: Ethan      Permalink     

February 13, 2006, 11:11 PM CT

Smarter Search Engines

Google a particular car type or disease and you're bound to spend time sorting between hundreds of more and less useful results. How to sort the wheat from the chaff in the world of too-much electronic information? NRC scientists are helping make the search for electronic information easier, and one key to this is teaching computers to understand language.

"The more computers are able to understand words, the more helpful they'll be to us in every daily task," says Peter Turney, an Ottawa-based research scientist with the Interteractive Information Group of the NRC Institute for Information Technology. The Interactive Information Group focuses on developing software tools to increase access to electronic information.

Turney's computer science speciality is the area of lexical semantics, or word meaning. At present, our desktop and laptop computers are linguistic toddlers. Spam filters, and other software such as editing tools, are able to distinguish and make decisions based on single words like "Viagra", but there's no sense of meaning. It's like learning a second language but not knowing what the words mean or how they create meaning together.

So the race is on to create software that goes beyond single word recognition to extract deeper understanding. One example is sentiment analysis. This is software that can determine whether the words in a sentence are positive or negative. Sentiment analysis is being used to create a kind of Googling for feelings. One application of sentiment analysis involves following financial chat groups to track attitudes towards particular stocks.........

Posted by: Ethan      Permalink         Source

February 12, 2006, 10:18 PM CT

Spyware poses a significant threat on the Net

Spyware is alive and well on the Internet. That's the overall message of a new study by University of Washington computer researchers who sampled more than 20 million Internet addresses, looking for the programs that covertly enter the computers of unwitting Web surfers to perform tasks ranging from advertising products to gathering personal information, redirecting Web browsers, or even using a victim's modem to call expensive toll numbers. They examined sites in a set of popular Web categories, such as game sites, news sites and celebrity-oriented sites. Within these, they found that:.

More than one in 20 executable files contained piggybacked spyware.

On average, one in 62 Internet domains performed drive-by download attacks -- a method for forcing spyware on users who simply visit a Web site.

Game and celebrity Web sites appeared to pose the greatest risk for piggybacked spyware, while sites that offer pirated software topped the list for drive-by attacks.

The density of spyware seemed to drop from spring to fall of last year, but remained "substantial."

The research is being presented today as the opening paper for the 13th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium in San Diego, Calif.

"For unsuspecting users, spyware has become the most 'popular' download on the Internet," said Hank Levy, professor and holder of the Wissner/Slivka Chair in the UW's Department of Computer Science and Engineering and one of the study's authors. "We wanted to look at it from an Internet-wide perspective -- what proportion of Web sites out there are trying to infect people? If our numbers are even close to representative for Web areas frequented by users, then the spyware threat is extensive."........

Posted by: Ethan      Permalink         Source


February 10, 2006, 8:10 PM CT

Computer Use Improves School Performance

A new OECD report says school students who regularly use computers perform better in key subjects than those with little experience or a lack of confidence when it comes to performing basic computer tasks.

Access to computers in schools has increased in most OECD countries - New Zealand is number five on the list - but in some countries students still have limited access. Access to computers is more common at school than at home, but the study shows that 15-year-old students use their computers at home more frequently.

Nearly three out of four students on average in OECD countries use computers at home several times a week, while in Canada, Iceland and Sweden that figure is nine out of ten. But only 44% use computers frequently at school. Eighty percent of students in New Zealand report frequent use of computers at home, whereas only 45% use computers frequently at school, says the report. Gera number of has the lowest percentage of frequent computer users at school (23%) but a high number of frequent users at home (82%).........

Posted by: Ethan      Permalink    Read more....


February 9, 2006, 11:10 PM CT

Accelerated Drug Discovery with Supercomputer

IBM and the Georgia Institute of Technology today announced that one of the world's most powerful supercomputing clusters will anchor Georgia Tech's new Center for the Study of Systems Biology.

The Center will use IBM technologies to advance research into new drugs for the therapy of some of today's most life-threatening diseases, including cancer. The Center's research will be headed by one of the world's leading systems biologists, Dr. Jeffrey Skolnick, the Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Computational Systems Biology.

Funded by $8.5 million in grants from the State of Georgia, the Georgia Research Alliance and the National Institutes of Health, the new Center for the Study of Systems Biology merges Dr.Skolnick's biomedical research expertise with IBM's high-performance computing capabilities to create a brand new supercomputer. The new supercomputing cluster running Linux will be among the fastest in the world, and one of the most powerful among research universities in the Southeastern United States. The cluster is hosted by BellSouth's world-class facilities in Midtown Atlanta.

"By using IBM technology for our research, we can significantly shorten the time to market for new drugs," said Dr. Skolnick. "Systems biology integrates mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology with advanced, high performance computing and engineering. Bioinformatics and systems biology allow us to utilize the vast information growing out of the sequencing of the human genome, enabling drug developers to reduce the number of compounds they must screen by a factor of 10."........

Posted by: Ethan      Permalink


February 9, 2006, 10:44 PM CT

Transistors Powered by Single Electrons

Researchers have demonstrated the first reproducible, controllable silicon transistors that are turned on and off by the motion of individual electrons. The experimental devices, designed and fabricated at NTT Corp. of Japan and tested at NIST, may have applications in low-power nanoelectronics, especially as next-generation integrated circuits for logic operations (as opposed to simpler memory tasks).

The transistors, described in the Jan. 30, 2006, issue of Applied Physics Letters,* are based on the principle that as device sizes shrink to the nanometer range, the amount of energy mandatory to move a single electron increases significantly. This makes it possible to control individual electron motion and current flow by manipulating the voltage applied to barriers, or "gates," in the electrical circuit. At negative voltage, the transistor is off; at higher voltage, the transistor is turned on and individual electrons file through the circuit, as opposed to thousands at a time in a conventional device.

This type of innovative transistor, called a "single-electron tunneling" (SET) device, is typically made with a metal "wire" interrupted by insulating barriers that offer a rigid, narrow range of control over electron flow. Silicon devices, by contrast, have barriers that are electrically "tunable" over a wider operating range, offering finer, more flexible control of the transistor's on/off switch. Particular voltage levels are applied across the barriers, to manipulate charge, as a means of encouraging or impeding electron flow. Silicon-based devices also allow fabrication using standard semiconductor technology. Until now, however, no silicon SET transistor designs have been reported that are reproducible and controllable.........

Posted by: Ethan      Permalink