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Monday, March 12, 2007 |
TV Airwaves To Deliver Internet?. roscoetoon directs our attention to a proposal from an odd assortment of tech companies [~] Google, Microsoft, H-P, Intel, and others [~] to reuse TV wavelengths to deliver first-mile connectivity. The Washington Post article is subtitled "Cable, Phone Companies Watch Warily." As well they might. One of the big content companies that the incumbent duopolists propose to soak by dismantling network neutrality, in company with some powerful allies, is striking back at the heart of their business.[Slashdot]
10:31:22 PM  Google It!.
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The Ten Most Important Games. Taking a page from the National Film Preservation Board, the History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University and a group of five prestigious games industry figures have inducted ten games into a sort of 'canon'. The New York Times reports that some of these titles represent the start of weighty gaming genres, while all are laudable for their place in gaming history. "[Henry] Lowood and the four members of his committee -- the game designers Warren Spector and Steve Meretzky; Matteo Bittanti, an academic researcher; and Christopher Grant, a game journalist -- announced their list of the 10 most important video games of all time: Spacewar! (1962), Star Raiders (1979), Zork (1980), Tetris (1985), SimCity (1989), Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990), Civilization I/II (1991), Doom (1993), Warcraft series (beginning 1994) and Sensible World of Soccer (1994)." Most likely, future years will see additional titles inducted into this game canon.[Slashdot]
6:51:04 PM Google It!.
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Intel Stomps Into Flash Memory. jcatcw writes "Intel's first NAND flash memory product, the Z-U130 Value Solid-State Drive, is a challenge to other hardware vendors. Intel claims read rates of 28 MB/sec, write speeds of 20 MB/sec., and capacity of 1GB to 8GB, which is much smaller than products from SanDisk. 'But Intel also touts extreme reliability numbers, saying the Z-U130 has an average mean time between failure of 5 million hours compared with SanDisk, which touts an MTBF of 2 million hours.'"[Slashdot]
3:17:55 PM Google It!.
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Animation Tool Puts You in the Game. Matthew Sparkes writes "A new technique could take a simple body scan and allow a user to upload it and use it as an avatar or game character. Previously an animator would have to create a skeleton inside the model and describe movement capabilities manually. In tests, an inexperienced user could produce the animations in less than 15 minutes."[Slashdot]
2:34:22 PM Google It!.
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Trolltech Qtopia Greenphone and SDK Review. An anonymous reader writes "The Greenphone comes at a time when there are countless mobile Linux platforms, but not many of them are open for easy development. This little device aims to fill a niche for a community-oriented mobile development platform. How does it perform? Linuxlookup.com has the Trolltech Qtopia Greenphone and SDK review." [Slashdot]
12:10:13 PM Google It!.
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French Parliament Chooses Ubuntu. atamyrat reminds us that last November it was announced that the French Parliament had decided to switch to Linux. At that time the distro had not been determined. It will be Ubuntu: "[T]wo companies, Linagora and Unilog, have been selected to provide the members of the Parliament as well as their assistants new computers containing free software. This will amount to 1,154 new computers running Ubuntu prior to the start of the next session which occurs in June 2007." [Slashdot]
12:08:38 PM Google It!.
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Linspire To Switch To Kubuntu. FliesLikeABrick writes "The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter has stated that Linspire announced that they will be switching to base their distribution off Ubuntu. With their polished KDE desktop this makes Linspire the latest in the impressive list of operating systems based off Kubuntu. It was also announced that Linspire's Click and Run install programme would be added to the Ubuntu archive, giving users of all Ubuntu distributions easy access to a large range of free and proprietary software."[Slashdot]
12:07:33 PM Google It!.
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Making Sense of Census Data With Google Earth. mikemuch writes "Irman Haque has developed a mashup of Google Earth with data from the U.S. Census Bureau, called gCensus. The app uses the XML format known as KML (Keyhole Markup Language), which can create shapes and colors on the maps displayed by GE. Haque had to build custom code libraries (which he's made available as open source) that could generate KML for the project. He also had to extract the relevant data from the highly counter-intuitive Census Bureau files and store them in a database that could handle geographic data. gCensus lets you do stuff like create colorful overlays on maps showing population ages, race, and family size distributions."[Slashdot]
12:06:08 PM Google It!.
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How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People. CoolVibe writes "Two Subversion developers talk at google about how to keep pests and malcontents out of your open source projects. From the abstract: "Every open source project runs into people who are selfish, uncooperative, and disrespectful. These people can silently poison the atmosphere of a happy developer community. Come learn how to identify these people and peacefully de-fuse them before they derail your project. Told through a series of (often amusing) real-life anecdotes and experiences""[Slashdot]
12:04:13 PM Google It!.
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Uses and Abuses of Personas. I've been following the debate on the Sakai Pedagogy list, about personas and their shortcomings.
For the benefit of those unfamiliar with this term, 'personas' are generic user profiles, similar in many respects to the consumer profiles used by marketing organisations. They are employed as a tool for systems analysis, the aim being to design and build more usable systems, by understanding the needs and intentions of the people who will use them. The process of creating a set of personas normally involves an iterative process of research / evaluation, whereby individuals' unique 'needs and intentions' are grouped into normative sets.
The problem is, they don't work. Their chief benefit is also their greatest shortcoming: personas are inherently generic. They are not tools for personalisation.
The other issue is that personas encourage systems analysts / software designers to build systems around institutional roles, instead of activities. Why!? Organisations change. Organisational and institutional roles have a tendency to mutate, shift, and/or vanish, and people may change roles within an institution - once, or several times. Changing a customised system once it's built is expensive and time-consuming.
I believe systems should be built around tasks and activities. People don't visit a website or fire up a program in order to perform a role; they want to complete a task. Here's a 5-second test: try looking at the website of a local university. How many institutional websites divide information and hide it away according to roles? ('For Staff'; 'For Students'; 'For Alumni'...) Yet the tasks and activities that each of these groups will need to perform are, in many cases, more alike than they are unalike. This way of structuring information inevitably leads to gross inefficiencies and significant duplication of information across various 'gateway' sites.
Personas can be a useful way to think about the different types of people working within an organisation, and they can be a useful way to group tool / systems users. But I believe their days are numbered, because the type of organisation (and organisational culture) they are designed to support is on the wane. The use of personas ultimately reflects an approach to systems design that is outdated. Organisations are gradually becoming looser and less structured, and their members want the ability to retain control of the tasks they have to perform. They want to have their information delivered in a way that is meaningful to them. [EDUCAUSE CONNECT blogs]
12:00:04 PM Google It!.
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Peering into Video's Future. Video applications already account for more than 60 percent of Internet traffic, says CacheLogic. "I imagine that within two years it will be 98 percent," adds Hui Zhang, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. And that will mean slower d... [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News] -- it has been speculated that this slowing of the internet is the reason for google building regional data centers to counter the trend and also offer cashed copies of the videos locally -- BL
11:54:04 AM Google It!.
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© Copyright 2007 Bruce Landon.
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