Book Reviews
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Thursday, December 12, 2002
![[Item Permalink]](http://radio.weblogs.com/0112083/images/ur_bullet.gif){kind=small} Welcome to the Spy Society -- Comment()
Today my net column titled Welcome to the Spy Society (in Finnish, "Tervetuloa kyttäysyhteiskuntaan") appeared on the MikroPC web site. This text was actually a "leftover" from a longer article, which will appear early next year. By the way, the article on John Poindexter at warblogging.com is absolutely essential reading, and gave some background to my net column. In addition, my two-page comparison review of Apple PowerBook G4 and IBM ThinkPad T30 appeared today in the issue 15/2002 of the MikroPC magazine. I noticed some slight inaccuracies in the article, but otherwise I'm not at all displeased with the final result.
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-- Comment()
About that semantic web: "A pretty interesting article from David Green. The upshot is that the semantic web may act as a 'collective memory',..." [kasia in a nutshell]
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How graphics processor chips work.: "For more than 20 years, general-purpose microprocessors, like those manufactured by Advanced Micro Devices, IBM, and Intel, have been viewed as the workhorses of desktop and server computers. But graphics processor chips..." [Google Technology News]
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Butterfly wingstrokes -- Comment()
Boing Boing Blog points to What flight engineers can learn from butterfly wingstrokes: This is the first time that anyone has captured images that show what the wing beats of free-flying insects do to the air they flutter on. (Other visual studies have used tethered insects, moths, for example, glued to a lightweight rod.) The red admiral butterflies, moving without restraint, show an extraordinary agility and complexity in their flight. Not only do they use many different wing strokes, they use them on successive wing beats.
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Gateway builds 14 teraflop cluster: "Gateway is taking 8,000 computers out of excess inventory and turning them into a 14 teraflop (14 trillion floating point operations/second) parallel supercomputer, and renting out time on the system to supercomputing junkies." [Boing Boing Blog]
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Political activism via blogging: "There's a cool article today in Wired News about logging protesters using weblogs to get their stories out." [megnut]
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Joel on Software on programming: "So for now, my advice is this: don't start a new project without at least one architect with several years of solid experience in the language, classes, APIs, and platforms you're building on. If you have a choice of platforms, use the one your team has the most skills with, even if it's not the trendiest or nominally the most productive. And when you're designing abstractions or programming tools, go the extra mile to make them leak proof." [megnut]
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How Total Information Awareness Works: A Simple Guide contains a nice diagram of the US project for controlling citizens with electronic surveillance. [Aaron Swartz: The Weblog]
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Piracy, bits, and meatspace points to Tim O'Reilly's article on why piracy isn't so serious: "Piracy is a kind of progressive taxation, which may shave a few percentage points off the sales of well-known artists (and I say "may" because even that point is not proven), in exchange for massive benefits to the far greater number for whom exposure may lead to increased revenues." [Aaron Swartz: The Weblog]
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Weblog metrics: "Chris Gulker has a writeup on weblog metrics, using UserLand's top 100 Radio weblogs and the Blogging Ecosystem as data sources, which basically says you have to be famous to get lots of hits. Also that the top 10 Radio weblogs don't link out much, which is interesting, considering that one particular Manila weblog does most of the linking on the ecosystem ;-)" [Second p0st]
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