Four short links: 20 July 2009

1. Apple's iPhone Wrecking the Cell Industry -- bleat bleat. Andy Oram's comment hits the mark: The music companies and AT&T were like travelers who refused to believe they were taking a long trip. They didn't pack warm clothing, and therefore had to buy it at disadvantageous terms when they came to need it. Apple was more sophisticated about where all companies are going technologically, so they had what others needed.
2. Fruux -- a lightweight and convenient system preference pane, that syncs your Address Book, Calendars, Tasks and Bookmarks between different Macs. (via Daniel Raffel)
3. Redflax -- notable not just for art, but for the Maori quote: He toi whakaaro, he mana tangata - roughly translates: where there is creativity/artistic expression, there is human dignity/prowess.
4. Google's Chiller-less Data Center -- Belgium has only 7 days (on average) when the ambient air temperature isn't enough to cool the data center. Finally, a business model for unpleasantly-cold climates.

Twitter Quote of the Day: 26 January 2009

@GregorMacdonald: Emily Dickinson on economists falling to Keynes: "...as Freezing persons recollect the Snow. First-Chill-then Stupor- then the letting go."

Four short links: 6 Jan 2009

Four thought-provoking links from the worlds of disaster tech, multicore, bioengineering, and 17th century French nobility.

1. Techies: Volunteering to Save the World - article on NGO work being the new black for technology. In particular, this caught my eye: "Earlier this year, IBM launched a program called Corporate Service Corps to send 100 employees to Romania, Turkey, Vietnam, the Philippines, Ghana and Tanzania to work on projects that combine economic development and IT. And the response was impressive: More than 5,000 employees applied to participate."
2. Laurence Livermore Lab releases Stack Trace Analysis Tool - debugging tool for code running over 20k processors. We need new tools like this to handle the complexity thrown up by a multicore world.
3. Spinning Silkworm Cocoons into Biosensors - interesting article in MIT Technology Review about bioengineer Fiorenzo Omenetto who is using silk to build optical devices that can be used as sensors in the body. "In the devices that ­Omenetto and Kaplan are developing, proteins embedded in the optical material efficiently bind to a target such as oxygen or a bacterial protein; when they do, the light transmitted by the sensor changes color."
4. La Rochefoucauld Quotes - lots of thought-provoking quotes. For example, on the freemium business model: "What seems to be generosity is often no more than disguised ambition, which overlooks a small interest in order to secure a great one." On Twitter: "As it is the characteristic of great wits to say much in few words, so small wits seem to have the gift of speaking much and saying nothing." On social network sites: "However rare true love may be, it is less so than true friendship." On Google/Microsoft/Apple/[insert big company here]: "There are heroes in evil as well as in good."