Ministry of Intrigue

Loren Feldman of 1938 Media does a great job summarizing many of things going wrong at Techcrunch these days, and it’s an excellent overview of the issues at hand. In particular, Feldman points out a number of important unanswered questions still lingering in the wake of Michael Arrington’s supposed transparency regarding the MacBook Air scandal.

From the post:

At this point it’s obvious that the TechCrunch site is incapable of doing the right thing. There is simply no moral compass over there to guide them so I am once again forced to stop producing puppet shows for a few dozen people and spell it out.

[snip]

[It’s] still not clear is Daniel’s relationship with TechCrunch. Mike Arrington, Editor-In-Chief of TechCrunch, said that Daniel is merely an intern and that “the frequency of [his] posts was light.” If by “light” he means “over a hundred stories” then okay. Daniel states no, he was not an unpaid intern but a part-time employee. The TechCrunch site lists him with a fancy title. Intern, employee, dog sitter, no one is too sure what this kid does. Which is it? It’s February. Did he just get a 1099 or not?

Go give it a read, I think it summarizes many of the reasons that I stopped regularly reading Techcrunch about a year ago, although it leaves out an important one: their policy of posting stories based on rumors from anonymous sources without getting confirmation or performing anything that could pass as journalistic due diligence. I still think it’s disgraceful that the tech community at large gives so much influence to a site that is just one small step above being a gossip rag.

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This is huge. This is bigger than Buzz, bigger than the Nexus One and bigger than Wave. If Google’s trials are successful, they could seriously reshape the standard for the speeds at which Americans access the Internet, specifically around 1 gigabit per second over fiber connections.

From the post:

 Our goal is to experiment with new ways to help make Internet access better and faster for everyone. Here are some specific things that we have in mind:

Next generation apps: We want to see what developers and users can do with ultra high-speeds, whether it’s creating new bandwidth-intensive “killer apps” and services, or other uses we can’t yet imagine.

New deployment techniques: We’ll test new ways to build fiber networks, and to help inform and support deployments elsewhere, we’ll share key lessons learned with the world.

Openness and choice: We’ll operate an “open access” network, giving users the choice of multiple service providers. And consistent with our past advocacy, we’ll manage our network in an open, non-discriminatory and transparent way.

Guess this settles the question of why Google has been buying up all that dark fiber over the last few years. OK, tech pundits, in the wake of this announcement, do any of you seriously care if Buzz is a flop or not?¹ Stop opining about social networking sites and “power of social media” (a phrase guaranteed to earn you a punch in the groin from me) and start thinking big.

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Outstanding example of what an HTML5 based video player can be. I look forward to the day when all web video is consumed like this: with no browser plugins, seamless buffering, and without hogging my computer’s resources.

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This is the kind of breakthrough we need in order to make AR a practical technology for day to day use.

One of the limitations of current head-up displays is their limited field of view. A contact lens display can have a much wider field of view. “Our hope is to create images that effectively float in front of the user perhaps 50 cm to 1 m away,” says Parviz.

Just as exciting is proposed power source for the device:

Parviz says that future versions will be able to harvest power from a user’s cell phone, perhaps as it beams information to the lens. They will also have more pixels and an array of microlenses to focus the image so that it appears suspended in front of the wearer’s eyes.

WANT

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By masses, of course, they mean companies that can afford the hardware, but this is still a pretty huge development in pushing quantum computing out of the lab and into the real world. The Dutch will get it first, but hopefully it will begin to become common in developed countries with high broadband penetration.

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It begins…

People have been dying to start writing extensions for Chrome since it was first released. I’ve actually become accustomed to living without extensions when using Chrome, because the speed and other interface tweaks fit my workflow very well. Still the ability to add extensions to Chrome is a huge step forward.

Currently, you need to use the developer version of Chrome ( instructions here ) to install extensions and the installation/management process is still pretty basic, but it’s a good start.

Now, Google just needs to get versions out for Mac and Linux.

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This is a fascinating read by those of you who, like myself, are particularly interested in approaches to scaling applications at the database level. According to this post, FriendFeed has implemented a very interesting schema-less model for storing data within MySQL.

From the article:

As our database has grown, we have tried to iteratively deal with the scaling issues that come with rapid growth. We did the typical things, like using read slaves and memcache to increase read throughput and sharding our database to improve write throughput. However, as we grew, scaling our existing features to accomodate more traffic turned out to be much less of an issue than adding new features.

[snip]

Our datastore stores schema-less bags of properties (e.g., JSON objects or Python dictionaries). The only required property of stored entities is id, a 16-byte UUID. The rest of the entity is opaque as far as the datastore is concerned. We can change the “schema” simply by storing new properties.

We index data in these entities by storing indexes in separate MySQL tables. If we want to index three properties in each entity, we will have three MySQL tables - one for each index. If we want to stop using an index, we stop writing to that table from our code and, optionally, drop the table from MySQL. If we want a new index, we make a new MySQL table for that index and run a process to asynchronously populate the index without disrupting our live service.

As a result, we end up having more tables than we had before, but adding and removing indexes is easy. We have heavily optimized the process that populates new indexes (which we call “The Cleaner”) so that it fills new indexes rapidly without disrupting the site. We can store new properties and index them in a day’s time rather than a week’s time, and we don’t need to swap MySQL masters and slaves or do any other scary operational work to make it happen.

Make sure to read the article for a lot of design details, it is a very interesting approach to scaling.

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This is ridiculous. Essentially, if this passes as it stands it means if you have a router in your home or business, even if it is password protected, you need to keep logs of network activity for two years. From the article:

The legal definition of electronic communication service is “any service which provides to users thereof the ability to send or receive wire or electronic communications.” The U.S. Justice Department’s position is that any service “that provides others with means of communicating electronically” qualifies.

That sweeps in not just public Wi-Fi access points, but password-protected ones too, and applies to individuals, small businesses, large corporations, libraries, schools, universities, and even government agencies. Voice over IP services may be covered too.

Seriously, I can be held culpable if my router doesn’t maintain two years of log data? I mean, I’m all for stopping child pornography, but it’s boneheaded provisions like this, proposed by people who don’t understand the technology they are regulating, that causes me to have absolutely no faith that our government can effectively deal with the issues of the modern age.

I’m not even going to get started on the potential privacy issues that this raises, as I’m sure the rest of the Interwebs are busy enough doing that for me.

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This is a pretty good summary of what’s going on with non-relational databases right now. There’s definitely some interesting things happening with them, and they are certainly easier to scale.

That being said, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that relational databases are doomed. The advantages of having a data store that automatically enforces integrity constraints, as well as the well-defined standards that allow developers to pick their poison with regards to database without having to alter their code base means that relational databases are going to remain compelling for small to medium projects, as well as large mission-critical applications for quite a while. Combine that with advanced database techniques such as sharding to help distribute relational databases across multiple servers, and I think relational databases will be around for some time to come.

That being said, non-relational databases could very well become the standard for cloud-computing applications, but they will need to settle on some common standard for development before it happens.

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This title is a little bit more incendiary than I think it needs to be, but it looks like Facebook has finally found its business model. We all knew this is direction they would end up going, but it doesn’t mean you have to happy about it.

Honestly, as long as they’re not giving away my contact info/identity and it is limited to anonymized demographics, and not just linked to user accounts with only the name blanked out (which can easily be matched up) I don’t care that much. When they start providing all the info about me and linking it to me, then things get ugly fast.

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