We’re fans of open data, and the possibility for smarter and smarter mashups. One place we find datasets is here on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/datasets/
A robot at UC Berkeley that can autonomously fold unseen towels. Amazing example of image pattern detection and problem solving.
Mozilla has found that increasing the performance of their download page can dramatically increase their conversion ratio:
Let’s start with the punchline: By making a few minor tweaks to our top landing pages, we can drive an additional 60,000,000 Firefox downloads per year
With 275,000 daily visitors, a 15% improvement on this single English page translates to 10.28 million additional downloads per year. And, if we’re able to achieve a similar performance boost across our other top landing pages, we’ll drive in excess of 60 million yearly Firefox downloads.
How did they do it? By inlining javascript and css files… a technique we use extensively here at Core.
We make use of Minify, a php-based compressor and cache system that groups our css files and js files into as few separate documents as possible. It then compresses the files by removing whitespace, gzips them, and stores them for the next request.
It’s great to see documented improvements on such large sites as Mozilla. Keep up the good work!
http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/2010/04/05/firefox-page-load-speed-–-part-ii/
My sense of what’s an april fool’s joke today is way off balance. Is google really building nuclear reactors?
Google has acquired a company that has created a new process for highly efficient isotope separation, we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. The primary use of this technology, say experts we’ve spoken with, is uranium enrichment.
Enriched uranium is a necessary ingredient in the creation of nuclear energy, and one source we’ve spoken with at Google says that this is part of the Google Green Initiative. The company will use the new technology to enable it to design and possibly build small, mobile and highly efficient nuclear power generators.“Google has already begun building an enrichment plant,” says a high ranking IAEA source.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/31/exclusive-google-to-go-nuclear/
Just saw this post come through my inbox:
AIGA/NY & SPARK PRESENT: HOW TO LEAD CLIENTS TOWARDS BEING GREEN
Do you wish your clients thought more about the impact their materials have on the earth? Would you like to introduce them to more responsible, sustainable solutions but don’t know how to begin the conversation? Or perhaps you have approached the subject and were met with budget concerns?
This lively panel will discuss strategies from principals of design firms on how they lead even the most unexpected of clients towards the benefits of going green right from the start.
http://aigany.org/events/details/10SK/
Looking into RethinkDB. A post caught my eye that it was recently rewritten in Lisp.
After many heated debates, I remembered a phrase drilled into to me by an ex-coworker I deeply respect. He always said: “Don’t guess. Measure.” We decided to take a measured approach and use data and logical reasoning instead of emotional arguments. Because of the immense expressive power of both programming languages, we could develop two prototypes in a matter of days, and measure the performance with our internal benchmarking toolkit. Mike rewrote RethinkDB in Haskell, and I rewrote it in Common Lisp.
The features look very compelling:
No more seek latency.
RethinkDB is designed to be extremely fast, and implements powerful features that are cumbersome and inefficient with rotational storage. Today’s databases heavily optimize to account for high seek latency—the time it takes for a rotational drive’s platter to move. RethinkDB takes full advantage of solid-state drives, making traditional data storage layouts unnecessary.
Databases the way they were meant to be. RethinkDB borrows ideas from many diverse areas of computer science. Because we’re no longer constrained by the limitations of rotational drives, we can bring our ideas to reality and build a database the way it was always meant to be built.
[Flash 10 is required to watch video]
Corey Szopinski explains why Dumbo (New York’s digital district) deserves Google’s new gigabit-speed fiber internet connection. Put together as a Dumbo collective application: http://nydd.us/
