Открыл купальный сезон в преддверии НГ 2011
понедельник, 27 декабря 2010 г.
четверг, 2 декабря 2010 г.
вторник, 23 ноября 2010 г.
Facebook Alternative Diaspora Launches Their Private Alpha With Some Bet Hedging
MG Siegler1 hour ago
We’ve been tracking the progress of Diaspora, the open-source Facebook alternative, since before the project even started. That’s because the idea got so much buzz on the crowdsourced micro-funding site Kickstarter, that they were able to turn a goal of raising $10,000 in 39 days into $200,000 from 6,500 backers in the same timeframe. But with such high expectations, you have to deliver. And many expressed doubts that the small team of college students could do that.
After the money came in, the team sequestered themselves for the Summer to work on the project. Despite some hiccups, they were able to unveil the source of the project in September to mixed reviews. Meanwhile, a user-facing alpha launch was promised for October. That came and went, and they pushed the launch to Thanksgiving. Well, we’re two days away from turkey day, and Diaspora has delivered this time.
As the company notes on their blog, the first batch of private alpha invites are going out today. They note that each week they’ll be adding more people to the test, starting with those who contributed to the service’s funding.
Says the team:
We are proud of where Diaspora is right now. In less than five months, we’ve gone from nothing to a great starting point from which the community can keep working. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how people can share in a private way, and still do all the things people love to do on social networks. We hope you’ll find it fun to use and a great way to keep in touch with all the people in your life.
Interestingly enough, it sounds as if Diaspora is heavily predicated on lists, which they call “aspects”. This is interesting because Facebook is going in the opposite direction, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made it clear that people on their service don’t want to make lists. In fact, their entire new Groups project is a way to make it so you don’t have to make lists. “We think that aspects are a simple, straightforward, lightweight way to make it really clear who is receiving your posts and who you are receiving posts from,” writes Diaspora.
But the service is also quick to hedge their bets. “It isn’t perfect, but the best way to improve is to get it into your hands and listen closely to your response,” they note about the aspects idea. They then go on to list five things they know they could do better, including: security, better APIs, better documentation, easier upgrades, and cleaner code. Yeah, that’s quite a few major things.
“Our work is nowhere close to done. To us, that is the best part. There are always more things to improve, more tricks to learn, and more awesome features to add,” they conclude.
As you can see in the alpha site graphic below, they’re smartly playing towards some of the things people complain about the most with regard to Facebook: choice, ownership, simplicity.
via techcrunch.com
понедельник, 22 ноября 2010 г.
Facebook Vies To Become Your Homepage – And Why That’s A Big Deal
Robin Wauters14 hours ago
It’s a very old trick, and arguably a mighty effective one. Ask people to set your website as their homepage, and it will become their entry point to the Web, the very first thing they’ll see when they open their browser. Venturebeat
noticed that Facebook started prompting visitors to set the site as their homepage before the weekend, by means of a bar at the top that actually shows some pictures and names of your Facebook friends.
Others have reported
From the looks of it, Facebook is A/B testing this with a small subset of users, and trying out a variety of messages and pop-up layouts to figure out which one yields the best results.
This is undeniably a significant move, particularly when it will roll out to the site’s roughly 500 million active users in full. Keep in mind that Google
Being people’s homepage is good for branding, great for ‘stickiness’ and phenomenal for traffic.
But for many people, social networking sites are slowly taking over at least part of the role of search engines, which is mainly to retrieve information. When you can tap your entire social graph for answers to your queries, sites like Facebook have the ability to push aside search engines like Google as the first site that springs to mind when people think about surfing the WWW to find information, connect to other people, communicate with friends, and so on.
I can easily see why more and more people would eventually switch to Facebook as their homepage of choice, and actively prompting them to do so might be just what some Facebook users need to actually configure their browsers to do just that.
Come to think of it, I’m wondering why Facebook hasn’t been doing this forever.
Facebook’s traffic is still very much not going anywhere but up
That said, you’ve set TechCrunch as your homepage, right?
via techcrunch.com
Facebook Removing Gmail From List Of Third Party Email Providers
Alexia TsotsisNov 20, 2010
Something is up on the Facebook vs. Google data reciprocity front. It looks like Facebook is removing Gmail from the list of third party email providers on “Find Friends”, whereas we were seeing direct link downloads to Gmail contacts still offered as an option just a couple of days ago.
It gets stranger. Some new users who sign up with their Gmail accounts can still see the option to add friends from Gmail, but when I tried to import contacts I got the below “Everyone on this contact list is already on Facebook or has already been invited” message. In other words it didn’t work.
Signing up with a non-Gmail account eliminates the option entirely even though you still have the capability to manually download and upload your contact files. This seems to be the latest development in the ongoing Facebook vs. Google slap fight
Here’s our ongoing tally:
- Google To Facebook: You Can’t Import Our User Data Without Reciprocity
- Data Protectionism Begins In Earnest
- Facebook Finds A New Way To Liberate Your Gmail Contact Data
- Google’s Response To Facebook’s Response To Google’s Facebook API Ban
- Google Gets Feisty, Kicks Data Portability Fight With Facebook Up A Notch
- Google No Longer Claims Facebook Will “Trap” Users. Or Do They?
I’ve contacted both Facebook and Google for more information and will update this post when they respond. For the record, Mark Zuckerberg called Gmail Priority Inbox “pretty cool” onstage at Web 2.0 Summit after Facebook announced their own email product last week.
Update: Word from Google is that nothing has changed from its side. Atul Arora
Before …
After.
via techcrunch.com
четверг, 18 ноября 2010 г.
Kinect прикрутили к роботу клево
Kinect sensor bolted to an iRobot Create, starts looking for trouble
While there have already been a lot of great proof-of-concepts for the Kinect, what we're really excited for are the actual applications that will come from it. On the top of our list? Robots. The Personal Robots Group at MIT has put a battery-powered Kinect sensor on top of the iRobot Create platform, and is beaming the camera and depth sensor data to a remote computer for processing into a 3D map -- which in turn can be used for navigation by the bot. They're also using the data for human recognition, which allows for controlling the bot using natural gestures. Looking to do something similar with your own robot? Well, the ROS folks have a Kinect driver in the works that will presumably allow you to feed all that great Kinect data into ROS's already impressive libraries for machine vision. Tie in the Kinect's multi-array microphones, accelerometer, and tilt motor and you've got a highly aware, semi-anthropomorphic "three-eyed" robot just waiting to happen. We hope it will be friends with us. Video of the ROS experimentation is after the break.
via engadget.com
понедельник, 15 ноября 2010 г.
Benchmarks 2: snap,happstack,yesod,manos,nginx,go http lib.
all haskell compiled with threaded and run with +RTS -A4M -N4 -qg0 -qb -g1
tested with httperf --hog --num-conns 1000 --num-calls 1000 --burst-length 20 --port 3000 --rate 1000 --uri=/pong
snap (from cabal)7038.1 req/s
happstack (from darcs) 2715.3 req/s
yesod (from cabal) simple = error
yesod (from cabal) dev = error
yesod (from cabal) wai snap = 1322.2 req/s
manos(mono 2.8) = error
go = 3693.8 req/s(186 errors)
nginx static = 14993.4 req/s(112 errors timeout)
snap static = 4701.2 req/s
пятница, 12 ноября 2010 г.
“Flash Is Great.” — Anonymous Flash Developer
MG Siegler8 hours ago
I used to think that Android fanboys worked themselves into the biggest tizzy when you suggest their favorite device of the week may not be the absolute bee’s knees. I was wrong. Flash fanboys are much worse. They’re worse not only because they go absolutely ape-shit if you disrespect their platform, but also because at the end of the day at least Android fans have a leg to stand on. At least their object of love is ultimately pretty good and has a bright future. Flash? Yeah…
Adobe’s CTO paints a rosy picture of the platform. But that’s his job. The reality is what many of us see with our own eyes: Flash is a massive pain point in our day to day computing. If it’s not crashing our browsers left and right, it’s causing our computers to cook our thighs (or worse
). If it’s not draining our batteries 33 percent faster, it’s opening gaping security holes.
Let’s look at just the most recent headlines. Yesterday, Apple released
Meanwhile, Flash is now fully baked into Google’s Chrome browser. If you read the update notes or bug reports on the various channels, you’ll see that a massive number are related to Flash.
What about Flash on other devices? It’s the killer feature of the new Samsung Galaxy Tab, right? Wrong
Meanwhile, on the smartphone side of things, Adobe just released an update for Flash for Android likely ahead of the 2.3 roll-out. Does it fix any of the performance issues? Nope. I’m using it right now. Playback is still jittery as hell.
So you’ll forgive me if when Kevin Lynch announces all these great-sounding things
The fact of the matter is that if everything was peachy keen in the state of Flash, Adobe wouldn’t have anything to worry about. Apple could go on the offensive against them, but it wouldn’t matter. Nothing would change. But things are changing. And Adobe is scared to death.
But all of these reports across various sectors must be wrong. Flash is just great. People are screaming about how wonderful it is. It’s a pure coincidence that they all happen to be Flash developers.
via techcrunch.com
Exclusive: Samsung 'flagship' phone with Gingerbread and huge display coming in early 2011 (update) -- Engadget
Exclusive: Samsung 'flagship' phone with Gingerbread and huge display coming in early 2011 (update)
Okay, so you're not feeling Samsung's Nexus S. We'd say that's a little premature, but still, we get it. We understand. How about this, then? Is this more to your liking? We've just been tipped with a few morsels on what should become Samsung's flagship Android device early next year -- February, to be specific, suggesting we could see an unveiling at MWC -- and it's looking promising. Different parts of the slide deck describe it as having either a 4.3- or 4.5-inch "sAMOLED2" display, presumably standing for "Super AMOLED 2" and implying that Sammy's made some advancements over the screens we've been seeing on the Galaxy S series this year. It'll naturally have Android Gingerbread and be equipped with an 8 megapixel camera capable of 1080p video capture, 14.4Mbps HSPA, Bluetooth 3.0, a 1.2GHz core of some sort, and 16GB of storage onboard. The deck describes it as having an "ultra sleek design," and judging from the side shot, we'd tend to agree. So who's holding out for this?Update: We're confident that the above slide comes from Samsung, but one of the pictures therein is most definitely not of a new Samsung phone -- but rather a VoIP handset by Apiotek from several years ago. Considering the image in question pops up right away in a Google Image search for "ultra slim phone," we're inclined to think Samsung got a little hasty putting together the PowerPoint this time round. [Thanks, Nathan H.]
via engadget.com
четверг, 11 ноября 2010 г.
Написал выполнение взаимной рекурсии без рекурсии на c#(trampoline из clojure)
Вчера мне при попытках разобраться с вложенной рекурсией посоветовали посмотреть на функцию trampoline в clojure. Для лучшего понимания я ее переписал на c#. Определение trampoline в clojure здесь (http://pramode.net/clojure/2010/05/08/clojure-trampoline/).
using System;
namespace Trampoline
{
class Program
{
static void Main()
{
//Console.WriteLine(FunA(100000));//stack overflow
Console.WriteLine(Trampoline(FunAT(100000)));
Console.ReadLine();
}
public static long FunA(long n)
{
return n == 0 ? 0 : FunB(n - 1);
}
private static long FunB(long n)
{
return n == 0 ? 0 : FunA(n - 1);
}
public static object FunAT(long n)
{
if (n == 0) return 0;
return new Func<object>(() => FunBT(n - 1));
}
private static object FunBT(long n)
{
if (n == 0) return 0;
return new Func<object>(() => FunAT(n - 1));
}
private static long Trampoline(dynamic result)
{
while (true)
{
if (result is Func<object>)
{
result = result.Invoke();
}
else
{
return result;
}
}
}
}
}
А теперь надо подумать поможет ли мне это с вложенной рекурсией по типу функции Аккермана.
среда, 10 ноября 2010 г.
Сравнение Erlang и Clojure в несколько строк.
Erlang: The Movie <=> Clojure: The Podcast :-)
Erlang распределенный, Clojure нет.
Агент в ерланг это легковесный поток, над потоками стоит шедулер.
Агент в кложа это объект и вы асинхронно можете посылать сообщение (функцию) этому объекту. Каждый объект имеет очередь и по очереди обрабатывает сообщения. Не надо путать агентов с потоками. Агент это просто объект и вы можете иметь миллионы в памяти безо всякой нагрузки. Обработка сообщений агентов распределяется по пулу потоков. Шедулера нет.
Короче говоря если вы посылаете агенту сообщение с бесконечным циклом, то тред в котором он будет выполнятся заблокируется. В ерланг оно понятно таких проблем нет.
вторник, 9 ноября 2010 г.
iPad в России: где купить и сколько стоит?
re:Store ©Сегодня, 9 ноября в 19:00 по московскому времени, в России начинаются долгожданные продажи легендарного планшетника от Apple. Скептики курят в сторонке, пока iМаньяки готовятся стать первыми владельцами РСТ-таблеток по вкусной цене. У кого, где и почём сегодня можно купить правильный «русский» iPad — в нашем эксклюзивном материале.
Как и ожидалось, первыми среди равных выступили «МВидео», «Re:Store» и «Белый Ветер Цифровой». Все три ритейлера запланировали торжественные мероприятия на 7 часов вечера. Выбираем по вкусу, предпочтениям и ближайшему месту расположения.
«МВидео» предлагают заглянуть на огонёк за «таблеткой» в целый ворох магазинов в Москве и Санкт-Петербурге. Приятный сюрприз «в красном» так же поджидает жителей Ростова-на-Дону и Волгограда:
Москва:
— Олимпийская деревня, Мичуринский проспект, д.3, корп.1, ТРЦ «ФЕСТИВАЛЬ»
— ул. Красная Пресня, д. 23Б, стр. 1
— ул. Садовая-Спасская, д. 3, стр. 3
— ул. Зеленодольская, д. 40, ТЦ «Будапешт», 3 этаж
— Славянский б-р, дом 13, стр. 1
— Проспект Мира, дом 91, корпус 1
— Ленинградское шоссе, дом 16, ТЦ «Метрополис»
— МО, г. Химки, Микрорайон 8, стр. 1, ТРК «МЕГА»
— ул. Генерала Белова, дом 35
— ул. Народного ополчения, дом 28, к. 1
— МО, Люберецкий район, г. Котельники, 1-й Покровский проезд, д. 5, ТЦ «МЕГА Белая Дача»Санкт-Петербург:
— Московский проспект, д. 44
— ул. Пражская, д.48/50, ТРК «Южный полюс»
— пересечение КАД и проспекта Энгельса, ТРЦ «МЕГА-Парнас»Ростов-на-Дону:
— ул. Красноармейская, д.157Волгоград:
— пр-т им. В.И. Ленина, д. 65К, ТЦ «Стройград»
В стороне от столь ожидаемого события не остались и Re:Store. Специальные мероприятия, посвященные старту продаж, пройдут в двух таких разных, но столицах одной страны по адресам:
Москва:
— 1-я Тверская-Ямская, д. 28Санкт-Петербург:
— ТРК «Сенная», Ефимова, д.3
«Белый Ветер Цифровой» так же проводит праздничную церемонию в Москве по случаю старта продаж iPad. Желающие проходят на Тверскую улицу, д. 19А. Приобрести планшет так же можно в следующих магазинах БВЦ:
Москва, торговые центры:
— «Горбушкин двор»
— «Европейский»
— «Черемушки»
— «Щука»
— «Мега Теплый Стан»
— «Мега Химки»
— «Мега Белая дача»
— «Пражский пассаж»Магазины «БВЦ» рядом с метро:
— Октябрьское поле,
— Маяковская,
— Лубянка,
— ПушкинскаяСанкт-Петербург, торговые центры:
— «Мега Дыбенко»,
— «Мега Парнас»,
— «Рамстор Удельный парк»Казань:
— ТЦ «Кольцо»Нижний Новгород:
— ТЦ «Фантастика»Ярославль:
— ТЦ «Вернисаж»
Все три сети рапортуют о наличии у них всех шести моделей планшета. Сколько стоит каждая? За шесть часов до старта продаж, «МВидео» поделились с редакцией iPhones.ru официальными ценами на каждую модель:
iPad WI-FI 16Gb — 19 990 руб.; iPad WI-FI 32Gb — 23 990 руб.; iPad WI-FI 64Gb — 27 990 руб.; iPad WI-FI +3G 16Gb — 24 990 руб.; iPad WI-FI +3G 32Gb — 28 990 руб.; iPad WI-FI +3G 64Gb — 32 990 руб. Желаем всем российским iМаньякам поменьше очередей, побольше айпэдов и, конечно, приятных покупок.
Фотографии и отчёты с события национального i-масштаба принимаются от читателей с 18:00 по МСК в секции комментариев.
via iphones.ru
понедельник, 8 ноября 2010 г.
Думаете какой телефон на Windows Phone 7 купить? Вот вам табличка.
US handsets:
International only:
via engadget.com
Building the Simple Enterprise
Editor’s note: Guest author Aaron Levie
In the enterprise, simplicity simply doesn’t sell. Complexity, on the other hand, justifies costly software licenses and a swat team of consultants and systems integrators. It explains why updates are available every three years instead of being pushed weekly. And it even serves as an easy – but ultimately blameless – scapegoat for failed deployments and lagging user adoption. After all, the problems faced by today’s enterprises are incredibly challenging, and complex problems require equally complex solutions, right?
Wrong. This mindset needs to change – in fact, in order to survive, enterprise software must become simpler. Consumers are bringing new technology and expectations into the workplace where, more often than not, they’re forced to work with and around legacy platforms that disable rather than enable productivity. Simplicity will become the most important factor in business technology’s success, and to get there it can no longer be a dirty word in the enterprise. But it’s going to require some serious effort on the part of vendors and buyers alike.
We don’t want complexity, but don’t know how to value simplicity
While I deeply respect and admire the many innovations brought about by legacy solutions, the current state of technology in the enterprise kind of sucks. There’s a reason why a Google search returns more than 2 million results for “I hate Lotus
This bias isn’t limited to technology buyers or builders – the analysts I speak with often focus more on feature comparisons and product matrices than end-user experience and customer success. But that is changing, slowly. Gartner analyst Brian Prentice recently argued that simplicity is misunderstood
CIOs and IT administrators may be wary of out-of-the-box simple solutions, but they’re certainly not happy with the complexity of current solutions. A recent Forrester report
Building simple software takes vision and discipline
Mark Twain (or Ben Franklin, depending on your source) said, “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” This, in essence, is the challenge with simplicity. Building simple technology is not easy; it inherently takes much more work to reduce complex problems into simple solutions for people. Building products that suck is far easier, as David Barrett of Expensify pointed out in his post yesterday. Simplicity requires that you have user experience drive product management and solve problems with exceptional design. And it also means you sometimes have to say no.It’s really, really hard to say no to customers. They want the world from your product, and they deserve it (really, they do). But letting customer feature requests or analyst reports exhaustively drive your product roadmap can be incredibly damaging. It’s not that they want something useless or that they’re wrong in their demands; it’s that they’re not seeing the underlying fabric of your product. And this is why it’s so crucial to have a vision: if you don’t know where your product is heading in a fundamental way, your customers or competitors will take you in too many directions. As Rypple co-CEO Daniel Debow points out
There will always be a few really complex problems that require complex solutions. But for the vast majority (read: 95%) of use cases, simplicity will suffice. Where complexity is necessary – whether it’s to build a specific workflow, integration, or solution for a particular vertical – solve it through customization. Abstract the core areas of your product from the parts that can be modified by a developer or customer, making sure the core and default use is still simple. The best products in the world can do as much or as little as customers want without you having to think twice. The economic upside of this is obvious, of course, as you’ll now have a rich ecosystem of integrators, value-added resellers, and professional service firms that can participate in your success.
You can’t change market expectations, but you can create new markets
So how does Box make enterprise content management simple? We don’t, really. We redefine it. If Box tried to compete based on the laundry list of functionalities that have come to define ECM, we’d quickly lose to SharePoint, which has a sufficiently filled-out offering and deep penetration. An existing market has certain expectations because of the companies that have come before you, and you can’t just build to meet these standards, nor should you set out to change them immediately. Instead, find the dimensions where you can make things materially simpler, and build a solution that gives users more power with fewer features. Start with a department and end-users, solve their problem, and expand.
Or look at the problems your product is already solving, and expand into entirely new, under-served markets. For instance, there’s an explosion of demand for business software in the mid-market. Companies in the 50-1,000 employee range are large enough to have challenging and interesting problems, and for years they’ve either lacked the technology to address them, or they’ve had to buy into more expensive solutions than their needs require. Bring your software to new organizations and new markets, and if you build the best product, it will grow. It’s far easier to maintain simplicity by finding the groups that have the problem you already solve really well, than by trying to reach legacy markets by building new features.
Take MySQL, who redefined the database market by offering a simpler database for every developer in the world. They now own a huge chunk of the market without having to compete with Oracle in the process. GoodData, Zendesk, Assistly and Workday have all leveraged the cloud to build simpler solutions in markets dominated by big, clunky, overly comprehensive systems. Salesforce.com, with a $15B market-cap, has shown how to build a very large enterprise by selling a little to a lot of customers: an average Salesforce.com customer only has an estimated 15-20
How to build a simpler enterprise:
If you’re in IT: Look throughout your organization and find the areas where employees spend a disproportionate amount of time or run into problems on a specific set of tasks. Enabling technologies in these areas will pay huge dividends for your organization. Pilot tools with employees, or find out what they’re already using before implementing something site-wide — more likely than not, a simpler solution has already been adopted. Consider the intangible value of implementing simpler technologies: less support, less maintenance, less headache, more productivity. Demand simplicity from your vendors.
If you’re building software: Invest disproportionately in design, usability and engineering. Create transparent feedback loops to make sure your product is being successful. Building great, usable technology is not subjective. Constantly test what you’re building on users and gather data consistently. Reduce features sets, allow for customization, and stick to your vision. Sell based on the complexity of the problem and the simplicity of the solution.
If you’re a business manager or end-user: Talk to your IT department. Explain why your existing technology isn’t meeting your needs, and offer to pilot new technologies. Use your IT organization as a source of knowledge and innovation rather than just a support center, and they’re far more likely to implement user friendly, innovative technologies.
Simplicity will be incredibly beneficial, and it will also be incredibly disruptive. The losers will be the technology providers who are either too lazy or too overextended to settle on a vision; the winners will be workforces that are empowered by usable technology and the vendors that serve them.
Photo credit: Getty
via techcrunch.com
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