As we’ve speculated it might, Amazon has announced its own cloud-based media streaming service. It’s called the Amazon Cloud Player and you can start using it right now. More
There’s fewer than 800 Mountain Gorillas left in the entire world, and their survival depends in part on people willing to pay money to go see them. But all this human interaction is bringing gorillas into contact with dangerous diseases. More
There’s fewer than 800 Mountain Gorillas left in the entire world, and their survival depends in part on people willing to pay money to go see them. But all this human interaction is bringing gorillas into contact with dangerous diseases. More
There’s fewer than 800 Mountain Gorillas left in the entire world, and their survival depends in part on people willing to pay money to go see them. But all this human interaction is bringing gorillas into contact with dangerous diseases. More
A new coating material for food packaging could keep sodas fizzy, chips crispy and military rations more edible, scientists say. It’s made of a thin film of nanoscale bits of clay, the same kind used to make bricks, mixed with polymers. When viewed under an electron microscope, the film looks like bricks and mortar, according to its creator. More
In the debate about programming languages, libraries, and platforms we focus too much on the technical details. What matters more, is the human community of people who create, maintain, and use the technologies. Every programming language we’d consider is Turing complete, and there is no shortage of tooling or frameworks for any important language. You can build pretty much any web app in any language and it would work. Culture matters. The difference between technologies and languages are their cultures. It defines the way the community structures itself, what it values, the origin myths, the way it collaborates, shares, and creates. With this talk I tried to tell the story of Ruby’s Culture. I also tried to inspire programmers to be active participants, to be creators – not consumers of their tools. Watch the Keynote Last October I had the priviledge of co-organizing the first Ruby Conf in Uruguay . My personal goal was to bridge worlds. There’s a great small hacker community in the region, but the larger community of programmers wasn’t paying attention. We could watch videos of other people’s conferences, but we were missing the hallway conversations. We wanted to have a great programmers conference where we could show off what we’d been doing, be inspired by others, and change the way software development is thought about in Rio de la Plata (Uruguay and Argentina). We hoped to have 75 people come, we had over 250 show up! As the date approached, we needed a keynote. We thought, Blaine Cook , he does a good talk, but he wanted to talk about federated social networks and web standards, it wasn’t quite right. Then Tim Bray said he could join us, he gives a great talk, too, but he’s working on Android these days. The other speakers who have the right energy all wanted to talk about deeply technical topics. Santiago Pastorino just joined Rails Core, and would be great but he wanted to do a very technical talk on meta programming. Eventually we decided that perhaps I should do the talk I wanted to hear. It was my first time giving a full length keynote talk. Focusing on technical subjects is an easier more constrained problem. Inspiring and telling a story is harder. The technology we create is not isolated and mechanical. It’s a reflection of the values, constraints, and aspirations of it’s creators. Free and Open Source technology is even more a community endeavor. We need to understand the history and culture of our creations. For once i’d like to acknowledge that the culture of technology is as important as it’s implementation. Broken implementations are easier to fix than broken cultures. In the last year, we’ve seen the node.js community move from a small technological core, to a full and robust environment. They build libraries, technology, but they managed the process through community organizing and collective values. It’s about rough consensus, running code, and a shared aesthetic. When you choose a technology, these values, the community and it’s culture are as important as performance and type system. The robustness of libraries are a reflection of the community’s work. Pick a healthy vibrant community where you feel comfortable.
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Ruby Culture – The way community and culture shape technology
The artificial leaf has been a target of solar research for years — an object that creates fuel sources out of sunlight, mimicking photosynthesis. But this solar energy breakthrough has always been thwarted by the need for rare components… until now. More
Last month’s handheld cancer-sniffing device (pictured) has already met its match in a tool that's the size of a dime—a tool that can spot cancer, but also HIV. The engineers who invented the microfluidic device are hopeful it can be used in developing countries. More
Here’s something I’ve never been able to remember: when I rent a car I forget to notice which side the gas cap is on.
For the rest of my trip, I don’t think to look. I only think about it when I’m driving and it’s time to fill up the tank. I try to use the side view mirrors to see which side the gas cap is on. It never works. Then I look at other cars on the road, hoping to spot one that is the same model as mine so I can see which side the gas cap is on. Unfortunately, I’m car blind in the way that some people are face blind, so that usually doesn’t work. I usually end up driving to the pump and finding out if I got lucky.
But last month someone I met at TED told me (and I apologize to the person who told me, because I can’t remember who told me) that most late-model cars have a little arrow on the gas gauge that points to the side of the car with the gas cap. This information has changed my life.
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How to tell which side of your rental car the gas cap is on
Where would we be without Google? Well, we wouldn’t have pretty charts to gawk at, for starters! The Mountain View squad has pulled 10 years’ worth of fiscal data from the US Census Bureau and compiled it into some gorgeous, infinitely sortable, and re-organizable graphs. They inspire both our admiration and apprehension, as their lines illustrate most starkly the shrinkage that replaced US economic growth over the latter half of the last decade. We’ve only picked out a few of the big states here, but all 50 are in Google’s public database — why not hit the source link and check up on your local governors’ pecuniary (mis)management skills, eh?
Continue reading Visualized: Google charts the rise and fall of United States revenues
Visualized: Google charts the rise and fall of United States revenues originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Mar 2011 15:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.