Preventing errors: Looking for ugly »
Kevin Kelly:
Preventing errors within extremely complicated technological systems is often elusive. The more complex the system, the more complex the pattern of error. But a curious thing happens in systems that are kept relatively error free: as major errors are prevented, it gets more difficult to forecast future major errors — because so few happen! In these kind of mission-critical systems the genesis profile of a major failure may be unknown because major failures are so rare.
Hungrier Mile ruins prize site: architects »
The NSW State Government is planning on selling East Darling Harbour in “superlots”, which will bypass the site’s architectural design of public streets and non-homogeneous buildings.
“If one developer is owning several blocks, they can do what they like with the streets,” Mr Thalis said. “They can move them, put malls on them, close them, turn them into business parks. The public interest in Sydney is at risk of being stolen by private and commercial interests. I don’t have a problem with density but I do have a problem when it’s at the cost of the public domain. We are the citizens. We own the streets. This will be thrown out the window for a 10-year fashion for big, monolithic buildings.”
Amazon adds sort feature to SimpleDB »
Amazon AWS SimpleDB now supports sortable query result sets. Previously query results came back in insertion order only, but now you can sort on (only) one attribute. This makes a lot of standard relational DB use-cases more feasible for implementation in SimpleDB, as it makes for less data post-processing.
Sorting on only one attribute is still quite limiting, though, and queries still only return object IDs, which forces many further queries to retrieve the full data-set.
Read the fine print »
Fairfax photographer John Reid on the common practise of shady photographic competitions:
I’m talking about the increasing use of photography competitions for reasons other than the celebration of fine quality photographic image making.
One of the most common adulterations of the concept of the photographic competition is to use it as a cheap way of building a bank of images. To commission thousands of images from professional photographers would cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars but, trick people into giving you their photos in exchange for the chance of winning something (money, camera gear), and you can bring the cost right down.
Hyper-inflation: Zimbabwe introduces $100 billion note »
Zimbabwe, grappling with a record 2.2 million per cent inflation, has introduced a new $Z100 billion ($5.50) bank note to tackle cash shortages.
Multicolr Search Lab »
Explore Flickr photos by colour content:
We extracted the colours from 3 million “interesting” Flickr images. Using our visual similarity technology you can navigate the collection by colour.
Oddball “DRM” on MISaustralia.com
Have a look at this article on MISaustralia. The first sign that something’s awry is their use of a monospace font for body copy.
Now try selecting some of the body text: only every second letter gets highlighted.
Take a look at the HTML source and you see this is deliberate: they are using JavaScript to overlay and interweave two streams of text with alternating missing letters into one block of contiguous text.
This oddball “DRM” might prevent casual readers from copying and pasting the text, but it also makes the content inaccessible to sight-impaired readers, and to search engines. The use of the monospace font also makes the text less legible.
NSW Department of Education going to Gmail »
The NSW Department of Education is migrating its email system for 1.5 million students from Exchange to Gmail.
They’re going from a $33M contract that gave users 65 megabytes of storage, to a $9.5M contract that gives at least 6 gigabytes.
Microsoft releases pre-07 Office file specs »
Microsoft has released the specifications to the file formats in the pre-2007 Office suite.
The Microsoft Office binary file formats documentation provides detailed technical specifications for the .doc, .ppt .xls, and .xlsb file formats as created by the following Microsoft Office applications:
- .doc: Microsoft Word 97, Microsoft Word 2000, Microsoft Word 2002, Microsoft Office Word 2003, Microsoft Office Word 2007
- .ppt: Microsoft PowerPoint 97, Microsoft PowerPoint 2000, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007
- .xls: Microsoft Excel 97, Microsoft Excel 2000, Microsoft Excel 2002, Microsoft Office Excel 2003, Microsoft Office Excel 2007
- .xlsb: Microsoft Office Excel 2007