Is Big Dogs a Workhorse?
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The company is changing. Does c-h-a-n-g-e spell opportunity?
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Fossils from extinct dogs show why bigger is not better -- giant meat-eating animals died out because they relied too heavily on hunting other big animals, scientists reported on Thursday.
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It's just 10 months old, but Google Apps may be in for a life lesson in 2008. If so, it's likely to involve the dangers of running with big dogs such as Microsoft Office when one is just a pup ... and a pup destined to grow into more of a chihuahua-type hound, at that.
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KRUGER NATIONAL PARK, South Africa  - There are no  easy answers when it comes to keeping the world's largest land  mammal in check.
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It's bigger than General D's or L-3's, but is it better?
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In September, IBM announced that the Blue Gene/L prototype had sustained speeds of 36 trillion calculations per second. Blue Gene/L recently achieved a sustained performance of 70.
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I just started watching The Dog Whisperer on the National Geographic Channel a few weeks ago, and I'm hooked. I really like the way the star, Cesar Millan, explains stuff. He shoots straight, with love. You can't be politically correct and get a dog to behave.  And he never misleads the owners, they have to change in order for the dog to change. Dogs are very simple, they can't just be your friend. The dog's world is hierarchic. Someone is the boss. If you're not the boss, he or she is. Every pack has a leader. Watching the show I wish I had a dog so I could try out his ideas. I also wish news shows were like this, get to the real story, find a solution to the problem.  Maybe he'll run for Governor of California. I'd vote for him.  Sue Polinsky loves the Dog Whisperer too.
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Can this small drug company compete with the industry's giants?
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Itâs not every day that a 350-pound tiger breaks out of its cage and runs loose in the United States. Now imagine that tiger running rampant in a zoo and attacking three people, killing one of them and sending the other two to a hospital with bite marks and deep wounds before the animal could [...].
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Most machines don't improve with use. Old pickup trucks don't gradually become Ferraris just by driving them fast, and a pocket calculator won't change into a supercomputer by crunching lots of numbers. The human body is different...
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Machines that only a few years ago seemed to be the stuff of fantasy are slowly but surely reaching the mainstream.  Photos: IBM's Blue Gene/L  Photos: Barcelona's big blade
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The letters pour in by the boxload, asking for a picture, a pet story or even a paw print. A year after becoming America's big dog, a barking, slobbering Newfoundland named Josh is more popular than ever.
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Continuing the thread on commoditization of scalable server software, the third installment. Yesterday, Matt Tucker from the OpenFire community, said: "I'm not sure that S3 magically kills off the scaling priests. It certainly makes it easy to turn on more storage resources, but writing an application to scale efficiently across multiple virtual machines is no easy task." To which I responded... It won't make scaling obsolete, but what it does do is commodify it. Right now I can't buy a Jabber server that scales without also hiring someone who will scale it for me. But in a few years I should be able to buy a Jabber server that, when it needs more CPUs, just asks for them all transparently to the user, the same way my word processor asks the OS for more memory today. I remember word processors that didn't do memory management, you got a 64K buffer and that's it. One document. When you filled it up, you started another. Technology will go forward and scaling won't be a black art, it'll be something built into the software you license.
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Being the biggest dog may pay off at feeding time, but species that grow too large may be more vulnerable to extinction, new research suggests. Over 50 million years a succession of large carnivores evolved in North America, diversified, and then died out.
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The super-rodents can run farther and about an hour longer than average mice. The new rodents also appear to resist weight gain in the complete absence of exerciseâeven when fed a high-fat diet that led normal mice to become obese.
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In the dog show world, there are plenty of champions with long, pretentious names. And then there's Josh &#151; just Josh.
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When Amazon introduced S3 a couple of years ago I knew I would useit and I was sure a lot of other developers would. I saw it as a solution to a problem we all have -- storage that scales up when needed, and scales down when not. Otherwise we all have to buy as much bandwidth as we need in peak periods. With S3, you pay for what you use. It makes storage for Internet services more rational. Later they did the same for processors and queuing. And a couple of days ago they announced a lightweight scalable database, using the same on-demand philosophy and simple architecture and API. It's going to be a huge hit and forever change the way apps are developed for the Internet. I was explaining the significance of this to Scoble on the phone this morning. It's worth repeating here. When I developed Frontier in the late 80s and early 90s my target platform was a modern desktop computer, a few megabytes of RAM, a half-gig of disk, a few megahertz CPU. A system capable of running Quark XPress, Hypercard or Filemaker. It would be used to develop apps that would drive desktop publishing. Later, it was used to generate static websites, then a demonstration of democracy (a multi-author ultra-simple CMS), then news sites, which became weblogs, then blogs, and editthispage.com, Manila, weblogs.com, and that's when scaling became an issue. (Later we side-stepped the scaling issue by moving most of the processing to the desktop with Radio 8.) As we approached then cracked ease of use in web authoring, scaling became an issue, then the issue. A Manila server would work fine for a few thousand sites, but after that it would bog down because the architecture couldn't escape the confines of a single machine it was designed for in the 80s. (Before you say it's obsolete, there still are a lot of apps for single machines. Perl, Python, JavaScript and Java share the same design philosophy.) Same with weblogs.com. It worked great when there was a few thousand blogs. Once we hit 50K or so, we had to come up with a new design. Eventually we were tracking a couple million, and Frontier was hopelessy outclassed by the size of the problem. If only Amazon's database had been there, both Manila and weblogs.com could have been redesigned to keep up. It would have been a huge programming task, but it would have made it economically possible.  Today, when a company raises VC, it's probably because their app has achieved a certain amount of success and to get to the next level of users they need to spend serious money on infrastruture. There's a serious economic and human wall here. You need to buy hardware and find the people who know how to make a database scale. The latter is the hard problem, the people are scarce and the big companies are bidding up the price for their time. Now Amazon is willing to sell you that, to turn this scarce thing into a commodity, at what likely is a very reasonable price. (Haven't had time to analyze this yet, but the other services are.) Key point, the wall is gone, replaced with a ramp. If you coded your database in Amazon to begin with you will never see the wall. As you need more capacity you have to do nothing, other than pay your bill.  Further, the design of Amazon's database is remarkably like the internal data structures of modern programming languages. Very much like a hash or a dictionary (what Perl and Python call these structures) or Frontier's tables, but unlike them, you can have multiple values with the same name. In this way it's like XML. I imagine all languages have had to accomodate this feature of XML (we did in Frontier), so they should all map pretty well on Amazon's structure. This was gutsy, and I think smart.  They're going down a road we went down with XML-RPC and then SOAP. There may be some bumps along the way but there are no dead-ends, no deal-stoppers. All major environments can be adapted to work with this data structure, unless I'm missing something (standard disclaimers apply). Their move makes many things possible. As I said earlier, if it existed when we had to scale weblogs.com, we would certainly have used it. One could build an open identity system on it, probably in an afternoon, it would be perfect for that. A Twitter-like messaging system, again, would be easy. It's amazing that Microsoft and Google are sitting by and letting Amazon take all this ground in developer-land without even a hint of a response. It seems likely they have something in the works. Let's hope there's some compatibility.