Paul Goscicki

Another great TED talk

(via Chris Wanstrath)

Great talk. Short, only 25 minutes. Don’t know who Larry Lessig is? Shame on you…

From TEDTalks.

The best read of the day, week or maybe even month:

In particular I’ve concluded the free is deeply entwined into the very foundation of technology. I was sharing some of those emerging half-baked thoughts with Chris in the lobby of TED. Since that conversation I’ve discovered that the tie between technology and the free goes even further than I thought. My current conclusion can be summarized simply: Technology wants to be free.

Let me state it more precisely: Over time the cost per fixed technological function will decrease. If that function persists long enough its costs begin to approach (but never reach) zero. In the goodness of time any particular technological function will exist as if it were free.

This seems to be true for almost anything we make: basic things like food stuffs and materials (often called commodities), and complicated stuff like appliances, as well as services and intangibles. The costs of all these (per fixed unit) has been dropping over time, particularly since the industrial revolution.

From Technology Wants To Be Free by Kevin Kelly.

As a bonus, a semi-follow-up called Better Than Free is also a great read.

And another bonus, in similar tune, by the same author Where Music: Will Be Coming From.

During the recent move of my development machine to the basement I’ve conducted a test telling me what is the actual power consumption of my new Core 2 Duo powered server. Basically, it is a normal PC: Core 2 Duo E6300 1.86GHz, 2 x 512MB DDR2, 2 x 250GB SATA 7200rpm (RAID 1), old PCI graphic card and a 350W power supply. All running latest Ubuntu (currently 7.04 Feisty Fawn, server edition). Since it is a development machine, it’s idle most of the time (98% or even more). And this is the state I was making my measurements in. So what are the results? Well, I was quite surprised how low my power consumption actually is. I took three tests, which indicated basically the same: about 77 Watts. Even taking into the account temporary power usage spikes (when I’m actually using the machine…) it shouldn’t cost me more than 4$ per month to keep it running 24/7. Isn’t that sweet?

Apparently there seems be some hidden truth beneath the Apple’s decision to switch to the Intel chips. Robert X. Cringely suggests that it might be that Intel is planning to buy out Apple (just another word for merger). I must say that he uses some really convincing arguments. On the other hand the rumor that Intel might be producing PowerPC chips for Apple was very sensible and convincing too.

Here are some excerpts:

If Apple is willing to embrace the Intel architecture because of its performance and low power consumption, then why not go with AMD, which equals Intel’s power specs, EXCEEDS Intel’s performance specs AND does so at a lower price point across the board? Apple and AMD makes far more sense than Apple and Intel any day.

(…)

The vaunted Intel roadmap is nice, but no nicer than the AMD roadmap, and nothing that IBM couldn’t have matched. If Apple was willing to consider a processor switch, moving to the Cell Processor would have made much more sense than going to Intel or AMD, so I simply have to conclude that technology has nothing at all to do with this decision. This is simply about business – BIG business.

Read the full article: Going for Broke.

We are all familiar with the term vendor lock in (and it’s no news that it’s mainly associated with Microsoft), but a vendor lock out? Apparently this is what FeedBurner is doing with their latest offer:

Let’s say you decide you want to stop using FeedBurner. You loved the services, you loved the customer support, you loved everything about FeedBurner, but let’s face it: you’re going crazy with all the delightful services, and you’ve decided you can’t take it anymore. You want out. You’ve always been able to do this if you run your own server: just like you redirect your feed traffic to FeedBurner, you can redirect your traffic away from FeedBurner. No problem.

The only disconcerting fact is that they provide the return redirect for 31 days. After this period they delete your feed/redirect permanently. Other than that – they play very nice. Who knows, maybe I’ll switch my RSS feeds to them as well?

Apparently the rumors were true and we will see Pentium based Macs. We could already see a 3.4GHz P4 running Mac OS X at the WWDC conference just yesterday. At least people were saying that it was actually a P4 as I did not see it with my own eyes. It is definitely a huge change for Apple. What I really would like to know is if I will ever be able to install Mac OS X on my x86 processor as a secondary system, next to my beloved & hated Windows XP. Although many people say that it won’t happen, I certainly hope that it will. Either officially or using some ugly and nasty hacks. But it doesn’t matter. I just want to have my yours Mac OS X!