Incredible database of English nouns!
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This gentrification and destruction of historic city centres for fun and profit is going on everywhere – when we were having a holiday in Portugal a couple of months ago we came across the campaign to save Bolhao market in downtown Porto. Some Dutch company had bought it to convert into a modern shopping centre a la Cabot Circus (and for that we’ve waited nearly 20 years since the demise of the WSDC!). Anyway I thought I’d let people know, as Porto is Bristols twin city.
Created with flickrSLiDR.
Making the World A Billion Times Better
Making the World A Billion Times Better
By Ray Kurzweil
Sunday, April 13, 2008; B04
M IT was so advanced in 1965 (the year I entered as a freshman) that it actually had a computer. Housed in its own building, it cost $11 million (in today’s dollars) and was shared by all students and faculty. Four decades later, the computer in your cellphone is a million times smaller, a million times less expensive and a thousand times more powerful. That’s a billion-fold increase in the amount of computation you can buy per dollar.
Yet as powerful as information technology is today, we will make another billion-fold increase in capability (for the same cost) over the next 25 years. That’s because information technology builds on itself — we are continually using the latest tools to create the next so they grow in capability at an exponential rate. This doesn’t just mean snazzier cellphones. It means that change will rock every aspect of our world. The exponential growth in computing speed will unlock a solution to global warming, unmask the secret to longer life and solve myriad other worldly conundrums.
How open source saved a school district’s IT department – LinuxWorld
How open source saved a school district’s IT department
California district slashes expenses, improves productivity with open source software
By Jon Brodkin, NetworkWorld.com, 09/21/07
Heather Carver faced major dilemmas when she became the IT director at Windsor Unified School District in California one year ago. There was no virus protection, no data backup, and upgrading to current Microsoft technologies would have cost more than $100,000, half of the district’s IT budget. Buying security from Trend Micro to cover all seven schools would have cost $200,000 a year.
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“When I got here a year ago they did not have an IT manager or director,†Carver said this week while giving a presentation at the Gartner Open Source Summit in Las Vegas. “It was basically someone who had some computer experience who fell into it. I had to do a complete review of my entire district, the desktop and servers, software licensing.â€
The solution to most of Windsor’s problems boiled down to two words: open source.
Postscripts: The Anatomy of Humor 6: “A guy walks into a bar . . .”
A penguin walks into a bar and asks the bartender, “Has my father been in here?” The bartender says, “I don’t know. What does he look like?”
