Interesting Reading 11/18
Design by the Book video series
http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/bythebook/
inspiration for artists and designers, from vintage valentines and textile
patterns, to fabric samples and turn-of-the-century menus from around the
world. For this online-only miniseries, Design by the Book, the Library
partnered with the leading design blog Design*Sponge to invite five New
York City-based artists to sift through our collections in search of
inspiration. Stay tuned for future episodes as the artists, who range from
a glassblower to a letterpress printer, create unique works inspired by
what they found. Special guest Isaac Mizrahi will also join us to share
his sources of inspiration. -------- Amazon CloudFront: Outlook for CDN Is Cloudy (and That's Good)
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/amazon_cloudfront_outlook_for.php Two months ago, Amazon - which has taken to sharing some of its massive
computing power with mere mortals as a means of developing additional
revenue streams - announced that they were developing a content-delivery
network (CDN) to complement their existing Amazon Simple Storage Service
(S3) offering. Today, they unveiled the beta version of that service,
named Amazon CloudFront. Boasting a now-familiar, pay-as-you-go pricing
model, Amazon CloudFront promises to make CDN an affordable addition for
any site looking to gain more efficient content delivery. -------- Storyboarding in IBM Rational Requirements Composer
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/08/1118_zhou/index.html?ca=drs- A storyboard is a logical and conceptual description of system
functionality for a specific scenario, including the interaction required
between the system users and the system. In IBM® Rational® Requirements Composer, a storyboard is represented as a
frame-by-frame depiction of a usage scenario, where each frame has a
description of the actions that lead to the next frame. It contains an
in-depth walkthrough of a linear story, represented as graphical frames on
a timeline with sample data. In essence, a storyboard is a sequence of
frames that elaborates the user experience. It includes a frame list,
timeline viewer, and frames. Frames are basically instances of sketches
within a storyboard. -------- Barcode Your Clothes to Get Web Traffic
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/magazine/16-11/st_cuecat Don't talk to strangers - scan them instead. That's the idea behind the
so-called ShotCodes on clothing by W-41, a Netherlands-based online
apparel company. If you spot one of these unique logos in the wild (bar,
club, methadone clinic, DMV), you surreptitiously snap a photo of it with
your phonecam and a tiny app directs you to the wearer's LinkedIn,
Facebook, or MySpace profile. You can then decide whether a "Hello" is in
order. To get in on the action, simply visit W-41.com, download a free
mobile app, select a ShotCode, and purchase gear from the online store
($50 to $57 a pop). Owners can connect their symbol to any Web site. Beats
having to dust off lines like "If you were a phaser, you'd be set on
'stunning.'"* -------- A Decentralized, Distributed Social Web
http://threeminds.organic.com/2008/11/a_decentralized_distributed_so.html With movements like Data Portability, the social web is moving to a more
open platform. The big networks are joining or building service offerings
to take content, user data, social graphs, and technology out to the wider
web. Facebook has Connect, MySpace and Ning are part of OpenSocial, and
smaller players like Twitter and Friendfeed were built on an open platform
from the start. The walls of the garden are breaking down, and it begs the question: What
will this new social world look like? Where will we be socializing in the
future and how? We are seeing the start of this next generation social web with the
emergence of social browsing applications. These projects range from
browser extensions like Headup and Glue to actual full-on browser
offerings like Flock. These tools help bring social conversation and
content directly into the browsing experience. While each offers its
unique flavor, not all of these start-ups will survive. The ultimate winner will be the one that follows these two rules:
- reduce, don't create, social noise and
- leverage existing social data and connections -------- A Computing Pioneer Has a New Idea
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/technology/businesscomputing/17machine.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss Steven J. Wallach is completing the soul of his newest machine. Mr. Wallach had a new idea. He had long been fascinated with a chip
technology called Field Programmable Gate Arrays. These chips are widely
used to make prototype computer systems because they can be easily
reprogrammed and yet offer the pure speed of computer hardware. There have
been a number of start-ups and large supercomputer companies that have
already tried to design systems based on the chips, but Mr. Wallach
thought that he could do a better job. The right way to use them, he decided, was to couple them so tightly to
the microprocessor chip that it would appear they were simply a small set
of additional instructions to give a programmer an easy way to turbocharge
a program. Everything had to look exactly like the standard programming
environment. In contrast, many supercomputers today require programmers to
be "heroic." The Convey computer will be based around Intel's microprocessors. It
will perform like a shape-shifter, reconfiguring with different hardware
"personalities" to compute problems for different industries, initially
aiming at bioinformatics, computer-aided design, financial services and
oil and gas exploration. -------- Stay Focused, Citigroup Chief Tells Employees
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/stay-focused-citigroup-chief-tells-employees/ Amid all the slides, graphs and figures in Citigroup's "town hall"
meeting, the news of additional job cuts more than 50,000 of them, many
through attrition and asset sales - was likely what employees were
dwelling on Monday. In an e-mail sent to Citi workers after the presentation, Vikram Pandit,
Citi's chief executive, told workers that "all of you have done an
outstanding job in the last 11 months" and urged them to "maintain your
focus" on serving clients and customers. He also said, in various ways,
that banking giant is well positioned to navigate the ongoing financial
crisis, declaring that "we will be the long-term winner in the industry." DealBook has the internal memo; read it after the jump.
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