Tech-Blog: Category technology

iPod video

Mike — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 11:04:00 -0400

The worst kept secret is now public.

Will the video iPod move mainstream video off of cable? Maybe not. But it may be the trigger for mainstream video blogs and pod casts, downloadable TV shows, live video. Something big is going to happen. It will also be interesting to see if/how Sony reacts with their PSP.

There may be an opportunity for a bloglines-like app for notification of new video content -- an RSS based TV guide. Or maybe a Flickr for home video?

Web quickies

mop — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 12:09:00 -0500

Some tidbits from my Bloglines RSS subscriptions.

Phonetags

Via Smart Mobs, Phonetags allows cell phone users to create bookmarks for BBC6 radio content, complete with metadata. A clever way to create playlists for users ’on the go’, and a taste of what is to come as radio and TV merge with Internet enabled mobile devices.

Spell with Flickr

Flickr, one of the leading online photo organizers, opened their API some time ago, allowing third party applications to flourish. Spelling with images is a little cheezy, but it’s a start (note the smart URI for the In-Touch example). Amazon, one of the first to open their API, can do something similar with conver art. Via Smart Mobs.

Yahoo Mobile RSS

Yahoo has added RSS aggregation to it’s list of mobile offerings. The UI seems a little primitive, although it’s tough to comment much without seeing the aggregator in action. See also the Yahoo news article. I’d like to hear comments from anyone who uses Yahoo on their mobile. Via MMOM.

Foray into 64-bit computing

mop — Thu, 12 Aug 2004 11:00:00 -0400

A summary of my experience to date with AMD’s 64-bit platform...

AMD has been developing 64-bit processors since 1999 or so, and released their first commercial chips in 2003. Large word systems have been around for some time (SPARC, MIPS, etc.), so why now and why AMD? Much of the recent interest in 64-bit systems is due to the scaling of commodity hardware - processors are fast and memory is cheap. In theory, fast hardware will diminish the overhead associated with larger data chunks and registers, and 64-bit systems can utilize large amounts of RAM. The new AMD processors are interesting because they are backward compatible with Intel 32-bit instruction sets (i.e. you can use binaries compiled for x86) and because the chips are priced to compete with 32-bit commodity hardware.

32-bit emulation

Is it marketing hype or is AMD64’s backwards compatibility a stroke of genius. Perhaps on a desktop, where you’re running a mix of compiled and commercial software it’ll be nice to have a choice. The reality is probably not that simple, but I suspect OSs will adapt. On servers, I suspect that most 64-bit systems will run in a pure 64-bit environment.

larger address space

The AMD address space is larger than conventional systems (40-bit, I think) allowing many gigabytes of RAM (terrabytes?) to be addresses without funky munging that is required in 32-bit systems. The 4GB address space of 32-bit systems is becoming a practical limit in today’s commodity systems. This, I think, is AMD64’s current sweet spot.

NetGear router upgrade

mop — Fri, 30 Jul 2004 21:53:00 -0400

If anyone else is having a hard time ugrading the firmware of their NetGear MR814 wireless router using Mozilla/Firefox, then Marty might have the answer. The trick is to include the Upgrade=" Upload " parameter.