"Last few weeks I was busy implementing CGL Map Reduce a streaming based map reduce implementation that uses a content dissemination network for all its communication. Our main objective behind this implementation is to avoid the overhead imposed by the technique adopted by both Google and Hadoop in their map-reduce implementations, that is communicate data via files." - Vlado Handziski
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This is good but I wish they'd made Hadoop use a pub-sub system so that they would be comparing pub-sub versus using a distributed file system. As it is they're comparing a different model (pub-sub) written in C++ with Hadoop's Java distributed file system. It's hard to tell if the performance differences they're seeing mean anything. - Adewale Oshineye
"The SWARM of autonomous beings by their very nature will have emergent and complex behavior. They will flock , flirt, dance and interact, and their actions will surprise and astonish even us, their creators. They are simple, but together they will behave in ways more complex than we can predict. A lot like LIFE ." - Vlado Handziski
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"Resource-constrained sensor gateways can use the WebSphere MQ Telemetry Transport (MQtt) protocol to communicate with the WebSphere MQ brokers. It is an open and lightweight publish/subscribe protocol designed specifically for remote telemetry applications and optimized for Networkings over low-bandwidth, high-cost networks. A Java implementation of the client side of the MQtt protocol can be downloaded from this location." - Vlado Handziski
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"In virtually every field of endeavor, most people learn quickly at first, then more slowly and then stop developing completely. Yet a few do improve for years and even decades, and go on to greatness." - Adewale Oshineye
Great tips. I hope they find their way in the next edition of the patterns book :) - Vlado Handziski
At some point in the next month I have to change: http://softwarecraftsmanship.o... to make more explicit reference to Ericsson's notions of "deliberate practice" and possibly the, out of print, book called Etudes for Programmers - Adewale Oshineye
Cool. I did not know that you have some of the content online! - Vlado Handziski
The plan is to put everything online once the book's published. - Adewale Oshineye
:( I hope we get some feedback from the FF guys on what happened... - Vlado Handziski
my guess is too many people. Scoble seems to think this is a better infrastructure or some bullshit like that... but my guess is that all these nets have the same problem of popularity stresses. we'll see now won't we? - AnotherⓃⓄⒶⒽ
it will be really interesting to see if FF tell us all what happend - h1ro
"these are the main reasons why we chose XMPP as the native message passing protocol for the Evergreen backend. It's very low overhead, extremely reliable and because it is connection oriented it has much lower latency and startup cost than HTTP for high-traffic environments"
More examples undermining the Restafarian Jihad - Adewale Oshineye
Wait, XMPP is *low overhead*? Sigh, what have we come to. - ⓞnor
XMPP is the "silver bullet" layer. It's complex enough that few people understand it, and so they can push all of their problem down to XMPP and imagine that it solves them :) - Paul Buchheit
Don't worry, the XMPP BOSH people will "solve" that problem also :) We keep piling levels of abstraction and hope that the architecture is going to hold. Until now the technology was always one step ahead, so we were never cornered into a position where we have to stop and rethink the basics. But those times are over. That is why all the next-Internet research is so important. That's why GENI is important, so we can test new ideas without the burdens of backwards compatibility... - Vlado Handziski
For a taste of these architectural explorations, google the following papers: "Making the World (of Communications) a Different Place", "A Data-Oriented (and Beyond) Network Architecture", "Towards a Modern Communications API", etc. - Vlado Handziski
Wait. You're tired of the layering in the XMPP stack, so the answer is to reinvent the entire Internet protocol? Anyway, isn't XMPP just packets, only slower? It's not like it's reliable or anything. - ⓞnor
What is the sudden interest in XMPP pubsub, AMQP, telling us? People find the interaction pattern and its semantics useful for their applications. They are data-oriented, they can benefit from the identity and time decoupling... So why are we still using the BSD socket as the de-facto API between the APP and the networking stack and build all these abstractions on the top. Maybe the time has come to re-base and promote pubsub as the basic transport level API? We in academia have to earn our bread somehow :) - Vlado Handziski
Isn't that called IP multicast? Nobody wanted it. - ⓞnor
In IP-multicast one needs to explicitly specify the network identities of the parties to communicate with (via the multicast address). The whole idea of pubsub is exactly not having to know the peer identity. i.e. one subscribes to a particular topic, or places a filter on the content of the notifications, etc. The optimal network layer implementation of this semantics would skip the service lookup step that would be needed if one tries to implement pubsub on top of raw IP multicast. - Vlado Handziski
Well, it's all totally moot, because it's clear that nobody's going to be changing IP any time soon. In any case, it seems like we should figure out what we would want at the application layer before anyone goes nuts redesigning TCP/IP. Sure, people are talking about pub/sub - in fact, people have been talking about pub/sub for approximately as long as there has been pub and/or sub - but it's not like we have a clear model that everyone loves. - ⓞnor
XMPP has a rather large weakness: there are very few implementations of many of the critical XEPs but it's proponents are fond of handwaving away problems by saying that there's a XEP that covers that. For instance this discussion: http://ralphm.jaiku.com/presen... with @BobWyman revealed that no-one seems to know where you can get hold of an open source XEP-0060 implementation. Since that's the pub-sub XEP I'm a little concerned. - Adewale Oshineye
@nor, we can decouple the interface and to some extent its semantics from the implementation, so we can use the existing protocol stack. All the MOMs have been doing this for a long time. Building directly on TCP like XMPP does, instead of tunneling everything over HTTP is a good first step towards reducing this overhead in the Web world. But down the road we will have to solve the problems we are facing today in a more systematic way. - Vlado Handziski
This Twisted-based code has not been touched for a long time, but it claims to have interoperated with ejabbered pub-sub at some time: http://code.google.com/p/pytho... . Still a long way to XEP0060 compliance, I guess... - Vlado Handziski
BTW, what is the status of Wokkel, ralphm's own implementation effort? - Vlado Handziski
Some people prefer simple solutions that work. Some people prefer theoretically ideal solutions. In general, the simple solutions are the ones that we actually use today, but the theoretically ideal solutions are expected to replace them as soon as we work out a few of the unexpected complications :) - Paul Buchheit
food for thought: Can SMTP be used for these scenarios? What are enabling features in XMPP that are not present in SMTP? - Gary Burd
@Vlado -- I'm skeptical of the argument that "building directly on TCP like XMPP does, instead of tunneling everything over HTTP is a good first step towards reducing this overhead in the Web world." The reason I'm skeptical is that URL-addressed HTTP/1.1 with Keep-Alive runs just about everywhere today, works well across existing infrastructure like firewalls and proxies and cache servers, and can be made to be more efficient on the server (comet, eventlets, greenlets). - DeWitt Clinton
DeWitt, as long as performance / scale is not a problem we can continue building our infrastructure on top of HTTP. After ajax and comet, now we even have TCP sockets in JavaScript (http://cometdaily.com/2008/07/...). What's next? Building web servers in our browsers? At some point this will have to stop. If sending XML over TCP can do the job, why go over HTTP? - Vlado Handziski
@Vlado - why go over HTTP? Because it is already supported by every server and client in the world, it provides well-known and well understood semantics for resource addressing (URLs), caching (If-Modified, Expires, Etags, etc), proxying (Location, X-Forwarded-For), authentication (Basic, Digest, OAuth), persistence (Keep-Alive), state (Cookies), representational transfer (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc). Reinventing and redeploying that all over again seems like the wrong boulder to push up the hill. - DeWitt Clinton
@DeWitt: I am far from denying HTTP's success. It is currently our only viable workaround around several systemic shortcomings in the existing network architecture.But things would look different if we can redesign from scratch :) URLs are a good resource addressing scheme, so why are we not directly routing by them (yes, string matching can be made almost as efficient as IP matching)? Many applications want SUBSCRIBE/UNSUBSCRIBE, PUBLISH so why shoestring over GET/POST/PUT/DELETE semantics, etc... - Vlado Handziski
"As yet unseen footage of the first stable version of levelHead, an augmented-reality spatial-memory game by Julian Oliver.
Warning! This is a spoiler for the first 3 cubes: the easy Red Cube, the tricky Green Cube and the ridiculously difficult Orange Cube." - Vlado Handziski
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"Except Google might well be moving away from XMPP to a binary protocol for Google Talk on mobile devices, in Android, to reduce the communication overhead. While XMPP support will probably get back into Android, maybe a binary protocol (not this one) is better suited to high-volume notifications?" - Vlado Handziski
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""touched echo" is a minimal medial intervention in public space. The visitors of the Brühl's Terrace (Dresden, Germany) are taken back in time to the night of the terrible air raid on 13th February 1945. In their role as a performer they put themselves into the place of the people who shut their ears away from the noise of the explosions. While leaning on the balustrade the sound of airplanes and explosions is transmitted from the swinging balustrade through their arm directly into into the inner ear (bone conduction)." - Vlado Handziski
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"The HDMI Extender includes a set of HDMI Transmitter and a HDMI Receiver and allows transmission of 1080P HD over 150ft over Ethernet cables. CAT 6 cable is recommended for 1080P and best performance." - Chris White
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I must be psychic, since I wired my house with 2 cat6 cables a couple years ago. :) - Chris White
It's just bits, right? Why do we keep inventing different, incompatible ways to move bits through wires? - ⓞnor
My electrician's A/V guy told me he usually wires high-end homes with component cable throughout the house. This seems archaic to me, and also requires a really thick conduit. Cat6, on the other hand, can be used for ethernet, phone, remote control, and now HD video. I'm really excited about this product. - Chris White
interesting - but I wonder - how far away exactly is most people's dvd players from their televisions to where this would be needed? And if so, seems like the wireless option will have more appeal http://news.cnet.com/8301-1078... - Jason Kaneshiro
:) Archaic is probably what I did 3 years ago when I used a combination of RG6 and Cat6 runs to all sockets. I had to build a custom patch panel to terminate all the video cables (the commercial solutions from the EU equivalents of Leviton, Lagrand were way too expensive). All cabling fits nicely in a 11U rack, but I use the RG6 only for distributing a satellite TV signal to all the rooms. I guess I should have used 2xCat6 instead :( - Vlado Handziski
It's not for DVD players, it's so you can have a single centralized media center PC with your movies and stuff on hard disk, and you don't have to try to make your PC run silent and look pretty under the TV, and you can drive all your TVs from a single box in the basement or a closet somewhere. - ⓞnor
@nor. Yes, exactly. I've built a media closet with all the wiring in the house feeding into it. There's a bundled cable you can pull to get 2 cat6 and 2 coax: http://www.broadbandutopia.com.... I also have all 20 speakers in the house terminating in the closet. - Chris White
I already do streaming from a computer to the entertainment system via WiFi. And also, don't have ethernet ports anywhere near the entertainment area. Running wires all over the place is very do not want. - Jason Kaneshiro
Jason, I'm trying to build a system that allows me to watch the highest quality HD video (1080p) in different rooms, including the kitchen, bedroom, and living room. I don't want different boxes in all those locations. The Belkin product looks interesting, I'll be interested in seeing if it can handle wireless interference and still deliver 1080p HD. - Chris White
However, I'm writing software to handle all this, and I want to do some reasonably sophisticated home automation stuff, so off the shelf solutions might not work well for me. That's why I'm excited about this extender. - Chris White
"What’s intriguing is the notion that we can learn about Ultra LARGE Scale issues by working at any extreme scale, where the extremes “break” the received software engineering wisdom." - Vlado Handziski
It is nice to see that people are starting to understand that the large scale Internet/Web and the Wireless Sensor Networks communities have a lot to learn from each other. - Vlado Handziski
What speaks against a simple IM setup using any of the Jabber clients out there? - Vlado Handziski
Nothing in particular - but is there a servce that will give me free IM to SMS? The keys here are the ability to subscribe to a specific stream, the fact that is has RSS output, and the fact that it can be delivered via SMS (and this can be controlled independently of the subscription). Anything else that can do those (and is an open platform as well) would be better than using Twitter. - Cameron Neylon
If free SMS is a requirement then there are not too many options. For the ones willing to pay, there are several commercial Jabber2SMS bridges: http://www.jabber.org/node/465 - Vlado Handziski
I have to admit the free SMS from Twitter is appealing - just because it means I don't have to spend money. That said it costs money to send SMS so you get what you pay for. Its important to have the messaging work when we're not necessarily at a computer. Ultimately building something using Jabber or just RSS that does exactly what we want will become appealling. - Cameron Neylon
"Dave Munger over at Cognitive Daily just wrote this post about people's lack of understanding of error bars in the graphical representation of data. The post is very interesting and I encourage people to take the quiz that he has posted on the correct interpretation of error bars." - Vlado Handziski
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"After many months in the making, we ‘re announcing the Mobile Industry Atlas. The Atlas is a visual map of who’s who in the mobile handset industry, available in glossy A2 wallchart and PDF format. This is a comprehensive map showcasing 400+ leading companies across 30 market sectors, spanning all major players involved from handset design through retailing including development and delivery of hardware, software, SIM cards, services and content." - Vlado Handziski
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"There is a personal motivation in proving that java technology can help solve many of the technical problems of the field. The HA field is very fragmented many many vendors, many standards, few dominant, a lot of proprietary standards. Using the modularity of JBoss we plan on supporting various such protocols out of the box." - Vlado Handziski
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I think that it should be clear by now that different applications will have different requirements in terms of the naming scheme as well as the underlying notification and subscription routing. The trade-off between the expressiveness of the naming model and the complexity of the matching, routing and forwarding will have to be selected in each case separately. - Vlado Handziski
"Kemp's model, developed with Massachusetts Institute of Technology cognitive scientist Josh Tenenbaum, runs data through an assortment of potential maps -- trees, linear orders, multidimensional spaces, rings, dominance hierarchies, cliques and so on -- and decides which type of relationship best fits the data." - Vlado Handziski
I see XMPP becoming VERY important in the coming years. We have only touched the surface of what's possible. I think it will have the importance of HTTP. - Meryn Stol
Instead of experimenting with custom solutions, it might be better if the community revisits the proposed PubSub XMPP extension in the form of XEP-0060, cleaning the specification from the needles details and adding more advanced content filtering. - Vlado Handziski
I suspect that one of the reason SixApart don't complain about being polled is because they have: http://updates.sixapart.com/ It's an Atom based solution to the problem of pushing out updates. - Adewale Oshineye
As for the idea of Twitter being selective in the updates they send out I suspect that it's easier for them (in terms of the amount of coding needed) to send out all updates as they happen than to query their DB or perform message matching before selectively sending out updates. - Adewale Oshineye
"While we all worry about where we’re going to get more energy in an increasingly energy-obsessed world, there’s also another alternative: Use less power. That may soon be simpler, thanks to the introduction of a bevy of inexpensive devices that let homeowners monitor how much energy appliances, TVs, PCs, and heating and cooling systems actually use." - Bret Taylor
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Does anyone own a Control4 system? I've seen them at CES, but I wonder how well they work in practice. - Chris White
It is nice to see these devices finally reaching the wider public. The underlying IEEE 802.15.4 PHY+MAC and to lesser extend Zigbee can be considered as proven technologies by now. So I have no doubt that the Control4 solutions will work as expected, but the prices are still way too high for a mass market penetration. - Vlado Handziski
I think it's possible to have products built on good standards, and still not provide a good experience. There could be user interface and interoperability problems, as well as having common devices not supported. Just trying to see if anyone has any direct experience with these systems. - Chris White
I've automated much of my home with X10 (and now Insteon) devices for years - automatic lights, drapes and window shades open and close at specific temperatures, I can even call on phone to turn devices on and off and set thermostats. While its nice to know how much power is drawn by a specific device, I take the stance that if I'm not using it, all of it is wasted. - JodyUnwired
I'm putting in a lot of automation into my new cottage I'm building hoping that it will minimize some of the wasted power. Also installing solar power and soloar heating for the pool. My next power project is to get approval for wind generator! - Bryan Thatcher
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somehow it is jarring to see "cottage" and "pool" in the same sentence .. america? - Gregory Lent
Interview with ..."Jeff Becker of Honeywell Process Solutions about wireless technologies for industrial use including wireless sensor networks, WiFi, wireless for control and an update on the ISA SP100 committee." - Gary Mintchell - Vlado Handziski
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"Interview with Kris Pister, CTO and founder of Dust Networks discusses wireless sensor networks, what mesh networking is, offers evidence of reliability and security, and discusses the economics of implementing the technology." - Gary Mintchell - Vlado Handziski
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He definitely won the harts of the people here. More than 250.000 showed up, demonstrating that the spirit of the transatlantic partnership is still very much alive. Winning the battle at home will be much harder... - Vlado Handziski
Returning from almost a week offline and looking at my Inbox makes me wonder why the current generation of Gmail labs extensions is limited to simple UI modifications. With all the data at their disposal, they are in the best position to provide us with powerful AI support to deal with the information torrent... - Vlado Handziski
We were talking about this at lunch and we didn't have any really workable ideas on how to do this. What concrete things can be done to help people "deal with the information torrent?" - Adewale Oshineye
I think one can start with small steps like automatic labeling, priority assignment, etc. For example, if I constantly reply within a small window to messages from particular set of contacts, mark incoming mail from this set with higher priority. - Vlado Handziski
Another example: Labeling based on keywords sometimes fails (a rule labeling all mails containing "Call for Papers" as "cfp" also marks direct correspondence containing the phrase, although this is not in line with the "semantic" meaning of the label -- CfP announcements). Gmail should use the knowledge that a mail has been sent to a lot of other users to increase the precision in labeling such "announcement" mails, etc. - Vlado Handziski
"As the dust is clearing after the storm, a new landscape is unveiling in the mobile industry; one where the balance of power is concentrating around 7 centres of gravity: Adobe, Apple, Google, LiMo, Microsoft, Nokia and Qualcomm. In other words, the industry is transitioning from a horizontal structure of operating system offerings circa 2002 to a vertical structure of complete offerings circa 2008 (as all industries do, based on the double-helix management theory)." - Vlado Handziski
"But I have to wonder: is there a better way? Is there something beyond RHTML, Views, and Templates? What examples would you point to of web development stacks that avoided degenerating into yet more hazardous, difficult to maintain tag soup? Is there anything truly better on the horizon?" - Vlado Handziski
I must say I was a bit disappointed that nobody in the comments mentioned Divmod's Stan (part of Nevow) as alternative. I think it is one of the better ways for generating markup in python. For a lightweight introduction check the "Meet Stan" tutorial: http://www.kieranholland.com/c... - Vlado Handziski
"Why ruin a perfectly good messaging format by throwing this RPC junk into the package?" - Vinoski - Vlado Handziski
"My advice to Google, then, is to just drop all the service and RPC stuff. Seriously. It causes way more problems than it’s worth, it sends people down a fundamentally flawed distributed computing path, and it takes away from what is otherwise a nice message format and structure." - Vinoski - Vlado Handziski
I am enjoying the discussion between Steve and Adewale in the comments... - Vlado Handziski
“I have 16,011 subscribers and I would like to tell them about smart people to subscribe to. Who are the smartest FriendFeed'ers around? Any physicists? Scientists? Doctors? Economists? Lawyers? Chemists? Material scientists?”
Hey Robert I thought you did not care about number of followers and here you go!!! You can't help it heh. I know it is about who you follow and not who follows you, but you also keep telling me not to worry about numbers that don't matter :) - Loic Le Meur
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Loic: you'll notice, though, that I'm looking for more smart people to follow. That's what's driving this, not a beg for more followers. And, also, note that I'm trying to add some value to the exhaust I send along to the people who do follow me. I'm trying to find smarter people to listen to, so that my exhaust is smarter too. It's who you follow that defines you. - Robert Scoble
I'm a Physicist, AI & Robotics programmer. Waiting on funding news so I can start my PhD. - CannonGod
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Why only scientists, doctors, and the other categories named here? What is "smart"? In my book, there are different types of intelligence, and I don't see any artists, writers, musicians, or smart plumbers on this list. What's with strictly equating an occupation with intelligence? Let's think a little more openly, please. - Cathryn Hrudicka
i think http://friendfeed.com/nova is interesting due to his work with ontology and the semantic web. i really like where you're going with this thread, bring on the BIG thinkers! - Nice Fish Films
And oh yes! I'm building software to rethink the way socialmedia should be :) - directeur
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@Nice Fish Films thanks! Semantic Web is one of my interests... adding nova. :D - Rom Feria
@creativesage: I love Coltrane, Ahmad Jamal, Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis, Dizzy, Birdy... does this count? :) - directeur
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Tell them to subscribe to me, even if you use me as an example of who NOT to subscribe to. --- ok, enough bad jokes for tonight. I promise. - Paul Short
I like the idea of increasing the clumpiness of your long tail. Help your followers/fans meet each other. The value isn't just in the scale of your fan base but in their interconnectedness with each other. How long before we have Scoblizer meetups? - Phil Wolff
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Thanks for starting this thread, @Scoble. Am subscribing to more smart people... hoping that some of their intelligence will rub off to me via the ethers of the internet. :) - Rom Feria
Robert, A high degree of self-confidence! - mahyaa
Zahra: I was trying to find some of the less technology-industry centric smart people. But many of the smartest people in my life are engineers (my dad is one). - Robert Scoble
Come on... It's not about the title/status (I've been a univ. teacher at 23) It's about what we make. What we "create". Don't you think? :) - directeur
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@directeur Commentary can carry just as much importance as creation, they are just different categories. - xero
I see:) anyway I'm a software engineer. seems it doesn't count ;) - Zahra HB
Software engineers are extremely smart. What you do is akin to magic for most people. - Robert Scoble
@jokeyxero: Totally agree! Inovation is not just about "making" "things" - directeur
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@zahrahb: Of course it counts! and your firstname is a flower, so it counts more ;-) - directeur
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I think by responding to your request, I have some how diminished in smartitudinessosity...besides, smart people aren;t interesting to follow; train wrecks are much more fun (i.e. reality television). - Josh Tabin
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Feels like magic sometimes. I actually have a code snippet folder labeled "Magic". - xero
Robert, you should be following some of the wine geeks (and not just GaryV, who dwells on another plane of existence). There's not many of them of FF yet, but what they lack in intelligence (per se), they more than make up with personality and opinion. - Randy Hall
Someone like Tim Elliot (on FF) or Tom Wark (not on FF, but I'm trying!) - Randy Hall
Respectfully, kind of a one sided list there. There's also the creative, often less linear side. Different kind of "smart" - and not a lot of them on here unfortunately. Writers, directors, artists, etc. Different assumptions about the world, different ways of looking at it and processing it. - Dean Terry
I'm a physicist but never think a phycist can be smart:D - Maryamss
But I haven't seen any geek who could be said smart ... all of them live isolated in their office (Generally) - saee:Dsharif
Can we find the smartest person on FF and have them make a Gattica room and then they can screen for the genetically and educationally superior among us? That would be awesome - Marco (aureliusmaximus)
Physicists are smart enough to know that they know absolutely nothing. Quantum entanglement still blows my mind. - xero
you should subscribe to Bryan Jones, on twitter as bwjones. He's a scientist and also great photographer. Check his website, linked from his twitter page. - mark zero (Jason)
<- looking for more 'SMARTest' FriendFeed'ers as in SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE and GUT FEELING, creativity & ARTISTS - Margit Hinke
I found most of Iranian users smart.they are very clever and educated - Maryamss
due to maryam's comment, I think all geeks are smart ;) - Zahra HB
In general Robert, I think we have serious under-representation of the sciences here on FF. There seems to be a vibrant community of Bio-chemists that I am tracking via @neilfws and @mndoci that also tackle more general subjects like doing science in the Web 2.0 setting. Until now I could not find anything comparable in my side of the woods, i.e. systems research in networking, etc. There is a large community of us on Facebook, but my friends there are slow in accepting FF - Vlado Handziski
I agree w/Berci below--that's a good place to start, but it's an aggregate of ALL doc/medstudent bloggers, some far more tech saavy than others. By definition, most docs don't have a TON of time for noodling online to keep active in all communities, but there's no shortage of us who attempt to leverage newer social tech to our professional advantage--and more of a 'purist' approach, not for slimy marketing gimmicks either. - Enrico C.
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3rd year Computer Science Undergrad. Yeaah, we need a dedicated CS room. What say you??????? - Roberto Bonini
That's absolutely right, Vlado! Life scientists and medical professionals are under-represented in Friendfeed and it will take a lot of time to persuade others to join us. For example, I only know about 3 medical students (including me) who are on Friendfeed. What do tech guys think about that? How could we persuade more people of these fields to join Friendfeed? - Berci Mesko
Berci: one problem is that newbies are not able to immediately see the richness of the FF world (the experience is coupled with the number of subs, participation, etc.), and they loose interest fast. That is why I like the approach of creating rooms dedicated to different science areas and exporting their feeds to colleagues, so they can learn about the dynamics on FF even before they join. - Vlado Handziski
I did a Ph.D. in bioinformatics / computational biology and is currently in the process of starting my own research group. I will leave it to others to judge if that is a smart thing to do ;-) - Lars Juhl Jensen
BTW: there is a considerable number of life scientists at FF - just take a look at group "The Life Scientists". - Lars Juhl Jensen
Well, I do have a degree in Physics but do not use it. =) - Jauder Ho
Personally, I look for motivated people to follow, those who are following their passions to make the world (at least THEIR part in the world) a better place. I have 3 graduate degrees (Rehabilitation, Mental Health, and Education) and 2 professional licenses but no longer work in the field. I write about the field, using my knowledge of related topics, but do nothing that requires those qualifications. So the degrees aren't everything. - Shelly Weiss
It's really cool of Scoble to want to "give back" something to those who follow him. Anyway, what's Scoble's definition of "Smart"? I am a Web Ninja (Developer, Engineer, whatever you call it, but because I enjoy my work, I prefer to call myself a NInja), and a part-time Radio Host, so am I smart? Hmm.. - Winston Teo
Winston, he already defined it: 1) Anyone who is a scientist (including, but possibly not limited to: physicists, chemists, and material scientists), 2) doctors, 3) economists, 4) lawyers, 5) some engineers (including, but possibly not limited to software engineers), and 6) Anyone who is married to a CERN physicist. - Mark Trapp
Mark: my definition of smart is much broader than that, but I only have about 200 characters to play with on FriendFeed. I used to room with a janitor who was smart. They are rare, but out there. Probably are programming on weekends like this guy was. I'm thinking about why some people are smart. Probably has something to do with the first words out of their mouth are about ideas, not about celebrities. - Robert Scoble
I have a B.Sc. in psychology, half of a B.Eng., and a graduate certificate in corporate communications & public relations. Does that make me smart? Maybe. Lets have a conversation, and you can judge for yourself. - Rick Weiss
Here is a link to a small survey about the scientists that participate in the Life Scientists room, regarding on what do they work on. http://friendfeed.com/e/c0dafa... - Pedro Beltrao
"This fall, San Francisco will test 6,000 of its 24,000 metered parking spaces in the nation’s most ambitious trial of a wireless sensor network that will announce which of the spaces are free at any moment." - Robert Seidman
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I think the intent is to limit the fights that already happen over parking spots. Hopefully no pedestrians get run over while people are driving around while looking at their iPhones... - Robert Seidman
Man, this is like a million George Costanzas crying out and suddenly silenced. - Mark Trapp
(starts coding iPhone app that shows free parking spaces AND gives you a coupon for the Red Lobster you just parked in front of) :-) - Karim
LOL Karim, but there are no Red Lobsters in the city of San Francisco. - Robert Seidman
Hey, Robert ... Before I finally manage to turn the computer off tonight (intense threads this week!) ... Just thought I'd remind everyone that Monday's your birthday :) So Happy Birthday in advance old friend! - Charlie Anzman
Robert - so they passed some kind of law in San Francisco that only allows for edible seafood? - Karim
Thanks, Charlie. Karim, not really sure why but there aren't many national chains in the city itself beyond fast food. No Olive Garden, Fridays, Applebees, Chillis, etc. The lone exception I can think of is Chevys. - Robert Seidman
If this smartphone idea comes out the SF's Municipal Transportation Agency & their Department of Parking and Traffic, it will probably be an efficient system. Their intensely organized group has been very quick with getting me my unpaid parking ticket notifications to my doorstep in a timely manner. - Pete Delucchi
For the geeks here on FF, here is some more info on the TSMP protocol from Dust Inc. (provider of the nodes and the low-level networking infrastructure) that makes all this possible: http://tinyurl.com/68to5a - Vlado Handziski
