Use an image as a search criterion

I here by claim this idea,,
use an image as the search term "I want to find images like this".

UPDATE
Those crazy dudes at http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr
have just blooming well gone and made it :(
This weeks "Nice work" award goes to Christian Langreiter who did all this way back in 2006

Doing buisness in a virtual world

In the beginning Phil created a virtual world it was without form, and void; And Phil said let there be an architecture and there was the linden grid. And Phil saw the grid and saw that it was good. And so Phil saw rich teens creating avatars in Paris Hiltons image and thought ...
"hey I could really make a few bucks here".

Well thats how it all started. Making virtual money is more complicated nowerdays, Linden Lab founded 99 by Philip Rosedale now has a GDP above $500,000,000 and all the paraphernalia that goes with it, but the virtual economy is not just Secondlifes domain, no no, other virtual worlds such as Club Penguin and Habbo are milking real money out of the pre-teen demographic, and the big boys Disney, Sony and Warner are all about to wade in.

Techniques such ad pegging USD to game tokens, selling virtual relestate, charging for premium content and advertising into the virtual world either during user media consumption or in a specialised area are all helping to loosen our purses. Interestingly a major revenue stream is advertising, consumption is often rewarded i.e. you cant get the cute white Paris H. sunglasses until your avatar has eaten a virtual Mackie D.

We can expect to see new profit leveraging techniques soon such as exclusive content, brand splitting and targeting different consumer demographics such as mothers and the over 40's. I can only wish that the apocalypse happens before I find myself looking forward to taking a virtual bus tour to Snowdonia just so that I can get a virtual zimmer frame.

Green IT and the Prisoner's dilemma

Imagine you want to buy a data center ... you have a choice of 3 suppliers, all things being equal and above board, you will choose the supplier that provides the best kit and service for the lowest cost,.
simple?
no.

If you look at it from an entirely fiscal point of view, which ever supplier has the lowest cost has an advantage in winning the business, as they can provide a lower cost to their customer. But thats bloody obvious I hear you yelling. What stops one of our suppliers from behaving like a right bastard, abusing their work force and the environment? The answer is the state with its threat of the judiciary which representing us individuals and the other suppliers can remove that suppliers competitive advantage and even freedom. Overall everyone is forced to co-operate and by and by everyone more or less wins, in the places where the judiciary has the ability to impose its will.

Game theory describes situations like this as "The prisoners dilemma" the prisoners who default are the bad suppliers, and if everyone behaves (both prisoners and guards) then every one wins

Now apply this logic to the global green issue and climate change. Whichever country that pollutes has a commercial advantage because they have lower costs ... but ... on a global scale there is no real judiciary except the western military which is not powerfull enough to enforce fair play across the entire problem domain therefore the only state that the world can adopt is the Pareto-suboptimal solution. I.e. all nations default, and we allow the environment to collapse.

The only other stable state is a single world government.

Green research focused on HP and Sun,

Sun
Not very forth comming, if phoned they will direct you to the VAR, is messaged they will direct you to a random weirdo in a call center who will redirect you to the VAR! Sun Has a really good “reuse” policy for data center components, servers and other equipment.

Most importantly they are measuring power consumption to transactions which is the most important metric for efficiency to carbon emission.

Here is their public corporate carbon statement > http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/csr/report2007/eco/carbon_reporting.jsp

Here is the bench mark for the SPARC t2000 > http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/t2000/benchmarks.jsp#21

HP
Very forth coming, great site with lots of information (but not transactions), and a nice flash animation of a tree. Most importantly they not only provide power consumption usage they also provide toxicological information and reuse help
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/globalcitizenship/environment/
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/globalcitizenship/environment/productdata/edsenterprise.html

Importantly, I could not find the per product manufacturing toxological or carbon cost from either sun or hp.
However both companies have a real focus on addressing the ewaste issue.

Apple Walled garden

After having designed so manny walled gardens, Ive got a special interest in this tech dirt article
"Apple's Walled Garden Will Hurt iPhone Innovation"

Apple have a history of releasing easily hackable software, I have even heard marketing experts say that this is a deliberate policy to drive penetration without putting the apple logo on innovations from the community. They were allowing software like ourTunes to exist and therefore drive the adoption of iTunes. Do you think that this is a serious attempt to limit the development community on the iPhone platform?

im just hoping that they call it the Walled Garden Information Services or WaGIS for short :)

Catholic reform - ideas for a bid for work

I kinda just doodled this. I thought it looked good, so it gets blogged. Ive got another one for "Which ERP tool would Jesus use" but I feel thats taking the mickey too much

How not to be creative

So the new job is really challenging my creativity skills, I was looking for ideas and new ways to present information, and I found this video. Very cool and enjoyable. It stopped me going and getting that Mac :). ill stick to my trusty ubuntu.

This guy is really making sense, and is echoing alot of the thoughts and issues that I have found working in the software community. I remember one project where an architect who was working in the billing and CIO part of the buisnes and I sat down and tried to work out how to do somthing. Well we came up with an idea I combined a couple of technologies with a couple of his technologies ... and we had a very simple way to pay for TV channels. but! my division and his division did not want to work together so although we made v1 a success v2 never happened. He left the company and so did I. The important thing is this. PFE - Proudly Found Elsewhere not Not Invented Here.

NASA's CoLab virtual worlds

What does NASA stand for? Not Another Secondlife Announcement. The egg heads, brianiacs and boffins at NASA have decided to boldly go where no other national space agency has gone before. This weeks announcement is that NASA have launched a second life project called CoLab … as in co-laborate. It’s a virtual laboratory where space enthusiasts can meet with NASA, share their thoughts and take part in “virtual” experiments, such as landing a pod on mars or having a go with a lunar rover.

And Its GREAT!

When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon it marked two massive changes in society, obviously mankind touched its second planet, however (and far more significantly) we saw the birth of global mass media. For many, as Neil Armstrong iconicly made one small step, they were taking a huge leap into the advertisers dream, imagine 1 billion consumers all seeing the same 30 second infomercial.

Nearly 40 years on NASA are looking to pull off the same stunt. A senior NASA PR guy has said “When NASA revisits the moon in 2012 we are going to take you with us”. They hope that landing on the moon again will be a big enough event to get mass acceptance of a virtual world experience.

Ever since my RSS reader picked this news up I’ve been trying to teleport to CoLab and last night I made it all the way through to their region, I even managed to look at the thrusters on an Apollo Saturn before my PC rebooted. The important thing of note here though is that NASA are demonstrating to us a new business technique, which is the opposite of “Not Invented Here”. Its called “Proudly Found Elsewhere”. Modern brands such as Lego, BBC or Google are actively engaging with their brand consumers, and making it fun for them to participate in the production of the brands products.

This is a brilliant and really open way to share information in an interactive way and entertaining way. The fact that space travel is still so incredibly popular that it can bring down secondlife is witness that NASA is a strong global brand. Additionally it shows that NASA’s values about openness and inclusively are still high on their agenda. Nerds in space? I do hope so, and I will certainly be one of them when NASA take us back to the moon

JIRA Confluence - introduceing social networking to the enterprise

I'm so into confluence at the moment. Ive got to try and keep a balance and not let it effect all my solutions.
Its by atlassian, who are a great company that are really driving the new development / content creation environments. http://www.atlassian.com/
Some great videos to watch, just check out bamboo … its really cool

also check this IBM dude http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/km/elsua/archives/introducing-collaboration-technologies-to-the-enterprise-is-a-challenge-and-how-a-critical-mass-of-early-adopters-can-help-12152

His blog makes loads of sense
Here is something else on XMPP (which is behind google chat, but can do loads more)

Ive not used the software he is talking about but have used Jive instead, but its all pretty much the same stuff.
http://www.process-one.net/en/blogs/article/introducing_the_xmpp_application_server/

this is a good read
http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/casestudies/dowjones.jsp

Word processing

Who would buy a word processor that dosnt contain the work "blog" in the dictionary?

King of the code

Julian made this song up about me when I left Chello, and frankly I am honored.I hope you find it as amusing as I do. (hosted by the internet archive)