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White House To Announce IT-Powered Smart Grid
Showing posts with label house. Show all posts
Showing posts with label house. Show all posts
Sunday, June 12, 2011
White House To Announce IT-Powered Smart Grid
FizzaNawaz writes "On Monday, the Obama administration is preparing announce the next steps that the US will take to build its 21st century electric grid, and IT is expected to play a big part in the plans. The White House is hosting a 90-minute media event called 'Building the 21st Century Electric Grid' and is releasing a new report on what it will take for lawmakers and the private sector to come together to solve this aspect of the energy challenge."
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Mark Zuckerberg's New $7 Million House [PHOTOS]
Mark Zuckerberg has finally bought his own house in Silicon Valley.
We have photos of what we think is his house based on a tip we got.
He reportedly paid $7 million for the five bedroom, five bathroom home. A steep price, considering one brochure we saw for the house listed the price at a million dollars less than that.
The house itself is really pretty. It's not some hideous McMansion. It has a good porch, big windows, and a great big yard for his doggie to play in.
Compared to the home he could buy with all his money, it's actually quite modest.
The front of the house is protected by a nice brick fence
Very elegant looking from the outside
And here's the back, you can see the large yard and pool
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
For the latest tech news, visit SAI: Silicon Alley Insider. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
See Also:
- Startling Facts That Show How HUGE Indian Tech Is
- Everything Facebook Will Tell The Police About You
- Who Are The People In That Great 1999 Video From Google, And Where Are They Now?
Mark Zuckerberg's New $7 Million House [PHOTOS]
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Strange Planet: Real Life UP House
Do you want to see the video of how National Geographic Channel lifted a house with balloons? Of course you do!
Is it really possible to lift a house off the ground with helium balloons, like in the movie Up?
National Geographic Channel's new television series, "How Hard Can It Be?," aimed to find out, and ended up setting a world record for the largest balloon cluster flight ever attempted.
So how many balloons do you think it took to raise this house 10,000 feet over a private airfield outside Los Angeles? Check your guess here.
Video: National Geographic Channel
Is it really possible to lift a house off the ground with helium balloons, like in the movie Up?
National Geographic Channel's new television series, "How Hard Can It Be?," aimed to find out, and ended up setting a world record for the largest balloon cluster flight ever attempted.
So how many balloons do you think it took to raise this house 10,000 feet over a private airfield outside Los Angeles? Check your guess here.
Video: National Geographic Channel
Strange Planet: Real Life UP House
Monday, January 3, 2011
Trouble In The House Of Google (GOOG)
[Editor's note, this post is from Jeff Atwood, cofounder of Stack Overflow.]
Let's look at where stackoverflow.com traffic came from for the year of 2010. (See chart on the right.)
When 88.2% of all traffic for your website comes from a single source, criticizing that single source feels … risky.
And perhaps a bit churlish, like looking a gift horse in the mouth, or saying something derogatory in public about your Valued Business Partnertm.
Still, looking at the statistics, it's hard to avoid the obvious conclusion.
I've been told many times that Google isn't a monopoly, but they apparently play one on the internet.
You are perfectly free to switch to whichever non-viable alternative web search engine you want at any time.
Just breathe in that sweet freedom, folks.
Sarcasm aside, I greatly admire Google. My goal is not to be acquired, because I'm in this thing for the long haul – but if I had to pick a company to be acquired by, it would probably be Google. I feel their emphasis on the information graph over the social graph aligns more closely with our mission than almost any other potential suitor I can think of.
Anyway, we've been perfectly happy with Google as our de-facto traffic sugar daddy since the beginning. But last year, something strange happened: the content syndicators began to regularly outrank us in Google for our own content.
Syndicating our content is not a problem. In fact, it's encouraged. It would be deeply unfair of us to assert ownership over the content so generously contributed to our sites and create an underclass of digital sharecroppers.
Anything posted to Stack Overflow, or any Stack Exchange Network site for that matter, is licensed back to the community in perpetuity under Creative Commons cc-by-sa. The community owns their contributions. We want the whole world to teach each other and learn from the questions and answers posted on our sites. Remix, reuse, share – and teach your peers! That's our mission. That's why I get up in the morning.
However, implicit in this strategy was the assumption that we, as the canonical source for the original questions and answers, would always rank first. Consider Wikipedia – when was the last time you clicked through to a page that was nothing more than a legally copied, properly attributed Wikipedia entry encrusted in advertisements? Never, right? But it is in theory a completely valid, albeit dumb, business model. That's why Joel Spolsky and I were confident in sharing content back to the community with almost no reservations – because Google mercilessly penalizes sites that attempt to game the system by unfairly profiting on copied content. Remixing and reusing is fine, but mass-producing cheap copies encrusted with ads … isn't.
I think of this as common sense, but it's also spelled out explicitly in Google's webmaster content guidelines.
However, some webmasters attempt to improve their page's ranking and attract visitors by creating pages with many words but little or no authentic content. Google will take action against domains that try to rank more highly by just showing scraped or other auto-generated pages that don't add any value to users. Examples include:
Scraped content. Some webmasters make use of content taken from other, more reputable sites on the assumption that increasing the volume of web pages with random, irrelevant content is a good long-term strategy. Purely scraped content, even from high-quality sources, may not provide any added value to your users without additional useful services or content provided by your site. It's worthwhile to take the time to create original content that sets your site apart. This will keep your visitors coming back and will provide useful search results.
In 2010, our mailboxes suddenly started overflowing with complaints from users – complaints that they were doing perfectly reasonable Google searches, and ending up on scraper sites that mirrored Stack Overflow content with added advertisements. Even worse, in some cases, the original Stack Overflow question was nowhere to be found in the search results! That's particularly odd because our attribution terms require linking directly back to us, the canonical source for the question, without nofollow. Google, in indexing the scraped page, cannot avoid seeing that the scraped page links back to the canonical source. This culminated in, of all things, a special browser plug-in that redirects to Stack Overflow from the ripoff sites. How totally depressing. Joel and I thought this was impossible. And I felt like I had personally failed all of you.
The idea that there could be something wrong with Google was inconceivable to me. Google is gravity on the web, an omnipresent constant; blaming Google would be like blaming gravity for my own clumsiness. It wasn't even an option. I started with the golden rule: it's always my fault. We did a ton of due diligence on webmasters.stackexchange.com to ensure we weren't doing anything overtly stupid, and uber-mensch Matt Cutts went out of his way to investigate the hand-vetted search examples contributed in response to my tweet asking for search terms where the scrapers dominated. Issues were found on both sides, and changes were made. Success!
Despite the semi-positive resolution, I was disturbed. If these dime-store scrapers were doing so well and generating so much traffic on the back of our content – how was the rest of the web faring? My enduring faith in the gravitational constant of Google had been shaken. Shaken to the very core.
Throughout my investigation I had nagging doubts that we were seeing serious cracks in the algorithmic search foundations of the house that Google built. But I was afraid to write an article about it for fear I'd be claimed an incompetent kook. I wasn't comfortable sharing that opinion widely, because we might be doing something obviously wrong. Which we tend to do frequently and often. Gravity can't be wrong. We're just clumsy … right?
I can't help noticing that we're not the only site to have serious problems with Google search results in the last few months. In fact, the drum beat of deteriorating Google search quality has been practically deafening of late:
- Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google
- Dishwashers, and How Google Eats Its Own Tail
- Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs & Google Should Be Worried
- On the increasing uselessness of Google
- Google, Google, Why Hast Thou Forsaken the Manolo?
Anecdotally, my personal search results have also been noticeably worse lately. As part of Christmas shopping for my wife, I searched for "iPhone 4 case" in Google. I had to give up completely on the first two pages of search results as utterly useless, and searched Amazon instead.
People whose opinions I respect have all been echoing the same sentiment -- Google, the once essential tool, is somehow losing its edge. The spammers, scrapers, and SEO'ed-to-the-hilt content farms are winning.
Like any sane person, I'm rooting for Google in this battle, and I'd love nothing more than for Google to tweak a few algorithmic knobs and make this entire blog entry moot. Still, this is the first time since 2000 that I can recall Google search quality ever declining, and it has inspired some rather heretical thoughts in me -- are we seeing the first signs that algorithmic search has failed as a strategy? Is the next generation of search destined to be less algorithmic and more social?
It's a scary thing to even entertain, but maybe gravity really is broken.
This post originally appeared on Coding Horror.
Join the conversation about this story »
See Also:
- Google To Boot Sites With Pirated Content From AdSense
- Google Admits Algorithms Are Subjective
- Google: Being Bad To Your Customers Is Bad For Business
Trouble In The House Of Google (GOOG)
Thursday, December 16, 2010
White House Joins Digg Community
Digg has announced that the White House has joined the Digg community!
White House Joins Digg Community
Backlink: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DTWB/~3/zsGBnew_4JA/
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Rent Mark Zuckerberg's House!
Looks like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has moved out of his Palo Alto rental. A tipster emailed us the listing for the 26-year-old billionaire's former digs—$7,850 a month for a "gorgeous" four-bedroom with "charm and functionality."
Don't get too excited about the prospect of sleeping in Zuck's old bedroom just yet. It's unclear if Zuck's former digs are still available. According to the expired listing on ApartmentHunterz.com, someone has "recently successfully leased this listing." And yet as of this morning, the ad was still up on Craigslist. (It was posted on Craigslist on Monday.) And don't expect the sort of generous month-to-month lease that Zuckerberg had, either: the Craigslist post specifies a "12 month or longer" lease term.
So what was Zuck getting for his money? (Besides "Prestigious location! Charm and functionality!" of course.) A nice big house, complete with a "chef's kitchen with gas stove," a "huge family room with the view of Kitchen" and a "wood-burning fireplace" perfect for warming up after a day of rolling back privacy options across your social network.
And don't forget the location: If you moved in, your new neighbor would likely be YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim. (Not to mention the privacy: The portion of the Palo Alto street where Zuck's home lies has been removed from Google Street View sometime since we posted an item on his neighbor, showing only the text "This image is no longer available.")
Why are we sure that this is Zuck's former crib? Besides the obvious visual evidence (see below), property records indicate that Zuckerberg's former address—2073 Princeton St.—is owned by a man named Stanley Wu. The reply-to email address for the Craigslist ad? stanwu58@hotmail.com.
Of course, you can also clearly see it's the house by comparing the photo in the listing to the photo we published over the summer:
We've contacted Wu, who owns the house, to ask him about his former tenant. We'll let you know if he gets back to us.
Send an email to Max Read, the author of this post, at max@gawker.com.
This post originally appeared at Valleywag and is republished here with permission.
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Sunday, November 21, 2010
Gowalla Checks-in at Mouse House (On Influence and Automation)
Yesterday Gowalla announced a partnership with one of the biggest brands on the planet - Walt Disney, Inc.. There are plenty of skeptics that don't believe in social media – let alone geo-social apps like Gowalla, (Foursquare and Facebook Places.) So, why does this partnership make sense? Corporate Blogging for Dummies is now available on Amazon and in book stores. Check out our new...
Source : On Influence and Automation
Explore : Cinema, Directors, Social Network, Walt Disney
Post originale: http://wik.io/info/US/229917827
Friday, November 12, 2010
The Radar: Montmartre Open House, Living Social Escapes, Google Map Error
- Artists residing in the famed Parisian neighborhood of Montmartre will open their studios to the public this month. The weekend of November 19th to 21st is the annual Artists' Studios Open House Days: Anvers to Abbesses, which began in 1990. 124 artists in 74 locations will open their studios to the public to talk about their work and sell pieces. [NYTimes.com]
- Clear your calendars. Not satisfied with brokering cheap rates on everything from restaurants to yoga classes to housecleaning, group buying site Living Social dipped their toe into the travel pool yesterday when they announced the launch of their weekend Escapes program. Their packages to hotels across the country include fun activities like cooking classes, ski passes and champagne breakfasts. [Living Social Escapes]
- A Google Map error of up to 2.7 kilometers was enough to raise a border dispute between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Last week Nicaraguan troops crossed the border and took down a Costa Rican flag, raising their own, because Google Maps said the land belonged to Nicaragua. The Organization of American States and UN Security Council are being called in to mediate the dispute. [Wired.com via Infoconvulso]
Photo: Anna Koszeghy/My Shot
Post originale: http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/blogs/intelligenttravel/2010/11/the-radar-montmarte-open-house.html
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg were spotted taking a walk together after having dinner together at Jobs' house.
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