Copacetic

So you are Catholic and you care that your religious organisations in this country perpetrated the most heinous crimes on the children of this country.

Then show it by withholding your contributions where it counts, in the collection basket.  CORI saved itself over half a billion euros in that shameful deal that Michael Woods brokered all those years ago, so they have plenty to survive on for the next few years.

Instead drop that money in a charity that will do some good, preferably one without religious links.

(thanks to my wife Ann for this idea)

From Amazon this morning,

Dear Amazon Web Services Customer,

We are excited to announce the limited beta of AWS Import/Export, a new offering that accelerates moving large amounts of data into and out of AWS using portable storage devices for transport. AWS transfers your data directly onto and off of storage devices using Amazon’s high-speed internal network and bypassing the Internet. For significant data sets, AWS Import/Export is often faster than Internet transfer and more cost effective than upgrading your connectivity.

You can use AWS Import/Export for:

• Data Migration – If you have data you need to upload into the AWS cloud for the first time, AWS Import/Export is often much faster than transferring that data via the Internet.
• Offsite Backup – Send full or incremental backups to Amazon S3 for reliable and redundant offsite storage.
• Direct Data Interchange – If you regularly receive content on portable storage devices from your business associates, you can have them send it directly to AWS for import into your Amazon S3 buckets.
• Disaster Recovery – In the event you need to quickly retrieve a large backup stored in Amazon S3, use AWS Import/Export to transfer the data to a portable storage device and deliver it to your site.

The AWS Import/Export Beta currently supports importing data into Amazon S3 buckets in the US, and participation is limited. Export and EU support will be added in the coming months. For more information and to be considered for participation, please see the AWS Import/Export Detail Page.

We hope you find this new capability useful, and we look forward to your feedback.

Sincerely,

The AWS Import/Export Team

The AWS Import/Export Detail Page has a more information on when it makes sense to use the service,

When to Use AWS Import/Export

If you have large amounts of data to load and an Internet connection with limited bandwidth, the time required to prepare and ship a portable storage device to AWS can be a small percentage of the time it would take to transfer your data over the internet. If loading your data over the Internet would take a week or more, you should consider using AWS Import/Export.

Below is a table that provides guidance on when it’ll take at least week to transfer your data over the Internet into AWS (and hence, when you should consider using AWS Import/Export). For example, if you have a 10Mbps connection and expect to utilize 80% of your network capacity for the data transfer, for uploads of 600GB or more, it’ll take you at least a week to transfer to AWS over the Internet and you should consider using AWS Import/Export.

Available Internet Connection	Theoretical Min. Number of Days to Transfer  1TB at 80% Network Utilization	When to Consider AWS Import/Export?
T1 (1.544Mbps)	82 days	100GB or more
10Mbps	13 days	600GB or more
T3 (44.736Mbps)	3 days	2TB or more
100Mbps	1 to 2 days	5TB or more
1000Mbps	Less than 1 day	60TB or more

For more details regarding data loading costs see the AWS Import/Export Calculator.

Watch this video to get an overview of Wolfram Alpha. What alpha does is make the web computable. How? by combining natural language queries, large public datasets and the Mathematica compute engine. Alpha brings all these pieces together to generate new information from data as opposed to slavishly returning the mob results that Google collects. This is information generation from first principles.

This is going to do to Google what Google did to Microsoft? Why?

• Wolfram is a private held company which will never be for sale. Stephen Wolfram is privately wealthy and isn’t interested in selling at any price, he wants to change the world. This eliminates Googles fist tack which is the early purchase of potential competitors.
• Mathematica is a heavily defended piece of Wolfram technology which is at the heart of the smarts running Alpha. Mathematica was first released in 1988 so they have been building and improving it for over 20 years.  So don’t expect some open source project to reproduce its capabilities.  As for MS and Google, well they have some catching up to do.
• The interface implicitly supports rendered output as opposed to textual results and combination of results
• The natural language interface will open it up to everyone
• The mathematica link means this will make real the software plus service mantra of Microsoft. BTW Microsoft is nowhere in this market.
• Add a REST API and suddenly you have taken much of what we do in cloud computing off the me nu
• Its a lot easier to clone Google search into alpha than it is to clone Wolfram Alpha into Google
• Its not just search, notice the bit where you can fill in form data to refine a calculation. Expect to see more of this including the ability to build complex computations with streaming real time results
• Crowd sourcing results will rapidly allow them to eliminate the less useful results

Questions:

• Whats the business model?
• Will it link with mathematica?
• Will they provide an API?
• How will Google and Microsoft react?
• Does Amazon have a part to play?

Did this presentation out at the IADT today.  Apart from one person say “I don’t understand anything you said” I think it went ok.

Still some work to do but its getting there. You can see the theme developing on my back catalog on slideshare.net.

w595 Jan 09 006

Originally uploaded by Joe Drumgoole

I have a bushel of this stuff growing like a weed (at least 100 packs worth) in my back garden in Dublin.

Rosemary is hardy as nails, lives comfortably through Irish winters. Why we have to import it from Spain is beyond me.