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Hungrier Mile ruins prize site: architects »
The NSW State Government is planning on selling East Darling Harbour in “superlots”, which will bypass the site’s architectural design of public streets and non-homogeneous buildings.
“If one developer is owning several blocks, they can do what they like with the streets,” Mr Thalis said. “They can move them, put malls on them, close them, turn them into business parks. The public interest in Sydney is at risk of being stolen by private and commercial interests. I don’t have a problem with density but I do have a problem when it’s at the cost of the public domain. We are the citizens. We own the streets. This will be thrown out the window for a 10-year fashion for big, monolithic buildings.”
Amazon adds sort feature to SimpleDB »
Amazon AWS SimpleDB now supports sortable query result sets. Previously query results came back in insertion order only, but now you can sort on (only) one attribute. This makes a lot of standard relational DB use-cases more feasible for implementation in SimpleDB, as it makes for less data post-processing.
Sorting on only one attribute is still quite limiting, though, and queries still only return object IDs, which forces many further queries to retrieve the full data-set.
Read the fine print »
Fairfax photographer John Reid on the common practise of shady photographic competitions:
I’m talking about the increasing use of photography competitions for reasons other than the celebration of fine quality photographic image making.
One of the most common adulterations of the concept of the photographic competition is to use it as a cheap way of building a bank of images. To commission thousands of images from professional photographers would cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars but, trick people into giving you their photos in exchange for the chance of winning something (money, camera gear), and you can bring the cost right down.
Hyper-inflation: Zimbabwe introduces $100 billion note »
Zimbabwe, grappling with a record 2.2 million per cent inflation, has introduced a new $Z100 billion ($5.50) bank note to tackle cash shortages.
Multicolr Search Lab »
Explore Flickr photos by colour content:
We extracted the colours from 3 million “interesting” Flickr images. Using our visual similarity technology you can navigate the collection by colour.
NSW Department of Education going to Gmail »
The NSW Department of Education is migrating its email system for 1.5 million students from Exchange to Gmail.
They’re going from a $33M contract that gave users 65 megabytes of storage, to a $9.5M contract that gives at least 6 gigabytes.
Microsoft releases pre-07 Office file specs »
Microsoft has released the specifications to the file formats in the pre-2007 Office suite.
The Microsoft Office binary file formats documentation provides detailed technical specifications for the .doc, .ppt .xls, and .xlsb file formats as created by the following Microsoft Office applications:
- .doc: Microsoft Word 97, Microsoft Word 2000, Microsoft Word 2002, Microsoft Office Word 2003, Microsoft Office Word 2007
- .ppt: Microsoft PowerPoint 97, Microsoft PowerPoint 2000, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007
- .xls: Microsoft Excel 97, Microsoft Excel 2000, Microsoft Excel 2002, Microsoft Office Excel 2003, Microsoft Office Excel 2007
- .xlsb: Microsoft Office Excel 2007
Submarine cable map »
TeleGeography’s Submarine cable map, showing the 120+ submarine cable systems that make up the internet, voice networks, and private networks.
Available as free desktop wallpaper, or a printed map.
Shops track customers via mobile phone »
This system from Path Intelligence tracks people in a shopping mall by triangulating on their mobile phone. It can uniquely (but anonymously) identify people by the IMEI (a unique serial number) of their phone.
It would be a fascinating source of data to mine: paths through malls, shopping habits, how people behave differently on their own or when in a group; all kinds of things. But it does seem quite invasive; I think I would feel quite uncomfortable being under such close a gaze. Perhaps if they dropped the IMEI identification and only looked and aggregated trends.
Seems to be quite excitingly priced at around £20,000 a month to rent.