Tech Brief
On Tech Brief today: Is your humble mobile phone a supercomputer in disguise? And bringing home the reality of the BP oil spill.
• It may have an embarrassing ringtone and a cracked screen but that mobile phone in your pocket is still a little powerhouse, .
Inspired by (most kind), Mr WR used an adapted format of the Linpack benchmarks used to measure the speeds of the world's fastest machines to measure the processing speed of his Android mobile:
"[A] tweaked Motorola Droid is capable of scoring 52 Mflop/s which is over 15 times faster than the 1979 Cray 1 CPU. Put another way, if you transported that mobile phone back to 1987 then it would be on par with the processors in one of the fastest computers in the world of the time, the ETA 10-E, and they had to be cooled by liquid nitrogen."
Walking Randomly's own trusty mobile turned out to be 2.3 Mflop/s - or 66% as fast as a single processor on a Cray 1. How sweet.
• While the rages on, to demonstrate how big an area the leaked oil would cover if it were a little closer to home.
You key in your location and the spill appears there. So if the leak had occurred in Nottingham UK, for example, it would have stretched widthways from Bangor to Grimsby and lengthways from Scarborough to Cheltenham:
"The data used to create the spill image comes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA releases a daily report detailing where the spill is going to be within the next 24 hours. They do this by collecting data from a number of sources, including satellite imagery and reports by trained observers who have made helicopter flights back and forth across the potentially affected areas. This data is entered into several leading computer models by NOAA oceanographers along with information about currents and winds in the gulf."
• Oh dear. Wired magazine's weighty 500MB iPad app hasn't gone down very well in some parts of the blogosphere. it to an old-school CD-ROM and says it's a bit too 20th-Century for his liking:
"My gut feeling is that there is a massive opportunity to reinvent the concept of a magazine - yet we end up with something akin to what the web was like in the mid to late 90s. This basically boils down to a print designer's vision of what the web should be like - but in this case it's a print magazine person's vision of what an interactive magazine should be like."
Miaow.
• Good news for the somewhat beleaguered - the UK Treasury used it to release datasets about public spending today, .
"By using BitTorrent to share information with the public, the UK government is in good company. NASA too uses BitTorrent for their 'Visible Earth' project, a massive library of high resolution images of the earth. In addition, several Universities use BitTorrent powered systems to update their computers."
BitTorrent's image has been somewhat tarnished by stories about piracy in recent years, so Ernesto says it's good news for the open-source file-sharer. Tech Monitor remains unconvinced that it's going to get a hero's welcome over at the music industry, though.
• that Twitter is user-testing a "you both follow" feature that will enable tweeters to see whether others follow the same people as them:
"It is not clear whether the new feature, which will appear above the followers box on the right hand nav on the Twitter website will only be available to Twitter website users or be added to the vast array of API options available to developers."
Hmm - so you'll be able to see how your followers are networked to each other and to you. Wonder what Facebook makes of that.
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