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When Starbucks grew from regional powerhouse to cultural phenomenon, there was one small problem: the coffee they sold did not jive with their brand. So much so that in 2000 they printed millions of pamplets in the US explaining why it was that even though they really, really wanted to sell organic, shade-grown, fairly traded…

Last week I read the book small is possible. It’s a great read, and I heartily recommend it to anyone who enjoyed books like The Tipping Point, The Wisdom of Crowds, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and other books that powerfully explain the world from a new perspective. From the back cover of the book: Forget homeland…

I was happy to learn on Monday that the Petaflop barrier has been broken. IBM’s Roadrunner supercomputer achieved this feat with commodity hardware and open source software (including Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux). Achieving this level of performance is something that many in the research community have dreamed of for a long time. When it was…

I just read the story of Helmer, a Fedora 8 linux cluster in an IKEA Helmer cabinet. The story begins 3D computer rendering are very CPU intensive and the best way so speed up slow render problems, are usually to distribute them on to more computers. Render farms are usually very large, expensive and run…

Business Week has written a series [1], [2], [3] of articles on the One Laptop Per Child project this week, and none are too favorable. I myself have blogged my disappointment with the apparent direction of the project. Yesterday they released Build 703, and before I say anything else negative, I have to see how…

Apparently somebody somewhere sometime recently called Walter Bender, late of the OLPC, an open source fundamentalist. Walter expressed confusion about what that meant. I wish I could clear it up for him, but I don’t know what it means either. We never talk about Open Source in terms of religion or philosophy, morality or ethics.…