A large-scale scan of the top million web sites (per Alexa traffic data) was performed in early 2010 using the Nmap Security Scanner and its scripting engine.

We retrieved each site’s icon by first parsing the HTML for a link tag and then falling back to /favicon.ico if that failed. 328,427 unique icons were collected, of which 288,945 were proper images. The remaining 39,482 were error strings and other non-image files. Our original goal was just to improve our http-favicon.nse script, but we had enough fun browsing so many icons that we used them to create the visualization below.

The area of each icon is proportional to the sum of the reach of all sites using that icon. When both a bare domain name and its “www.” counterpart used the same icon, only one of them was counted. The smallest icons–those corresponding to sites with approximately 0.0001% reach–are scaled to 16×16 pixels. The largest icon (Google) is 11,936 x 11,936 pixels, and the whole diagram is 37,440 x 37,440. Since your web browser would choke on that, we have created the interactive viewer below (click and drag to pan, double-click to zoom, or type in a site name to go right to it).

via Icons of the Web.

The Data Centre environment provides the foundation for the reliability, availability and security of systems and networks that power the world’s economy. The consumer’s drive for 24/7 availability of goods and services places increasing pressure on the availability of the facilities, systems and networks that provide these services. Underpinning the service reliability is the provision of a suitable, stable and reliable operating environment. The Data Centre is this environment.

As applications, data and infrastructure grow they have an increasing impact on the Data Centre and in turn an increasing impact on the environment. Business and consumer demands for richer functionality and interfaces are driving more complex applications which create demands on processing and data storage that can outstrip performance growth. This brings increased power and cooling requirements for the Date Centre. The economic and environmental impacts of this growth now require serious consideration.

The IT industry as a whole has charged forward without much attention paid to its impact on the environment. Among today’s hot topics are the inefficiencies found within Data Centres, including the facilities themselves and the IT equipment they house. One of the key areas the DCSG is focused on is working with the UK, EU and North American legislative bodies to ensure our industry is properly focused on driving the changes required to become more efficient with our use of energy.

Whilst there are many individuals in our industry with useful knowledge and experience in Data Centre engineering, their information is not easily accessible. The DCSG has been formed to create a forum for open and honest discussion, information sharing and evaluation of Data Centre-related issues and technologies.

What does the future of the Data Centre look like and just how critical a role will it play in business, the environment and the economy?
The DCSG aims to hold around twelve meetings/events per year that will focus on the hot topics of the moment and provide a forum for communication while further fostering professionalism through the industry.

Zahl Limbuwala FBCS CEng CITP MIET

DCSG Founder & Chairman

Data Centre Specialist Group.

It’s just been a few months since a 45-gigapixel panorama of Dubai claimed the title of world’s largest digital photograph, but it’s now already been well and truly ousted — the new king in town is this 70-gigapixel, 360-degree panorama of Budapest.

As with other multi-gigapixel images, this one was no easy feat, and involved two 25-megapixel Sony A900 cameras fitted with 400mm Minolta lenses and 1.4X teleconverters, a robotic camera mount from 360world that got the shooting done over the course of two days, and two solid days of post-processing that resulted in a single 200GB file — not to mention a 15-meter-long printed copy of the photograph for good measure. Of course, what’s most impressive is the photo itself.

Hit up the source link below and start zooming in.

source70 Billion Pixels Budapest via 70-gigapixel panorama of Budapest becomes world’s largest digital photograph — Engadget.

Designed by Applied Works, this interactive infographic for the iPad platform was commissioned to accompany a news story on the North/South health divide in England. The different Health Wheels distil 32 different health indicators across 9 geographical regions. The wheels act as visual barometers for the health of each region, in order to provide users with an intuitive way of scanning through all the indicators.

A map of England communicates the national perspective in response to the wheel, with a traffic light colour code identifying which regions score better than, worse than or average compared to the national mean. For the regional view, segments on the wheel are color-coded according to the performance of each indicator.For those infosthetics.com readers lucky enough to have access to both an iPad and The Times app, this infographic lives along a story titled “Major Shift Planned for NHS Treatment”, which is currently featured in the News section. Those readers are also kindly invited to leave a short personal review in the comments section below.

Does this new form of infographics truly exploit iPads unique capabilities?

For all other mortals, including myself, the Times kindly provided a short video demonstration and a Flickr set to demonstrate this fresh incarnation of information graphics on an alternative display medium.

via Infographics on the iPad: The Times Summarizing the Health of England – information aesthetics.

As promised, Nokia and Intel have revealed the pre-alpha version of MeeGo for handsets today, supporting the Intel-powered Aava reference phone and the Nokia N900.

Whats most interesting at this early stage is the UI, which appears to have taken a big Nokia-influenced step away from the Intel-designed MeeGo netbook and tablet UI — and were definitely detecting some hints of Android and webOS here and there. Seriously, just check out that task switching interface. Of course, MeeGo is open-source, so were sure Nokia has some deeper UI customizations in store — like homescreen widgets, which are notably missing here.On a deeper level, this build of MeeGo includes the base MeeGo APIs, including Qt and the MeeGo touch frameworks, the Firefox-based browser, a photo viewer, and some basic UI elements like the status bar, app launcher, and virtual keyboard.

There are pre-built images for the Atom-based Aava handsets available now, but N900 owners will have to do a little building until someone makes an image available. Be warned, though: theres a long enough list of known bugs, and while thats totally fine for pre-alpha code, it might not be too fine for your device. Thats not going to stop us from installing this thing, but you be careful, alright? And let us know how it goes. Video of the UI after the break.P.S. Given that the N8 is destined to be the last Symbian N Series device, we cant help but feel its being overshadowed by MeeGo before its even out. Can we pre-pour one out? Is that a thing? It is now.

via MeeGo for handsets makes its first appearance — Engadget.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6YTQJVzwlI

In February 2010, the man who built the technology of Minority Report twice — once for the movie, and once in real life — spoke at TED about the future of user interface design.

Yesterday, TED posted John Underkoffler’s entire fifteen-minute video presentation — a copy of which you’ll find right after the break.

Get a curated glimpse into his company’s tech in the following demo, and hear from the man himself when the gloves might come off. And if that doesn’t satisfy your appetite, read an in-depth interview with Underkoffler at our more coverage link.

You have no doubt seen a Tableau chart before. They tend to be sleek, interactive, and intuitive. And they have already appeared in the Wall Street Journal, CNN Money, and CBS Sports among other places.

The software is loved by many and quickly becoming the industry standard for those who DON’T necessarily consider themselves to be analysts.And it just became much easier for the non-analyst set to create excellent interactive charts with the recent release of Tableau Public, a new tool that puts the power of Tableau into the hands of everyone. This free version of Tableau was released earlier this year to much fanfare. We have sliced and diced all its details below, so please have a read.As you might already know, this is our final review of the big three of free, online social visualization software approaches: Swivel, IBM Many Eyes, and now Tableau Public.

We will wrap up with final thoughts next week with a benchmark that would make Tufte proud. Be sure to check back for an interesting look at all three tools, pitted side by side, embedded in this blog, so you can interact with each and make your own judgments.

CRITERIA

Cost :Free

Free Version available:  Yes

Ease of Use: Easy

Embeddable into a web page: Yes

Shareable: Yes

Comments / Discussion: No

Private workgroup: No

Plugin Required: JavaScript/AJAX

Software Required: Tableau

Public Software: free or Tableau Desktop

Export Formats: CSV, PNG, PDF

Data Storage: 50 Mb

Maturity age of software: < 1 year although Tableau software is 5 years old

Customer Service: None provided, but Tableau employees are very active on Twitter, LinkedIn, FB, and their forums.

Data Import Formats: Oracle NoSQL Server NoSybase NoDB2 NoPostgreSQL NomySQL NoExcel YesText Yes

other If you purchase their Desktop or Desktop Pro software, you will be able to use many more data sources such as mySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, DB2, Teradata, Oracle, etc.

Reviewers Kim ReesDate reviewed 4/28/2010Other

Features: Ability to make rich dashboards for sharing. Interactive features are very robust. Community can filter the data you present, highlight it, and sort the data in various ways. Community can also download data and export any view they create.

Pros- Extremely robust software that is rock solid. It’s now on version 5.1.- Very easy to use. Simple drag and drop interface.- Ability to add subtotals, totals, and other calculations.-

Can have multiple worksheets in a file.- Dashboards with a flexible worksheet layout.- Easy to customize.

Cons- All data becomes public.- There is no option for private groups.- Can only save to the web cannot save a working copy locally.- Must use stand alone software that is only PC compatible for creation, not for viewing.- No text analysis.- Mapping is limited compared to other tools.

via Social Visualization Software Review: Tableau Public – information aesthetics.

Amazon’s cloud storage services are going to be getting another major competitor this week: Google.

We hear that this week during its I/O conference, Google will be announcing a new service that is a direct competitor with Amazon’s S3 cloud storage. Google’s service will be called Google Storage for Developers, or ‘GS’. We believe it will be available in a private beta initially.

We also hear that the service will be positioned to make it very easy for existing S3 customers to make the switch to Google Storage.Features will include a REST API, the ability to use Google accounts to offer authenticated downloads, and data redundancy. Developers will be able to use a command line tool to manage their data, and there will be a web interface as well.We’d previously reported that Google was looking to expand its cloud service offerings, but that it would primarily be focused on ‘value-added’ services that took advantage of technology Google has been using internally, like its translation tools and video processing.

We’re hearing that such value-added services will not be part of this launch, but it is highly likely that they will be coming in the future. And that’s the key here — competitors will have a hard time matching the array of technologies and infrastructure Google has spent years developing.

via Google To Launch Amazon S3 Competitor ‘Google Storage’ At I/O.

Google Wave opens doors to public, asks old friends for new chance.

By Ross Miller posted May 19th 2010

To think, it was about this time last year that Google first unveiled its collaboration tool Wave, and today the company’s taking out the invitational step and opening it to the public at large — which begs the question, did anyone not have an invite that wanted one at this point? It’ll also be now available in the enterprise-centric Apps suite for no extra charge.

On the developer side of things, expect some more open source code be unleashed, including most importantly the rich text editor. Can’t say we’ve really dug around in the service ourselves since its beta launched, but co-creator Lars Rasmussen tells us we should be giving it another go. He further acknowledged that they’ve got some work to do on educating users on the best ways to use the service, which at this point seems to be mid- and small-scale collaboration. To that end, expect some new tutorial videos, and with any luck, some amusing animation.

via Google Wave opens doors to public, asks old friends for new chance — Engadget.

The Laser Celebrates Its 50th Frickin Birthday

BY WARREN RIDDLE — MAY 14TH 2010 AT 5:40PM

Albert Einstein first postulated the possibility of amplifying protons to create “masers” in 1917, but the theory wouldnt produce effective technology until the post-World War II period. The science of masers continued to evolve over the following decade, and, in 1958, Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow of Bell Labs published a seminal report that would spark a scientific revolution. The paper proposed that, by incorporating maser properties with the light spectrum, researchers could emit an intense optical beam.

Theodore Maiman of Hughes Labs would finally bring that research to fruition when he constructed the first functional laser and fired the first blast on May 16th of 1960. For those keeping score, that means the laser is officially turning 50 this very day. According to CNETs Daniel Terdiman, Hughes Labs which would later become Raytheon initially developed lasers that were primarily used by the military for guidance and targeting operations, a system which would prove significant and highly effective during the Vietnam War. The beams have since diverged into a multitude of directions, as the technology has been applied to a seemingly infinite array of endeavors — even if its just a cheap method for kids to annoy their pets, teachers and classmates.

While 50 is still relatively young, this year is currently hosting an incredible laser renaissance as scientists seem to be realizing the full potential of the technology. What better way to celebrate a monumental milestone than with the completion of the worlds largest laser, spaceships engaging in distant orbital exchanges, and — finally — a mosquito-zapping Photon Fence? Huzzah! [From: CNET]

via The Laser Celebrates Its 50th Frickin Birthday.