Common Paradox Tech Blog

Dan Jones writes “As discussed here last year, IBM has made good on its promise to release the Power7 processor (and servers) in the first half of 2010. The Power7 processor adds more cores and improved multithreading capabilities to boost the performance of servers requiring high up-time, according to Big Blue. Power7 chips will run between 3.0GHz and 4.14GHz and will come with four, six, or eight cores. The chips are being made using the 45-nm process technology. New Power7 servers (up to 64 cores for now) are said to deliver twice the performance of older Power6 systems, but are four times more energy efficient. Power7 servers will run AIX and Linux.” And reader shmG notes Intel’s release of a new Itanium server processor after two years of delays. The Power7 specs would seem to put the new Intel chip in the shade.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Having several blogs can be a bit hard to maintain, and micro blogging services like Posterous and Tumblr provide a quicker way to post content to the web. However, WordPress has added features which are similar to Posterous, in the form of posting by email to WordPress.com blogs.

If you have started using that feature and are looking to import data from your old Posterous blog to your WordPress.com blog, you will now be able to do it using the Posterous importer. To import content from your Posterous blog to WordPress, login to your dashboard and go to Tools -> Import, click on the link for Posterous importer to being the process of importing data to your WordPress.com blog.

More info and details at the Official WordPress.com blog.

Sure, Google’s Superbowl ad was cute and left us giggling, but how would a French romance powered by Google really go? [UCB—Thanks, Mackenzie!]

Last year, Yahoo still dominated display advertising on the Web in terms of sheer number of ad impressions on its properties, but social networking sites MySpace and Facebook came on strong. Some new data from comScore in its just-released 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review ranks the top Web properties by the number of display ad impressions.

Yahoo served up an estimated 521 billion impressions last year, according to the report, followed by Fox Interactive Media (i.e. MySpace) with 368 billion, and Facebook with 330 billion. Microsoft sites (No.4) only served up 218 billion display ads, whereas Google (No. 6) served up only 70 billion. (These numbers do not include paid search text ads)

Here’s the full ranking:

Top Ten Publishers Of Display Ads
in billions of impressions (comScore)
1. Yahoo! Sites: 521 billion
2. Fox Interactive Media (MySPace): 368 billion
3. Facebook: 330 billion
4. Microsoft Sites: 218 billion
5. AOL: 192 billion
6. Google Sites: 7o billion
7. eBay: 36 billion
8. Glam Media: 25 billion
9. Amazon Sites: 22 billion
10. United Online: 20 billion

Obviously, the biggest sites with the most visitors serve up the most display ads. This year, Facebook doubled in size to the point where it is well past MySpace and catching up to Yahoo in audience size. It is already bigger than Yahoo in terms of pageviews.

Facebook has more advertising inventory than it knows what to do with, although not all of it is desirable. But Facebook is now selling all of its display ad inventory itself after it renegotiated its ad deal with Microsoft.

Biggest doesn’t mean most profitable. Facebook might be serving up more ads than almost anyone else, but they are still selling at very low ad rates because they perform poorly for the most part. If Facebook can figure out a way to make the ads on its site become more relevant and useful, it has a lot of room to boost its ad rates.

You can download the entire comScore report at this 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Reviewlink.

href="http://api.tweetmeme.com/share?url=http://mashable.com/2010/02/08/music-ownership-beats-subscription/&service=bit.ly"> width="51" height="61" src="http://api.tweetmeme.com/imagebutton.gif?url=http://mashable.com/2010/02/08/music-ownership-beats-subscription/" align="right"/>

src="http://cdn.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/music-260.jpg" alt="" title="music-260" width="260" height="199" class="alignright size-full wp-image-200762" />In last week’s href="http://www.mashable.com/tag/web-faceoff">Faceoff Series we asked about href="http://mashable.com/2010/02/02/subscription-vs-ownership/">music consumption models: Do Mashable readers prefer to own their entire music collections or do some of you gravitate toward subscription services?

One week later and the results are in: Ownership wins the day at a full 50% of the vote. Of all our past Faceoffs, though, this edition had one of the highest “tie” votes constituting people who really like both models. The music subscription model still came in second place behind ownership at 28% of the vote, but the “Tie: I like them both!” option was very close behind at 22%.

The results seem to indicate both a growing contingent of folks warming up to the idea of music subscription services, and the idea that there could be room in the market for both approaches to be sustainable business models. Which option got your vote in our poll, and why? Let us know in the comments!

Tags: href="http://mashable.com/tag/music/">music, href="http://mashable.com/tag/polls/">polls, href="http://mashable.com/tag/social-media/">social media, href="http://mashable.com/tag/subscription/">subscription, href="http://mashable.com/tag/web-faceoff/">web faceoff

If you’re a huge space buff, you might not be surprised by anything in this video tour of the International Space Station. But it’s still great to just get a simple walkthrough of this incredible project and all its corners.

Anyone else get a bit bit light-headed watching all those twists and turns? [CrunchGear]

Asus is apparently making plans to release their first Pine Trail powered all-in-one PC. The Eee Top ET1610PT will come equipped with the fairly new Intel Atom D410 single core CPU, and of course, Intel integrated graphics. The PC will have a 15.6 inch touchscreen display with a resolution of 1600×900. It will also come equipped with 802.11n Wi-Fi, which is a nice feature on a low end machine.

Strangely, this new PC will come with Windows XP preinstalled. You read that right, no Windows 7 on this bad boy. The presence of that touchscreen display makes the decision to go with XP just that much more baffling. The machine is expected to go for 400 Euros when is ships.

An anonymous reader writes “What I feared has come true: after buying Sun, Oracle had a look at its accessibility group and made big cuts in it by firing the most important contributors to the Linux accessibility tools. This is a very sad day for disabled people, as it means we do not really have full-time developers any more.” The coverage in OSTATIC has a few more details, including the caution: “This just shows that all too few companies are sponsoring a11y work. If one company laying off a couple of developers spells trouble for the project, then there were problems before that happened” (thanks to reader dave c-b for pointing this out).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Probably the most controversial thing about the blogging service Tumblr is that it doesn’t have a built-in way to comment on posts. You sort of can do it now if you reblog an item and add your own note (which then shows up under the original post), but it’s not the same. And while they still haven’t added comments, tonight they’ve temporarily turned on a new feature: Photo Replies.

While it doesn’t appear the feature is working just yet, Tumblr notes that they’re going to turn it on for the next 48 hours as an experiment. When it is on, you will presumably see a new photo icon in your dashboard which will allow you to upload a picture in response to a Tumblr post. So yes, basically it’s a photo comment.

To enable it on any post, simply check the box that reads “Let people photo reply” in the Tumblr backend for your blog.

While Tumblr itself doesn’t have a native commenting system, many users choose a third-party commenting option. The Tumblr Staff Blog, for example, uses Disqus.

[top photo via]