Sometimes, even HTML is just too hard.

In this postmodern world, we’re all professionally fragmented jacks of all trades, and few of us have the patience (read: OCD) for learning enough CSS and Flash to allow us to keep up with the Jonses in terms of functional, sexy web design. Here are some cheat sheets, the Cliff Notes of site creation, if you will. Read on to discover four awesome, in-browser resources for creating your own beautiful corner of the web without the horror of code.

Edicy: Sites in Seconds

Edicy is a resource we just found out about recently. The in-browser site creation and editing service gives users a simple toolbar for text, video, and images and a lower dashboard for changing page design. Users can insert tables and Google-powered maps, and the drag-and-drop image features for creating multiple galleries was awesome for achieving a visually pleasing page and would probably be great for portfolios or family websites. The blog feature was so-so; we don’t really see Edicy as a competitor when it comes to the CMS game, though. Still, we created this page in about 15 minutes, making Edicy one of the fastest tools we’ve worked with.

YourOwn.com: Edicy offers free vanity.edicy.com domains and publishing to any domain the user chooses for about $8.50 a month.

Choose Your Own Coding Adventure: Users can only pop the hood, so to speak, on HTML for sections of text. We couldn’t find a way to, for example, change the color scheme or background image or page formatting.

SEO-riffic: Edicy lets users add keywords and descriptions, but not other metadata or tags for images or other media.

Zimplit: Fully Simple, Fully Editable

Zimplit is a resource we reviewed some time ago, but we feel it’s perfect for this particular round-up. We were able to create a simple, elegant page within about a half hour. It’s an open-source, dead-simple application that works just as well for code-free “dummies” as well as it does for those with an inkling or two about web design on the back end. For non-coders, a gallery of great design templates kick things off, and a simple 12-button toolbar does it all after that.

YourOwn.com: Vanity URLs on Zimplit.com are available, and regular domains (plus email addresses) are available starting at around $4.25 per month.

Choose Your Own Coding Adventure: Users have complete access HTML and CSS for their pages, making this a great resource for learning as you go.

SEO-riffic: Sorry, Charlie. You’ll have to access the code to tweak your metadata and keywords.

Wix: Flash Sites for Flashy Folks

We’re not going to lie: Creating a Flash site in Wix will take you a little more time. But for those who desire that Flash-y touch, this is one of the best free resources you’ll find. This editor will present tools familiar to those familiar with other graphic design programs such as image editing or more GUI-oriented website editing programs. The effects, behaviors, animations, and other options offer complete control. Also, we adore the horde of multimedia gallery options. You’ve got slide shows, Apple-like sliders, and tidy matrices. But to be honest and fair, Wix is just as strangely buggy as any Flash service you’ve tried to use.

YourOwn.com: There’s a whole slew of premium options. Users can elect to choose their own domains for as little as $4.95 a month. An ad-free site, however, costs a dollar a month more.

Choose Your Own Coding Adventure: We couldn’t see any back end here, folks. But with all the design options available through the Wix interface, we’re not sure you’ll need much more.

SEO-riffic: “SEO Friendly” options start at $4.95 a month.

Amplifeeder: A Catchall for the NMDs Among Us

Another site we’ve reviewed before is Amplifeeder. What users create there may not qualify as full-on websites, but for those who are hip, Amplifeeder creates sites that are the living end in terms of social media aggregation. Really, we all create so much content across our various networks that a personal site can be static and even redundant. Amplifeeder uses great design templates to bring together blog posts, Twitter and Facebook updates, Flickr pics, YouTube videos, and any number of other social media happenings. The page we created is beyond cool and serves as a gorgeous, clean portal to all the places we really live online. Plus, the data you put here is all portable, backup-able, and restorable.

YourOwn.com: Hosting options are coming soon, according to site creator Jon Davies.

Choose Your Own Coding Adventure: Customize your heart out with a blank CSS slate.

SEO-riffic: This part’s all up to you. Your SEO will be the moment of truth: What DO you really talk about and share most? Transparency meets SEO when Amplifeeder serves an aggregation of your social streams.

So there you have four great resources for website creation, from super simple to creatively complex. Now get out there and start souping up your web presence. We just made keeping up with the Joneses that much more competitive.

Facebook announced today that it now has 250 million users, having added 50 million new users in just the past three months. If Facebook was a country it would now be the 4th most populous place on earth. If it maintains this kind of growth there will be more Facebookers than people living in the United States by early November. The man who ostensibly rules this kingdom is 25 years old.

Could Facebook be too big? It has centralized an incredible amount of power over a huge number of peoples’ lives; the texture of Facebook now shapes the pattern of a substantial portion of human communication around the world. Is Facebook too big? That seems like an important question.

Subtle Influences

Let’s look at an analogy. Every week about 30 million Americans watch American Idol on television. What are the lessons re-enforced by this program? Perhaps it’s that anyone can achieve great things, that harsh public judgment can be funny and appropriate, that the story of our culture is one of rising from obscurity through hard work to wealth and heroism. There may be more subtle messages communicated. It’s widely understood that American Idol is an important cultural influence at this point in history.

Facebook is almost 10 times as big and its users spend far more time on the site than people spend watching American Idol. They use it to communicate with some of their closest friends and family. Surely there can be no doubt that the culture of Facebook has an impact on the larger culture of the human experience. The old cliche “the medium is the message” still rings true and Facebook is a very big medium.

That much influence centralized in one technology company, at a time of dramatic cultural change brought about by technology, is cause for serious concern.

What Is Facebook Teaching Us?

Facebook says all the time that it is helping the world become more connected; it acknowledges that it is making a cultural impact. Facebook cannot be trusted, however, to discuss all the different ways it is changing the world. The cultural impacts of Facebook will take a long time to analyze, but two examples are worth looking at.

Peter Thiel and the Singularity

Facebook’s first and most important investor is PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. Thiel is a big believer in what’s called The Singularity, defined by the Singularity Institute as “the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence.” Thiel believes that investing in the Singularity means thinking ahead about how humanity can benefit from our relationships with these smarter-than-human machines instead of being hurt by them. He says that the Singularity will either lead to the biggest economic boom in human history or it will lead to an apocalypse. Literally.

So one of Facebook’s keystone thinkers has his eyes set on a future where machines are smarter than humans, and that either helps us a lot or destroys us all. He is essential to the vision of a communication technology now used daily by 250 million people.

Facebook’s machine intelligence is very real; its system is learning quickly about how humans interact and how different people respond to different events, for example. Let’s hope that the very wealthy Thiel, the very young Zuckerberg and the rest of the company’s insular brain-trust, can steer that machine towards truly helping humanity and not destroying it.

You Will Be Less Private

Facebook made its mark and appeals to so many people in large part because what you say on Facebook is by default only visible to social connections you have chosen to approve. Already the site was changing our traditional understanding of privacy from one where certain things were said to certain people in certain circumstances – into an experience where all things are said to all people that we know, in a big bucket.

Now, the company is rolling out changes to the way Facebook works that will prod users into making more of their shared information visible to everyone on Facebook, all 250 million other users and an unknown number of robots analyzing your information for the company, perhaps for advertisers and perhaps for people building applications you’ll appreciate.

We asked Facebook execs earlier this month when they held a press call about privacy if they were in fact seeking to push users towards communicating more information publicly. Two of the three people on the call said yes, they are. One, the executive in charge of privacy on the site, gave an obtuse answer about how Facebook wants to give users more control over their communication. It doesn’t really seem that way.

Facebook is making changes to the public/private balance in a big way that hundreds of millions of people communicate. We may or may not like the results.

These are just two examples of ways that Facebook could be changing the world. It has incredible reach in doing so. Whether that is good or bad is an important question to ask.

NerdMaster writes “Last week nVidia held their Spring 2008 Editor’s day, where they presented their forthcoming series of graphics processing units. While the folks at Hardware Secrets couldn’t tell the details of the new chips, they posted some ideas of what nVidia is seeing as the future of computing. Basically more GPGPU usage, with the system CPU losing its importance, and the co-existence of ray-tracing and rasterization on future video cards and games. In other words, the ‘can of whoop-ass’ nVidia has promised to open on Intel.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

D Ninja writes “Yesterday, Lockheed Martin was awarded the $1.4 billion Air Force contract to build the next-generation global positioning satellite system. This occurred after a series of delays as the Air Force decided between Lockheed and the competing bidding contractor, Boeing Co. ‘GPS III, will give new navigation warfare (NAVWAR) capabilities to shut off GPS service to a limited geographical location while providing GPS to US and allied forces. GPS III will offer significant improvements in navigation capabilities by improving interoperability and jam resistance. The procurement of the GPS III system is planned for multiple blocks, with the GPS IIIA portion currently underway. GPS IIIA includes all of the GPS IIF capability plus up to a ten-fold increase in signal power, a new civil signal compatible with the European Union’s Galileo system, and a new spacecraft bus that will allow a growth path to future blocks.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. said it is cutting about 10% of its work force, or about 1,650 jobs, and warned that weaker-than-expected sales hurt results in its recent quarter.

Posted by Brooke Crothers 2 comments
Intel doesn’t enter markets gently. Its new high-capacity solid-state drives (SSDs) are expected to jolt a market currently dominated by Samsung, Toshiba, and SanDisk.

Intel’s current offering: the Z-P140 PATA solid-state drive.(Credit: Intel Corp.)
At the moment, Intel offers small-capacity chip-level (what are called Thin Small Outline Packages or TSOPs) technology that provides end-product sizes ranging up to 16GB. But this modest line of products will get a big boost in the second quarter when Intel offers 1.8- and 2.5-inch SSDs ranging from 80GB to 160GB in capacity, said Troy Winslow, marketing manager for the NAND Products Group at Intel. Intel’s new SSDs will compete with Samsung, for example, which is slated to bring out a 128GB SSD in the third quarter.
With new competition, drive speeds will jump. Currently, the fastest SSDs from companies like Samsung approach 100MB/second for reading data. "What I can tell you is ours is much better than that," Winslow said. Hard drives typically read data at about half this speed.
"We will be supplementing our product line with a SATA offering," he said. Serial ATA, or SATA, is an interface used in high-performance hard disk drives. Intel’s products will be based on the SATA II specification that offers speeds of 3 gigabits (Gb) per second. Samsung is now shipping 64GB SSDs to Dell using the same technology.
"When Intel launches its…products, you’ll see that not all SSDs are created equal," Winslow said. "The way the SSDs are architected, the way the controller and firmware operates makes a huge difference," he said, referring to the chip (controller) that manages the SSD and software (firmware) that the controller uses.
Intel believes 2008 is the year of the SSD. (See SSD primer below.) "For the first time, flash is going into the compute environment. In the last nine years or so when it experienced all of its growth, this has been in digital cameras and USB keys," Winslow said. But now flash memory, in the form of SSDs, will be used as the main storage device in PCs. "When you’re putting all your critical applications and data into notebook or server (SSDs), who knows those markets better than the manufacturer that’s supplying the world with CPUs," Winslow added.
While the latter statement seems like typical marketing spin, it’s more than just spin in Intel’s case. The largest chipmaker in the world is in a competitive position because it already supplies many of a PC’s core components including the processor, chipset, communications silicon, and in some cases, the graphics processor. Add the main storage device to the mix, and–with the exception of an optical drive and screen–that’s all the core component in a notebook PC.
But to be competitive with hard drives, SSD prices have to come down–a lot. In many cases, upgrading from a hard drive to an SSD in a notebook can mean paying an extra $1,000. Intel, like Samsung and Toshiba, sees steep declines in cost in the next two years. "Price declines are historically 40 percent per year," Winslow said. "And in 2009, a 50 percent reduction, then again in 2010."
Also, like Samsung, Intel sees SSDs playing a role in the server market as a "performance accelerator." Winslow said that Intel recently did a video-on-demand demonstration where it streamed 4,000 videos simultaneously. Just to do the streaming (not to store the video), it took 62 15,000 RPM (very high-performance) hard drives, he said. "We were able to replace those 62 hard drives with 10 SATA (SSD) technology drives," he said.
Finally, Winslow addressed the price collapse in the flash market in general–a topic that generated a lot of press after the Intel analyst meeting on Wednesday. "A majority of flash is being sold in very cyclical consumer electronics devices. Q1 and Q2 are soft quarters," he said. On top of this, suppliers continue to shrink manufacturing process technologies, leading to more capacity at lower cost, he said.
SSD Primer, Part 1: SSDs are based on flash memory chip technology and have no moving parts. Hard-disk drives (HDDs), in contrast, use read-write heads that hover over spinning platters to access and record data. With no moving parts, SSDs avoid both the risk of mechanical failure and the mechanical delays of HDDs. Therefore, SSDs are generally faster and more reliable. The catch is the cost: SSDs are currently much more expensive than HDDs.
SSD Primer, Part 2: Intel will be shipping in the second quarter a Multi-Level Cell or MLC solid-state drive. This is a more sophisticated technology than current Single-Level Cell or SLC. The advantage is larger capacity since MLC uses multiple levels per cell to allow more bits to be stored. The disadvantage is more complexity which can result in lower performance. "Inherently, MLC is slower and inherently fewer write cycling endurance," Winslow said. Intel, however, has technology that will get around these problems, he said.
Intel Flash/SSD capacity: Intel and Micron have a joint venture called IM Flash Technologies. Both companies are currently making flash on a 50-nanometer process with plans to move to 40nm later this year. There are three NAND flash fabrication plants and one more currently being built in Singapore. The Intel-Micron venture provides funding for the development of silicon technology and the capacity to produce that silicon, according to Winslow. But marketing and end-product decisions are "absolutely separate," he said.

As more entrepreneurs set their sights on the potential to make money (and ostensibly do some "good" in the process) in the solar power industry, it would seem obvious that Silicon Valley would emerge as a hotbed of activity. Anecdotally, Silicon Valley is home to more aspiring founders and CEOs per capita than any other place in the world; people flock here ready to take their shot at the-next-big-thing. The Valley's many success stories have spawned a large group of people who have the name recognition and/or money needed to tackle big challenges. In a recent column, The New York Times draws connections between the experience and aspirations of Silicon Valley's business elite and the likelihood Silicon Valley could also become "Solar Valley".

While many people are looking for the first solar industry Google to emerge, it is companies like Intel that provide the better template for what Solar Valley businesses might look like (Moore's Law having nothing to do with it). Google became a household name and corporate giant barely a half decade after its founding. Key to that success is competing in an industry with low capital requirements, and where creating a successful brand can be a self-fulfilling. On the other hand, Intel was around for twenty five years before its marketing efforts led people to start asking for Intel Inside; even today Intel's products remain essentially hidden behind the more visible brands of PC manufacturers. Like chip companies, solar businesses face capital-intensive startup and long product development cycles. As a whole, the solar industry faces development hurdles like land acquisition, permitting, environmental review, and transmission capacity, which will limit the rate at which solar companies can grow. And solar companies are unlikely to earn much of a premium on their name: your electricity bill will not say Energized By Ausra any time soon. Even residential products will be sold through local solar installers, and homeowners are more likely to choose an installer based on the best value for the service than any particular panel manufacturer that that installer represents.

There's no doubt that interest and http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071211/012928.shtml">investment in solar power will continue to grow in Silicon Valley, and the area will almost certainly produce success stories. But the nature of the industry means that most of the magazine covers will stay reserved for members of the Internet crowd.