Why are US cell carriers suddenly pushing you to upgrade faster? For the money

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So why is this happening all of a sudden? Put simply, the American mobile market is highly saturated—there are fewer and fewer new customers for these carriers. Only 1.1 million Americans got mobile phones for the first time in the first quarter of 2013—the lowest ever growth for that market. Q1 2012 saw around 1.83 million new additions, which shows a quarter-over-quarter loss of 60 percent this year. Meanwhile, there was a modest quarter-over-quarter gain in prepaid customers.

via Why are US cell carriers suddenly pushing you to upgrade faster? For the money | Ars Technica.

Amazon AWS Route 53 GEO DNS Configurations

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You can send visitors to different servers based on country of their IP address using Amazon Route 53 cloud based dns server. For example, if you have a server in Amsterdam, a server in America, and a server in Singapore, then you can easily route traffic for visitors in Europe to the Amsterdam server, people in Asia go to the Singapore server and those in the rest of the world be served by the American server.

via Amazon AWS Route 53 GEO DNS Configurations.

In this post, I will explain how to configure and test GeoDNS using AWS Route 53 service.

Microsoft is cutting the price of its Surface RT tablets, base model to cost $349

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The new Surface RT prices are detailed below.

  • Surface RT 32GB – $349.99
  • Surface RT 64GB – $449.99
  • Surface RT 32GB with Touch Cover – $449.99
  • Surface RT 64GB with Touch Cover – $549.99

via Microsoft is cutting the price of its Surface RT tablets, base model to cost $349 | The Verge.

Still too high.  I can get a decent laptop at Microcenter for $350 and if I want to go small there are plenty of under $200 tablets.  The Surface looks and feels like what they used to call a netbook.  Those didn’t do so well in the market.  I can’t imagine doing real work on one of those.  It’s hard enough with a laptop.  The size of the QWERTY keyboard is a big factor in productivity IMHO.

Why Nintendo can legally shut down any Smash Bros. tournament it wants

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Video games are treated differently, though, primarily because they exist on a screen rather than a board. “A video game under copyright law is an audiovisual work, which gives a public performance right to the copyright holder,” Dallas attorney and Law of the Game blog author Mark Methenitis explained in an interview with Ars. “Under the public performance right, the copyright holder is allowed to say when, where, or whether something is publicly performed, meaning displayed in front of a group of people larger than, say, at your house.”

In other words, if you want to put on a Street Fighter tournament and charge people to watch, Capcom can make you get a license for the “public performance” of the game. In fact, that is exactly what Capcom does with for-profit tournaments.

via Why Nintendo can legally shut down any Smash Bros. tournament it wants | Ars Technica.

AT&T Invents The Ultimate Anti-Piracy System

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The patent in question is named “Real-time content detection in ISP transmissions” and focuses exclusively on tracking and deterring online piracy. According to the telco, copyright infringement is a “recurring problem in Internet usage” that is hard to police without the proper tools..

via PRISM for Pirates: AT&T Invents The Ultimate Anti-Piracy System | TorrentFreak.

It looks like deep packet inspection comparing against hashes of known violating content that constantly updates.  Even the patent seems obvious as I had that idea circling in my head how they would do that as soon as I read the headline of this article.   This is not innovative.  AT&T must feel comfortable with their monopoly status to screw over customers like this.  I can’t imagine keeping hash tables of content violations accurate will be very easy.   Add to that the security implications of hackers infecting these tables with bogus hashes and you have a recipe for disaster.  Only a company with monopoly status can take such a risk because many of their “customers” have no other choice for Internet access.

Hibernate (Java)

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Hibernate is an object-relational mapping (ORM) library for the Java language, providing a framework for mapping an object-oriented domain model to a traditional relational database. Hibernate solves object-relational impedance mismatch problems by replacing direct persistence-related database accesses with high-level object handling functions.

Hibernate is free software that is distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License.

Hibernate’s primary feature is mapping from Java classes to database tables (and from Java data types to SQL data types). Hibernate also provides data query and retrieval facilities. It also generates the SQL calls and attempts to relieve the developer from manual result set handling and object conversion and keep the application portable to all supported SQL databases with little performance overhead

via Hibernate (Java) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The site to download it is here.

The hot new technology in Big Data is decades old: SQL

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Over the past six months, vendors have responded to the demand for more corporate-friendly analytics by announcing a slew of systems that offer full SQL query capabilities with significant performance improvements over existing Hive/Hadoop systems. These systems are designed to allow full SQL queries over warehouse-size data sets, and in most cases they bypass Hadoop entirely (although some are hybrid approaches). Allowing much faster SQL queries at scale makes big data analytics accessible by many more people in the enterprise and fits in with existing workflows.

via The hot new technology in Big Data is decades old: SQL | Ars Technica.

Why mobile web apps are slow

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At some point it will occur to you that keeping 30MB buffers open to display a photo thumbnail is a really bad idea, so you will introduce 6) the buffer that is going to hold a smaller photo suitable for display in the next screen, 7) the buffer that resizes the photo in the background because it is too slow to do it in the foreground. And then you will discover that you really need five different sizes, and thus begins the slow descent into madness. It’s not uncommon to hit memory limits dealing just with a single photograph in a real-world application.

via Why mobile web apps are slow | Sealed Abstract.

Dropbox wants to replace your hard disk

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With up to 500 developers expected for the inaugural developer conference in San Francisco, the company is bullish about its future prospects. “We are replacing the hard drive,” said Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, according to a report on Wired. “I don’t mean that you’re going to unscrew your MacBook and find a Dropbox inside, but the spiritual successor to the hard drive is what we’re launching.”

via Dropbox wants to replace your hard disk | News | PC Pro.

Good luck with that!