Ebook Readers: Device to Go the Way of Dinosaurs?

Posted on by

Shipments of ebook readers by year-end will fall to 14.9 million units, down a steep 36 percent from the 23.2 million units in 2011 that now appears to have been the peak of the ebook reader market. Another drastic 27 percent contraction will occur next year when ebook reader shipments decline to 10.9 million units. By 2016, the ebook reader space will amount to just 7.1 million units—equivalent to a loss of more than two-thirds of its peak volume in 2011.

via Ebook Readers: Device to Go the Way of Dinosaurs? – Home & Consumer Electronics portal at IHS iSuppli® offers the latest broadband industry trends, with in-depth broadband research analysis. at iSuppli.

Errata Security: Apple’s secret “wispr” request

Posted on by

The reason Apple does this is because you may be using an app other than the web browser. For example, the only thing you might be doing is syncing your e-mail. In such situations, you would never see the portal page, and your app will mysteriously fail to connect to the Internet.

Therefore, before your app has a chance to access the network, Apple does this for you. It sends out a request to the above URL. If the request gets redirected, then Apple knows there is a portal. It then launches a dialog box, containing Safari, to give you a chance to login.

via Errata Security: Apple’s secret “wispr” request.

At my local Starbucks, all web surfing is free. But, Windows presents a captive logon page where you must accept the Terms of Service, but the iPhone doesn’t. I assume the portal detects this URL, and automatically opens up the access-point without doing a redirection. I need to test witha Linux distro in order to figure out what’s going on.

Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits

Posted on by

Adafruit was founded in 2005 by MIT engineer, Limor “Ladyada” Fried. Her goal was to create the best place online for learning electronics and making the best designed products for makers of all ages and skill levels. Since then Adafruit has grown to over 35 employees in the heart of NYC. We’ve expanded our offerings to include tools, equipment and electronics that Limor personally selects, tests and approves before going in to the Adafruit store. We pride ourselves on having great prices, the best customer service, technical support and fast shipping. We hope we can assist you on your journey of learning! Want to learn more? See what others are saying on the Adafruit press page!

via Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits.

From: Entrepreneur of 2012: Limor Fried

In October Fried moved her 35 employees from a 2,000-square-foot loft near Wall Street to a 12,000-square-foot industrial space in SoHo, then hired 15 more people. Just a week after the move, Fried was bubbling with excitement, obvious even over the din of 500 packages being prepped for the daily UPS shipment. “It’s a new chapter in the business,” she exclaims. “I think we can quadruple our current size.” No mean feat, considering Adafruit has shipped more than half a million kits in the last seven years, and revenue has doubled every year for the past three.

Here’s a comment from slashdot…

I’m near retirement and have worked in embedded software for four different companies. In all my years of experience, the best engineers I have encountered were those educated at MIT. Limor Fried is not only from MIT, but she did a stint at the MIT media laboratory. I’ve bought lots of products from her and the quality is first rate, her circuit boards are works of art with tin plating on the solder pads (compare that to a Velleman board) and legible annotation.

Introducing Qt 5.0 | Qt Blog

Posted on by

While we have cleaned up many things in our internal architecture and made Qt more modular, leaner and faster, we have managed to keep application compatibility in a way that most applications will work with very few changes and a simple recompile on Qt 5.

Of course, this also implies that Qt Widgets are fully supported and an essential part of Qt 5.

via Introducing Qt 5.0 | Qt Blog.

To stream everywhere, Netflix encodes each movie 120 times

Posted on by

Xboxes, iPads, connected TVs: Netflix streams to a lot of different devices. More than 900, to be precise. And many of them have different screen sizes, bitrate requirements and codec support. That’s why Netflix is doing a whole lot of encoding: Each and every movie is encoded in 120 different versions, according to a behind-the-scenes video recently published by the company.

via To stream everywhere, Netflix encodes each movie 120 times — Online Video News.

How Akamai’s New CEO, Tom Leighton, Hopes to Speed up Mobile Computing

Posted on by

You can’t measure the capacity of the Internet from the last mile connection. Just because you have that 100-megabit or even one-gigabit connection from your house to some local data center doesn’t mean you are even going to get a five-megabit stream if you are getting service from a data center halfway across the country.

via How Akamai’s New CEO, Tom Leighton, Hopes to Speed up Mobile Computing | MIT Technology Review.

Instagram Can Now Sell Your Precious Photos

Posted on by

Earlier this month, Instagram disabled photo integration with Twitter, raising the ire of many users and pundits. “The only way these companies can succeed financially is by tricking members and forcing them into walled gardens,” Dan Lyons wrote in a Dec. 10 ReadWrite posting. “Think of it this way—there’s a reason that they don’t hold a circus out in the open, and instead put it under a tent—and it’s not to keep you dry in case of rain.

Via Instagram Can Now Sell Your Precious Photos.

How to find out if X is an element in an array?

Posted on by

Try using the modern “smart match” operator:
if ( $tofind ~~ @in )

via How to find out if X is an element in an array?.

Had to do this for a script I’m writing where I need to compare two lists and find out which elements in list A aren’t in list B.   This was the simplest of all the solutions described in the above link.  I haven’t actually implemented this yet…

Update 12/19.  The above does indeed work.  Not sure how they do it.  It would seem comparing two lists of length n would be an O(n**2) problem.  Might have to look into a proper database however it’s still manageable at this scale.

Also, a shoutout to perlmonks.org, a site that usually gets high rankings on my searches for perl related information and that is always concise and easy to read to  divine the info I was searching for.  The above link is a perfect example.  It points to a page that contains a lot of different implementations of what is probably a very common algorithmic problem.