Mark Cuban: Facebook Is Driving Away Brands – Starting With Mine

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“We are moving far more aggressively into Twitter and reducing any and all emphasis on Facebook,” Cuban says, via email. “We won’t abandon Facebook, we will still use it, but our priority is to add followers that our brands can reach on non-Facebook platforms first.”

via Mark Cuban: Facebook Is Driving Away Brands – Starting With Mine.

“The big negative for Facebook is that we will no longer push for likes or subscribers because we can’t reach them all. Why would we invest in extending our Facebook audience size if we have to pay to reach them? That’s crazy.

The original link has a few programming problems but the article can be read after hitting the stop button on your browser.

Finding Rootkits By Monitoring For ‘Black Sheep’

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Blacksheep compares memory dumps from each monitored system, first creating lists of kernel memory modules that are then sorted and compared, calculating the distance that each list of modules is from the others. The system then compares each byte of a modules’ code with other systems to find differences that could indicate changes inserted by a rootkit. Blacksheep also conduct memory crawling to catch changes to kernel data and checks five different kernel entry points for signs of changes.

via Finding Rootkits By Monitoring For ‘Black Sheep’ – Dark Reading.

Vint Cerf and NASA’s BP and DTN Protocol: How It Works

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The big difference between BP and IP is that, while IP assumes a more or less smooth pathway for packets going from start to end point, BP allows for disconnections, glitches and other problems you see commonly in deep space, Younes said. Basically, a BP network — the one that will the Interplanetary Internet possible — moves data packets in bursts from node to node, so that it can check when the next node is available or up.

via Vint Cerf and NASA’s BP and DTN Protocol: How It Works.

DTN = Disruption Tolerant Networking

Toshiba laptop service manuals and the sorry state of copyright law

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As you would be no doubt already aware, I run a section of my blog here devoted to the free sharing of laptop service manuals. This is a side project I have run for the last three years, gathering as many repair manuals as I could find on the internet and rehosting them on my website for anybody to download and use.

I have unhappy news for you all. Since I was first contacted by Toshiba Australia’s legal department, I have been attempting to discuss with them the potential for me to continue to share their laptop service manuals on my site. Their flat and final response was “You do not have permission [to disseminate Toshiba copyright material] nor will it be granted to you in the foreseeable future.” As a result, all Toshiba material that was on my website is now gone, permanently.

via Future proof » Blog Archive » Toshiba laptop service manuals and the sorry state of copyright law.

Building a wisp

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This guide shows the basic requirements and steps to build a WISP (Wireless Internet Service Provider) using Ubiquiti AirMax devices; suggested equipments and examples are intended for a system of up to 400 subscribers based on a single Base Station and “centrally managed” from the principal router. It covers the following themes: basic legal and commercial requirements, required equipments and basic services on the Base Station, clients’ configuration and general recommendations for starters.

via Building a wisp – Ubiquiti Wiki.

One in Six Active U.S. Patents Pertain to the Smartphone

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If anything illustrates the absurdity of the current state of affairs in the patent system, it is that the smartphone handset market — although booming — accounts for less than 1% of the U.S. annual GDP (by U.S. sales) but encompasses 16% of all active U.S. patents.***

via One in Six Active U.S. Patents Pertain to the Smartphone.

To put the absurdity of the current system into perspective, scholars Christina Mulligan and Timothy B. Lee estimated that it would take roughly 2,000,000 patent attorneys working full-time to compare every software-producing firm’s products with every software patent issued in a given year.

GNOME 3.8 Is Dropping Its Fallback Mode

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Matthias Clasen on the behalf of the GNOME Release Team has announced that they have decided to eliminate GNOME’s “fallback mode” with the upcoming 3.8 release that allowed a “GNOME classic” mode that didn’t depend upon OpenGL/3D rendering and was more like the GNOME2 traitional desktop.

via [Phoronix] GNOME 3.8 Is Dropping Its Fallback Mode.

Now for GNOME users without a proper GPU and drivers, if you want to still use GNOME, you will need to use LLVMpipe for a software-accelerated experience of the GNOME Shell.

Gnome has totally gone off the rails.  Luckily there is a fork for Gnome called Mate.  Mate is supposed to be shipped with Fedora 18.  I have used Mate in a Linux Mint virtual machine and it works well.  I tried loading it into a Fedora 17 VM many months ago and it had problems but I’m sure all of that will get worked out.  IMHO, Gnome has become a product of hubris.  I’ve tried to use it and just can’t deal with the constant context switching to do simple tasks like opening a terminal window.

Coursera, edX, and MOOCs Are Changing the Online Education Business

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Online education isn’t new—in the United States more than 700,000 students now study in full-time “distance learning” programs. What’s different is the scale of technology being applied by leaders who mix high-minded goals with sharp-elbowed, low-priced Internet business models. In the stories that will follow in this month’s business report, MIT Technology Review will chart the impact of free online education, particularly the “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, offered by new education ventures like edX, Coursera, and Udacity, to name the most prominent (see “The Crisis in Higher Education”).

via Coursera, edX, and MOOCs Are Changing the Online Education Business | MIT Technology Review.

Will they succeed and create something truly different? If they do, we’ll have the answer to our question: online learning will be the most important innovation in education in the last 200 years.

From:  MOOCs will eat academia

MOOCs will al­most cer­tainly hol­low out the teach­ing com­po­nent of uni­ver­si­ties as it stands today. I don’t see any­thing on the hori­zon that will re­verse this tide. In most tech­ni­cal fields, the nuts and bolts tech­ni­cal in­ter­view and on-the-job learn­ing and per­for­mance mon­i­tor­ing long ago re­placed any faith in de­grees as cre­den­tials. That leaves very few fields, such as law, where you ab­solutely do need the de­gree as a cre­den­tial.

Hadoop Corona

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Hadoop Corona is the next version of Map-Reduce. The current Map-Reduce has a single Job Tracker that reached its limits at Facebook. The Job Tracker manages the cluster resource and tracks the state of each job. In Hadoop Corona, the cluster resources are tracked by a central Cluster Manager. Each job gets its own Corona Job Tracker which tracks just that one job. The design provides some key improvements:

via hadoop-20/src/contrib/corona at master · facebook/hadoop-20 · GitHub.