The tablet that changed the whole market for tablets, and isn’t a tablet

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Kindle Fire’s best feature is its ability as an e-book reader, according to reviewers. It is much more, however. For a list price of $199, customers get a seven-inch display, 8GB of RAM, free storage on Amazon’s cloud, WiFi and USB connections, the ability to run any Android-compatible app or game and automagical connections to media (for which you can pay Amazon) including e-books, music, movies and anything else you can find on the Internet.

Fire’s list price is $430 lower than the list price of the latest edition of the iPad and $249 less than Amazon’s discount price for a new ten-inch Samsung Galaxy tablet and $50 less than the seven-inch Samsung Galaxy.

via The tablet that changed the whole market for tablets, and isn’t a tablet | ITworld.

UCR Today: Scholars to Apply Facial Recognition Software to Unidentified Portrait Subjects

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RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Anyone who has admired centuries-old sculptures and portraits displayed in museums and galleries around the world at some point has asked one question: Who is that?

Three University of California, Riverside scholars have launched a research project to test — for the first time — the use of facial recognition software to help identify these unknown subjects of portrait art, a project that ultimately may enrich the understanding of European political, social and religious history.

via UCR Today: Scholars to Apply Facial Recognition Software to Unidentified Portrait Subjects.

“Almost every portrait painted before the 19th century was of a person of some importance,” Rudolph explained. “As families fell on hard times, many of these portraits were sold and the identities of these subjects were lost. The question we hope to answer is, can we restore these identities?”

Its Samsung Day! Congratulations Samsung for being world’s biggest handset maker, and biggest smartphone maker

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So it was 14 years of Nokia leadership in the most widely used technology ever seen on the planet. At its peak, there was a quarter in 2006 that Nokia had 40% of the global market for phones, and there were years when Nokia was as big as rivals numbers 2 and 3 combined, there were quarters where Nokia was as big as rivals number 2, 3 and 4 combined. Nokia had spread to be in the pockets of 1.3 Billion people, 19% of the total population alive on the planet. No other technology ever, indeed no brand is used by as many people as Nokia. Not Sony Walkmans or TVs, not Microsoft on the PC, not Coca Cola in drinks, not Levi’s in blue jeans, not Bic in pens. But now that King has been toppled. The King is Dead, Long Live the King. Now Samsung will take over and build even a bigger footprint, as mobile phone handsets keep spreading to new first-time users in India, Africa, Latin America etc.

via Communities Dominate Brands: Its Samsung Day! Congratulations Samsung for being world’s biggest handset maker, and biggest smartphone maker.

Engineers ponder easier fix to dangerous Internet problem

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But the routers do not verify that the route “announcements,” as they are called, are correct. Mistakes in entering the information — or worse yet, a malicious attack — can cause a network to become unavailable.

It can also cause, for example, a company’s Internet traffic to be circuitously routed through another network it does not need to go through, opening the possibility the traffic could be intercepted. The attack is known as “route hijacking,” and can’t be stopped by any security product.

via Engineers ponder easier fix to dangerous Internet problem | ITworld.

In March 2011, a researcher noticed that traffic destined for Facebook on AT&T’s network strangely went through China for a while. While the requests would normally go directly to Facebook’s network provider, the traffic first went through China Telecom and then to SK Broadband in South Korea before routing to Facebook. Although the incident was characterized as a mistake, it would have been possible for unencrypted Facebook traffic to have been spied on.

China plans national, unified CPU architecture

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According to reports from various industry sources, the Chinese government has begun the process of picking a national computer chip instruction set architecture (ISA). This ISA would have to be used for any projects backed with government money — which, in a communist country such as China, is a fairly long list of public and private enterprises and institutions, including China Mobile, the largest wireless carrier in the world. The primary reason for this move is to lessen China’s reliance on western intellectual property.

via China plans national, unified CPU architecture | ExtremeTech.

The other option, of course, is developing a brand new ISA — a daunting task, considering you have to create an entire software (compiler, developer, apps) and hardware (CPU, chipset, motherboard) ecosystem from scratch. But, there are benefits to building your own CPU architecture. China, for example, could design an ISA (or microarchicture) with silicon-level monitoring and censorship — and, of course, a ubiquitous, always-open backdoor that can be used by Chinese intelligence agencies. The Great Firewall of China is fairly easy to circumvent — but what if China built a DNS and IP address blacklist into the hardware itself?

AWStats

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AWStats is a free powerful and featureful tool that generates advanced web, streaming, ftp or mail server statistics, graphically. This log analyzer works as a CGI or from command line and shows you all possible information your log contains, in few graphical web pages. It uses a partial information file to be able to process large log files, often and quickly. It can analyze log files from all major server tools like Apache log files (NCSA combined/XLF/ELF log format or common/CLF log format), WebStar, IIS (W3C log format) and a lot of other web, proxy, wap, streaming servers, mail servers and some ftp servers.

via AWStats – Free log file analyzer for advanced statistics (GNU GPL)..

UPD Cambridge UK Trial of TV White Space Wireless Broadband is Successful

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The TV White Spaces Consortium, which comprises 17 international and UK technology and media companies (BT, Microsoft, BBC, Virgin Media, Alcatel-Lucent etc.), has reported that their 10 month long trials of White Space (IEEE 802.22) wireless broadband tech in urban and rural areas around Cambridge (England) have been “successful“.

via UPD Cambridge UK Trial of TV White Space Wireless Broadband is Successful – ISPreview UK.

City centre coverage. The consortium set up base stations on the north side of the Cambridge city centre in four pubs and a theatre, aiming to provide widespread coverage, including “pop-up” Wi-Fi hotspots. The base stations were connected to dual omnidirectional wide-band antennas mounted on rooftops (radios and antennas provided by Neul), enabling considerably further coverage than could have been achieved with conventional Wi-Fi, in 2.4GHz, for example. The tests showed that TV white spaces can help extend broadband access and offload mobile broadband data traffic. These hotspots can enable users to enjoy data-intensive services such as online video provided by BBC iPlayer and Sky Go during peak usage times, when additional capacity and wider reach is needed.

Python e-book error

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Python will turn your everyday binary strings into Unicode strings when necessary. But things get trickier if you put non-ASCII characters in Byte strings.

via. http://lobstertech.com/python_unicode.html

The ebook reader in linux was written in python and chokes on a lot of abnormal characters and I think the above is the reason why.  This could be a problem with the nook and other ebook readers but I’m not sure and it’s really not a priority to find out.   I know the nook will not accept an epub with a malformed stylesheet.css even though the python linux e-reader will.

It will be interesting to find out how some of the bigger tablets handle this.