Mirror Group Digital enjoyed a surge in daily browsers of nearly 20% last month, after the Sun introduced its website paywall
via Mirror’s online traffic soars in wake of Sun paywall | Media | theguardian.com.
Groundbreaking Results for High Performance Trading with FPGA and x86 Technologies
As market data enters the switch, the Ethernet frame is parsed serially as bits arrive, allowing partial information to be extracted and matched before the whole frame has been received.
Then, instead of waiting until the end of a potential triggering input packet, pre-emption is used to start sending the overhead part of a response which contains the Ethernet, IP, TCP and FIX headers. This allows completion of an outgoing order almost immediately after the end of the triggering market feed packet.
The overall effect is a dramatic reduction in latency to close to the minimum that is theoretically possible.
via Groundbreaking Results for High Performance Trading with FPGA and x86 Technologies | Low-Latency.com.
Solr: The Most Important Open Source Project You’ve Never Heard Of
Lucene is used by many companies and groups as the foundation for their search engines. These organizations include AOL, Disney, and Eclipse. Lucene’s chief selling point is that the indexing engine, with a footprint of a mere megabyte of RAM, can index up to 150GBs per hour of text on commercial off-the-shelf hardware. That’s darn good!
Solr comes into the picture as the search platform front-end for Lucene. It provides full-text search, including the ability to handle such formats as Microsoft Word and PDF with Apache Tika; hit test highlighting; and faceted search, which incorporates free text searching with topic taxonomy indexing.
via Solr: The Most Important Open Source Project You’ve Never Heard Of.
Under the hood, Solr is written in Java and it relies on Lucene for its core functionality. It usually runs within a servlet container such as the Jetty HTTP server and Javax.servlet.
Hundreds of Innovators Tell Congress to Stop Patent Troll Abuse and Legislate Cheaper, Faster Ways to Fight
The Alliance letter calls for legislation that would:
– Create a cheaper, faster alternative to litigation by allowing the Patent Office to review – when evidence justifies – all business method and software patents so that start-ups have a chance to fight against the low-quality patents that are trolls’ best ammunition.
– Require the Patent Office to create public searchable demand letter databases so we can track the basis and volume of patent claims and quickly identify abusive trolls;
– Reduce litigation costs by requiring parties to pay if they demand more in discovery than “core” technology documents, which are generally all that is needed to know if a technology is infringing.
– Protect end-users of off-the-shelf hardware and software. Just as coffee shops should not be sued for providing wi-fi to customers, app developers should not be sued for using off-the-shelf APIs that infringe a patent.
Content Industry Drafts Anti-Piracy Curriculum for Elementary Schools
“It suggests, falsely, that ideas are property and that building on others’ ideas always requires permission,” Stoltz says. “The overriding message of this curriculum is that students’ time should be consumed not in creating but in worrying about their impact on corporate profits.”
All LinkedIn with Nowhere to Go
On one level, of course, this world of aspirational business affiliation is nothing new. LinkedIn merely digitizes the core, and frequently cruel, paradox of networking events and conferences. You show up at such gatherings because you want to know more important people in your line of work—but the only people mingling are those who, like you, don’t seem to know anyone important. You just end up talking to the sad sacks you already know. From this crushing realization, the paradoxes multiply on up through the social food chain: those who are at the top of the field are at this event only to entice paying attendees, soak up the speaking fees, and slip out the back door after politely declining the modest swag bag. They’re not standing around on garish hotel ballroom carpet with a plastic cup of cheap chardonnay in one hand and a stack of business cards in the other.
via All LinkedIn with Nowhere to Go | Ann Friedman | The Baffler.
In the same vein, actual business acumen and leadership skills usually take a back seat in the LinkedIn system to simple digital renown. Some of the best-known gurus on the site have had the most success in the realm of . . . thinking about stuff.
PayPal Nears Deal for Braintree Payments
The deal for Braintree would give PayPal access to data and lucrative transaction fees from Braintree’s expanding network, which currently processes more than $10 billion annually for companies like OpenTable, Uber Technologies and Airbnb. Braintree charges merchants a 2.9% commission and 30-cent transaction fee.
via PayPal Nears Deal for Braintree Payments – Digits – WSJ.
“Synthetic Tracking” Set to Revolutionise Near-Earth Asteroid Discovery
By contrast, they say that with a 5 metres telescope, synthetic tracking should spot about 80 of these objects each night. That’s “almost 1000 times higher than the discovery rate of these small objects over the last 5 years,” they say.
But there are other uses for this data. NASA is hoping to send a crewed mission to a near Earth asteroid in the not-too-distant future and has started a program called the Asteroid Grand Challenge to identify potential targets.
Paper on this subject here.
$199, 4.2” computer is Intel’s first Raspberry Pi competitor
One thing these platforms have in common is an ARM processor. Now they have some competition from Intel with its “MinnowBoard,” a $199 computer in the form of a 4.2″ x 4.2″ board with an Intel Atom processor.
via $199, 4.2” computer is Intel’s first Raspberry Pi competitor | Ars Technica.
MinnowBoard uses a 5V/2.5A power supply. Other specs are as follows:
- Intel Atom E640 CPU (1.0GHz, 32-bit with Hyper-threading and Virtualization Technology)
- Integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 600
- PCI Express
- SATA2 3Gbps
- Gigabit Ethernet
- >MicroSD
- USB
- UEFI Firmware
- 1GB DDR2 RAM<
- 8 GPIO pins
- 2 GPIO-controlled LEDs
- 4 GPIO switches
Wi-Fi sniffing lets researchers take social snapshots of crowds
Wi-Fi client devices can seek a wireless network to connect to through active or passive scanning for ‘beacons’ broadcast by access points. Smartphones typically use active scanning, which means they switch on their wireless radio for a brief period to send a probe request and receive information about networks within range. The operating systems of wireless devices can include a preferred network list (PNL), which incorporates some of the SSIDs of Wi-Fi networks the device has previously successfully connected to, and some devices will include this information in their probe requests.