FlatWorld Interactives sued Apple in April 2012, naming just about every gadget in Apple’s arsenal as a product that infringed its two related patents, said to cover swiping gestures on a touch screen. Over the next three months, the company filed similar lawsuits against LG Electronics and Samsung, against a wide array of smartphones made by those companies.
Haswell is here: we detail Intel’s first 4th-generation Core CPUs
This time around, Intel is actually much more interested in telling us about that lowered power consumption, as is evident in the use of phrases like “biggest [generation-to-generation] battery life increase in Intel history.” By the company’s measurements, a laptop based on Haswell should in some circumstances be able to get as much as a third more battery life than the same laptop based on Ivy Bridge.
via Haswell is here: we detail Intel’s first 4th-generation Core CPUs | Ars Technica.
Haswell is the sort of CPU upgrade we’ve come to expect from Intel: a whole bunch of incremental improvements over last year’s model, all delivered basically on-time and as promised. Again, we’ll need to have test systems in hand to verify all of the lofty claims that the company is making here, but at least on paper Haswell looks like a big push in the right directions. It increases GPU power to fight off Nvidia and AMD, and it decreases overall power consumption to better battle ARM.
Rackspace Adds Brocade’s vRouter
The vRouter is a software-based router that runs on server hardware, so it can do other things — routing (duh) or acting as a virtual private network (VPN) gateway, for instance. The attraction to the firewall piece is that cloud customers previously had been building things like firewalls out of Linux components, says John Engates, Rackspace’s CTO.
Network Engineering Stack Exchange
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Hottest Questions This Month – Network Engineering Stack Exchange.
DRBL – About
DRBL (Diskless Remote Boot in Linux) is free software, open source solution to managing the deployment of the GNU/Linux operating system across many clients. Imagine the time required to install GNU/Linux on 40, 30, or even 10 client machines individually! DRBL allows for the configuration all of your client computers by installing just one server (remember, not just any virtual private server) machine
via DRBL – About.
DRBL uses PXE/etherboot, NFS, and NIS to provide services to client machines so that it is not necessary to install GNU/Linux on the client hard drives individually. Once the server is ready to be a DRBL server, the client machines can boot via PXE/etherboot (diskless). “DRBL” does NOT touch the client hard drives, therefore, other operating systems (e.g. MS Windows) installed on the client machines will be unaffected. This could be useful in, for example, during a phased deployment of GNU/Linux where users still want to have the option of booting to Windows and running some applications only available on MS windows. DRBL allows great flexibility in the deployment of GNU/Linux.
Survivorship Bias
Taking survivorship bias into account, Wald went ahead and worked out how much damage each individual part of an airplane could take before it was destroyed – engine, ailerons, pilot, stabilizers, etc. – and then through a tangle of complicated equations he showed the commanders how likely it was that the average plane would get shot in those places in any given bombing run depending on the amount of resistance it faced. Those calculations are still in use today.
via Survivorship Bias « You Are Not So Smart.
Simply put, survivorship bias is your tendency to focus on survivors instead of whatever you would call a non-survivor depending on the situation. Sometimes that means you tend to focus on the living instead of the dead, or on winners instead of losers, or on successes instead of failures. In Wald’s problem, the military focused on the planes that made it home and almost made a terrible decision because they ignored the ones that got shot down.
USA Intellectual Property Theft Commission Recommends Malware!
“Additionally, software can be written that will allow only authorized users to open files containing valuable information. If an unauthorized person accesses the information, a range of actions might then occur. For example, the file could be rendered inaccessible and the unauthorized user’s computer could be locked down, with instructions on how to contact law enforcement to get the password needed to unlock the account. Such measures do not violate existing laws on the use of the Internet, yet they serve to blunt attacks and stabilize a cyber incident to provide both time and evidence for law enforcement to become involved.”
via Lauren Weinstein’s Blog: USA Intellectual Property Theft Commission Recommends Malware!.
Google acquires kite-power generator
It plans to operate the tethered wings in small groups of six with each one anchored at the points of a hexagon. The wings operate between 250m (820ft)and 600m above ground.
Why Tumblr Was a Massive Steal for Yahoo
Everyone’s Facebook feed is pretty much the same as everyone else’s of the same age. Twenty-year-olds pose in the club, 30-year-olds share wedding photos, by age 40 you’re looking at a lot of cute pictures of your friends’ kids. But with Tumblr, you never know what you’re going to get — even with people you know personally. That, in a nutshell, is the difference between a social graph and an interest graph.
via Why Tumblr Was a Massive Steal for Yahoo – Adam Rifkin – Voices – AllThingsD.
Here’s an interesting tidbit from TechCrunch written Feb 2013. From Tumblr Is Not What You Think
Pop quiz: what is the favorite social networking site of Americans under age 25? If you guessed Facebook you are way behind the eight-ball, because Tumblr now enjoys more regular visits from the youth of America. That figure struck me while reading Garry Tan’s January 2013 survey and I wondered why? So I delved deeper; this article describes what I discovered while exploring the Tumblr network.
Scientists growing new crystals to make LED lights useful for office, home
Technically the LEDs produce light by passing electrons through a semiconductor material, in combination with materials called phosphors that glow when excited by radiation from the LED. “But it’s hard to get one phosphor that makes the broad range of colors needed to replicate the sun,” said John Budai, a scientist in ORNL’s Materials Science and Technology division in a release. “One approach to generating warm-white light is to hit a mixture of phosphors with ultraviolet radiation from an LED to stimulate many colors needed for white light.”
via Scientists growing new crystals to make LED lights useful for office, home.