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.
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.
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.
China Unicom, one of the biggest telecoms providers in the country, is now killing connections where a VPN is detected, according to one company with a number of users in China.
via China tightens ‘Great Firewall’ internet control with new technology | Technology | guardian.co.uk.
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.
Companies like Facebook, Microsoft, Zynga all have spoken in tandem about the HTML5 specification announcement and have congratulated W3C for the milestone. The consortium took this opportunity to announce the first draft of HTML 5.1 and Canvas 2D, Level 2.
via W3C Finalizes HTML5 Specification – ParityNews.com: …Because Technology Matters.
The download feature, which lets Comcast adopt an iTunes-ish model without the incremental pay-per-view component (for now), is a nice add-on because it lets users watch shows and movies on planes and in other venues that usually don’t have a solid enough broadband connection for streaming.
via Light Reading Cable – The Bauminator – Who’s Behind Comcast’s Video Downloader?.
“You will see the World War I artillery acronyms are shorter, but, that is because, you have to remember, that, the primitive radio-transmitters that sent the Morse code were run by batteries, and, those didn’t last much more than a half-hour tops, probably less.
“Thus all World War I codes had to be S-n-S, Short-n-Sweet.
via BBC News – Has World War II carrier pigeon message been cracked?.
Kamailio™ (former OpenSER) is an Open Source SIP Server released under GPL, able to handle thousands of call setups per second. Among features: asynchronous TCP, UDP and SCTP, secure communication via TLS for VoIP (voice, video); IPv4 and IPv6; SIMPLE instant messaging and presence with embedded XCAP server and MSRP relay; ENUM; DID and least cost routing; load balancing; routing fail-over; accounting, authentication and authorization; support for many backend systems such as MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, Radius, LDAP, Redis, Cassandra; XMLRPC control interface, SNMP monitoring. It can be used to build large VoIP servicing platforms or to scale up SIP-to-PSTN gateways, PBX systems or media servers like Asterisk™, FreeSWITCH™ or SEMS. Kamailio and the SIP Express Router (SER) teamed up for the integration of the two applications and new development.
via Kamailio SIP Server.
In this short post, I’d like to show how hash-DoS can be applied to the btrfs file-system with some astonishing and unexpected success. Btrfs, while still in development stage, is widely considered as being a viable successor of ext4, and an implementation of it is already part of the Linux kernel. According to this page,