The jury at the Supreme Court of Victoria agreed with Google up to a point. The company wasn’t responsible for the results until Trkulja asked it to take them down, it said. (Read the decision in full here.) Because it stuck to its guns, Google must pay $200,000 in damages..
Netflix Gives Data Center Tools to Fail
Netflix has released Hystrix, a library designed for managing interactions between distributed systems, complete with “fallback” options for when those systems inevitably fail.
The code for Hystrix—which Netflix tested on its own systems—can be downloaded at Github, with documentation available here, in addition a getting-started guide and operations examples, among others.
via Netflix Gives Data Center Tools to Fail.
Netflix will also release the real-time dashboard it uses for monitoring Hystrix. That dashboard relies on a traffic-light system to display service dependencies for the last ten seconds, with colors measuring latency and the size of the circles showing traffic.
The OpenNMS Project
OpenNMS is the world’s first enterprise grade network management application platform developed under the open source model.
via The OpenNMS Project.
Leverage the value of an truly open source project with an active community. Download OpenNMS now, check out the wiki, and join the discussion.
Halving day is almost upon us!
Bitcoin is built so that this reward is halved every 210,000 blocks solved. The idea is as bitcoin grows the transaction fee’s become the main part of the reward and the introduction of new bitcoin’s slows down to a trickle. This also means that there will only ever be 21,000,000 bitcoins in circulation.
Well, in less than 4 days the block count will reach the first of these 210,000 block milestones and the reward for solving a Bitcoin block will half from 50BTC to 25BTC. (Have a look at bitcoinclock.com)
Scientists See Advances in Deep Learning, a Part of Artificial Intelligence
Last year, for example, a program created by scientists at the Swiss A. I. Lab at the University of Lugano won a pattern recognition contest by outperforming both competing software systems and a human expert in identifying images in a database of German traffic signs.
The winning program accurately identified 99.46 percent of the images in a set of 50,000; the top score in a group of 32 human participants was 99.22 percent, and the average for the humans was 98.84 percent.
via Scientists See Advances in Deep Learning, a Part of Artificial Intelligence – NYTimes.com.
Orange Finds Its Web Services Voice
The app has been launched for iOS in 95 countries and will be ready for Android early next year. It is free for anyone to download, no matter which mobile network they are on. It enables users to make free high-definition voice calls and send instant messages to other Libon users over mobile or Wi-Fi connections, as well as set up three personalized visual voicemails that can be set to respond to certain individuals or contact groups. In addition, voicemails can be updated with the user’s most recent Twitter of Facebook status messages (converted into a voicemail using a text-to-speech tool — that could be interesting…).
via Orange Finds Its Web Services Voice – 4G/LTE – Telecom News Analysis – Light Reading Mobile.
UNSW Computing 1 – The Art of Programming
Discover the world of computing, learn software design and development while solving puzzles with world renowned lecturer Richard Buckland.
UNSW Computing 1 is presented by OpenLearning with original content derived from UNSW COMPUTING’s first year computing course. Take the course for online for free, the next cohort starts on December 3rd 2012.
via UNSW Computing 1 – The Art of Programming – (OpenLearning).
BlackBerry 10: AWESOME. If the hardware matches it, RIM jobs are safe
For example, the BlackBerry knows when it’s in a holster. It knows when it’s on a nightstand so it can do all kinds of “I’m in a nightstand now” things. You know what’s “incoming” without taking it out of its case – you can tell that from the LED indicator. (Enthusiasts have written programs to allow you to set sophisticated ‘Blinkenlights’ sequences of coloured flashes, telling you in much more detail what is going on.) The obsession with usability extends to giving everything a shortcut key. You can set up a custom shortcut key to show you all the emails from Alice in the last three months, for example.
via BlackBerry 10: AWESOME. If the hardware matches it, RIM jobs are safe • The Register.
Once you’ve got used to it, and that the Hub is the home screen, BB10 is by some distance the most brutally efficient multitouch interface I have used so far. It makes the others look like hard work.
“Anonymous” File-Sharing Darknet Ruled Illegal by German Court
A court in Hamburg, Germany, has granted an injunction against a user of the anonymous and encrypted file-sharing network RetroShare . RetroShare users exchange data through encrypted transfers and the network setup ensures that the true sender of the file is always obfuscated. The court, however, has now ruled that RetroShare users who act as an exit node are liable for the encrypted traffic that’s sent by others.
via “Anonymous” File-Sharing Darknet Ruled Illegal by German Court | TorrentFreak.
Windows 8 — Disappointing Usability for Both Novice & Power Users
The new design is obviously optimized for touchscreen use (where big targets are helpful), but Microsoft is also imposing this style on its traditional PC users because all of Windows 8 is permeated by the tablet sensibility.
How well does this work for real users performing real tasks? To find out, we invited 12 experienced PC users to test Windows 8 on both regular computers and Microsoft’s new Surface RT tablets.
via Windows 8 — Disappointing Usability for Both Novice & Power Users Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox.
The underlying problem is the idea of recycling a single software UI for two very different classes of hardware devices. It would have been much better to have two different designs: one for mobile and tablets, and one for the PC.