Bold plan: opening 1,000 MHz of federal spectrum to WiFi-style sharing

An advisory council to President Obama today said the US should identify 1,000 MHz of government-controlled spectrum and share it with private industry to meet the country’s growing need for wireless broadband.

via Bold plan: opening 1,000 MHz of federal spectrum to WiFi-style sharing | Ars Technica.

There’s a tag on this blog called monopolistic practices.  This article describes something exactly opposite of that.

Up Close With the Space Shuttle Enterprise

Up Close With the Space Shuttle Enterprise.

From: Up close with the Enterprise shuttle at the Intrepid Museum

This shuttle, OV-101, never made it to orbit but was used in-atmosphere for testing purposes. At one time it was considered for a retrofit — adding engines and a heatshield so that it would be able to make it to space and back — but NASA opted to build Challenger instead. So while it’s not exactly the crown jewel of US space flight history it’s still an impressive piece of work and something that it is extremely inspiring to be in the presence of.

NSA Mimics Google, Pisses Off Senate

But the NSA also saw the database as something that could improve security across the federal government — and beyond. Last September, the agency open sourced its Google mimic, releasing the code as the Accumulo project. It’s a common open source story — except that the Senate Armed Services Committee wants to put the brakes on the project.

via NSA Mimics Google, Pisses Off Senate | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com.

Google Research Publication: BigTable

Bigtable is a distributed storage system for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size: petabytes of data across thousands of commodity servers. Many projects at Google store data in Bigtable, including web indexing, Google Earth, and Google Finance. These applications place very different demands on Bigtable, both in terms of data size (from URLs to web pages to satellite imagery) and latency requirements (from backend bulk processing to real-time data serving). Despite these varied demands, Bigtable has successfully provided a flexible, high-performance solution for all of these Google products. In this paper we describe the simple data model provided by Bigtable, which gives clients dynamic control over data layout and format, and we describe the design and implementation of Bigtable.

via Google Research Publication: BigTable.

Apache Accumulo

The Apache Accumulo™ sorted, distributed key/value store is a robust, scalable, high performance data storage and retrieval system. Apache Accumulo is based on Google’s BigTable design and is built on top of Apache Hadoop, Zookeeper, and Thrift. Apache Accumulo features a few novel improvements on the BigTable design in the form of cell-based access control and a server-side programming mechanism that can modify key/value pairs at various points in the data management process. Other notable improvements and feature are outlined here.

via Apache Accumulo.

ARM rival MIPS porting Android 4.1 to low-cost tablets

MIPS is a processor licensing company that battles ARM, which dominates the tablet and smartphone market. But MIPS late last year sprang a surprise by announcing a US$99 tablet, in conjunction with a manufacturer called Ainol, based on its processor and running Android 4.0. The tablet was among the cheapest and among the first at that time with Android 4.0, but this year Google took the honors of releasing the first Android 4.1 device with Nexus 7, which runs on a quad-core ARM processor.

via ARM rival MIPS porting Android 4.1 to low-cost tablets – Google Nexus 7 tablet, Android OS, Android, smartphones, consumer electronics, processors, Components, MIPS Technologies, Google, Intel – Mobile Phones – Mobile – Techworld.

Raspbian-based SD card image released

We are pleased to announce the release of our first SD card image based on the Raspbian distribution. This is the result of an enormous amount of hard work by Alex and Dom over the past couple of months, and replaces the existing Debian squeeze image as our recommended install. Notably, it is the first official image to take full advantage of the Raspberry Pi’s floating point hardware for, amongst other things, much faster web browsing.

via Raspbian-based SD card image released | Raspberry Pi.

Troll sues Facebook, Amazon and others for using Hadoop

Big data has become the latest front for the patent troll epidemic as a shell company is suing firms for using a common open-source storage framework known as the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS).

via Troll sues Facebook, Amazon and others for using Hadoop — Tech News and Analysis.

Hadoop has been built by a large network of contributors, including individual developers and large companies like Yahoo and is an Apache Software Foundation project. HDFS, its storage component, was based on Google’s Google File System. Parallel Iron’s patent complaints, however, say the whole system was made possible by four men: