The technologist’s guide to troubleshooting hardware

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PCs are always getting simpler and more streamlined, but there are still a lot of different parts to most of them, which means that there is a lot more that can go wrong with them. We’ll go through potential problems component by component, matching symptoms to issues and telling you the best way to inform your friend on the other end of the phone. Pay attention here, because many of these symptoms and procedures are also going to be useful when troubleshooting Macs, phones, and tablets.

via The technologist’s guide to troubleshooting hardware | Ars Technica.

A Faster Fourier Transform

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The principle of the Fourier transform, which dates back to the 19th century, is that any signal, such as a sound recording, can be represented as the sum of a collection of sine and cosine waves with different frequencies and amplitudes. This collection of waves can then be manipulated with relative ease—for example, allowing a recording to be compressed or noise to be suppressed. In the mid-1960s, a computer-friendly algorithm called the fast Fourier transform (FFT) was developed. Anyone who’s marveled at the tiny size of an MP3 file compared with the same recording in an uncompressed form has seen the power of the FFT at work.

via A Faster Fourier Transform – Technology Review.

A faster transform means that less computer power is required to process a given amount of information—a boon to energy-conscious mobile multimedia devices such as smart phones.

Note the higlighted statement.  Power consumption is trumping speed in modern computing devices.  Also Note:  The author of the linked to article isn’t me.

Ebooks Made of YouTube Comments Invade Amazon Kindle Store

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A pair of artist-coders have unleashed a small army of bots designed to flood the Kindle e-book store with texts comprised entirely of YouTube comments. According to the artists, even they have no idea how many books their autonomous bots are posting to the store.

via Ebooks Made of YouTube Comments Invade Amazon Kindle Store – Technology Review.

“The KINDLE’VOKE machinary is based on three major parts. (1) The “Sucker” a clever suction apparatus to gather comments from Youtube. (2) the “Ghost Writer’s Table”: the book compiler that handles generation of books content, book covers, authors at the same time. (3) The “Amazon Kindle Scatter Bots” that make the brand new digital literature available for all of us.

AMD Licenses ARM Technology: AMD Leans on ARM for Security

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Last year after that particular AFDS, there was much speculation that AMD and ARM would get a whole lot closer. Today we have confirmed that in two ways. The first is that AMD and ARM are founding members of the HSA Foundation. This endeavor is a rather ambitious project that looks to make it much easier for programmers to access the full computer power of a CPU/GPU combo, or as AMD likes to call them, the APU. The second confirmation is one that has been theorized for quite some time, but few people have actually hit upon the actual implementation. This second confirmation is that AMD is licensing ARM cores and actually integrating them into their x86 based APUs.

via AMD Licenses ARM Technology: AMD Leans on ARM for Security | PC Perspective.

MacBook Pro with Retina Display Teardown

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Laptops are expensive. It’s critical that consumers have the option to repair things that go wrong, as well as upgrade their own hardware to keep it relevant as new technologies roll out. On top of being glued together, the new MacBook Pro is virtually non-upgradeable—making it the first MacBook Pro that will be unable to adapt to future advances in memory and storage technology.

via MacBook Pro with Retina Display Teardown | iFixit.

“Defensive Patent License” created to protect innovators from trolls

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The pledge might help Twitter attract ethical engineers, but ultimately it’s just one company taking a stand among a sea of litigators that are happy to prevent the sale of competitors’ products or extract licensing fees. A potentially more ambitious project called the “Defensive Patent License” aims to take the same basic idea practiced by Twitter and spread it across a big part of the technology industry.

via “Defensive Patent License” created to protect innovators from trolls | Ars Technica.

The commitment is both daunting in that it requires submitting all of a member company’s patents to the pool, and forgiving in that members can still sue the pants off non-members. Schultz said his team thought long and hard about the exact implementation of the Defensive Patent License.

Hortonworks Data Platform 1.0 Targets Enterprises

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Hortonworks has unveiled Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) 1.0, an open-source platform built on Apache Hadoop 1.0 that includes data-management, monitoring, metadata and data-integration features.

via Hortonworks Data Platform 1.0 Targets Enterprises.

For example, the platform’s provisioning interface surveys nodes in the target cluster and recommends optimal software configurations, with the subsequent ability to start the cluster via a single click. The monitoring interface offers a streamlined ability to see the health of the cluster in depth. The data integration services allow users to connect with data services and build transformation logic via graphical interfaces, sparing them from having to write code.

VMware’s Serengeti Brings Hadoop to Virtual, Cloud Environments

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Hadoop is a framework for reliably running applications on large hardware clusters. Many large enterprises (such as Facebook and IBM) have come to rely on it as a vital part of their respective data-crunching infrastructures. Research firm IDC recently predicted that worldwide revenues from Hadoop and MapReduce, another framework for processing problems across huge datasets, could hit $812.8 million in 2016, a significant uptick from $77 million in revenues last year.

via VMware’s Serengeti Brings Hadoop to Virtual, Cloud Environments.

VMware has positioned Serengeti as a “one click” deployment toolkit that, when used in conjunction with its vSphere platform, can deploy an enterprise-level Hadoop cluster in a matter of minutes. The company claims that vSphere’s virtualization capabilities will boost the “availability and manageability” of Hadoop clusters.

Project Serengeti

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Serengeti is an open source project initiated by VMware to enable the rapid deployment of an Apache Hadoop cluster HDFS, MapReduce, Pig, Hive, .. on a virtual platform.

Serengeti 0.5 currently supports vSphere, with the ability to support other platforms. The project is at an early stage, and is endorsed by all major Hadoop distributions including Cloudera, Greenplum, Hortonworks and MapR.

via Project Serengeti.

European ISPs Lobby ITU Against Net Neutrality

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ETNO’s submission to the ITU sets out a difference between “end to end quality of service delivery” and “best-effort delivery”, and says operators should get “fair compensation”,  concluding that “nothing shall preclude” commercial agreements based on differentiated service.

Net Neutrality advocates say charging for services would allow providers to kill off competitors that run on top of their networks, like VoIP services such as Skype that operate over networks and compete with telephone services. The question also raises fears of Internet taxes.

via European ISPs Lobby ITU Against Net Neutrality | | TechWeekEurope UKTechWeekEurope UK.