Yahoo Challenges Apple with a Cocktail of Mobile Publishing Tools

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It turns out that Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) has ambitious plans to help publishers get more efficient about how they push content out to mobile devices. Specifically, Yahoo wants to become the new middleman of the mobile publishing world, giving media companies software that they could use to reach users of iPhones, Android devices, Windows phones, and other gadgets without having to bow to the programming approaches favored by their powerful makers—namely Apple, Google, and Microsoft.

via Yahoo Challenges Apple with a Cocktail of Mobile Publishing Tools | Xconomy.

The first thing you need to understand about Yahoo’s publishing vision is that it’s coming from the Platform Technology Group. This is the same part of the company that created and then open-sourced key technologies that are now part of the Web’s infrastructure, such as Hadoop, which allows companies to run big, distributed software systems,

First ‘Super Wi-Fi’ network goes live in North Carolina

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“Super Wi-Fi” is essentially a buzzword created by the FCC to describe mobile data networks that run over the white spaces spectrum. The spectrum band’s low frequency allows for signals to travel farther and penetrate more walls than traditional Wi-Fi networks.

via First ‘Super Wi-Fi’ network goes live in North Carolina.

The debate over white spaces has been a contentious one, with tech companies such as Google and Microsoft pitted against all the major broadcasting companies, as well as major telecom carriers such as Verizon. Proponents of unlicensed white space use have often argued that opening up the spectrum would help bring mobile broadband to underserved regions and would help close the so-called “digital divide” between many urban and rural areas in the United States. On the other side, the National Association of Broadcasters has argued that mobile Internet devices cannot operate on unlicensed spectrum without clashing with broadcasts on nearby frequencies.

Congrats North Carolina!

SPDY: Google wants to speed up the web by ditching HTTP

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In an attempt to avoid these issues, SPDY uses a single SSL-encrypted session between a browser and a client, and then compresses all the request/response overhead. The requests, responses, and data are all put into frames that are multiplexed over the one connection. This makes it possible to send a higher-priority small file without waiting for the transfer of a large file that’s already in progress to terminate.

via SPDY: Google wants to speed up the web by ditching HTTP.

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Google works on Internet standards with TCP proposals, SPDY standardization

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Google’s focus is on reducing latency between client machines and servers, and in particular, reducing the number of round trips (either client to server and back to client, or vice versa) required. When data is sent over a TCP connection, its receipt must be acknowledged by the receiving end. The sending end can only send a certain number of packets before it must wait for an acknowledgement. The time taken to receive an acknowledged is governed by the round-trip time (RTT). With high bandwidth, high latency connections, clients and servers can end up spending most of their time waiting for acknowledgements, rather than sending packets.

via Google works on Internet standards with TCP proposals, SPDY standardization.

More far-reaching than these SSL tweaks is Google’s proposed alternative to the HTTP protocol that underpins the Web: SPDY.

CPU Startup Combines CPU+DRAM

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There are three limiting factors, or walls, that limit the scaling of modern microprocessors. First, there’s the memory wall, defined as the gap between the CPU and DRAM clock speed. Second, there’s the ILP (Instruction Level Parallelism) wall, which refers to the difficulty of decoding enough instructions per clock cycle to keep a core completely busy. Finally, there’s the power wall–the faster a CPU is and the more cores it has, the more power it consumes.

via CPU Startup Combines CPU+DRAM – HotHardware.

When your CPU has fewer transistors than an architecture that debuted in 1986, it’s a good chance that you left a few things out–like an FPU, branch prediction, pipelining, or any form of speculative execution. Venray may have created a chip with power consumption an order of magnitude lower than anything ARM builds and more memory bandwidth than Intel’s highest-end Xeons, but it’s an ultra-specialized, ultra-lightweight core that trades 25 years of flexibility and performance for scads of memory bandwidth.

WiFi Antennas | Selecting a WiFi antenna

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Parabolic or dish antennas

This is where the real power is! Parabolic dish antennas put out tremendous gain but are a little hard to point and make a connection with. As the gain of an antenna increases, the antenna’s radiation pattern decreases until you have a very little window to point or aim your dish correctly. Dish antennas are almost always used for a point to point system for long haul systems. The Parabolic Dish antennas work by focusing the power to a central point and beaming the radio’s signal to a specific area, kind of like the adjustable reflector on a flashlight. These antennas are highly focused and are the perfect tool if you want to send your signal a very long distance.

via WiFi Antennas | Selecting a WiFi antenna.