In Europe, sound recordings enter the public domain 50 years after their initial release. … , a published U.S. sound recording created in 1890 will not enter the public domain until 177 years after its creation, constituting a term of rights protection 82 years longer than that of all other forms of audio visual works made for hire.”
via Copyright Protection That Serves to Destroy | Sightings by Terry Teachout – WSJ.com.
Apache Mesos is a cluster manager that provides efficient resource isolation and sharing across distributed applications, or frameworks. It can run Hadoop, MPI, Hypertable, Spark (a new framework for low-latency interactive and iterative jobs), and other applications. Mesos is open source in the Apache Incubator.
via Apache Mesos: Dynamic Resource Sharing for Clusters.
Mesos is being used to manage clusters at Twitter, AirBnb, Conviva, UC Berkeley, and UC San Francisco.
Chronos has a number of advantages over regular cron. It allows you to schedule your jobs using ISO8601 repeating interval notation, which enables more flexibility in job scheduling. Chronos also supports the definition of jobs triggered by the completion of other jobs, and it also supports arbitrarily long dependency chains.
via Introducing Chronos: A Replacement for Cron – Airbnb Engineering.
In a complex processing pipeline every step increases the chance of failure. Until December last year, we were relying on a single instance with cron to kick off our hourly, daily and weekly ETL jobs. Cron is a really great tool but we wanted a system that allowed retries, was lightweight and provided an easy-to-use interface giving analysts quick insights into which jobs failed and which ones succeeded.
Avaya, for example, is known for suing service companies, accusing them of violating copyright for simply using a password to log in to their phone systems. That’s right: typing in a password is considered “reproducing copyrighted material.”
Because manufacturers have copyrighted the service manuals, local mechanics can’t fix modern equipment. And today’s equipment — packed with sensors and electronics — is too complex to repair without them. That’s a problem for farmers, who can’t afford to pay the dealer’s high maintenance fees for fickle equipment.
In the end, cloud providers — many of which aim for 99.9 percent uptime, or “three nines” — are likely to offer individual companies a more reliable service than those companies attain for themselves, the CSA’s Howie says.
via Cloud Providers Work To Disperse Points Of Failure – Dark Reading.
Note that telecom typically operates under 5 nines uptime. The point of this article may be that end users need to implement their own backup plans to get higher than three 9s reliability.
Sound lasers work on a similar principle. For Mahboob and his team’s phaser, a mechanical oscillator jiggles and excites a bunch of phonons, which relax and release their energy back into the device. The confined energy causes the phaser to vibrate at its fundamental frequency but with at a very narrow wavelength. The sound laser produces phonons at 170 kilohertz, far above human hearing range, which peters out around 20 kilohertz. The entire device is etched onto an integrated circuit that’s about 1 cm by 0.5 cm.
via Pew Pew! Scientists Build Lasers Out of Sound, Call Them Phasers | Wired Science | Wired.com.
Developing an astronaut corps and conducting operations aboard a space station can dramatically transform a nation’s image both internally and externally. The creation of jobs and lucrative economic opportunities via microgravity research, development, and manufacturing can inspire a new cadre of domestic scientists and engineers while attracting the best and brightest minds from around the world to a country’s universities and companies.
via Bigelow Aerospace.
Per the information above, utilizing a Falcon 9 and Dragon, for only $51.25 million, a client can travel to the Alpha Station for two months and enjoy dominion over 110 cubic meters of volume for 60 days.
VirnetX sued Cisco, Apple, NEC and others back in 2010, and it won over $368 million from Apple earlier this year. It also has separate litigation pending against Apple and Mitel Networks.
via Cisco beats patent holder VirnetX, which sought $258 million over VPN patent | Ars Technica.
BigQuery is a cloud service that lets users analyze terabyte-sized data sets using SQL-like queries. It’s based on Google’s Dremel querying system, which can analyze data where it’s located (i.e., in the Google File System or BigTable) and which Google uses internally to analyze a variety of different data sets.
via Google BigQuery is now even bigger — Tech News and Analysis.
The idea behind the Internet Bad Neighborhood concept is that the probability of a host in behaving badly increases if its neighboring hosts (i.e., hosts within the same subnetwork) also behave badly. This idea, in turn, can be exploited to improve current Internet security solutions, since it provides an indirect approach to predict new sources of attacks (neighboring hosts of malicious ones).
via Internet bad neighborhoods – UTpublications.
This is a good start in developing some kind of IP blacklist.