There is one group of people that can stop this madness before it’s too late – the domain name registrars themselves. In the middle of October, Mark Jeftovic, CEO of the Canadian hosting company EasyDNS, vocally refused to comply with a request from PIPCU. Has he suffered the wrath of the British authorities? Nope. Was EasyDNS’s accreditation revoked? No. Is the company still in business? Oh yes.
via The UK Government Is Already Censoring The Global Internet.
Heat makes atoms move and can shake Cooper pairs apart, so the holy grail is to design a material where the pairs are bound together so strongly that superconductivity can happen even up to room temperature. It might be possible to describe a Fermi surface that would create that condition, and perhaps then imagine what crystal structure it would require. “Ideally we would like to be able to tell the materials scientist to put elements X, Y and Z together,” Lee said. “Unfortunately we can’t do that yet.”
via New superconductor theory may revolutionize electrical engineering.
It may seem surprising that Bitcoin’s basis is cryptography. Isn’t Bitcoin a currency, not a way of sending secret messages? In fact, the problems Bitcoin needs to solve are largely about securing transactions — making sure people can’t steal from one another, or impersonate one another, and so on. In the world of atoms we achieve security with devices such as locks, safes, signatures, and bank vaults. In the world of bits we achieve this kind of security with cryptography. And that’s why Bitcoin is at heart a cryptographic protocol.
Nothing like this happened with nuclear power. It was a technology whose development was dictated by a few prominent government and military officials and large organizations and straitjacketed within narrow constraints. Most of the developers of nuclear technologies were staid, elderly bureaucrats rather than young iconoclasts like Frederic de Hoffmann. An early design invented by Admiral Hyman Rickover – suitable for submarines but hardly optimal for efficient land-based power stations – was frozen and applied to hundreds of reactors around the country. Since then there have been only a hundred or so reactor designs and only half a dozen or so prominent ones. Due to a complicated mix of factors including public paranoia, lack of economies of scale, political correctness and misunderstandings about radiation, nuclear technology was never given a chance to be played around with, to be entrusted to youthful entrepreneurs experimenting with ideas, to find its own way through the creative and destructive process of Darwinian evolution to a plateau of technological and economic efficiency. The result was that the field remained both scientifically narrow and expensive. Even today there are only a handful of companies building and operating most of the world’s reactors.
via The future of nuclear power: Let a thousand flowers bloom – Nobel Week Dialogue.
I’d been working on a PiFace interface so I could use my Raspberry Pi without a keyboard and monitor. For a bit of fun I wondered if I could turn it into a simple digital camera, that would take a picture when a button was pressed, and to my pleasant surprise, discovered you could. An idea was beginning to form in my head. If I wrote a bit more code, instead of pressing a button to take a picture, I could trigger it remotely over a network. Furthermore, it cost a lot less than any other digital camera. Could the Raspberry Pi really recreate a bullet time style effect?
via Bullet Time Effect – Frozen Raspberry Pi | PiFace.
To everyone’s amazement, including mine, it actually worked! Raspberry Pi had frozen time, recreating a Hollywood effect for a fraction of the cost. You can see the results in the video above http://youtu.be/IqoA4HeBCQ4?t=2m19s
Opus 1.1 includes:
- new analysis code and tuning that significantly improves encoding quality, especially for variable-bitrate (VBR),
- automatic detection of speech or music to decide which encoding mode to use,
- surround with good quality at 128 kbps for 5.1 and usable down to 48 kbps, and
- speed improvements on all architectures, especially ARM, where decoding uses around 40% less CPU and encoding uses around 30% less CPU.
These improvements are explained in more details in Monty’s demo (updated from the 1.1 beta demo).
- Source code: opus-1.1.tar.gz
via Opus Codec.
From the Xiph.org developers
Opus is a codec designed for interactive usages, such as VoIP, telepresence, and remote jamming, that require very low latency. In this test Opus is running with 22.5ms of total latency but the codec can go as low as 5ms. Making a codec for low latency requires serious tradeoffs which reduce efficiency, so it might seem a bit strange to test it against a collection of state-of-the-art codecs which are completely unsuitable for these low-latency applications.
What is Postfix? It is Wietse Venema’s mail server that started life at IBM research as an alternative to the widely-used Sendmail program.
Postfix attempts to be fast, easy to administer, and secure. The outside has a definite Sendmail-ish flavor, but the inside is completely different.
Lack of competition plays a role in the poor U.S. showing, as does the country’s significant geographical mass (Russia is ranked 35, Canada is ranked 37). As our commenters are quick to note, many users also may not subscribe to the fastest connection available, often due to cost.
via U.S. Now 31 in Mean Broadband Speed | DSLReports, ISP Information.
On Quora, Messina explained why he chose to let the hashtag become a free device anyone can use and not a licensable product that he could have made money from:
- claiming a government-granted monopoly on the use of hashtags would have likely inhibited their adoption, which was the antithesis of what I was hoping for, which was broad-based adoption and support — across networks and mediums.
- I had no interest in making money (directly) off hashtags. They are born of the Internet, and should be owned by no one. The value and satisfaction I derive from seeing my funny little hack used as widely as it is today is valuable enough for me to be relieved that I had the foresight not to try to lock down this stupidly simple but effective idea.
via Chris Messina Talks About Inventing The Hashtag On Twitter – Business Insider.
The goal is to put physical shops on a similar playing field as e-commerce stores, which already have a wealth of data about customer buying habits. According to the website, Swarm treats smartphones like “offline cookies,” so stores can personalize the experience for new and repeat shoppers. Swarm does this through its cloud-based platform that integrates into a store’s public Wi-Fi network.