DJ's Junk Drawer

Linux 3.4 released

noreply@blogger.com (DJ) — Tue, 22 May 2012 16:40:00 +0000

Linux 3.4 released: Linux kernel 3.4 has been released. New features include several Btrfs updates: support of metadata blocks bigger than 4KB, much improved metadata performance, better error handling and better recovery tools; there is also a new X32 ABI which allows to run programs in 64 bit mode with 32 bit pointers; several updates to the GPU drivers: early modesetting of Nvidia Geforce 600 'Kepler', support of AMD RadeonHD 7xxx and AMD Trinity APU series, and support of Intel Medfield graphics; support of x86 cpu driver autoprobing, two new device-mapper targets, several perf improvements such as GTK2 report GUI and a new 'Yama' security module. Here's the full list of changes.

Slime computes freeways systems

noreply@blogger.com (DJ) — Tue, 22 May 2012 16:29:00 +0000

Slime computes freeways systems:

We've posted before about researchers exploring slime molds as a kind of bio-computer capable of some amazing accomplishments in information processing. Recently, computer scientist Andrew Adamtzky of the University of the West of England in Bristol and his colleagues used a slime mold to devise optimal interstate highway systems for the United States, Britain, Mexico, Brazil, the Netherlands, and Canada (above). He will detail his latest slime systems in a forthcoming issue of the scientific journal Complex Systems, "devoted to the science, mathematics, and engineering of systems with simple components but complex overall behavior." For a teaser, check out Adamatzky's recent op-ed in the New York Times, titled "The Wisdom of Slime."

Qualcomm hires former AMD CTO, makes 'em pay for dropping mobile

noreply@blogger.com (DJ) — Tue, 22 May 2012 16:23:00 +0000

Qualcomm hires former AMD CTO, makes 'em pay for dropping mobile:

Qualcomm is hiring AMD's former CTO Eric Demers to help the company produce a blockbuster mobile graphics chip. It needs the silicon for its big push for smartphone dominance (and tablets running Windows RT) in the face of strong competition from Imagination Technologies' Series 6 PowerVR and NVIDIA's Tegra 3. Demers' first job will be to merge Qualcomm's in-house Adreno team with ATI's Imageon mobile graphics chip team, which AMD flogged off for $65 million back in 2009 -- a move Sunnyvale is probably regretting now that it too is trying to get its hardware into mobile devices, unless it included a do-over clause in the sales contract.

Qualcomm hires former AMD CTO, makes 'em pay for dropping mobile originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 21 May 2012 12:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Conclusions from studying 20 file-sharing papers

noreply@blogger.com (DJ) — Tue, 22 May 2012 16:16:00 +0000

Conclusions from studying 20 file-sharing papers:
Zeropaid's Drew Wilson has wrapped up his series examining 20 studies that looked at the impact of filesharing on the sales of entertainment products (previously). He's summed up his conclusions based on the project, comparing the entire corpus to the notorious "Phoenix study" that was used as "evidence" for SOPA:

Claim: One of the claims the Phoenix study that we picked up was that finding a legal framework to stop infringement online has proven to sell politically.

Fact: After our extensive review, we found that, even though there is fierce opposition towards laws such as SOPA and any form of graduated response, the problem isn’t actually political. The problem is that there is no scientific basis for laws such as a “graduated response” or censorship of the Internet. After we examined the studies, there was a general theme that the best approach to dealing with file-sharing was not legal enforcement, but rather, a change in a business model that’s adapted to today’s digital reality. If you wanted to find debate where there was no real consensus, then it’s exactly how the industry is suppose to adapt their business model to the digital environment. While many pointed to price point, some suggested trying to find other ways of selling music like what iTunes has done. In fact, one study suggested that enforcement does not bring back customers by itself, but rather, building a model that is actually palatable so the customers return to you more voluntarily. Even the most pro-enforcement study we came up with said that if you’re going to actually do something like litigation, build a better business model as well, but simply resorting to legal tactics against file-sharers is not necessarily a good idea.

Claim: Another claim the Phoenix study made was that (in the process of disagreeing that there is a difference between a physical stolen piece of property and an unauthorized download) there is no incentive for producers and artists to make music. In addition, because of the activities of file-sharing, there will be less creative works made available.

Fact:

Let’s cut to the chase. Part 8 of our series explicitly debunked the claim that file-sharing causes the decrease in quantity of music. The authors of that study explicitly state that they found no evidence of any kind that linked any decline in the quantity of music and file-sharing. If there was any decline that happened during the existence of file-sharing, the decline was merely a continuing trend since before Napster.

In addition, numerous studies point to the trend of an increase in profits for artists both before this series and during this series thanks to the sampling effect. In fact, the only evidence that file-sharing is even hurting artists at all points out that it’s only the super rich and super famous top acts in the entire industry that may suffer any sort of loss at all (as seen in part 19 of our series). Again, as far as our series and the previous studies are concerned, not true at all.

Claim:

File-sharing displaces legitimate sales. The evidence points to that.

Fact:

This is a classic case of error by omission. What we found in our investigation was that there are numerous reasons why music sales were in decline in the early 2000′s other than the existence of file-sharing. Explanations included an increase in other entertainment sectors, the unbundling of the music album and returning to the singles model (re: the comments of deadweight losses) and an increasing pressure of the consumers bottom line in the face of todays economic realities. So, judging by the evidence we’ve collected, the evidence does not point in the direction that file-sharing, in and of itself, displace sales, but rather, other factors would also play a role in displacement of sales.

Claim:

Since people can enjoy music that they downloaded, they are taking away from society and therefore placing a tax on society which means file-sharing must be stopped.

Fact:

This model, when compared to all of the models we’ve seen, is completely out to lunch. There’s been plenty of calculations and economic models and non of them say anything like this. The closest we can recall in our series was Part 5 in our series which used the flawed theory of 1 download means one lost sale. While the models suggest that consumers do get something out of downloaded material, the losses still only account for less than $2 per album.

There's lots more, and it's all worth reading. A great companion piece to TechDirt's The Sky is Rising.

What Filesharing Studies Really Say – Conclusions and Links

Chiba University's one-armed robot juggles balls, is not a Juggalo (video)

noreply@blogger.com (DJ) — Fri, 18 May 2012 02:56:00 +0000

Chiba University's one-armed robot juggles balls, is not a Juggalo (video):

Two balls, one hand? In this case, that's a definite yes, although the end result is much more appropriate for all ages. Furthering our slow creep towards engineering's Uncanny Valley, comes a cybernetic effort out of Japan's Chiba University that's made to mock our most precious clown-past time: juggling. The one-armed, three-fingered robot, shown off at the 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, utilizes a high-speed camera to track a ball's flight at 500fps and help coordinate its repetitive movements with eerie precision. The current setup's not without hitches, though, considering the bot's fixed shoulder joint can only carry out successful catches on a 2D plane before, quite literally, dropping the ball. Refinements are apparently on the way to expand the cyborg limb's range of motion which, of course, will only serve to defeat us in the end. Robot apocalypse, we're looking at you.
Continue reading Chiba University's one-armed robot juggles balls, is not a Juggalo (video)

Chiba University's one-armed robot juggles balls, is not a Juggalo (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 May 2012 06:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Is Adobe Creative Cloud a good value?

noreply@blogger.com (DJ) — Fri, 11 May 2012 01:30:00 +0000

Is Adobe Creative Cloud a good value?:

It's the question I've asked myself since Adobe unveiled the subscription service in late April; it launches May 11. For me, $49.99 a month is steep. But $29.99 strongly tempts. I'm eligible for that lower pricing, and you might be, too. But to get either price, Adobe requires 12-month commitment -- and gets 50 percent still, if you cancel early. Month-to-month option is $79.99 per 30 days, or $959.88 yearly versus $599.88 for standard annual subscription pricing.
You get a lot regardless of pricing plan -- more than 20 products now and others planned (I'm waiting for Photoshop Lightroom 4.x, Adobe), offering huge savings that surely will appeal to someone. For starters: student, sole-proprietorship or small business. Among the included products and list price, if purchased (rather than subscribed): Acrobat Pro ($499), After Effects ($799), Flash Pro ($599), Illustrator ($599), Photoshop Extended ($699) and Premiere Pro ($799).
Five Questions
There are seven stand-out questions to ask when evaluating Creative Suite's value:
1. Do you qualify for lower, $29.99/month pricing? If a student or licensee of Creative Suite 3, 4 or 5, or one of the individual apps, yes -- as long as the software is registered with Adobe. That works out to $359.88 for the first year, which is an introductory offer.
2. What can you afford now? If you need, or want, lots of Adobe apps, annual subscription -- standard or discounted -- will cost less and monthly payments are easily budgeted. Meanwhile, the additional outlay is much less than buying any single app.
3. Which of your existing applications are eligible for discounted upgrades? For example, Adobe charges $399 for the Photoshop CS6 Extended upgrade from versions 3, 4 or 5 (the older two only through end of this year). If you qualify for the discounted subscription, annual payment would be less than just Photoshop.
4. What more do you need than what you have now, if any, Adobe creative apps? Most major single applications at full price will cost more than paying $49.99 per month, should you want to add something else. Meanwhile, you also get access to the newest versions of the products already purchased.
5. How often would you otherwise upgrade? Buying software gets you a perpetual license. Subscription means the software deactivates after you stop paying. Do the math: Adobe released Creative Suite 5 two years ago, and CS6 went on sale this week. Assuming, new versions every two years, would you upgrade that soon?
Subscription through May 2014 costs $1,199.76 at the standard subscription rate, with annual commitment, assuming Adobe doesn't raise prices. So at the start of the next upgrade cycle your cost commitment would be $1,799.64, spread out in monthly payments over three years but actual investment in CS6 about $600 less. Standard Design is lowest-cost edition, at $1,299. Your two-year cost would be about $100 less than the six-app bundle and you get access to more 20 products total.
Subscription vs. Perpetual License
Creative Cloud is a surprising offering from Adobe. Subscription software is by no means new -- anti-malware providers like Symantec have done this for years. But Adobe offering subscriptions to products of this caliber and pricing, primed for the cloud, is atypical outside of volume-licensing plans. The difference: Your right to use the applications ends when you stop paying, as aforementioned.
From one perspective, Adobe is taking a huge risk, given just how much Creative Suite or individual apps sell for. CS is among the costliest productivity apps that mere mortals -- meaning anyone outside the lords of corporate IT -- can afford. Microsoft Office, which arguably is used differently, sells for considerably less outside of volume-licensing. The point: People choosing subscription over perpetual license will pay less, which could cut into Adobe revenue and even margins.
On the other hand, laws of volume could work greatly to Adobe's advantage if monthly payments open up a huge number of students, sole-proprietorships and small businesses to buy into Creative Suite who otherwise couldn't justify the expense. Or worse: Who would pirate the software. The scheme also stands to woo satisfied customers running older CS versions, who either can't afford or don't see value paying for, to upgrade by taking a subscription. Perhaps most valuable to Adobe: The prospect of perpetual customers among buying segments less likely to pay for a big suite.
It's for these reasons I ask the question the headline poses.
I'm seriously considering signing up for 12 months, perhaps after Adobe adds Lightroom 4.x to Creative Cloud. But if the $29.99/month intro plan disappears in 2013, I likely wouldn't renew. On my budget, $360 is a huge value. Now. In a year, $600 likely won't be, as I look at the impressive, rich touch apps available for smartphones and tablets. Expect sudden maturation of cloud-connected device hardware and apps over the next 12 months -- good enough to displace most of what most people need PCs for today.
Photo Credit: Galushko Sergey/Shutterstock

Every Major's Terrible

noreply@blogger.com (DJ) — Fri, 11 May 2012 01:21:00 +0000

Every Major's Terrible:

Long Commutes Are Sucking the Life Out of You: Shortening Yours by 20 Minutes Could Save Your Health [Health]

noreply@blogger.com (DJ) — Thu, 10 May 2012 16:14:00 +0000

Long Commutes Are Sucking the Life Out of You: Shortening Yours by 20 Minutes Could Save Your Health [Health]:

Long drives to and from work don't just suck up your time; these long commutes may also be hazardous to your health. Besides draining you mentally and forcing you to sit for extended periods through traffic jams, long commutes are linked to less sleep, high cholesterol, and obesity. More »

Your Brain Will Melt After You See This Negative Image [Illusions]

noreply@blogger.com (DJ) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 03:22:00 +0000

Your Brain Will Melt After You See This Negative Image [Illusions]:

Want to add more wrinkles to that ol' brain of yours? Stare at the colored dots on the girl's nose in the photo above for 30 seconds. Then look at a white surface (blank browser, mayhaps) and start blinking. You should see a non-negative image of the girl. WHAT. BRAIN. MELTING. WHAT. OHMYGOD. Yep, that jiggly stuff in your head just processed a negative image. Sweet. [PetaPixel] More »

Megaupload’s demise: What happens to your files when a cloud service dies?

noreply@blogger.com (DJ) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 04:52:00 +0000

Megaupload’s demise: What happens to your files when a cloud service dies?:

If you’re only just joining us, late yesterday the US Department of Justice shut down Megaupload, arrested seven employees, and seized assets worth more than $50 million (including three 82-inch TVs, two 108-inch TVs, 14 Mercedes, and other rich boys’ toys). This huge indictment poses many questions, but today we’re going to look at just one of them: What happens to all of those files that people had stored on Megaupload’s servers?

This morning the web is littered with hundreds of millions of broken Megaupload links. There was no warning, no preamble: If you stored files on Megaupload, they are gone — at least for now. So you have some idea of the scale of Megaupload, a quick search on XDA-Developers for “megaupload” returns some 226,000 hits. There are hundreds if not thousands of forums on the internet that are similar in scale to XDA-Developers.

It is possible that Megaupload’s servers will be brought back online, but only if Megaupload and its employees are found innocent — and in all likelihood, the trial and sentencing process will take months. Even if Megaupload does return, there’s no guarantee that your files will still be there.

In short, if you stored important files on Megaupload, I really hope you had an up-to-date backup on your computer.

The folly of cloud storage

There have always been two major concerns about cloud services in general, and cloud storage (Dropbox, Megaupload, SkyDrive, iCloud, and so on). The first is privacy: When you upload data to a third party, there’s always the risk that they can look at the contents of your files. Some cloud providers securely encrypt data, but many don’t. The second issue is data security and integrity: Does the third party keep a tight ship against hackers? What happens if a hard drive fails? What protections have the cloud provider put in place to mitigate against natural disasters, bankruptcy, or being shut down by the Feds?

For the most part, the only real way of ameliorating these concerns is by doing an awful lot of research before pushing in your chips. Even then, though, you would be hard pressed to find a cloud storage provider that offers an easy way to migrate your data in case of bankruptcy. If Dropbox decides to shut down, the only way to transfer data to another cyberlocker is to download it and re-upload to another service. If you’re an enterprise customer using Microsoft Azure or Amazon AWS, you should probably be given help to migrate your data to another provider. In the case of a federal indictment, though, I don’t think any cloud provider really offers a way out — and if there’s an earthquake, you better hope that they kept an off-site backup (and you can bet that consumer services like Dropbox or Backblaze don’t).

At the end of the day, though, the only other option is keeping your own backups on some kind of NAS and maintaining your own off-site backups — which is feasible, and how many companies and individuals choose to do it, but rife with its own issues. Cloud storage is so simple — it’s the epitome of fire-and-forget — that you forget about the risks… and then Megaupload gets shut down.

So, what happens to my files when a cloud service dies?

Assuming the midden hits the windmill, then, and your cloud storage provider goes offline without notice — what happens to your files?

In Megaupload’s case, where some 1,000 servers (and thousands of hard drives) were seized, the Feds will probably pore through your files looking for evidence that improves their chance of a conviction. It’s almost guaranteed that Megaupload stored the IP address of file uploaders, and the Feds could pursue individual copyright infringement cases at a later date. If Dropbox was ever indicted of similar charges, the situation would probably be the same.

For consumer-oriented services that are more about backup than file sharing — Backblaze, for example — your files would probably remain in the digital ether, encrypted for all eternity. It’s unlikely that a backup provider would ever be shut down, but it could go bankrupt. In such a situation, you would probably be given a week or month to grab all your data — and then that would be it. There is no chance of Backblaze sending you a hard drive with your data on, for example.

Finally, at the enterprise level — Azure, AWS, Rackspace, etc. — it’s likely that you would be given ample opportunity to recover your files, and you might even receive help in migrating your data directly to another cloud service. In this case, if you’re storing terabytes of data in the cloud, you could probably even request that your data be returned via FedExed hard drives.

Amazon brings single sign-on to AWS management

noreply@blogger.com (DJ) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 04:48:00 +0000

Amazon brings single sign-on to AWS management:

Amazon has made it easier for authorized business users to manage their Amazon Web Services infrastructure after signing on — once — to their corporate network.

This is the latest in a steady drip, drip, drip of functionality that Amazon adds to its services over time. This week, for example, Amazon announced free Windows “micro” instances to its EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud service on Sunday, and three days later announced the DynamoDB NoSQL database to its roster.

In this case, the aim is to make it easier for authorized users to maintain and tweak their Amazon-based services. Once the user is identified and authenticated by whomever manages the AWS account, he or she can sign onto the corporate network using existing credentials, then navigate to the AWS Management Console without re-entering a password, according to an AWS blog posted late Thursday. Before, users had to sign into the AWS Management Console separately.

When that user requests entry into the management console, the identity broker “validates that user’s access rights and provides temporary security credentials which includes the user’s permissions to access AWS. The page includes these temporary security credentials as part of the sign-in request to AWS,” according to the blog.

This all requires up-front work. The person in charge of a company’s AWS account must set up the user’s identity and federate it to the appropriate services. When the user signs into the corporate network, the identity broker pings Amazon’s Security Token Service (STS) to request temporary security credentials. Until now, those credentials gave specified users access to Amazon services for a set period of time (up to 36 hours.) Now those same credentials will be good for AWS Management Console as well.

The bulk of Amazon services — including Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, VPC, ElastiCache — support that identity federation to the management console. The company is working to add the new Amazon DynamoDB NoSQL database service to that list, said Amazon Web Services Evangelist Jeff Barr in the post.

As Microsoft beefs up its Azure cloud offering with expected Infrastructure-as-a-Service capabilities, and more OpenStack-based IaaS offerings come online, the competition to provide cloud services will only heat up.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user Will Merydith

Lamar Smith Can't Hear You

noreply@blogger.com (DJ) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 07:36:00 +0000

Lamar Smith Can't Hear You:

Here's ChadRocco's Lamar Smith anti-election poster, in honor of the congressman's advocacy for the net-killing Stop Online Piracy Act and his blithe dismissal of the bill's critics.

Meet Lamar Smith, representative from Texas, and Chairman of the House Committee on the Judiciary.

As Chairman he can kill any bill he doesn't like by denying it a hearing while giving priority to the bills he wants to pass, Like SOPA.

While addressing the massive outcry over SOPA he stated that:

“It’s a vocal minority. Because they’re strident doesn’t mean they’re either legitimate or large in number. One, they need to read the language. Show me the language. There’s nothing they can point to that does what they say it does do. I think their fears are unfounded.”

Above is a list of people that have pointed at the language, including law professors and computer experts.

You have a civil war among video game companies, and the successful boycott of a company. How do you ignore that?

It's an election year. This November. Whatever happens, Texas, please kick this guy out of office.

SOPA- I CAN'T HEAR YOU

(Thanks, Melted Crayons!)

The General Problem

noreply@blogger.com (DJ) — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 17:34:00 +0000

The General Problem:

Excelsior! Marvel Comics to offer digital releases same day as print

noreply@blogger.com (DJ) — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 22:05:00 +0000

Excelsior! Marvel Comics to offer digital releases same day as print:

Sure, we may have established that Stan Lee doesn't really know what to do with his iPhone on the last Engadget Show, but that doesn't mean your friendly neighborhood Marvel employees aren't ready to embrace the digital wave with full-force. According to Gizmodo, the comics publishing powerhouse will be bringing its full line of books (save for some third-party licensed titles) to digital platforms the same day they're released in stores, a move that comes as the company's chief competition, DC, has been aggressively establishing itself in the digital space. The transition is expected to be completed by the end of March. 'Nuff said

Qualcomm announces Q4 earnings: rakes in $4.12 billion in revenue

noreply@blogger.com (DJ) — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 17:39:00 +0000

Qualcomm announces Q4 earnings: rakes in $4.12 billion in revenue:

The Qualcomm juggernaut just keeps on rolling. As the company's financial year comes to a close it's celebrating yet another stellar quarter, reporting $4.12 billion in revenue -- up 39-percent from the same time last year and a dramatic 14-percent higher than its Q3 earnings. Of that incoming green, $1.06 was profit. For the year as a whole, Qualcomm saw profits rise 31-percent over 2010 to $4.26 billion while revenues were 36-percent higher than last year, reaching $14.96 billion. Qualcomm exceed expectations not only for earnings but also sales -- moving 127 million MSM chips in Q4, when analysts were estimating between 120 and 125 million units sold. You'll find some PR after the break but, for all the pretty financial charts you'll have to hit up the source.

Continue reading Qualcomm announces Q4 earnings: rakes in $4.12 billion in revenue

Qualcomm announces Q4 earnings: rakes in $4.12 billion in revenue originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Nov 2011 17:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

How To: Break the speed of light in your own backyard

noreply@blogger.com (DJ) — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 16:26:00 +0000

How To: Break the speed of light in your own backyard:

Minute Physics serves up another nifty video.

Via Jennifer Ouellette

Video Link

November

noreply@blogger.com (DJ) — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 16:16:00 +0000

November:

Crab nebula's neutron star is pulsing with gamma rays

noreply@blogger.com (DJ) — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 00:24:00 +0000

Crab nebula's neutron star is pulsing with gamma rays:

In 1054, a supernova went off in our galactic neighborhood and was recorded in a number of historical accounts. Today, the remnants of that blast form the spectacular Crab Nebula shown above. Buried within it is a rapidly rotating neutron star, which we can detect by its pulsed emissions. Now, researchers have used a rather unusual telescope—one that incorporates our own planet into the optics—to catch a glimpse of the pulsar using very high energy gamma rays.

The results are surprising: in contrast to expectations, the pulses are visible at energies of 100GeV and beyond, casting doubt on our current models for how pulsars work.

Peeking at pulsars

Stars of an appropriate mass—larger than the sun, but not big enough to form a black hole—leave behind a neutron star following their explosive ends. These stars start out spinning very rapidly and, in the process, sweep an intense magnetic field through the surrounding medium. The moving field accelerates charged particles, causing them to emit light at radio frequencies right up through gamma rays. Because of their rapid rotation, these light emissions come in the form of pulses that are only milliseconds apart, matching the neutron star's rapid rotation.

Eternal Flame

noreply@blogger.com (DJ) — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 18:59:00 +0000

Eternal Flame:

Why Oracle’s big boxes are on the wrong side of history

noreply@blogger.com (DJ) — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 18:37:00 +0000

Why Oracle’s big boxes are on the wrong side of history:

When the week is over, Oracle World will have been bracketed by two events. One: the unveiling of Oracle Exalytics, a beefy in-memory appliance dedicated to large-scale analytics, during Larry Ellison’s opening keynote. Two: the undressing of Oracle’s cloud computing initiatives by Marc Benioff, SalesForce’s CEO, and the unceremonious cancellation of his keynote this morning.

Both events highlight that when it comes to Big Data, analytics and cloud computing, Oracle is on the wrong side of history.

To glimpse the future of the data stack, Oracle need look no further than its own backyard, to what Silicon Valley start-ups are embracing: the distributed processing ecosystem of Hadoop, NoSQL data stores like MongoDB, and cloud platforms like Amazon’s web services. As Marc Andreessen said last week, “Not a single one of our startups uses Oracle.”

The challenge for Oracle, which did $36 billion in revenue last year, is that they sell to big enterprises and selling technology to start-ups doesn’t move the needle.

Worse, Oracle’s support for the kind of technology stacks embraced by startups — open-source software, elastic architectures, commodity hardware grids — cannibalizes revenue from their existing lines of business.

“I don’t care if our commodity X86 business goes to zero,” Ellison said in Oracle’s last earnings call, “We don’t make money selling that.”

This commoditization wave may have sent others, including HP, fleeing from hardware, but it has driven Oracle into the breach: they are attempting to capture higher margins on sales of their Sun-acquired SPARC architectures.

The buyers of these big boxes are enterprises struggling with sharp increases in data volumes, and willing to pay top dollar for what Ellison dubs a “100 percent upwardly compatible migration path,” referring to the SuperCluster T4-4.

But history is not on Oracle’s side. Today’s startups are tomorrow’s Goliaths, and soon they will have to confront a future that, as William Gibson quips, “is already here… just not evenly distributed.”

Here are four realities that Oracle must face to maintain its unassailable position as the world’s leading data firm:

The future of data is distributed

“Lots of little servers everywhere, lots of little databases everywhere. Your information got hopelessly fragmented in the process.” – from Matthew Symonds book Softwar (p. 38).

This is how Larry Ellison described the technology landscape of the 1990s, and his personal jihad against complexity has deepened Oracle’s distrust of distributed computing.

But the tide of data isn’t turning back, and the scale is too large to contain in any box; Big Data, on the scale of hundreds of terabytes to petabytes, must be distributed across “lots of little servers.” The most viable tool available today for processing and persisting Big Data is Hadoop.

Whether at the data layer — or a level above, at analytics — firms must adapt to this distributed reality and build tools that enable parallelized, many-to-many migration of data between nodes on Hadoop and those on their own platforms.

The future of computing is elastic

Metal server boxes don’t bend or expand; they are inelastic, both physically and economically. In contrast, the needs of businesses are highly elastic; as companies grow, they shouldn’t have to unpack and install boxes to meet their compute needs, any more than they should install generators for more electricity.

Computing is a utility, compute cycles are fungible, and firms want to pay for what they need, when it’s needed, like electricity.

The ability to scale storage and compute capacity up or down, within minutes, is liberating for individuals and cost-effective for organizations, but it is impossible with a “cloud in a box.” It is only enabled by a true cloud computing infrastructure, with virtualization and dynamic provisioning from a common pool of resources.

The future of applications is not on the desktop

Despite that Oracle developed the first pure network computer in 1996 (or perhaps because of this), far too many of Oracle’s supporting business applications are delivered via the desktop, rather than via web browsers.

By comparison, Cloudera has created a rich web-based application for managing and monitoring all aspects of Hadoop clusters; Amazon Web Services has a fully-featured web console for interacting with its offerings; and Salesforce’s products are almost exclusively web-driven.

The expressivity afforded by web browsers has risen dramatically in the last two years, particularly with the emergence of Javascript as the lingua franca of web application development, and improvements in Javascript engines.

The same trend from desktop to browser also extends into mobile devices. An increasingly large fraction of computing occurs on smart phones and tablets, and forward-thinking firms, like Dropbox, have built applications that cater to this reality.

The future of analytics is beautiful

The decades of disappointment with business intelligence tools isn’t due only to their lack of brains (such that they’ve now fled to the fresh moniker of “business analytics”), but also the absence of beauty. Data is beautiful, as any reader of Edward Tufte can attest.

When visualized thoughtfully and artfully, data has an almost hymnal power to persuade decision makers. And when exploring data of high complexity and dimensionality, the kind that lives in Oracle’s databases, tools that accelerate the “mean time to pretty chart” are essential.

In addition, analytics tool users are right to expect a smooth user experience on a par with other tools, whether photo editing or word processing, when they are creating and exploring data visualizations.

Yet amidst all of Oracle’s presentations and marketing materials about big data and analytics, one finds not a single dashboard or visualization to stir the senses.

While Spotfire and Tableau are notable exceptions to this critique, on the whole, the tools that dot the Oracle landscape lack either brains or beauty.

Enterprises will be slow to wake up to these realities, and Oracle will continue to profit handsomely from their slumber.

However, the opportunities abound to chip away at the massive market share that Oracle now holds, providing data services to start-ups who refuse to pay Oracle’s prices, or helping medium-sized businesses migrate to new solutions.

Michael Driscoll is the CTO of Metamarkets (see disclosure), a data analytics firm.

Disclosure: Metamarkets is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Image courtesy of Flickr user crazytales562.

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In a faraway galaxy, seven supernovas explode all at once [Astronomy]

noreply@blogger.com (DJ) — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 20:30:00 +0000

In a faraway galaxy, seven supernovas explode all at once [Astronomy]:

Galaxy Arp 220, located 250 million light-years from Earth, is home to seven different supernova explosions all going on at the same time. We've never seen so many stars exploding simultaneously in the same galaxy. More »

Amazon Brings "Cloud-Accelerated" Silk Browser To Kindle Fire

noreply@blogger.com (DJ) — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 04:44:00 +0000

Amazon Brings "Cloud-Accelerated" Silk Browser To Kindle Fire:
Does the Internet truly need another Web browser? Perhaps, and particularly so when thinking about browsers for mobile devices. In the midst of Amazon launching a spate of new devices last week, they also introduced something non-hardware related. Amazon Silk is the company's new "cloud-accelerated" Web browser, and it will initially be available...

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noreply@blogger.com (DJ) — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 04:56:00 +0000

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If you see NASA’s falling satellite today, remember to duck

noreply@blogger.com (DJ) — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 07:53:00 +0000

If you see NASA’s falling satellite today, remember to duck:

Good news: If you are reading this story on Friday evening or Saturday morning, it means that you have yet again survived the momentous (but incredibly common) impact of a meteorite here on Earth. If you’re reading this on Friday morning, though, on your way to work perhaps, be sure to keep an eye out for NASA’s 20-year-old, 6.5-ton, bus-sized Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite which is scheduled to begin its fiery descent through our planet’s atmosphere some time today.

UARS, which was deployed by Space Shuttle Discovery on STS-48 back in 1991, was originally tasked with studying the Earth’s ozone layer. Its mission was only meant to last three years, but by the time it was finally decommissioned in 2005, six out of its 10 instruments were still operational. Now, six years after it was (intentionally) placed into an orbit that would impact the Earth, UARS is heading home.

The satellite will splinter into hundreds of pieces as it tumbles towards Earth, and much of it will burn up during re-entry, but 26 larger metal chunks — fuel tanks, support struts, and so on– will survive the friction and strike the Earth at around six miles per second, or 21,000mph. Needless to say, if you end up on the wrong end of a hundred-pound fuel tank moving at 20 times the speed of sound, you are unlikely to emerge the victor; on the other hand, the meteorite will be moving so quickly that you won’t even see it coming, so at least your messy, fragmented death will be relatively peaceful.

The good news is that no one — at least in recorded history — has ever been killed by a meteorite, a happy statistic that is made positively amicable by the fact that over 3,000 meteorites slam into Earth every day. 75% of the Earth’s surface is water, you see — and out of the remaining 25%, we humans only occupy a few percent. “Earth’s City Lights,” a photo of the Earth’s surface at night (and ironically enough, captured by a satellite), shows just how sparsely spaced our settlements are.

NASA UARS concept art

Still, the most worrying thing is that NASA doesn’t know where the satellite debris will strike; it only knows that it will hit between Friday evening and Saturday morning, that the meteorites will stretch across a 500-mile path, and that it won’t hit North America; good news if you want to see tomorrow’s dawn, but bad news if you were hoping for a glimpse of the firework display that will occur when the satellite begins to burn up — or if you happen to be outside North America…

Overall, NASA says there’s a 1-in-3200 chance of someone being struck by the satellite — and if you extrapolate that out to the actual chance of you being hit by it, it’s something like 1-in-a-few-trillion. In other words, you have more chance of winning the lottery tomorrow than being struck by the satellite.

Read more at Space and The New York Times (which includes a hilarious quote from a rabbi…), or the BBC (which has a video of the satellite falling)

Demystifying UEFI, the long-overdue BIOS replacement

noreply@blogger.com (DJ) — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 03:10:00 +0000

Demystifying UEFI, the long-overdue BIOS replacement:

After more than 30 years of unerring and yet surprising supremacy, BIOS — the IBM PC’s Basic Input Output System — is taking its final bows and shuffling into the theater’s wings. Taking its place in the limelight is UEFI, a specification that begun its life as the Intel Boot Initiative way back in 1998 when BIOS’s antiquated limitations were hampering systems built with Intel’s Itanium processors. Later, the Initiative became EFI, and in 2005 Intel donated EFI to the newly-formed UEFI Forum, a consortium made up of the usual suspects: AMD, Apple, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and so on.

UEFI, or Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, is a complete re-imagining of a computer boot environment, and as such it has almost no similarities to the PC BIOS that it replaces. While BIOS is fundamentally a solid piece of firmware, UEFI is a programmable software interface that sits on top a computer’s hardware and firmware (and indeed UEFI can and does sit on top of BIOS). Rather than all of the boot code being stored in the motherboard’s BIOS, UEFI sits in the/EFI/ directory in some non-volatile memory; either in NAND on the motherboard, on your hard drive, or on a network share (more on that later).

As a result, UEFI almost resembles a light-weight operating system. A computer boots into UEFI, an arbitrary set of actions are carried out, and then it triggers the loading of an operating system. Further reinforcing its OSness, the UEFI spec defines boot and runtime services, protocols for communication between services, device drivers (UEFI is designed to work across all platforms), extensions, and even an EFI shell, where you can run EFI applications. On top of all this is the boot loader, which executes an operating system’s boot loader.

UEFI, being a pseudo-operating system, can access all of the hardware on the computer — you can surf the internet from the UEFI interface, or backup your hard drives — and it even has a full, mouse-driven GUI (below right). The fact that all of this boot data is stored on NAND flash or on a hard drive means that there’s a lot more space for things like language localization, boot-time diagnostics (begone meaningless POST beeps!), utilities (backup, restore, malware scanners), and so on.

As a corollary, the fact that UEFI is entirely software-based is what makes it unified. So far UEFI has been used by almost every combination of 32- and 64-bit ARM, Intel, and AMD chips, and in each case the boot code just had to be compiled for the target platform. Every major desktop (OS X, Windows) and server OS (Linux) supports UEFI boot today — and Windows 8, when it rolls out, will have features that only work with UEFI (though it will still run on conventional, BIOS-booted computers).

Underneath this crazy, extensible, software-driven interface, UEFI also specifies a few standard features that must be implemented. Windows 8′s ability to detect rootkit and malware infections (and rogue Linux installations), for example, relies on UEFI’s secure boot functionality. Low-level cryptography, network authentication, universal graphics drivers, and more, are all provided as standard. Update: Microsoft now has an excellent article about UEFI, Windows 8, and secure boot (Linux will be able to run just fine!)

Finally, it’s worth noting that UEFI is still incredibly young, and very few operating systems actually take advantage of any of the features listed above. Linux certainly supports UEFI, but no Linux distro really utilizes it. Mac OS X makes slightly better use of UEFI with the Bootcamp boot manager. Windows 8, when it launches in 2012, will probably be the first major OS to take extensive advantage of UEFI, with Restore, Refresh, secure boot, and possibly more.

Read more about UEFI on Wikipedia, UEFI Forum website, or How-To Geek

If you know how to pronounce UEFI, do let us know in the comments. We want to pronounce it “you-eff-eye,” but it could also be “you-fee,” or even “oo-fee”…