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August 12 2010
August 11 2010
Bill Gates on Science, Education, the Future
Quotes from Microsoft founder Bill Gates at last week’s Techonomy Conference:
On Energy:
“You’re not going to have a lot of people putting down money (on nuclear power projects) when the time period to start is longer than the patent…people like to work on things that happen in their lifetime.”
“The value of cheap energy to the poor is literally life and death.”
“Government has to do the basic...
August 10 2010
Press Release: Apache CouchDB Now Available on Google Android
Developers can now build web or native mobile applications taking advantage of CouchDB’s peer-to-peer sync
Oakland, CALIF. – August 10, 2010 – Couchio (http://www.couch.io/), corporate sponsor of the CouchDB post-relational database, today announced that the first release of a CouchDB SDK for Android devices is now available for free download. Designed to take full advantage of CouchDB’s...
Dexcode Teardown of the Android SMS Trojan
I got my hands on a copy of the recent Android SMS trojan that commits toll fraud via SMS messages to premium Russian shortcodes. What follows is a brief teardown of the APK and disassembly of the trojan’s dexcode and description of its malicious functionality. It’s incredibly simple in nature so there’s not much detail to go into.
Package: RU.apkPackage Name...
August 09 2010
Solving the Rubik’s Cube in Twenty Moves or Less
A mathematician from Kent State University, an engineer at Google, a math teacher from Darmstadt, Germany, and a programmer from Palo Alto, California arrive at some definitive conclusions regarding the thirty-six year old Rubik’s Cube puzzle:
“With about 35 CPU-years of idle computer time donated by Google, a team of researchers has essentially solved every position of the Rubik’s Cube, and...
August 08 2010
zfs diff in Opensolaris
So with a command like
zfs diff datapool/texts@monday datapool/texts, you get an output like M /myfiles/M /myfiles/link_to_me (+1)R /myfiles/rename_me ->...
August 06 2010
August 05 2010
TRANSFER OF OWNERSHIP
Language Specific Package Managers
As many people I’ve talked to IRL probably know, I really hate language-specific package managers. Java has several, Python/Ruby/Erlang etc. each have their own, etc. I totally understand the temptation. I know it’s not all about NIH Syndrome (though some is); some of it’s about Getting Stuff Done as well. Consider the following example. I tried to install Tornado using yum.
...
Unserious About Security
Our devices all touch the Internet all the time. There are many people on Internet who are extremely smart and extremely bad and want to steal money. We need to take security very seriously. The tech community’s writers, both professional amateur, are doing an inadequate job; arguably guilty of both recklessness and laziness.
Consider two mobile-device security stories that broke...
August 03 2010
How Smartphones Are Lifting Fortunes of an Old-Economy Gorilla
Back when the fiber boom was at its peak, a company that became the darling of Wall Street was decidedly old-school — an industrial-era company that specialized in making glass — Corning. It made the actual fiber that was in high demand and leveraged that to become a big component supplier to the optics industry. Now there’s another boom in the making — the smartphone boom — and Corning is...
August 02 2010
People want all the things the Holga doesn't do
The Holga: There’s no on-board flash. No PC connector for an external flash. There’s no shutter speed selection. You get (approx) 1/100 of a second and deal with it. It offers only two F stops: f. 11 and f. 8 (“sunny” or “less sunny”) — you switch a little plastic lever back and forth to choose which one you want. There’s no tripod socket (you can rubber band it or drill one in if you want)...
The Great Game
Is it VHS vs Betamax, Mac vs PC, or Coke vs Pepsi? The currentmultibillion-dollar mobile-market war is a confusing tangle of softwaremakers, hardware makers, and network operators.This isn’t what a theorists would call a perfect or even very cleancompetitive market, but it does seem to be delivering a regular flow ofbetter, faster, more usable products to the people of Earth. It’s a...
July 31 2010
July 30 2010
T-Mobile IPv6 Open Trial
T-Mobile USA is running an open beta (or "friendly user trial") of their IPv6-over-cellular service. If you're a T-Mobile USA customer, and have the right phone, you should check this out.
What's note-worthy about this trial is that it's self-service. Unlike the Comcast or Verizon FIOS trials, you don't have to apply and wait for approval and new gear.
To participate in the T-Mobile USA IPv6...
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