"hp" entries

Four short links: 18 August 2011

Four short links: 18 August 2011

Amazon Publishing, Flash Erasing, I Can Believe It's Not An iPad, and Yo' Website Is So Fat

  1. Amazon Publishing Signs Tim Ferris (NY Times) — Amazon’s vertical integration now extends to 15m female orgasms.
  2. Erasing Data from USB Drives (PC World) — With flash drives things are more complex, thanks to mechanisms built into the drives to prolong their lifespan. Because flash memory cells stop working after they’ve been overwritten too many times, flash devices use tricks called “wear leveling” to even out how the memory cells are used. A side effect of wear levelling is that it is “almost impossible” to completely erase data from a flash device, McClain said.
  3. HP TouchPad Not Selling WellThe biggest sale yet from flash sale site Woot, which sold the tablet for $120 off, got HP a meager 612 customers.
  4. HTTP Archive: The First Nine Months (Steve Souders) — total data transferred up, HTTP requests up, redirects up. Flash down, so it’s not all bad news, but in general web sites appear to be binging on high latency corn syrup.
Four short links: 6 July 2011

Four short links: 6 July 2011

China Snaffling Facebook Stock, DNS Douchebaggery, Corporate Whores, and Comic Relief

  1. China Wants to Buy Facebook (Forbes) — Beijing approached a fund that buys stock from former Facebook employees to see if it could assemble a stake large enough “to matter.” This has implications for Facebook entering China. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg is reportedly “wary about the compromises Facebook would have to make to do business there.” If she loses her argument with Zuckerberg and Facebook enters China, the company will eventually be subject to demands to censor its sites, those both inside and outside China. That’s apparently why the Chinese want to own a big stake in Facebook. They are, in short, looking for control in the long run. No other explanation is consistent with the Party’s other media and “educational” initiatives. Again the world’s most desirable emerging market is fraught for those who would enter it.
  2. Cisco Helping China Build Surveillance (WSJ, subscription probably needed) — Western companies including Cisco Systems Inc. are poised to help build an ambitious new surveillance project in China—a citywide network of as many as 500,000 cameras that officials say will prevent crime but that human-rights advocates warn could target political dissent. Check out the mealy-mouthed weasel from HP: “We take them at their word as to the usage.” He added, “It’s not my job to really understand what they’re going to use it for. Our job is to respond to the bid that they’ve made.” (a) buyers don’t bid, vendors bid; (b) you’re a piss-poor vendor if you don’t understand what the client hopes to achieve; (c) really, maintaining plausible denial is the best way to preserve your brand’s integrity? Hewlett and Packard are turning in their graves, the heat given off from which could be detected by sensors, routed through Cisco boxes and displayed on HP terminals.
  3. US Claims .net and .com In Their JurisdictionThe US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) wants to take down web sites that use the .com and .net top level domains (TLD) regardless of whether their servers are based in the US. Not only do DNS interventions like this not stop the copying, they’re the thin end of the political wedge into yet another piece of critical Internet infrastructure. Who woke up this morning and thought, “I want a copyright rentacop to decide which websites I can see”? The generative power of the Internet is eroded with every misguided meddling such as this.
  4. SVK Launches — BERG London finally launch their excellent comic. “Comic?” you ask. Noted science future awesome Warren Ellis wrote it, and it features some clever augmented reality hardware. I have one, and I am happy. You can be too, for only ten pounds plus shipping.

Let the tablet wars begin

As Apple ruffles feathers, HP's TouchPad -- and some of its subscription terms -- are unveiled

HP is squaring up against Apple with its new TouchPad tablet and new subscription terms with Time Inc.

Four short links: 4 May 2010

Four short links: 4 May 2010

Software vs Biology, Virtual Keyboards, Massive Sensor Network Scheme, and MTurk via JavaScript

  1. Comparing genomes to computer operating systems in terms of the topology and evolution of their regulatory control networks (PNAS) — paper comparing structure and evolution of software design (exemplified by the Linux operating system) against biological systems (in the form of the e. coli bacterium). They found software has a lot more “middle manager” functions (functions that are called and then in turn call) as opposed to biology, where “workers” predominate (genes that make something, but which don’t trigger other genes). They also quantified how software and biology value different things (as measured what persists across generations of organisms, or versions of software): Reuse and persistence are negatively correlated in the E. coli regulatory network but positively correlated in the Linux call graph[…]. In other words, specialized nodes are more likely to be preserved in the regulatory network, but generic or reusable functions are persistent in the Linux call graph. (via Hacker News)
  2. Virtual Keyboards in Google Search — rolling out virtual keyboards across all Google searches. Very nice solution to the problem of “how the heck do I enter that character on this keyboard?”. (via glynmoody on Twitter)
  3. Information and Quantum Systems Lab at HP — working on the mathematical and physical foundations for the technologies that will form a new information ecosystem, the Central Nervous System for the Earth (CeNSE), consisting of a trillion nanoscale sensors and actuators embedded in the environment and connected via an array of networks with computing systems, software and services to exchange their information among analysis engines, storage systems and end users. (via dcarli on Twitter)
  4. Turkit Java/JavaScript API for running iterative tasks on Mechanical Turk. (via chrismessina on Twitter)