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There were two high points for me at Def Con 1. First was the appearance of Dan Farmer, then head of data security for Sun Microsystems. Dressed all in black leather with flaming shoulder-length red hair and a groupie on each arm, Dan sat literally making-out in the back row until it was time for his presentation. But that presentation was far more entertaining than the smooching. In a series of rapid-fire slides Farmer showed dozens of ways in which crackers had attacked Sun’s network. Rooting the casino's minicomputer, partying with a U. S. Attorney and other hacker hijinx.
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Today, I’m excited to announce that Windows 8.1 Enterprise Preview is now available for download for customers to start testing the operating system in their environments. Windows 8.1 Enterprise Preview builds on the Window 8.1 Preview which is currently available, adding premium features designed to address mobility, security, management and virtualization needs of today’s enterprise. AKA Windows 8.1 No Minesweeper And No You Can't Reinstall It Edition.
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Still no start menu? Fail.
.-.
|o,o|
,| _\=/_ .-""-.
||/_/_\_\ /[] _ _\
|_/|(_)|\\ _|_o_LII|_
\._. |\_/|"` |_| ==== |_|
|_|_| ||" || ||
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|_|_| ||'----'||
/_/ \_\ /__| |__\
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Interesting lessons can come from unexpected places! I was pleasantly surprised at how something as “simple” as reversing bits in a byte could lead me on an unexpectedly deep exploration: operation vs instruction count, memory access patterns and cache behavior, and low-level CPU instructions. It’s often very easy to make assumptions about the performance of code that we write, and I hope that this article serves as a reminder that the map is never the territory, and that the only way to understand what’s happening inside your code is by observing and measuring it. Studying the Stanford bit hacks and a little cheating.
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The second perpetual myth is that Haskell cannot be used for “real world applications”. Normally real world is usually left undefined in such a discussion, but can often be taken to mean that Haskell is not suited for database and web development work. Haskell has a rich library ecosystem and is well-suited for these tasks but I concede that there might be a systemic lack of introductory material for many domain specific tasks. Something that many projects and companies are trying to remedy. Do I still need a graduate degree in category theory to write to a file?
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We at Erlang Solutions have had the pleasure of coming into contact with shiny Parallella board prototype and over the past few weeks we have been exploring how to utilise it as part of our experiments in the multicore domain. In this blog post Edward Tate, our resident OpenCL hacker, introduces the reasons we have been interested in making use of the Parallela: Data Parallelism and OpenCL. Watch this blog for more details on supercomputing programming for Parallela.
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Ten months ago, the chipmaker Adapteva unveiled a bold quest—to create a Raspberry Pi-sized computer that can perform the same types of tasks typically reserved for supercomputers. And... they wanted to sell it for only $99. A successful Kickstarter project raised nearly $900,000 for the so-called "Parallella," and the company got to work with a goal of shipping the first devices by February 2013 and the rest by May 2013. As so often happens, the deadlines slipped, but Adapteva has done what it set out to do. The people's supercomputer?
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Attending technical events, from the local after-hours meetups to the high-caliber and well-known conferences, becomes the usual part of a developer’s life. Generally, those events are packed with 45-minute talks, often also to the full one hour. I argue that there are more benefits of limiting such tech talks to a shorter duration, say 20 minutes (or even 18 minutes, in the style of TED talks). The most important is that it will lead to a more thoughtful, lean, and balanced content. Anyone know what this is? Class? Anyone? Anyone?
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: Anyone know what this is? Smart.
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.-John Q. Adams You must accept one of two basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not alone in the universe. And either way, the implications are staggering.-Wernher von Braun Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.-Albert Einstein
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Most of the technical conferences that I attend (non-IT) allow 20 minutes for a presentation and 10 minutes for questions. There are moderators that keep things on schedule.
CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr., P. E.
Comport Computing
Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: Anyone know what this is? Someone with a extremely short attention span. If you can't focus for an hour, IT is not for you.
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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The Nexus Q was killed off before other services could be added, but at a high level the Q’s functionality as a playback device rather than streaming endpoint carried onto its successor, the Chromecast. The Chromecast is obviously everything the Q should’ve been. It’s a simple, small, $35 HDMI dongle, powered by USB, that’s designed to discreetly plug into the back of a TV.... The hardware is what it needs to be – small, simple, and conducive to the low price point. Brian Klug looks inside the Chromecast to see how it works.
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The GPLv2 continues to be the most widely used FOSS license, but has been rarely interpreted by courts. Most of these decisions have come from Germany as a result of the enforcement actions of Harold Welte. The recent Fantec decision in Germany is the latest such decision and provides guidance on the requirements for companies to manage their use of FOSS and the lack of ability to rely on statements from their suppliers. What part of "complete corresponding source code" is so difficult to understand?
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Fragmentation is both a strength and weakness of the Android ecosystem. When comparisons are made between Android and iOS the issue of different API levels, and the vastly different devices running them, is often emphasised. In this report we examine the extent of Android fragmentation and analyse its impact on both users and developers. All those pretty colors... are differently configured devices you need to support. Good luck.
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We take for granted how computers in the workplace are all connected together. Sharing files with coworkers, sending documents to a network printer, and accessing data from a networked server are all routine procedures thanks to the invention of Ethernet technology. On Ethernet’s 40th anniversary, the IEEE History Center shares excerpts from the oral history interview it conducted with Ethernet’s co-inventor Robert Metcalfe in February 2004. It all starts with an attempt to share an office printer... as do so many tall IT tales.
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I recently found myself explaining to different pods of folks how to add 'scripting' to their games. The consistent response was confusion and bemoaning the difficulty of the task. Certainly there is some work to be done (if you want to add Lua, Javascript, Perl, Python etc) to your engine but it doesn't need to go _that_ far. With planned access points and a 'ninja' method to process what was entered you can have functional scripting with little hassle. Add scripting to your game engine with VB.
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I was having fun casting shadows with my laser pointer the other day. I began to wonder about the 3D information that was embedded in the 2D shadow. Given enough shadows of an object, could you recreate it? What information is lost, what is preserved? Point clouds and silver linings.
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Having spent some time with Firefox OS last week, I thought I would share some thoughts on the platform, and a few key aspects of the user experience.... I do have reservations regarding the occasionally overtly prescriptive definitions of a “mobile web app” (i.e. single page, JavaScript heavy, transition and gesture enabled), but am also interested in seeing how things play out. If FFOS does well, it may prove the first large scale investigation of just where the app/site threshold lies from a purely user-facing perspective. Crazy as a fox: web apps as native apps.
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This little device is about the size of a webcam, and it perches on top of your computer monitor in much the same way. It’s Disney’s solution to haptic feedback for gestural input. That is to say, wave your hands in the air to control a computer, and this will give you some sense of actually touching the virtual objects. It's a magical kingdom of virtual interaction.
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There are plenty of resources online about tethering the iPhone 5 with the graphical interface, but I wanted to be able ‘hotswap’ my Raspberry Pi’s Internet connection without command line, and without the graphical interface. Plug and play, essentially. I was able to get this working last night using Raspian (a free operating system based on Debian optimized for the Raspberry Pi hardware) and a few scripts. Raspberry Apple Pi... sounds like a Ben & Jerry's flavor.
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How do we get more “Diversity” (Women) in Technology? This question was beat to death at Codemash this year. TO DEATH.... But here’s the thing: the people asking these questions are the people making our community so great... the people passionate enough about technology to facilitate a way to share knowledge. They’re the people who are able to make a difference, and from what I’ve seen, they’re really trying. Those asking these questions aren’t asking to make us feel different. They’re asking because they are truly looking for an answer; an answer to a really hard question. What Can We Do? I have no idea what “we” can do, but I can tell you what I’m trying to do. It's a people issue, not a tech issue. Be excellent to each other.
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Video game developers will be able to self-publish their Xbox Live Arcade titles on Xbox 360 without the need to go through a third-party publisher starting later this summer, according to an update from The Pinball Arcade developer FarSight Studios. Ready Developer One?
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On the 360 everything had to go through the publisher, even critical updates. Then Microsoft had to manually deploy the patch, which could also take another day or so.
Of course they must have realized that this was a unworkable system.
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Sony and Panasonic have announced their plans to create super powerful optical discs that will be able to store 300 GB of information! Can you hear the minds from 2003 being completely blown...? So, why an emphasis on optical discs now? The investment in optical storage may appear to be a somewhat odd choice in that we’ve already seen 1 terabyte flash drives—not to mention near limitless cloud-based storage options. Well, the NSA has to back up your metadata somewhere...
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Would the optical disk be affected as much by say an EMP as much as a flash drive ?
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