For anyone of us who thinks that past was better... or to show to new comers that, some time ago, a computer device was not supposed to be always switched on!
Many of us have been waiting for the moment when 3D printers
would not only be offered ready-to-use without the need of DIY
assembly, but at a price comparable to a common computer. Well get
excited, because that day has arrived.
Created by 3D Systems, the Cube
will retail for just $1,299 and is connected to a community of 3D
designers where you can find inspiration, or upload your own designs and
sell them in the Cubify marketplace. Admittedly, the MakerBot Replicator
is only a tad more expensive at $1,749, but just like the early
versions of the home Windows PC versus the Mac, the Cube wins on style
points for those who prefer a less industrial look and feel to their 3D
printer.
You can order the Cube 3D printer here and check out the design to fabrication process in the video below.
In a hologram, information about each small area of image is scattered throughout the holograph. You can’t say this little area of the hologram corresponds to this little area of the image. At least that’s what I’ve heard; I don’t really know how holograms work.
I thought about holograms the other day when someone was describing some source code with deeply nested templates. He told me “You can’t just read it. You can only step through the code with a debugger.” I’ve ran into similar code. The execution sequence of the code at run time is almost unrelated to the sequence of lines in the source code. The run time behavior is scattered through the source code like image information in a holograph.
Holographic code is an advanced anti-pattern. It’s more likely to result from good practice taken to an extreme than from bad practice.
Somewhere along the way, programmers learn the “DRY” principle: Don’t Repeat Yourself. This is good advice, within reason. But if you wring every bit of redundancy out of your code, you end up with something likeHuffman encoded source. In fact, DRY is very much a compression algorithm. In moderation, it makes code easier to maintain. But carried too far, it makes reading your code like reading a zip file. Sometimes a little redundancy makes code much easier to read and maintain.
Code is like wine: a little dryness is good, but too much is bitter or sour.
Note that functional-style code can be holographic just like conventional code. A pure function is self-contained in the sense that everything thefunctionneeds to know comes in as arguments, i.e. there is no dependence on external state. But that doesn’t mean that everything theprogrammerneeds to know is in one contiguous chuck of code. If you have to jump all over your code base to understand what’s going on anywhere, you have holographic code, regardless of what style it was written in. However, I imagine functional programs would usually be less holographic.
Microsoft has developed a new kind of Wi-Fi network that performs at
its top speed even in the face of interference. It takes advantage of a
new Wi-Fi standard that uses more of the electromagnetic spectrum, but
also hops between the narrow bands of unused spectrum within television
broadcast frequencies.
In 2008, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission approved limited use of "white spaces"—portions
of spectrum adjacent to existing television transmissions. The ruling,
in effect, expanded the available spectrum. Microsoft developed the new
network partly as a way to push Congress to allow much broader use of
white spaces, despite some concerns over interference with some other
types of wireless devices, such as wireless microphones.
The fastest Wi-Fi networks, which can transmit data at up to a
gigabit per second, use as much spectrum as possible, up to 160
megahertz, to maximize bandwidth. Krishna Chintalapudi and his team at
Microsoft Research have pioneered an approach, called WiFi-NC, which
makes efficient use of these white spaces at these speeds.
Rather than using a conventional Wi-Fi radio, it uses an array of
tiny, low-data rate transmitters and receivers. Each of these broadcast
and receive via a different, narrow range of spectrum. Bundled together,
they work just like a regular Wi-Fi radio, but can switch between
white-space frequencies far more efficiently.
That means the system is compatible with existing equipment. "The
entire reception and transmission logic could be reused from existing
Wi-Fi implementations," says Chintalapudi.
The team calls these transmitters and receivers "receiver-lets" and
"transmitter-lets." Together, they make up what's known as a "compound
radio."
The resulting wireless network doesn't increase data rates in
specific ranges of spectrum above what's currently achieved with
latest-generation technology. It does, however, make more efficient use
of the entire range of spectrum, and especially the white spaces freed
up by the FCC.
The new radio integrates with a previous Microsoft project that provides a wireless device with access to a database of available white-space
spectrum in any part of the United States. That system, called
SenseLess, tells a device where it can legally broadcast and receive.
WiFi-NC then chooses the bands of spectrum that have the least
interference, and broadcasts over them.
By sending its signal over many smaller radios that operate in
slivers of the available spectrum, WiFi-NC suffers less interference and
experiences faster speeds even when a user is at the intersection of
overlapping networks. This is important because the white spaces that
may be authorized for commercial use by the FCC are at the lower ends of
the electromagnetic spectrum, where signals can travel much further
than existing Wi-Fi transmissions.
Whether or not Microsoft's WiFi-NC technology gets commercialized depends on Congress, says Kevin Werbach,
a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Business
School, and an expert on the FCC's effort to make more spectrum
available for wireless data transmission.
"The problem is that many of the Congressional proposals to give the
FCC [the authority to auction off currently unused bandwidth] also
restrict it from making available white spaces for devices around that
spectrum," says Werbach.
Microsoft hopes WiFi-NC will persuade Congress to approve wider use of white spaces.
"It is our opinion that WiFi-NC's approach of using multiple narrow
channels as opposed to the current model of using wider channels in an
all-or-nothing style is the more prudent approach for the future of
Wi-Fi and white spaces," says Chintalapudi. The team's ultimate goal, he
adds, is to propose WiFi-NC as a new wireless standard for the hardware
and software industries.
MongoDB might be a popular choice in NoSQL databases, but it’s not perfect — at least out of the box. At last week’s MongoSV conference
in Santa Clara, Calif., a number of users, including from Disney,
Foursquare and Wordnik, shared their experiences with the product. The
common theme: NoSQL is necessary for a lot of use cases, but it’s not
for companies afraid of hard work.
If you’re in the cloud, avoid the disk
According to Wordnik
technical co-founder and vice president of engineering Tony Tam, unless
you’re willing to spend beaucoup dollars on buying and operating
physical infrastructure, cloud computing is probably necessary to match
the scalability of NoSQL databases.
As he explained, Wordnik actually launched on Amazon Web Services and
used MySQL, but the database hit a wall at around a billion records, he
said. So, Wordnik switched to MongoDB,
which solved the scaling problem but caused its own disk I/O problems
that resulted in a major performance slowdown. So, Wordnik ported
everything back onto some big physical servers, which drastically
improved performance.
And then came the scalability problem again, only this time it was in
terms of infrastructure. So, it was back to the cloud. But this time,
Wordnik got smart and tuned the application to account for the strengths
and weaknesses of MongoDB (“Your app should be smarter than your
database,” he says), and MongoDB to account for the strengths and
weaknesses of the cloud.
Among his observations was that in the cloud, virtual disks have virtual
performance, “meaning it’s not really there.” Luckily, he said, you can
design to take advantage of virtual RAM. It will fill up fast if you
let it, though, and there’s trouble brewing if requests start hitting
the disk. “If you hit indexes on disk,” he warned, “mute your pager.”
Foursquare’s Cooper Bethea echoed much of Tam’s sentiment, noting that “for us, paging the disk is really bad.” Because Foursquare
works its servers so hard, he said, high latency and error counts start
occurring as soon as the disk is invoked. Foursquare does use disk in
the form of Amazon Elastic Block Storage, but it’s only for backup.
EBS also brings along issues of its own. At least once a day, Bethea
said, queued reads and writes to EBS start backing up excessively, and
the only solution is to “kill it with fire.” What that means changes
depending on the problem, but it generally means stopping the MongoDB
process and rebuilding the affected replica set from scratch.
Monitor everything
Curt Stevens of the Disney Interactive Media Group
explained how his team monitors the large MongoDB deployment that
underpins Disney’s online games. MongoDB actually has its own tool
called the Mongo Monitoring System that Stevens said he swears by, but
it isn’t always enough. It shows traffic and performance patterns over
time, which is helpful, but only the starting point.
Once a problem is discovered, “it’s like CSI
on your data” to figure out what the underlying problem is. Sometimes,
an instance just needs to be sharded, he explained. Other times, the
code could be buggy. One time, Stevens added, they found out a
poor-performing app didn’t have database issues at all, but was actually
split across two data centers that were experiencing WAN issues.
Oh, and just monitoring everything isn’t enough when you’re talking
about a large-scale system, Stevens said. You have to have alerts in
place to tell you when something’s wrong, and you have to monitor the
monitors. If MMS or any other monitoring tools go down, you might think
everything is just fine while the kids trying to have a magical Disney
experience online are paying the price.
By the numbers
If you’re wondering what kind of performance and scalability
requirements forced these companies to MongoDB, and then to customize it
so heavily, here are some statistics:
Foursquare: 15 million users; 8
production MongoDB clusters; 8 shards of user data; 12 shards of
check-in data; ~250 updates per second on user database, with maximum
output of 46 MBps; ~80 check-ins per second on check-in database, with
maximum output of 45 MBps; up to 2,500 HTTP queries per second.
Wordnik: Tens of billions of documents with more
always being added; more than 20 million REST API calls per day; mapping
layer supports 35,000 records per second.
Disney: More than 1,400
MongoDB instances (although “your eyes start watering after 30,” Stevens
said); adding new instances every day, via a custom-built self-service
portal, to test, stage and host new games.
OLPC had already announced it was bringing along its XO-3 tablet to CES this coming week; now we know what the new education-focused slate will look like. Less slimline than the older concepts and nowhere near as space-age as the earlier dual-screen XO-2 renders,
the new silicone-clad XO-3 does at least have the bonus of actually
fitting inside the Marvell ARMADA PXA618 processor and half gig of RAM
we’re expecting.
Up front is an 8-inch screen – a 1024 x 768 Pixel Qi panel,
no less, for indoor and outdoor visibility – with a peel-off silicone
cover so as to protect it from scratches and bumps while in a schoolbag.
There’ll also be solar panels on the inside, one of a trio of
recharging options to keep the OLPC XO-3 running: as well as plugging it
into the mains, should you have the luxury of being near an AC supply,
there’ll be a hand-crank to manually top up the battery.
Sixty seconds of cranking is good for ten minutes of use, or so OLPC
tells us, and the OS is either Android or the specialist
education-focused Sugar platform. Ports – which are also covered up by
that clever cover – include full-sized USB, audio and a memory card
slot.
Best of all, though, is the price: OLPC expects the XO-3 to kick off
at $100, though that will be for regular LCD rather than Pixel Qi
versions. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to drop by Best Buy and pick
one up, as OLPC will be selling direct to educational organizations and
charities.
IBM researchers reverse engineered a macaque brain as a start to engineering one of their own
The gnomes at IBM’s research labs were not content to make merely a genius computer
that could beat any human at the game of jeopardy. They had to go and
create a new kind of machine intelligence that mimics the actual human
brain.
Watson, the reigning jeopardy champ, is smart, but it’s still
recognizably a computer. This new stuff is something completely
different. IBM is setting out to build an electronic brain from the
ground up.
Cognitive computing, as the new field is called, takes computing
concepts to a whole new level. Earlier this week, Dharmendra Modha, who
works at IBM’s Almaden Research Center, regaled a roomful of analysts
with what cognitive computing can do and how IBM is going about making a
machine that thinks the way we do. His own blog on the subject is here.
First Modha described the challenges, which involve aspects of neuroscience, supercomputing, and nanotechnology.
The human brain integrates memory and processing together, weighs
less than 3 lbs, occupies about a two-liter volume, and uses less power
than a light bulb. It operates as a massively parallel distributed
processor. It is event driven, that is, it reacts to things in its
environment, uses little power when active and even less while resting.
It is a reconfigurable, fault-tolerant learning system. It is
excellent at pattern recognition and teasing out relationships.
A computer, on the other hand, has separate memory and processing.
It does its work sequentially for the most part and is run by a clock.
The clock, like a drum majorette in a military band, drives every
instruction and piece of data to its next location — musical chairs with
enough chairs. As clock rates increase to drive data faster, power
consumption goes up dramatically, and even at rest these machines need a
lot of electricity. More importantly, computers have to be
programmed. They are hard wired and fault prone. They are good at
executing defined algorithms and performing analytics.
With $41 million in funding from the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA), the scientists at the Almaden lab set out to
make a brain in a project called Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive
Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE).
The rough analogy between a brain and a computer posits roles for
cell types — neurons, axons, and synapses — that correspond to machine
elements — processors, communications links, and memory. The matches
are not exact, as brain cells’ functions are less distinct from each
other than the computer elements. But the key is that the brain
elements all reside near each other, and activity in any given complex
is stimulated by activity from adjacent complexes. That is, thoughts
stimulate other thoughts.
Modha and his team set out to map and synthesize a wiring diagram for
the brain, no trivial task, as the brain has 22 billion neurons and 220
trillion synapses. In May 2009, the team managed to simulate a system
with 1 billion neurons, roughly the brain of a lower mammal. Except
that it operates at one-thousandth of real time, not enough to perform
what Modha called “the four Fs”: food, fight, flight, and mating.
But the structure of this machine is entirely different from today’s
commercial computers. The memory and processing elements are built
close together. It has no clock. Operations are asynchronous and event
driven; that is, they have no predetermined order or schedule. And
instead of being programmed, they learn. Just like us.
Part of getting the power down to brain-like levels is not storing
temporary results (caching, in industry jargon). Sensing stimulates
action, which is sensed and acted upon further. And so on.
The team recently built a smaller hardware version of the brain
simulation, one with just 256 neurons, 262,000 programmable synapses,
and 65,000 learning synapses. The good news is that this machine runs
at within an order of magnitude of the power that a real brain
consumes. With its primitive capabilities, this brainlette is capable
of spatial navigation, machine vision, pattern recognition, and
associative memory and can do evidence-based hypothesis generation. It
has a “mind’s eye” that can see a pattern, for example, a badly written
number, and generate a good guess as to what the actual number is.
Already better than our Precambrian ancestors.
Modha pointed out that this type of reasoning is a lot like that of a
typical right hemisphere in the brain: intuitive, parallel, synthetic.
Not content with half a brain, Modha envisions adding a typical von
Neumann-type computer, which acts more like a reasoning left hemisphere,
to the mix, and having the two share information, just like a real
brain.
When this brain is ready to go to market, I’m going to send my own on holiday and let Modha’s do my thinking for me.
Oh, and, by the way, in case you were wondering whether the SyNAPSE
project has caused Watson to be put out to pasture, nothing could be
further from the truth. Watson is alive and well and moving on to new,
more practical applications.
For example, since jeopardy contestants can’t “call a friend,” Watson
was constrained to the data that could be loaded directly into the
machine (no Internet searches), but in the latest application of Watson
technology — medical diagnoses — the Internet is easily added to the
corpus within the machine, allowing Watson to search a much wider range
of unstructured data before rendering an answer.
Watson had to hit the bell faster than the human contestants, but the
doctors seeking advice on a strange set of symptoms can easily wait a
half hour or longer. So, Watson can make more considered choices.
Watson at work is a serious tool.
All this genius is causing my brain to explode.
Disclosure: Endpoint has a consulting relationship with IBM.
Hackers reportedly plan to fight back against Internet censorship by
putting their own communications satellites into orbit and developing a
grid of ground stations to track and communicate with them.
The news comes as the tech world is up in arms about proposed legislation that many feel would threaten online freedom.
According to BBC News, the satellite plan was recently outlined at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin. It's being called the "Hackerspace Global Grid."
If you don't like the idea of hackers being able to communicate better,
hacker activist Nick Farr said knowledge is the only motive of the
project, which also includes the development of new electronics that can
survive in space, and launch vehicles that can get them there.
Farr and his cohorts are working on the project along with Constellation, a German aerospace research initiative that involves interlinked student projects.
You might think it would be hard for just anybody to put a satellite
into space, but hobbyists and amateurs have been able in recent years to
use balloons to get them up there. However, without the deep pockets of
national agencies or large companies they have a hard time tracking the
devices.
To
better locate their satellites, the German hacker group came up with
the idea of a sort of reverse GPS that uses a distributed network of
low-cost ground stations that can be bought or built by individuals.
Supposedly, these stations would be able to pinpoint satellites at any
given time while improving the transmission of data from the satellites
to Earth.
The plan isn't without limitations.
For one thing, low orbit satellites don't stay in a single place. And
any country could go to the trouble of disabling them. At the same time,
outer space isn’t actually governed by the countries over which it
floats.
The scheme
discussed by hackers follows the introduction of the controversial Stop
Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the United States, which many believe to be
a threat to online freedom.
As PC World's Tony Bradley put it, the bill is
a combination of an overzealous drive to fight Internet piracy, with
elected representatives who don't know the difference between DNS, IM,
and MP3. In short, SOPA is a "draconian legislation that far exceeds its intended scope, and threatens the Constitutional rights of law abiding citizens," he wrote.
And apparently those who typically don't follow the law -- hackers -- think there's something they can do about it.