Apple’s Patents possibly covering android
Apple’s initial legal victory over rival HTC in a patent infringement suit could pave the way for Apple to collect high royalties from devices running Google Android, according to one analysis. Mike...
View ArticleAmerican corporate management
ASUSTeK started out making the simple circuit boards within a Dell computer. Then ASUSTeK came to Dell with an interesting value proposition: ‘We’ve been doing a good job making these little boards....
View ArticleVCs bailing on signed term sheets
Via Trevor Loy (not a bailer) this story We’ve heard three stories in which lead investors bailed on rounds after term sheets were signed. The first upset came last week from a WeWork Labs company....
View ArticleComputer architecture, power, and PHP
The Tile-Gx chips have 64-bit processing on their cores, and include floating point math instructions that allow a floating point operating to be done in five cycles instead of hundreds of cycles when...
View ArticleSinking in too many layers
Facebook engineers and analysts tap the company’s Hadoop clusters via a SQL-like query language known as Hive. [..] Separate from its Hadoop work, Facebook built Cassandra, a distributed database also...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Fukushima Robot Blog
This from the IEEE is really fascinating. It is the blog of a robot operator in the Fukushima nuclear plants. Some interesting things about controls, robot handling, and durability are discussed. And,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The multics file system
The design proposed in this paper is ubiquitous. A file is simply an ordered sequence of elements, where an element could be a machine word, a character, or a bit, depending upon the implementation. A...
View ArticleDroning on about computer security
Good grief. The US military’s unmanned Predator and Reaper drones are continuing to fly remote missions overseas despite a computer virus that has infected their US-based cockpits. Government officials...
View ArticleRichard Stallman speaks
A supply of tea with milk and sugar would be nice. If it is tea I really like, I like it without milk and sugar. With milk and sugar, any kind of tea is fine. I always bring tea bags with me, so if we...
View ArticleApple’s A5 chip made in Austin
Although I think it might have been designed here too. The A5 processor – the brain in the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 – is now made in a sprawling 1.6 million square feet factory in Austin owned by Korean...
View ArticleThe UNIX file system as a recursive function
Ignoring “write” operations, for the moment, a file system is just an implementation, a concrete manifestation, of a map from file names to file contents. A UNIX style file system complicates the story...
View ArticleJulia programming language and hadoop
While we’re being demanding, we want something that provides the distributed power of Hadoop — without the kilobytes of boilerplate Java and XML; without being forced to sift through gigabytes of log...
View ArticleManufacturing and devices
The answer is obvious but few people stop for a second to wonder about this. After all, it is not like Apple has control over all aluminum in the world. Apple were just the first to see the potential...
View ArticleLoose cables at CERN and Time synchronization is hard
According to sources familiar with the experiment, the 60 nanoseconds discrepancy appears to come from a bad connection between a fiber optic cable that connects to the GPS receiver used to correct the...
View ArticleMurdoch strikes against copyrights
The witnesses allege a software company NDS, owned by News Corp, cracked the smart card codes of rival company ONdigital. ONdigital, owned by the ITV companies Granada and Carlton, eventually went...
View ArticleTimestamp based reconciliation
Timestamp based reconciliation: This case differs from the previous one only in the reconciliation mechanism. In case of divergent versions, Dynamo performs simple timestamp based reconciliation logic...
View ArticleFree software and newspapers
Folks who decry the idea of subscriber fees argue that paywalls won’t work, and that those who advocate for them, don’t understand the Internet. The opposite is true. These folks don’t understand the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Samsung’s trial brief in the Apple patent lawsuit
http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/1257891/Samsung_unredacted_trial_brief.pdf Contrary to the image it has cultivated in the popular press, Apple has admitted in internal documents that its strength is...
View Article