The Internet of Linux Things

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The Linux Foundation is a non-profit organization that sponsors the work of Linus Torvalds. Supporting companies include HP, IBM, Intel, and a host of other large corporations. The foundation hosts several Linux-related projects. This month they announced Zephyr, an RTOS aimed at the Internet of Things.

The project stresses modularity, security, and the smallest possible footprint. Initial support includes:

  • Arduino 101
  • Arduino Due
  • Intel Galileo Gen 2
  • NXP FRDM-K64F Freedom

The project (hosted on its own Website) has downloads for the kernel and documentation. Unlike a “normal” Linux kernel, Zephyr builds the kernel with your code to create a monolithic …read more

Secret menu found in Mortal Kombat 20 years later

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MKII
The original Mortal Kombat games were great for many reasons. They had one of the more in-depth fighting game stories, a cast of colorful characters, really cool music, and of course, lots of […]

Imogen Heap is using digital currency tech to change music

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Imogen Heap is no stranger to using bleeding-edge technology to perform music, but she’s now using it to change how you buy music. Her Mycelia project not only lets artists sell music directly to fans, but uses blockchains (the same technology behind digital currencies like Bitcoin) to get the kind of data that would normally require the help of a label. It’d include credits and usage rights, and could track things such as where and when people play a given tune — if a song is really popular with Australians, you’ll know it without asking anyone else.

Heap doesn’t see Mycelia as a complete replacement for existing music streams and sales (she’s talking to Spotify about it), but she does believe it could upturn the industry. Artists would handle the sales and data themselves, limiting the labels to marketing. In effect, you’d have more control over your music career.

The technology is a ways off (there’s a hackathon in early April to help get it going), and how well it works is up in the air. Just how much data will musicians get, for example? How easy will it be to implement? We’ve reached out to Heap for more details. If it does work as promised, though, it could help indie artists make a living while resisting the temptation to make a deal with a major publisher.

Via: Quartz

Source: Mycelia

Humans – 1 Robots – 0: Mercedes deautomates production lines

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Machines are just too inflexible, says production boss

In a surprise win for humanity, Mercedes Benz has announced that it’s ditching the robots used on its assembly line in favor of human workers because they can cope with the job better.…

The Politics Of The Internet Of Things 

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IOTcoffee The prospective scale of the Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to fill anyone looking from the outside with the technical equivalent of agoraphobia. However, from the inside, the view is very different. Looked at in detail, it is a series of intricate threads being aligned by a complex array of organizations. As with any new technological epoch, questions around shape, ownership… Read More

People don’t want big OpenFlow deployments, so let’s do small ones

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Eating an elephant slice by slice is much easier than eating the whole thing

OpenFlow looks like it has all the hallmarks of inevitable success: it fits into a broad stack of open networking protocols, it has lots of vendor support, it’s backed by the Linux Foundation, and it’s been under development since 2009.…

Giving The Pi Zero USB, Ethernet, And Serial Over USB

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Just as the USB port on your phone can serve as a serial connection, mass storage device, and a network connection, the Pi Zero can do the same. We’ve seen a few people turn the Zero into a single USB gadget, but what about turning the Zero into a USB HID device, network connection, and serial port all at the same time? That’s what [Tobias] did, and his method is even easier than the old one.

The old method of turning the Pi Zero into a USB device required the user to modify and recompile the kernel. Obviously, this isn’t an ideal solution. …read more

Google wants hard drives designed to store your cloud data

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Take a look at the hard drive in your desktop PC. It might hold terabytes of data, but the basic 3.5-inch design can be traced back to the early days of computing — not really relevant in an era when a lot of your content sits in the cloud, is it? Google wants to change that. It’s hoping to work with both the tech industry and researchers to design hard drives that are tailor-made for cloud-based storage. It wants to optimize the "collection" of disks instead of focusing on individual drives, and is more concerned about capacity and performance — the things that matter most in a bustling data center — over sheer reliability.

You shouldn’t expect any breakthroughs in the immediate future, since companies will take a while to implement Google’s ideas. Google is well-aware of the practical realities, though — while it’s pushing for physical changes (such as taller, grouped-together drives), it’s also suggesting near-term improvements like firmware updates. It might not be long before your internet services of choice run that much faster.

Source: Google Cloud Platform Blog

13 cheap (or free) online classes you should take to boost your digital skills

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Laptop

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Image: Mashable Composite, Crew

We live in a digital world. Just look at where you’re reading this article right now — without that phone, tablet, or laptop in front of you, this content would never reach you.

Now, I’ll be honest and say that I’m old-fashioned, which is why I prefer using Post-its instead of Apple Calendars, holding a physical book rather than reading with a Kindle, or talking in person rather than through social media. But like everyone else, I’ve had to adapt to life’s changes — and quite honestly, it’s actually made me a lot more productive and efficient in everything I do. Read more…

More about WordPress, Job Search, Linkedin, Digital Advertising, and Business

OpenStack Developer Mailing List Digest Feb 13-19

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OpenStack Operators Midcycle

  • Takeaways from the OpenStack Mid-Cycle Ops Meetup: first time’s the charm [1]
  • OpenStack Upgrading Tutorial: 11 pitfalls and solutions [2]

“No Open Core” in 2016 (continuing)

  • Continuing with discussions on Poppy in particular, Doug Hellmann raises that the Poppy team has done everything we’ve asked. The governance currently emphasizes on the social aspects of the project and community interactions. Tell the Poppy team they “are not OpenStack” even though they followed things is distressing.
  • Sean Dague mentions that solutions like Neutron have an open source solution. It may needed some work, but at least there was one open source solution for testing.
  • Dean Troyer brings up how we have things like Cinder with commerical products as storage drivers. Even without those storage drivers though, Cinder is still useful.
  • Poppy’s open source implementation option, OpenCDN is currently an abandoned project.
  • Full thread: http://bit.ly/1Q0gDIx

Upgrade Implications of Lots of Content in paste.ini

  • A set of Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) patches came out recently [3], that adds a ton of content to paste.ini.
  • Paste.ini is a config that operators can change.
    • Large amounts of complicated things in there which may change in future releases is really problematic.
    • Deprecating content also is a challenge.
    • Why aren’t these options just the defaults of the CORS middlware?
      • Some projects like Ironic did request to not have headers prescribed, for eample, if Ironic is using something other than Keystone, different allowed headers would be required.
      • However, Keystone is defcore, so the default should be useful there first. Then be flexible to other auth options can go on top.
  • Where do we go from here?
    • Option 1: Implement as is, keep things consistent, fix them in Newton.
      • This is not fixable in Newton as it requires deprecating out for the next three releases.
    • Option 2: Try to fix it in Mitaka 2 of CORS middleware setting defaults and projects having the ability to override [4].
      • This will require patches against a bunch of projects [5]. Who can help?
  • Full thread: http://bit.ly/1PNvKSC

 

[1] – http://bit.ly/1TwyWWl

[2] – http://bit.ly/1PNvKSD

[3] – http://bit.ly/1TwyZ4D

[4] – http://bit.ly/1PNvKSE

[5] – http://bit.ly/1TwyZ4E

Thinking Different: Data Centers and IoT

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Microsoft Launches Plumbago, A Paper App Competitor That Lets You Sketch & Handwrite Notes

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PlumbagoMain Microsoft’s Office suite already has a popular note-taking app with OneNote, but today the company is turning its attention to how note-taking should work on tablets that support stylus and touch-based input. The company has now released Plumbago, a digital notebook application for Windows 8.1 and 10 tablets that allows users to handwrite text, highlight, plus sketch and draw using… Read More

Ford Sync 3 is also heading to Europe this summer

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Ford is apparently launching the Sync 3 connected car system this summer not only in the US, but also in Europe. The voice-activated 8-inch infotainment center can easily find establishments for you — all you need to do is press a button and say "I need a coffee" or "I need gas petrol." And since the automaker baked both Android Auto and Apple Car Play support into the system, you can pair it with either an iPhone or an Android device.

Ford has added five additional European languages* to Sync 3’s knowledge bank in preparation for its debut. The company has also installed localized versions of Emergency Assistance, so drivers and passengers can initiate emergency calls in the country’s own language. Sync 3 will initially be available in Europe aboard the Mondeo, the S‑MAX, the Galaxy and eventually, the Kuga SUV. It will make its first appearance in the continent on the new Kuga at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week.

(*The system’s European languages are: Czech, Danish, Norwegian, Polish (including voice control), Swedish (including voice control), Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and U.K. English.)

Source: Ford

PrimaryIO first flash cacher with VAIO support

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No, not for Sony notebooks. VMware application IO filtering

PrimaryIO, once known as CacheBox, has the first VAIO-integrated caching software to the market to speed database apps in vSphere 6.…

You Can Now Dual Boot Windows and Chromium with CloudReady

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CloudReady, the software that allows you to turn just about any old laptop into a Chromebook , now offers a dual boot option so you can check out Chromium without ditching your default operating system.

Read more…



ARM Cortex-R8 aka ‘Now your hard drive will have a quad-core CPU in it’

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New design for demanding real-time applications

Brit processor designer ARM has drawn up a quad-core Cortex-R8 CPU so storage drives can cope with the demands of increasing capacities – and phones can download stuff faster.…

IBM open sources its blockchain code – the non-crazy part of Bitcoin

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Places bet on software for future transactions

IBM has open sourced a significant chunk of the blockchain code it has been working on, putting its weight behind the Linux Foundation and its Hyperledger project.…

Microsoft’s new Wireless Display Adapter is more responsive

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Like other Miracast HDMI dongles, Microsoft’s Wireless Display Adapter lets you easily mirror the screen of your Windows (or Android) devices on monitors, TVs and projectors — anything with an HDMI input, really. Redmond’s reasonably priced dongle has been kicking around for roughly 18 months now though, meaning its high time for an updated model. Microsoft’s next-gen Wireless Display Adapter improves on its predecessor in two ways. For starters, the HDMI dongle itself has been almost halved in length, though it still draws power from a tethered USB cable. More importantly, the new version improves responsiveness (aka latency), so your poorly framed smartphone video should pop up on your living room TV that bit quicker.

As the dongle simply mirrors the screen of the source device directly, you’re not limited to specific, supported apps. Your PC, tablet or smartphone, however, will need to be running Windows 8.1 or above, and any Android device with Jelly Bean (4.2) or later should also be compatible. The new Wireless Display Adapter is available to pre-order from Microsoft in the US now for $49.95 ($10 cheaper than the previous generation’s launch price), heading to other outlets including Best Buy and Amazon when it’s officially released on March 1st.

Source: Microsoft (1), (2)

Silk Labs Sense: Not your typical home monitoring camera

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As useful as Nest’s Dropcam is, it isn’t the best looking home monitoring camera. Still, there aren’t many of them that do a better job design-wise. Silk Labs, a startup founded by Mozilla’s former CTO, Andreas Gal, sees this as an opportunity to offer something different. Enter Sense, which is similar to Dropcam in functionality but also comes with a few notable differences. For example, it’s said to be smart enough to recognize multiple faces; that can be used to let you know if it thinks a stranger is in your home, or play music based on a particular individual’s taste.

Sense (pictured above) also pairs with third-party hardware, such as Sonos speakers and smart light bulbs, among others. Not surprisingly, you’ll find a built-in microphone and speaker on the back of it, used for voice recognition and more features that may be added in the future. Meanwhile, the Sense’s industrial design is intended to blend with people’s lifestyle, according to Gal. It’s supposed to be "something you’re happy to put in your living room," he says.

Gal, who left the Firefox team in 2015, told me that Silk Labs’ goal with Sense is to create a whole new Internet of Things platform: "We are not a hardware company," he says. Instead, Gal hopes the device will drive interest from both developers and manufacturers, especially since Sense and the software powering it are going to be open source. The Kickstarter is launching today, with the product priced at $225.

And Gal doesn’t want you to worry about it being a crowdfunded project, because Silk Labs isn’t financed that way. "Kickstarter is just a way to bring this to people," he added.

Source: Kickstarter (Silk Labs)

‘5D’ discs can store data until well after the sun burns out

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Researchers at the University of Southampton’s Optical Research Center announced on Tuesday that they’ve perfected a technique that can record data in 5 dimensions and keep it safe for billions of years. The method etches data into a thermally stable disc using femtosecond laser bursts. The storage medium itself holds up to 360 TB per disc, can withstand temperatures up to 1000 degrees C and are estimated to last up to 13.8 billion years at room temperature without degrading.

Each file is comprised of three layers of nanoscale dots. The dots’ side and orientations, as well as their position within the three standard dimensions, constitute its five dimensions. These dots change the polarization of light travelling through the disc which is read using a microscope and polarizer.

The Southampton team originally demonstrated the technology back in 2013 though, at that point, they could only fit a 300kb test file onto a disc. In the three years since their first demonstration, they’ve essentially perfected the recording technique and have since recorded the entirety of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Newton’s Opticks, Magna Carta and Kings James Bible.

"It is thrilling to think that we have created the technology to preserve documents and information and store it in space for future generations," Professor Peter Kazansky from the ORC said in a statement. "This technology can secure the last evidence of our civilisation: all we’ve learnt will not be forgotten."

Source: University of Southampton

Getting Ready For HTTP/2: A Guide For Web Designers And Developers

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The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the protocol that governs the connection between your server and the browsers of your website’s visitors. For the first time since 1999, we have a new version of this protocol, and it promises far faster websites for everyone.

Getting Ready For HTTP/2: A Guide For Web Designers And Developers

In this article, we’ll look at the basics of HTTP/2 as they apply to web designers and developers. I’ll explain some of the key features of the new protocol, look at browser and server compatibility, and detail the things you might need to think about as we see more adoption of HTTP/2. By reading this article, you will get an overview of what to consider changing in your workflow in the short and long term. I’ll also include plenty of resources if you want to dig further into the issues raised.

The post Getting Ready For HTTP/2: A Guide For Web Designers And Developers appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

NICE catch, Amazon: Bezos buys HPC toolkit from Italy

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Is Uncle Jeff’s cut-price bit-barn rental company contemplating HPCaaS?

Amazon’s sparking speculation a more ambitious high-performance computing (HPC) plan with the acquisition of Italian company NICE Software.…

OpenStack Developer Mailing List Digest Feb 7-12

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SuccessBot Says

  • dhellmann: [1] is live with release history and upcoming release schedules.
  • ttx:  Governance changes are now announced in #openstack-dev, to increase general awareness about them!
  • jklare: Just merged the first batch of opentack-chef cookbook patches for the Mitaka cycle! 4.229 lines of code refactored and 18.678 lines removed!
  • johnthetubaguy: Nova subteams starting to look after themselves, and effectively reporting their progress to the wider community
  • All: http://bit.ly/1VJsrMI

Dropping KEYSTONE_CATALOG_BACKEND – Plus Update Your Devstack Plugins

  • Devstack has some half baked support for Keystone templated service catalog.
  • In an effort to clean up parts of Devstack, we’re dropping that [2].
  • This breaks everyone’s Devstack plugin that references the KEYSTONE_CATALOG_BACKEND variable.
  • This variable will be kept around until Newton development opens up.
  • Full thread: http://bit.ly/20RsKwW

All Hail the New Per-region PyPI, wheel and APT Mirrors

  • We have new AFS-based consistent per-region mirrors of PyPI and API repositories, with additional wheel repositories containing pre-built wheels for all the modules in global-requirements.
  • You should not notice a difference, except jobs should be a bit faster and more reliable.
  • Full thread: http://bit.ly/20RsKwX

Release countdown for week R-7, Feb 15-19

  • Focus: Project teams should be focusing on wrapping up new feature work in all libraries.
  • Release Actions:
    • We will be strictly enforcing the library release freeze before Mitaka-3 in 2 weeks.
    • Review client libraries, integration libraries, and any other libraries managed by your team, and ensure recent changes have been released.
    • Ensure global-requirements and constraints lists are up to date, with accurate minimum versions, and exclusions.
    • Projects using cycle-with-intermediary release model need to produce intermediate releases. See Thierry’s emails for details [3].
    • Review stable/liberty branches and submit patches to openstack/releases if you want them.
  • Important Dates
    • Final release for  non-client libraries: Feb 24
    • Final release for client libraries: Mar 2
    • Mitaka 3: Feb 29-Mar 4 (includes feature freeze and soft string freeze)
  • Full thread: http://bit.ly/1PIUCsw

Why WADL When You Can Swagger

  • Continuing from previous update [4].
  • Every build of the api-site is now running fairy-slipper to migrate from WADL to Swagger.
    • Those migrated Swagger files are copied to [5].
  • Not all files migrate smoothly. We’d love to get teams looking at these migrated files. Thank you to those who have already submitted fixes!
    • If you see a problem in the original WADL when viewing [5], log it [7].
    • If you see a problem with the migration tool, log it [8].
  • The Infra team is reviewing a specification [6] so that we can serve API information from developer.openstack.org.
  • You can hop onto #openstack-doc or #openstack-sdks to ask nick annegentle
  • Full thread: http://bit.ly/20RsNsk

Tenant VS. Project

  • Sean Dague brings up that OpenStack’s use of tenant vs. project. Which are we transitioning to?
  • Keystone is working towards allowing project_id in the service catalog [9].
  • Neutron is transitioning to project_id now.
  • The current Ansible OpenStack modules are using project [10].
  • OSLO Logging/Context are using project.
  • Full thread: http://bit.ly/1PIUzwR

Proposal: Separate Design Summits From OpenStack Conferences

  • The OpenStack design summits originally started out as working events.
  • The OpenStack summits growing more marketing and sales focus, the contributors attending are often unfocused.
  • Some contributors submit talks for the conference, because their company says it’s the only way for them to attend the conference. Part of the reason for this is the cost of attending.
  • Thierry Carrez (who helps organize the design summit) explains that he has been working a solution for separation of the summit and the conference himself, and the Foundation is finalizing a strawman proposal that will be pushed to the community for comments soon.
  • Full thread: http://bit.ly/20RsNsl

[1] – http://bit.ly/1PIUCsx
[2] – http://bit.ly/20RsM7X
[3] – http://bit.ly/1PIUzwS
[4] – http://bit.ly/20RsNsm
[5] – http://bit.ly/1PIUzwT
[6] – http://bit.ly/20RsM7Y
[7] – http://bit.ly/1PIUCsy
[8] – http://bit.ly/20RsNsn
[9] – http://bit.ly/1PIUCsz
[10] – http://bit.ly/20RsM7Z

Sick and tired of modern Windows? Upgrade to Windows 3.1 today – in your web browser

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Over 1k programs and games preserved by Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is taking us back to 1992 with the release of over 1,000 programs and games that run on what was arguably the first mass-market graphical interface: Windows 3.1.…

Creating Colorful Emails with PowerShell

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color-aspect-hero

Here’s a tip on creating colorful emails with PowerShell.

The post Creating Colorful Emails with PowerShell appeared first on Petri.