New Hardware and the Internet of Things (Jon Bruner) — The Internet of Things and the new hardware movement are not the same thing. The new hardware movement is driven by new tools for: Prototyping (inexpensive 3D printers, CNC machine tools, cheap and powerful microcontrollers, high-level programming languages on embedded systems); Fundraising and business development (Highway1, Lab IX); Manufacturing (PCH, Seeed); Marketing (Etsy, Quirky). The IoT is driven by: Ubiquitous connectivity; Cheap hardware (i.e., the new hardware movement); Inexpensive data processing and machine learning.
OpenCV 3.0 Released — I hadn’t realised how much hardware acceleration comes out of the box with OpenCV.
FBI: Companies Should Help us Prevent Encryption (WaPo) — as Mike Loukides says, we are in a Post-Modern age where we don’t trust our computers and they don’t trust us. It’s jarring to hear the organisation that (over-zealously!) investigates computer crime arguing that citizens should not be able to secure their communications. It’s like police arguing against locks.
cockroach — a scalable, geo-replicated, transactional datastore. The Wired piece about it drops the factoid that the creators of GIMP worked on Google’s massive BigTable-successor, Colossus. From Photoshop-alike to massive file systems. Love it.
