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"hardware" entries
Unionize BigCos, Design Docos, IoT Protocol, and Hackability
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Employees at Google, Yahoo, and Amazon Lose Nothing if They Unionize (Michael O. Church) — When a company’s management plays stack-ranking games against its employees, an adversarial climate between management and labor already exists. This is a deeply interesting article, with every paragraph quotable and relevant to The Next Economy. Read it.
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Design Documentaries — a really nice index of design documentaries, many with YouTube links.
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MQTT — IoT connectivity protocol designed as an extremely lightweight publish/subscribe messaging transport. It is useful for connections with remote locations where a small code footprint is required and/or network bandwidth is at a premium.
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Camp for Apple II Fanatics — “I invested a lot of time and knowledge into the Apple II, to the point where I really understood all of what the system is doing. All 64K of memory and what’s happening in RAM and ROM, the firmware the programs are using when they run on the Apple II,” he said. “With today’s machines, you get farther away from the metal the thing’s running on. Things change so fast, your phone is a million times more powerful than the Apple II was, but you can’t do things on the metal.” The micros were invented by the people who built and ran the minis and mainframes of old, and gave people the same insight. Tablets and mobiles were invented by the people who built and ran micros, and took away that same insight.
Mobile Medical Scanner, Amazon Hardware Showcase, Consistency Challenges, and Govt Alpha Geeks
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Cellphone-Based Hand-Held Microplate Reader for Point-of-Care Testing of Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assays — we created a hand-held and cost-effective cellphone-based colorimetric microplate reader that implements a routine hospital test used to identify HIV and other conditions. (via RtoZ)
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Amazon Launchpad — a showcase for new hardware startups, who might well be worried about Amazon’s “watch what sells and sell a generic version of it” business model.
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Challenges to Adopting Stronger Consistency at Scale (PDF) — It is not obvious that a system that trades stronger consistency for increased latency or reduced availability would be a net benefit to people using Facebook, especially when compared against a weakly consistent system that resolves many inconsistencies with ad hoc mechanisms.
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The White House’s Alpha Geeks — Megan Smith for President. I realize now there’s two things we techies should do — one is go where there are lots of us, like MIT or Silicon Valley or whatever, because you can move really fast and do extraordinary things. The other is, go where you’re rare. … It’s almost like you’re a frog in boiling water; you don’t really realize how un-diverse it is until you’re in a normal diverse American innovative community like the President’s team. And then you go back and you’re like, wow. You feel, “Man, this industry is so awesome and yet we’re missing all of this talent.”
Auto-Remediation, Fast and Good, Life's Game of Conway, and Self-Assembly Lab
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Nurse at LinkedIn — automating the responses to alerts.
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Moving Fast With High Code Quality (Quora) — Lots of practical detail about how they combine speed with quality.
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John Horton Conway (The Guardian) — These were two separate areas of study that Conway had arrived at by two different paths. So, there’s no reason for them to be linked. But somehow, through the force of his personality, and the intensity of his passion, he bent the mathematical universe to his will. Fascinating profile, taken from a new book.
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MIT Self-Assembly Lab — multi-material 3D/4D printing, advances in materials science, and new capabilities in simulation/optimization software […] made it possible to fully program a wide range of materials to change shape, appearance, or other property, on demand.
Artificial Compound Eye, Google Patent Licensing, Monitoring and Alerting, Computer-Aided Inference
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A New Artificial Compound Eye (Robohub) — three hexagonal photodetectors arranged in a triangular shape, underneath a single lens. These photodetectors work together and combine perceived changes in structured light (optic flow) to present a 3D image that shows what is moving in the scene, and in which direction the movement is happening.
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Google’s Defensive Patent Initiative (TechCrunch) — good article, despite TechCrunch origin. Two-tiered program: give away groups of patents to startups with $500k-$20M in revenue, and sell patents to startups.
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Bosun — an open-source, MIT licensed, monitoring and alerting system by Stack Exchange.
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The Rise of Computer-Aided Explanation (Michael Nielsen) — Hod Lipson of Columbia University. Lipson and his collaborators have developed algorithms that, when given a raw data set describing observations of a mechanical system, will actually work backward to infer the “laws of nature” underlying those data. (Paper)
Smart Headlights, Habitual Speed, AI Authors, and Programming Language Evolution
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Ford’s Smart Headlights — spotlights targeted by infra-red, and accumulating knowledge of fixed features to illuminate. Wonder what an attacker can do to it?
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Speed as a Habit — You don’t have to be militant about it, just consistently respond that today is better than tomorrow, that right now is better than six hours from now. This is chock full of good advice, and the occasional good story.
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Coding Creativity: Copyright and the Artificially Intelligent Author (PDF) — if AI creates cultural works (e.g., DeepDream images), who owns those works? Suggests that “work for hire” doctrine may be the way to answer that in the future. (via Andreas Schou)
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Punctuated Equilibrium in the Large-Scale Evolution of Programming Languages (PDF) — Here we study the large-scale historical development of programming languages, which have deeply marked social and technological advances in the last half century. We analyse their historical connections using network theory and reconstructed phylogenetic networks. Using both data analysis and network modeling, it is shown that their evolution is highly uneven, marked by innovation events where new languages are created out of improved combinations of different structural components belonging to previous languages. These radiation events occur in a bursty pattern and are tied to novel technological and social niches. The method can be extrapolated to other systems and consistently captures the major classes of languages and the widespread horizontal design exchanges, revealing a punctuated evolutionary path. (via Jarkko Hietaniemi)
Smalltalky Web, Arduino Speech, Testing Distributed Systems, and Dataflow for FP
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Project Journal: Objects (Ian Bicking) — a view askew at the Web, inspired by Alan Kay’s History of Smalltalk.
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Speech Recognition for Arduino (Kickstarter) — for all your creepy toy hacking needs!
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Conductor (github) — a framework for testing distributed systems.
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Dataflow Syntax for Functional Programming? — two great tastes that will make your head hurt together!
Consumer Exoskeleton, Bitcoin Trends, p2p Sockets, and Plain Government Comms
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ReWalk Robotics Exoskeleton — first exoskeleton for the paralyzed to receive regulatory approval; 66 bought so far, 11 with reimbursement from insurance. The software upgrades for the ReWalk 6.0 provide a smoother walking gait (with less of a soldier-like marching step), an easier stopping mechanism, and a much-improved mode for ascending and descending stairs. The user wears a wristwatch-like controller to switch the suit between sit, stand, walk, and stair modes. How long until a cheaper version hits the market, but you don’t always get to control where it takes you if there’s a sale on featuring brands you love? (via IEEE)
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Bitcoin Trends in First Half of 2015 — 94% increase in monthly transactions over the past year. 47% of Coinbase wallet holders are now from countries outside the U.S.
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Socket.io p2p — an easy and reliable way to set up a WebRTC connection between peers and communicate using the socket.io-protocol.
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18F Content Guide — communications guide for government content writers that bears in mind the frustrations citizens have with gov-speak websites.
Big Data Architecture, Leaving the UK, GPU-powered Queries, and Gongkai in the West
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100 Big Data Architecture Papers (Anil Madan) — you’ll either find them fascinating essential reading … or a stellar cure for insomnia.
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Software Companies Leaving UK Because of Government’s Surveillance Plans (Ars Technica) — to Amsterdam, to NYC, and to TBD.
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MapD: Massive Throughput Database Queries with LLVM and GPUs (nvidia) — The most powerful GPU currently available is the NVIDIA Tesla K80 Accelerator, with up to 8.74 teraflops of compute performance and nearly 500 GB/sec of memory bandwidth. By supporting up to eight of these cards per server, we see orders-of-magnitude better performance on standard data analytics tasks, enabling a user to visually filter and aggregate billions of rows in tens of milliseconds, all without indexing.
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Why It’s Often Easier to Innovate in China than the US (Bunnie Huang) — We did some research into the legal frameworks and challenges around absorbing gongkai IP into the Western ecosystem, and we believe we’ve found a path to repatriate some of the IP from gongkai into proper open source.
Academic Publishing Concentration, Hardware Independence, Exception Monitoring, and Negotiating Tactics
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The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era (PLoSone) — Combined, the top five most prolific publishers account for more than 50% of all papers published in 2013. (via CBC)
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LLVM Bitcode Gives Apple Hardware Independence (Medium) — Bob [Mansfield] has been quietly building a silicon team with the skills to rival all other players in the industry. Bob works for one of 15 companies with an ARM architecture license, giving his team carte blanche to modify and extend ARM in any way they see fit. And Bob’s CPUs only have to satisfy a single customer.
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Github Exception Monitoring and Response — I need another word than “porn” to describe something that makes me sigh fervently with desire to achieve at that level.
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31 Negotiation Tactics (Nick Kolenda) — he mysteriously omitted my power tactics of (a) crying, (b) greeting my opposite number with the wrong name, and (c) passing a napkin covered with random scrawls as I say, “what do you make of this?”
Jeff Han, Google Closure, Software Verification, and Sapir-Whorf Software
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The Untold Story of Microsoft’s Surface Hub (FastCo) — great press placement from Microsoft, but good to hear what Jeff Han has been working on. And interesting comment on the value of manufacturing in the US: “I don’t have to send my folks over to China, so they’re happier,” Han says. “It’s faster. There’s no language, time, or culture barrier to deal with. To have my engineers go down the hallway to talk to the guys in the manufacturing line and tune the recipe? That’s just incredible.”
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Five Years of Google Closure (Derek Slager) — Despite the lack of popularity, a number of companies have successfully used Google Closure for their production applications. Medium, Yelp, CloudKick (acquired by Rackspace), Cue (acquired by Apple), and IMS Health (my company) all use (or have used) Google Closure to power their production applications. And, importantly, the majority of Google’s flagship applications continue to be powered by Google Closure.
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Moving Fast with Software Verification (Facebook) — This paper describes our experience in integrating a verification tool based on static analysis into the software development cycle at Facebook. Contains a brief description of dev and release processes at Facebook: no QA …
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The Death of the von Neumann Architecture — A computer program is the direct execution of any idea. If you restrict the execution, you restrict the idea. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis for software.