"hardware" entries

Four short links: 24 February 2015

Four short links: 24 February 2015

Open Data, Packet Dumping, GPU Deep Learning, and Genetic Approval

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | February 24, 2015
  1. Wiki New Zealand — open data site, and check out the chart builder behind the scenes for importing the data. It’s magic.
  2. stenographer (Google) — open source packet dumper for capturing data during intrusions.
  3. Which GPU for Deep Learning? — a lot of numbers. Overall, I think memory size is overrated. You can nicely gain some speedups if you have very large memory, but these speedups are rather small. I would say that GPU clusters are nice to have, but that they cause more overhead than the accelerate progress; a single 12GB GPU will last you for 3-6 years; a 6GB GPU is plenty for now; a 4GB GPU is good but might be limiting on some problems; and a 3GB GPU will be fine for most research that looks into new architectures.
  4. 23andMe Wins FDA Approval for First Genetic Test — as they re-enter the market after FDA power play around approval (yes, I know: one company’s power play is another company’s flouting of safeguards designed to protect a vulnerable public).
Four short links: 23 February 2015

Four short links: 23 February 2015

Self-Assembling Chairs, Home Monitoring, Unicorn Horn, and Cloud Security

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | February 23, 2015
  1. MIT Scientists and the Self-Assembling Chair (Wired) — using turbulence to randomise interactions, and pieces that connect when the random motions align. From the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT.
  2. Calaos — a free software project (GPLv3) that lets you control and monitor your home.
  3. Founder Wants to be a Horse Not a Unicorn (Business Insider) — this way of thinking  —  all or nothing moonshots to maximise shareholder value  —  has become pervasive dogma in tech. It’s become the only respectable path. Either you’re running a lowly lifestyle business, making ends meet so you can surf all afternoon, or you’re working 17-hour days goring competitors with your $US48MM Series C unicorn horn on your way to billionaire mountain.
  4. Using Google Cloud Platform for Security Scanning (Google Online Security) — platform vendors competing on the things they can offer for free on the base platform, things which devs and ops used to have to do themselves.
Four short links: 20 February 2015

Four short links: 20 February 2015

Robotic Garden, Kids Toys, MSFT ML, and Twitter Scale

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | February 20, 2015
  1. The Distributed Robotic Garden (MIT) — We consider plants, pots, and robots to be systems with different levels of mobility, sensing, actuation, and autonomy. (via Robohub)
  2. CogniToys Leverages Watson’s Brain to Befriend, Teach Your Kids (IEEE) — Through the dino, Watson’s algorithms can get to know each child that it interacts with, tailoring those interactions to the child’s age and interests.
  3. How Machine Learning Ate Microsoft (Infoworld) — Azure ML didn’t merely take the machine learning algorithms MSR had already handed over to product teams and stick them into a drag-and-drop visual designer. Microsoft has made the functionality available to developers who know the R statistical programming language and Python, which together are widely used in academic machine learning. Microsoft plans to integrate Azure ML closely with Revolution Analytics, the R startup it recently acquired.
  4. Handling Five Billion Sessions a Day in Real Time (Twitter) — infrastructure porn.
Four short links: 18 February 2015

Four short links: 18 February 2015

Sales Automation, Clone Boxes, Stats Style, and Extra Orifices

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | February 18, 2015
  1. Systematising Sales with Software and Processes — sweet use of Slack as UI for sales tools.
  2. Duplicate SSH Keys Everywhere — It looks like all devices with the fingerprint are Dropbear SSH instances that have been deployed by Telefonica de Espana. It appears that some of their networking equipment comes set up with SSH by default, and the manufacturer decided to reuse the same operating system image across all devices.
  3. Style.ONS — UK govt style guide covers the elements of writing about statistics. It aims to make statistical content more open and understandable, based on editorial research and best practice. (via Hadley Beeman)
  4. Warren Ellis on the Apple Watch — I, personally, want to put a gold chain on my phone, pop it into a waistcoat pocket, and refer to it as my “digital fob watch” whenever I check the time on it. Just to make the point in as snotty and high-handed a way as possible: This is the decadent end of the current innovation cycle, the part where people stop having new ideas and start adding filigree and extra orifices to the stuff we’ve got and call it the future.
Four short links: 12 February 2015

Four short links: 12 February 2015

Finance Instrument, Retro Predictions, Trust Engineering, and Haptics

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | February 12, 2015
  1. Update on indie.vc — We’ve worked with the team at Cooley to create an investment instrument that has elements of both debt and equity. Debt in that we will not be purchasing equity initially, but, unlike debt, there is no maturity date, no collateralization of assets and no recourse if it’s never paid back. The equity element will only become a factor if the participating company chooses to raise a round of financing or sell out to an acquiring company. We don’t have a clever acronym or name for this instrument yet, but I’m sure we’ll come up with something great.
  2. How Nathan Barley Came True (Guardian) — if you haven’t already seen Nathan Barley, you should. It’s by the guy who did Black Mirror, and it’s both awful and authentic and predictive and retro and … painfully accurate about the horrors of our Internet/New Media industry. (via BoingBoing)
  3. Trust Engineers (Radio Lab) — Facebook has a created a laboratory of human behavior the likes of which we’ve never seen. We peek into the work of Arturo Bejar and a team of researchers who are tweaking our online experience, bit by bit, to try to make the world a better place. Radio show of goodness. (via Flowing Data)
  4. DARPA’S Haptix Project — The goal of the HAPTIX program is to provide amputees with prosthetic limb systems that feel and function like natural limbs, and to develop next-generation sensorimotor interfaces to drive and receive rich sensory content from these limbs. Today it’s prosthetic limbs for amputees, but within five years it’ll be augmented ad-driven realities for virtual currency ambient social recommendations.
Four short links: 9 February 2015

Four short links: 9 February 2015

iBeacon at Scale, Product Teams, Progress Bars, and Distributed Fallacies

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | February 9, 2015
  1. The Realities of Installing iBeacon at Scale (Brooklyn Museum) — death by a thousand mundane little real-world pains.
  2. How We Build Software (Intercom) — rare to see descriptions of how to build product teams.
  3. MProgress.js — Material Design progress bars for the web.
  4. Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing — your network is unreliable, slow, congested, insecure, changing, expensive, and inconsistent. And that’s on a good day.

A bigger and different way of looking at the IoT

Tim O’Reilly’s Solid Conference keynote highlights the capabilities that will let us shape the physical world.

by Mac Slocum | @macslocum | +Mac Slocum | February 5, 2015

Tim O’Reilly has recently focused on the connection between humans and the Internet of Things (IoT). It’s a topic he’s written about and talked about, and it’s also at the heart of our explorations into interaction design and connected devices and experience design and the Internet of Things.

O’Reilly’s keynote address at the Solid Conference in 2014 explored the human-IoT link. The talk expanded the scope of the IoT, making it clear this isn’t just about individual devices and software — we’re creating “networks of intelligence” that will shape how people work and live.

The talk has become an essential resource for us as we’ve investigated the blurring of the physical and virtual worlds. That’s why we decided to put together a text-friendly version of the presentation that’s easy to scan and reference. And since we think it’s so useful, we’ve made the text version publicly available.

You can download your free copy of “Software Above the Level of a Single Device: The Implications” here. Read more…

Four short links: 5 February 2015

Four short links: 5 February 2015

Mobile Supply Chain, Regulating the Interwebs, Meh MOOCs, and Security School

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | February 5, 2015
  1. The Home and the Mobile Supply Chain (Benedict Evans) — the small hardware start-up, and the cool new gizmos from drones to wearables, are possible because of the low price of components built at the scale required for Apple and other mobile device makers. (via Matt Webb)
  2. FCC Chairman Wheeler Proposes New Rules for Protecting the Open Internet (PDF) — America may yet have freedom. No blocking, no throttling, no paid prioritisation.
  3. The Future of College (Bill Gates) — The MOOC, by itself, doesn’t really change things, except for the very most motivated student. HALLELUJAH!
  4. Breaker 101 — 12-week online security course. $1,750 (cue eyes water). Putting the hacker back in hacker schools …
Four short links: 21 January 2015

Four short links: 21 January 2015

Mousey PC, Sad G+, Medium Data, and Upgraded DARPA Contest Robot

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | January 21, 2015
  1. PC in a Mouse — 80s = PC in a keyboard. 90s = PC in a box. 2000s = PC in the screen. 2015 we get PC in a mouse. By 2020 will circuitry be inline in the cable or connector?
  2. Estimating G+ Usage (BoingBoing) — of 2.2B profiles, 6.6M have made new public posts in 2015. Yeesh.
  3. Medium Data — too big for one machine, but barely worth the overhead of high-volume data processing.
  4. New Hardware for the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals (IEEE) — in the future, we’ll all have a 3.7 kwh battery and a wireless router in our heads.

The Internet of Things is really about software

Our new report, "What is the Internet of Things," traces the IoT's transformations and impact.

by Jon Bruner | @JonBruner | +Jon Bruner | January 20, 2015

The Internet of Things (IoT) is everywhere right now. It appeared on the cover of the Harvard Business Review in November, and observers saw it in practically every demo at CES.

One of the reasons that it’s ubiquitous is that it bears on practically everything. A few years ago, many companies might plausibly have argued that they weren’t affected by developments in software. If you dealt in physical goods, it was hard to see how software that existed strictly in the virtual realm might touch your business.

The Internet of Things changes that; the kinds of software intelligence that have already revolutionized industries like finance and advertising are about to revolutionize all the other industries.

Mike Loukides and I have traced out our idea of the Internet of Things and its impacts in a report, “What is the Internet of Things,” that’s available for free here.

As much as we all love the romance and gratification of hardware, the Internet of Things is really about software; the hardware just links the Internet to the rest of the world. If you think of the IoT as a newly developing area in software, it’s easy to draw out some characteristics of it that are analogous to things we’ve seen in web software over the last decade or so. Read more…