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BMW and the GPL
I accidentally caused a little brouhaha last week - for which I would like to apologise. In my blog post about BMW's unencrypted software updates, I said: Judging from the files, it would appear that the infotainment system is made by Magneti Marelli with components by Wind River, AutoSAR, and Nvidia Tegra. Looking at…
Please scan my towel
My friend Scott pointed out the towels in most hotels now have RFID tags to help with inventory control: I also knew that my RSA Conference badge would have an RFID tag in it so it could be scanne…
Trackers
A couple of weeks ago I went to the local shopping centre looking for a thermometer. After entering one store upon leaving without buying anything a tracker was assigned to me. I didn’t think much of it at first, but he followed me dutifully around the shopping centre, took careful note of how I walked. Whenever I…
Frameworks Don't Make Much Sense
Frameworks are one of the hugest anti-patterns in software development. They're hard to learn. They limit your creativity. They increase your project's complexity and dependencies. They go out of business and get abandoned. You have to maintain and upgrade your code to match the latest framework versions for no good...
Image Processing 101
At the Recurse Center, I spent some time teaching myself image processing. When I started, I had no idea what it entailed. I just knew that it could help me recognize text, shapes and patterns and to do interesting things with them.
Update on InfluxDB Clustering, High Availability and Monetization
InfluxDB clustering is key for high availability and monetization. Clustering and high availability functionality will be available as part of our Influx Enterprise offering. Get a crash course on this topic and also read the newer version as well as u...
Playing “Moneyball” on EA FIFA 16
I'm an EA FIFA enthusiast. More than that, I’ve played since 1994. Last year, I was talking with a friend about the game and he asked me if I was playing Career Mode. My first answer was: "That is boring ... I want to play the real game and not play as a manager". From that day, he decided to convince me to play…
JEP 286: Local-Variable Type Inference
Enhance the Java Language to extend type inference to declarations of local variables with initializers.
Qubes OS 3.1 has been released
I’m happy to announce that today we’re releasing Qubes OS 3.1! The major new architectural feature of this release has been the introduction of the Qubes Management infrastructure, which is based on the popular Salt management software. In Qubes 3.1, this management stack makes it possi...
PyPy 5.0 Released
PyPy 5.0 We have released PyPy 5.0, about three months after PyPy 4.0.1. We encourage all users of PyPy to update to this version. You ...
What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP
In 2015 we migrated Quizlet from our legacy host to a large cloud provider. AWS is the default choice for most companies, but after comparing the options, we went with Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This is a summary of our analysis.
C++17 and other future highlights of C++
Welcome to the 3rd and last part about current proposals for C++17 and beyond. In the last part, there was an overview on the current Technical Specifications, most likely to move into C++ after C++17 . The full proposal listing of 2016 sorted by subgroups contains many more proposals then I can cover.
Hacking with LaTeX
In this blogpost I want to outline basic attacks against web based LaTeX compilers. This inspired me to create the Web90 - TexMaker challenge.\n
Opera: Introducing native ad-blocking feature for faster browsing
If there were no bloated ads, some top websites would load up to 90% faster. Today we introduce Opera's ad-blocking feature.
Stem Cells Regenerate Human Lens After Cataract Surgery, Restoring Vision
Researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Shiley Eye Institute, with colleagues in China, have developed a new, regenerative medicine approach to remove congenital cataracts in infants, permitting remaining stem cells to regrow functional lenses.
When Accessibility Gets Labeled Wasteful
Note on Accessibility There has been some concerns about the contrast on this blog, unfortunately some find it hard to read light text on a dark background while others prefer it. I am looking into…
John Carmack on Idea Generation
Last year at an internal talk at Facebook I was fortunate to see [John Carmack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack) speak about his idea generation system. At first I was disappointed because...
Ansible vs. Chef (2015)
I wrote an earlier post about evaluating Ansible as an alternative to Chef. So after spending many years with Chef, I’ve found that Ansible is a lot easier to manage with startups. It’s easier to train developers, it’s easier to manage inventory and orchestration, and it works reasonably well on the scale of thousands…
How Web Scraping Is Revealing Lobbying and Corruption in Peru
How Web Scraping is Revealing Lobbying and Corruption in Peru - Discover how web scraping is shedding light on lobbying and corruption issues in Peru.
White House's Claims That the TPP Would Curb Internet Censorship Are Fantasy
One of the United States government's priorities in Internet policy is encapsulated by a term that's recently been making the rounds; the "free flow of information." It appears almost every time U.S. officials describe how they intend to protect the free and open Internet, especially when it comes...
Google joins Open Compute Project to drive standards in IT infrastructure
We’re excited to announce that we're joining the Open Compute Project (OCP) to help drive standardization in IT infrastructure. More specifically, Google will contribute a new rack specification that includes 48V power distribution and a new form factor to allow OCP racks to fit into our data centers.
Train your own image classifier with Inception in TensorFlow
Posted by Jon Shlens, Senior Research ScientistAt the end of last year we released code that allows a user to classify images with TensorFlow model...
Facebook's new front-end server design
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