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Fukushima Robot Blog
This from the IEEE is really fascinating. It is the blog of a robot operator in the Fukushima nuclear plants. Some interesting things about controls, robot handling, and durability are discussed. And, big surprise, the competence of the organization that created the disaster in the first place seems less than stunning.
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Sinking in too many layers
Facebook engineers and analysts tap the company’s Hadoop clusters via a SQL-like query language known as Hive. [..] Separate from its Hadoop work, Facebook built Cassandra, a distributed database also based on a piece of Google’s backend. Google uses a proprietary distributed database known as BigTable that runs atop the Google File System (GFS) system,…
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Computer architecture, power, and PHP
The Tile-Gx chips have 64-bit processing on their cores, and include floating point math instructions that allow a floating point operating to be done in five cycles instead of hundreds of cycles when done in software. This is, believe it or not, important for PHP support, Ihab Bishara, director of cloud computing applications at Tilera,…
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VCs bailing on signed term sheets
Via Trevor Loy (not a bailer) this story We’ve heard three stories in which lead investors bailed on rounds after term sheets were signed. The first upset came last week from a WeWork Labs company. The startup’s lead investor pulled out of a $500,000 round. Another entrepreneur raised between $3 and $4 million and thought he was…
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American corporate management
ASUSTeK started out making the simple circuit boards within a Dell computer. Then ASUSTeK came to Dell with an interesting value proposition: ‘We’ve been doing a good job making these little boards. Why don’t you let us make the motherboard for you? Circuit manufacturing isn’t your core competence anyway and we could do it for…
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Apple’s Patents possibly covering android
Apple’s initial legal victory over rival HTC in a patent infringement suit could pave the way for Apple to collect high royalties from devices running Google Android, according to one analysis. Mike Abramsky with RBC Capital Markets believes that Apple has the upper hand over HTC, which is a smaller handset maker with a limited…
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Computer Science 101
CS101 – Introduction to Computing Principles Welcome to CS101 — the essential ideas of computing via little phrases of Javascript code. For interested teachers, here is a demo and discussion of this approach. From Stanford! When I taught CS 101 at the crappy state school, we did some coding in C, some algorithm analysis, some architecture,…
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Why computers are more and more devices for generating heat from electricity
Why is it that the hardware interfaces of disk drives 30 years ago were simple and clear and they currently require enormously elaborate drivers? Imagine if one could provide a command consisting of (read/write, diskaddress, buffer_address, count, notification_address) so that the disk drive controller wrote a completion code in the notification_address when done. Would that…
