Month: October 2012

Categories
Google

Inside Google’s Data Centers

Google Data Center Storm Trooper

Google Data Center Storm Trooper

Google’s opening up about their data centers in a pretty big way. From being secret to even the locations a few years ago they’ve now posted a street view tour, as well as some pretty great video. Facebook has also become a bit more open in terms of their data center operations.

Part of this openness is to make the “internet” seem more trustworthy and less intimidating. The other part is to show off the energy-saving improvements they are making in the wake of controversy data centers have faced over their power usage.

I think someone at Google or Facebook needs to get me a tour of their facility 😉 .

Categories
Audio/Video Funny

Guy Jumps In Frozen Pool

Guy Jumps In Frozen Pool

Guy Jumps In Frozen Pool

This might be my new favorite video on the internet. You knew someone at some point in your life who did something like this. Every time I watch it, I laugh harder than the time before.

Categories
Software

Kaspersky Lab Developing Its Own Operating System

Kaspersky Lab, of AntiVirus fame is apparently developing its own operating system:

We’re developing a secure operating system for protecting key information systems (industrial control systems (ICS)) used in industry/infrastructure. Quite a few rumors about this project have appeared already on the Internet, so I guess it’s time to lift the curtain (a little) on our secret project and let you know (a bit) about what’s really going on.

Sounds like a competitor for VxWorks and other embedded systems. More competition is good since this will cause other OS’s to strengthen to compete. There’s really nobody on the market other than OpenBSD that markets itself primarily as being secure.

Categories
Hardware In The News

Where Amazon Will Go Next

The other day Amazon’s Jeff Bezos admitted Amazon makes no money from the Kindle itself. That’s not as bad as it sounds. Jeff Bezos is referring to the hardware. Amazon sells content for the Kindle and that can make money. This is akin to shipping at cost and making money off the product you sell.

The Kindle isn’t a product, it’s a delivery method.

This however has me thinking. Jeff Bezos is a bright guy, and Amazon is a clever company who is constantly innovating. It’s pretty clear Amazon is looking to expand its warehouses to more locations to cut down on delivery time and perhaps even offer same day delivery in many places. It seems quite possible however that Amazon’s Lab 126 may have another trick up it’s sleeve for the (substantially) longer term: 3D printing. If Amazon can manage to create an ecosystem where products can be printed on demand, it can turn anything into eBook. Sold and delivered through their ecosystem. Simplistic items first and perhaps eventually more complicated items.

That’s not to say expect Amazon to sell 3D printers tomorrow. We’re talking years most likely. However it would be the ultimate delivery method for applicable goods.

Categories
Space

Why Is It Dark At Night?

Why is it dark at night?

Why is it dark at night?

This was pretty interesting to watch and easy to understand. Space is amazing.

Via Alex King

Categories
Apple Funny

SNL On iPhone 5 Complaints

iPhone 5 SNL Sketch

iPhone 5 SNL Sketch

Saturday Night Live had a great little sketch on the iPhone 5. They hyphenated CNet, but we’ll let that one slide.

Categories
Tech (General)

Jeff Hawkins On Early Laptops

Jeff Hawkins, founder of Palm and Handspring on why the first Laptop had trouble in the market:

This is an amazing fact. We had this product. It was designed for business executives. And the biggest obstacle, one of the biggest obstacles, we had for selling the product was the fact — believe it or not — that it had a keyboard. I was in sales and marketing. I saw this first-hand. At that time, 1982, business people, who were in their 40s and 50s, did not have any computer or keyboard in their offices. And it was associated with being part of the secretarial pool or the word processing (remember that industry?) department. And so you’d put this thing in their office and they’d say, “Get that out of here.” It was like getting a demotion. They really were uncomfortable with it.

Meanwhile today it’s pretty much unimaginable to me that an office wouldn’t have a keyboard. Out with the old, in with the new.

Categories
Audio/Video

Moral Behavior In Animals

Moral Behavior In Animals

Moral Behavior In Animals

This might be one of the most interesting TEDTalks I’ve seen in a while. It’s pretty clear that these animals are way more aware than you’d think. Their behavior is extremely human like. It’s fascinating to watch.

Categories
Security

Silent Circle Finally Bringing Security To Mobile?

Silent Circle is a pretty interesting sounding app:

It’s a model for the nested cryptography of Silent Circle. The “safe room” is the iPhone processor, where all the encryption happens. By the time your text leaves the phone, it’s been completely encrypted, unrecoverable without the key. To keep the key safe, Silent Circle uses the ZRTP protocol, a dance of data drops and verifications that’s every bit as intricate as the Southern Command’s network of swipes and codes. At the end of each call, the keys are erased, so nothing can be decrypted after the fact.

This sounds like security done right. Why this is newsworthy in 2012 is what saddens me. This should be the standard, not the exception. Regardless, kudos to these folks for shedding light on what so many others are doing wrong.

Categories
Tech (General)

Getting Heart Rate From Video

From the creatives folks at Fitbit:

The basic idea is that the color of your face fluctuates slightly as blood perfusion under the skin changes from your heart’s pumping. If you measure the color change, you can measure heart rate. It sounds simple, but it’s not. One thing that makes this difficult is user motion: if the person being measured moves, it becomes difficult to disentangle cardiac-induced color changes from changes in lighting conditions on the face, rotations of the face, etc. But in some cases, we’re actually able to filter out some of this motion. Pretty cool, right?

This is hardly polished technology, but the idea is that you can get heart rate by looking at skin color changes. This is really pretty impressive. It’s a pretty clever approach. I’d be curious how well it transfers from using older film to using some modern 1080p broadcast quality video. Does the accuracy improve?