April 26, 2009
April 26, 2009
April 26, 2009 – Latest addition to the cloud – a Supercomputer!
April 26, 2009
April 26, 2009
April 26, 2009
April 26, 2009 – Latest addition to the cloud – a Supercomputer!
April 26, 2009
Latest addition to the cloud – a Supercomputer!
Posted at Slashdot
gubm writes “Nearly one and a half years after making a stunning entry into the global supercomputer list with Eka, ranked as the fourth-fastest supercomputer in the world, Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a Tata Sons’ subsidiary, has succeeded in creating a new market for supercomputers — that of offering supercomputing power on rent to enterprises in India. For now, for want of a better word, let us call it ‘Supercomputer as a Service.’”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Unleashing the gambler within
Posted at TechCrunch
by MG Siegler
I used to think the Kindle was stupid. Then I bought one and realized I was wrong. It’s still way too expensive, but it’s great at what it does. And what it does keeps on expanding. Now, it takes a step into the up-to-date travel guide market, with a partnership with the customizable travel guide service, Offbeat Guides.
Starting tomorrow, you’ll be able to find 500 of the company’s newest guides in the Kindle store at prices ranging from $3.99 for smaller cities to $7.99 for larger ones. Here’s why these are great. Just like the Offbeat Guides regular guidebook products, its Kindle-ready guidebooks are way more up-to-date than traditional guidebooks. While there have been some guidebooks available on the Kindle in the past, most are only updated once a year. Offbeat Guides are updated every month.
This means they can include information such as real-time events for specific cities, like concerts or festivals. It also means the guides can have a Kindle menu option to find out something going on in the city you are visiting that night. For tourists who don’t know anyone in a particular city, that’s a great feature.
There are a couple downsides. Naturally, because the Kindle only handles grayscale images, you won’t get the full color pictures you usually find in other tour guides. And because the Kindle’s screen isn’t ideal for displaying maps, tailored, local maps that are a part of Offbeat Guides regular guides aren’t included here.
But, at 10.2 ounces (for the latest version), the Kindle is likely lighter than regular tour guides. And, if you’re planning a multiple city trip, you can obviously load up a bunch of these guides on one Kindle. One thing that particularly excites me is the fact that you can also view these on your iPhone if you go somewhere and don’t feel like carrying around a Kindle. Because the Kindle app on the iPhone stays in sync with the Kindle content, you can bookmark pages and look at them later on your phone.
Offbeat Guides has been working on these Kindle-tailored guides for 6 months now, CEO Dave Sifry tells me. He also notes that there are 5 times as many cities available as compared to other guides. Right now, if you plan on traveling to a city often and want the most up-to-date guide, you’ll have to buy a new one each time. But Sifry says they will explore the possibility of having subscriptions for certain cities if customers demand that. Such a feature may even be useful to locals of a particular city to know what is going on. But the focus right now remains on leisure and business travelers, he says.
Find a full list of the Offbeat Guides Kindle options here.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Posted at www.iclarified.com
| iPhone How to Sync Your iPhone With Multiple Computers | ||
| Monday, 27th October 2008, 08:10 pm | ||
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These are instructions on how to sync your iPhone with two or more computers at the same time. To clarify this process a bit the tutorial is divided into two parts. The first part will instruct you on how to obtain the iTunes Library ID from your main computer. The second part will then modify your secondary computer to use the same iTunes Library ID, thus allowing for sync on both. For your convenience instructions for Part One and Part Two are provided for both Windows and Mac. PART ONE (MAC): Step One Step Two Step Three Step Four Step Five PART ONE (WINDOWS): Step One Step Two Step Three Step Four ——————————– PART TWO (MAC): Step One Step Two Step Three Step Four
Step Five Step Six
Step Seven Step Eight Step Eight
Step Nine
PART TWO (WINDOWS): Step One Step Two Step Three
Step Four Step Five
Step Six Step Seven Step Eight
Step Nine
THANKS***: This tutorial is based on the discovery by Andrew Grant. He deserves credit for his work. You can check out his blog posting on the subject here |
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Posted at TechCrunch
by Jason Kincaid
The Cloud is looming large, offering us ways to store and share our data in ways that were never before possible. We can effortlessly share our documents and photos with our families and friends, while maintaining control over their spread using powerful granular privacy controls. But it’s quickly becoming clear that the cloud isn’t ready for us. Because the services we rely on are letting us down with a frequency that is simply unacceptable.
I’ve been putting this post off for a while, mostly because I didn’t want to point to a single breach and call it a trend. But in only the last two months, we’ve covered at least three major web services that suffered security lapses tied to software bugs or scaling issues. In our posts covering these problems, one of our commentors will inevitably say something along the lines of, “that’s what you get for uploading your data to X service“. And the more problems I see, the more I’m beginning to agree with them.
For a recap, let’s revisit some of the problems we’ve recently seen.
In March I wrote about a bug in Google Docs that would share your files with people whom you’d never given access to. Granted, it would only share these files with contacts you’d previously interacted with, and not the entire world, but this did little to ameliorate the issue – in some cases it would be better to share a supposedly private document with a stranger than a coworker.
Two weeks later, we were alerted to a bug on Facebook that would allow users to circumvent any ‘limited profile’ lists they’d been placed on by their friends. For example, if you had placed your boss on a ‘Limited’ profile list so they couldn’t see your latest party photos, they’d be able to get around it. This ‘exploit’, if it could even be called one, was so easy to carry out that I’m sure many people did it accidentally.
Finally, earlier this week Twitter posted a note to its Status blog saying it was having issues with “misdelivery of direct messages”. In other words, some supposedly private messages were being routed to the wrong users. Given Twitter’s problems with bugs in the past this didn’t come as a huge surprise, but it’s unnerving nonetheless.
When faced with such security lapses, most services try to downplay them by pointing out how few people (relatively speaking) were affected. In the case of the Google Docs issue, Google promptly explained that only .05% of all documents were wrongly shared. But when we’re talking about userbases of millions, even an apparently trivial percentage becomes significant, with thousands of people affected. What’s worse, I’m sure this sort of phenomenon is far more common than we realize. The other services involved just aren’t big enough (or honest enough) for anyone to notice.
So why is this happening? There seems to be an accepted notion among many engineers that as their service scales, there is no way that it will be 100% secure. To some extent, I acknowledge and agree with this. Very smart people are always going to be trying to access valuable data by whatever means necessary, and complex security exploits are unfortunately a fact of life on the web. But that doesn’t mean that it’s acceptable for the service to wrongly share user data simply because of a bug. It’s the difference between having your bank apologize for losing your money because someone robbed it, and it telling you that the teller accidentally withdrew a few thousand dollars from your bank account and handed it to someone else. This sort of thing just can’t be happening.
My real issue with these security lapses isn’t so much about the misdirected messages or the wrongly shared photos – the odds of these being truly damaging really are quite low. It’s that these problems serve to undermine the public’s trust in ‘the cloud’. Once we get past the security problems, having our data immediately accessible no matter where we are is incredibly valuable – and probably inevitable. It’s only a matter of time before our health records are going to be stored online in some form, simply because having instant access to them can be lifesaving. But if the public loses faith in the integrity of their data stored online, or the security measures protecting it, then it could take years to regain its trust.
So what can we do? Though I’ve dabbled in programming for years, I unfortunately am not an engineer by trade (a fact that I’m sure opponents of this post will promptly point out to show that I can not possibly know what I’m talking about). But the answer seems clear regardless. If an application is cracking under load, or is too complex for its own good, then new signups and features should be put on hold until the damn thing actually works properly. The word ‘private’ should not mean “this will remain hidden until we accidentally break something”.
To close, I want to make clear that I understand that these engineers are dealing with extremely difficult problems, scaling their incredibly complex services at unprecedented rates. And I respect the hell out of that. But the more often issues like these pop up, the more the general population is going to distrust the security protections of these online services, no matter how good they eventually become. Which is why we need to sort these problems out now.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
April 24, 2009 – This won the best paper in WWW 2009
April 24, 2009 – This won the best paper in WWW 2009
This won the best paper in WWW 2009
Posted at arxiv.org
Abstract: Search auctions have become a dominant source of revenue generation on theInternet. Such auctions have typically used per-click bidding and pricing. Wepropose the use of hybrid auctions where an advertiser can make aper-impression as well as a per-click bid, and the auctioneer then chooses oneof the two as the pricing mechanism. We assume that the advertiser and theauctioneer both have separate beliefs (called priors) on the click-probabilityof an advertisement. We first prove that the hybrid auction is truthful,assuming that the advertisers are risk-neutral. We then show that this auctionis superior to the existing per-click auction in multiple ways: 1) It takesinto account the risk characteristics of the advertisers. 2) For obscurekeywords, the auctioneer is unlikely to have a very sharp prior on theclick-probabilities. In such situations, the hybrid auction can result insignificantly higher revenue. 3) An advertiser who believes that itsclick-probability is much higher than the auctioneer’s estimate can useper-impression bids to correct the auctioneer’s prior without incurring anyextra cost. 4) The hybrid auction can allow the advertiser and auctioneer toimplement complex dynamic programming strategies. As Internet commerce matures,we need more sophisticated pricing models to exploit all the information heldby each of the participants. We believe that hybrid auctions could be animportant step in this direction.
Jeetu Mirchandani
