Brrr: The chilly conditions that quantum computers need to run — Tech News and Analysis -
Quantum computers, which have recently been bought by Google and Lockheed Martin, aren’t just sophisticated computers, they need to operate at near absolute zero temperatures to deliver their quantum effects, and that’s a tricky problem.
M.I.T. Scholar’s 1949 Essay on Machine Age Is Found - NYTimes.com -
The year was 1949, and computers and robots were still largely the stuff of science fiction. Only a few farsighted thinkers imagined that they would one day become central to civilization, with consequences both liberating and potentially dire.
Gimme the cache! memcached turns 10 years old | Ars Technica -
This week, memcached, a piece of software that prevents much of the Internet from melting down, turns 10 years old. Despite its age, memcached is still the go-to solution for many programmers and sysadmins managing heavy workloads. Without memcached, Ars Technica would likely be unable to serve this article to you at all.
Func -
Func is a secure, scriptable remote control framework and API. It is intended to replace SSH scripted infrastructure for a variety of datacenter automation tasks (such as taking hardware inventory, running queries, or executing remote commands) that are run against a large amount of systems at the same time. Func provides both a command line tool and a simple and powerful Python API. It is also intended to be very easy to integrate with your provisioning environment and tools like Cobbler.
One of the common patterns across successful startups is the perilous chasm crossing from startup to wildly successful startup. Finding people, evolving infrastructures, servicing old infrastructures, while handling huge month over month increases in traffic, all with only four engineers, means you have to make difficult choices about what to work on. This was Tumblr’s situation. Now with twenty engineers there’s enough energy to work on issues and develop some very interesting solutions.
Probabilistic Programming-and-Bayesian-Methods for Hackers -
If you think this way, then congratulations, you already are a Bayesian practitioner! Bayesian inference is simply updating your beliefs after considering new evidence. A Bayesian can rarely be certain about a result, but he or she can be very confident. Just like in the example above, we can never be 100% sure that our code is bug-free unless we test it on every possible problem; something rarely possible in practice. Instead, we can test it on a large number of problems, and if it succeeds we can feel more confident about our code. Bayesian inference works identically: we update our beliefs about an outcome; rarely can we be absolutely sure unless we rule out all other alternatives.
IBM's Watson Now A Customer Service Agent, Coming To Smartphones Soon - Forbes -
Starting in the next few months, IBM will be rolling out with several key customers an “Ask Watson” feature that will greet and offer help through various channels: Web chats, email, smartphone apps and SMS. Some customers will eventually equip the service with voice recognition from a partner such as Siri or Nuance. The guinea pigs include Australia’s ANZ Bank, Nielsen, Celcom, IHS, and Royal Bank of Canada.
Google shows developers how to hack Glass and run Ubuntu -
After all of this, running Linux is as easy as installing the Android Terminal Emulator and Complete Linux Installer apps, the combination of which allows you to download and then boot any Linux distribution on the Glass. Google showcased the process by booting up glass into Ubuntu.
Reply to Aphyr attack to Sentinel - Antirez weblog -
In a great series of articles Kyle Kingsbury, aka @aphyr on Twitter, attacked a number of data stores: [1] http://aphyr.com/tags/jepsen Postgress, Redis Sentinel, MongoDB, and Riak are audited to find what happens during network partitions and how these systems can provide the claimed guarantees.
Making quantum encryption practical - MIT News Office -
One of the many promising applications of quantum mechanics in the information sciences is quantum key distribution (QKD), in which the counterintuitive behavior of quantum particles guarantees that no one can eavesdrop on a private exchange of data without detection.
Musings: If Google Wallet owns the pipes it’ll be a win « {5} Setfive – Talking to the World -
If Google can sidestep the existing payments infrastructure for Wallet, like they did with the telcos for Fiber, they’ll end up redefining how digital payments work.
$99 HDMI stick turns displays into virtual desktops · LinuxGizmos.com -
Ceptor’s embedded computer is based on a dual-core i.MX6 ARM Cortex-A9 SOC, clocked at 1GHz and backed with up to 1GB RAM and up to 32GB internal flash (depending on its shipped configuration). The device plugs directly into a display’s HDMI input port and accesses its enabling cloud service via built-in 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi. User input is accomplished with Bluetooth or USB keyboards and pointing devices (not included with the Ceptor).
UCI Machine Learning Repository -
We currently maintain 239 data sets as a service to the machine learning community. You may view all data sets through our searchable interface. Our old web site is still available, for those who prefer the old format. For a general overview of the Repository, please visit our About page. For information about citing data sets in publications, please read our citation policy. If you wish to donate a data set, please consult our donation policy. For any other questions, feel free to contact the Repository librarians. We have also set up a mirror site for the Repository.