October 2, 2012
by sjvn01
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UltraViolet: Another DRM dead-end for Internet video

UltraViolet sounded good. “UltraViolet is DVD for the Internet. Just as the DVD logo means that you can buy a DVD from any seller and expect it to play in any player with a DVD logo (DVD players, DVD PCs, DVD entertainment systems in automobiles, and so on), the UltraViolet logo means you can buy UltraViolet movies from any seller, keep track of your ‘online locker’ or ‘virtual collection’ of movies, and expect them to play on anything with the UltraViolet logo (PCs, tablets, smartphones, Blu-ray players, cable set-top boxes, and so on).” Oh well, lots of things sound good at first.

I really liked the idea of having a networked copy of my movies. As it is, I’ve been converting my DVDs to Apple TV MP4 friendly formats with HandBrake. It’s not hard, but it is time-consuming. It would be great if every time I bought a physical DVD I’d also get a digital copy and that’s what UltraViolet seemed to promise.

Alas, my hopes were dashed when I finally looked at UltraViolet’s fine print.

UltraViolet: Another DRM dead-end for Internet video. More >

October 1, 2012
by sjvn01
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How Watson Won at Jeopardy

While IBM’s Watson expert system isn’t ready to take over the world ala Skynet, it’s certainly “smart” enough to beat the world’s best two Jeopardy players. The company isn’t treating this as a trivial exercise; they’re also hard at work turning Watson technology into medical expert systems for cancer research and treatment, as they explained at LinuxCon 2012 in San Diego last month.

Watson, the most famous example of IBM’s DeepQA Project, is made up of ten racks of servers with 15 terabytes of RAM; 2,880 3.55GHz POWER7 processor cores; and a run speed at 80 teraflops. You’re not going to find one of these at your local electronics store.

Watson is far more than an ordinary supercomputer crunching linear equations. No, Watson is meant to solve the far harder problem of “understanding” natural language questions. DeepQA’s eventual goal, according to IBM Fellow David Ferrucci, the principal investigator for Watson technologies, is to create computers that learn through interacting with us. “They will not necessarily require us to sit down and explicitly program them, but through continuous interaction with humans they will start to understand the kind of data and the kind of computation we need,” Ferrucci says.

How Watson Won at Jeopardy. More >

October 1, 2012
by sjvn01
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US government gets an “F” for IPv6 Internet make-over

Two years ago, then U.S. federal CIO Vivek Kundra ordered all federal agencies to upgrade their public-facing Web services to native IPv6 by September 30, 2012. So, how did they do? Well, to cut to the chase: Not very well.

According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), out of 1,494 government agencies, only 287 had IPv6 up and running on their Web sites. That’ comes to a percentage of about 20%. Can we say “Fail?” I knew you could.

Fewer agencies still, 166, had IPv6 Domain Name System (DNS) services up and running and only a handful, 54, supported e-mail with IPv6. Other NIST estimates show as many as 387 federal Web domains working properly with IPv6, but the percentage is still very low.

US government gets an “F” for IPv6 Internet make-over. More >

September 30, 2012
by sjvn01
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Adobe Flash: I’m not dead yet!

Yes, we all hate Flash. Even Adobe’s not that crazy about Flash anymore. Too bad. There’s still no replacement for it.

HTML5 video you say? What about it? There’s nothing magical about it.

HTML5’s video tag doesn’t define which the file format, such as MPEG4 or WebM, or video or audio codec, such as H.264 or VP8, that are permitted. The only thing HTML5 does is let Web developers set up case statements so that they can supply a choice of various combinations of containers and codecs in the hope that your device can support one of them.

In other words, HTML5 video is just a rug that covers the dirt of multiple video formats. It doesn’t replace Flash at all. In fact, you can still use Flash within it. We’re a long way from being Flash free.

Adobe Flash: I’m not dead yet! More >

September 28, 2012
by sjvn01
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Before the Internet: The Ant-net

Way, way back in pre-history, back when dinosaurs walked the Earth and we were mere gleams in the eyes of furry critters whose usual fate was to go crunch, harvester ants had worked out how many foragers to send out of the nest to bring home the Jurassic bacon using techniques we now use on the Internet.

This is not an Onion story. As reported by Standford University, two researchers, Deborah Gordon, a biology professor told Balaji Prabhakar, a computer science professor, about how harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex barbatus) worked out how to send out ants to collect food. Prabhakar soon realized, to his surprise, that the ants were using almost the exact same TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) algorithm that we use on the Internet

When the ants hunt for food, an ant won’t return to the nest until it’s found something. If there’s a lot of food, usually seeds, available, they’ll bring the goods back to the next. Then, more ants will join them and the food will get marched back to the nest at a quicker pace. As the food supply runs low, the nest will start sending out fewer foragers.

Before the Internet: The Ant-net. More >

September 27, 2012
by sjvn01
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BlueStacks and AMD bring Android apps to Windows

What do you get when you add applications from the most popular mobile operating system, Android, to the most popular desktop system, Windows? Well, many of you will soon have a chance to find out since BlueStacks, creator of a Windows app that enables you to run Android apps on Windows, has joined forces with AMD to bring their cross-platform application to AMD-powered tablets and PCs.

AMD is also working with its partners to pre-load the the BlueStacks Android App Player on AMD-powered Windows 7 and 8 laptops, desktops, and tablets. If you don’t want to wait for a new PC you can download the master Android on Windows app, AMD AppZone Player. Or, you can simply download an Android app from the AMD AppZone and it will automatically install the player in addition to the app.

BlueStacks and AMD bring Android apps to Windows. More >

Practical Technology

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