Category: technology

China’s data center giants have become the next big hope to give traction to ARM’s server initiative.

Source: Will China Grab ARM Servers? | EE Times

Very interesting article mentioning some shifts in the market for Chinese data center giants. The U.S. heavy weights have tried but did not buy substantial amount of the 32 or 64bit ARM cpus intended to provide a sea of cores running at low power for all their workloads. Small niche applications were found as basic storage node type cpus instead of compute node cpus. This article even makes mention of one company I was following (Calxeda) who were attempting to break into market of ARM-based data center compute nodes.

Now it seems Chinese data center architects and accounting types want to revisit the ARM 64bit cpu and see if it might apply to the new data centers they’re building en masse. It will be interesting to see if they find the killer app for ARMx64. I know that Intel is happy to continue flogging x86 at all price levels and performance classes. And they can make it really hard for an upstart like ARM to enter the market. The biggest barrier as near as I can tell is the different architecture of the CPU and the instruction sets. It is a non-trivial task to redo/recompile/migrate to the new CPU when you have a lot of moving parts that may also be on a continuous development and deployment cycle.

Ahead of the Apple Music exclusive stream of the documentary ‘808’ set for Dec. 9, Apple has tweeted a new trailer for the film that focuses on Roland’s iconic TR-808 drum machine. ‘808’ was originally shown at the 2015 SXSW Film Festival and is just shy of 7/10 stars on IMDb as of this writing. Atlantic Records…

via Apple shares new trailer for Apple Music exclusive documentary ‘808’, releasing Dec. 9th  — 9to5Mac

I got to watch a series recently on PBS broadcast TV called Soundbreaking. It was a really interesting survey of pop music since WW2 with more interviews and details from contemporary and current music producers. It was sponsored by George Martin (the music producer par excellence) or I should say his philanthropic organization to celebrate all the hard work people do at the studio, behind the mixing consoles to make the works that get sold and now downloaded afterward. One segment of Soundbreaking focused in on the Roland RS-808 Rhythm Machine and how it was adopted by independent musicians to make sounds nobody had heard before. The company had intended it to be for independent musicians to create rhythm tracks for demos they would record and present to execs at publishing outfits. Just goes to show you how an unintended consequence can be a beautiful thing. I’m really looking forward to this documentary and hope it’s as good as the Soundbreakering series on PBS.

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TL;DR – Starting with Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 14965, you can format any “Removable” USB Flash Drive with more than one partition. Perfect for installation of large (over 4GB) WIM files on UEFI machines! Hey all, back from a week at the Microsoft MVP summit, a Week in the UK, and a week […]

via Formatting a removable USB drive with 2 partitions — Keith’s Consulting Blog

Back in 2013 I attempted to put a Patriot 64GB USB thumb drive through the paces as a Universal WinPE (BIOS and UEFI 64bit). But Win7 Diskpart couldn’t do it, couldn’t back a primary and a primary part. I read up on some tricks to perform a forced firmware update, trying to “flip bits” on the firmware to get it to look like a fixed disk instead of a removable USB thumb drive. None of the tricks worked. So I gave up on it. In the time that’s passed, I did move from a Patriot to a SanDisk Extreme 64GB and it looks like for all intents and purposes I might be able to get THAT thumb drive partitioned up as a universal WinPE with 2 partitions (one Fat-32 the other NTFS).

To date my workaround was to just do a WinPE 32bit/BIOS only flavor. That allowed me to use an NTFS partition and flat-boot the whole thing in one big 64GB partition on the thumb drive. This worked on the Patriot and the SanDisk equally well. It works on smaller older thumb drives too. One partition does all the heavy lifting, no dual partitions required. But still I knew in time this would need to be migrated forward to get on board with Win10 and UEFI/GPT format computers.

Reading this article just now gives me hope for the production release of the next Diskpart that finally sheds the limits of USB drives and gives them the benefit of the doubt, letting them masquerade as fixed disks with multiple partitions. Now we can get a universal WinPE that boots 64bit UEFI or 64bit BIOS machines and can lay down images on either. Now THAT, is a change I can believe in. And I will now pursue getting onboard the UEFI/GPT bandwagon along with Win10.

The Stream is a weird place. Your Facebook feed, for example, is a series of posts by various people that in some ways resembles a forum, but in other ways it’s not at all like a forum. When you post something to Facebook, there’s not an explicit prompt you are responding to, which seems non-problematic […]

via Scanning the Facebook Feed as a Rebuttal Shopping Experience — Hapgood

I propose resurrecting the T-shirt based on I’m with Stuipid design, the hand pointing to the person on the left, with the words 2016 emblazoned across the top. ‘Cuz that’s about what this hostage situation feels like up in these here United States. Here now a well thought out essay by Bryan Alexander.

I woke up at 6 am EST to find my fellow Americans had elected Donald Trump pre… presi – presid- … Damn. It’s actually hard to say. Saying or writing “Drumpf” isn’t quite as funny as it once was. I have many reactions and thoughts, starting with this: I also have many personal thoughts about […]

via The American election, the morning after: American Brexit edition — Bryan Alexander

Update: Dyn reports that as of about 9:30 a.m., service has been restored and affected sites and services should start returning to normal. Read on to see what happened and how big it was. Original story: Users of dozens of popular sites and services — including Spotify, Twitter, Github, Reddit, Airbnb, and others — are…

via Trouble With Twitter, Reddit, Or The Rest Of The Internet This Morning? It’s Not Just You. — Consumerist

I found out reading on Gizmodo, that root level DNS servers are the ones most often attacked. One work around is to use the DNS of a very large cloud services/hosting company say like Google. Their DNS servers are 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 for starters.  According to a single comment on the Gizmodo article, Google’s DNS almost never gets attacked with a denial of service.

via This Is Probably Why Half the Internet Shut Down Today [Updating]

As of 9:05 EDT, it sounds like the attack is spreading and affecting more websites on the Internet. The one I’m most dependent on for day-to-day operations is our company’s Box.com domain.

It’s been a decade since I interviewed Paul English on the subject of customer service and human dignity (audio). He was CTO and co-founder at kayak but in this interview we talked more about GetHuman. It had begun as a list of cheats to help you hack through the automated defenses of corporate customer service […]

via Customer service and human dignity — Jon Udell

I remember the links and postings some years back that Jon mentions in this posting. All the phone trees were slightly different, but people were way more interested in getting to a person at their bank. So that was my first introduction for the customer service tree workaround. Now it seems like things are even more elaborate than just getting to a customer representative. If you’re willing to pay you can do all sorts of creative things to get in touch with a customer rep. I think something similar to this might have been posted on Cosumerist.com prior to it being folded into the Consumer Reports enterprise.

You just found out your credit or debit card info has been used by someone else to make a fraudulent purchase. There are so many different people you can call, each involved in some aspect of this theft. There’s your bank that issued the card, the credit card network the issuer uses for that card,…

via Who Am I Supposed To Call When My Credit Card Info Is Stolen? — Consumerist

Work with your bank first and foremost and do it immediately. Time is not on your side when disputing a fraudulant charge to a credit card. Once you got the wheels rolling with your credit card issuer, at the very least add your incident to the FBI list of Internet Crimes. They may not investigate  your individual incident but use it ganged up with others to link related incidents. If they don’t know about  yours, they may not have enough info to link up. So at the least report it to the FBI too. Then take necessary precautions to protect your personal identifying info.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about a company called SVIRAL that appeared to have cracked one of the toughest problems in computing today — that of creating software programs that can effectively use multiple processing cores and threads without requiring programmers to have PhDs in computer science (see Startup Cracks MultiCore, Thread Programming Problem).via CORNAMI’s sea-of-cores solution may defuse data explosion | EE Times

Boy howdy, it seems like the ghosts of massively parallel multi-core architectures is back in teh nooz’s ;^)

And by that I mean the likes of companies past like Tilera perhaps?