Facebook — one of the world’s largest advertising companies — magnanimously acknowledges that in your life on the internet, you’ve probably encountered some bad ads. And you almost certainly have, because online advertising can be obtrusive, creepy, and irritating to say the least. But Facebook thinks that they are so far ahead of the pack…

via Facebook Thinks You Love Ads So Much, It’ll Helpfully Block Your Ad-Blocker For You — Consumerist

Every time I see a news story anywhere on the web re:Facebook, I’m reminded of this movie I watched prior to de-activating my own account.

The details of this include a lawsuit filed in Europe to get Facebook to provide documentation re:How they use/sell the data of the people enrolled. That to me was such a telling behavior to skirt the issue and fight it in court. They do not want anyone to know anything about what their business is. But this story today from Consumerist is the great big reminder that you, YOU dear reader are the product that is behind the shiny thumbs up symbol.

As for me, I’m still deactivated, and contemplating a full shutdown of my account. I know from watching the YouTube video: Facebookistan they keep ALL my old data no matter what. So a fat lot of good that will do me. But for now at least, I scrubbed out all my old data. That account is now a mere dried up husk of it’s former self. Best part yet is there’s more than one person on FB with my first/last name so good luck trying to find out which person is which. I know FB doesn’t care in the long run, but anyone that stops participating on FB is tops in my book. Not just from the paranoia aspect, which is not what I’m really touting, but from the less than stellar, less than open Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle like behavior of what is promoted as Web 2.0, the replacement for the Internet. It’s no replacement, believe me. I’ll take the good ol’ Internet any day over the entry way into Prison Camp that is the Facebook login screen.

Seagate is looking to break records with two enterprise SSDs they’re showing off at Flash Memory Summit this week. The first drive is one that’s been seen before: the 10GB/s PCIe x16 SSD that Seagate demonstrated in March. It has now been named the Nytro XP7200 and is scheduled for mass production in Q4. Based…

via Seagate Introduces 10GB/s PCIe SSD And 60TB SAS SSD — AnandTech

*Nota Bene: The IOPs for read transactions for the card pictured in this article the Nytro XP7200 is 940,000 for read transactions. That’s dangerously close to what I consider the golden target of 1M IOPs achievable 10 years ago but only on hardware costing millions and millions of dollars. And then it was only achievable using benchmarking software on an experimental test rig setup by the vendor as a means of generating marketing materials. By that I mean they wanted to claim being able to hit 1M IOPs with their custom config of racks and racks of SAN disks connected via FibreChannel switches and custom accelerator boxes. All of it done in the name of marketing to Wall Street trading floors that need millisecond latencies and return times for transactions so they could do “high frequency” trading.

We’ve come a long way since then, mashing all that stuff down in to a 16-Lane PCIe 3.0 card. Truly we’re going to achieve 1M IOPs in a single PC chassis before you know it. And this is a step certainly in that direction, if only the write IOPs spec was symetrically as big. But that’s not the case here. Write IOPs is a good deal less than the 10GB/sec for the read operations. But who knows? A few more runs of new boards, redesigns, errata and bug fixes and there could be a small ramp for the write performance. I’m amazed Seagate’s got the nerve to engineer this, let’s hope they got the nerve to produce it in quantity.

Toshiba announced that it will have its new BG series of products at the Flash Memory Summit 2016 next week. These new NVMe SSDs come in the smallest of form factors, such as small M.2 2230 (22x30mm) and BGA (Ball Grid Array) form factors.

via UFS And NVMe Go Toe-To-Toe In Mobile, Toshiba Launches 3D BiCS NVMe SSDs — News Tom’s Hardware

UFS is the new, new thing for removable media. Samsung pre-announced a whole line of UFS memory cards to compete against the top of the line mini-SDXC memory cards. The speeds of UFS are so much faster than existing SDXC it’s very nearly as fast as a hard drive. If we can get fast removable memory like UFS with native SSD hard drive speeds, I would say even Hard drives are on their way out. The interfaces are just too slow.

I’m enjoying the use of the digital video projectors. It makes for a much grander scale and pallette for the choreography. I’m reminded a bit of the whole English creation myth we got to see in the London Ceremony. Everyone gets to act out the history of the world as een through their eyes. (20:26 EDT)

Portuguese colonization is next up. This is sadly when the 4million indigenous people start to lose their lands.Slave trade enters the country and does not leave until 1888, a number of years after the U.S. Civil War. So sad. One day I would love to see Egypt host an Olympics and get to tell their story in the opening ceremonies. And India too! And why not Vietnam? (20:31 EDT)

After a photographer who’s donated thousands of images to the public domain filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Getty Images for allegedly threatening her for using her own photos, the photo agency says it will investigate the complaint, and “vigorously defend” if need be. Last week, U.S. photographer Carol Highsmith filed a copyright complaint [PDF]…

via Getty Will Fight Photographer’s $1B Lawsuit For Selling Her Public Domain Images — Consumerist

How did Getty Inc. and Alany ever get ANY rights to the images in question?

We have now lost both Seymour and Marvin Minsky this year. I met Seymour a few times, and heard him speak at several Logo conferences and at Alan Kay’s Apple Hill camps (and even contra danced next to him once!). Probably the most frightening meeting was when, as a PhD student, I sat next to Seymour at […]

via Seymour Papert has died and leaves a lasting legacy — Computing Education Blog

Sad indeed the giants who shoulders so many have stood on, they are gone. Long live the giants of developmental psychology and computing.

Robert Rauschenberg,
Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953

I have without a moment’s hesitation deleted, unliked, cleaned my presence on that Grand Ole Platform known as Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Using a free utility somewhat creepily known as Facebook Seppuku (that’s the Japanese word for ritual suicide) and much clicking of Delete/Done, I got rid of all the entries, mentions, likes I accumulated since 2006 when I joined. It was kind of fun to see the wave of activities as people, nay a whole wave of FB immigrants took hold in 2008 when Zuck opened the floodgates to the world.Prior to this it required an .edu email address to join, and further back still your College campus had to be one of the elites to allow Facebook registrations, and then from bona fide student email accounts. But I digress.

What really shed a great deal of light on Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook operations was this movie shared on YouTube: Facebookistan

One sees an utter lack of acccountability and standards too which even the smallest businesses are held. Facebook is allowed a free ride by EVERYONE. Nobody is enforcing any rules or practices, Facebook is the law of its own land. It decides and worse yet, you don’t even know WHAT it has decided. The rules are not published, the process is not documented and every employee is under a gag order upon being hired. Nothing is allowed to let the cold light of day creep in on the operations at Facebook. You have to understand Facebook is not an ISP, is not a Service Provider. It is an advertising business. It collects data, watches you click thru ads, looks at what you share and  begins filing you into generalized hoppers to then sell you to a manufacturer, supplier, service provider (in other words a “REAL” business). They don’t judge, they don’t really enforce a whole lot of rules. People can make spoof accounts and masquarade as anyone nearly anonymously and Facebook doesn’t care. Why? Because they have as of today 1.7Billion users. Even Twitter cannot overcome that lead (read NYTimes story below)

Facebook Casts a Giant Shadow Over Twitter

Add to this my own personal aggravation, I just got suspended on Twitter as of Tuesday morning this week! As much as I like Twitter, their appeal process is EVERY bit as obscure, unsure and murky as the day-to-day operations at Facebook. There’s no explanation as to WHY you got suspended other than the EULA and rules for being a member, and possible infractions that may cause a suspension. Getting ANYTHING like detail or actionable steps to unsuspend your account is impossible. You can do searches on this to find out more. The extent of what you can do is send an appeal in email asking “why”? And see if they respond, when they respond. It’s been 48 hours for me now. So I’ve been without Facebook, without Twitter for that full length of time. I have great hopes for stealing back all the time these two “free” services have stolen from me. And they won’t have this datapoint to kick around anymore. This is my declaration of intellectual independence.

Let Freedom REIGN!

Students from the Stanford Graduate School of Education’s Learning, Design and Technology master’s program will showcase their master’s projects on July 29 at the LDT Expo on the Stanford campus.

via Stanford to Showcase Learning, Design and Technology Student Master’s Projects — Campus Technology: All Articles