As for me, when I submit comments on any publication’s website, I look for Disqus (which I have registered with using my OpenID) or straight out OpenID. Totally worth it when they want authentication and identification. It also helps tie my ID back to my WordPress blog. So it has a second knock-on effect if people want to find out more about my other writings. OpenID works and it works well, and failing that Disqus works equally well for me. No need to reinvent any wheels when it comes to logins, authentications, etc.
If you are creating a new website or mobile app, one of the things you need to worry about most is user login.
User login is thorny. Make it too hard, and users won’t sign up. Make it too easy, and you put users’ passwords at greater risk of being hacked.
Moving all that pain to [company]Facebook[/company] might seem like an attractive option. Facebook has been pushing its Facebook Connect service as a way you can outsource the login capability to Facebook. You let Facebook handle the databases, the passwords, and so on, and you just do some simple code to link to Facebook. And there are already more than 1 billion Facebook users, so it’s likely your users already have a log-in. What’s not to Like (bad pun intended)? What’s not to like?
Well, most web properties have two important success criteria and measures: how many new users sign on every month, and how often they come back. Once you’ve used Facebook Connect, guess…
English: A small device used by Goverment to tap ilyas’s official phone in 2003 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In a terrific demo of the wrong technology for the Flash Memory Summit, HGST is showing a PCIe-connected Phase Change Memory device running at three million IOPS with a 1.5 microsecs read latency.
For a very long time I’ve been keenly following the IOPs ratings of newly announced flash memory devices. From the SATA->SSD generation and the most recent PCIe generation to the UltraDIMMs. Now however, this Phase Change Memory announcement has kind of pushed all those other technologies aside. While the IOPs are far above a lot of other competing technologies, that is for reads and not writes. The speed/latency of the writes is about 55 times slower than the reads. So if you want top speed on reading and not writing the data, PCM is your best choice. But 55 times slower is not bad, it puts the write speed at approximately the same speed as Multi-Level Cell (MLC) flash memory currently used in your consumer grade SSD flash drives.
Chris Mellor’s emphasis is PCM likely better suited as a competitor to UltraDIMM as a motherboard memory than a faster PCIe SSD drive. And a lot depends on the chips, glue logic and Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) on the PCIe board. HGST went to great lengths to juice the whole project by creating a bypass around the typical PCIe interfaces allowing much greater throughput overall. Without that engineering trick, it’s likely the 3M IOPs level wouldn’t have been as easily achieved. So bear in mind, this is nowhere near being a shipping product. In order to achieve that level of development it’s going to take more time to make the thing work using a commodity PCIe chipset on a commodity designed/built motherboard. But still 3M IOPs is pretty impressive.
Flipped Classrooms and MOOCs still are hot topics and popular in the higher education and technology websites. Certainly in the time since the big entrepreneurial opportunities like Udacity and EdX sprang up something should have been learned. What have we learned in the 3 years since Sebastian Thrun put his AI course online for all to register for and take for a semester? Are we closer to understanding the cost and return of adopting this format for online education? The jury is still out but the doubts are there.
A sample apple grown around Shenandoah Valley, Va. (Photo credit: Boston Public Library)
Since last year, Apple’s been hard at work building out their own CDN and now those efforts are paying off. Recently, Apple’s CDN has gone live in the U.S. and Europe and the company is now delivering some of their own content, directly to consumers. In addition, Apple has interconnect deals in place with multiple ISPs, including Comcast and others, and has paid to get direct access to their networks.
Given some of my experiences attempting to watch the Live Stream from Apple’s combined iPhone, Watch event, I wanted to address CDN. Content Distribution Networks are designed to speed the flow of many types of files from Data Centers or Video head ends for Live Events. So I note, I started this article back on August 1st when this original announcement went out. And now it’s doubly poignant as the video stream difficulties at the start of the show (1PM EDT) kind of ruined it for me and for a few others. They lost me in that scant few first 10 minutes and they never recovered. I did connect later but that was after the Apple Watch presentation was half done. Oh well, you get what you pay for. I paid nothing for the Live Event stream from Apple and got nothing in return.
Back during the Steve Jobs era, one of the biggest supporters of Akamais and its content delivery network was Apple Inc. And this was not just for streaming of the Keynote Speeches and MacWorld (before they withdrew from that event) but also the World Developers Conference (WWDC). At the time enjoyed great access to free streams and great performance levels for free. But Apple cut way back on that simulcasts and rivals like Eventbrite began to eat in to Akamai’s lower end. Since then the huge data center providers began to build out their own data centers worldwide. And in so doing, a kind of internal monopoly of content distribution went into effect. Google was first to really scale up in a massive way then scale out, to make sure all those GMail accounts ran faster and better in spite of the huge mail spools on each account member. Eventually the second wave of social media outlets joined in (with Facebook leading a revolution in Open Stack and Open Hardware specs) and created their own version of content delivery as well.
Now Apple has attempted to scale up and scale out to keep people tightly bound to brand. iCloud really is a thing, but more than that now the real heavy lifting is going on once and for all time. Peering arrangements (anathema to the open Internet) would be signed and deals made to scratch each other’s backs by sharing the load/burden of carrying not just your own internal traffic, but those of others too. And depending on the ISP you could really get gouged by those negotiations. But no matter Apple soldiered on and now they’re ready to really let all the prep work be put to good use. Hopefully the marketing will be sufficient to express the satisfaction and end user experience at all levels, iTunes, iApps, iCloud data storage and everything else would experience the boosts in speed. If Apple can hold its own against both Facebook and Gmail in this regard, they future’s so bright they’re gonna need shades.
Really good linkage to a review site for batteries, chargers, and led flashlights. Well worth the data and comparisons. And a great example of how to go about doing a review site.
Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA – Statue of founder William Marsh Rice with Lovett Hall in background. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Tour said: “Our technology is the only one that satisfies every market requirement, both from a production and a performance standpoint, for nonvolatile memory. It can be manufactured at room temperature, has an extremely low forming voltage, high on-off ratio, low power consumption, nine-bit capacity per cell, exceptional switching speeds and excellent cycling endurance.”
Rice University is continuing research on it’s ReRAM (resistive RAM) and has come up with some new ways to manufacture it. That’s the key to adopting any new discovery first done in a lab environment. You have to keep tweaking it to find out the best way to manufacture it at scale and at a reduced cost. So in the four years since the original announcement was made, now it’s possible to manufacture the Rice U ReRAM. And at the end of the article there’s a note that some people are already buying up licenses for the technology. Hopefully that’s not just for patent trolling protection insurance, no. Instead, I’m hoping some small Fabless chip design house takes this up and tries out some batches of this and qualifies it for manufacture at a large scale contract manufacturer of silicon chips. When that happens, then we’ll have the kind of momentum required to make ReRAM a real shipping product. And with any like Rice U. will continue work on improving the basic science behind the product so it more companies will find it attractive and lucrative. Keep your eye on ReRAM.
As research is being done on incremental improvements in Lithium Ion batteries, some occasional discoveries are being made. In this instance, the anode is being switched to pure lithium with a coating to protect the very reactive metal surface. The problem with using pure lithium is the growth of micro crystalline “dendrites”, kind of like stalagmites/stalactites in caves, along the whole surface. As the the dendrites build up, the anode loses it’s efficiency and that battery slowly loses it’s ability to charge all the way. This research has shown how to coat a pure lithium anode with a later of carbon nanotubes to help act as a permeable layer between the the electrolytic liquid in the battery and the pure lithium anode.
In past articles on Carpetbomberz.com we’ve seen announcements of other possible battery technologies like Zinc-Air, Lithium-Air and possible use of carbon nanotubes as a anode material. This announcement is promising in that it’s added costs might be somewhat smaller versus a wholesale change in battery chemistry. Similarly the article points out how much lighter elemental Lithium is versus the current anode materials (Carbon and Silicon). If the process of coating the anode is sufficiently inexpensive and can be done on a industrial production line, you will see this get adopted. But with most experiments like these, scaling up and lowering costs is the hardest thing to do. Hopefully this is one that will make it into shipping products and see the light of day.
Ya’ know, there’s a whole world of contract manufacturers out there and the NSA lets them all bid on these. They do not do all this work on their own in house, they like CIA have front companies that go around seeding the ideas, bids, RFPs that eventually lead to these devices. It’s a cottage industry of sorts of small COMMs outfits making small runs of very sophisticated devices. All in the name of National Security.
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 