“a little bit”? Howzabout a lotta bit. Like this is the solution looking for a problem. Same too, the self-driving car. Dean Kamen invented, developed and marketed the Segway as a revolution in human mobility and transportation. Google is touting the self-driving car as a revolution in human mobility and transportation. Google Glass is being touted as a revolution in mobile computing even as the mobile phone is still evolving. I don’t think the understand just what it is they DO here. They sell advertising and mine BIG DATA. That’s ’bout it.
Category: technology
General technology, not anything in particular
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Audrey Watters: The Future of Ed-Tech is a Reclamation Project #DLFAB
Audrey Watters Media Predicts 2011 (Photo credit: @Photo.) We can reclaim the Web and more broadly ed-tech for teaching and learning. But we must reclaim control of the data, content, and knowledge we create. We are not resources to be mined. Learners do not enter our schools and in our libraries to become products for the textbook industry and the testing industry and the technology industry and the ed-tech industry to profit from.
via The Future of Ed-Tech is a Reclamation Project #DLFAB.(by Audrey Watters)
Really philosophical article about what it is Higher Ed is trying to do here. It’s not just about student portfolios, it’s Everything. It is the books you check out the seminars you attend, the videos you watched the notes you took all the artifacts of learning. And currently they are all squirreled away and stashed inside data silos like Learning Management Systems.
The original World Wide Web was like the Wild, Wild West, an open frontier without visible limit. Cloud services and commercial offerings has fenced in the frontier in a series of waves of fashion. Whether it was AOL, Tripod.com, Geocities, Friendster, MySpace, Facebook the web grew in the form of gated communities and cul-de-sacs for “members only”. True the democracy of it all was membership was open and free, practically anyone could join, all you had to do was hand over the control, the keys to YOUR data. That was the bargain, by giving up your privacy, you gained all the rewards of socializing with long lost friends and acquaintances. From that little spark the surveillance and “data mining” operation hit full speed.
Reclaiming ownership of all this data, especially the component that is generated in one’s lifetime of learning is a worthy cause. Audrey Watters references Jon Udell in an example of the kind of data we would want to own and limit access to our whole lives. From the article:
“Udell then imagines what it might mean to collect all of one’s important data from grade school, high school, college and work — to have the ability to turn this into a portfolio — for posterity, for personal reflection, and for professional display on the Web.“
Indeed, and at the same time though this data may live on the Internet somewhere access is restricted to those whom we give explicit permission to access it. That’s in part a project unto itself, this mesh of data could be text, or other data objects that might need to be translated, converted to future readable formats so it doesn’t grow old and obsolete in an abandoned file format. All of this stuff could be give a very fine level of access control to individuals you have approved to read parts or pieces or maybe even give wholesale access to. You would make that decision and maybe just share the absolute minimum necessary. So instead of seeing a portfolio of your whole educational career, you just give out the relevant links and just those links. That’s what Jon Udell is pursuing now through the Thali Project. Thali is a much more generalized way to share data from many devices but presented in a holistic, rationalized manner to whomever you define as a trusted peer. It’s not just about educational portfolios, it’s about sharing your data. But first and foremost you have to own the data or attempt to reclaim it from the wilds and wilderness of the social media enterprise, the educational enterprise, all these folks who want to own your data while giving you free services in return.
Audrey uses the metaphor, “Data is the new oil” and that at the heart is the problem. Given the free oil, those who invested in holding onto and storing the oil are loathe to give it up. And like credit reporting agencies with their duplicate and sometime incorrect datasets, those folks will give access to that unknown quantity to the highest bidder for whatever reason. Whether its campaign staffers, private detectives, vengeful spouses, doesn’t matter as they own the data and set the rules as to how it is shared. However in the future when we’ve all reclaimed ownership of our piece of the oil field, THEN we’ll have something. And when it comes to the digital equivalent of the old manila folder, we too will truly own our education.
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Big Data Is Not the New Oil
One of the sources of Audrey Watters piece is this article by Jer Thorp in the Harvard Business Review.
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AnandTech | Samsung SSD XP941 Review: The PCIe Era Is Here
Mini PCI-Express Connector on Inspiron 11z Motherboard, Front (Photo credit: DandyDanny) I don’t think there is any other way to say this other than to state that the XP941 is without a doubt the fastest consumer SSD in the market. It set records in almost all of our benchmarks and beat SATA 6Gbps drives by a substantial margin. It’s not only faster than the SATA 6Gbps drives but it surpasses all other PCIe drives we have tested in the past, including OCZ’s Z-Drive R4 with eight controllers in RAID 0. Given that we are dealing with a single PCIe 2.0 x4 controller, that is just awesome.
via AnandTech | Samsung SSD XP941 Review: The PCIe Era Is Here.
Listen well as you pine away for your very own SSD SATA drive. One day you will get that new thing. But what you really, really want is the new, NEW thing. And that my friends is quite simply the PCIe SSD. True the enterprise level purchasers have had a host of manufacturers and models to choose from in this form factor. But the desktop market cannot afford Fusion-io products at ~15K per card fully configured. That’s a whole different market there. RevoDrive has had a wider range of products that go from heights of Fusion-io down to the top end Gamer market with the RevoDrive R-series PCIe drives. But those have always been SATA drives piggy-backed onto a multi-lane PCIe card (4x or 8x depending on how many controllers were installed onboard the card). Here now the evolutionary step of dumping SATA in favor of a more native PCIe to NAND memory controller is slowly taking place. Apple has adopted it for the top end Mac Pro revision (the price and limited availability has made it hard to publicize this architectural choice). It has also been adopted in the laptops available since Summer 2013 that Apple produces (and I have the MacBook Air to prove it). Speedy, yes it is. But how do I get this on my home computer?
Anandtech was able to score an aftermarket card through a 3rd party in Australia along with a PCIe adapter card for that very Samsung PCIe drive. So where there is a will, there is a way. From that purchase of both the drive and adapter, this review of the Samsung PCIe drive has come about. And all one can say looking through all the benchmarks is we have not seen anything yet. Drive speeds which have been the bottle-neck in desktop and mobile computing since the dawn of the Personal Computer are slowly lifting. And not by a little but by a lot. This is going to herald a new age in personal computers that is as close to former Intel Chairman, Andy Grove’s 10X Effect. Samsung’s PCIe native SSD is that kind of disruptive, perspective altering product that will put all manufacturers on notice and force a sea change in design and manufacture.
As end users of the technology SSD’s with SATA interfaces have already had a big time impact on our laptops and desktops. But what I’ve been writing about and trying to find signs of ever since the first introduction of SSD drives is the logical path through the legacy interfaces. Whether it was ATA/BIOS or the bridge chips that glue the motherboard to the CPU, a number of “old” architecture items are still hanging around on the computers of today. Intel’s adoption of UEFI has been a big step forward in shedding the legacy bottleneck components. Beyond that native on CPU controllers for PCIe are a good step forward as well. Lastly the sockets and bridging chips on the motherboard are the neighborhood improvements that again help speed things up. The last mile however is the dumping of the “disk” interace, the ATA/SATA spec as a pre-requisite for reading data off of a spinning magnetic hard drive. We need to improve that last mile to the NAND memory chips and then we’re going to see the full benefit of products like the Samsung PCIe drive. And that day is nearly upon us with the most recent motherboard/chipset revision from Intel. We may need another revision to get exactly what we want, but the roadmap is there and all the manufacturers had better get on it. As Samsung’s driving this revolution,…NOW.
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VLC is getting Chromecast support for iOS and desktop versions
VLC is without a doubt one of the best desktop/mobile apps. It has been around so long and continuously improved and recompiled to take advantage of each platform on which it’s built, few media players can match it. It is the the Swiss Army knife of media players and it keeps solidiering on and on. If they can get VLC to work with Chromecast screensharing that would be a real accomplishment. I wish the whole VLC developers team a lot of luck.
The popular open source media player VLC could get Chromecast support soon: VLC developers recently confirmed on the official VideoLAN forum that they’re currently working on bringing Chromecast support to the media player (hat tip to Reddit user badgerflower). Lead OSX and iOS developer Felix Paul Kühne wrote:
“In addition to the iOS variant, we are also working on a Windows / Linux / Mac implementation, which will take a bit longer because it’s harder.”
Enabling casting from the desktop app is likely harder because Google (S GOOG) hasn’t released an SDK for native apps on Windows, Mac or Linux yet. This means that the VLC team would either have to reverse engineer the functionality — which could lead to updates breaking it — or have VLC work in concert with the Chrome browser.
VLC is an open source video player application that’s popular because it’s capable of playing close…
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Meet the godfather of wearables | The Verge
Stasi HQ building, Berlin, Germany (Photo credit: Wikipedia) He continues, “People are upset about privacy, but in one sense they are insufficiently upset because they don’t really understand what’s at risk. They are looking only at the short term.” And to him, there is only one viable answer to these potential risks: “You’re going to control your own data.” He sees the future as one where individuals make active sharing decisions, knowing precisely when, how, and by whom their data will be used. “That’s the most important thing, control of the data,” he reflects. “It has to be done correctly. Otherwise you end up with something like the Stasi.”
via Meet the godfather of wearables | The Verge.
Sounds a little bit like VRM and a little bit like Jon Udell‘s Thali project. Wearables don’t fix the problem of metadata being collected about you, no. You still don’t control those ingoing/outgoing feeds of information.
Sandy Pentland points out a lot can be derived and discerned simply from the people you know. Every contact in your friend list adds one more bit of intelligence about you without anyone ever talking to your directly. This kind of analysis is only possible now due to the End User License Agreements posted by each of the collecting entities (so-called social networking websites).
An alternative to this wildcat, frontier mentality by data collectors is Vendor Relationship Management (as proposed in the Cluetrain Manifesto) Doc Searls wants people to be able to share the absolute minimum necessary in order to get what they want or need from vendors on the Internet, especially the data collecting types. And then from that point if an individual wants to share more, they should get rewarded with a higher level of something in return from the people they share with (prime example are vendors, the ‘V’ in VRM).
Thali in another way allows you to share data as well. But instead of letting someone into your data mesh in an all or nothing way, it lets strongly identified individuals have linkages into our out of your own data streams whatever form those data streams may take. I think Sandy Pentland, Doc Searls and Jon Udell would all agree there needs to be some amount of ownership and control ceded back to the individual going forward. Too many of the vendors own the data and the metadata right now, and will do what they like with it including responding to National Security Letters. So instead of being a commercial venture, they are swiftly evolving into branches or defacto subsidiary of the National Security Agency. If we can place controls on the data, we’ll maybe get closer to the ideal of social networking and controlled data sharing.
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Apple Launches Swift, A New Programming Language For Writing iOS And OS X Apps
I remember the first big lurching migrations in Developer’s Tools when the PowerPC came into view (CodeWarrior marked the move from Pascal to C), then subsequent to that OS 9 to OS X (moved from C to Objective-C) then the last big migration was from PowerPC to Intel. Now today we got Swift to mark the next migration from Objective-C to a faster language altogether.
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Testing, Testing: How Google And Amazon Can Help Make Websites Rock Solid – ReadWrite
It’s not unprecedented: Google already offers a testing suite for Android apps, though that’s focused on making sure they run well on smartphones and tablets, not testing the cloud-based services they connect to. If Google added testing services for the websites and services those apps connect to, it would have an end-to-end lock on developing for both the Web and mobile.
via Testing, Testing: How Google And Amazon Can Help Make Websites Rock Solid – ReadWrite.
Load testing websites and web-apps is a market whose time has come. I know where I work we have Project group who has a guy who manages an installation of Silk as a load tester. Behind that is a little farm of old Latitude E6400s that he manages from the Silk console to point at whichever app is in development/QA/testing before it goes into production. Knowing there’s potential for a cloud-based tool for this makes me very, very interested.
As outsourcing goes, the Software as a Service (SaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS) or even Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) categories are great as raw materials. But if there was just an app that I could login to, spin up some VMs install my load-test tool of choice and then manage them from my desktop, I would feel like I had accomplished something. Or failing that even just a toolkit for load testing with whatever tool du jour is already available (nothing is perfect that way) would be cool too. And better yet, if I could do that with an updated tool whenever I needed to conduct a round of testing, the tool would take into account things like the Heart Bleed bug in a timely fashion. That’s the kind of benefit a cloud-based, centrally managed, centrally updated Load Test service could provide.
And now as Microsoft has just announced a partnership with Salesforce on their Azure cloud platform, things get even more interesting. Not only could you develop using an existing toolkit like Salesforce.com, but host it on more than one cloud platform (AWS or Azure) as your needs change. And I would hope this would include unit test, load test and the whole sweet suite of security auditing one would expect for a webapp (thereby helping prevent vulnerabilities like HeartBleed OpenSSL).
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TrueCrypt, An Open-Source Whole-Disk Encryption System, Leaves Users High And Dry
More word on TrueCrypt closing up shop and taking out one of the best full disk encryption utilities available for free or for money.
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 