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Comment: Philo Farnsworth (Score 1) 541

by CowboyRobot (#40081711) Attached to: Of currently dead inventors, my favorite is ...
I'm not the first to mention him, but I add Philo Farnsworth because he's the most relatable of the bunch. I simply don't have the brainpower or industriousness to be like Tesla or Leonardo, but I think if I really applied myself to a few core, solvable problems, I would be able to come up with something that no one had done before.
Data Storage

The Return of Magnetic Tape->

Submitted by
CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes "This month is the 60th anniversary of magnetic tape as a data storage medium, and many companies (most of which did not exist when IBM developed the first tape drive) are realizing that the main complaints about tape are no longer relevant.
"The three biggest complaints about tape — that data is hard to find, might then be hard to read, and the media is generally unreliable — no longer hold water. The vendors emphasize that tape has become much easier to manage and use via automated health- and data-integrity verification tools. Thanks to file systems such as LTFS, tapes can look and act like enormous USB drives. Most surprising is the revelation that the raw bit error rate of tape is orders of magnitude better than that of most disk drives.""
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Google

Google's Servers Housed in Racks With Wheels->

Submitted by 1sockchuck
1sockchuck writes "New photos from inside Google's data centers show servers housed in racks on wheels. In recent years, cloud builders have begun having servers delivered pre-populated in racks for "rack-and-roll" deployment. The photos were released as part of a presentation explaining how an email travels through Google's infrastructure to your inbox. But they offer clues (and raise questions) about the inner realm of the data centers where Google houses its 900,000-plus servers."
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Cloud

Is Facebook Overpriced? $124,000 / Mbps->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "If you thought Facebook's 95:1 price / earning ratio made the stock expensive, a new report looks at the value of Facebook's network bandwidth. The study use some rough numbers combined with a size estimate of Facebook's 1% share of Internet traffic to come up with a mind blowing $124,000 / Mbps.

If my home cable traffic were this expensive, I'd have to pick a winning lottery ticket every time I checked my Facebook status."
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Government

UK Government Offers PC + Broadband For £159->

Submitted by
judgecorp
judgecorp writes "In a bid to get non-connected citizens online, the UK government is backing a scheme to offer a refurbished PC and a year's broadband for £159. "Get Online @ Home" aims to get people over the hurdle of buying a PC, and will offer a minimum spec of a 2GHz Pentium 4 with 1G RAM and 40G hard drive, along with broadband from TalkTalk (ironically, the ISP which tops the tops the official Ofcom list of complaints to broadband providers"
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Crowdsoucing Speeds Satellite Monitoring of Syrian Crisis->

Submitted by
MGoldbergatDI
MGoldbergatDI writes "Tomnod, which was founded by four former University of California at San Diego doctoral students in 2010, has created a crowdsourcing user interface and machine learning analytical engine to more easily analyze the nearly six million square kilometers of satellite imagery taken every day, most of which would normally never be viewed by human eyes. The company’s user interface and analytical back end uses volunteers online to accurately and efficiently categorize that data, allowing the experts to focus their efforts when major events happen. The company is using this system to analyze satellite imagery of Syria during the ongoing conflict in that country."
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After 5 Years, Court Officially Declares Jim Gray Dead->

Submitted by
CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes "It has been 5 years since the disappearance of highly-respected researcher and Turing award-winner Jim Gray in a sailboat off the coast of San Francisco. That disappearance resulted in one of the most highly-sophisticated searches in history. Gray's former students, colleagues, and co-workers included many people who went on to control many aspects of the Web and were able to utilize those resources to help with the search.

"One former student, Werner Vogels, now CTO of Amazon Web Services, made Amazon's Mechanical Turk, a distributed workflow system, available to parcel out satellite images for volunteers to review. A satellite image consists of an immense, gray ocean image of 8,000 by 8,000 pixels. The Mechanical Turk could assign 400 by 400 pixel tiles of the master image to volunteers, who could then look for the off-color, 6-8 pixels that might represent a 40-foot boat.""
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Software

Wozniak's Original System Description of the Apple ][->

Submitted by
CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes "Opening with the line, "To me, a personal computer should be small, reliable, convenient to use and inexpensive." Stephen Wozniak gave his system description of the Apple-II in the May, 1977 issue of BYTE.
It's instructive to read what was worth bragging about back then, such as integral graphics, "A key part of the Apple-II design is an integral video display generator which diectly accesses the system's programmable memory. Screen formatting and cursor controls are realized in my design in the form of about 200 bytes of read only memory."
And it shows what the limitations were in those days, "While writing Apple BASIC, I ran into the problem of manipulating the 16 bit pointer data and its arithmetic in an 8 bit machine.
My solution to this problem of handling 16 bit data, notably pointers, with an 8 bit microprocessor was to implement a nonexistent 16 bit processor in software, interpreter fashion.""
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GAO study shows 3 trillion barrels of recoverable oil in U.S.->

Submitted by Sparticus789
Sparticus789 writes "A GAO report starts out by saying "Oil shale deposits in the Green River Formation are estimated to contain up to 3 trillion barrels of oil, half of which may be recoverable, which is about equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves." The Green River Formation is located in the Colorado/Montana/ Wyoming area. Is this the way to stop OPEC?"
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I just ate a whole package of Sweet Tarts and a can of Coke. I think I saw God. -- B. Hathrume Duk