Is open source technology a disruptive innovation force in the Clayton Christensen sense of the term — meaning it starts out serving the underserved or unserved, and works its way up to eventually chase the market leaders upstream? Photo: Joe McKendrick It certainly meets that definition, in that it has made powerful solutions available to the smallest and budget-tight players, and, yes, many open source solutions have […]
The conventional wisdom says that the days of the mainframe are numbered, but it just might be that a new generation of apps will breathe new life into it. A state-of-the-mainframe survey by Syncsort shows that the mainframe market as ever is experiencing some shrinkage, but also that there are some grounds for optimism. Syncsort has been working on mainframes since 1968 and has customers in more […]
The Power of Networks: Six Principles that Connect Our Lives • By Christopher G. Brinton and Mung Chiang • Princeton University Press • 310 pages • ISBN: 978-0-691-17071-8 • £27.95 We don’t normally think of our lives this way, but each of us is enmeshed in myriad networks — the real-life one of people, social media like Twitter and Facebook, and technical networks (internet, cellular). According to […]
Only a minority of the world’s pipelines can be cleaned with pigs like this one. Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto Around one-third of the world’s gas pipelines can be inspected using ‘pipeline pigs’. These cylindrical devices have figured in three James Bond movies, in one case being modified to secretly transport a person across borders. Back in the real world, the problem is that the other two-thirds of the […]
The three cases are part of a campaign by Saudi women, who have been broadcasting daring videos with their cellphones, using Facebook to organize street protests and posting Twitter messages to challenge the very idea of male supremacy in their famously patriarchal society. Continue reading the main story The campaign, started by a loose network of activists who have enlisted young, media-savvy women, has gone far beyond […]
In this Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2016, file photo, Google Home, right, sits on display near a Pixel phone following a product event, in San Francisco. Google’s voice-activated assistant can now recognize who’s talking to it on the Google’s Home speaker. An update coming out Thursday, April 20, 2017, will enable Home’s built-in assistant to learn the different voices of up to six people, although they can’t all […]
French telecom company Orange is launching a bank this Summer in France. Orange CEO Stéphane Richard listed some of the features behind Orange Bank this morning at a press conference. And let’s just say that it doesn’t sound as groundbreaking as the company thinks. Just like N26, Revolut and others, you’ll be able to control your payment card directly from your phone. Transactions will show up instantly […]
It was an exposé made for the era of social media—and it’s still having an impact. A year ago this week, reporters at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and more than 100 news organizations around the world released their first stories linked to the Panama Papers—a leaked trove of more than 11 million records from Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca. The documents and thousands of published stories […]
Your smartphone is a very versatile tool that contains a huge amount of computational power. By using the right apps and augmenting the smartphone with other hardware you can make it do some very unusual things. Turn your smartphone into a tool to diagnose car problems Got a ‘Check Engine’ light on your dash, staring at you? In the trade that’s called ‘the money light.’ Wonder what […]
The basic format of political fact-checking is identical the world over: Start from a widely circulated claim by a public figure, then rate the truthfulness of its objectively verifiable components. Tom Rosenstiel, executive director at the American Press Institute, thinks it may be time to rethink this model. Local newsrooms especially, he suggests, should make “the key unit of fact-checking not a claim or a fact, but […]
After centuries of getting around primarily via horses, many people viewed the first automobiles with apprehension. This newfangled “horseless carriage” was considered too fast and dangerous to ever catch on. In the late 19th century, England even had a law called the Red Flag Act, which required self-propelled vehicles to be led at walking pace by someone waving a red flag. In 1895, the New […]
One of the few regrets of Vint Cerf, who is often referred to as the ‘father of the Internet’, is the fact that encryption using public cryptography was not baked in the original ARPANET design. While the early Internet was meant to meet a number of requirements such as resilience and openness, encryption was not one of them. Some of this was because of the high cost […]
Any sufficiently advanced parody is indistinguishable from reality. That’s an extreme paraphrase of Poe’s Law, but it applies to so much of our world today. Including the management of Twitter. On Thursday, Twitter announced more changes to the way it works. Soon after, an image started circulating which supposedly explained these changes. And it was so confusing. “Replies now part of Timeline. Timeline and TimelLine are now […]
For as long as man has looked up at the heavens, he’s pondered one question: Are we alone in the universe? While the answer remains unclear, there’s a tonne of research being conducted to determine just what life-sustaining planets beyond Earth might exist — and what they might look like. There’s no shortage of imaginative renderings and fiction about what such worlds may entail, as well. Countless […]
Fused deposition modeling printing is the most common printing method used in 3D printing. The two key words are “deposition” and “fused”. Basically, what an FDM 3D printer does is heat up plastic, extrude it out of a nozzle, deposit that plastic onto either a printer plate or already deposited plastic, and fuse that new plastic to the old. As the printer head moves on a given […]
Last week, a colleague received the printer’s proofs for an article that she submitted two years ago. You read that correctly. In the time that it takes to earn a master’s degree, she managed to navigate the labyrinth of academic peer review in order to publish one essay. It’s a success story, if you can maintain your sense of humor. Journal publishing in the humanities […]
In the wake of the terror attacks in England, France, Germany and elsewhere, can we finally admit that the war on terror is an utter and complete failure? 10 Ways to Reduce Terrorism So if the war on terror has failed, what should we do to stop terrorists? I. Stop Overthrowing the Moderates and Arming Crazies We know it’s a difficult concept to grasp, but if we […]
Iona Craig, who reported on the aftermath of the botched Navy SEAL raid in Yemen for The Intercept from Yeman, did so with the help of the Pulitzer Center. Iona Craig. Grants from the Pulitzer Center go a long way for international journalists who eke out a difficult existence covering tough stories from dangerous places. The details of her recent Yemen experience should give pause to most […]
Smart Voice & One Remote Making TVs “smart” is one thing, but being able to use them smartly and to their full potential is another. Smart TVs have come a long way since Samsung first introduced theirs as a “connected-TV” back in 2009. In 2011, Samsung was the first to use the term “Smart TV” that converged the computer and its integrated internet, a conventional TV, and […]
DevOps is a great concept — but many enterprises are still struggling to get out the starting gate with it. Photo: CERN Press Office That’s the key takeaway from a recent survey of 2,045 IT managers and professionals, released by Quali, an IT automation solutions provider. While most people in enterprises would say at this point that they have DevOps underway in some shape or form, achieving […]
The parkas that have made it to the top of Mount Everest and the cover of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit edition have found their way to Wall Street. Shares of Canada Goose, the maker of down winter coats with coyote fur trim and a circle patch logo, soared in their New York debut on Thursday, rising 26 per cent to $16.08 after pricing at $12.78 a piece, above […]
By Jackie Cai and Adam Jourdan | SHANGHAI SHANGHAI China’s annual consumer rights day TV show turned its spotlight on U.S. sports brand Nike Inc (NKE.N) for misleading advertising and Japanese brand Muji for selling food products allegedly sourced from part of Japan affected by radiation. The state-run China Central Television (CCTV) show – which can have brands and their corporate PR teams scurrying to take evasive […]
(Image: CNET) The Amazon Echo was the first mass-market, consumer-level device responding to voice control with general purpose functions, such as playing music. It was launched in the US in 2015. Then, in 2016, Google released its competing device, Google Home. Framingham, Mass.-based digital agency Stone Temple collected 5,000 questions to ask both Google Home and Amazon Alexa. Itverbally asked the devices each question and noted many […]
Good morning. Here’s our morning roundup of all the media news you need to know. Want to get this briefing in your inbox every morning? Subscribe here. Nate Silver’s “March Madness” analysis is out and, knock on hardwood, he’s not picking Hillary Clinton. I know, I know. Cheap (jump) shot. It’s that time of year when FiveThirtyEight, the ESPN-owned politics and sports data site founded by Silver, […]
