Technology

The next version of HTTP won’t be using TCP

Today’s HTTP (versions 1.0, 1.1, and 2) are all layered on top of TCP (Transmission Control Protocol). TCP, defined as part of the core set of IP (Internet Protocol) layers, provides reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of data over an IP network. ‘Reliable’ means that if some data goes missing during transfer (due to a hardware failure, congestion, or a timeout), the receiving end can detect this and demand that the sending end re-send the missing data; ‘ordered’ means that data is received in the order that it was transmitted in; ‘error-checked’ means that any corruption during transmission can be detected.

India Pushes Back Against Tech ‘Colonization’ by Internet Giants

With Facebook, Google and Amazon dominating India’s internet, lawmakers have declared their intention to impose tough new rules on the tech industry. India is trying to establish strong data protections for its citizens, as Europe did, while giving the government the right to obtain private information as it sees fit. For some Indian political leaders, it is as if their nation — which was ruled by Britain for a century until 1947 — is being conquered by colonial powers all over again.

Fast fashion: for an e-commerce model in China, 150 outfits in 13 hours is a day’s work

Samsung Securities’ $105 Billion Fat-Finger Share Error Triggers Urgent Regulator Inquiry

The Art of Soldering

The story of solder, the unsung hero of the digital revolution that benefits from a low melting point. It’s what keeps the circuits attached to the silicon.

Seeing More with In Silico Labeling of Microscopy Images

In the fields of biology and medicine, microscopy allows researchers to observe details of cells and molecules which are unavailable to the naked eye. Transmitted light microscopy, where a biological sample is illuminated on one side and imaged, is relatively simple and well-tolerated by living cultures but produces images which can be difficult to properly assess. Fluorescence microscopy, in which biological objects of interest (such as cell nuclei) are specifically targeted with fluorescent molecules, simplifies analysis but requires complex sample preparation.

The Electronics Cooling System 400 Million Years in the Making

Why SQLite Does Not Use Git

SQLite does not use the Git version control system. SQLite uses Fossil instead. Fossil and Git are both block-chain version-control systems.

This app features super-accurate GPS, and I can’t figure out how it works

One of Estonia’s first “e-residents” explains what it means

In 2014, Estonia, a country previously known as much for its national singing revolution as anything else, became the first country in the world to launch an e-Residency program. Once admitted, e-Residents can conduct business worldwide as if they were from Estonia, which is a member of the EU. They are given government-issued digital IDs, can open Estonian bank and securities accounts, form and register Estonian companies, and have a front-row seat as nascent concepts of digital and virtual citizenship evolve.

Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

Lidar system images bullet in flight

Lidar imaging has been around for almost as long as the technology it’s based on, the laser. But unlike its more famous cousin, radar, it was mostly used for research purposes. The reason scientists know so much about the density of aerosols in the upper atmosphere is largely due to the practice of shooting powerful lasers into the atmosphere and examining the return signal.

China Is Building a Rain-Making System Three Times as Big as Spain

Why German companies fail at digital innovation

We Germans have a huge problem. We invented the car. We have some of the best engineers and 11 of the 100 most valuable brands.

In field tests, device harvests water from desert air

You really can extract clean drinking water right from the air, even in the driest of deserts, MIT researchers have found. They’ve demonstrated a real-world version of a water-harvesting system based on metal organic frameworks, or MOFs, that they first described last year.

Fabric Aggregator: A flexible solution to our traffic demand

All traffic that leaves or enters Facbook’s data centers is handled by the fabric aggregation layer. Traffic that flows between buildings in a region is referred to as east/west traffic, while traffic exiting and entering a regions is known as north/south traffic. As we scale our regions and introduce more immersive experiences, both types of traffic continue to grow, although at different rates.

The Play Store gets a “try now” button for games, no install required

IBM Built a Computer the Size of a Grain of Salt. Here’s What It’s For

Low-power microLED display tech could power future Apple Watches

Apple is reportedly taking a big step toward making its own displays, and it isn’t using the technology you may be most familiar with. According to a Bloomberg report, a secret facility in California close to Apple Park houses engineers developing microLED displays for Apple mobile devices. While Apple has been making its own chips for its mobile devices for a few years, this would be the first time the company has attempted to build its own displays.

LiDAR scans are finding hidden Roman roads and cutting crime

Open Location Code: Easier location encoding

Open Location Codes are a way of encoding location into a form that is easier to use than latitude and longitude. They are designed to be used like street addresses, especially in places where buildings aren’t numbered or streets aren’t named.

Why Siri is behind the Google Assistant and Alexa

According to the report, after acquiring the original Siri app in 2010 for $200 million, Apple proceeded to quickly integrate the digital assistant into the iPhone 4S in 2011. There was so much potential for Siri, and Apple promised to bring voice controls to the masses just as it did multi-touch on the original iPhone.

Digitising books as objects: The invisible made visible

Technology has improved immensely since then and a lot of ‘ink’ has been spread across physical and virtual pages about the remit, the limitations and the advantages of what is offered to the public through the surrogates uploaded onto countless web portals. This piece is just another little drop into this ocean of ink to share some considerations built upon experience and from the perspective of a book conservator who sees, because of his professional background, the limitations of this, but also the exciting challenges to overcome them.

The Nexus Linking IBM, California Wine, and Climate Modeling

By 2015, Hamann says, the technology—which uses machine learning to extract insights from multiple layers of information—proved itself. Gallo improved yields on the test site while reducing water use. The partnership quickly found another use for IBM’s AI: analyzing a number of variablessuch as proximity to the winery, weather patterns, elevation, days of sunshine, and other factors toidentify suitable locations for new vineyards.

Profilo: Understanding app performance in the wild

The Facebook apps for Android and iOS are used by billions of people across the world. We have ambitious goals around delivering a delightful experience for people using Facebook and a strong belief that responsiveness and smoothness are keystones of a high-quality product experience. Together, these mean that, among other things, we need to quickly and efficiently investigate performance problems.

The Military-Industrial Complex Roots of GPS

The story of the Navstar Global Positioning System starts in 1973, when the US Department of Defense approved funding for the technology, and the system was built out in bits and pieces up until 1995.

Cloudflare JavaScript Workers are $0.50 per million requests

Exactly one year ago today, Cloudflare gave me a mission: Make it so people can run code on Cloudflare’s edge. At the time, we didn’t yet know what that would mean. Would it be container-based?

Building Windows: 4 million commits, 10 million work items

Microsoft’s switch to using Git as the version control system for Windows’ development has resulted in many challenges. Git wasn’t really built for a 300GB repository with 3.5 million files, and the engineering effort to make Git scale in this way continues.

Recreating the self-driving experience: the making of the Waymo 360° video

How Do Drone Light Shows Work?

MRS is a new initiative of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Multi-Robot Systems, and it’s intended to bring together researchers who are in the field of multi-robot systems (MRS) and multi-agent systems (MAS). “Typically MRS/MAS research is spread across large conferences, so the intent of this more focused conference is to bring those researchers together to highlight the best in the field and learn more from each other,” said Dr. Nora Ayanian, Assistant Professor and Director of the ACT Lab at USC and MRS chair.

Philosophical intuition: just what is ‘a priori’ justification?

Philosophers use the term ‘intuition’ in a slightly different sense than it is used in everyday discourse. Generally speaking, the difference is that philosophical intuitions are based solely on understanding a proposition, while non-philosophical intuitions are not. If a proposition seems true to you simply on the basis of your understanding of it, and not on the basis of empirical evidence, testimony, memory or reasoning, then you are having an intuition in a philosophical sense that it is true.

5G’s secret weapon will be low latency, empowering next-gen VR and gaming

The Costly Fiasco of Minnesota’s Licensing and Registration System

How long should a state take to develop an information system to manage its vehicle and driver services’ transactions? For Minnesota, the wish is that it is only going to be the 11 years it is now scheduled to take.

HotSwap: Bringing hot code reloading to Buck

Every day hundreds of Facebook engineers make thousands of code changes, each of which requires at least one, and usually many, iterations of the edit-compile-run development cycle. To speed up this process, we built and open-sourced Buck, a build tool designed from the ground up for fast iteration, allowing engineers to compile and run changes quickly.

Feeding Frenzy for AI Engineers Gets More Intense

Demand for software engineers with AI expertise continues to increase, while supply flattens

Computing With Random Pulses Promises to Simplify Circuitry and Save Power

Magic Leap New Patent Applications

Just some quick notes to let my readers know I am in the process of digesting some new Magic Leap Patent Applications that were published last week. There are several related applications, but the most interesting one was US20180052277 MULTI-LAYER DIFFRACTIVE EYEPIECE. This application is 272 pages long, and I have only had time to flip through it, so this is all preliminary information, so I am mostly going off the figures.