anr blogja

http://crispian-jago.blogspot.hu/2013/03/the-venn-diagram-of-irrational…

Internet Census
Upon discovering hundreds of thousands open embedded devices on the Internet, an anonymous researcher conducted a Census of the Internet, mapping 460 million IP addresses around the world.

While playing around with the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) we discovered an amazing number of open embedded devices on the Internet. Many of them are based on Linux and allow login to standard BusyBox with empty or default credentials. We used these devices to build a distributed port scanner to scan all IPv4 addresses. These scans include service probes for the most common ports, ICMP ping, reverse DNS and SYN scans. We analyzed some of the data to get an estimation of the IP address usage.
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The why is also simple: I did not want to ask myself for the rest of my life how much fun it could have been or if the infrastructure I imagined in my head would have worked as expected. I saw the chance to really work on an Internet scale, command hundred thousands of devices with a click of my mouse, portscan and map the whole Internet in a way nobody had done before, basically have fun with computers and the Internet in a way very few people ever will. I decided it would be worth my time.
http://flowingdata.com/2013/03/22/internet-census/
http://internetcensus2012.bitbucket.org/paper.html

http://cheezburger.com/7136023040

One of the best-kept secrets of Google’s rapid evolution into the most dominant force on the web is a software called Borg. Google has been using the system for a good nine or 10 years and John Wilkes and his team are now building a new version of the tool, codenamed Omega.

Borg is a way of efficiently parceling work across Google’s vast fleet of computer servers, and according to Wilkes, the system is so effective, it has probably saved Google the cost of building an extra data center. Yes, an entire data center.
...

Google's systems are big. Google engineers might receive an emergency alert because a system that stores data is down to its last few petabytes of space. In other words, billions of megabytes can flood a fleet of Google machines in a matter of hours.

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, vendors will ship 918.6 million smartphones this year, or 50.1% of the total mobile phone shipments worldwide.

By the end of 2017, IDC forecasts 1.5 billion smartphones will be shipped worldwide, which equates to just over two-thirds of the total mobile phone forecast for the year due to these primary factors.
...
China will easily remain the world's largest market for smartphones, specifically low-cost handsets based on the Android operating system and to a lesser degree iOS.
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23982813#.UTUEr2xXqLo

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21595541

The total mobile phone market, at 438.1 million units, was flat year-on-year, while the worldwide smart phone market grew 37%. Android smart phones accounted for 34% of all phone shipments and iOS phones 11%. Smart phones now represent almost 50% of all the phones that shipped in Q4 2012.

Non-smartphone mobile phones should be virtually extinct in 2015 (based on the 37% year over year growth of smartphones and the flat mobile phone market).

In the smart phone market, Android handsets accounted for 69% of the 216.5 million shipped. Samsung had a very strong quarter, growing 78%, while the Chinese vendors Huawei, ZTE, Lenovo and Yulong all grew by triple-digit percentages. Android’s share did, however, dip sequentially from 74% as Apple’s share grew from 15% to 22% on the strength of the iPhone 5. BlackBerry and Windows Phone shares remained unchanged sequentially at 4% and 2% respectively.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/02/non-smartphone-mobile-phones-should-be…

The shortest traveling salesman route going through all 13,509 cities in the United States with a population of at least 500 (as of 1998).

Not long ago, a team of researchers from Stanford and McGill universities broke a 35-year record in computer science by an almost imperceptible margin — four hundredths of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a percent, to be exact.
...
In 1976, Nicos Christofides, a professor at Imperial College London, developed an algorithmthat produces routes guaranteed to be at most 50 percent longer than the shortest route.
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Finally in 2011, the Stanford-McGill team edged past Christofides’ 50 percent guarantee for certain types of traveling salesman problems, showing that its algorithm’s solutions would be at most 49.99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999996 percent longer than the true answer.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/01/traveling-salesman-problem/al…

One of the prescriptions you suggest for companies to avoid obsolescence is to cannibalize their own products. Explain.
The reason you need to cannibalize is because change is coming so fast and new technologies are coming and obsoleting old technologies. If you don’t cannibalize your own products, your competitors will. A classic example is Apple, which introduced the iPhone and cannibalized the iPod.

...
How long does it usually take for a big innovation to find success?
On average it takes about six years for a new product to take off. Initially, the products with the new technology are often inferior. But as the quality improves and the price drops, they offer a better value than the old technology.

http://flowingdata.com/2013/01/25/internet-explorer-causation/

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/correlation.png

Benjamin
Data from Net Applications shows that Windows 8 is less popular than Windows Vista, the operating system that proved unpopular with the enthusiast audience.
Windows 8 usage uptake has slipped behind Vista’s in the same point in its release. Windows 8 online usage share is around 1.6% of all Windows PC’s which is less than the 2.2% share that Windows Vista commanded at the same two month mark after release.
http://www.kitguru.net/software/operating-systems/benjamin/windows-8-pr…

Games by genre, and games by platform
http://chartporn.org/2012/12/21/video-games-1975-2011/

The phenomenon of "social engineering" is behind the vast majority of successful hacking.

This isn't the high tech wizardry of Hollywood but is a good, old-fashioned confidence trick.

It's been updated for the modern age, and although modern terms such as "phishing" and "smishing" are used to describe the specific tricks used, they all rely upon a set of human characteristics which, with due respect to Hieronymus Bosch, you might picture as the "seven deadly sins" of social engineering:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20717773

There are three basic types of solids: metals, semiconductors, used in today’s transistors, and insulators – also called dielectrics.

Dielectrics do not conduct electricity and get damaged or break down if too high of fields of energy are applied to them. The scientists discovered that when dielectrics were given very short and intense laser pulses, they start conducting electricity while remaining undamaged.

The fastest time a dielectric can process signals is on the order of 1 femtosecond – the same time as the light wave oscillates and millions of times faster than the second handle of a watch jumps.

IEEE Spectrum - Flash memory wears out after being programmed and erased about 10 000 times. That’s fine for a USB dongle that you’ll probably lose in a year, but not ideal for the solid-state drives of server farms. And the same problem keeps manufacturers from using flash to replace other types of computer memories. This month, at the 2012 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting, engineers from Macronix plan to report the invention of a self-healing NAND flash memory that survives more than 100 million cycles.
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Macronix engineers saw a solution in a competing technology, phase change RAM. In PCRAM, a bit is stored in a material called a chalcogenide glass, which can be either conductive or insulating. The bit’s material switches between those states when briefly heated in a particular way. According to Lue, Macronix researchers noticed that heating the glass to its melting point had a kind of healing effect on their PCRAM. (They reported those results at the IEEE International Reliability Physics Symposium in April 2012.)

Parrot's AR.Drone 2.0 captures photos and video via on-board HD camera offers live recording and streaming via Wi-Fi and can even execute 360-degree roll by simply hitting a button or by tilting a smartphone or tablet. Seydoux calls Parrot's toy drones “a new frontier for video games.”
http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/12/smartphones-move-center-stage-in-cars…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ze84IaSnKFs

The 40th edition of the twice-yearly TOP500 List of the world’s top supercomputers was released today (Nov. 12, 2012). The Oak Ridge National Laboratory Titan, a Cray XK7 system, achieved 17.59 Petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second) on the Linpack benchmark. Titan has 560,640 processors, including 261,632 NVIDIA K20x accelerator cores.

In claiming the top spot, Titan knocked Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Sequoia out of No. 1 and into second place. Sequoia, an IBM BlueGene/Q system, was No. 1 in June 2012 with an impressive 16.32 Petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark. With 1,572,864 cores, Sequoia is the first system with one million or more cores.
http://www.top500.org/lists/2012/11/

Every iPhone or iPad or iPod touch that you see in the wild, they all have processors inside that were manufactured by Samsung. Samsung, knowing that Apple simply can’t call another company and ask them to make their chips, raised the prices of said chips by 20% according to MarketWatch. There’s not much Apple can do, and the report confirms that, saying Apple accepted the price bump. It also goes on to say that Samsung made roughly 130 million processors for Apple in 2011. This year that number is expected to surpass 200 million. And the contract that Apple and Samsung have, it doesn’t expire until 2014.

Sales up 45%. Earnings up 59.5%. Cash up $40 billion. Analysts were disappointed.
:)

Employees: 72,800 full-time equivalent, up from 60,400 in 2011
Retail employees: 42,400 full-time equivalent, up from 36,000
Building space: 17.3 million square feet, up from 13.2 million
Land owned: 1,770 acres, up from 584
Retail stores: 390, up from 357
Revenue per store: $51.5 million, up from $43.3 million
Price range of common stock: $354.24 to $705.07
Quarterly dividends: $2.65 per share, up from $0.00
Stock performance: Up 335% since Sept. 30, 2007, compared with 5% for S&P 500
Net sales: $156.5 billion, up from $108.2 billion
Earnings per share: $44.15, up from $27.68
Gross margin: 43.9%, up from 40.5%
Cash and marketable securities: $121.25 billion, up from $81.57 billion
Long term debt: $0.00
Research and development: $3.38 billion, up from $2.43 billion
Capital expenditures: $10.3 billion, up from $8.3 billion
Projected CapEx for 2013: $10 billion -- $850 million for retail stores, $9.15 billion for product tooling and manufacturing process equipment, and corporate facilities and infrastructure, including information systems hardware, software and enhancements
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/11/01/by-the-numbers-apples-fiscal-201…

The percentage is greater than 100 to offset for operating losses incurred by struggling vendors like Research in Motion, Nokia and Motorola.

http://cdn.eetimes.com/electronics-blogs/other/4400412/Apple--Samsung-s…

-Samsung shipped more than twice as many smartphones as Apple Inc. in the third quarter
-Worldwide smartphone shipments increased 32.8% YoY to 155.5 million
-Worldwide handset shipments decreased 1.9% YoY to 387.3 million units in Q3 2012
-Nokia smartphone shipments declined 38% from Q2 2012 to 6.3 million
-Nokia will have trouble remaining a top ten smartphone OEM in Q4
- LG returned to profitability on the back of strong LTE smartphone shipment growth while ZTE showed the best YoY smartphone shipment growth of 168.4%.
-RIM and HTC both continued to struggle with their smartphone strategies and portfolios by experiencing YoY smartphone shipment declines of 37.2% and 54.6% respectively.
http://www.abiresearch.com/press/samsung-ships-twice-as-many-smartphone…

On Where the Internet lives, our new site featuring beautiful photographs by Connie Zhou, you’ll get a never-before-seen look at the technology, the people and the places that keep Google running.
http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery
In addition, you can now explore our Lenoir, NC data center at your own pace in Street View. Walk in the front door, head up the stairs, turn right at the ping-pong table and head down the hall to the data center floor. Or take a stroll around the exterior of the facility to see our energy-efficient cooling infrastructure. You can also watch a video tour to learn more about what you're viewing in Street View and see some of our equipment in action.
http://goo.gl/q1bh8
http://goo.gl/w03sJ
http://googleblog.blogspot.hu/2012/10/googles-data-centers-inside-look…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avP5d16wEp0&feature=player_embedded

What are Apple's still existing advantages?

It has the best supply chain in the business. We see the power of that supply chain this month as the new iPhone has gotten top reviews on sites like gdgt.com.
It has the best design team in the business.
It has the best PR team in the business. At Apple's latest press conference it had six times more satellite trucks outside than when Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, spoke.
It has the best retail channel in the business.
What is missing now that Jobs is gone?

The salesmanship. He goaded the industry to move to higher things and he convinced us that the future was here and that it was important to pay attention.
His ability to say no and keep things from shipping. Andy Grignon, who worked on the first iPhone, tells me all the time about how Jobs would kill a project or send it back for more work. He tells about how the original iPhone looked nothing like the shipping product. Jobs kept saying "no" until it was perfect.
His ability to get us to appreciate seemingly unimportant details. I still remember when he told me to look at how beautiful the back of an iMac was. Mr Cook tries to pull this off, but it doesn't sound the same coming from him.