Link: The secrets to Apple’s success in marketing to teenagers
Month / August 2007
Security violation scorecard: Military: 3,900, Milbloggers: 30
Link: Security violation scorecard: Military: 3,900, Milbloggers: 30
With the ongoing debate about the potential security risks of soldiers who blog, one wouldn’t expect official military web sites to have 130-fold more security violations than soldier blogs. Yet they do.
ongoing · Spook Country
Link: ongoing · Spook Country
Mmm, new William Gibson. Interesting comment at the end on good book marketing.
Dell Considers Bundling Virtualization on Mobos
Link: Dell Considers Bundling Virtualization on Mobos
castrox writes “Ars Technica is reporting that Dell may be considering bundling virtualization on some of their motherboards. No more dual boot or VMs inside the running OS? ‘Any way you slice it, though, putting the hypervisor in a chunk of flash and letting it handle loading the OS is the way forward, especially for servers and probably even for enterprise desktops. Boot times, power consumption, security, and flexibility are all reasons to do this … The big question is: which hypervisor will Dell bundle with its machines? Vance suggests hypervisors from XenSource and VMware as two options, but I think that VMware is the most likely candidate since it seems to be the x86 virtualization solution of choice for the moment. However, if Dell doesn’t try too hard to lock it down, this system could easily be modified in an aftermarket fashion to include almost any hypervisor that could fit on the flash chip.’”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Algorithm Seamlessly Patches Holes In Images
Link: Algorithm Seamlessly Patches Holes In Images
Beetle B. writes in with research from Carnegie Mellon demonstrating a new way to replace arbitrarily shaped blank areas in an image with portions of images from a huge catalog in a totally seamless manner. From the abstract: “In this paper we present a new image completion algorithm powered by a huge database of photographs gathered from the Web. The algorithm patches up holes in images by finding similar image regions in the database that are not only seamless but also semantically valid. Our chief insight is that while the space of images is effectively infinite, the space of semantically differentiable scenes is actually not that large. For many image completion tasks we are able to find similar scenes which contain image fragments that will convincingly complete the image. Our algorithm is entirely data-driven, requiring no annotations or labelling by the user.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.