Amazon Architecture This is a wonderfully informative Amazon update based on Joachim Rohde's discovery of an interview with Amazon's CTO. You'll learn about how Amazon organizes their teams around services, the CAP theorem of building scalable systems, how they deploy software, and a lot more. Many new additions from the ACM Queue article have also been included. Amazon grew from a tiny online bookstore to one of the largest stores on earth. They did it while pioneering new and interesting ways to rate, review, and recommend products. Site: Information Sources
Unboxing the First Quad-Core Android Tablet The Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime, the first quad-core Android tablet has arrived. Before you read the full review, check out the unboxing photos. It's a tablet! The Transformer Prime goes on sale in about two weeks for $499 (32GB) and $599 (64GB). Besides being built around a powerful quad-core 1.4GHz processor, tablet has an 8-megapixel rear camera, a 10-inch, 1280-by-800 super bright "super-IPS" LCD screen, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. The Transformer Prime and keyboard each arrive in a simple black box without many extra components; you do get a charger with the tablet, slim manuals and a blue cleaning cloth, but that's about it. Thus far, the Transformer Prime is the most powerful Android tablet you can get, thanks to the Tegra 3 chipset, but it's missing a key element for 2012: Ice Cream Sandwich, the latest version of Android. To learn more about the Transformer Prime, check out our story from the tablet's announcement.
Gapminder: Unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact based w BOINC E La Carte Raises $4M From Groupon Co-Founders To Bring Tablets To Restaurant Tables E la Carte, a company that develops a tableside tablet for the restaurant and related hospitality industries, has raised $4 million in funding from Lightbank, the venture fund created by Groupon co-founders Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell. The Y Combinator-backed startup previously raised more than $1 million from angel investors including SV Angel, Dave McClure, Joshua Schachter, Roy Rodenstein, and Skip Sack, a former board member and SVP at Applebee’s chain of restaurants. As we’ve written in the past, E la Carte launched ‘Presto,’ earlier this year to bring user-friendly tablets to restaurants to bring efficiency to the tableside and ordering experience. Presto tablets have a full-day battery life, a credit card reader and sit comfortably and on restaurant tables. Similar to shopping for items in an online store, the Menu feature of Presto lets eaters pick which items they’d like to order and uses a shopping cart system so you can order multiple things at once.
Supercomputer Predicts Civil Unrest In Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" series, the future of masses of people can be predicted with "psychohistory," a method of predicting future political and social trends, using a device called the "Prime Radiant." In the 1950s, there wasn't the math or the computational power available to make such a thing reality. Now there might be. Supercomputers, such as the Nautilus at the University of Tennessee's Center for Remote Data Analysis and Visualization, may have brought the world closer to Asimov's vision, though it is still early days. The key is seeking patterns in massive amounts of data and being able to visualize them. Kalev Leetaru, assistant director for text and digital media analytics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, did just that. SCIENCE CHANNEL: Hacker Quiz: Can you distinguish a "phish" from a "pharm"? Leetaru used a database of 100 million news articles spanning the period from 1979 to early 2011. BLOG: Bin Laden Conspiracies Rely on Complex Scenarios
A Glut of Food-Tech Startups Competing for a Piece of the Pie Rajat Suri was excelling at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he dropped out and became a waiter — not the typical direct path to fame and fortune in the technology industry. But then Suri took his restaurant and technology expertise to Palo Alto, raised three rounds of venture capital, including $4 million from the founders of Groupon, and took a seat at the increasingly crowded table of entrepreneurs mixing technology with food. Suri used his time as a waiter to study restaurant inefficiencies and to devise technological solutions. The result: his company, E la Carte , and an iPad-like tablet called Presto that allows diners to order and pay at their tables without server interaction and play games while they wait. E la Carte is one of several similar startups in Silicon Valley. With so many food-tech startups in the area, some observers, including the entrepreneurs themselves, wonder how the companies can stand out and earn money. Marc St. HeardAbout?
Prof Promises Supercomputer on Every Desktop | Wired Enterprise Virginia Tech researcher Wu Feng hopes his work on the HokieSpeed supercomputer will help make supercomputing more accessible (Photo:Virginia Tech) When Wu Feng looks at an iPad, he sees something more than a great way to play Fruit Ninja. To him, Apple’s sleek device looks more like a compute node on a supercomputer of the future: 1.5 gigaflops of computer power just waiting to be harnessed. Feng — an associate professor of computer science at Virginia Tech — hopes to one day bring the supercomputer to an entirely new audience. Today, supercomputers are used by research laboratories, oil companies, and big financial firms, but Feng wants to put them in small businesses and doctor’s offices. And he plans to do it using existing consumer hardware. He’s known for building very small supercomputers. By today’s standards, HokieSpeed is not exactly an elite supercomputer. “A lot of the capability, right now, of personal computers is just latent,” Feng says.
How to Use Your Tablet Computer as a Small Business Tool | SBA.gov Community Think your new tablet is strictly for entertainment purposes? Think again. Small businesses are rapidly finding innovative ways to use tablet computers (iPad, Kindle Fire, Playbook, etc.) to connect with clients, market while on the go, and enhance customer experiences. With the deluge of apps available in the marketplace geared toward tablet devices like the iPad, we small business owners can have the latest technology at a fraction of the cost of more traditional setups. Here are a few ways a tablet can help your business. 1. It seems odd to think that a tablet could replace your workers, but that’s what the iPad is doing for many restaurants nationwide. Point-of-sale systems for restaurants like ISISPOS also make it easy to seat tables, update menus and accept payments, all from a tablet. 2. If your business is too small to really benefit from merchant services and credit card processing, but would like to accept credit cards, the tablet can help you do that. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Charity Engine: The Ethical Supercomputer That Can Win You $10,000 SETI@Home, a massive distributed computing effort hunting for alien life, is beloved by space geeks and Jodie Foster fans everywhere. But distributed computing--grabbing CPU time from individual computers to generate supercomputing-like abilities--isn’t limited to quests for aliens. The technology is used to assemble proteins (Rosetta@home), detect earthquakes, and more. The latest distributed computing project, dubbed Charity Engine, uses surplus PC time for all sorts of projects. In the process, it raises cash for charity and offers participants the chance to win cold, hard cash. The idea for Charity Engine didn’t come from a charity, or even a large university seeking extra computing power. Anyone who wants to help can download the Charity Engine app, which runs in the background of your computer. Charity Engine’s biggest future client is Wolfram Mathematica, but the system could be used for everything from climate modeling to molecular modeling.
Point of sale Points of sale at a Target store POS (point-of-sale) is the place where a retail transaction is completed. It is the point at which a customer makes a payment to the merchant in exchange for goods or services. At the point of sale the retailer would calculate the amount owed by the customer and provide options for the customer to make payment. The merchant will also normally issue a receipt for the transaction. The POS in various retail industries uses customized hardware and software as per their requirements. The modern point of sale is often referred to as the point of service because it is not just a point of sale but also a point of return or customer order. Terminology[edit] The most common term used is the Point of Sale, particularly when talking about this area from the customer's perspective. History[edit] Software prior to the 1990s[edit] Early electronic cash registers (ECR) were controlled with proprietary software and were limited in function and communications capability.
TechMan: Supercomputers in the cloud You've probably heard a lot of talk about the cloud -- software and services that live on computers somewhere else but can be used by you over the Internet. Well there are also supercomputers in the cloud, brought to you by that retail giant Amazon. In 2006 Amazon debuted its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). What does a company that sells books and CDs and electronics have to do with supercomputing? Well, besides having warehouses full of goods, Amazon has buildings full of computer servers. These days a supercomputer is often made up of thousands of off-the-shelf computers working together to solve complex problems. Implementing the software that creates these supercomputers in the cloud from machines all over the world is where Jason Stowe comes in. In 2005, he began Cycle Computing, which helps its clients assemble and use cloud-based supercomputers. It is a concept known as utility supercomputing, and Mr. But, to be serious, the possibilities are impressive. Mr. That's a bargain. Mr.