Nerdly News Curated from Interesting Sites
Software service 72Lux today announced the launch of Shoppable, a new website and ecommerce platform that allows consumers to manage their shopping wish lists over a variety of retailers and publishers in one place. Read More
When the Supreme Court ruled Aereo was illegal last week, many thought it was the final nail in the coffin for the nascent cloud-based antenna service.
But it seems even though CEO Chet Kenojia said he didn’t have a Plan B, he came up with one. On Tuesday he sent a letter to subscribers, calling them to demand action from their representatives in Congress. Read More
Last night a sizable number of Facebook advertisers received receipts listing other people’s ads, including company names, campaign names, and amount spent. Sources tipped us off to the bug, and Facebook confirms to me it occurred and was fixed in about two hours. It confirms that no one was charged for other people’s ads, despite one victim claiming otherwise, and ad… Read More
Google Capital led the latest round of $110 million in financing for Bangalore based MapR Technologies. MapR, which helps companies around the world deploy Hadoop, raised $80 million in private equity from Google Capital, Qualcomm Incorporated, through its venture investment group, Qualcomm Ventures, and existing investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, NEA and… Read More
NASA scrubbed the launch of a Delta II rocket Tuesday, 46 seconds before it was to carry the agency’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) satellite into orbit.
The grandeur of Mesa Verdes cliff-side dwellings and the awe-inspiring engineering feats of Chaco Canyon attest to the vibrant cultures that flourished in the American Southwest more than 1,000 years ago. At these sites, ancient civilizations monitored the motions of the cosmos, developed…
A former female executive at Tinder, the popular dating app, alleges in a lawsuit that two male superiors sexually harassed her through frightening text messages and disparaging comments, then later demoted her because of her gender.
In “How To Build Template Driven Java Websites with FreeMarker and RESTEasy,” Java developer Dele Taylor argues that combining template-driven development with RESTful resources adds up to a serious sweet spot for Java web developers. His quick programming example leverages FreeMarker along with JBoss’s RESTEasy framework and Twitters Bootstrap front-end framework to build web app in just a few easy steps.
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T-Mobile may claim that it always has its customers’ best interests at heart, but the US government thinks otherwise. The FTC just filed a suit against the carrier alleging that it has been engaging in the practice of “cramming” its customers’ bills with false charges. According to the FTC, T-Mobile commonly adds charges for “premium” SMS-based subscriptions for services like “flirting tips, horoscope information or celebrity gossip” that typically cost $9.99 per month. Furthermore, the FTC is claiming that T-Mobile did nothing to stop these charges for years after it signs showed the services were spam.
Lastly, the FTC says that the services in question had refund request rates of up to 40 percent in a single month a fact that the…
For decades, the data collection process for behavioral therapists has mostly been manually done. But now, a new startup called Nightingale is seeking to change the way that behavioral therapists collect and report data, simplifying the process with mobile apps instead of pen and paper. Read More
Three recently public technology companies are surging today, potentially indicating fresh analyst and investor enthusiasm for tech shares. GoPro is up more than 21% at the time of writing, continuing a massive bull run since its recent debut. Its shares are nearing the $50 mark. The company IPO’d at $24 per share, meaning that it has more than doubled its value since going public.… Read More
Gymnastic rings are excellent equipment for bodyweight fitness training
British Airways is trialling an in-flight sensor blanket called the “Happiness Blanket” to determine what makes first class passengers happy.
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With its painterly style, Okami is easily one of the most beautiful experiences in gaming, and now you can hang it on your walls. Publisher Capcom has partnered with Dutch art dealership Cook & Becker to release a series of limited edition, “museum-grade” art prints for the game, which was originally released on the PlayStation 2 back in 2006.
The new hand-numbered prints feature a variety of art and designs from Takeyasu Sawaki, Kenichiro Yoshimura, and Mari Shimazaki who all worked on the…
We take portable music for granted these days. Any commuter in any big city in the world is more likely than not to have a pair of earbuds or headphones on as they walk, bike, or ride to their destination. The thing is, personal portable music didn’t exist for most of human history, at least not in any mainstream fashion. Not until the Sony Walkman came along.
The first of Sony’s iconic portable cassette tape players went on sale on this day, July 1st, back in 1979 for $150. As the story…
Why would prestigious VCs Founders Fund and Lowercase Capital invest $4.5 million in what looks like a Tinder clone? Because Hinge is building a romance graph of what structured data clues suggest two people will want to date. While Hinge’s app might not be as carefree as swiping through Tinder’s seemingly endless queue of mates, it delivers a daily set of tailored… Read More
Today, HP announced it had reached a settlement with its shareholders over its handling of the purchase of Autonomy for $10B back in 2011, but it’s far from the end of the story as the fight over the Autonomy purchase will very likely head to court, this time with HP and its shareholders at one table and Autonomy’s former executives at the other. Apparently, HP shareholders decided… Read More
In 1961 just a few days before a meeting of scientists interested in the search for ET, pioneering astronomer Frank Drake came up with a powerful provocation: an equation to estimate the number of worlds likely to harbor extraterrestrial civilizations; over at National Geographic, his science writer daughter Nadia looks at her dad’s impact.
Recently I was asked what I thought was the most important trend in IT. And it wasn’t hard to answer: The shift from proprietary, scale-up systems to commodity, open source, scale-out systems.
NoSQL databases provide a good example of scaling out versus up. To beef up Oracle or any other conventional, proprietary RDBMS, you need to scale up the database server with more cores, more caching, more flash, and so on. At a certain point, you’ll need another server, which means you’ll be saddled with sharding the database and maintaining it in that state (yes, you could use Oracle RAC, but that’s another story).
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Last week saw the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 ruling, effectively wipe Aereo off the map by making the company’s streaming service illegal. The decision had swift ramifications, with the company alerting customers over the weekend that it would suspend its offerings until it worked out next steps with the courts. In a last-ditch effort, CEO Chet Kanojia today sent a letter to customers urging them to notify Congress that they want the decision reversed.