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Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey – it’s little surprise that those titans of tech want to encourage more wannabe coders. But in a short film released Tuesday by the nonprofit Code.org, it’s not just the usual suspects talking up all the reasons why the U.S. needs more computer scientists.

Sure, Silicon Valley luminaries share the stories of their humble beginnings (Gates says his first program was for tic-tac-toe). But NBA all-star Chris Bosh talks about coding in college before joining the Miami Heat and the Black-Eyed Peas’ Will.i.am says “great coders are today’s rockstars.”

The message of the film – just like the over-arching theme of the nonprofit: the country needs more coders and, really, it’s not as hard as you think.

Code.org, which launched last month, was founded by brothers Ali and Hadi Partovi to bring more attention to the need for more coders and increase computer programming education opportunities at schools around the country. As evidence of the problem, it says:

• Less than two percent of students study computer programming – tripling that could close the gap between students and jobs
• In 41 states, computer science doesn’t count toward high school graduation requirements
• Programming jobs are growing at double the pace of other jobs but programming is not offered at 90 percent of U.S. schools

Code.org’s site offers learn-to-code tools supplied by Khan Academy, Codecademy and Scratch. And it’s enlisted big-name supporters from different industries to help with its campaign. Other tech leaders include Marc Andreesen, Ron Conway and Sheryl Sandberg, but it’s also recruited politicians Al Gore and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the presidents or deans of Stanford and Harvard, celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Bono and top scientists and doctors.

The short film, which was directed by Lesley Chilcott (producer of An Inconvenient Truth and Waiting for Superman), will be distributed to teachers and classrooms across the country. And, according to The Seattle Times, Microsoft is paying to have the movie shown as a trailer in select theaters.

In the past year or so, we’ve seen several startups — including Codecademy, Udacity, LearnStreet and others – rush in to fill the skills gap between what our digital economy needs and what students are learning. (Earlier today we covered the Peter Thiel-backed Thinkful, one of the newer startups in the learn-to-code space.) We’ve also seen the rise of technology high schools — like Brooklyn’s Pathways in Technology Early College High School recently endorsed by President Obama — that put programming and STEM skills at the center of the curriculum. But by featuring voices from industry, pop culture and politics Code.org stands to bring awareness to a wider group of people.

Below, check out the video:

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Trina Spear, 29, graduated in 2011 with an MBA from an elite school and a hefty $170,000 in student loans. The debt was the reason she took a job in private equity rather than start her own company. "For someone coming out of Harvard Business School, people think you have every opportunity in the world to do everything you want in life," she said. "[But] you really feel like you’re handcuffed and you have to go to the big corporate job."

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Well, that didn't take very long. eBay has taken down a listing form a seller that claimed that he had been given the opportunity to purchase Google Glass as part of the search company's #ifihadglass competition, but not before the item was bid up to $15,900 (according to a cached version of the page). That's ten times the price that Google said it would charge competition winners, but, more to the point, the entire sale was a scam. Google's website for the competition, which is opening up early access to the Explorer Edition of the headset to "creative individuals," says that winners won't be notified until mid-to-late March. The deadline for applications is today. As PCMag points out, Google's terms and conditions for the competition...

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Scientists have pulled off a real world, rodent-scale version of Vulcan "mind meld" from Star Trek, linking the brains of pairs of rats together over the internet to allow them to share sensory information and solve problems together in realtime without being in the same room, or even on the same continent. "These experiments showed that we have established a sophisticated, direct communication linkage between brains," said the project's leader Miguel Nicolelis, a neurobiologist at Duke University, in a statement released Thursday.

He and his colleagues at Duke and ELS-IINN , a Brazilian neuroscience institute, constructed what they say is the first working "brain-to-brain" interface by surgically implanting electrodes in the brains of...

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While I’m sure there’s some scientific reason for demonstrating how the quadrupedal Big Dog can pick up and throw cinder blocks across a workshop (“Ahem, urm, we’re showing how the mass of the brick has little or no direct effect on the quadruped’s center of gravity, allowing it to carry large objects in the field, ahrm.”), I think what we’re seeing here is the first example of a nascent new robotic sport, human tossing.

What’s really going on here are experiments involving using the legs of the robots to propel objects. “This sort of dynamic approach is routinely used by human athletes and is now improving the performance of robots,” writes Big Dog’s creators at Boston Dynamics. If they only knew.

Imagine a field full of Big Dogs and some of the finest convict athletes from the off-world colonies. Zarg fakes to the left but Big Dog lunges and grabs his suit, ripping off the helmet (and head) and throwing it across the end zone. Torgo grabs a cinder block to throw at Master Big Dog but two Minor Big Dogs grab it in mid-air and toss it back, crushing a group of spectators in the stands.

Naturally, the Big Dogs always win.

via Giz

Download a song from iTunes, and you can only add that song to the music library of five other computers. Grab a copy of the latest Microsoft Office, and you’d better hope you won’t be upgrading your computer any time soon. Obviously DRM is a great tool for companies to make sure we only use software and data as intended, but outside planned obsolescence, there isn’t much in the way of DRM for physical objects.

This is where a team from the University of Art and Design in Lausanne, Switzerland comes in. They designed a chair that can only be sat upon eight times. After that, the chair falls apart necessitating the purchase of a new chair. Somewhere in the flat-pack furniture industry, someone is kicking themselves for not thinking of this sooner while another is wondering how they made a chair last so long.

The design of the chair is fairly simple; all the joints of the chair are cast in wax with a piece of nichrome wire embedded in the wax. An Arduino with a small switch keeps track of how many times the chair has been used, while a solenoid taps out how many uses are left in the chair every time the user gets up. When the internal counter reaches zero, a relay sends power through the nichrome wire, melting the wax, and returning the chair to its native dowel rod and wooden board form.

Melting wax wasn’t the team’s first choice to rapidly disassemble a chair; their first experiments used gunpowder. This idea nearly worked, but it was soon realized no one on the team wanted to sit on a primed and loaded chair. You can see the videos of the wax model failing after the break.

Filed under: android hacks

I was browsing Reddit the other day when I happened upon a fascinating AskReddit thread, which posed the question: “How do Marty McFly’s parents not realize that they gave birth to their friend from the 50′s who mysteriously disappeared?” It’s a question that’s always vexed me as well. I mean, Calvin Klein made such a dramatic impact on the McFly’s lives, you’d think they’d have recognized their second son, Marty, was growing up to be this dude, no?

Well, maybe they did. The thread spawned some pretty fascinating discussion. I’ve excerpted some of the best responses below the jump, but make sure to check out the whole thread.

Reddit user rildchaper9988 chimes in with an obvious, but astute, observation:

A person’s looks can be distorted by memories, so even though he’s the same person, they may not remember him looking like that. Also Marty didnt always look like that. He was born looking very different and grew up to look the way he does. So when he turned 18 or whatever his parents wouldnt just be like “holy shit, it’s Calvin!” In reality, they’d probably just think of it as a weird co-winky-dink.

Reddit user BPJordan suggests the following:

I’m way too late to get an answer that will get upvoted, but I’ve always thought George remembered Marty and his mysterious disappearance and realizes his similarities to Marty. So what explains his casual acceptance of all of it? George McFly fundamentally believes that aliens interfered in his life in order to bring him and Loraine together.

The prom where he knocks out Biff and falls in love with his wife is obviously the most pivotal event in his life. His experiences with the young Marty are so memorable to him that he even adopts his own son’s sayings, “If you put your mind to it, you can achieve anything.” But the rest of the story makes no sense if you’ve been thinking about if for years.

Where did Calvin come from? Where did he go? Who was he? Why was he wearing a life preserver? None of these things make much sense in isolation, but when you put everything that was Calvin Klein/Marty McFly together it starts to make a sort of creepy Nostradamus-like effect. Remember the scene where Marty wakes up his father dressed in the radiation suit and threatens him to comply with the plan? This is a small part of the movie, but I can’t imagine there would be a day that went by where George McFly didn’t think about it.

What would happen in a few years when there was a popular science fiction villain named Darth Vader and also Star Trek that had a planet Vulcan? George McFly would see it and think that the entirety of pop culture had been infiltrated by extraterrestrials. How the fuck else could they have had knowledge of popular science fiction years before it was thought up on Earth?

Why isn’t he surprised when he has a kid that eventually looks like Marty? Well, that guy was attempting to get him to be with Lorraine at the exact same time the alien visited him. Eventually he’d put two and two together. The Marty at that time was either a time traveller or an alien. This would also be confirmed at the end when Marty tells them not to be as angry at him for setting fire to the rug when he was 9. The moment that Marty set fire to that rug George McFly would have seen this like a confirmation of a prophecy.

I’ve become even more convinced of this because of George McFly’s book. If you look closely at it near the end of the movie, it’s called “A Match Made in Space.” The cover features a boy who looks like George about to kiss a girl that looks like Lorraine being brought together by an alien wearing a suit. I’ve always thought that George McFly’s book is just a re-telling of the whole film. George McFly wrote this book which is to him a non-fiction account of what happened to him, but to the world is a science fiction masterpiece by a little known author.

This would be even further evidence by the fact that Old Man Peabody probably would have eventually told everyone in town that some alien had knocked down one of his pine trees and ruined his barn. Then he had to take a shot at it. To George, these rumors would only reinforce his own perception that the Marty he met in his youth was just a shape-shifting alien who was on a mission to make sure George married Lorraine.

TL;DR – George McFly thinks Marty is Jesus.

User mrthedon has a slight spin on this theory:

You’re wrong. They do know. They’ve known a long time – well, at least George has.

Back in 1976 when George arrived home to find Lorraine screaming and the kids running around all freaked out because the living room rug had burst into flames, he was furious. After he heroically puts out the fire, Marty starts crying and apologizing and saying it was an accident. Just as George is getting ready to kick some ass, he remembers something a good friend told him long ago:

“If you guys ever have kids and one of them when he’s eight years old, accidentally sets fire to the living room rug, be easy on him.”

Ever get that feeling that something is just too crazy to be a coincidence? Well, George did, and pardoned Marty, saying that he was just glad everyone was OK. Yeah, it was pretty strange, but he shook it off and dismissed it. Until…

… 1977. George McFly is a huge fan of sci-fi, so you KNOW he was at the Star Wars premiere. Imagine his shock when none other than DARTH FUCKING VADER appeared on the big screen! That’s right, the same Darth Vader who back in 1955…

“… came down from planet Vulcan. And he told me that if I didn’t take Loraine, that he’d melt my brain.”

Wait a second… the planet Vulcan? Darth Vader isn’t from Vulcan. Vulcan isn’t even in the Star Wars universe – it’s in the Star Trek universe, which, HOLD ON… how did Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan threaten him in 1955 when they hadn’t even been made up yet? THIS IS HEAVY. George was pretty freaked out, but he didn’t put all the pieces together until a few years later.

One night George was sitting in his chair trying to read his copy of H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine” when Marty suddenly started blasting one of his favorite songs on the stereo – Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode”. Marty – who had finally started looking more and more like George’s good buddy from 1955… His good buddy from 1955 who was also named Marty… who played that same song at his high school dance years before it was released… “HOLY SHIT 1955 MARTY IS ACTUALLY MY FUTURE SON WHO WENT BACK IN TIME TO HOOK ME UP WITH HIS MOTHER!!!”

It was all clear to George now! Everything made sense!! He was so, so very proud of his boy, yet he knew he wouldn’t be able to tell him so for many years, because George knew that nobody should know too much about his own density.

If he told Marty that he knew what he knew before Marty had a chance to go back in time, the result could cause a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the space-time continuum and destroy the entire universe. Granted, that’s the worse case scenario. The destruction might, in fact, be very localized, limited to merely our own galaxy… BUT STILL – he couldn’t risk it.

And now you know… “the rest of the story!”

User Luciuspecker has perhaps the darkest take of all:

Marty’s father always suspected his wife of cheating, but loved her too much to call her on it. Later he couldn’t help but notice the striking similarities between his son and their old week-long pal “Calvin Klein.” The resemblance ate him more as the years went by and he could tell that she had ran into Calvin at some point. Along with his penis. She had often swooned over his amazing guitar solo while reminiscing of high school. But he swallowed the suspicion-laced pain for the good of his family. And three weeks after the events of Back to the Future 3 he also swallowed a bottle of pain-killers and a liter of cheap scotch, unable to live with Calvin’s son looking at him across the table every morning.’

And finally, a bonus theory by JakeDDrake, in response to ”Why the f*ck would the McFly’s hire a guy who pretty much attempted to rape Loraine to detail their car?”

It bugs me when people assume that George hired Biff as his own personal assistant. Why would you ever do that with someone who tried to rape your wife?

I bet any amount of money that Biff’s personality being subservient is because Biff was not expecting to work for George McFly that day. I mean, if we take into account your narrative (which seems like a very likely scenario), Biff would be working as a detailer, and get hired out by his employer to go to an all-too-familiar residence. So to stall another ass-kicking, Biff gets started on a whole load of ass-kissing. This would also explain George’s somewhat dickish remarks to Biff during the last scene. He’s simply reminding Biff about who’s in charge.

Again, given that this town has only one highschool, it’s safe to say that all of the people here know each other, hear the news about people’s lives, etc. So Biff’s been in the loop in regards to how awesome Lorraine and George McFly’s life has been. He probably runs into their kids often enough, maybe while he’s working at the main car-wash/ gas station, perhaps at the same Texaco that shows up in 1955 and 2015. This is why he’s familiar with Marty, and knows well enough about him, and probably the other siblings.

[edit: Turns out Biff was self-employed. No biggie, it just means that George probably did it with full malicious intent, as a sort of "hey, it's that douche I knocked out in high school, I'm going to hire him to humiliate him" thing. Which makes you question exactly how much of a jerk George McFly's turned into.]

I just like to assume that Biff’s being there on that specific day was more of a coincidence than anything else, and he had not been employed by George for very long. That’d just be weird. He also wasn’t quite as subservient as we thought. I mean, think about it. In 2015, Biff’s an old (but angry and devious) coot of a man. It’s fair to say that he never was a sniffling sycophant, but held a lot of his anger in over the years, making him grow more bitter and impotent with rage. If he were truly broken of spirit, he never would have taken that copy of Gray’s Sports Almanac to the past to put himself back into a dominant position. He also wouldn’t have given a reason for his Past self to grow up to become the man who kills George McFly, by telling him of his future before his confidence is shaken. After all, Biff is a dick, but he’d never been shown to have murderous tendencies. So Old Biff probably explained to Young Biff what would happen, that it’s probably inevitable, but with the power of that book, he can simply bide his time, build up a lot of wealth, and then have George killed.

***

Discuss: How do you explain the crazy coincidences of Back to the Future?

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If you love yourself some Adventure Time with Finn and Jake then you doubtless love their gender swap alternate versions Fionna and Cake, who have their own curious asides in the Ice Kings freaky fan fiction.

Now artist and Cosplayer Jin Joson from the Phillipines has created some really lovely fan art Cosplay featuring Fionna and Marshall Lee (the gender swapped Marcella of the Scream Queens fame). Not content to wait for another gender swap episode Jin likes the idea of creating some art of his own to fill the void, and it is awesome!

 

 

 

 

Of his inspiration to create the art Jin says:

Some of my favorite Adventure Time episodes are those which revolve around Finn’s friendship with Marceline, so I feel like I’d feel the same way when we get to see more of Fionna with Marshall Lee. While we’re waiting for another genderswap episode, I immensely enjoy seeing fan animations like Marshall Time 

 

 

With movie adaptations being made of every book, TV series, video game, action figure, and boardgame in sight, it was only a matter of time before Cartoon Network’s Ben 10 found its way to the big screen. Joel Silver signed on to make a live-action feature version of the popular sci-fi series back in 2011, and while there haven’t been a ton of updates since then it’s now taking a step forward as up-and-coming writer Ryan Engle boards. Hit the jump to keep reading.

For the uninitiated, Ben 10 follows a boy named Ben Tennyson, who comes across a watchlike device called the Omnitrix that allows him to take on ten different alien forms. The franchise started out as a Cartoon Network animated series in 2008, and has since yielded three more series, three animated TV movies, two live-action TV movies, numerous video games, toy lines, and comic books. Along the way, it’s also picked up two Emmys.

THR writes that Engle will be working off of a previous draft of the script by Albert Torres (Henry Poole Is Here). Engle is relatively new on the scene, but gained some notice a couple years back when his screenplay On a Clear Day landed on the Black List. Since then, he’s also been hired to work on New Line’s video game adaptation Rampage and New Regency’s comic book adaptation The New West. He worked with Silver on the set of Non-Stop, the upcoming Jaume Collet-Serra thriller starring Liam Neeson.

Cartoon Network is backing the development of the Ben 10 movie. As of 2011, the project seemed likely to find a home at Warner Bros., but the film is not currently set up at any studio. Silver’s hope is to turn Ben 10 into a tentpole franchise starter aimed at kids. No casting or release date has been announced as of yet.

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Make your own V for Vendetta / Anonymous Papercraft Mask.

Found in response to Low-Poly V Mask on Thingiverse, submitted by Xaq R., in response to Bahrain’s banning of the mask.

On March 1st, Neil Gaiman spoke at the opening ceremony for this year’s Cambridge International Student Film Festival about his upcoming film and television work. The Book Smugglers were there, tweeting out the highlights, and Neil took control of the Festival's own Twitter account before that, giving out revelations on how HBO will break up American Gods and the work that goes into his Doctor Who scripts.

[HBO’s American Gods and Gaiman’s Doctor Who]

Read the full article

Designers Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen use both real and fictional biotechnology to explore the connection between the natural and the man-made, and invite questions about the impact of biotechnology. One of their projects, Life Support, imagines a world in which dogs and sheep take the role of life-saving medical devices. Their photos compel the viewer to ask: If the technology were available, would you want a greyhound respirator? More »

QR codes are one of those technologies where the execution just hasn't lived up to the concept. But every now and then, someone comes up with a cool application of those little black squares. Berrge Tattoo in Istanbul uses this newspaper ad to make sure their tattoo artist applicants at least have the fine motor skills for the job. In order to reach the job application, they must black in the appropriate squares and scan the QR code. More »

BAD HAVEN might not seem particularly cultured at first glance, but f**k you for being so judgmental  We know what the inside of an art gallery looks like. We’ve been thrown out of plenty in our time….so…yeah….

Insecure reactions aside, once upon a time (2009 to be exact) Marvel did something pretty cool for Wolverines 35th Anniversary and Brian Michael Bendis recently re-shared it via his tumblr:

Now this was pretty cracking – for Wolverine fans, but also for anyone who appreciates great art. And these simply beautiful homages by industry art legends Paolo Rivera, Laura Martin and Fiona Staples but to name a few makes for some required viewing.

We republished them because they’re really too good not to get a second look in, and here’s the gallery below via Marvel.com

 

Uncanny X-Men #508 by Laura Martin – Tribute to Vincent van Gogh

 

Ms Marvel #38 by Paolo Rivera – Tribute to N. C. Wyeth

 

 

Amazing Spider-Man #590 by Paolo Rivera – Tribute to C. M Cooldige

 

 

Bauhaus was a style popular in the early twentieth century, featuring a combination of traditional designs and futuristic curves. In Hungary, the style was all the rage, especially in architecture. Here are some of the most gorgeous examples. More »

What if Anakin Skywalker hadn't gone over to the Dark Side and instead set up a happy domestic life with Padme and their twin children? Artist Renata Castellani has sketched up a few sweet and silly comics and illustrations imagining the happy home life of the Skywalker family. More »

As if putting feathers on dinosaurs wasn't insult enough, a radical new theory from Paul Else of the University of Wollongong is proposing that dinosaurs produced a kind of milk for their offspring, that they essentially lactated — a physiological process that's associated almost exclusively with mammals. But as Else's new paper suggests, some modern birds feed their newly hatched young with secretions similar to the milk of mammals. So why not dinosaurs, too? More »

A Greek prosecutor has asked for an investigation into whether retouched mug shots are covering up evidence of police brutality, Reuters reports. Earlier in February, four young men were arrested during an attempted armed bank robbery, and photos taken at the time of their arrest show heavy bruises or split lips. Mug shots released not long afterwards, though, didn't match up — they'd been poorly Photoshopped, with injuries apparently gone.

Critics have accused police of singling out and beating the suspects, then altering photographs to downplay the extent of their injuries. "My son — and the others arrested — was not treated like every other law violator but with particular hatred because he is an anarchist," says the mother of...

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Alex Trebek exploring the depths of Watson's server racks during the IBM Challenge episode of Jeopardy.

IBM’s Watson, the supercomputer that gave our best two Jeopardy-playing humans what-for in three nights of play two years ago, is now showing mortals how to do better at another classic human struggle: curing cancer. Watson has spent the last year parsing data on cancer treatments from the Sloan-Kettering Memorial Center and is now being offered as a cloud-based application for determining the best course of action for cancer patients.

While Watson’s turn at Jeopardy was entertaining and a true battle of man versus machine, the computer’s higher purpose was always in medicine. During a panel discussion of Watson held as the computer did battle with Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, Dr. Chris Welty, a member of Watson’s algorithms team, noted that the computer had a future in helping diagnose medical conditions (as well as in tech support).

According to the Associated Press, Watson has improved its performance by 240 percent since its Jeopardy stint. In March 2012, scientists at Sloan-Kettering set Watson about the task of internalizing 600,000 pieces of medical evidence, 1.5 million patient records, 2 million pages of texts from medical journals, and 1,500 lung-cancer cases.

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Those who question the theory of evolution generally do it on religious grounds. But there's a non-faith-related reason to question evolution. A lot of animals are too absurd to have been shaped by any kind of natural selection process. Here's our working alternate explanation: these animals were designed by tired anime artists slaving away in Nintendo's HQ. Here are 12 creatures we're pretty sure are actually Pokémon who escaped into real life. More »

Super Mario is best known as plumbing hero of the Mushroom Kingdom and perpetual savior of the continually kidnapped Princess Peach, by Bowser; a massive, evil turtle b@stard of some kind with a penchant for fascism and kidnap.

Enter pop artist Billy Butcher and his Sex Pistols styled take on the iconic Nintendo games character, and what you have is less Mario and Peach and more Sid and Nancy, as the mushroom gobbling plumber takes on a lawry punk identity along with his nemesis Boswer, who’s now very human, and very punk.

I sense this version of Punk Super Mario would be more likely to smoke pipes than go down them and inclined to gob on turtle shells, get high on Mushrooms and might save Princess Peach, if only to end her fascist regime.

Anarchy in the MK.

What do you think:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Source: MisturaUrbana

The post PUNK SUPER MARIO Bros. Never Mind The Blocks Art appeared first on BAD HAVEN.

A Apple perdeu o nome iPhone para a Gradiente, que lançou uma linha de smartphones com o mesmo nome em meados de dezembro. A próxima edição da Revista da Propriedade Industrial do INPI (Instituto Nacional de Propriedade Industrial) sai amanhã (05/02) com a decisão, mas o jorn...

Wine emulator, the popular open-source application that is used to run Windows applications on Unix-like systems such as Linux and OS-X is being ported to Google's Android platform. Soon you will be able to run Windows apps on your Android smartphones or tablets.

According to a report from Phoronix, Alexandre Julliard, the original developer behind the Wine project, delivered a keynote yesterday at the FOSDEM open source conference in Brussels, where he demoed Wine running on Android. The report said that the performance was horrendously slow but noted, it was because Wine was running on an “emulated Android environment” rather than on an actual device.

“A Windows application running on Android. While Wine is coming to ARM and there's quite a lot of interest there, CodeWeavers is quite interested and hopeful for the success of Intel x86 Atom CPUs for tablets. If Android gains traction on x86-based tablets and other mobile devices, CodeWeavers has a lot of commercial opportunities for pushing the running of Windows software on Android.”

The port is still in development and definitely not ready for public use.

via Ars Technica

© Instant Fundas, 2013

One of the courses I'm taking this quarter at Cal Poly is an Introduction to Computer Networks course, where we learn about the tedious 7 layer OSI model, and then learn about how networking works from the bottom up. Like most Cal Poly classes, this includes a lab, where we take a bunch of Ethernet cables and Cisco gear (thanks Cisco!) and run around for a few hours to hopefully learn something.

The lab this previous week was an interesting one where we had 1,000 (virtual) devices all send traffic at a network switch all at once, and see how quickly and intelligently the switch can process all of this traffic. Moving packets between the Ethernet ports was no issue for the switch, but where it choked was processing Ethernet frames from devices it had never seen before.  While any decent network switch can move a couple million packets between physical ports, when a new MAC address passes through a switch on the network it needs to do a little more processing to remember where this MAC address came from.  This "MAC Address Learning" is a nice feature of switches, such that they only send traffic down the single link towards it's destination instead of all four, eight, 24, or 48 ports connected to the switch. This greatly multiplies the effective throughput of any switched network by freeing up the bandwidth of every other link to do other useful work.

Long story short, while a switch can move millions of packets, it can only learn a few thousand new MAC addresses per second.  This isn't particularly important, since having more than maybe one or two dozen MAC addresses on one L2 network is rare, and even in a large network you won't see thousands of MAC addresses join or physically move in the network in a second.

I also happen to be the only EE in this CPE/CSC class, which even with 60 students is evident to the point where the professor has opted to call me "the EE guy" in lieu of learning my name. This lab piqued my interest in the internals of a network switch and why it can switch frames orders of magnitude faster than it can process them, so since I'm the only person in the classes who soils himself with physical hardware, I figured I should tear one apart and see what an Ethernet switch looks like.
Of course, the Cal Poly CPE department would probably be pretty displeased if I went into the networks lab with a screw driver and went to town in one of their switches. Luckily, I have a level 60 junk box with a +5 against finding random electronics, so I just so happen to have a spare HP ProCurve 24 port Gigabit Ethernet switch sitting in my closet.

---

Starting with a bird-eye view of the switch's entire motherboard, the system can be roughly divided into three sections.  (Note: all of these pictures can be clicked on to see much larger versions, and I'm including both the diagrammed and unmolested versions of the pictures, for your enjoyment.)

• In red on the top left of the board is the switching power supply, which takes 12V from a 120VAC power supply and converts it down to the high current low voltage (3.3V) needed by all the ICs.
• Boxed in blue on the top right is the actual processor of the switch, in addition to the supporting RAM and Flash memory. The switch's operating system runs on this processor, and is thus what you interact with to change settings on the switch.
• The giant orange region, which takes up most of the board's area, is the hierarchical switching hardware, which operates as an independent system from the processor to switch Ethernet frames from one port to another.

This hack could be titled ‘Exercise or Starve’. [Charalampos] needed some motivation to become more active. There’s a device called a FitBit tracker (black and blue on the left) which records your activity and submits it to a web interface. You get daily goals and can earn badges. But those stinking badges didn’t motivate him. He decided he needed something that would really get him off of the couch. So he hacked the FitBit to cut power to his refrigerator. Not meeting his goals will eventually result in a stinky mess and no dinner.

It’s a bad idea to cut power to the icebox. But we see this merely as a proof of concept. He’s using the Belkin WeMo networked outlet. Other than some security issues we discussed on Thursday this is a very simple way to control devices from your server. [Charalampos'] implementation uses the FitBit API to check his activity and drives the outlet accordingly.

Filed under: lifehacks

WASHINGTON, D.C. - 01 Feb 2013: President Obama will honor a team of three IBM (NYSE: IBM) scientists -- James J. Wynne, Rangaswamy Srinivasan and Samuel Blum -- with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the country's most prestigious award ...

Designer Sruli Recht creates experimental fashions that often have as much to do with where his materials come from as what the final product looks like. For example, he's woven horsehair garments, tanned the leather of stillborn lambs, and extracted silk from a spider's silk gland implanted in a goat's milk duct. As part of his latest collection, Recht decided to put himself into one of the pieces in a very literal way. More »

This falls within the realm of strong rumor, but it's an exciting rumor all the same. Deadline is reporting that Benedict Cumberbatch is "in deep conversations" to play cryptanalyst and computer scientist Alan Turing in the biopic The Imitation Game, a script from the 2011 Black List. Will Cumberbatch make the jump from playing a literary genius to playing a historical one? More »

Apple's press release for the new 128GB iPad contains an unusual concession from the company: the word "multitouch." Seriously. It's been more than five years since Apple first introduced the iPhone, and it's never once used the word "multitouch" — it's always been "Multi-Touch™" with that charming unregistered trademark symbol.

And yet here we are today, with AutoDesk's Amy Bunszel quoted in the official Apple press release for the new iPad:

"These files are often large and highly detailed so having the thin and light iPad with its Multitouch display, integrated camera and all-day battery life, is a real advantage for iPad users to view, edit and share their AutoCAD data."

Never mind all those questionable comma errors —...

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