Osias Jota

For five years, researchers have toiled over an obscure bit of fundamental internet infrastructure that promises to make the connections to our mobile devices faster and more reliable than ever, and if you’ve already downloaded Apple’s iOS 7 to your iPhone or iPad, you could be using it already.

It’s called multi-path TCP, and here’s why it matters and how it works: At present, if your phone or tablet is connected to Wi-Fi and a cellular network at the same time, it can only use one or the other connection to transmit data. But what if your Wi-Fi connection or your 3G connection drops? Whatever data was being transmitted—data for an app, a webpage, an iMessage—will fail to arrive, and you have to try again, usually after getting a frustrating error message or a blank page. Just as importantly, if one of your connections to the internet slows down, or speeds up, your phone has no ability to use its other connections to its advantage, leading to a poorer and slower experience overall.

Activate Siri to feel the power of the future

Multi-path TCP allows your phone to send data by whatever way it’s connected to the internet, whether that’s Wi-Fi, 3G or ethernet (say, if it were running on a laptop connected to the internet via a cable). And if you want to activate it, says one of the researchers who built multi-path TCP, you have only to use Apple’s voice command software, Siri.

This is the first time that this new means of connecting to the internet has appeared in a commercial product. That it showed up in Apple’s software and not Google’s shows that Apple’s technical chops are substantial, even when the company isn’t highlighting what it’s up to.

What this means for the internet as a whole

The ability to connect and maintain a continuous connection to the internet over multiple wired and wireless connections might sound like a nice-to-have feature rather than one that’s all that important, but there’s a reason researchers worked on this problem for five years before coming up with a standard that could be widely implemented: Multi-path TCP is the future. It’s arguably the first and most important change to the low-level architecture of the internet to reflect the fact that our connections to it are more mobile and wireless than ever.

In a September 2013 presentation (pdf) to the Australian Network Operations Group, computer scientist Mark Smith suggested that Multi-path TCP was the beginning of a larger change in how the internet is built, in which individual devices decide how they will communicate with one another, rather than simply relying on the protocols that have already been built into the computers that pass along all our traffic to and from the internet. Such a “dumb” network connected to “smart” hosts—the smart hosts being our phones, tablets and PCs—would allow for rapid experimentation and evolution of the fundamental language of the data devices are passing back and forth.

This will be especially important as the internet—and our airwaves—become ever more congested. Already, the protocol that handles most requests for web pages and data for apps, plain old TCP, is being crowded out on some networks by another, less well-behaved protocol designed to stream video and audio. In some ways, multi-path TCP is an effort to address this competition: If your phone sees that your Wi-Fi network is begin strained by that episode of Breaking Bad you’re streaming or pirating, it can switch to your 3G connection to maintain a reliable connection.

So far, the only way that Apple’s devices appear to be using this protocol is to communicate with Siri, which makes sense: Understanding speech is a difficult enough problem that Apple, like Google, probably sends recordings of our voice into the cloud, where powerful servers can parse our speech, rather than processing it on our relatively wimpy mobile devices. For an application like this, speed is of the essence, and having as many paths to get data to and from Apple’s servers is critical.

http://imgur.com/wdaekjY

Original Source

raiining:

redtigress:

randomredux:

thefingerfuckingfemalefury:

ocaradosquadrinhos:

Best A+X ever!

THE FOX VERSION OF ROBIN HOOD

You all realise

This means Deadpool is a Disney fan :D

Hahahaha oh my god these two.

Surprise! The trick is that they’ve all got explosives in them!

Phil left specific orders that Clint and Wade should never be sent on missions together.

Obviously, those instructions were ignored.

Its okay, though - Jasper took pictures of Phil’s face when he read the comm line transcripts. They are epic.

drgrlfriend:

sylphofdirkjake:

audreyii-fic:

Writers Cabin (x) (tumblr)

why are they tied up

THEY KNOW WHAT THEY DID.

Happy Talk Like A Pirate Day! If you’ve got a deck, today would be a good day to swab it. Or you could just kick back with a bottle o’ rum and read pirate comics!

tofu-sama:

wow~

This is exhibiting one of many properties of water, this picture in particular demonstrates that water is wet. 

YOU HAVE GOT TO BE FUCKING KIDDING ME.

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ofmusesandsins:

sandandglass:

Not even John McCain has time for their shit. 

when John McCain has to call you out on your shit something has gone hideously wrong with your life

These men would gladly die for one another. But they’ll slag each other off first. :)

vigilanted:

is no one going to talk about this or

the-fury-of-a-time-lord:

losingmycool-bcsupernatural:

jtotheizzoe:

An important reminder that the universe has three spatial dimensions and is best appreciated with all three engaged*.

*engage fourth as needed for EXTREME MODE

god dammit people tag your porn

FUCK THIS IS SEXY

In 1941, as the British War Office searched for ways to help Allied prisoners escape from German POW camps, it found an unlikely partner: John Waddington Ltd., the U.K. licensee for Monopoly. “Games and pastimes” was an approved category of item to be included in care packages sent to captured soldiers, so Waddington’s set about creating special sets to be sent to the camps.

Under the paper surface of each doctored board was a map printed on durable silk showing “escape routes from the particular prison to which each game was sent,” Waddington’s chairman Victor Watson told the Associated Press in 1985. “Into the other side of the board was inserted a tiny compass and several fine-quality files.” Real French, German, and Italian currency was hidden in the stacks of Monopoly money.

MI-9, the intelligence division charged with helping POWs escape, smuggled the games into prison camps, where prisoners would remove the aids and then destroy the sets in order to prevent their captors from divining the scheme.

“It is not known how many airmen escaped thanks to these Monopoly games,” writes Philip Orbanes in The Game Makers, his 2004 history of Parker Brothers, “but 35,000 POWs did break out of prison camps and reach partisans who helped them to safety.”

(Thanks, Ron.)

allthingslinguistic:

An interesting article by Christine Schreyer (who you might recognize from Kryptonian) on using conlangs to teach linguistic anthropology. Abstract: 

In my Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology class, my students are assigned the task of creating a new language over the course of the term. As the students learn new aspects of linguistic analysis they develop those pieces of their languages, including: phonology, morphology and syntax, proxemics and non-verbal communication, and language change. In this paper, my students and I argue that created languages help anthropology students realize how closely connected language and culture are, since students have usually found it hard to create any piece of their language without first imagining who the people are and what their culture is like (in other words - world building). Finally, we argue that creating languages allow students to more fully understand the concept of “cultural relativity” or the idea that each culture is unique and that we should not judge a culture based on how it compares to our own way of looking at the world.

There’s also an article by Schreyer on how people using media and technology to revitalize endangered languages can learn from other people’s efforts to learn conlangs like Klingon and Na’vi. It’s behind a paywall, but here’s an excerpt: 

Na’vi also has numerous YouTube postings that are dedicated to helping others learn the language. Some of them are of Paul Frommer, who is seen describing the language.31 Interestingly, in the comments to one of these videos, one person reflected ‘this is great but I just wish we had the same enthusiasm for real endangered languages’. Other Na’vi speakers who wish to share what they have learnt about Na’vi with future learners have also posted YouTube videos such as the video ‘Na’vi Lesson 1: Vowels and Ejectives’. Like Klingon, Na’vi also has an iPhone application, as well as a Global Positioning System translation system, and these are just some of the ways that Na’vi speakers can improve their Na’vi language skills through information technology. […]

One way that endangered language communities can emulate the language planning of created language communities is by incorporating ‘the cool factor’ into their own curriculum and documentation efforts. For instance, the innovation does not have to be connected to technology, but could instead be a new or different way of learning the language. The Haa shagóon ítx yaa ntoo.aat, Tlingit language board game, that I developed with Taku River Tlingit First Nation community members is one such instance of using novel ideas to help encourage language use. The game is a fun and interactive way to learn Tlingit and also models real-life activities since community members continue to fish, hunt, and gather berries and medicines even today (Schreyer & Gordon, 2007). Also, while only a few copies of the game have been printed due to limited funding (Schreyer, 2011a), the copies that are in the community have been professionally printed adding to its ‘cool factor’ since the game resembles other board games, such as monopoly or risk, that individuals might be familiar with.

More educational material relating to conlangs can be found at The Conlanger’s Library and from DS Bigham (see especially these slides describing a course on invented languages). 

Gif based web comics, Stephen Vuillemin

Nick Perks delivers the hard truth on this one for The Line It Is Drawn. Peppermint Patty, on the other hand, would make a hilarious Green Lantern.

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“"I [recently] resorted to the un-PC abbreviation AD, whereas my usual practice for thirty years has been to use the divisions BCE and CE. A couple of months ago, a dear former colleague of mine in Biblical studies at Harvard told me of a Jewish mentor he had who clung in contrarian fashion to the BC/AD nomenclature. When questioned how he could accept BC, he said, ‘Well, I take BC as meaning "before Christianity."’ No problem there. And when asked how he could apply the AD concept without being untrue to his Jewishness, he replied that to him it signified not ‘anno Domini’ but ‘After dat.’"”

- Jan Ziolkowski (via likeavirgil)

Tom não suportou.

A felicidade plena, galera, é uma missão impossível.

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nevver:

Bo Dahlbom