In the waning years of the last millennium, at my university, one of the cause célèbres of the progressive left was a concept known as “Manufacturing Consent,” the title of a book and film, by and starring Noam Chomsky. Its central thesis was that U.S. mass media “are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry […]
European Union finance ministers have agreed a defacto ban on the launch in the region of so-called global ‘stablecoins’ such as Facebook’s planned Libra digital currency until the bloc has a common approach to regulation that can mitigate the risks posed by the technology. In a joint statement the European Council and Commission write that […]
Figma, the design tool maker that has raised nearly $83 million from investors such as Index Ventures, Sequoia, Greylock and Kleiner Perkins, has today announced a new feature called Auto Layout that takes some of the tedious reformatting out of the design process. Designers are all too familiar with the problem of manually sizing content […]
Ten years ago, the vast majority of designers were working in Adobe Photoshop, a powerful tool with fine-tuned controls for almost every kind of image manipulation one could imagine. But it was a tool built for an analog world focused on photos, flyers and print magazines; there were no collaborative features, and much more importantly […]
Data breaches that could cause millions of dollars in potential damages have been the bane of the life of many a company. What’s required is a great deal of real-time monitoring. The problem is that this world has become incredibly complex. A SANS Institute survey found half of company data breaches were the result of […]
What kinds of businesses might be able to operate in space? Well datacenter are one potential target you might not have thought of. Space provides an interesting environment for datacenter operations, including advanced analytics operations and even artificial intelligence, due in part to the excellent cooling conditions and reasonable access to renewable power supply (solar). […]
At its re:Invent conference, AWS today announced the launch of its Inferentia chips, which it initially announced last year. These new chips promise to make inferencing, that is, using the machine learning models you pre-trained earlier, significantly faster and cost effective. As AWS CEO Andy Jassy noted, a lot of companies are focussing on custom […]
Amazon says Cyber Monday 2019 has now become the retailer’s biggest shopping day of all-time, based on the number of items sold worldwide. However, in the U.S., a different trend took shape over the big sales holiday weekend kicked off by Black Friday. This year, Walmart became the No. 1 shopping app in the U.S. […]
Today at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, the company announced that Elastic Kubernetes Service is available on Fargate. EKS is Amazon’s flavor of Kubernetes. Fargate is a service announced in 2017 that enables you to launch containerized applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. “Starting today, you can start using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service to […]
At its re:Invent conference, AWS CEO Andy Jassy today announced the launch of AQUA (the Advanced Query Accelerator) for Amazon Redshift, the company’s data warehousing service. As Jassy noted in his keynote, it’s hard to scale data warehouses when you want to do analytics over that data. At some point, as your data warehouse or […]