Deep Dream: Artificial intelligence meets hallucinations
Artificially intelligent neural networks can not only identify images, they can be used to generate images Hieronymus Bosch would have been proud of.
Artificially intelligent neural networks can not only identify images, they can be used to generate images Hieronymus Bosch would have been proud of.
Since we published a roundup of 10 Raspberry Pi operating systems the number of choices has exploded.
Incredible space memorabilia that will make you geek out!
The PR people from Amazon got in touch after I published my review of the new Amazon Fire Phone (Amazon Fire Phone: Nice but nothing to get fired up about). They had a couple of points they asked me to clarify:
The people at a company called aiia (their Web site loads insanely slowly) out of the Ukraine pitched me the SSSSSpeaker (yes, that's how they spell it, it's not a a typo), billed as the world's smallest Bluetooth speaker, and sent me a unit.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Automatic, a dongle that plugs into your car's OBD-II connector and sends data about your car's performance and your driving via Bluetooth LE to an app on your iOS or Android smartphone.
What man breaks, man can fix ... at least, that's what we like to think. Consider, for example, bees. Bees of all species are dying off in the US and Europe and over the last few years we've seen the commercial beekeeping industry decimated by a syndrome called colony collapse disorder (CCD).
In the previous column on hacking PingPlotter I discussed how you can use the tool's Web interface and the curl utility to add targets to be tracked, for example, to add a single host you would enter the following on the command line:
In 1964 IBM announced one of the most famous mainframes ever, the IBM System/360 which, on the low end versions ran at 0.0018 to 0.034 MIPS. For the time, that was serious performance ... in comparison, the iMac I'm writing this on runs at 92,100 MIPS.
I have, in previous Gearhead articles (first in Comcast's latest bad idea turns your Wi-Fi into everybody's Wi-Fi and then in Revisiting Comcast's Xfinity public hotspot strategy), discussed Comcast's strategy for implementing opt-out Wi-Fi hotspots on their customers' Xfinity gateways. In the latter post I questioned the security of the service and noted that access to the Comcast service isn't as tightly controlled as the company might think.
There's a story that when the notorious bank robber "Slick Willie" Sutton was asked why he robbed banks he replied "Because that's where the money is" (see Sutton's Law). As a strategy for maximizing the potential "take home" Sutton was, if you'll forgive the pun, right on the money even if the risk was higher than, say, knocking over a supermarket.
There's a story that when the notorious bank robber "Slick Willie" Sutton was asked why he robbed banks he replied "Because that's where the money is"(see Sutton's Law). As a strategy for maximizing the potential "take home" Sutton was, if you'll forgive the pun, right on the money even if the risk was higher than, say, knocking over a supermarket.
Last week I wrote about Comcast's plan to build the nation's biggest Wi-Fi service by co-opting their customers' Xfinity gateways and, following a detailed conversation with a representative from Comcast's Corporate Communications group, I have some corrections to make and quite a few additional concerns to add.
If you haven't been following this story it may (hopefully) turn out to be a milestone in the history of software patents: The story concerns a US financial institution, CLS Bank, and an Australian software company that holds a patent on software used to mediate escrow for financial transactions. CLS argued that the process of escrow is centuries old and therefore not patentable while Alice argued that computerizing the process met the criteria for patentability.
With the explosion of interest in Big Data everyone in every department is looking for actionable intelligence. That's great but there's a downside: Trying to explain to, say, your VP of sales that the sales of barbecue sauce might appear to be connected to the selling price of beef but you can't say that's true for certain and that it would be inadvisable to act on that conclusion without deeper analysis.