Bookmarks of Marco Fioretti
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The open and inclusive platform of healthcare projects for citizens, based on collaborative making, digital fabrication and distributed manufacturing.
the security, secrecy, and transparency requirements for online voting transactions are structurally very different from, and generally much stricter than, those for E-Commerce transactions. The security mechanisms that make ecommerce transactions relatively safe for (consumers at least) are not sufficient to guarantee the safety of online voting.
The first major distinction is that we can at least eventually detect E-Commerce errors and fraud, but we may never even know about online election fraud.
The first major distinction is that we can at least eventually detect E-Commerce errors and fraud, but we may never even know about online election fraud.
2019/09/10: Millions of books are secretly in the public domain thanks to a copyright loophole, a new project seeks to put them on the Internet Archive.
2019/09/23: According to Arpit Joshipura, The Linux Foundation's general manager of networking, edge computing will overtake cloud computing by 2025.
Fridge0 is a design for an offgrid, solar powered fridge, with no battery bank. Using an inexpensive chest freezer with a few modifications, the fridge retains cold overnight and through rainy periods.
Fridge0 consists of a standard chest freezer, an added thermal mass, an inverter, and computer control. It ties into the typical offfgrid system of a solar charge controller, battery bank, and photovoltaic panels to maintain a safe temperature range.
The battery bank is a large part of the cost of a typical offgrid fridge installation. It needs to be sized to run the fridge overnight, as well as for several days of poor weather. Cheaper batteries only last 3-5 years, and longer lasting batteries are correspondingly expensive; either way a battery bank for an offgrid fridge is extremely expensive over the lifetime of the friddge.
By storing solar power in the form of cold, fridge0 avoids the battery bank expense and environmental footprint. The only battery power fridge0 needs is enough to turn it off cleanly when the solar panels stop producing -- a few minutes of power instead of days -- and a small amount for its computer control.
There are offgrid fridges produced by several manufacturers, which are designed for 12v solar power, but these still may need a battery bank, and are much more expensive than conventional equipment due to being very well insulated using features like vacuum bottles. These offgrid fridges were designed when solar panels were much more expensive than they are today.
With modern cheap and efficient solar panels, commercial offgrid fridges make less sense than they used to. A kilowatt of solar panels provides enough power to run a conventional fridge on even most cloudy days, and costs less than a commercial offgrid fridge.
Fridge0 consists of a standard chest freezer, an added thermal mass, an inverter, and computer control. It ties into the typical offfgrid system of a solar charge controller, battery bank, and photovoltaic panels to maintain a safe temperature range.
The battery bank is a large part of the cost of a typical offgrid fridge installation. It needs to be sized to run the fridge overnight, as well as for several days of poor weather. Cheaper batteries only last 3-5 years, and longer lasting batteries are correspondingly expensive; either way a battery bank for an offgrid fridge is extremely expensive over the lifetime of the friddge.
By storing solar power in the form of cold, fridge0 avoids the battery bank expense and environmental footprint. The only battery power fridge0 needs is enough to turn it off cleanly when the solar panels stop producing -- a few minutes of power instead of days -- and a small amount for its computer control.
There are offgrid fridges produced by several manufacturers, which are designed for 12v solar power, but these still may need a battery bank, and are much more expensive than conventional equipment due to being very well insulated using features like vacuum bottles. These offgrid fridges were designed when solar panels were much more expensive than they are today.
With modern cheap and efficient solar panels, commercial offgrid fridges make less sense than they used to. A kilowatt of solar panels provides enough power to run a conventional fridge on even most cloudy days, and costs less than a commercial offgrid fridge.
2019/07/App-based food delivery has opened up the historically male-dominated line of work to women in India but that has not insulated it from patriarchal norms.
2019/04/11: geothermal energy is predominantly known for power generation & district heating, low & medium temperature geothermal resources can serve as a sustainable & effective energy source for food production & drying
2019/08/16: In July, the French daily newspaper Le Monde reported that the 0.6-mile (1 kilometre) solar road was a fiasco.
In December 2016, when the trial road was unveiled, the French Ministry of the Environment called it "unprecedented". French officials said the road, made of photovoltaic panels, would generate electricity to power streetlights in Tourouvre, a local town.
But less than three years later, a report published by Global Construction Review says France's road dream may be over. Cracks have appeared, and in 2018, part of the road had to be demolished due to damage from wear and tear.
Even at its peak, the road was only producing half of the expected energy, because engineers didn't take into consideration rotting leaves falling on the road. They also didn't think about the pressure and weight from tractors, two locals told Le Monde.
In December 2016, when the trial road was unveiled, the French Ministry of the Environment called it "unprecedented". French officials said the road, made of photovoltaic panels, would generate electricity to power streetlights in Tourouvre, a local town.
But less than three years later, a report published by Global Construction Review says France's road dream may be over. Cracks have appeared, and in 2018, part of the road had to be demolished due to damage from wear and tear.
Even at its peak, the road was only producing half of the expected energy, because engineers didn't take into consideration rotting leaves falling on the road. They also didn't think about the pressure and weight from tractors, two locals told Le Monde.
2019/06/26: Just a few years ago, time series databases were somewhat niche in nature. Sure, if you were running a trading application within a financial services firm, you were devoted to your kdb+ (proprietary) database, but for most everyone else a general-purpose relational or NoSQL database was de rigueur. No more. The reason? The world increasingly demands that enterprises be able to query, analyze, and report on streaming data in real-time, not batch mode.
2019/06/29: Things aren’t too rosy at the ‘Linux’ Foundation where Linus Torvalds is increasingly being marginalised (thanks in part to Microsoft-friendly media) and propped up to replace him are those who worked on Hyper-V (proprietary software for Windows) and similar Microsoft-centric projects at the Microsoft-occupied Novell
2019/08/14: Some Internet service providers and corporate companies might have blocked most of the ports, and allowed only a few specific ports such as port 80 and 443 to tighten their security. In such cases, we have no choice, but use a same port for multiple programs, say the HTTPS Port 443, which is rarely blocked. Here is where SSLH, a SSL/SSH multiplexer, comes in help. It will listen for incoming connections on a port 443. To put this more simply, SSLH allows us to run several programs/services on port 443 on a Linux system. So, you can use both SSL and SSH using a same port at the same time. If you ever been in a situation where most ports are blocked by the firewalls, you can use SSLH to access your remote server. This brief tutorial describes how to share a same port for https, ssh using SSLH in Unix-like operating systems.
2019/08/14: Silverblue is basically a version of Fedora. There’s one key difference, however, which is that the operating system is mounted read-only, meaning that it’s immutable.
What does "immutable" mean? It means that it can’t be changed. To be more accurate, in a software context, it generally means that something can’t be changed during run time.
What does "immutable" mean? It means that it can’t be changed. To be more accurate, in a software context, it generally means that something can’t be changed during run time.
2019/08/13: June (as shown at the top of this post) is when zero-click searches in browsers passed 50%, but the pie chart above shows that even before that, Google was sending a huge portion of search clicks to their own properties (~6% of queries and ~12% of clicks). Those properties include YouTube, Maps, Android, Google’s blog, subdomains of Google.com, and a dozen or so others (full list here).
Maybe Google’s websites are ranking exclusively because they’re the best result, but if Congress is asking questions about whether a monopoly is potentially abusing its market dominance in one field to unfairly compete in another, I’ve got something else they’ll want to see. It’s a chart of where searches happened on major web properties in Q2, and as you can see, there’s no competition.
Maybe Google’s websites are ranking exclusively because they’re the best result, but if Congress is asking questions about whether a monopoly is potentially abusing its market dominance in one field to unfairly compete in another, I’ve got something else they’ll want to see. It’s a chart of where searches happened on major web properties in Q2, and as you can see, there’s no competition.
2019/08/09: Electric cars are stunning performers off the line. In sprint tests they routinely humble high-performance combustion-engined cars many times more expensive than them. But in order to achieve this massive startup torque out of small-diameter, easily packaged motors, most of them use gearboxes. Not multi-speed gearboxes like you'd use with a combustion engine, but single-speed reduction boxes designed to let electric motors spin at high, efficient RPM while the wheels spin slower.
These gearboxes are heavy, complex and expensive – and potentially unnecessary, according to a Texan father-and-son team that claim they've invented a new type of electric motor that can radically simplify the electric powertrain while delivering big efficiency, torque, power and range bonuses.
Where most motors suffer from torque pulsing, or cogging, at slow speeds, which could make an electric car take off in a jerky manner, the HET is able to produce overlapping power pulses around the stator for enormous, smooth torque at slow speeds, and then change its operating patterns by grouping poles together as motor speeds increase. This almost acts like an electronic transmission, emulating six-phase, three-phase, two-phase or one-phase designs and allowing the motor to increase speed without changing its frequency, voltage or current levels.
These gearboxes are heavy, complex and expensive – and potentially unnecessary, according to a Texan father-and-son team that claim they've invented a new type of electric motor that can radically simplify the electric powertrain while delivering big efficiency, torque, power and range bonuses.
Where most motors suffer from torque pulsing, or cogging, at slow speeds, which could make an electric car take off in a jerky manner, the HET is able to produce overlapping power pulses around the stator for enormous, smooth torque at slow speeds, and then change its operating patterns by grouping poles together as motor speeds increase. This almost acts like an electronic transmission, emulating six-phase, three-phase, two-phase or one-phase designs and allowing the motor to increase speed without changing its frequency, voltage or current levels.
J-core is a clean-room open source processor and SOC design using the SuperH instruction set, implemented in VHDL and available royalty and patent free under a BSD license.
The rest of this page explains how to compile and install a "bitstream" file to implement this processor in a cheap (about $50) FPGA board, then how to build Linux for that board and boot it to a shell prompt.
The rest of this page explains how to compile and install a "bitstream" file to implement this processor in a cheap (about $50) FPGA board, then how to build Linux for that board and boot it to a shell prompt.
2019/05/21: In 1959, Olivetti introduced one of the first transistorized mainframes and started its own transistor company.
2019/06/02: Global demand for cars will decline 3% in 2019, analysts predict.
There have been at least 38,000 job losses among automakers in the past six months.
One stark example: Commercial vehicle exports from the UK collapsed by 89% in April.
The decline in car sales has already wiped 0.2% off global gross domestic product, according to Fitch Ratings.
The world may have already passed "peak car."
At bank after bank, analysts are coming round to the idea that the world may have passed "peak car" and that in the future people will need fewer personal vehicles.
Certainly, they are telling clients, diesel vehicles will collapse into a niche as their polluting exhausts are regulated out of existence. Petrol/gasoline vehicles will be next, as governments in Europe and the United States set dates for manufacturers to switch their models to electric.
But that's not all. As on-demand services like Uber and Lyft grow their customer bases, more people will decide they no longer need to own a car of their own. Why would you, when it's cheaper to ride around in someone else's?
There have been at least 38,000 job losses among automakers in the past six months.
One stark example: Commercial vehicle exports from the UK collapsed by 89% in April.
The decline in car sales has already wiped 0.2% off global gross domestic product, according to Fitch Ratings.
The world may have already passed "peak car."
At bank after bank, analysts are coming round to the idea that the world may have passed "peak car" and that in the future people will need fewer personal vehicles.
Certainly, they are telling clients, diesel vehicles will collapse into a niche as their polluting exhausts are regulated out of existence. Petrol/gasoline vehicles will be next, as governments in Europe and the United States set dates for manufacturers to switch their models to electric.
But that's not all. As on-demand services like Uber and Lyft grow their customer bases, more people will decide they no longer need to own a car of their own. Why would you, when it's cheaper to ride around in someone else's?
2018/10/20: IOT is driving the need for new networks and computing on the edge.
5G models are varied and flexible; expect companies to compete based on their ingenuity in implementing them.
5G is important to low-latency, high-bandwidth applications, but competitors such as LoRa may dominate smart homes and other low-bandwidth uses.
Edge computing will enable autonomous driving and the empowered mobile workforce.
Competition will determine who wins the new network race, and I expect some surprising candidates will emerge for your investment dollar.
5G models are varied and flexible; expect companies to compete based on their ingenuity in implementing them.
5G is important to low-latency, high-bandwidth applications, but competitors such as LoRa may dominate smart homes and other low-bandwidth uses.
Edge computing will enable autonomous driving and the empowered mobile workforce.
Competition will determine who wins the new network race, and I expect some surprising candidates will emerge for your investment dollar.
2018/11/19: Edge computing is not a single technology, but a phrase that describes several layers of infrastructure, some of which are refinements of existing models. Edge infrastructure is a response to new technologies – such as autonomous vehicles and distributed AI applications – that require low latency and close proximity to users. These technologies are shaping the future of Internet infrastructure,
2019/04/26: KmPlot is part of the EDU suite of programs from the KDE project, and it was designed to plot functions and interact with them to learn about their behavior.