Category: Tech

  • Hybrid fixed wing drone goes at speeds of up to 100 kph

    Hybrid fixed wing drone goes at speeds of up to 100 kph

    X PlusOne The Hybrid Fixed wing drone has come up with some Simple innovation to make Drones more and more faster.

     

    I think the inspiration has come from Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey. But instead of having a tiltrotor here, we have the alternating speeds of brushless motors to tilt the drone 90 Degrees and effectively put in a flight position.

    US_Navy_120209-N-RE822-273_An_Osprey_makes_a_historic_first_landing_ce

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    They are on Kickstarter trying to raise funds and have managed to reach 86% funding till now.

     

    My only concern is, how can these be used for commercial purposes like, transporting stuff Or mounting cameras for shooting ?

    Something that the team should think about.

    Kickstarter Campaign Link:

    https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/137596013/x-plusone-your-ultimate-hover-speed-aerial-camera

  • Reblogging: My experience with using cp to copy a lot of files 432 millions, 39 TB

    One morning I was notified that a disk had failed. No big deal, this happens
    now and then. I called Dell and next day I had a replacement disk. While
    rebuilding, the replacement disk failed, and in the meantime another disk had
    also failed. Now Dell’s support wisely suggested that I did not just replace
    the failed disks as the array may have been punctured. Apparently, and as I
    understand it, disks are only reported as failed when they have sufficiently
    many bad blocks, and if you’re unlucky you can lose data if 3 corresponding
    blocks on different disks become bad within a short time, so that the RAID
    controller does not have a chance to detect the failures, recalculate the data
    from the parity, and store it somewhere else. So even though only two drives
    flashed red, data might have been lost.

    Having almost used up the capacity we decided to order another storage
    enclosure, copy the files from the old one to the new one, and then get the old
    one into a trustworthy state and use it to extend the total capacity. Normally
    I’d have copied/moved the files at block-level (eg. using dd or pvmove), but
    suspecting bad blocks, I went for a file-level copy because then I’d know which
    files contained the bad blocks. I browsed the net for other peoples’ experience
    with copying many files and quickly decided that cp would do the job nicely.
    Knowing that preserving the hardlinks would require bookkeeping of which files
    have already been copied I also ordered 8 GB more RAM for the server and
    configured more swap space.

    When the new hardware had arrived I started the copying, and at first it
    proceeded nicely at around 300-400 MB/s as measured with iotop. After a while
    the speed decreased considerably, because most of the time was spent creating
    hardlinks, and it takes time to ensure that the filesystem is always in a
    consistent state. We use XFS, and we were probably suffering for not disabling
    write barriers which can be done when the RAID controller has a write cache
    with a trustworthy battery backup. As expected, the memory usage of the cp
    command increased steadily and was soon in the gigabytes.

    For more visit: My experience with using cp to copy a lot of files 432 millions, 39 TB.

  • Elon Musk, our patent’s will not come in your way Tesla Motors

    Elon Musk, our patent’s will not come in your way Tesla Motors

    Elon Musk CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX just announced that Tesla Motors which holds at least 133 Patents will be allowed for  use by anyone with fair intentions.

    Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith. wants to use our technology.

    In times when innovation is Rare and Costly, Elon Musk has set a extraordinary example by letting this happen and he has a greater vision for doing this, simply say. He wants all Or any of the competitors/manufacturers to use the technology that they have developed by intellect, sweat and money.

    Here’s a Pic of the wall that held the patents

    The Tesla Patent Wall at HQ, now set free

    A good Close-up

    The Tesla Motors Patent Wall
    The Tesla Motors Patent Wall

    The most humbling thing about Elon Musk is that he is completely Okay with other competitors sharing the pie of the market, as he bravely accepts that they alone can not satisfy the needs for good future cars which have a positive impact on earth.

    I strongly believe that Elon and the stakeholders in Tesla Motors are equally to be thanked in this decision, as in todays capitalist environment this is a brave move.

    Lets just see if other’s take some learning.

    Image Source: Steve Jurvetson

    Source: All Our Patent Are Belong To You | Blog | Tesla Motors.

  • Announcing Portia, the open source visual web scraper! | Scrapinghub Blog

     

    The guys at Scrapinghub have come out with an interesting new product which will be immensely helpful for Data Mining and Researchers of all type.

    As officially

    Portia allows you to visually configure what’s crawled and extracted in a very natural way. It provides immediate feedback, making the process of creating web scrapers quicker and easier than ever before!

    Checkout the Video to see it working live. #Awesome

    Original blog post here: Announcing Portia, the open source visual web scraper! | Scrapinghub Blog.

  • How is the World Wide Web Actually connected ?

    If you ever wondered how were you able to access Google.com and the data hosted elsewhere in US.

    Or even have a conversation with someone over Skype over miles of distance.

    A lot of physical wiring in form of optical cables (cables that carry light signals as data).

    Follow the link below to see how does the connectivity happens between nations…

    via What the Internet looks like: The undersea cables wiring the ends of the Earth – CNN.com.