Your Instagram photos aren’t where they used to be.
This spring, even as some 200 million people were using Instagram on their smartphones, a small team of engineers moved the photo sharing service from Amazon’s cloud computing service—where it was built in 2010—into a data center operated by Facebook, which bought Instagram in 2012. “The users are still in the same car they were in at the beginning of the journey,” says Instagram founder Mike Krieger, “but we’ve swapped out every single part without them noticing.” Facebook calls it the “Instagration,” and it was an unprecedented undertaking for Mark Zuckerberg and company. Facebook has moved other acquired properties like FriendFeed into its data centers, but typically, they were small projects that involved shutting a service down before moving it into the Facebook universe. The Instagram switch was the live migration of an enormous—and enormously popular—operation. “The service couldn’t take any disruption,” says Facebook engineer George Cabrera. Facebook won’t say how many virtual machines were needed to run Instagram on Amazon, but it was in “the thousands.” And the service now stores over 20 billion digitals photos. For Instagram, the move was a way of more effectively plugging into a wide range of computing tools that have long helped drive Facebook’s vast online empire. And for the engineers overseeing Facebook’s worldwide network of data centers, it’s a template for merging their operation with applications the company may acquire in the years to come. “We were patient zero,” Krieger says. But the “Instagration” also provides a lesson or two for the broader tech community as it builds more and more apps atop cloud computing services like Amazon—apps they might one day migrate to private data centers. The key to the migration was a specialized Amazon service known as the Virtual Private Cloud. In April 2013, about a year after acquiring Instagram for $1 billion, Facebook vice president of engineering Jay Parikh said the company planned to move the photo-sharing service to its own computing facilities, and the project started around the same time. The migration took about a year, and although it was a huge undertaking, it was handled by a small team. Eight engineers oversaw Instagram’s infrastructure in 2013, a number that has since expanded to 20. Cabrera says the team spent the better part of a year preparing for a month of data migration.
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We may not have x-ray specs — but now we have have the world's first handheld x-ray gun, which enables police to search for explosives, guns and drugs in inaccessible places.
American Science & Engineering developed the device, known as the Mini Z, using the same Z Backscatter technology as the large scanners at airports. The beams are not strong enough to penetrate organic tissue the way a medical x-ray does; instead, they scatter off surfaces they encounter. It took the company seven years to miniaturize the technology into a 9-pound handheld device, according to the blog Defense One. It can scan cramped environments, such as the interior of a boat, or a wall that might have contraband hidden in it. The beams only travel a few feet, however, which means police will still need a warrant to search an apartment. The Z Backscatter rays highlight organic materials, as well as metallic objects. It can see currency, weapons and drugs. It can even spot a 3D-printed plastic gun, according to the Daily Mail. A tablet attached to the device displays an image in real-time, allowing quick scans of an object from different angles. Operators require little to no training, and Defense One points out they don't even need to be literate to use the scanner. AS&E CEO Chuck Dougherty told the Mail that the Mini Z system is "a game-changer for law enforcement and border security officials who are constantly challenged to quickly and accurately detect potential threats in hard-to-reach environments." On the Mini Z website, you can simulate scanning a port, airfield, border or city. Six(6) European teams,
Six(6) South American teams, Two(2) North American teams, Two(2) African teams make it to the knock out round of 16 in the ongoing FIFA World Cup 2014 in Brazil Uruguay striker Luis Suarez has been suspended from all football-related activity for four months for biting Italy defender Giorgio Chiellini.
The Liverpool player, 27, has also been banned for nine international matches, ruling him out of the rest of the 2014 Fifa World Cup.He will also miss the first nine games of the Premier League season. The incident occurred during Tuesday's 2014 Fifa World Cup Group D game, which Uruguay won to qualify for the last 16. Uruguay have three days to appeal against the decision. The ban is the biggest in World Cup history, beating the eight games given to Italy's Mauro Tassotti for elbowing Spain's Luis Enrique in 1994. "Such behaviour cannot be tolerated on any football pitch and, in particular, not at a Fifa World Cup when the eyes of millions of people are on the stars on the field," Claudio Sulser, chairman of the Fifa disciplinary committee, said in a statement. Suarez's first match back for Liverpool could be in round four of the Capital One Cup, with matches due to take place in the week commencing 27 October. Liverpool would have to win their third-round tie in September to reach that stage. Suarez has now been found guilty of biting three opponents in his career. The footwear is meant to replicate being barefoot and has thin, flexible soles that are contoured to the shape of the human foot, including visible individual sections for the toes. Vibram FiveFingers are a type of minimalist shoe manufactured by Vibram, originally marketed as a more natural alternative for different outdoors activities (sailing, kayaking, canoeing, and as a camp or after-hike shoe) In Russian police force, uniform modifies you! Or at least the public's perception of you. That is the principal argument behind the Russian Interior Ministry's recent ban on short skirts and other uniform modifications, the Moscow Times reports. "When you meet people, the first thing you see is their clothing, and for a police officer fulfilling his duties, it is crucial to have a tidy and neat appearance. From time to time, we have seen instances of officers improperly wearing their uniforms. … Heads [of departments] must pay more attention to the appearance of their subordinates," Deputy Interior Minister Sergei Gerasimov said in a memo obtained by Russian newspaper Izvestia. The Moscow Times reports that the ban was imposed to counteract a growing trend of rising hemlines among female officers, as well as a tendency of male officers to cut off their shirt sleeves. Department heads are encouraged to inspect uniforms daily to make sure they're appropriate. Uruguay advanced to the knockout round with a dramatic 1-0 win over Italy, but all anyone can talk about is Luis Suarez's rogue teeth.
Suarez appeared to bite Italy's Giorgio Chiellini in the 79th minute of the match, the third time in his career he's been involved in such a controversy. Take a look at the aftermath:
Reports on CNN say: iPhone screens are about to get a lot bigger, if a new report is to be believed. Suppliers in China are about to start work on two new iPhones, according to an article from Bloomberg. The phones will have display screens that are 4.7 inches and 5.5 inches across, when measured diagonally -- a major leap from the 4-inch displays on the iPhone 5S and 5C. Such a move would appear to be an effort to keep up with the competition. Rival smartphones, most notably those from Samsung, have been packing ever-larger displays in recent years. If these rumors are true, the bigger iPhone would nearly match the screen size of Samsung's massive Galaxy Note 3, with its pocket-busting, 5.7-inch "phablet" display. The Korean company's flagship Galaxy S5 has a 5.1-inch display, the new HTC One M8 has a 5-inch screen and the recently announced Amazon Fire phone checks in at 4.7 inches. The Bloomberg report says the new iPhones will ship to retailers "around September" and be more rounded and thinner than previous models. That would be consistent with launch patterns from Apple, which for the past several years has announced new iPhones in early fall. If the report is true, this would mark the second consecutive year Apple has released two phones. Last year, Apple borrowed from the playbook of Samsung and other competitors by releasing the high-end iPhone 5S and the cheaper, more colorful 5C model. Almost a year later, the plastic iPhone 5C sells for as low as $99 with a wireless contract. For the previous six years, Apple had offered only a single, iconic phone even as competitors rolled out phones with many sizes, shapes and prices. The new iPhones may also be part of a one-two punch from Apple, which has been under pressure to innovate and which has promised new products in 2014. Reports have said a long-awaited Apple smartwatch is also coming this fall. A Reuters report says the watch will have a 2.5-inch screen and be "slightly rectangular." Wizkid hanging out with Chris Brown in Carlifornia have landed him on the pages of UK DailyMail one more time, months after he first made it to the website in 2013 with One Direction's Liam Payne.
Chris Brown was spotted with his model beau, Karrueche Tran, as the pair made their way out of The SLS Hotel in Beverly Hils, California on Friday. The couple were joined by a group of friends which included Wizkid as they stepped out to enjoy the sunny day Amazon is a fascinating company, and the Amazon Fire Phone is a fascinating machine for connecting you with stuff to buy. It’s probably also the biggest single invasion of your privacy for commercial purposes ever. And no one seems to have noticed. There’s a lot of gee-whiz gadgetry in the new Fire Phone: a 3-D screen, head sensors, dynamic perspective shifts as you move, and real-time identification of over 100 million objects. That last part, the real-time identification, is the new Firefly function. Firefly is a seriously impressive combination of hardware, software, and massive cloud chops that delivers an Apple-like simplicity to identify objects like books, movies, games, and more, just by pointing your Fire Phone’s camera at them and tapping the Firefly button (Update: Amazon says you can delete your photos and recordings from Firefly at any time. However, until you delete them, it does use any Firefly photos and recordings to enhance its recognition system.) (Update: Amazon has clarified that while Firefly does use the camera and microphone, the camera app is separate from Firefly. Your personal photos and videos are not uploaded to the Firefly system; they’re stored separately in your personal storage account in Amazon’s cloud, and not used by Amazon in any way, Amazon says.) |
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