Interesting Snippets from 2012-08-27

• Silicon Valley’s Hardware Renaissance - NYTimes.com

  THE shift away from the Valley’s obsession with dot-com services and Web-based social networks is a return to the region’s roots. The Valley began as a center for electronics hardware design in the late 1930s, when Bill Hewlett and David Packard built an audio oscillator that Walt Disney used in the production of the movie “Fantasia.” At the start of the 1970s, the label Silicon Valley was coined because of the proliferation of semiconductor companies. In the mid-1970s, a group of computer hardware hobbyists started the Homebrew Computer Club here, which gave rise to several dozen start-ups, including Apple Computer.

  Today some of the most successful hardware start-ups in Silicon Valley have been formed from the diaspora of former Apple employees who want to try their hand at companies that pair hardware and software — which is an integral part of Apple’s DNA.

• Greyhole - Redundant Storage Pooling using Samba

  Greyhole is an application that uses Samba to create a storage pool of all your available hard drives (whatever their size, however they're connected), and allows you to create redundant copies of the files you store, in order to prevent data loss when part of your hardware fails.

• Saudi Oil Producer’s Computers Restored After Cyberattack - NYTimes.com

  Saudi Aramco, the world’s biggest oil producer, has resumed operating its main internal computer networks after a virus infected about 30,000 of its workstations earlier this month, the company said Sunday.

• Oracle Broadens Support for Open-source R Analytics | PCWorld

  Oracle is expanding its support for R, the open-source language for statistical analysis, the company announced Friday.

  New features include R ports for the Solaris and AIX OSes, adding to existing support for Linux and Windows environments, Oracle said. Oracle has also extended R support to its TimesTen in-memory database.

• Three kinds of big data - O'Reilly Radar

  So where will big data go to grow up?

  Once we get over ourselves and start rolling up our sleeves, I think big data will fall into three major buckets: Enterprise BI, Civil Engineering, and Customer Relationship Optimization. This is where we’ll see most IT spending, most government oversight, and most early adoption in the next few years.

• Computational social science: Making the links : Nature News & Comment

  The emerging field of computational social science is attracting mathematically inclined scientists in ever-increasing numbers. This, in turn, is spurring the creation of academic departments and prompting companies such as the social-network giant Facebook, based in Menlo Park, California, to establish research teams to understand the structure of their networks and how information spreads across them.

• rOpenSci - open source tools for open science

  At rOpenSci we are creating packages that allow access to data repositories through the R statistical programming environment that is already a familiar part of the workflow of many scientists. We hope that our tools will not only facilitate drawing data into an environment where it can readily be manipulated, but also one in which those analyses and methods can be easily shared, replicated, and extended by other researchers. While all the pieces for connecting researchers with these data sources exist as disparate entities, our efforts will provide a unified framework that will be quickly connect researchers to open data.

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