Day: May 2, 2012

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From Engadget: Google badmouths HTTP behind its back, proposes SPDY as a speedy successor

Google badmouths HTTP behind its back, proposes SPDY as a speedy successor

If there’s anything that Google doesn’t like, it’s things that collect dust. The company is famous for its annual spring cleaning efforts, in which the firm rids itself of redundant and dead-end projects, along with more bullish moves, such as its push to overhaul the internet’s DNS system. Now it’s looking to replace HTTP with a new protocol known as SPDY, and to that end, it’s demonstrating the potential speed gains that one might expect on a mobile network. According to the company’s benchmarks, mean page load times on the Galaxy Nexus are 23 percent faster with the new system, and it hypothesizes that further optimizations can be made for 3G and 4G networks. To its credit, Google has already implemented SPDY in Chrome, and the same is true for Firefox and Amazon Silk. Even Microsoft appears to be on-board. As a means to transition, the company proposes an Apache 2.2 module known as mod_spdy, which allows web servers to take advantage of features such as stream multiplexing and header compression. As for HTTP, it’s no doubt been a reliable companion, but it seems that it’ll need to work a bit harder to earn its keep. Stay weird, Google, the internet wouldn’t be the same without you.

 

from Engadget

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From Discover Magazine: Mutant flu paper is finally published, reveals pandemic potential of wild viruses | Not Exactly Rocket Science

Am I the only one that thinks this is a bad idea??!!  o.O

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It’s finally out. After months of will-they-won’t they and should-they-shouldn’t-they deliberations, Nature has finally published a paper about a mutant strain of bird flu that can spread between mammals.

The strain was produced by Yoshihiro Kawaoka from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was trying to understand whether wild bird flu viruses have the potential to start a pandemic. These viruses can occasionally infect humans, but so far, they’ve been contained by their inability to efficiently jump from human to human. Kawaoka’s work makes it clear that they can evolve that ability.

Kawaoka’s study, along with a similar one from Ron Fouchier, has been the subject of intense debate for the last several months (catch up on the backstory here). What are the benefits of the research, and do they outweigh the risks? Now that the paper is finally out, we can start to answer those questions.

I’ve written about the paper for Nature News, focusing very heavily on the science rather than the politics. Head over there for a tighter version of this story. In this post, I’m going to highlight four important themes from the paper.

One: H5N1 can evolve to spread …

from Discover Magazine

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From Autoblog: Video: Japanese owner of Harley-Davidson that washed up on Canadian shore found

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Ikuo Yokoyama

As far-fetched as it may seem, the owner of the Japanese Harley-Davidson motorcycle that washed up on the coast of Canada has been found. Beachcombers sent photographs of the bike to Harley-Davidson, which managed to track the registration to Ikuo Yokoyama in Miyagi Prefecture. Yokoyama lost three family members and his home in the tsunami that struck Japan a little more than a year ago and assumed his bike was gone forever. But the beachcombers have extracted the bike from the remote shore, and at its own expense, Harley-Davidson reportedly plans to have the machine shipped back to Miyagi, where it will be restored and returned to its rightful owner. Yokoyama is still living in a temporary shelter.

The bike drifted some 3,100 miles across the Pacific ocean in the back of a cube van. Yokoyama was using the box as storage for the bike on his property. Harley-Davidson says that despite plenty of corrosion, the motorcycle is in surprisingly good shape given what the machine has endured.

Miyagi Prefecture was one of the hardest-hit areas of Japan, where the disaster left 11,000 people dead or missing. Click past the jumpto watch a CBC report on the remarkable story.

 

from Autoblog