Viewing profile — mctavjb9

The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid: http://lcg.web.cern.ch/LCG/public/ It's designed to handle up to 15 petabytes of data per year. Data transfers from 11 data centers around the wor…

Noticeable shaking on the 3rd floor of a concrete building in Cambridge, MA. Some people evacuated. Being a former LA resident, I deemed it minor and didn't bother.

It depends how you define "secure." There are numerous weaknesses of 2G (GSM) security that were addressed in the 3G (UMTS) standards. The major ones: 1) GSM supports one-way authe…

"Rarer than a free quark" would save your analogy.

Oh come on, BostInnovation is not a misnomer. There are plenty of certifiably innovative startups and several well-known VCs on the Right Bank of the Charles. Runkeeper and Cloudan…

Happily not the case in my family. The Apple II Plus was my Christmas present in 1980. My younger brother (now an MBA) was content playing video games when I wasn't hunched over th…

I spent 2.5 years at CERN as a grad student in experimental particle physics in the 1990s. I never experienced anything like the condescending head patting or bad pick-up lines the…

My knee jerk reaction to this story was "do any women work at this company"? (I'm female and do pushups every day as a component of marathon & triathlon training, so I'm not whinin…

Definitely my experience. I still have vivid nightmares about the general exam more than 10 years later. It was an 3 day x 8 hours per day written test with no breaks. If you wante…

The fact that "Joey" was annoyed with someone willing to clue him in on social norms that he could easily glean through careful observation is a sad commentary on what seems to be …

David Skok of Matrix Partners has blogged comprehensively on this topic: http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/ The content may seem obvious, but how many startups can you think of that …

I can totally relate to the statement: "If, like me, you'd rather eat glass than sit down to write some Java code in Eclipse, it would appear that you are out of luck when it comes…

This result should be taken with a large chunk of NaCl until the analysis is internally approved by the collaboration and peer reviewed. Although it's been a while since I got my P…

Yes, but the LHC is actually running at this very moment and will be operational through the end of 2012. CERN opted to run at 7 TeV and put off the shutdown required to increase t…

FPGA designer here. I don't think it's accurate to claim that SystemC is replacing VHDL and Verilog for ASIC/FPGA design. I view SystemC as a niche tool to allow software engineers…

I'd be curious to know what the results of this survey question were from companies that made it to the first round but were not selected for the incubation phase. I had the entry …

Why do you think OpenBTS is illegal in Brazil? There's a research group at UFPA in Belem that's been quite active in the OpenBTS project. I met two of the guys at the OpenBTS Works…

Yes, it was recorded: http://justin.tv/mitef/b/273997550 Be warned that the audio isn't so wonderful and the running time is 1h41m. Thiel had some verbal tics that were distracting…

Sorry to be a buzzkill, but the LHC beam circulates in an extremely high vacuum. There's no way a hand could even get in the beam without breaking the vacuum, thereby causing the a…

Here are some suggestions for further reading: http://www.villagetelco.org Steve Song's blog (Telecommunications Fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation): http://manypossibilities.ne…

Low bit rate codecs with acceptable quality will be a boon for VoIP over satellite. Satellite Internet service is both bandwidth-limited and hideously expensive-- Inmarsat Fleet Br…

I read this statement quite differently: the sample size is small, so the author makes an extra effort to learn from the experiences of others that she views as role models (i.e., …

Are you referring to Chris Paget's demo at DEFCON at the end of July? OpenBTS can in fact be used for nefarious purposes (or to demonstrate the intrinsic insecurity of the GSM stan…

As a point of reference, the BOM for last year's Burning Man setup can be found at the bottom of this page: http://gnuradio.org/redmine/wiki/gnuradio/OpenBTSBM2009RF The default ha…