Geeks Helping Geeks Teach Geeks

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Geeks Helping Geeks Teach Geeks
Number 2670
Broadcast Date JANUARY 20, 2016
Episode Length 48:07
Hosts Tom Merritt
Guests Scott Johnson, Luria Petrucci

Online education fell off the hype radar but it’s getting stronger than ever. Luria Petrucci shares what she learned setting up Geeks University with Tom Merritt and Scott Johnson.

Guest

Headlines

Apple released a free update to GarageBand for iOS Wednesday. A new feature called Live Loops, a drum-machine style experience with pre-made loops in styles like EDM and DubStep plus the ability to create your own loops with built-in keyboards. There’s an FX panel for adding wobble and reverb sometimes by moving the device itself. There’s also a feature called Drummer which lets you add a session drummer who plays in a particular style. for instance, Leah embraces lean minimal tech house beats.And Audio Units supports third-party plugins.
Apple also released a new app Wednesday called, Music Memos aimed at musicians. Features include uncompressed audio recording, instrument tuning, and the ability to add in a drums or bass line after analyzing the rhythm of a track. It also integrates with GarageBand and Logic. Recorded songs can be tagged by sound, location, or rating, and shared over Apple Music’s Connect.
Fortune reports IBM is in advanced talks to acquire Ustream, according to multiple sources familiar with the deal. Ustream was the only video service offered in IBM’s cloud marketplace which launched in April 2014 and Ustream provides the video streaming capability for IBM’s open cloud development platform.
ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley reports Microsoft will conduct a worldwide recall of power cords from Surface Pro, Surface Pro 2, Surface Pro 3 sold before March 15, 2015 due to concerns on over heating. Microsoft will replace cords free of charge in the US. A site with more information is expected to be available shortly.
Submitted by flyingspatula
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced a plan to donate $1 billion of cloud services to 70,000 non-profits over the next 3 years to “advance the public good.” Bloomberg reports a bulk of the funding will cover free and discounted cloud services like Azure and Office 365 with rest going to expanding free Azure for universities and expanding Internet connectivity in the developing world.
I know all of us have wanted to spend more than $1,100 on the Apple Watch Hermès without having to bother going to a luxury boutique in New York, LA, San Francisco or Miami. Good news! Starting Friday January 22nd you can buy them on Hermes.com or Apple.com! You’ll be able to get the entire collection including the “single Tour” for $1100 the “Double Tour” for $1250 and the “Cuff” for $1500.
Brave Software released a version 0.7 of its new Web browser today which promises quicker loading of websites by blocking programmatic ads and replacing them with Brave’s own inventory. The idea would be to share the revenue with publishers. Brave claims to load 40% faster on desktop and 4 times as fast on mobile by blocking all third-party tracking. The open source browser is available for Mac, Windows, iOS and Android. Brave is run by javascript creator and Mozilla cofounder Brendan Eich.
Facebook has announced they will be reporting aggregate data to Nielsen on how many times people mention TV shows in order to inform Nielsen’s new social TV ratings later this year. Twitter TV Ratings will be renamed “Social Content Ratings.” Nielsen intends to incorporate content from Instagram eventually as well.
Submitted by PhilipShane
The Economic Times reports Apple India has filed an application with the department of industrial policy and promotion to open Apple branded stores in India. Last November, India loosened rules on foreign direct investment in single-brand retail. Previous rules required 30% of products sold to be sourced within India.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India or TRAI sent a letter to Facebook Monday criticizing the company’s campaign to get user’s to support the Free Basics in India program. Free Basics exempts certain Websites and apps from data plans. TRAI said Facebook’s templated letters had the flavor of “a crudely majoritarian and orchestrated opinion poll.” and noted, “you have not been authorized by your users to speak on behalf of them collectively.”
Researchers from Perception Point published a blog post Tuesday describing a vulnerability in Linux Kernel version 3.8’s OS keyring that can escalate a local user to root privileges. Oversimplified a leak happens when a process tries to replace its current session keyring with the very same one, and then a memory overflow can free the keyring object. The bug affects PCs, servers and an estimated 66% of Android devices. The researchers privately reported the bug to Linux kernel mainatiners and fixes are on the way, so keep your patches up to date folks!
Submitted by GreggN

Discussion

Pick of the Day

I thought you would be interested in this Freakonomics episode on "How to Be Less Terrible at Predicting the Future".

They talked about many interesting topics such as "vague verbiage" (how an ambiguous statement like "fair chance of success" by the Chiefs of Staff almost affected JFK's decision to invade Cuba when "fair chance" actually meant only one in three) and "superforecasters" (how ordinary, outsider people with the right attitude can outperform the full-time professionals). The whole episode is worth listening to.

Cheers,
Submitted by Komei

Messages

Hi

I watched an interesting news story on Norwegian television two days ago where a local fire department was talking about how important drones can be when putting out fires. This particular news story was triggered by a fire close to a few storage container filled with explosives, 35 metric tons of high explosives (38,5 short ton for you US-guys). The local fire brigade launched a drone to get a good overview of the situation and monitor the fire while evacuation everyone within a radius of 1 km (0,6 miles). They managed to monitor the fire and the radiant heat until it burned out by itself and they could safely enter and secure the area.

More details, pictures and a video here: http://www.fvn.no/lokalt/sogne/--Det-har-vart-betydelig-fare-for-eksplosjon-2953181.html (sorry, only in Norwegian…but you don’t need to know Norwegian to check out the images)
Sent by Magnus in freezing cold Oslo, Norway


In yesterday's show you had a pilot being skeptical about autonomous cars because he was comparing cars with autonomous aircraft. However, I would argue that this is a faulty comparison. Cars and aircraft have a totally different "factor of safety" when designing them. Aircraft typically have a factor of safety of 1.5 where cars are around 4. This means you figure out how much stress a component should take and multiply it by that fudge factor, oops I mean factor of safety ;-)

So it is not just public perception that makes aircraft systems more stringent but the fact that they can take less error. So if you are comparing autonomous aircraft to autonomous cars, I would say that shows autonomous cars are just around the corner. Cars can accommodate more weight and thus more safety systems. And since the speeds are far slower than aircraft, the stress levels are smaller too.
Sent by Paul your friendly former aerospace engineer


Just looked at the year-end financials (attached) for Netflix after listening to Tuesday’s show. Costs in general are historically in line and the main bump in EPS seems to be from tax benefit rather than operations, so I don’t think it is something to get too excited about for Netflix in general. Only 3.3% of revenues is left after their costs of revenues, marketing, technology, and administrative costs.
Sent by Brian Henry, Assistant Professor of Finance at Benedictine College

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Preceded by:
"Amazon Dash: Push It Real Good"
Geeks Helping Geeks Teach Geeks
Followed by:
"Botline Bling"