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this is quite nice. PipelineDB allows direct hookup of a Kafka stream, and will ingest durably and reliably, and provide SQL views computed over a sliding window of the stream.
(tags: logging sql kafka pipelinedb streaming sliding-window databases search querying)
the impact of the economic crisis on public funding for universities in Europe
Ireland leading the pack with a drop of funding by 20% :(
(tags: universities ireland ucd tcd dcu funding public-funding europe history downturn)
CurrencyFair P2P International Money Transfers
recommended by Paul Hickey
(tags: via:phickey money money-transfer currency currency-conversion tools recommendations)
How the banks ignored the lessons of the crash
First of all, banks could be chopped up into units that can safely go bust – meaning they could never blackmail us again. Banks should not have multiple activities going on under one roof with inherent conflicts of interest. Banks should not be allowed to build, sell or own overly complex financial products – clients should be able to comprehend what they buy and investors understand the balance sheet. Finally, the penalty should land on the same head as the bonus, meaning nobody should have more reason to lie awake at night worrying over the risks to the bank’s capital or reputation than the bankers themselves. You might expect all major political parties to have come out by now with their vision of a stable and productive financial sector. But this is not what has happened.
(tags: banks banking guardian finance europe eu crash history)
The price of the Internet of Things will be a vague dread of a malicious world
So the fact is that our experience of the world will increasingly come to reflect our experience of our computers and of the internet itself (not surprisingly, as it’ll be infused with both). Just as any user feels their computer to be a fairly unpredictable device full of programs they’ve never installed doing unknown things to which they’ve never agreed to benefit companies they’ve never heard of, inefficiently at best and actively malignant at worst (but how would you now?), cars, street lights, and even buildings will behave in the same vaguely suspicious way. Is your self-driving car deliberately slowing down to give priority to the higher-priced models? Is your green A/C really less efficient with a thermostat from a different company, or it’s just not trying as hard? And your tv is supposed to only use its camera to follow your gestural commands, but it’s a bit suspicious how it always offers Disney downloads when your children are sitting in front of it. None of those things are likely to be legal, but they are going to be profitable, and, with objects working actively to hide them from the government, not to mention from you, they’ll be hard to catch.
(tags: culture bots criticism ieet iot internet-of-things law regulation open-source appliances)
excellent offline mapping app MAPS.ME goes open source
“MAPS.ME is an open source cross-platform offline maps application, built on top of crowd-sourced OpenStreetMap data. It was publicly released for iOS and Android.”
(tags: maps.me mapping maps open-source apache ios android mobile)