MIT didn’t ask feds to prosecute Swartz

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology never sought a federal prosecution of Aaron Swartz, the programming prodigy who was charged with stealing millions of academic papers from an online archive at MIT, according to a report by the institute.

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Creating a $99 Parallel Computing Machine is Just as Hard as it Sounds

Adapteva

Ten months ago, the chipmaker Adapteva unveiled a bold quest—to create a Raspberry Pi-sized computer that can perform the same types of tasks typically reserved for supercomputers. And… they wanted to sell it for only $99. A successful Kickstarter project raised nearly $900,000 for the so-called “Parallella,” and the company got to work with a goal of shipping the first devices by February 2013 and the rest by May 2013.

As so often happens, the deadlines slipped, but Adapteva has done what it set out to do. Last week, the company shipped the first 40 Parallellas and says it will ship all 6,300 computers ordered through the Kickstarter by the end of August. Anyone who didn’t back the Kickstarter can now pre-order for delivery in October.

The first version of the board was finished in January, but it cost $150 to produce. “After that it was iterating time after time to get the bill of materials down to something we wouldn’t be losing $50 per board on,” Adapteva CEO and founder Andreas Olofsson told Ars.

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Couchbase’s Bob Wiederhold: Riding High on Big Data With NoSQL

NoSQL might well be called “the little database engine that could.” It is quietly proving it is on track as Big Data transitions to cloud-based data storage and management. NoSQL is increasingly considered a viable alternative to relational databases, but it is still a relatively small category in a growing world of database technologies.

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Bogus Chrome, Firefox extensions pilfer social media accounts

Trend Micro has found two malicious browser extensions that hijack Twitter, Facebook and Google+ accounts.

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