TechNews - Facebook uses 10,000 Blu-ray discs - tech
(hx) 08:13 PM CET - Feb,02 2014
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- Intel's voice recognition doesn't use the cloud !! - Intel
has a solution, says the company's head of wearables Mike Bell in an
exclusive interview with Quartz. Intel partnered with an unnamed third
party to put that company's voice recognition software on Intel mobile
processors powerful enough to parse the human voice but small enough to
fit in the device that's listening, no round trip to the cloud
required. The result is a prototype
wireless headset called "Jarvis" that sits in the wearer's ears and
connects to his or her smartphone. (Perhaps coincidentally, Jarvis is
also the name of the voice recognition and artificial intelligence
software in the Iron Man franchise.) Jarvis can both listen to commands
and respond in its own voice, acting as both a voice control and a
personal assistant.
Not only is Intel's voice recognition solution more responsive than
those offered by its cloud-obsessed competitors, but it also leads to
what Bell calls "graceful degradation," which means that it works even
when the phone it's connected to is not online.
- Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for
$400M - Google
is shelling out $400 million to buy a secretive artificial
intelligence company called DeepMind. Google confirmed the deal after
Re/code inquired about it, but declined to specify a price. Based in
London, DeepMind was founded by games prodigy and neuroscientist Demis
Hassabis, along with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman. This is in large
part an artificial intelligence talent acquisition, and Google CEO
Larry Page led the deal himself, sources said. According to online
bios, Hassabis in particular is quite a talent, a child prodigy in
chess who was later called “probably the best games player in history”
by the Mind Sports Olympiad. DeepMind has only a landing page for a
website where it describes its business as building learning algorithms
for simulations, e-commerce and games. Profiles on LinkedIn indicate
the company is about three years old. Sources said Founders Fund is a
major investor in DeepMind, along with Horizons Ventures. Skype and
Kazaa developer Jaan Tallin was an investor and advisor (not a founder,
as we initially described him).
- Google to Sell Motorola to Lenovo for $2.91 Billion - Google has
announced that it intends to sell Motorola to Lenovo for $2.91
billion.
- Microsoft Introduces OneDrive - Microsoft has changed the
name of SkyDrive
to OneDrive. It should be business as usual for current SkyDrive
users, everyone else will have to wait for the the official launch of
OneDrive.
- Microsoft faces new brand dispute over OneDrive name - Earlier
this week, Microsoft announced its plans to relaunch SkyDrive under the
new 'OneDrive' brand. The move came after the company faced a dispute
with British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB, trading as 'Sky'), which argued
that Microsoft's SkyDrive brand infringed on its own trademark. But it
seems that Microsoft may be facing a further dispute over its new
OneDrive branding. One.com has offered cloud storage solutions under
the 'Cloud Drive' moniker for the last three years, allowing customers
to synchronise their files to their online storage. Thomas Medard
Frederiksen, chief operating officer of One.com, said
that his company is now "consulting trademark experts" following
Microsoft's rebranding, stating that OneDrive is "a name that is very
close to One.com's own cloud service." One.com says that "OneDrive,
from Microsoft, is a similar product - with a similar name, that will
lead to confusion."
- Windows 8.1 Update Will Hide Tile Interface By Default? - Microsoft
is once again planning to alter the way its Start Screen works in
Windows 8.1 Update 1. While the software giant originally released
Windows 8.1 last year with an option to bypass the "Metro" interface at
boot, sources familiar with Microsoft's plans have revealed to The
Verge that the upcoming update for Windows 8.1 will enable this by
default. Like many other changes in Update 1, we're told the reason for
the reversal is to improve the OS for keyboard and mouse users.
We understand the latest internal builds of Windows 8.1 Update 1 have
the boot-to-desktop option enabled by default, a change that Wzor noted
earlier today. The update is still in development, and Microsoft could
alter this further before it ships, but it's currently being changed to
appease desktop users. It may seem like a minor change, but the move
reverses parts of Microsoft's original vision for Windows 8. While some
critics argued Microsoft simply forced the Start Screen interface onto
desktop PCs with little regard for keyboard and mouse users, the
company pitched its "Metro" environment as the future of Windows. With
the interface booting by default, developers had an opportunity to
place their apps front and center on millions of PCs.
- Facebook uses 10,000 Blu-ray discs to store 'cold' data - If
you thought Netflix and iTunes would make optical discs a thing of the
past, think again. Facebook
has built a storage system from 10,000 Blu-ray discs that holds a
petabyte of data and is highly energy-efficient, the company said
Tuesday. Facebook said last year that it was exploring Blu-ray for its
data-center storage needs, and on Tuesday it showed a prototype system
at the Open Compute Project summit meeting in San Jose, California. It
designed the system to store data that hardly ever needs to be
accessed, or for so-called 'cold storage.' That includes duplicates of
its users' photos and videos that Facebook keeps for backup purposes,
and which it essentially wants to file away and forget. The Blu-ray
system reduces costs by 50 percent and energy use by 80 percent
compared with its current cold-storage system, which uses hard disk
drives, said Jay Parikh, Facebook's vice president of infrastructure
engineering, in a talk at the Open Compute summit. The company expects
to be able to increase the capacity of the system to five petabytes
over time, he said. Blu-ray discs are a good option for cold storage
because they cost less to buy than hard disks and there's a lot of room
for manufacturers to increase the storage density of Blu-ray, said
Jason Taylor, Facebook's director of infrastructure, in an interview.
- If You Used This Secure Webmail Site, the FBI Has Your Inbox -
It's a damn shame that even apps like Angry
Birds are being used to spy on us :-(
- NSA Targets Leaky Apps Like Angry Birds - It's a damn
shame that even apps like Angry
Birds are being used to spy on us :-(
- Snowden Considers Returning to the US - Edward
Snowden, the whistleblower extraordinaire of NSA leaks fame held an
interview of sorts, ,answering
questions posed by Twitter users concerning his actions, their
repercussions and his possible return to the US.
- Angry Birds website hacked after NSA-GCHQ leaks - Video
game developer Rovio has
confirmed that hackers defaced its Angry Birds site with an image
entitled Spying Birds, featuring an NSA logo. The attack followed the
publication of leaks that indicated the US spy agency and its British
counterpart GCHQ had obtained data released by at least one of the
Finnish firm's games. The company said it did not "collaborate or
collude" with any government spy agency. It added it had quickly fixed
its site. "The defacement was caught in minutes and corrected
immediately," said marketing manager Saara Bergstrom. "The end user
data was in no risk at any point. Due to how the internet name
resolution works, for most areas it was not visible at all, but some
areas take time for the correct information to be updated. CHQ GCHQ
says that its surveillance activities are "authorised, necessary and
proportionate" "This attack looks to be similar to the New York Times
attacks from last year."
- Yahoo Reports Attack on Mail Accounts - Another day,
another breach. In yet another reminder of the importance of using
different passwords across different websites, Yahoo
said Thursday that attackers had attempted to gain access to Yahoo
Mail accounts using usernames and passwords collected from a breach on
a third-party site. "Recently, we identified a coordinated effort to
gain unauthorized access to Yahoo Mail accounts," Jay Rossiter, Yahoo's
senior vice president for platforms and personalization products, wrote
in a blog post Thursday. "Based on our current findings, the list of
usernames and passwords that were used to execute the attack was likely
collected from a third-party database compromise." Mr. Rossiter did not
say how many accounts were affected, only that Yahoo had reset
passwords for affected accounts and added two-step verification, a
system that asks users to enter a second, one-time password. The
company said it was also working with law enforcement to investigate
the breach and had stepped up security on its systems.
- GoDaddy Admits Hacker Tricked Them - An
update in the @N account hacking case has just come through from
GoDaddy, one of the companies involved in the somewhat convoluted
social engineering case. The company admits that one of its employees
was 'socially engineered' into giving out additional information which
allowed a hacker to gain access to Naoki Hiroshima's GoDaddy account. The hack was
performed by calling up PayPal and GoDaddy to gain access to
Hiroshima's personal email, which was then used to extort the @N
Twitter user handle from him.
- Amazon Realizes It Makes Almost No Profit, Will Raise Shipping
Fees - Amazon investors might have finally heard the news they
have been waiting for: The
retailer is raising shipping fees. Amazon has 237 million active
customers but as a general rule makes almost no profit. Thursday's
announcement that the company was considering raising prices by as much
as 50 percent on its $79 Prime shipping program could mean $500 million
for its skimpy bottom line. The news came in a conference call when the
Seattle-based retailer discussed its fourth-quarter earnings. The
announcement helped deflect disappointment that Amazon's torrid growth
might be slowing. Amazon has been pouring money into new ventures,
ranging from new warehouses to free videos for Prime subscribers. The
eternal question is when it will turn all that expansion into profit.
- FAA Stops Drone Beer Delivery Service - The FAA has
shut down that beer drone delivery service that popped up last week
:-(
- What It's Like To Get Caught Inside A 25 Foot Wave - Amazing
GoPro footage of Hawaiian big wave surfer Mark Healey
getting caught inside by a 25-foot wave during the 2014 Mavericks
Invitational.
- Early build of 'iOS in the Car' shown in video - Alongside
the announcement of iOS 7 this summer, Apple announced an interface for
select cars accessible through connecting your iPhone with your
vehicle. In the preview, they showed some screenshots and spoke of
basic functionality and now a developer
has managed to uncover the hidden interface within the iOS SDK simulator
and demo it in video for the first time.
- Let This Video Inspire Your Creativity - Daniel Sax
lovingly shoots Ira Glass's now-famous quote about creative
types, and the frustrating gap between one's taste and one's
ability.
- AeYO Fun - check it out!
- F1 2014 Jerez Testing and F1 2013 Sound Comparison - First
official day for the 1.6T V6 engines and the new 2014 F1 cars.
There were plenty of tasks and problems on all teams to get their cars
running. Many teams didn't come out until the end of the day, when it
started raining, and only for a few laps: installation lap and not much
else.Lap times were at least 9-10 seconds worse than the best lap times
you can remember in recent years at Jerez.
- Southern snow leaves motorists stranded (video) - Living
in the North means learning to deal with seasonal snow fall. It means
practicing in an empty parking lot when the first few inches fall.
Equipping snow tires and knowing just how quickly one can safely go
when the white stuff starts falling is seemingly ingrained into the DNA
of Yankee drivers. That, along with our fleets of snow plows and salt
trucks, makes it easy to shake our heads and chuckle when our Southern
friends get a dusting of powder that shuts down entire towns. What's
happening south of the Mason-Dixon now, though, is not funny at all.
Snow, freezing rain and perilously low temperatures have embraced the
southern US for the second time this year, and the results for
motorists have been catastrophic, with traffic jams lasting over night.
CNN
reports on one woman, Rebekah Cole, whose nine-mile drive home
started Tuesday afternoon and had run well into Wednesday morning. She
was only half way there. Cole described the epic jam as something out
of a "zombie movie."
- Jonah Hill - Him (Spoof Of The Movie Her) - SNL 1-25-14 - The spoofs
keeping rolling in for "Her," with the man/machine romance sparking
some fun takes on the movie. So far, we've seen what Samantha sounds
like as voiced by Philip Seymour Hoffman, as well as watched the parody
sequel, "Him." Now comes yet another riff on the movie entitled "Me."
- A Million Ways to Die in the West - Red Band Trailer -
Seth MacFarlane directs, produces, co-writes and plays the role of the
cowardly sheep farmer Albert in "A Million
Ways to Die in the West."
After Albert backs out of a gunfight, his fickle girlfriend leaves him
for another man. When a mysterious and beautiful woman rides into town,
she helps him find his courage and they begin to fall in love. But when
her husband, a notorious outlaw, arrives seeking revenge, the farmer
must put his newfound courage to the test.
- The Fault In Our Stars - Official Trailer - Hazel
(Shailene Woodley) and Gus (Ansel Elgort) are two extraordinary
teenagers who share an acerbic wit, a disdain for the conventional, and
a love that sweeps them -- and us -- on an unforgettable journey. Their
relationship is all the more miraculous, given that they met and fell
in love at a cancer support group. THE FAULT IN
OUR STARS, based upon the number-one bestselling novel by John
Green, explores the funny, thrilling and tragic business of being alive
and in love.
- Bill Hader's Killer "Star Wars" Impressions - CONAN
Highlight: Attention J.J. Abrams: nobody can
pull off a dying tauntaun & Jabba like Bill Hader can.
- Jake Gyllenhaal Faces Himself in the First Trailer for 'Enemy'
- Denis
Villeneuve's Enemy was picked up by A24 Films at TIFF, and will
arrive in theaters on March 14th.
- 30-Second Super Bowl Spots for 'Monuments Men' +
'Pompeii' - Two more Super Bowl TV spots have debuted online
thanks to Sony
Pictures, pushing their two films: Pompeii, the big, dumb action
extravaganza from Paul W.S. Anderson, and The Monuments Men, George
Clooney's big WWII drama about rescuing artwork from the Nazis, which
was delayed from a late 2013 release.
- 10 Super Bowl Facts You Should Know - Using bad data
analysis, it's
possible to correlate a city's unemployment percentage with their
chances of winning a superbowl.
- Kia gives K900 Matrix spoof for Super Bowl commercial - Kia
made a splash when it announced that Laurence Fishburne would revisit
Morpheus, his bespectacled, blade-wielding badass character from the
Matrix trilogy for a Super Bowl commercial. When we originally broke
that story, we offered up a brief synopsis of the spot, produced by
David&Goliath. Now, we have an extended, 90-second
version of the 60-second Kia K900 commercial that's slated to air
during this weekend's Super Bowl. While it does stick to the brief we
reported on a few weeks back, there's a big, ridiculous twist in the
last bit of the video, not to mention a few easter eggs for fans of the
movies. We won't spoil it for you, so scroll down and have a look.
- Most Poorly Planned Wedding Ever - This video
has been around since 2011, but given the wedding party's
proclivity for shoddily planned pyrotechnics, it really deserves
another viewing.
- World's largest toy car collection is in Beirut, and it's - It's
common for auto enthusiasts to have a few miniatures of their favorite
cars around their home or office. They provide a respite of happiness
knowing that if you can't have the real things, at least you can look
at them in miniature. However, Billy Karam of Beirut, Lebanon, has
taken collecting toy cars to its extreme. His
collection of over 30,000 model cars and 400 dioramas is certified
by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's largest collection
of car toys.
- Ravijour - TRUE LOVE TESTER - check it out
:P
- Weird 5-Second Test Can Tell You If Your Friends Are Good
Liars - It all has to do with how aware we are of being perceived.
Does
that sound complicated? It's not. Or are we lying?
- Footage Of Horrific Crash At Rolex 24 - Coming out
of Turn 3 and blinded by the sun, the No. 99 of Memo Gidley slams
into the back of the stalled No. 62 car of Matteo Malucelli at the
Rolex 24 at Daytona International Speedway
- Helmet cam from unconscious skydiver being rescued mid-air - This
is the terrifying moment a skydiver was left plummeting 12,500ft to the ground
after he was knocked out in a skydiving accident.
- This Girl Makes $9,000 A Month Eating Food In Front Of Her
Webcam - Gastronomic voyeurism, or watching people eat, is
a new craze that's sweeping South Korea.
- Two girls trying to give each other black eyes - OMG!
- Fedora Tricks and Parkour - extremnists:
clay young, daniel woodin, and andy agee further test their skills
at random stuff that they think of of the top of their heads by
mastering the art of top-hat throwing and catching on the head and
extend our head-eye cordination in random trick that will blow your
head off, and also mixing in some parkour tricks(mostly minor stuff due
to injuries:me-torn ligament, and another missing a knee cap).the fun
starts out in fancy hotel and winds up in a backyard to find the most
extreme hat parkour places suitable for the experts. Kids, don't try
this at home!
- This PSA Takes A Very Unexpected Turn - This PSA
(which is not an actual PSA) brings home why you should stay in
school in a very unexpected way.
- Woman Caught in Tidal Wave - On Sardinero Beach, a woman
found herself caught in a tidal wave and got carried for a fair
while!
- Americans Taste Test Australian Food - Chicken-flavored
chips are dumb. Take note, Lays.
- The Blindfolded Exotic Meat Taste Test - Like anyone
knows what
an elk tastes like.
- Shaolin Monk 2 Finger Stand - Apparently
only two people in the world can do this!!
- SiriPornstar - Wild Thing - check it out
- Taylor Swift Attacked at Grammys - LOL - Taylor Swift
Attacked during her performance at the 2014 Grammys. Like a pro,
the attack didn't faze her and she kept on singing.
- Budweiser's Super Bowl Ad Will Make You Cry - This is just
adorable.
- The Scarlett Johansson SodaStream Ad Banned From The Super
Bowl - Sorry, Coke & Pepsi' is the uncensored version of
SodaStream's commercial for the Big Game 2014. Watch as
Scarlett Johansson shows us how to save the world with a soda
that's better-for-you and all of us. Less sugar, less bottles!
- Martha Hunt Picture Moment - Take a look!
- Hottest Babes on the Internet #18 - Which one is
hottest? ;-)
- The best pics on the Internet #61 -All pictures
are carefully handpicked!
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Updated:10:44 AM CEST Sep,20
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