So if you only need a non-EV a dozen times per year, have you considered renting for those trips? You can rent a small (but decent) car for about $30 per day. Assuming each of your long trips was for two days, that would run you about $600 per year in rental fees. Whether or not fuel savings the rest of the year would offset that cost depends on many, many factors. Of course, this assumes that you have a car rental location within driving distance for your EV, but unless you're really out in the sticks, you probably do.
on top of which it's extremely expensive for what it is
Perhaps. I find that I really *like* driving an EV. The relatively high acceleration, especially off the line, plus the silence -- and the ability to warm the car up with the garage door closed on a cold morning -- are nice. I enjoy driving an EV more than I enjoy driving a combustion-powered vehicle, which is worth something to me.
I should mention that I own two vehicles. One is an EV (Nissan LEAF) which we use for running around. We live 20 miles from town, but it has enough range to run into town, do some running around, and get home. If we absolutely need it, there's a quick charger in town that we can use to "top up" to get home. 15 minutes there gives us enough charge to get home, but it's rare that we need it. My other vehicle is a full-sized pickup truck (Ford F350) with a big diesel V8. We use that for hauling stuff, towing stuff (boat, tractor (on flatbed trailer), camp trailer, etc.), tooling around in the mountains, etc. We sometimes use the pickup for long trips, but usually if we don't actually need the pickup we rent a small car. It's cheaper than feeding that big diesel (which gets 15-19 mpg).
My LEAF is leased and the lease expires next month. I normally buy vehicles and drive them until they die, but EVs were new enough that I wanted to be able to walk away. I think we're going to go test drive the Chevy Bolt, and if we like it we'll get one of those. We like EVs, but would appreciate just a little more range than the LEAF gets us -- to ensure we never have to stop at that quick charger.
People who don't swear scare the fucking life out of me.
I don't, except in circumstances where I'm deliberately trying to shock, or at least surprise. It's not a matter of "repression", it's that profanity is not part of my vocabulary. You assume that people who don't swear are "repressing" or "censoring" themselves, but that assumption presumes that they actually do swear in their internal dialogue, but then don't say it out loud. But I don't use profanity in my internal dialogue, either, though I suppose I have some stand-in words (dang, etc.) which fill more or less the same purpose.
To put it another way, a good friend of mine like to say "If you don't scream FUCK when you hit your thumb with a hammer, your head will explode." My response is "When I hit my thumb with a hammer, I'm in way too much pain to go to the effort of remembering to scream FUCK." He's assuming that the curse word will be naturally present and that if you don't scream it it's because you're holding it back. For me, the curse word just isn't there, so what happens when I hit my thumb is a wordless howl of pain. No repression involved, and my head remains intact.
In addition, I think profanity is generally counterproductive. Rather than saying that something is "fucking stupid", why not spend two more seconds thinking, and articulate why it's stupid, or what about it is stupid? Your phrase accomplishes exactly nothing other than to make people understand that you're angry. It conveys no other information and does nothing to rectify the stupidity. Also, it's pretty common that when people bother to think about what exactly it is that's making them mad, they discover that, in fact, it's not stupid and that they just hadn't thought the whole situation through.
Finally, I find that the fact that I hardly ever use profanity makes it a really powerful tool on the rare occasions I do choose to use it. Those who use it constantly have basically nowhere to go when the situation deserves a really strong statement.
because people report vulnerabilities against very old versions of Android which, while they do still exist in the wild, constitute a fairly small number of devices...
Android KitKat, which was released in 2013, is still being used on 22.1% of the devices out there. And 36.3% of the devices out there run KitKat or older versions of Android.
The problem is that nobody goes after manufacturers that violate the GPL. If Google were to put their money where their mouth is, they should pursue ALL the manufacturers that refuse to release the GPL code to their Android software.
Here are some of the big GPL violators:
Amlogic
MINIX
Samsung
HTC...
What would that accomplish? The only thing that you could get is whatever kernel modifications they've made. Do you really think there's a lot of really innovative kernel work being done by those players? And, AFAIK, they do publish the kernel changes to comply with the GPL. Samsung and HTC do, anyway. I'm not sure about the smaller ones.
The rest of Android is under the Apache2 license, so OEMs have no obligation to publish their changes. Not even to Google.
What do people mean when they say "make America great again"?
I think most of those people actually mean "I want the world to revert back to how it was X years ago". With X depending on personal experiences.
Of course, that's impossible.
Very true. And I think what Trump is thinking of when he says it is the greatness of the captains of industry, like Rockefeller, Sinclair, Carnegie, etc., with himself and his friends in the leading roles.
Remember the original PC was "open" because IBM were forced to under anti trust law.
That's not true. There was no anti-trust ruling against IBM related to the PC (though when they created the PC they were already operating under the terms of a consent decree related to anti-trust prosecution for actions in the mainframe space), and the PC's openness was really a result of Compaq's careful cleanroom reverse engineering of the BIOS, rather than any legal constraints on IBM. The previous anti-trust action against IBM probably did have the effect of making them more circumspect about trying to control the PC, but that was less of a factor than Compaq's work.
Boy, I was wrong:-( Android we all hoped would be a GNU OS with all rooted phones and terminals and hacks back in 2009 when we read about it. Nope. Is it too late and why won't Google be more open?
Android is open, rootable and hackable. Most OEMs make phones that are locked down, but Google's Nexus and Pixel line have unlockable bootloaders (note, however, that Verizon required the Pixels to be locked down; buy from Google for the open version), and full source code to the OS is available, including build toolchains. There are binary blobs for firmware (as is the case for lots of PC hardware, too), and Google's own apps are closed source, but the operating system is absolutely open and hackable. There's also no cost for writing your own apps, and nothing requiring you to use Google's "walled garden", the Play store. In fact there are other play stores out there, and you can download and install individual apps.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Wilson
You can refuse a presidential pardon and still be convicted.
The precise Supreme Court ruling is kind of interesting. The holding was that a judge cannot recognize a pardon unless it has been introduced into the court. The mere fact that a judge knows the pardon was granted isn't enough; someone has to actually bring it up in court. So, you can be prosecuted even if you've been pardoned, but all you have to do is to say "Hey judge, I've been pardoned" (more or less) and the judge will dismiss the case (with prejudice, I'd expect). But if you refuse to bring it up, the trial and sentencing go forward as normal. Unless the prosecution brings it up, but that would be dumb.
Of course, in most cases if you've been pardoned and haven't rejected the pardon, the prosecutor won't even bother trying to prosecute you because he knows you have a get-out-of-jail-free card. But in theory he could try to prosecute anyway... until the defense files a motion to dismiss.
It's really impressive how much a difference sharp eyes make. I like taking close-up portraits with my 85mm f/1.4 on a full frame sensor.
99% of the whole picture is basically completely out of focus. If the other 1% falls on the eyes, the picture looks perfectly sharp.
It's junk otherwise.
Yup. When people look at portraits, they look first, last and middle at the eyes. My slight oversharpening brings out detail in the irises and lashes that people don't consciously notice but really make the image "pop".
Most of photography is understanding how humans see images and enhancing (with various techniques, including composition, focus, lighting, post-processing etc., etc.) the portions that the photographer wants the audience to look at, in ways the audience finds compelling. In hindsight it's obvious that you can take random photos and go the other direction, losing detail that no one cares about, without degrading human perception of the image. Doing it well requires some understanding of the content of the image, though, so it takes a smart-ish system.
And everybody agrees JPEG is old, tired and long in the tooth the old patent issues. Then there was JPEG-2000 but again patent issues. Again, why would Google push this on top of what's essentially something that collectively we've been told is dying and encumbered by *possible* patent issues? I can see from the press info and details that they've come up with a way to use ML in a new way, great. But again, why not on top of WEBP they're own great new way of doing this and not JPEG? you can convert JPEGs to WEBP why not? Oh the browsers don't support WEBP but do JPEG?
You're missing the forest for the trees, I think.
This technique is entirely independent of image format. You could do it with JPEG, or WEBP or anything you like... you could even do it with lossless compression formats, though you'd obviously be making them lossy. The researchers used JPEG because it was convenient.
....is a lie, it reduces image quality just in a way you cannot see visually
If all you want to do is look at the image this is fine, but anything else that needs it full quality will be sacrificed
Actually I think you could probably see it if the device are using isn't already so high def you can't tell the smallest details anyway. What they do is just request a 1/4 size image and then upscale it. Woo clever.
No, they request a 1/4 size image, then upscale it, then selectively restore details to portions of the image that humans pay attention to. The result isn't much larger than the 1/4 size image, but looks much better to people.
I've been doing something vaguely similar (though not automatically) for years in my portrait photography. I selectively sharpen (actually, oversharpen) key facial features (especially eyes) that are the things that people focus on when looking at a portrait. This makes the whole image seem sharper and more vibrant, though it isn't. In fact, if the entire image were sharpened in the same way it would look terrible. This is especially useful when I shoot with a soft-focus filter which creates a very nice dreamy effect but can make the subject look dull. Soft focus plus sharpened eyes (and, often, lips -- it depends) make a beautiful portrait which people find more appealing and "realistic" than without the phony sharpening. Similarly, reduced overall resolution with detail retained in the right places makes an image look as good as the full resolution version, even though it's not.
Google you're annoying as fuck with the moving targets on your open standards, and while I think it's great that we now have another way to store images but we still have GIF, PNG, SVG, JPEG and even your own )(*@)(*! WEBP
This ins't a new standard. The images processed by this algorithm are standard JPEGs, just adjusted in a way that reduces image complexity in a way that is imperceptible to humans.
One more thought: I actually could see value in two USB-C ports, one at the top and one at the bottom. When using wired headphones, it's convenient to have the wire coming from the top of the phone.
I wonder if they have something to say about putting dual USB (either dual USB-C, or USB-C plus micro USB) on the phone, because I need power + audio out more often than I need something else.
Good question. I don't think dual USB would be the right solution, though. USB can deliver data/audio out while pushing power in, so you only need one port. With a miniature USB hub plus a USB audio adapter you'd be able to charge and listen at the same time. And someone could even combine them into one small device. I found one that allows charging the device while getting HDMI output, so something like that.
Personally, my phone (Pixel XL) charges so quickly and lasts so long that I rarely need power + audio, except in the car where I use Bluetooth audio anyway. The combination of quick charging and long battery life means I charge when it's convenient for me to charge, rather than when the phone needs it. Mostly that means I only plug it in when I'm in the car (where my dock has a charger, so it requires no conscious decision to charge).
Because the engineering mantra of designing something that's the minimum needed to do the job properly has been supplanted
Alternatively, given the available more flexible and general-purpose alternatives, the headphone jack is no longer required to do the job properly, so the mantra dictates that it should be removed.
I've spoken with mobile phone hardware engineers about the issue, and what they say is that there are very compelling reasons to remove the headphone jack. It takes a huge amount of space, particularly due to depth, and does so right in a crucial area where designers would prefer to put antennas. Being able to get rid of it in favor of USB audio allows them to make better phones.
Fingerprints are not used for authentication, right?
Wrong. Fingerprints are great authenticators (and not particularly good identifiers; uniqueness guarantees are very weak), but the authentication is derived from the integrity of the measurement process, not the secrecy of the fingerprint.
That is, the security of a fingerprint-based authentication is primarily derived from the assurance you have that the fingerprint being measured is an actual body part and not some simulacrum. In the case of attended authentication stations, where a guard examines your fingers to verify that you're not wearing latex finger covers or similar the security is actually very good. In the case of a mobile phone phone sensor or similar, the security is fairly low -- though stronger than a typical phone password when shoulder-surfing opportunities are factored in.
Because your less-than-technically savvy "friends" and acquaintances will try sending you email at WallyL at aol.com, which is not my email address, because mine is at gmail.com, but those people don't know the difference and send stuff to the wrong person.
I've never had that problem, in 25 years of email use.
While Apple, Google and Amazon all have electronic services delivery, Amazon is, by far, the largest in terms of physical plant for their vast goods-shipping network.
While yes, Apple and Google do ship, they simply don't have the sheer scope of what Amazon is dealing in.
So yeah, Amazon's going to come in behind those two.
This report is only about data centers, not all operations. So it's excluding goods shipment infrastructure.
I never understood the solar powered drones for internet access. Solar powered drones only make sense if you need to move large distances over many days. That's not what you need for internet access.
Drones also make sense if you want to stay roughly stationary at high altitude over many days, which would be very nice for providing Internet access. Google's other approach, using balloons, has the problem that unless you tether the balloons to the ground you basically have to let them follow the wind. That means you need enough balloons to provide complete coverage, so that as one balloon floats out of range, another one comes into range. Even if you have enough balloons to provide that level of coverage, you also have to figure out how to deal with different airspace jurisdictions; unless you can steer them by moving them up or down into different air currents, or unless you bring them to the ground and truck them back "upwind", they may eventually (depending on latitude) float into the airspace of some country that doesn't want them there.
The greater controllability of drones, plus the fact that they can usually travel upwind, has a lot of value for providing cheap high-flying Internet coverage. But it also comes with a lot of challenges.
Solving that problem is what this sort of research is about. For a good overview, read "Superintelligence", by Nick Bottom. It may be the most terrifying book you'll ever read.
The goal of this sort of research isn't too provide general-purpose ethics for AIs, it's to figure out how to make sure they don't decide to wipe out or oppress humanity. The problem is that there's no obvious reason that the intelligence level of an artificial mind is naturally limited to human equivalence. For that matter there's no reason human intelligence is limited... but increasing our intelligence is a slow process.
Given that an AI that reaches something close to human level intelligence can then be tasked with improving itself, it seems clear that shortly after we build something roughly as smart as us, we'll have something dramatically smarter than us. If such artificial superintelligence doesn't have a goal of preserving humanity and human freedom in something like the way humanity wants, we may find ourselves shuffled aside as an inconvenience... or just wiped out as either a nuisance or as a source of useful raw materials.
And it turns out that even if we assume that we can fix whatever goals we want into the AIs we build, it's still incredibly hard to define goals that can't be more easily satisfied by some horribly perverse outcome. For example, if we specified that our AIs should try to make us happy, one might decide that the most effective way to do that is to implant electrodes in all of our brains and directly stimulate our pleasure centers. That's a simplistic example, but more sophisticated approaches also turn out to have deep and non-obvious flaws -- and if we devise a goal that appears perfect to us, that doesn't mean it is.
Solving that problem is what this sort of research is about. For a good overview, read "Superintelligence", by Nick Bottom. It may be the most terrifying book you'll ever read.
Sure. Throughout the planet's history climate change has been the biggest driver of speciation, as life has to adapt to changing conditions. Anthopogenic climate change may ultimately be the single best answer to the similarly anthropogenic Holocene Extinction which has been going on for 10K years or so (but really ramped up recently).
Regardless, the planet and life on the planet will survive and thrive. With regard to AGW, the question we care about is just how much impact the climate change will have on us. We're capable of living in a wide variety of climates, but that doesn't mean that adapting won't be difficult and expensive.
And this, ladies and gentlemen is what a parade of mismanagement looks like. Corporate raider CEO after corporate raider CEO trying to pump up short term valuation at the expense of long term viability.
That got you a +5 on/., but it is a load of crap. Mayer wasn't a raider CEO and she didn't try to pump up short term valuation. Quite the opposite, she tried to find some way to build real value in what was clearly a moribund company. I'm not saying she did a good job -- it's entirely possible that a good CEO could have found a way to preserve and grow Yahoo. But it's also entirely possible that there was just nothing there to work with, and in fact that looks most likely to me.
Yahoo! had been coasting for a very long time when Mayer took job. Basically, the company's reason for existence ceased when Google proved in the late 90s that hand-curated directories were a dead end (up until that point, the general consensus was that search engines were doomed to failure; they were better at indexing but terrible at relevance and expected to get dramatically worse as the size of the Internet grew). But because Yahoo! had established itself as a major player it continued attracting capital, and thanks to some good deals with PC makers which got the Yahoo! search bar pre-installed on lots of machines, built considerable mindshare as a landing page and an email service. That ensured a small but decent ad revenue flow.
But Yahoo! was never able to find a way to build a compelling product. Its ad revenues on the desktop were in decline, thanks in large part to the demise of the landing page concept and it basically completely failed to make the transition to mobile (though it did make some nice apps). What Mayer needed to do to be successful was to take the talent and the revenue and use it to create an entirely new business. Pulling all of the employees back into the office was part of her strategy for doing that, based on the theory that co-located people are more capable of generating innovative ideas (which is true, but "more capable" is not a guarantee of a result).
But creating an entirely new line of business isn't an easy thing to do, even given a large pool of talent and plenty of money. Or, rather, it's easy to do on a small scale, but it's hard to create something that will scale rapidly up to become a multi-billion dollar business. It's actually a little easier to find a promising startup to acquire and then grow that... but even that is a crapshoot, and none of Mayer's acquisitions panned out.
So, Yahoo!'s failure had nothing whatsoever to do with corporate raiding CEOs or pump 'n dump schemes. Mayer attempted to succeed, and failed, plain and simple.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, to be clear, if we get the Bolt we'll buy it this time rather than lease. I'm thoroughly sold on EVs, and so is my wife.
So if you only need a non-EV a dozen times per year, have you considered renting for those trips? You can rent a small (but decent) car for about $30 per day. Assuming each of your long trips was for two days, that would run you about $600 per year in rental fees. Whether or not fuel savings the rest of the year would offset that cost depends on many, many factors. Of course, this assumes that you have a car rental location within driving distance for your EV, but unless you're really out in the sticks, you probably do.
on top of which it's extremely expensive for what it is
Perhaps. I find that I really *like* driving an EV. The relatively high acceleration, especially off the line, plus the silence -- and the ability to warm the car up with the garage door closed on a cold morning -- are nice. I enjoy driving an EV more than I enjoy driving a combustion-powered vehicle, which is worth something to me.
I should mention that I own two vehicles. One is an EV (Nissan LEAF) which we use for running around. We live 20 miles from town, but it has enough range to run into town, do some running around, and get home. If we absolutely need it, there's a quick charger in town that we can use to "top up" to get home. 15 minutes there gives us enough charge to get home, but it's rare that we need it. My other vehicle is a full-sized pickup truck (Ford F350) with a big diesel V8. We use that for hauling stuff, towing stuff (boat, tractor (on flatbed trailer), camp trailer, etc.), tooling around in the mountains, etc. We sometimes use the pickup for long trips, but usually if we don't actually need the pickup we rent a small car. It's cheaper than feeding that big diesel (which gets 15-19 mpg).
My LEAF is leased and the lease expires next month. I normally buy vehicles and drive them until they die, but EVs were new enough that I wanted to be able to walk away. I think we're going to go test drive the Chevy Bolt, and if we like it we'll get one of those. We like EVs, but would appreciate just a little more range than the LEAF gets us -- to ensure we never have to stop at that quick charger.
People who don't swear scare the fucking life out of me.
I don't, except in circumstances where I'm deliberately trying to shock, or at least surprise. It's not a matter of "repression", it's that profanity is not part of my vocabulary. You assume that people who don't swear are "repressing" or "censoring" themselves, but that assumption presumes that they actually do swear in their internal dialogue, but then don't say it out loud. But I don't use profanity in my internal dialogue, either, though I suppose I have some stand-in words (dang, etc.) which fill more or less the same purpose.
To put it another way, a good friend of mine like to say "If you don't scream FUCK when you hit your thumb with a hammer, your head will explode." My response is "When I hit my thumb with a hammer, I'm in way too much pain to go to the effort of remembering to scream FUCK." He's assuming that the curse word will be naturally present and that if you don't scream it it's because you're holding it back. For me, the curse word just isn't there, so what happens when I hit my thumb is a wordless howl of pain. No repression involved, and my head remains intact.
In addition, I think profanity is generally counterproductive. Rather than saying that something is "fucking stupid", why not spend two more seconds thinking, and articulate why it's stupid, or what about it is stupid? Your phrase accomplishes exactly nothing other than to make people understand that you're angry. It conveys no other information and does nothing to rectify the stupidity. Also, it's pretty common that when people bother to think about what exactly it is that's making them mad, they discover that, in fact, it's not stupid and that they just hadn't thought the whole situation through.
Finally, I find that the fact that I hardly ever use profanity makes it a really powerful tool on the rare occasions I do choose to use it. Those who use it constantly have basically nowhere to go when the situation deserves a really strong statement.
because people report vulnerabilities against very old versions of Android which, while they do still exist in the wild, constitute a fairly small number of devices...
Android KitKat, which was released in 2013, is still being used on 22.1% of the devices out there. And 36.3% of the devices out there run KitKat or older versions of Android.
Gingerbread 1.0% Ice Cream Sandwich 1.1% Jelly Bean 11.6% KitKat 22.6%
Very true, and part of the reason that the Play store and Verified Apps protections are so important.
The problem is that nobody goes after manufacturers that violate the GPL. If Google were to put their money where their mouth is, they should pursue ALL the manufacturers that refuse to release the GPL code to their Android software.
Here are some of the big GPL violators: Amlogic MINIX Samsung HTC ...
What would that accomplish? The only thing that you could get is whatever kernel modifications they've made. Do you really think there's a lot of really innovative kernel work being done by those players? And, AFAIK, they do publish the kernel changes to comply with the GPL. Samsung and HTC do, anyway. I'm not sure about the smaller ones.
The rest of Android is under the Apache2 license, so OEMs have no obligation to publish their changes. Not even to Google.
What do people mean when they say "make America great again"?
I think most of those people actually mean "I want the world to revert back to how it was X years ago". With X depending on personal experiences.
Of course, that's impossible.
Very true. And I think what Trump is thinking of when he says it is the greatness of the captains of industry, like Rockefeller, Sinclair, Carnegie, etc., with himself and his friends in the leading roles.
Remember the original PC was "open" because IBM were forced to under anti trust law.
That's not true. There was no anti-trust ruling against IBM related to the PC (though when they created the PC they were already operating under the terms of a consent decree related to anti-trust prosecution for actions in the mainframe space), and the PC's openness was really a result of Compaq's careful cleanroom reverse engineering of the BIOS, rather than any legal constraints on IBM. The previous anti-trust action against IBM probably did have the effect of making them more circumspect about trying to control the PC, but that was less of a factor than Compaq's work.
Boy, I was wrong :-( Android we all hoped would be a GNU OS with all rooted phones and terminals and hacks back in 2009 when we read about it. Nope. Is it too late and why won't Google be more open?
Android is open, rootable and hackable. Most OEMs make phones that are locked down, but Google's Nexus and Pixel line have unlockable bootloaders (note, however, that Verizon required the Pixels to be locked down; buy from Google for the open version), and full source code to the OS is available, including build toolchains. There are binary blobs for firmware (as is the case for lots of PC hardware, too), and Google's own apps are closed source, but the operating system is absolutely open and hackable. There's also no cost for writing your own apps, and nothing requiring you to use Google's "walled garden", the Play store. In fact there are other play stores out there, and you can download and install individual apps.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Wilson You can refuse a presidential pardon and still be convicted.
The precise Supreme Court ruling is kind of interesting. The holding was that a judge cannot recognize a pardon unless it has been introduced into the court. The mere fact that a judge knows the pardon was granted isn't enough; someone has to actually bring it up in court. So, you can be prosecuted even if you've been pardoned, but all you have to do is to say "Hey judge, I've been pardoned" (more or less) and the judge will dismiss the case (with prejudice, I'd expect). But if you refuse to bring it up, the trial and sentencing go forward as normal. Unless the prosecution brings it up, but that would be dumb.
Of course, in most cases if you've been pardoned and haven't rejected the pardon, the prosecutor won't even bother trying to prosecute you because he knows you have a get-out-of-jail-free card. But in theory he could try to prosecute anyway... until the defense files a motion to dismiss.
+1.
It's really impressive how much a difference sharp eyes make. I like taking close-up portraits with my 85mm f/1.4 on a full frame sensor. 99% of the whole picture is basically completely out of focus. If the other 1% falls on the eyes, the picture looks perfectly sharp. It's junk otherwise.
Yup. When people look at portraits, they look first, last and middle at the eyes. My slight oversharpening brings out detail in the irises and lashes that people don't consciously notice but really make the image "pop".
Most of photography is understanding how humans see images and enhancing (with various techniques, including composition, focus, lighting, post-processing etc., etc.) the portions that the photographer wants the audience to look at, in ways the audience finds compelling. In hindsight it's obvious that you can take random photos and go the other direction, losing detail that no one cares about, without degrading human perception of the image. Doing it well requires some understanding of the content of the image, though, so it takes a smart-ish system.
And everybody agrees JPEG is old, tired and long in the tooth the old patent issues. Then there was JPEG-2000 but again patent issues. Again, why would Google push this on top of what's essentially something that collectively we've been told is dying and encumbered by *possible* patent issues? I can see from the press info and details that they've come up with a way to use ML in a new way, great. But again, why not on top of WEBP they're own great new way of doing this and not JPEG? you can convert JPEGs to WEBP why not? Oh the browsers don't support WEBP but do JPEG?
You're missing the forest for the trees, I think.
This technique is entirely independent of image format. You could do it with JPEG, or WEBP or anything you like... you could even do it with lossless compression formats, though you'd obviously be making them lossy. The researchers used JPEG because it was convenient.
....is a lie, it reduces image quality just in a way you cannot see visually
If all you want to do is look at the image this is fine, but anything else that needs it full quality will be sacrificed
Actually I think you could probably see it if the device are using isn't already so high def you can't tell the smallest details anyway. What they do is just request a 1/4 size image and then upscale it. Woo clever.
No, they request a 1/4 size image, then upscale it, then selectively restore details to portions of the image that humans pay attention to. The result isn't much larger than the 1/4 size image, but looks much better to people.
I've been doing something vaguely similar (though not automatically) for years in my portrait photography. I selectively sharpen (actually, oversharpen) key facial features (especially eyes) that are the things that people focus on when looking at a portrait. This makes the whole image seem sharper and more vibrant, though it isn't. In fact, if the entire image were sharpened in the same way it would look terrible. This is especially useful when I shoot with a soft-focus filter which creates a very nice dreamy effect but can make the subject look dull. Soft focus plus sharpened eyes (and, often, lips -- it depends) make a beautiful portrait which people find more appealing and "realistic" than without the phony sharpening. Similarly, reduced overall resolution with detail retained in the right places makes an image look as good as the full resolution version, even though it's not.
Google you're annoying as fuck with the moving targets on your open standards, and while I think it's great that we now have another way to store images but we still have GIF, PNG, SVG, JPEG and even your own )(*@)(*! WEBP
This ins't a new standard. The images processed by this algorithm are standard JPEGs, just adjusted in a way that reduces image complexity in a way that is imperceptible to humans.
One more thought: I actually could see value in two USB-C ports, one at the top and one at the bottom. When using wired headphones, it's convenient to have the wire coming from the top of the phone.
I wonder if they have something to say about putting dual USB (either dual USB-C, or USB-C plus micro USB) on the phone, because I need power + audio out more often than I need something else.
Good question. I don't think dual USB would be the right solution, though. USB can deliver data/audio out while pushing power in, so you only need one port. With a miniature USB hub plus a USB audio adapter you'd be able to charge and listen at the same time. And someone could even combine them into one small device. I found one that allows charging the device while getting HDMI output, so something like that.
Personally, my phone (Pixel XL) charges so quickly and lasts so long that I rarely need power + audio, except in the car where I use Bluetooth audio anyway. The combination of quick charging and long battery life means I charge when it's convenient for me to charge, rather than when the phone needs it. Mostly that means I only plug it in when I'm in the car (where my dock has a charger, so it requires no conscious decision to charge).
Because the engineering mantra of designing something that's the minimum needed to do the job properly has been supplanted
Alternatively, given the available more flexible and general-purpose alternatives, the headphone jack is no longer required to do the job properly, so the mantra dictates that it should be removed.
I've spoken with mobile phone hardware engineers about the issue, and what they say is that there are very compelling reasons to remove the headphone jack. It takes a huge amount of space, particularly due to depth, and does so right in a crucial area where designers would prefer to put antennas. Being able to get rid of it in favor of USB audio allows them to make better phones.
Fingerprints are not used for authentication, right?
Wrong. Fingerprints are great authenticators (and not particularly good identifiers; uniqueness guarantees are very weak), but the authentication is derived from the integrity of the measurement process, not the secrecy of the fingerprint.
That is, the security of a fingerprint-based authentication is primarily derived from the assurance you have that the fingerprint being measured is an actual body part and not some simulacrum. In the case of attended authentication stations, where a guard examines your fingers to verify that you're not wearing latex finger covers or similar the security is actually very good. In the case of a mobile phone phone sensor or similar, the security is fairly low -- though stronger than a typical phone password when shoulder-surfing opportunities are factored in.
Because your less-than-technically savvy "friends" and acquaintances will try sending you email at WallyL at aol.com, which is not my email address, because mine is at gmail.com, but those people don't know the difference and send stuff to the wrong person.
I've never had that problem, in 25 years of email use.
While Apple, Google and Amazon all have electronic services delivery, Amazon is, by far, the largest in terms of physical plant for their vast goods-shipping network.
While yes, Apple and Google do ship, they simply don't have the sheer scope of what Amazon is dealing in.
So yeah, Amazon's going to come in behind those two.
This report is only about data centers, not all operations. So it's excluding goods shipment infrastructure.
Google just finally recognized it.
I never understood the solar powered drones for internet access. Solar powered drones only make sense if you need to move large distances over many days. That's not what you need for internet access.
Drones also make sense if you want to stay roughly stationary at high altitude over many days, which would be very nice for providing Internet access. Google's other approach, using balloons, has the problem that unless you tether the balloons to the ground you basically have to let them follow the wind. That means you need enough balloons to provide complete coverage, so that as one balloon floats out of range, another one comes into range. Even if you have enough balloons to provide that level of coverage, you also have to figure out how to deal with different airspace jurisdictions; unless you can steer them by moving them up or down into different air currents, or unless you bring them to the ground and truck them back "upwind", they may eventually (depending on latitude) float into the airspace of some country that doesn't want them there.
The greater controllability of drones, plus the fact that they can usually travel upwind, has a lot of value for providing cheap high-flying Internet coverage. But it also comes with a lot of challenges.
Solving that problem is what this sort of research is about. For a good overview, read "Superintelligence", by Nick Bottom. It may be the most terrifying book you'll ever read.
That's Nick Bostrom. Dang autocorrect.
It is prudent to secure "yourhandle" @ every domain you can, just like how a savvy business secures businessname.com and .net and .xxx and so on.
Why?
The goal of this sort of research isn't too provide general-purpose ethics for AIs, it's to figure out how to make sure they don't decide to wipe out or oppress humanity. The problem is that there's no obvious reason that the intelligence level of an artificial mind is naturally limited to human equivalence. For that matter there's no reason human intelligence is limited... but increasing our intelligence is a slow process.
Given that an AI that reaches something close to human level intelligence can then be tasked with improving itself, it seems clear that shortly after we build something roughly as smart as us, we'll have something dramatically smarter than us. If such artificial superintelligence doesn't have a goal of preserving humanity and human freedom in something like the way humanity wants, we may find ourselves shuffled aside as an inconvenience... or just wiped out as either a nuisance or as a source of useful raw materials.
And it turns out that even if we assume that we can fix whatever goals we want into the AIs we build, it's still incredibly hard to define goals that can't be more easily satisfied by some horribly perverse outcome. For example, if we specified that our AIs should try to make us happy, one might decide that the most effective way to do that is to implant electrodes in all of our brains and directly stimulate our pleasure centers. That's a simplistic example, but more sophisticated approaches also turn out to have deep and non-obvious flaws -- and if we devise a goal that appears perfect to us, that doesn't mean it is.
Solving that problem is what this sort of research is about. For a good overview, read "Superintelligence", by Nick Bottom. It may be the most terrifying book you'll ever read.
Sure. Throughout the planet's history climate change has been the biggest driver of speciation, as life has to adapt to changing conditions. Anthopogenic climate change may ultimately be the single best answer to the similarly anthropogenic Holocene Extinction which has been going on for 10K years or so (but really ramped up recently).
Regardless, the planet and life on the planet will survive and thrive. With regard to AGW, the question we care about is just how much impact the climate change will have on us. We're capable of living in a wide variety of climates, but that doesn't mean that adapting won't be difficult and expensive.
And this, ladies and gentlemen is what a parade of mismanagement looks like. Corporate raider CEO after corporate raider CEO trying to pump up short term valuation at the expense of long term viability.
That got you a +5 on /., but it is a load of crap. Mayer wasn't a raider CEO and she didn't try to pump up short term valuation. Quite the opposite, she tried to find some way to build real value in what was clearly a moribund company. I'm not saying she did a good job -- it's entirely possible that a good CEO could have found a way to preserve and grow Yahoo. But it's also entirely possible that there was just nothing there to work with, and in fact that looks most likely to me.
Yahoo! had been coasting for a very long time when Mayer took job. Basically, the company's reason for existence ceased when Google proved in the late 90s that hand-curated directories were a dead end (up until that point, the general consensus was that search engines were doomed to failure; they were better at indexing but terrible at relevance and expected to get dramatically worse as the size of the Internet grew). But because Yahoo! had established itself as a major player it continued attracting capital, and thanks to some good deals with PC makers which got the Yahoo! search bar pre-installed on lots of machines, built considerable mindshare as a landing page and an email service. That ensured a small but decent ad revenue flow.
But Yahoo! was never able to find a way to build a compelling product. Its ad revenues on the desktop were in decline, thanks in large part to the demise of the landing page concept and it basically completely failed to make the transition to mobile (though it did make some nice apps). What Mayer needed to do to be successful was to take the talent and the revenue and use it to create an entirely new business. Pulling all of the employees back into the office was part of her strategy for doing that, based on the theory that co-located people are more capable of generating innovative ideas (which is true, but "more capable" is not a guarantee of a result).
But creating an entirely new line of business isn't an easy thing to do, even given a large pool of talent and plenty of money. Or, rather, it's easy to do on a small scale, but it's hard to create something that will scale rapidly up to become a multi-billion dollar business. It's actually a little easier to find a promising startup to acquire and then grow that... but even that is a crapshoot, and none of Mayer's acquisitions panned out.
So, Yahoo!'s failure had nothing whatsoever to do with corporate raiding CEOs or pump 'n dump schemes. Mayer attempted to succeed, and failed, plain and simple.