Traditional kimchi gets its flavor from fermenting for days, preferably buried in a pot in the yard, but if you need some of the pungent, spicy cabbage right now , ChefSteps has a way to make it in mere hours. Read more…
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Cheat Your Way to Kimchi in Two Hours
(credit: Uber) One day, the Uber that comes to fetch you might not have anyone in the driver’s seat. On Thursday, Uber announced that it will begin testing an autonomous Ford Fusion hybrid on the streets of Pittsburgh, home to Uber’s Advanced Technology Center. Drivers in Pittsburgh should have no problem spotting the research vehicle—it’s carrying an array of sensors on its roof that includes a radar, lidar, and cameras. The Uber test car will actually be mapping its surroundings in addition to testing out autonomous driving—although there will be a human operator in the driver’s seat at all times to take over at a moment’s notice. We’ve known for some time that Uber has had an interest in autonomous vehicles. In the past, the company had been working with Google, but that relationship apparently deteriorated last year . It’s not the only ride-sharing service looking to ditch the human aspect, either. In January, we reported that General Motors invested $500 million in Lyft with the goal of developing a network of self-driving taxis. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Uber to begin testing self-driving cars in Pittsburgh
If virtual reality is going to take off the way Google, Facebook, Samsung, Sony and a host of other smaller players think it will, it’s going to need great content. Video games, Oculus’s first focus, are a logical place to start, but it’s clear now that VR will also need mainstream video content if it’s going to be a hit. That puts YouTube — and by extension, Google — in a pretty strong position of power. When the company’s just-announced Daydream VR experience starts arriving in the hands of consumers later this year, a brand-new YouTube VR app will be front and center. It took a year for Google to make YouTube more VR friendly. Updates included 360-degree video (both pre-recorded and live ), spatial audio and the ability to view any video on YouTube when using Cardboard — all things that Google is drawing on in its new YouTube VR app. “What you’re seeing now is our next step, which is taking all these early bets we made on the technology and bringing them to life in an experience built from the ground up for VR, ” says YouTube VR product manager Kurt Wilms. That “ground-up” experience is built on three things. The first is surfacing VR-ready content, with the home screen featuring personalized recommendations for VR videos as well as content with spatial audio. The second pillar is that all of YouTube will be available — all of the videos as well as the features that are familiar to users. “Watching any video, browsing the home screen, the ability to sign in, your subscriptions and recommendations are all available, ” Wilms says. The last major component of YouTube VR is that the app was designed to make viewing sessions as comfortable as possible. “Unlike Cardboard, which we think of as ‘snackable video, ‘ this is built for longer sessions, ” says Wilms. This means there’s a lot of customization to make the video “screen” fit your field of view properly. The app is also fully integrated with the Daydream remote, which means you won’t have to use your head’s movement to navigate through the interface (which is how Cardboard currently works). Nothing here seems wildly transformative, but Wilms stressed that Google went through a ground-up rethinking of how YouTube should be experienced when viewing it in VR. “The analogy I use is it’s building an experience like we did for the living room, ” he explains. “YouTube on smart TV is obviously different than using it on your phone.” The content may be the same, then, but each experience necessitates a different approach to how you use the app. That principle of building an experience specifically designed for VR applies to videos as well as the app itself. As I said earlier, content is king, and YouTube has a lot of it. You can watch anything on YouTube using a Daydream headset, and you can also watch any VR video from a phone or browser. The experience obviously won’t be as immersive, but if users find content that excites them on their phone, they might be more inclined to upgrade to a VR headset down the line. “Instead of having an admittedly narrow [virtual reality] audience that we have today, you actually have the opportunity to reach a much broader audience, ” says Jamie Byrne, a director in YouTube’s creators program. “What that’s going to do is encourage people to continue investing in the space.” Byrne believes that YouTube has “probably the deepest content library available to anyone who buys a headset, ” and that content continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Case in point: The number of VR uploads to YouTube is doubling every three months right now. Byrne also thinks we’re in the early days of virtual reality experimentation, much like we were with user-uploaded video on YouTube a decade ago. It remains to be seen what types of content end up being the most compelling to VR users YouTube is trying to solve that puzzle. “We want to work with creators, from the biggest partners to the smallest to help them learn and experiment, ” Byrne says. “We want to help discover what’s the ‘beauty tutorial’ or the ‘let’s play’ [gaming] videos of VR that no one could predict today, ” he continues, referencing two of YouTube’s most popular categories. To that end, Google says it’s working with creators to help them get their hands on VR-capable rigs like the GoPro Odyssey, not to mention Google’s own Jump Assembler software for stitching together VR footage. Additionally, YouTube’s LA and NYC studio spaces are now equipped with Jump gear, and creators can apply to book time there. Byrne says there are plenty of enthusiasts building their own VR rigs, but YouTube wants to make shooting and processing complicated VR footage much easier. After all, the more people out there are making VR video, the better off YouTube will ultimately be. For all the latest news and updates from Google I/O 2016, follow along here .
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YouTube is Google’s not-so-secret weapon in the VR wars
It’s been seven weeks since Frontier completed a purchase of Verizon’s fiber and copper networks in California, Florida, and Texas, and the company is finally explaining why so many former Verizon customers have been hit by service outages. Bad data from Verizon is the culprit, Frontier West Region President Melinda White told lawmakers in California yesterday during a nearly-two-hour hearing held by the State Assembly’s Utilities & Commerce Committee. Corrupted data prevented Frontier’s network from communicating properly with equipment at customers’ homes, making it impossible to provision service to everyone, she said. Frontier is providing bill credits to customers who lost service. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Verizon’s corrupt data to blame for weeks-long outages, Frontier says
The creators of a virus that forces users to pay to recover their own files seem to have turned over a new leaf. Security researchers at ESET are reporting that TeslaCrypt’s developers posted the master encryption key, enabling ESET to develop a free fix. According to the firm, the creators of the virus were “wrapping up” their activities, and when a researcher asked for the master key, it was simply handed over. ESET has subsequently been able to produce a decryption tool (available here ) that’ll enable anyone affected to get their files back. ESET has gone to great pains to point out that ransomware is still one of the largest threats to people’s data online. It advises that everyone should keep their operating system updated and use a good anti-virus, as well as making regular backups of anything they wouldn’t want to lose. There’s also the question as to why TeslaCrypt’s developers were so willing to hand over the keys, but let’s hope that they decided to do the right thing. The alternative is just too horrible to contemplate. Via: Bleeping Computer Source: ESET
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Makers of uncrackable ransomware hand over the key
An anonymous reader shares a report on The Verge: Google’s low-cost Chromebooks outsold Apple’s range of Macs for the first time in the U.S. recently. IDC analyst Linn Huang confirmed the milestone to The Verge. “Chrome OS overtook Mac OS in the US in terms of shipments for the first time in 1Q16, ” says Huang. “Chromebooks are still largely a US K-12 story.” IDC estimates Apple’s U.S. Mac shipments to be around 1.76 million in the latest quarter, meaning Dell, HP, and Lenovo sold nearly 2 million Chromebooks in Q1 combined. Chromebooks have been extremely popular in US schools, and it’s clear from IDC’s comments the demand is driving US shipments. Outside of the US, it’s still unclear exactly how well Google’s low-cost laptops are doing. Most data from market research firms like IDC and Gartner focuses solely on Google’s wins in the US. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Chromebooks Outsell Macs For the First Time In the US
https://youtu.be/QtMAHm4ZfIs Mathew Tizard says, “Something I made in 2005 – A zoom into the microstructure of a mosquito’s eye, created using scanning electron microscope imagery. The white dots you see at the deepest zoom level are called ‘ ommatidia ,’ clusters of photoreceptor cells. ”
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Deep microscopic zoom into a mosquito’s eye
If you like jigsaws, you’d love to be on the team at the European Space Agency that created this image. Made up of 7, 000 separate files—totalling 32 TB of data—the picture provides a completely cloud-free view of the whole of Africa. Read more…
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Stunning 7,000-Image Satellite Mosaic of African Doesn’t Have a Single Cloud
An anonymous reader writes from a report via PCWorld: Google says its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) advances machine learning capability by a factor of three generations. “TPUs deliver an order of magnitude higher performance per watt than all commercially available GPUs and FPGA, ” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai during the company’s I/O developer conference on Wednesday. The chips powered the AlphaGo computer that beat Lee Sedol, world champion of the game called Go. “We’ve been running TPUs inside our data centers for more than a year, and have found them to deliver an order of magnitude better-optimized performance per watt for machine learning. This is roughly equivalent to fast-forwarding technology about seven years into the future (three generations of Moore’s Law), ” said Google’s blog post. “TPU is tailored to machine learning applications, allowing the chip to be more tolerant of reduced computational precision, which means it requires fewer transistors per operation. Because of this, we can squeeze more operations per second into the silicon, use more sophisticated and powerful machine learning models, and apply these models more quickly, so users get more intelligent results more rapidly.” The chip is called the Tensor Processing Unit because it underpins TensorFlow, the software engine that powers its deep learning services under an open-source license. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Google’s Tensor Processing Unit Could Advance Moore’s Law 7 Years Into The Future
(credit: Cole Marshall ) Charter Communications today said it has closed its acquisitions of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks following approvals from the Federal Communications Commission and regulators in California , the final state that had to sign off on the deal. Charter has nearly quadrupled in size as a result of the transactions, going from 6.8 million customers to about 25.4 million in 41 states, second in the US after Comcast’s 28 million. The merger drew opposition from some advocacy groups, including one that took to calling the new Charter ” Mega Cable .” The cost of the acquisitions was originally expected to be about $67.1 billion, though Charter will reportedly end up paying a bit more than that. Charter’s announcement today said, “The completion of the transactions will drive investment into the combined entity’s advanced broadband network, resulting in faster broadband speeds, better video products, more affordable phone service, and more competition for consumers and businesses.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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“Mega Cable” is here, as Charter finalizes purchase of TWC