New music is often just old music put together in different ways. There’s only so many notes you can play, tunes you can sing, words you can string, you know? It’s just how it works, music sampling happens whether it’s acknowledged or not . For an entertaining look at the history of sampling, watch the video above. It’s everywhere. Read more…
Excerpt from:
Listen to the fascinating history of sampling songs in music
itwbennett writes “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’ (think duplicates of users’ photos and videos that it keeps for backup). The Blu-ray system reduces costs by 50% and energy use by 80% compared with its current cold-storage system, which uses hard disk drives, said Jay Parikh, Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure engineering.” It’s a prototype, and they’re also evaluating low power flash as another alternative to keeping seldom accessed data on hard drives. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
More:
Facebook Puts 10,000 Blu-ray Discs In Low-Power Storage System
The numbers may be shrinking a bit in recent years but, when you look at it, the sheer aggregate of people who’ve made a toon, joined a raid or bought a pet in World of Warcraft is still mind-boggling. Read more…
Read the article:
World of Warcraft’s Impressive First Decade, By the Numbers
The rumors are true: Google’s bringing Chrome apps to iOS and Android. Well, it’s providing the tools developers need in order to do so . The toolkit is only in a beta form at the moment, but it holds the promise turning Chrome apps into cross-platform suckers for your phone. If it turns out to be as easy at it sounds, Chrome apps just got a lot more interesting. [ Chomium Blog ] Read more…
View article:
The rumors are true: Google’s bringing Chrome apps to iOS and Android.
Sure, early hominins used fire for upwards of a million years. But when did early hominins start acting like humans—for example, cooking in the same spot each night? The new discovery of an old ( really old) hearth at an Israeli dig site could hold the answer. Read more…
See more here:
Archaeologists Uncover 300,000-Year-Old Kitchen in Israeli Cave
One of the biggest criticisms Google Glass has incurred since day one is that it’s, well, ugly and/or weird-looking. Believe it or not, Google may have actually just solved the problem. Read more…
More:
Whoa, Google Glass Just Got Way Better Looking (Plus Prescriptions)
3-D printing is far from new, but a $499 3-D printer is new enough to get a bunch of people to write about it, including someone whose headline read, CES 2014: Could 3D printing change the world? XYZPrinting, the company behind the da Vinci 1.0 printer, has some happy-looking executives in the wake of CES. They won an award, and their booth got lots of attention. This is what trade shows are all about for small and/or new companies. Now the XYZ Printing people can go home and pump out some product — assuming they got a lot of orders (and not just attention) at CES. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
See the article here:
$499 3-D Printer Drew Plenty of Attention at CES (Video)
For the first time in history, scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have captured how our brain makes memories in video, watching how molecules morph into the structures that, at the end of the day, make who we are. It’s there’s a soul, this how it gets made. Read more…
View original post here:
Scientists watch how the brain makes memories for the first time ever
If you’re planning on sticking around for longer—a lot longer—than a standard human lifespan, you’ll need a watch that keeps time on the galactic level. Van Cleef & Arpels’ new Complication Poétique Midnight Planétarium will certainly fit the bill. Instead of hands denoting the hours and minutes, it incorporates six of our solar system’s planets rotating a tiny version of the sun in real time. Read more…
Read More:
A Watch That Puts an Entire Planetarium on Your Wrist
Microsoft’s SkyDrive is a terrific little cloud service that doesn’t get as much attention as it deserves. Unless, of course, it’s being sued by British Sky Broadcasting Group over its name. But now SkyDrive will be called OneDrive, for just as long as is legally allowable. Read more…
Read the original:
SkyDrive Is Now OneDrive, Until Microsoft Gets Sued Again