Using an unprecedented technique of matching stars to the locations of temples on Earth, a 15-year-old Canadian student says he’s discovered a forgotten Maya city in Central America. Images from space suggest he may actually be onto something. Read more…
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Teen Discovers Lost Maya City Using Ancient Star Maps
Spencer Soper, writing for Bloomberg (edited and condensed): Amazon will let people post videos to its website and earn money from advertising, royalties and other sources, putting the company in more-direct competition with Google’s YouTube. Amazon already offers movies and television programs over the Internet — including its own original productions — to compete with Netflix. The new product dubbed Video Direct will let Amazon give consumers more options about what to watch without an upfront fee because many of those posting videos will be paid based on how their content performs. Competing streaming services have been driving up the cost of this material. Amazon used a similar strategy to boost its inventory of electronic books through Kindle Direct Publishing, which lets authors bypass traditional publishers and reach readers directly by posting and selling their own e-books online. The Seattle-based e-commerce giant said the service is designed for “professional video producers, ” but its only requirements are that the videos be high definition and have closed-captioning for the hearing impaired.The company is offering 15 cents for every hour of viewing a video creator’s content via Prime Video in the U.S, and six cents an hour for views outside of the U.S. Content creators can also allow Amazon to show their videos to any visitor for free. In such case, Amazon says it is offering 55 percent of all ad revenue their clips generate. Content creators can also sell their videos via its subscription service, or its rental its store — in which case, Amazon will offer 50 percent of the revenue. YouTube has been long criticized for paying less to YouTube creators, forcing many to leave the platform, or look for alternate revenue channels. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Amazon Goes After YouTube With New Online Video Posting Service
Last month, Uber settled two class-action lawsuits for $84 million to keep its California and Massachusetts drivers as contractors. Now, court papers reveal that the ride-hailing company could owe those workers as much as $750 million more if they were classified as employees. Read more…
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Uber’s Settlement to Keep Drivers as Contractors Could Save It as Much as $750 Million
Reader Robotech_Master writes: After a recent Kobo software upgrade, a number of Kobo customers have reported losing e-books from their libraries — notably, e-books that had been transferred to Kobo from their Sony Reader libraries when Sony left the consumer e-book business. One customer reported missing 460 e-books, and the only way to get them back in her library would be to search and re-add them one at a time! Customers who downloaded their e-books and illegally broke the DRM don’t have this problem, of course.From the report: A Kobo representative actually chimed in on the thread, telling MobileRead users that they were following the thread and trying to fix the glitches that had been caused by the recent software changes and restore customers’ e-books. It’s good that they’re paying attention, and that’s definitely better than my first go-round with Barnes and Noble support over my own missing e-book. Hopefully they’ll get it sorted out soon. That being said, this drives home yet again the point that publisher-imposed DRM has made and is making continued maintenance of e-book libraries from commercial providers a big old mess. About the only way you can be sure you can retain the e-books you pay for is to outright break the law and crack the DRM in order to be able to back them up against your company going out of business and losing the purchases you paid for. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Kobo Customers Losing Books From Their Libraries After Software Upgrade
NVIDIA gave us a taste of its new Pascal architecture with the P100 graphics card last month, which is aimed at servers for heavy duty computing. Now, it’s ready to show off how that technology will be adapted for consumers with its new GeForce GTX 1080 GPU. As you’d expect, it’s fast: NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang revealed that it’s better than its current performance king, the Titan X. It’s also faster than two GTX 980 cards running together using SLI technology. Like the P100, the 1080 is built with a new 16nm FinFET (a type of 3D transistor) manufacturing process, which makes it more power efficient, on top of just being faster. The GTX 1080 is the “largest GPU endeavor, largest chip endeavor, largest processor endeavor, in the history of humanity, ” said NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang. He added that the R&D budget for the new card was “several billion dollars” over the span of more than two years. “I’m pretty sure you can go to Mars [for that], ” he said. NVIDIA is basically positioning the GTX 1080 as the gamer’s dream card. Prior to its unveiling, Huang showed off several new titles like The Division and Rise of the Tomb Raider running at max settings in a high resolution over 60 frames per second. He later revealed that all of the games were running on the new card, to the delight of the entire crowd. But of course, NVIDIA won’t be alone with new hardware this year. AMD is expected to debut new cards with its Polaris technology this summer, which will focus on power efficiency as well. It sounds like Polaris is better suited for gaming laptops at the moment, but it could also be a way for AMD to deliver some powerful cards that you can actually afford (think under $300). Developing…
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NVIDIA’s GTX 1080 GPU is twice as fast the Titan X
Slashdot reader RockDoctor brings an update on a project to build Babbage’s Analytical Engine: Between 1822 and 1847, Charles Babbage worked on a number of designs for general-purpose programmable computing engines, some parts of which were built during his lifetime and after. Since 2011 a group under the name of “Plan-28” have been working towards building a full version of the machine known as the Analytical Engine. (The group’s name refers to the series of Babbage’s plans which they are working to — versions 1 to 27 obviously having problems.) This week, they’ve released some updates on progress on their blog. Significant progress includes working on the machine’s “internal microcode” (in today’s terminology; remember, this is a machine of brass cogs and punched cards!) [and] archive work to bring the Science Museum’s material into a releasable form (the material is already scanned, but the metadata is causing eyestrain). “One of the difficulties in understanding the designs is the need to reverse engineer logical function from mechanical drawings of mechanisms — this without textual explanation of purpose or intention…” Progress is slow, but real. Last year marked the bicentennial of Ada Lovelace, who wrote programs for the Analytical Engine and it’s predecessor, the Difference Engine, and whose position as “the world’s first programmer” is celebrated in the name of the programming language Ada. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Researchers Are Reconstructing Babbage’s Analytical Engine
It feels like forever since Time Warner Cable agreed to merge with Charter Communications , for an estimated $55 billion . But today, nearly a year after the two companies struck a deal, the Federal Communications Commission has finally granted its approval . The announcement follows FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and the US Justice Department green-lighting the merger in April, which confirmed that it was only a matter of time before it became official. It’s worth noting that Charter is also acquiring Bright House Networks , a regional TV and internet provider, as part of the agreement between it and the government. Additionally, last month Wheeler revealed there would be some caveats for Charter , including not being be able to impede access to streaming content. Namely, Charter can’t set data caps for subscribers or charge for service based on usage — and there might be more compromises. A detailed release of the conditions for the merger will be released over the coming days, according to a statement from the FCC . Nevertheless, this positions Charter as the second largest cable and internet service in the US with 24 million subscribers total, right behind Comcast’s 28 million . Persistence pays off , folks. Source: Federal Communications Commission
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Charter acquisition of Time Warner Cable approved by the FCC
Look around and count the number of screens surrounding you. You’ll probably run out of fingers before you’re done, but why stop there? Researchers at UC Berkeley have come up with a way to weave color-changing threads into fabrics, turning even garments into yet another display. Read more…
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Color-Changing Threads Might One Day Turn Your T-Shirt Into a Screen
There’s no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow but there are some colorful visuals you can trip out on if you can figure out how to stare the right way. Here’s a video that supposedly shows a camera gliding through the spectrum of a rainbow and making its way through ROYGBIV backwards. Read more…
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What It’s Like to Look Straight into a Rainbow
Although you might associate Siri with Apple, that particular pocket assistant wasn’t born in Cupertino. In fact, Siri was an independent app before its acquisition by Apple in 2010, and now its founders are back with a new and improved version, “Viv.” Read more…
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The Creators of Siri Are Releasing a New AI Next Week