events – Page 317 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

The AP adds 550,000 old newsreel clips to YouTube

The Associated Press has teamed up with British Movietone to share more than a century’s worth of newsreel footage with the denizens of the internet. The pair will upload more than a million minutes of archival clips to YouTube with the intention of creating a “view-on-demand visual encyclopedia” for the world. The 550, 000-plus stories range from footage of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake through to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It’s not the first time that a news organization has used YouTube to take its archives online. Last year, British Pathé uploaded more than 85, 000 newsreel clips from between 1896 and 1976 to the site. Users can feel free to embed the clips in whatever story they’re working on, but we assume that re-editing the work isn’t permitted. Which is a shame, because we were hoping for some cheeky dance remixes of the footage of Prince Charles getting frisky at the Rio Carnival. Which, for no reason at all , we’ve embedded below… Filed under: HD Comments Via: The Guardian Source: AP

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The AP adds 550,000 old newsreel clips to YouTube

Nanowires help produce hydrogen fuel using sunlight

You ideally want to produce clean hydrogen fuel using clean sources, and Dutch researchers have taken a big step toward making that a practical reality. They’ve built a solar cell that uses a grid of gallium phosphide nanowires to make hydrogen gas from water. The approach gets a useful yield of about 2.9 percent in lab tests. That may not sound like much, but it’s about 10 times more effective than previous techniques and uses 10, 000 times less exotic material. It’s still going to take more refinements before this kind of technology is practical. Even hooking up silicon cells to a battery nets a 15 percent yield, for example. If scientists improve their methods, though, you could be driving hydrogen cars whose fuel is eco-friendly at every step, not just when it’s in your vehicle. [Image credit: AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi] Filed under: Transportation , Science Comments Source: TUE , Nature

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Nanowires help produce hydrogen fuel using sunlight

Gmail Spam Filter Changes Bite Linus Torvalds

An anonymous reader points out The Register’s story that recent changes to the spam filters that Google uses to pare down junk in gmail evidently are a bit overzealous. Linus Torvalds, who famously likes to manage by email, and whose email flow includes a lot of mailing lists, isn’t happy with it. Ironically perhaps, it was only last week that the Gmail team blogged that its spam filter’s rate of false positives is down to less than 0.05 per cent. In his post, Torvalds said his own experience belies that claim, and that around 30 per cent of the mail in his spam box turned out not to be spam. “It’s actually at the point where I’m noticing missing messages in the email conversations I see, because Gmail has been marking emails in the middle of the conversation as spam. Things that people replied to and that contained patches and problem descriptions, ” Torvalds wrote. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Gmail Spam Filter Changes Bite Linus Torvalds

AMD Catalyst Linux Driver Performs Wildly Different Based On Program’s Name

An anonymous reader writes: In past years the AMD Catalyst Linux driver has yielded better performance if naming the executable “doom3.x86” or “compiz” (among other choices), but these days this application profile concept is made more absurd with more games coming to Linux but AMD not maintaining well their Linux application profile database. The latest example is by getting ~40% better performance by renaming Counter-Strike: Global Offensive on Linux. If renaming the “csgo_linux” binary to “hl2_linux” for Half-Life 2 within Steam, the frame-rates suddenly increase across the board, this is with the latest Catalyst 15.7 Linux driver while CS:GO has been on Linux for nearly one year. Should driver developers re-evaluate their optimization practices for Linux? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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AMD Catalyst Linux Driver Performs Wildly Different Based On Program’s Name

Popular Torrent Site Disappears From Google After Penalty

An anonymous reader writes: Following what appears to be a severe penalty, the popular torrent site KickassTorrents has become pretty much unfindable in Google. Meanwhile, the top search result in many locations points to a scam site that’s serving malware to its visitors. For now, only DuckDuckGo presents the real site as a main result. With millions of visitors per day, KickassTorrents is arguably the most visited torrent site on the Internet, and has gained new users during the moments when the notorious Pirate Bay has been offline. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Welcome Shift: Spam Now Constitutes Less Than Half of All Email

An anonymous reader writes: According to Symantec’s latest Intelligence Report, spam has fallen to less than 50% of all email in June – a number we haven’t seen in over a decade. Of all emails received by Symantec clients in June, junk emails only accounts for 49.7% down from 52.1% in April which shows a huge drop. Year over year, spam has decreased as well due to internet providers doing a better job at filtering and shutting down spam bots. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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A Welcome Shift: Spam Now Constitutes Less Than Half of All Email

Transparent Paper Produces Power With Just a Touch

ckwu writes: A new transparent-paper device can generate electrical power from a user’s touch. The paper energy-harvester could be used to make disposable, self-powered touch screens that fold; interactive light-up books; touch-sensitive skin for prosthetics; and security systems for art and documents, according to the researchers. The device is made out of nanopaper, a tangled mat made of nanometers-wide cellulose fibers that is transparent and smooth like plastic. The researchers deposit carbon nanotubes on the nanopaper to make a pair of electrodes, and then sandwich a polyethylene film in between. The generator works via electrostatic induction. Pressing one side of the device causes a change in the charge balance between the nanotube electrodes, resulting in a flow of current through the device. Releasing the pressure causes electrons to flow back, so repeated pressing and releasing creates continuous current. The researchers demonstrated that the generator could produce enough power when pressed to light up a small liquid-crystal display. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel delays next-gen chips as Moore’s law begins to crack

Intel says it’s next-gen ” Skylake ” will be delayed by six months, marking the second time in a row it hasn’t released a CPU on a two-year “Moore’s Law” cycle. That continues a trend, as last year’s 14-nanometer Broadwell chips were similarly delayed , and even Haswell and Ivy Bridge were behind schedule. Intel said that the setback for the new 10-nanometer chips was caused by the increasing complexity in building transistors that small. Addressing the elephant in the room, CEO Brian Krzanich said that “the last two technology transitions have signaled that our cadence today is closer to 2.5 years than two.” In other words, Moore’s Law needs a reboot. To address the lack of chips in the pipeline, Intel said that it’s going to release new 14-nanometer “Kaby Lake” chips based on the Skylake architecture. Krzanich said that “we expect that this addition to the roadmap will deliver new features and improved performance, and pave the way for a smooth transition to 10-nanometer.” Neverthless, he admitted that Intel is now on a “tick-tock-tick” cycle rather than a “tick-tock” as before. That bodes poorly for an already-struggling PC industry, as consumers will have less reason to get excited about new products. Intel also admitted that PC demand was weaker than expected, and expects it to get worse by year’s end. Nevertheless, it thinks the July 29 launch of Windows 10 will provide a tonic. “A lot of the really good features of Windows 10, things like Windows 10 Hello where you have facial log in, and you don’t have to use all your passwords, the Start screen… the touch usages of gaming, as the new games come to this product — those are going to run with PCs that have the latest features, ” Krzanich said. Despite the gloomy PC talk, Intel still managed to pull in a better-than-expected $13.2 billion for the quarter, thanks to a new focus on data centers, internet-of-things and memory. [Image credit: Getty images] Filed under: Peripherals , Intel Comments Source: Intel

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Intel delays next-gen chips as Moore’s law begins to crack

Google Accidentally Reveals Data On ‘Right To Be Forgotten’ Requests

Colin Castro points out an article from The Guardian, who noticed that Google’s recent transparency report contained more data than intended. When perusing the source code, they found data about who was making requests for Google to take down links under the “right to be forgotten” law. The data they found covers 75% of all requests made so far. Less than 5% of nearly 220, 000 individual requests made to Google to selectively remove links to online information concern criminals, politicians and high-profile public figures, the Guardian has learned, with more than 95% of requests coming from everyday members of the public. … Of 218, 320 requests to remove links between 29 May 2014 and 23 March 2015, 101, 461 (46%) have been successfully delisted on individual name searches. Of these, 99, 569 involve “private or personal information.” Only 1, 892 requests – less than 1% of the overall total – were successful for the four remaining issue types identified within Google’s source code: “serious crime” (728 requests), “public figure” (454), “political” (534) or “child protection” (176) – presumably because they concern victims, incidental witnesses, spent convictions, or the private lives of public persons. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Comcast Launches Streaming Service and Unveils Pricing For 2G Fiber

An anonymous reader writes: Comcast has announced the release of its Gigabit Pro service which offers speeds up to 2 gigabits per second. The service is $300 a month (agree to a two year contract and get the early promotional price of $159 per month) with a $500 installation and activation fee. The new service is only available in the Jacksonville, Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach Florida area. This announcement comes on the heels of the $15-per-month “Comcast Stream” launch. The live TV and streaming video service does not require a cable TV subscription, but live TV channels can only be watched on customer’s home internet connections. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Comcast Launches Streaming Service and Unveils Pricing For 2G Fiber