golf – Page 39 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

One week later, Google algorithm change hits streaming, torrent sites hard

One of Project Free TV’s domains has dropped in traffic since Google’s algorithm change. se Video streaming and torrent sites have dropped precipitously in Google rankings after the company altered its algorithm last Monday, according to reports from Searchmetrics. One of Project Free TV’s main operating domains, free-tv-video-online.me, fell 96 percent in Searchmetric’s rankings, one of the biggest drops alongside torrentz.eu and thepiratebay.se. Google committed to fighting piracy by decrementing search results that allow users to access illegal streams or torrents back in 2012. The first round of changes didn’t help much, according to interested parties like the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America. Google complies with takedown requests, of which it received 224 million in the last year, according to its own report. The company responded to these within six hours on average, but industry parties pushed for Google to make content sites less visible overall. Even with its new solution, Google notes that this won’t be the same as removing domains from search entirely: “the number of noticed pages is typically only a tiny fraction of the total number of pages on the site,” the company said. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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One week later, Google algorithm change hits streaming, torrent sites hard

45,000-year-old modern human bone yields a genome

The femur from which the DNA samples originated. Bence Viola, MPI EVA Svante Pääbo’s lab at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany has mastered the process of obtaining DNA from ancient bones. With the techniques in hand, the research group has set about obtaining samples from just about any bones they can find that come from the ancestors and relatives of modern humans. In their latest feat, they’ve obtained a genome from a human femur found in Siberia that dates from roughly the time of our species’ earliest arrival there. The genome indicates that the individual it came from lived at a time where our interbreeding with Neanderthals was relatively recent, and Europeans and Asians hadn’t yet split into distinct populations. The femur comes from near the town of Ust’-Ishim in western Siberia. It eroded out of a riverbank that contains a mixture of bones, some from the time where the sediments were deposited (roughly 30-50,000 years ago), and some likely older that had been washed into the sediments from other sites. The femur shows features that are a mixture of those of paleolithic and modern humans, and lacks features that are typical of Neanderthal skeletons. Two separate samples gave identical carbon radioisotope dates; after calibration to the 14 C record, this places the bone at 45,000 years old, give or take a thousand years. That’s roughly when modern humans first arrived in the region. That also turned out to be consistent with dates estimated by looking at the DNA sequence, which placed it at 49,000 years old (the 95 percent confidence interval was 30-65,000 years). Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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45,000-year-old modern human bone yields a genome

First major update to Windows 10 Preview, delivered through Windows Update

We’ve written before about Windows 10’s new updating policy, and today we’re seeing the real-world result for the first time. The Windows 10 Technical Preview, build 9849, is being updated to build 9860. That update will roll out automatically to members of the Windows Insider program, and it will be delivered through Windows Update. The operating system upgrade is a little more heavyweight than a regular hotfix; systems will need to reboot to finish installation, and Microsoft says that the reboot will take longer than normal. The major feature of the new build is that it contains the first iteration of Windows 10’s notification center. At the moment, it’s a simple collection of historic notifications. Microsoft says that future builds will add more capabilities to the notification center, such as the ability to take actions in response to notifications. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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First major update to Windows 10 Preview, delivered through Windows Update

New chips will “power the gigabit era of DSL,” Broadcom claims

Broadcom today unveiled DSL chips that use the new G.fast standard to deliver up to 1Gbps broadband over copper phone lines. That doesn’t mean everyone who has DSL will suddenly get a huge speed upgrade. G.fast, a standard from the International Telecommunication Union , is intended for fiber-and-copper networks in which fiber delivers data close to homes and copper takes it the rest of the way. These networks are cheaper to build than fiber-to-the-home because they reuse existing copper, but thus far they haven’t been able to match the gigabit speeds of fiber-only service. Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs and the British telecom company BT are both testing G.fast, with the latter using Huawei technology . Broadcom is now joining the party with technology it plans to sell to Internet service providers, who would then roll it out to their customers. The chips will power both the back-end technology needed to deliver high speeds as well as home gateway systems for Internet users. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New chips will “power the gigabit era of DSL,” Broadcom claims

The north pole moved to the North Pole in a single human lifetime

Leo Reynolds Geology rewards an active imagination. It gives us a lot of tantalizing clues about very different times and places in Earth’s history, leaving us to try to answer “Man, what would that be like? ” One of the things that’s tough to image involves changing something that most of us never give a second thought—the fact that compasses point north. That’s plainly true today , but it hasn’t always been. What we call the “north” magnetic pole—the object of your compass’ affection—doesn’t need to be located in the Arctic (it noticeably wanders there, by the way). It feels equally at home in the Antarctic. The geologic record tells us that the north and south magnetic poles frequently trade places. In fact, the signal of this magnetic flip-flopping recorded in the seafloor was the final key to the discovery of plate tectonics, as it let us see how ocean crust forms and moves over time . That the poles flip is interesting in itself, but “Man, what would that be like? ” Does the magnetic pole slowly walk along the curve of the Earth over thousands of years, meaning your compass might have pointed to some part of the equator for long stretches of time? Do the poles weaken to nothing, disappearing for a while before re-emerging in the new configuration? Do they somehow flip in the blink of an eye? Given the number of species that use the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate—especially for seasonal migrations—this is more than an academic curiosity. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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The north pole moved to the North Pole in a single human lifetime

Microsoft “loves Linux” as it makes Azure bigger, better

Wait, what happened at this thing?!? Microsoft In San Francisco today, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said something that was more than a little surprising: Microsoft loves Linux. The operating system once described as a “cancer” by Nadella’s predecessor, Steve Ballmer, is now being embraced (if not extended) with open arms, at least when it comes to Redmond’s Azure cloud platform. Nadella told us that some 20 percent of VMs on Azure use the open source operating system. The San Francisco event served dual purpose. First, it was an opportunity for Microsoft to tell the world just how much Azure had grown—Microsoft may not have been first to the cloud computing scene, but a ton of investment and development means that the company is now credible, and, if Gartner’s magic quadrants are to be believed, world-leading. Second, the event served to introduce new features and partnerships. Microsoft’s major sales pitch for Azure is essentially a three-pronged argument that Microsoft is the only company that can really do cloud right. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Latest Xbox One update adds MKV support, quicker voiceless commands

Quick-snap! Now, Kinect-less Xbox One owners can do a few more cool system functions on the fly. Microsoft’s near-monthly streak of Xbox One updates continued on Wednesday with a substantial October update . The console maker had already teased the update’s most intriguing feature in August when it announced a media-player app set to handle a staggering number of codecs—particularly the MKV container—and DLNA streaming from other devices on a home network. XB1’s new media player, like the system’s Blu-ray player, must be loaded as a separate app. We were able to test it during a beta period, and it worked as advertised, meaning it allowed us to watch all of our favorite, legitimately acquired TV shows and films in crisp MKV format. The update’s other major addition, a quick-snap menu, can be accessed with a double-tap of the controller’s home button. It focuses largely on functions that were formerly locked to voice control, including quick loads of previous games and apps and the ability to record your last 30 seconds of gameplay—which should make it easier for players who snapped up a cheaper, Kinect-less XB1 to multitask with the system. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Rogue Albanian drone flies over Serbian soccer stadium, cancelling match

Deadspin An already tense soccer match in Belgrade between the national teams of Albania and Serbia has been suspended after a drone flew over the field waving an Albanian flag. Based on online footage, the drone appears to be a DJI Phantom or a Phantom 2, which retails for roughly $500 to $800 depending on the model. The Tuesday game, which was to be a Euro 2016 qualifier match between the two sides, was the first time they had met in the Serbian capital since 1967. According to The Guardian , away fans were not allowed in the stadiums in either Belgrade or in the upcoming rematch in Tirana, the capital of the Republic of Albania. The two sides’ enthusiasm for soccer has been overshadowed by a larger political issue: Kosovo, a republic that broke away from Serbia in 2008. Kosovo, which has a majority ethnic Albanian population, is not formally recognized by Serbia but is recognized by the United States, Canada, Australia, France, the United Kingdom, and many other states. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Rogue Albanian drone flies over Serbian soccer stadium, cancelling match

Google gets an Amazon Prime competitor with Shopping Express sub

A smattering of the brands with products available via Google Express (née Google Shopping Express). Google Blog Google has added a subscription option to its Shopping Express service, putting it in competition with Amazon’s Prime membership program. Shopping Express customers can now pay $95 per year or $10 per month to access a number of perks, including free same-day or overnight delivery on orders of $15 or more and the ability to share the membership with another person in the household. Google has offered Shopping Express (which, going forward, the company will simplify to “Google Express”) in Northern California since the spring of 2013. It expanded the service to New York and LA a year later, just as a same-day delivery service. As of October, the company will expand Express to Chicago, Boston, and Washington, DC. Google Express service is limited to certain brands including Staples, Walgreens, and Target. New stores and retailers were added with this most recent update, including 1-800-Flowers, Barnes and Noble, and Sports Authority, as well as regional stores like Paragon Sports in New York and Stop & Shop in Boston. When users order from the selection of stores, a livery vehicle picks the items up and delivers them to the user’s location. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google gets an Amazon Prime competitor with Shopping Express sub

Since Netflix paid Verizon, video speed on FiOS has doubled

Netflix’s payments to Verizon for a direct connection to its network didn’t result in immediate improvements for the companies’ joint subscribers, but they’re finally paying off with better video performance. Verizon FiOS actually topped all other major ISPs in Netflix performance in September with an average stream rate of 3.17Mbps, Netflix said today . Netflix Although Verizon FiOS led all large ISPs in Netflix performance, Google Fiber is still No. 1 among all ISPs regardless of size with a 3.54Mbps average in September. In August, Netflix streamed at an average of 2.41Mbps on Verizon FiOS, ranking tenth out of 16 major ISPs. In July, Netflix speed on Verizon FiOS was 1.61Mbps and in June it was 1.58Mbps, ranking 12th in both months. The Netflix/Verizon deal was announced in late April . When performance continued to get worse after the interconnection agreement, Verizon said it might take until the end of 2014 to get all the proper network connections in place to speed up video. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments