Tag: jobs

BBC Confirms 50% Bitrate Savings For H.265/HEVC Vs H.264/AVC

An anonymous reader writes: A research team from the BBC has done a series of tests to confirm earlier computations showing a ~50% savings in bit rate for H.265/HEVC compared to video using H.264/AVC at comparable quality. “The subjective tests used a carefully selected set of coded video sequences at four different picture sizes: UHD (3840×2160 and 4096×2048), 1080p (1920×1080), 720p (1280×720) and 480p (832×480), at frame rates of 30Hz, 50Hz, or 60Hz. The video content was chosen to represent diverse spatial and temporal characteristics, and then coded using HEVC and AVC standards at a wide span of bit rates producing a variety of quality levels.” Here is the full published analysis. “The tests confirmed the significant compression efficiency improvements achieved in HEVC, verifying the results previously reported using objective quality metrics (PSNR based methods).” The team did not test against VP9, which is shaping up to be an impressive standard as well. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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BBC Confirms 50% Bitrate Savings For H.265/HEVC Vs H.264/AVC

OCZ RevoDrive 400 NVMe SSD Unveiled With Nearly 2.7GB/Sec Tested Throughput

MojoKid writes: Solid State Drive technology continues to make strides in performance, reliability and cost. At the CES 2016 show there were a number of storage manufacturers on hand showing off their latest grear, though not many made quite the splash that Toshiba’s OCZ Technology group made with the annoucement of their new RevoDrive 400 NVMe PCI Express SSD. OCZ is tapping on Toshiba’s NVMe controller technology to deliver serious bandwidth in this consumer-targeted M.2 gumstick style drive that also comes with a X4 PCI Express card adapater. The drive boasts specs conservatively at 2.4GB/sec for reads and 1.6GB/sec for writes in peak sequential transfer bandwidth. IOPs are rated at 210K and 140K for writes respectively. In the demo ATTO test they were running, the RevoDrive 400 actually peaks at 2.69GB/sec for reads and also hits every bit of that 1.6GB/sec write spec for large sequential transfers. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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OCZ RevoDrive 400 NVMe SSD Unveiled With Nearly 2.7GB/Sec Tested Throughput

Tesla Model S Software Updates Lets Car Park Itself With No One Inside It

An anonymous reader writes with a lnk to this article at Boy Genius Report about a software upgrade now hitting Tesla owners, which begins: Tesla earlier today began pushing out version 7.1 of its software to Model S and Model X owners and, suffice it to say, it’s a doozy of a software update. While we’ll get to the full changelog shortly, we first wanted to highlight a feature called Summon which enables users to park their cars without having to be inside it. Conversely, it also lets Tesla owners summon their cars that already happen to be parked. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Tesla Model S Software Updates Lets Car Park Itself With No One Inside It

Intel’s next NUC will be a quad-core mini PC with Iris Pro and Thunderbolt 3

Andrew Cunningham The Broadwell NUC (left) and the new Skylake NUC (right). 4 more images in gallery Last night, Intel’s opening-day CES keynote focused mostly on wearables and Internet of Things things, the sort of forward-facing, maybe-useful, possibly-vaporware technology that characterizes CES. But in a small meeting this morning, we were able to get more information on less zeitgeist-y but more practical gadgets like the Compute Stick and the NUC mini desktops. The basic NUC boxes have been around for four generations now, so their Skylake refresh is predictable. They still use low-voltage U-series dual-core Core i3-6100U and i5-6260U CPUs like the ones you’d find in Ultrabooks. The i3 versions come with Intel HD 520 graphics, while the i5 boxes have Iris graphics—non-Pro Iris GPUs in the Skylake generation get 64MB of eDRAM cache to help add memory bandwidth, so graphics performance should be quite a bit better than the HD 6000 GPU in the equivalent Broadwell NUC. Intel has dropped the mini HDMI port on the back of the PC in favor of a full-size HDMI port, and it’s added an SD card reader on all models. Otherwise input and output is the same: four USB 3.0 ports (two on front, two on back, one yellow one that can charge devices when the NUC is powered off), a mini DisplayPort 1.2 port, gigabit Ethernet, and an IR receiver and a headphone jack on the front. The lids are still interchangeable, and they can connect to a USB header on the motherboard to extend the capabilities of the box. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel’s next NUC will be a quad-core mini PC with Iris Pro and Thunderbolt 3

Twitter To Extend 140-Character Limit For Tweets

An anonymous reader writes: According to Re/code, Twitter is doing away with its 140-character limit for tweets. The company is currently planning on increasing the limit to 10, 000 characters, though the final number may change before they roll it out. “Twitter is currently testing a version of the product in which tweets appear the same way they do now, displaying just 140 characters, with some kind of call to action that there is more content you can’t see. Clicking on the tweets would then expand them to reveal more content. The point of this is to keep the same look and feel for your timeline, although this design is not necessarily final, sources say.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Twitter To Extend 140-Character Limit For Tweets

802.11ah Wi-Fi Standard Approved

alphadogg writes: A new wireless standard that extends Wi-Fi’s reach down into the 900MHz band will keep the 802.11 family at the center of the developing Internet of Things, the Wi-Fi Alliance announced today. 802.11ah, combines lower power requirements with a lower frequency, which means that those signals propagate better. That offers a much larger effective range than current Wi-Fi standards, which operate on 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies, and lets the newer technology penetrate walls and doors more easily. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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802.11ah Wi-Fi Standard Approved

IPv6 Turns 20, Reaches 10 Percent Deployment

An anonymous reader writes: Ars notes that the RFC for IPv6 was published just over 20 years ago, and the protocol has finally reached the 10% deployment milestone. This is an increase from ~6% a year ago. (The percentage of users varies over time, peaking on the weekends when most people are at home instead of work.) “If a 67 percent increase per year is the new normal, it’ll take until summer 2020 until the entire world has IPv6 and we can all stop slicing and dicing our diminishing stashes of IPv4 addresses.” “A decade or so ago, it was still quite common for people to complain about certain IPv6 features, and proclaim the protocol would never catch on. Although part of that can be blamed on the conservative nature of network administrators, it’s true that adopting IPv6 requires abandoning some long standing IPv4 practices. For instance, with IPv4, it’s common to use Network Address Translation (NAT) so multiple devices can share the use on an IPv4 address. IPv6 has more than enough addresses to give each device its own, so there’s no NAT in IPv6. The Internet is probably better off without NAT and the complications that it adds, but without NAT as a first but relatively porous line of defense against random packets coming in from the open Internet, it’s necessary to be much more deliberate about which types of packets to accept and which to reject.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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IPv6 Turns 20, Reaches 10 Percent Deployment

The Three Possible Classes of Interstellar Travel

An anonymous reader writes: The stars call to us through the ages, with each and every one holding the promise of a future for humanity beyond Earth. For generations, this was a mere dream, as our technology allowed us to neither know what worlds might lie beyond our own Solar System or to reach beyond our planet. But time and development has changed both of those things significantly. Now, when we look to the stars, we know that potentially habitable worlds lurk throughout our galaxy, and our spaceflight capabilities can bring us there. But so far, it would only be a very long, lonely, one-way trip. This isn’t necessarily going to be the case forever, though, as physically feasible technology could get humans to another star within a single lifetime, and potentially groundbreaking technology might make the journey almost instantaneous. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The Three Possible Classes of Interstellar Travel

State Dept. Releases 5,500 Hillary Clinton Emails, 275 Retroactively Classified

An anonymous reader sends this report from NBC News: The State Department on Thursday released 5, 500 more pages of Hillary Clinton’s emails, but fell short of meeting a court-ordered target of making 82 percent of the former secretary of state’s messages public by the end of 2015. The email dump is the latest release from the private server Clinton used during her time as America’s top diplomat. The State Department said it failed to meet the court’s goal because of “the large number of documents involved and the holiday schedule.” Portions of 275 documents in the batch were upgraded to classified, though they were not classified at the time they were sent to Clinton’s personal email, according to the State Department. In total, 1, 274 of her emails were retroactively classified by the government before their release. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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State Dept. Releases 5,500 Hillary Clinton Emails, 275 Retroactively Classified

New York Begins Public Gigabit Wi-Fi Rollout

An anonymous reader writes: Workers in New York City have begun installing the city’s first LinkNYC kiosks. The kiosks are free, public Wi-Fi access points, which are taking the spots formerly occupied by phone booths. 500 more of these hubs will be installed by mid-July, and the full network will eventually include over 7, 500 of them. “Once completed, the hubs will also include USB device charging ports, touchscreen web browsing, and two 55-inch advertising displays.” The displays are expected to bring the city $500 million in revenue over the next 12 years. When the project was announced in 2014, officials said construction would start “next year.” They sure cut it close. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New York Begins Public Gigabit Wi-Fi Rollout