Yesterday, Australian entrepreneur Craig Wright announced that he was the elusive creator of Bitcoin. His proclamation was immediately met with an avalanche of suspicion , with one prominent cryptography expert describing it as “flimflam and hokum.” Now, through a spokesman, Wright has promised that further proof for his claims is coming. Read more…
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Craig Wright Claims He Will Move Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin ‘In the Coming Days’
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Activist hedge fund Starboard Value LP moved on Thursday to overthrow the entire board of Yahoo Inc, including Chief Executive Marissa Mayer, who has struggled to turn around the company in her nearly four years at the helm. Starboard, which has been pushing for changes at Yahoo since 2014 and owns about 1.7 percent of the company, said it would nominate nine candidates for the board. The proxy fight comes as Yahoo is pressing ahead with an auction of its core Internet business, which includes search, mail and news sites. Yahoo and Starboard could still come to an agreement before the company’s annual meeting, expected to be in late June. If they cannot avoid a proxy fight and the Yahoo board election is taken to a shareholder vote, attention will swing to the large mutual and index funds that own the stock and will carry heavy weight in the final tally. Yahoo and Starboard representatives met on March 10 to discuss ways the two sides could avoid a proxy fight, according to people familiar with the matter. But those talks broke down, in part because Starboard was upset by Yahoo’s announcement that same day that it appointed two new board directors, these people say. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Starboard Launches Proxy Fight To Remove Entire Yahoo Board
mikejuk writes: In its recent earnings call, Yahoo revealed plans to cut its workforce by 15% — around 1, 600 employees by the end of the year. Yahoo Labs is another victim of the cuts as revealed in a Tumbler post by Yoelle Maarek who reports that both Yahoo’s Chief Scientist, Ron Brachman, and VP of Research Ricardo Baeza-Yates, will be leaving the company and that going forward: Our new approach is to integrate research teams directly into our product teams in order to produce innovation that will drive excellence in those product areas. We will also have an independent research team that will work autonomously or in partnership with product partners. The integrated and independent teams, as a whole, will be known as Yahoo Research. Maarek, formerly VP of Research now becomes leader of Yahoo Research. To anyone who has followed the story of research at Yahoo there will be a sense of deja vu. Back in 2012 Yahoo laid off many of its research team, many of whom found a new home with Microsoft. It was Marissa Meyer who in the following year recruited a substantial number of PhDs to Yahoo Labs which initiated some interesting projects. Meyer clearly thought research would save Yahoo!, but now it all seems a bit late and Yahoo! can’t save its research lab. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Yahoo Closes Lab – Among Other Things
Microsoft is rolling out a big update to Outlook.com that includes an overhaul to the interface alongside integration with a bunch of services that add in additional features. Read more…
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Outlook Gets a Redesign, Adds In Tons of Third-Party Integration
Well, here’s an interesting development. Some iPad Pro users have noticed that, with the latest version of iOS 9, their monstrous tablet is able to push firmware updates to a connected accessory. Many customers were experiencing lag and other niggles with Logitech’s Create Keyboard Case , but found they could fix the problem by updating their slate to the second beta of iOS 9.3. As German developer Stefan Wolfrum notes , when the keyboard is attached through the Smart Connector an intriguing “Accessory Update” option appears on-screen. Within less than a minute, the update is completed and the problems are seemingly resolved. It’s the first time we can recall an iOS device updating an accessory’s firmware in this way. The mystery, at least for now, are the requirements for such an exchange. Is it dependent on the Smart Connector, the new version of iOS, or both? If it does require Apple’s fancy new port, that means the useful feature is restricted to the iPad Pro for now. Given at least one new iPad is expected in March , however, it might not be long before we see the capability in another, smaller and cheaper iOS device. WHOA! iOS 9.3 beta 2 apparently just updated my @Logitech Create #iPadPro keyboard’s firmware!! /cc @settern pic.twitter.com/N2uRxVWBiL — Stefan Wolfrum ☺ (@metawops) January 27, 2016 Via: Cult of Mac Source: Stefan Wolfrum (Twitter)
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The iPad Pro can handle firmware updates for accessories
It’s that time of year again: Lenovo whips out some impossibly thin and light laptop. Last CES it was a 1.7-pound notebook , and this year it’s the Yoga 900s, a half-inch-thick, 2.2-pound machine that Lenovo claims is the world’s thinnest convertible laptop. Indeed, I had a chance to handle it in person and it really is absurdly, impressively thin and light. (I know, we always say that. But still.) Before you get too excited, though, it appears that the 12-inch Yoga 900s is the spiritual successor to a machine that … we didn’t like very much. That would be last year’s Yoga 3 Pro , a super-slim model that ultimately got a lukewarm review on account of its sluggish performance and mediocre battery life. The new Yoga 900s is even thinner and lighter, but it too runs on Intel’s watered-down Core M processors, which makes me think the performance isn’t going to be better. Lenovo says the battery life will be longer (up to 10.5 hours), but that appears to be with a lower-resolution screen, not the QHD (2, 560 x 1, 440) option. One thing you’ll get here that you won’t on the Yoga 3 Pro: active pen support. That’s something you won’t even get on the recent Yoga 900 , Lenovo’s similar but higher-performing flagship machine. If you can do without the pen support, though, and don’t mind a little extra heft, you’ll get better performance from the current Yoga 900. Undeterred? The 900s lands in March for $1, 099 and up. That’s not the only impressively thin and light machine that Lenovo unveiled today. The company also took the wraps off a more mid-range notebook called the 710s, which keeps its weight (and price) down by forgoing a touchscreen. All told, the 13.3-inch system comes in at 2.6 pounds and half an inch thick. And though it tops out at a fairly middling 1080p screen resolution, it makes up for it with up to a sixth-gen Core i7 processor, Intel Iris graphics and a PCIe SSD. Expect that to ship in July (just in time for back-to-school season), priced from $799. I saved the least interesting for last. In addition to those two skinny laptops, Lenovo also announced the Ideapad 700, a beefier machine with either a 15- or 17.3-inch 1080p screen and up to a Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM and optional discrete graphics (a 4GB NVIDIA X950M on the 15-incher and a 4GB X940M on the 17-inch version). Both are offered with up to 1TB in HDD or hybrid storage, or with a PCIe SSD (128GB or 256GB). As you’d expect for models this size, they’re not particularly light (5.1 and 5.9 pounds, respectively) and the battery life is relatively short: up to four hours. Look for those in June, starting at $799.
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Lenovo says the Yoga 900s is the world’s thinnest convertible
The new tool out of Disney Research’s labs could turn an ingénue’s semi-decent attempt into a finely nuanced performance. This software called FaceDirector has the capability to merge together separate frames from different takes to create the perfect scene. It does that by analyzing both the actor’s face and audio cues to identify the frames that correspond with each other. As such, directors can create brand new takes during post-production with zero input from the actor. They don’t even need specialized hardware like 3D cameras for the trick — it works even with footage taken by regular 2D cams. According to Disney Research VP Markus Gross, the tool could be used to lower a movie’s production costs or to stay within the budget, say, if it’s an indie film that doesn’t have a lot of money to spare. “It’s not unheard of for a director to re-shoot a crucial scene dozens of times, even 100 or more times, until satisfied, ” he said. “That not only takes a lot of time — it also can be quite expensive. Now our research team has shown that a director can exert control over an actor’s performance after the shoot with just a few takes, saving both time and money.” Considering the lab also developed a way to make dubbed movies more believable and to take advantage of incredibly high frame rates , we wouldn’t be surprised if filmmakers arm themselves with an arsenal of Disney Research tools in the future. It’s probably hard to visualize the way FaceDirector works without seeing an example, so make sure to watch the video below to see it in action. Source: Disney Research (1) , (2)
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Disney’s FaceDirector changes facial expressions in movies
In 2014, US doctors wrote ~20,000 prescriptions for risperidone, quetiapine and other antipsychotics for children under the age of two; a cohort on whom these drugs have never been tested and for whom there is no on-label usage. (more…)
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Experts baffled to learn that 2 years olds are being prescribed psychiatric drugs
wabrandsma writes with this news from Ars Technica: The regulation of Google’s search results has come up from time to time over the past decade, and although the idea has gained some traction in Europe (most recently with “right to be forgotten” laws), courts and regulatory bodies in the U.S. have generally agreed that Google’s search results are considered free speech. That consensus was upheld last Thursday, when a San Francisco Superior Court judge ruled in favor of Google’s right to order its search results as it sees fit. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Court Rules Google’s Search Results Qualify As Free Speech
Jason Koebler writes Yahoo announced [Tuesday] it would be laying off at least 400 workers in its Indian office, and back in February, IBM cut roughly 2, 000 jobs there. Meanwhile, tech companies are beginning to see that many of the jobs it has outsourced can be automated, instead. Labor in India and China is still cheaper than it is in the United States, but it’s not the obvious economic move that it was just a few years ago: “The labor costs are becoming significant enough in China and India that there are very real discussions about automating jobs there now, ” Mark Muro, an economist at Brookings, said. “Companies are seeing that automated replacements are getting to be ‘good enough.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Outsourced Tech Jobs Are Increasingly Being Automated