Comment Re:Reference encoder with some small tweaks (Score 1) 104
Just curious... Have you tested x265 scalability on any big iron? (e.g. eight socket Xeon server)
Nature Vs. Nurture: Waging War Over the Soul of Science 235
derekmead writes "Wherever determinism appears, controversy attends, raising specters of days when colonialists, eugenicists, public health officials, and political idealists believed they could cure the human condition through manipulation and force. Understanding those fears helps shed light on the controversy surrounding a recent paper (PDF) published in the American Economic Review, entitled, 'The "Out of Africa" Hypothesis, Human Genetic Diversity, and Comparative Economic Development.' In it, economists Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor argue that the economic development of broad human populations correlate with their levels of genetic diversity—which is, in turn, pinned to the distance its inhabitants migrated from Africa thousands of years ago. Reaction has been swift and vehement.
An article signed by 18 academics in Current Anthropology accuses the researchers of 'bad science' — 'something false and undesirable' based on 'weak data and methods' that 'can become a justification for reactionary policy.' The paper attacks everything from its sources of population data to its methods for measuring genetic diversity, but the economists are standing by their methods. The quality of Ashraf and Galor's research notwithstanding, the debate illustrates just how tricky it's become to assert anything which says something about human development was in any way inevitable."
US Postal Service Discontinuing Saturday Mail Delivery 582
Hugh Pickens writes "The Postal Service has been losing billions of dollars each year as Americans increasingly rely on online communications that drive down mail volumes. Now, Reuters reports that the Postal Service plans to drop Saturday delivery of first-class mail by August, saving $2 billion per year. 'The Postal Service is advancing an important new approach to delivery that reflects the strong growth of our package business and responds to the financial realities resulting from America's changing mailing habits,' says Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe. But the Postal Service is already facing some pushback for moving forward with delivery schedule changes. 'Today's announcement by Postmaster General Donahoe to eliminate six-day delivery is yet another death knell for the quality service provided by the U.S. Postal Service,' says Jeanette Dwyer, president of the National Rural Letter Carriers' Association. 'To erode this service will undermine the Postal Service's core mission and is completely unacceptable.' Package deliveries will continue under the new plan and were a bright spot in a bleak 2012 fiscal year, with package revenue rising 8.7 percent during the year. Donahoe says the changes would allow the Postal Service to continue benefiting from rising package deliveries as Americans order more products from sites such as eBay Inc and Amazon.com Inc."
Comment Re:It's a trap! (Score 2) 171
At the macro level, adding employment to Detroit would be a good thing. At the micro level, it could be a bad thing for individuals who take a job at GM, and then find themselves working in conditions that make Dilbert look good by comparison. I understand "any port in a storm, and any job in a recession." But if you have a choice, would you really want to go to work for somebody who is absolutely hated by many of his prior employees?
Comment It's a trap! (Score 3, Informative) 171
Anybody thinking of getting an IT job at GM should talk to somebody who worked under Randy Mott at one of his previous gigs (e.g. Wal-Mart, Dell, HP). You won't find many fans.
GoDaddy Goes Down, Anonymous Claims Responsibility 483
An anonymous reader writes "A member of the Anonymous hacktivist group appears to have taken down GoDaddy with a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). The widespread issue seems to be affecting countless websites and services around the world, although not for everyone. Godaddy.com is down, but so are some of the site's DNS servers, which means GoDaddy hosted e-mail accounts are down as well, and lots more. It's currently unclear if the servers are being unresponsive or if they are completely offline. Either way, the result is that if your DNS is hosted on GoDaddy, your site may also look as if it is down, because it cannot resolve."
Comment Re:At the end of the day (Score 5, Insightful) 387
The jury saw that, and decided that that was wrong.
And therein lies the problem. The point of a trial is to decide what is LEGAL. It's great when Right and Wrong correspond to Legal and Illegal, but it doesn't always work out that way. One reason it doesn't is because right vs. wrong can be very subjective, but legal vs. illegal is supposed to be very objective.
I'm concerned that this jury simply got offended that "Samsung copied Apple", and didn't fully consider the prior art that would make such copying perfectly legal. The foreman saying they wanted to "send a message", in clear violation of the judge's instructions, calls the result into question.
Comment The fight is really all about the codec (Score 2) 211
From a purely technical perspective, Microsoft's proposal may actually be the better choice. The problem is that CU-RTC-Web doesn't mandate a codec, and lets the peers negotiate. Microsoft spins this as being flexible, and at a purely technical level, it is. The problem is that if the standard doesn't mandate some reasonable baseline codec, you're going to end up with implementations that can't talk to each other. Microsoft knows this, and they doesn't care.
Google isn't exactly a Saint either. They know full well that Microsoft and Apple won't implement VP8 (for semi-defensible technical/legal reasons, as well as evil intent). WebRTC with VP8 is unlikely to ever be available on iDevices, and that's a significant chunk of the market. Google knows this, and they don't care.
New Analyst Report Calls Agile a Scam, Says It's An Easy Out For Lazy Devs 491
msmoriarty writes "We recently got a copy of a new Voke analyst report on Agile, and the firm basically blasts the movement from top to bottom. Some highlights: 'The Agile movement is designed to sell services. ... Out of over 200 survey participants, we received only four detailed comments describing success with Agile.' 'Survey participants report that developers use the guise of Agile to avoid planning and to avoid creating documentation required for future maintenance. ... Be aware that the Agile movement might very well just be either a developer rebellion against unwanted tasks and schedules or just an opportunity to sell Agile services including certification and training.' So did the analysts just talk to the wrong 200 people?"
Submission + - [Videos] Linaro engineers talk about the status of Linux on ARM (armdevices.net) 2
Charbax writes: "Some of the worlds best developers work at Linaro optimizing the future of Linux on ARM. In this 4-hour video series several of them describe software solutions for the upcoming ARM big.LITTLE architecture (ARM Cortex-A15 and ARM Cortex-A7), demonstrate how Linaro Android 4.0.4 runs twice as fast as stock Android 4.0.4 on the TI OMAP4430 Pandaboard, talk about the future of Android, unify the ARM bootloader, combine multiple ARM SoCs into one Linux Kernel for ARM. Canonical works to support ARM Servers, Mark Shuttleworth talks about the opportunity that ARM constitutes for Ubuntu on Laptops and Servers. The CTO of Linaro talks about the next billions of ARM Powered devices that they are working to optimize Linux for."
Comment Re:Sucks for Lightsquared (Score 5, Insightful) 178
Really, the FCC and/or the GPS equipment manufacturer should be the ones being penalised.
As a practical matter, there's no way to do that. If you allow Lightspeed to operate, you penalize the USERS of the (allegedly) badly designed GPS devices. It does suck to be Lightspeed, because GPS really is much more important than them.
Submission + - HP's New ARM Servers: It's All About Power (infoworld.com)
snydeq writes: "HP's decision to go with ARM for its new Redstone server "platform" is a blow to Intel, but the real story is that AC power now costs more than hardware, InfoWorld reports. 'HP's new high-concept initiative, Project Moonshot, under which the Redstone project was launched ... is actually a pretty bold plan: Push the data center toward extreme low-power servers and "hyperscale" architecture (another way of referring to a large private cloud). As a proof of concept, you're supposed to be able to squeeze more than 2,800 Redstone servers in a single rack. According to HP Labs, this configuration yields 89 percent less energy, 94 percent less space, and an overall cost reduction of up to 63 percent compared to traditional server systems.'"
Submission + - HP shows prototype ARM-based server (hp.com)
Anon E. Muss writes: HP formally announced Project Moonshot today, including the "Redstone" ARM-based server. They also announced plans to build servers based on Atom processors. The server is only a prototype at this point, but the concept looks promising. They're packing hundreds of CPU's in a 4U chassis.
No Tab Relocation Coming For Chrome 574
shaitand writes about Google disagreeing with the desire of Chrome users to put tabs under (rather than above) the location bar: "This issue has had overwhelming feedback from users with no notable dissent. But Google revealed their view on the community, saying that feedback and comments aren't considered, and today moved to silence dissent and lock comments on the issue. [A Chromium developer] says, 'Commenting on this bug has absolutely no effect at all on the likelihood that we are going to reconsider. So that people don't get their hopes up falsely, I'm locking this bug to additional comments.'"
SUA Deprecated In Windows 8? 226
An anonymous reader writes "I just tried to install Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA) on Windows 8 Preview and found that it's marked as DEPRECATED: 'Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA) is a source-compatibility subsystem for compiling and running custom UNIX-based applications and scripts on a computer running Windows operating system. WARNING: SUA is deprecated starting with this release and will be completely removed in the next release. You should begin planning now to employ alternate methods for any applications, code, or usage that depend on this feature.'"
