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Submission + - Google Testing AI System To Cool Data Center Energy Bills

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google is looking at artificial intelligence technology to help it identify opportunities for data center energy savings. The company is approaching the end of an initial 2-year trial of the machine learning tool, and hopes to see it applied across the entire data center portfolio by the end of 2016. The new AI software, which is being developed at Google’s DeepMind, has already helped to cut energy use for cooling by 40%, and to improve overall data center efficiency by 15%. DeepMind said that the program has been an enormous help in analyzing data center efficiency, from looking at energy used for cooling and air temperature to pressure and humidity. The team now hopes to expand the system to understand other infrastructure challenges, in the data center and beyond, including improving power plant conversion, reducing semiconductor manufacturing energy, water usage, and helping manufacturers increase throughput.

Submission + - How the Internet Helps Sex Workers Keep Customers Honest

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Mid-range prostitution is a relatively new market, enabled by technology. Before the internet, it was hard for escorts to find customers: They had to either walk the streets searching for customers, rely on word-of-mouth, or work with agencies. The internet changed all that as Allison Schrager writes at Quartz that if you work at Goldman Sachs in NYC and you want to tie up a woman and then have sex with her, you'll first have to talk to Rita. Rita will "insist on calling your office, speaking to the switchboard operator, and being patched through to your desk. Then she will want to check out your profile on the company website and LinkedIn. She’ll demand you send her message from your work email, and require a scan of either your passport or driver’s license."

Though some escorts rely on sex work-specific sites that maintain “bad date” lists of potentially dangerous clients, others make use of more mainstream sources to gather information about and verify the identities of potential johns. Rita is addressing a problem that every business, both legal and illegal, has. Before the internet, more commerce occurred locally—customers knew their merchants or service providers and went back to them repeatedly. As technology has expanded our transactional networks, it must also offer new ways of building trust and reputation. "The lesson here is that, while you’d think all the technological options for finding customers would make Rita’s job as a madam obsolete, it has actually made her services more critical," says Schrager. "One step ahead of the mainstream economy, Rita’s thriving business shows that some jobs won’t disappear. They just need to be recast in a way that capitalizes on what made them valuable in the first place."

Comment Re:I'm 31 (Score 1) 418

by LRayZor (#34340738) Attached to: Have I Lost My Gaming Mojo?

Truth is, I dropped all of the games that simulate real work. Big surprise, I have a full-time job. It's unfortunately because I really used to like the Master of Orion series, and number three was fantastic.

Ah... what?! I'm sure that must be a mistake. You mean MoM 2 not 3. Three was one of the very worst games I've ever bought. It was diabolically bad.

Comment Re:How secure (Score 1) 491

by LRayZor (#32873946) Attached to: Bitcoin Releases Version 0.3

The main problem the Eurozone faces is that it didn't stick to it's guns in the first place when introducing new member states. All new countries were supposed to reach a certain financial position in relation to overall spending and income and maintain it. Some countries such as Greece basically said 'Sure Thing Boss', frigged the figures, and then continued to overspend. The Eurozone failed to do sufficient due-diligence when allowing these countries to join. Even some of the original countries such as Italy are flouting the rules.
Games

The Perils of Pointless Innovation In Games 260

Posted by Soulskill from the why-does-my-rocket-launcher-have-reloading-minigame dept.
Negative Gamer is running a story discussing the need felt by the major game developers to create the next huge blockbuster, which often leads to innovation and change for their own sake rather than simply focusing on what makes a game fun. Quoting: "There seems to be this invisible pressure to create something that is highly 'intuitive' and incorporates the highest level of innovation that we have ever seen. The problem is that the newest ideas put into games are either gimmicky, terrible in execution, or blatantly ripping off another title. On the other hand there are series that feel the need to completely revamp a game that played perfectly fine before into something completely new that falls flat on its face. ... There's a critical problem with popular, mainstream video games that isn't as large with other mediums; they are expensive to make and require a lot of time and effort put in to create something masterful. With that, games must take cautious paths. I fully understand the risks, but adding unneeded material to certain games is not justifiable."

The Information Factories Are Here 126

Posted by CowboyNeal from the brave-new-world dept.
prostoalex writes, "Wired magazine has coined a new term for the massive data centers built in the Pacific Northwest by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! Cloudware is, ironically, a return of the centralized data and bandwidth power houses caused by the decentralized and distributed nature of the Internet. George Gilder thinks we're witnessing something monumental: 'According to Bell's law, every decade a new class of computer emerges from a hundredfold drop in the price of processing power. As we approach a billionth of a cent per byte of storage, and pennies per gigabit per second of bandwidth, what kind of machine labors to be born? How will we feed it? How will it be tamed? And how soon will it, in its inevitable turn, become a dinosaur?'"
Music

Submission + - Judge OK's Challenge to RIAA's $750-per-song Claim

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "In UMG v. Lindor, in Brooklyn federal court, the presiding judge has held that Marie Lindor can try to prove that the RIAA's claim of $750-per-song statutory damages is a violation of the Due Process Clause of the Constitution, since she has evidence that the actual wholesale price of the downloads is only 70 cents. This decision activates an earlier ruling by the Magistrate in the case that the record labels must now turn over "all relevant documents" regarding the prices at which they sell legal downloads to online retailers, and produce a witness to give a deposition by telephone on the subject. Judge Trager rejected the RIAA's claim that the defense was frivolous, pointing out that the RIAA had cited no authorities contradicting the defense, but Ms. Lindor's attorneys had cited cases and law review articles indicating that it was a valid defense. See Decision at pp. 6-7."

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I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

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