Новости за 08.03.2017

Senators got a chance to publicly grill Ajit Pai this morning for the first time since he was named FCC chairman, during an oversight hearing with the Senate Commerce Committee.

Islands in the Pacific Ocean are some of the most practical places to install solar panels. Since there’s no natural gas pipeline or rail line to haul in coal, islands like Kauai in Hawaii have traditionally generated electricity by shipping in many barrels of diesel fuel.

Pinterest said today that it has acquired Jelly, a bad 4-year-old search engine, for an undisclosed sum. Jelly, which was created by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, tried to reimagine search as a social question-and-answer network. Instead of relying on Google for hard-to-answer questions like “what are some child-friendly places to go in Fresno this weekend,” Jelly would attempt to route your questions to people who might know. After several minutes, it would then give you an answer that typically... Читать дальше...

Action scenes can be difficult for filmmakers. They’re technically challenging to film, and directors have to balance action against story. Too much violence can distract from what the characters are trying to accomplish, or just desensitize viewers to the stakes of the film completely. In a new essay, video blogger Evan Puschak (aka Nerdwriter) explains the show-stopping final battle in The Two Towers succeeds because of how it was structured.

Living in Colorado, I know a lot about driving in the snow. I have Nokian Hakkapeliitta studded winter tires for both my cars, and they allow my front-wheel drive vehicles to competently handle winter weather. Install high-quality winter tires on a car and it’s astonishing how well they can perform. Christian Koenigsegg, founder of Swedish supercar maker Koenigsegg, agrees.

Fei-Fei Li, chief scientist of artificial intelligence and machine learning at Google Cloud, came on stage at Google’s Next Cloud conference today to talk about the current and next-generation applications of AI that Google’s working on. These technologies will make a difference in self-driving cars and healthcare, sure, but also Snapchat’s filters and Google Photos’ search capabilities. But the big highlight came when she announced a new way to allow software to parse video.

Bungie detailed its plans for the next (and last) major Destiny event, called Age of Triumph. As the final event in the original Destiny before Destiny 2 — expected later this year — Age of Triumph focuses on celebrating players’ achievements and features the return of the original raids: Vault of Glass, Crota's End, and King’s Fall.

Facebook today announced a new server design it calls Big Basin, a successor to its Big Sur line of artificial intelligence training systems. These Nvidia-powered GPU servers, tied together into large training networks for AI software, are what enable Facebook products to perform object and facial recognition and real-time text translation, as well as describe and understand the contents of photos and videos.

In the days following Susan Fowler’s blog post about Uber, the internet exploded with tweets and blog posts from other women in tech. Some shared their personal observations directly with me as well. There was, appropriately, a fair amount of indignation; the claims Fowler made, and the subsequent stories that emerged about corporate culture at Uber, are so egregious that it’s hard to believe it was all kept under wraps for this long.

Last month I saw Gloria Steinem and Octavia Spencer speak on a panel about the film Hidden Figures at the Makers Conference. An audience member posited the question, “How do we find the other hidden figures in history?”

International Women’s Day isn’t being celebrated loudly (or at all) here at the Geneva Motor Show, but just as I was despairing at the old-fashioned use of attractive young women in short skirts as car decorations, I stumbled upon a ray of gender-balanced sunshine. Liberty Walk, a Japanese company that mods supercars to give them extra performance and even sharper looks, has come to Geneva with a pair of booth models to attract the attention of passers-by: one man and one woman. Both are clad in flamboyantly untraditional kimonos. Читать дальше...

Nest may finally have some new products in the works. According to a report from Bloomberg, the Alphabet-owned company is working on a slate of new connected products, including a home security system, a smart doorbell, an updated version of the indoor Nest Cam, and a cheaper version of its popular smart thermostat.

Google Play Music has today launched its first original podcast, City Soundtracks. Available on Google’s streaming service (and on iTunes!), the series will offer listeners a guide round the musical highlights of different cities, with each stop on the tour chaperoned by a local artist. The show is hosted by Hrishikesh Hirway (of the podcast Song Exploder), and for its first three episodes will visit Austin, Texas with Spoon, New Orleans in LA with Big Freedia, and Oakland, California with Kehlani. Читать дальше...

Back in 2011, I was talking with Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, backstage at our D9 conference, when he made a casual reference to a “Gang of Four” companies that he believed ruled the consumer tech industry. Once on stage, I asked him about that term.

Can silence and absence be loud in a digital space?

Continue reading…

2014’s Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor was a great game in its own right, taking the fantasy world of Tolkien and translating it into a compelling, brutally violent action experience. But for Michael de Plater, VP of creative at developer Monolith Productions, it was also a starting point — one the team is looking to expand upon significantly with the upcoming sequel, Shadow of War.

Women’s contribution to history often gets overlooked in textbooks. Unless you took some women’s studies classes in college, you might think the whole world was built by men. That’s obviously not true. There have been many talented female scientists, engineers, and innovators who changed the world for the better. But because men dominated for an awfully long time, they got to shape and write history. That’s gradually beginning to change.

The PlayStation 4 is getting a major system update tomorrow that will add some much-anticipated features to Sony’s home console. Among the changes coming with version 4.50 of the firmware is a previously revealed “boost mode” for those with a PS4 Pro. According to Sony, the new feature “has been designed to provide better performance for select legacy titles that have not been patched to take advantage of the PS4 Pro’s faster CPU and its faster and double-sized GPU.” The PS4 will also finally... Читать дальше...

ZTE, China’s second-largest maker of telecoms equipment, has been hit by a record fine from the US government. The company has pled guilty to charges of violating US sanctions against both Iran and North Korea, and will pay up to $1.2 billion — the largest criminal fine in a US sanctions case to date.

HTC’s U Ultra — memorably dubbed a “compendium of bad ideas” by The Verge’s Vlad Savov — will start shipping to customers in the US on March 10th. This information comes from HTC’s official store via PhoneArena. The $749 handset is also still available to pre-order, and comes unlocked and in three colors (Sapphire Blue, Brilliant Black, and Ice White).

With the debut of Netflix’s Iron Fist now imminent, Marvel is on the defensive. The studio is in an uncomfortable position: its three earlier streaming series, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Luke Cage, all received plenty of buzzy reception ahead of their respective launches. But Iron Fist was met with scrutiny and criticism before it even went into production. That criticism centers mainly on the optics of a white man starring in a series rooted in Orientalist stereotypes, which collides directly... Читать дальше...

The United States’ Marine Corps has issued a public video response to the news that Marines were using closed Facebook groups to share naked pictures of service women. The video, posted to the Marine Corps’ official Twitter account, calls out those involved for acting selfishly, and requests soldiers to speak out if they feel they are being harassed.

Apple has issued a statement to say that it has already fixed major security flaws in its iOS software identified in last night’s WikiLeaks CIA document dump. The company said that the latest public version of iOS, released in January, has already patched “many” critical vulnerabilities that had been detailed in the files, while Apple engineers continue to work to fix others that were known to the CIA.

Did you sign up for DirecTV Now back when the streaming TV service first launched? Check your email. AT&T is rewarding early customers by adding a free year of HBO to their existing channel package — “no strings attached.”

The 2018 Volvo XC60 is the company’s newest and safest offering. For a company with such a fanatical devotion to safety as Volvo, that’s saying something.