http://techreport.com/news/27953/star-ci...n-at-100gb
Patches could be up to 20 GB each. At this rate of game size expansion, hard drives still have a future, and SSDs had better drop in price and increase in capacity even further.

It's really good.

3-10-2015

Salt Lake City First Responders Heard Mystery Voice Before Rescuing Toddler From River


Three police officers and two firemen outside Salt Lake City, Utah, say they heard a mysterious voice asking for help before they knew a toddler was in a submerged car for 13 hours.


Officers Tyler Beddoes, Jared Warner and Bryan Dewitt, who responded to the incident in the Spanish Fork River Saturday, say they heard an adult voice say, "Help me," Spanish Fork Police officer Lt. Matt Johnson told ABC News.

Johnson said the two firefighters, Paul Tomadakis and Lee Mecham, also heard the voice before realizing there was a toddler in the car.

"To me, it was plain as day," Warner told KSL.com. "I remember hearing a voice that didn't sound like a child, just saying, 'Help me.'"

So, nVIDIA Q4'2015 numbers were released last month and surprise, surprise, Tegra numbers were down Q over Q from $168 to $112. But I though that TK1 was going to be a homerun with Nexus 9 and all that jazz? TK1 Denver being the 64bit Google poster child for Lolipop it should have been used in other Android tablets! What happened? And what about Shield? Surely such a *cough* wanted *cough* product would have been a success in Christmas time!

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8973/nvidi...-full-year

Let me also quote my reaction to the "Made to Game" event and new SHIELD console from another forum:

Quote:Yes I am, and somewhat disappointed. I was already expecting a games console, but I'm not sure going with Android TV is the best option. Ultimately they could have gone with an Android branch underneat and create their own user experience. I'm not a big believer in Smart TVs other than Chromecast. I would have preferred them to sell it as just a console.

I was half right about them working on porting other platforms games to run natively on SHIELD. However I agree that that function is merely a PR stunt and not substantial. Otherwise the system would have had more than the ridiculous 16GB of memory.

In my opinion GRID is not enough of a feature to sell this device in high quantity. That's why I was expecting them to not be as stupid as that and be serious about porting titles from other platforms. However, truth to be told the Tegra X1 is not nearly as powerful for that to happen extensively.

Ultimately, if I would have been in nVIDIA shoes I would have delayed this product for the next Tegra generation. Yes, it might have meant to lose the Android TV train, but I would not be interested on it anyway. There is plenty of OEMs working on Android TV already and that will be a market where nVIDIA does not stand to have a chance. This reminds me too much of XBOX One schizofrenia at launch: is it a TV or Gaming device? If it was "Made to Game" like they say, be serious about it instead of just going "me too" and "oh we do more than that".

A last note for the event itself: it was horribly presented and executed! Worst presentation from nVIDIA ever! Dull, lacked enthusiasm. It felt like even them do not believe in it. Just gives more strength to idea that since they can't get OEMs to adopt Tegra they have to develop their own products to get some revenue back.

I have no doubt this SHIELD will be another flop.. Possibly worse than SHIELD tablet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWaG9hOvNn0
John Vert gives a shocking presentation. Talk about no try before you buy. Making installing it yourself easy, or making it a good desktop OS aren't goals either. Though he indicates that they want to improve the desktop experience later.

And if Valve is really aiming for the living room, it's too late. 8th gen consoles have had their prices cut to below the Steam Machines, Nvidia has undercut them all with the SHIELD console, and getting a PC into the living room isn't going to work. Just look at HTPCs. They're perceived as too big and expensive for the living room, so what gets bought instead? A bunch of cheap, smaller things that in total can do what the HTPC does. And what's Steam Link? A cheap, small thing that does something Steam Machines do, which is stream games. See the pattern?

Oh, and at 23:50, that gift of a free subscription to all Steam games is fucking scandalous. People spend a ton of money on their Steam libraries and the Debian devs get all Steam games for Linux now and in the future for free!? Wait, could this after-the-fact-almost-a-bribe be how Steam became dominant?

Plus it's fucking hilarious to see him whining about how they intend to counter the open, non-dependent-on-app-stores Windows and Mac OS X platforms with the identical platform that is SteamOS. According to him later on, Valve is weighing up how far they want to go in letting people install their own packages. With this level of delirious behavior and his dizzy grin, I think John Vert should be called John Vertigo.

3-10-2015

American Hospitals charging over $10,000 for $10 blood test

A lipid panel is one of the most basic blood tests in modern medicine. Doctors use it to measure cholesterol levels in their patients, probably millions of times each year.


This is not a procedure where some hospitals are really great at lipid panels and some are terrible. There's just not space for quality variation: you are running blood through a machine and pressing buttons. That's it.

And that all makes it a bit baffling why, in California, a lipid panel can cost anywhere between $10 and $10,000. In either case, it is the exact same test.

"What we were trying to see is, when we get down the simplest, most basic form of medicine, how much variation is there in price?" says Renee Hsia, an associate professor at University of California, San Francisco who published the price data in a recent study.

For this research, published in August in the British Medical Journal, Hsia and her colleagues compiled reams of data about how much more than 100 hospitals charged for basic blood work. The prices these facilities charged consumers were all over the map.

The charge for a lipid panel ranged from $10 to $10,169. Hospital prices for a basic metabolic panel (which doctors use to measure the body's metabolism) were $35 at one facility — and $7,303 at another.

This huge variation in the price of a really simple, incredibly basic blood test tells us a few things about the American health care system.

Blood tests aren't the only place with this variation

Hsia's previous research looked at the cost of an appendectomy in California and found similarly gigantic variation. For an appendectomy with no complications, she found that hospitals in the state would charge anywhere between $1,529 and $186,955.

What this tells us about American health care

For one, there's not much price transparency: it's really hard to know whether one hospital is charging $10 or $10,169 because prices are rarely listed.

The $10,169 blood test tells us we're suckers: we've developed a health care system where its hospitals have pretty full authority to name their price with little protest from consumers.

Getting a $10,000 blood test can put a patient into bankruptcy. But right now, our health care system doesn't have the mechanisms to limit those high charges — nor would the patient likely have the tools to know the cost of his or her blood test to begin with.

"There's no other industry where you see this kind of extreme variation," Hsia says. "And nobody has ever really challenged it. It shows an extreme inefficiency, and something we really need to change."

3-9-2015

Florida bans use of words Climate Change and Global Warming

Climate change activists blasted Florida Governor Rick Scott on Monday for leading an "Orwellian" campaign to ban employees of the state's lead environmental agency from using such terms as “global warming” and “climate change.”

Despite coastal Florida's vulnerability to storm surges and rising sea levels, the state’s Department of Environmental Protection was directed in 2011 not to use the phrases in official communications, according to a report by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting.

Employees were told not to use the phrases ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming,’ 'sea level rise,' or ‘sustainability,

The prohibition began after the election of Scott, who had disputed the human impact on climate change during his 2010 campaign, according to the report.

Concerns about climate change are widely voiced by research scientists, but questioned by conservative Republicans who oppose controls on carbon emissions blamed for causing environmental damage.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/200...th-removal

Quote:One of the most daunting challenges of any security problem in consumer software is the difficulty of distributing a patch to everyone affected. Unless the software is tightly locked down and updates are mandatory, there are inevitably users who slip through the cracks, fail to apply an update when told to do so, or rarely connect online. It was inevitable that Lenovo would run into some of these problems with Superfish, but the company appears to have done only the minimum required to actually pull the software off the shelves.

For example, while Lenovo may have stopped shipping Superfish in January, it didn’t actually do any recalls to prevent previously built systems from including the malware — which means, yes, it’s still perfectly possible to buy a laptop with Superfish, assuming it shipped out before Lenovo’s change of heart. The Lenovo removal toolkit also doesn’t quite work as advertised — while it does remove the Superfish certificate and close the man-in-the-middle attack, it leaves behind the Superfish executable, SuperfishCert.dll, and at least one registry setting related to VisualDiscovery.

Lenovo isn’t the first company to have a less-than-perfect uninstaller and it won’t be the last. But in situations like this, nailing every last corner case is particularly important. The company’s failure to recall the systems already in flight ensures that the impact of Superfish will last for months, as infected systems continue to propagate through the supply channel. Superfish, therefore, won’t just fade away without considerable action from consumers to monitor their own systems — and since infected users are likely less technical to start with, it could take years before the bug is completely cleaned out of the industry.

The next President of the United States Jeb Bush will make the Internet only for the rich official.

3-9-2015

JEB BUSH: Net neutrality is 'one of the craziest ideas I've ever heard'

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush ®. Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida and a likely Republican presidential candidate in 2016, weighed in on the FCC's recent ruling on net neutrality for the first time over the weekend, The Hill reports.


"The idea of regulating access to the internet with a 1934 law is one of the craziest ideas I've ever heard," Bush said.

Bush is referring to the Communications Act of 1934, which regulated "interstate and foreign commerce in communication by wire and radio so as to make available, so far as possible, to all the people of the United States ... a rapid, efficient, nationwide, and worldwide wire and radio communication service with adequate facilities at reasonable charges, for the purpose of national defense."

The Communications Act was created because President Franklin D. Roosevelt, as well as lobbyists and state regulators, believed communications technology needed to be monitored and regulated so certain states, carriers, and customers did not face price discrimination.

Applying these rules to the internet, the principle of net neutrality says all data needs to be treated equally, regardless of who creates it — it provides a level playing field so new startups and services can compete with, and even supplant, established brands. But Bush apparently is not a fan of this idea

So while the FCC plans to protect the internet with these new rules, telecom companies, lobbyists, and politicians like Bush will continue to fight the decision for the foreseeable future.

http://hdguru.com/multi-industry-ultra-h...r-next-tv/
Read the interview too.

Quote:We’re only about four years into the market launch of high resolution 4K Ultra HDTV, but TV manufacturers, content producers and engineering consultants made it clear at International CES a few weeks ago that we’ve only just started to see what this new display ecosystem can deliver.

Learn the details and read an interview with a UHD Alliance member spokesperson after the break.

Platform stakeholders want to prove that Ultra HD is about more than just pixels, and whether or not you’re in the market for the best picture quality an Ultra HD TV can deliver today or tomorrow, you might want to consider what the industry has coming just ahead.

Since the launch of the first 4K Ultra HD sets, content producers, engineers and the media have debated whether or not the average consumer is really deriving a perceivable benefit from typical TV screen sizes capable of producing four times the resolution (1920×1080 vs. 3840×2160 pixels) of the previous Full HD benchmark.

To help put some of those concerns to rest, set manufacturers have started developing UHD TVs that address other areas of the picture to make them look more realistic, such as adding more colors from a wider swath of the visual color spectrum, and more detail in the deep black and bright white ranges of the image. Some of these areas are being addressed in new technologies like Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) display panels, LED/LCD TVs using quantum dot technology and other approaches.

The results are as varied as the different approaches in play, and what has been glaringly lacking is the absence of input from the content side of the equation.

For this reason, representatives from multiple companies in multiple industries have put aside their differences to work together to develop a best of breed framework. This so-named UHD (Ultra HD) Alliance is seeking to create a functionally competitive environment through which TV manufacturers and content producers can enhance the images produced by all of those extra pixels with new levels of expanded color bit depth, a wider and more natural color palette, higher frame rates, new 3D audio sound and the inclusion of techniques for adding high dynamic range for greater image detail. (See CES Recap: Thoughts On Color for more on this).

Ironically, these added side benefits aren’t necessarily 4K Ultra HD resolution dependent. The same or similar results can be achieved on Full HDTVs. But from a business standpoint, adding those extra benefits to a technology treading dangerously close to commoditization wouldn’t give manufacturers a lot of room for profit and could add prohibitive cost to a low-margin display technology, when time and again the market has shown bigger resolution spec numbers inspire TV upgrades. In time, however, many of the benefits derived from this body will undoubtedly move into mid- and even low-end ranges of the TV market. Just don’t hold your breath waiting.