We’ll finally — finally! — see the real thing at the 2019 Detroit Auto Show in January.
Source: CNET
It’s like a how-to guide for spoiling the very, very dark interactive movie.
Source: CNET
Porsche’s first all-electric sports car might be the most hotly anticipated vehicle of 2019. Even Tesla owners are hooked.
In a recent interview with CNET, Porsche North America president and CEO Klaus Zellmer said if everyone who has placed a deposit to pre-order the car actually buys it, the Taycan will be sold out in its first year of production.
Who are these early reservation customers? According to Zellmer, more than half have not owned or do not own a Porsche. More specifically, Zellmer said these potential customers are coming from Tesla .
The quote from CNET:
Typically, if we look at our source of business, people coming from other brands, it’s Audi, BMW, or Mercedes. The no. 1 brand now is Tesla. That’s pretty interesting, to see that people that were curious about the Tesla for very good reasons obviously don’t stop being curious.
Zellmer didn’t share any numbers or further details, however. It’s unclear how many deposits have been made or the number of Taycan vehicles Porsche will ultimately produce per year. Porsche previously planned to produce about 20,000 Taycans per year. Porsche CEO Oliver Blume told WirtschaftsWoche in November that demand for the Taycan prompted the automaker to increase production capacity without indicating by how much.
The Taycan is due to launch at the end of 2019.
Source: TechCrunch
After the year Mark Zuckerberg’s had, you’d think he’d struggle to appear so chipper.
“I’m proud of the progress we’ve made,” he said in an end-of-year note posted on his Facebook page for everyone to see. Acknowledging that the social network played its part in the spread of hate speech, election interference and misinformation, Zuckerberg’s note seemed more upbeat about his response to the hurricane of hurt caused by the company’s laissez-faire attitude to world affairs and less concerned about showing contrition and empathy for the harm Facebook caused in the past year — including its inability to keep its users’ data safe and, above all else, its failure to prevent its site from being used to incite ethnic violence and genocide.
Zuckerberg’s tone-deaf remarks read like 1,000 words of patting himself on the back.
But where the Facebook co-founder pledged to “focus on addressing some of the most important issues facing our community,” he conveniently ignored some of the most damaging, ongoing problems that the company has shown little desire to solve, opting instead for quick fixes or simply pretending they don’t exist.
A decade ago, Facebook had just 12 people moderating its entire site — some 120 million users. Now, the company relies largely on an army of underpaid contractors spread out across the world to moderate millions of potentially rule-breaking posts on the site each week.
Zuckerberg said the company has this year increased those working on safety to “more than 30,000 people.” That’s on top of the 33,600 full-time employees that Facebook had as of the end of September. But that’s a massive task to police Facebook’s 2.27 billion monthly active users. Those 30,000 new safety contractors equates to about one moderator for every 75,660 users.
Facebook’s contractors have long complained about long hours and low pay, and that’s not even taking into account the thousands of gruesome posts — from beheadings to child abuse and exploitation — they have to review each day. Turnover is understandably high. No other social network in the world has as many users as Facebook, and it’s impossible to know what the “right number” of moderators is.
But the numbers don’t add up. Facebook’s army of 30,000 safety staffers isn’t enough to combat the onslaught of vitriol and violence, let alone against an advanced adversary like the nation-state actors that it’s constantly blaming.
Zuckerberg made no mention of the photo data exposure and account breaches that the company had to contend with this year, even if he couldn’t avoid mentioning Cambridge Analytica, the voter research firm that misused 87 million Facebook users’ information, just the once.
Yet, Zuckerberg made no commitment to doubling down on the company’s efforts to secure the platform, despite years of its “move fast and break things” mentality. Since the departure of former chief security officer Alex Stamos in August, the company hasn’t hired his replacement. All signs point to nobody taking the position at all. While many see a chief security officer as a figurehead-type position, they still provide executive-level insight into the threats they face and issues to handle — no more than ever after a string of embarrassing and damaging security incidents.
Zuckerberg said that the company invests “billions of dollars in security yearly.” That may be true. But without an executive overseeing that budget, it’s not confidence-inducing knowing that there’s nobody with the years of experience needed to oversee a company’s security posture in control of where those billions go.
Fake news, misinformation and election meddling is one thing, but Zuckerberg refused to acknowledge the direct impact Facebook had on Myanmar’s ethnic violence — which the United Nations is calling genocide.
It can’t be much of a surprise to Zuckerberg. The UN said Facebook had a “determining role” in inciting genocide in the country. He faced questions directly from U.S. lawmakers earlier this year when he was told to testify to senators in April. Journalists are regularly arrested and murdered for reporting on the military-backed government’s activities. The Facebook boss apologized — which human rights groups on the ground called “grossly insufficient.”
Facebook said last week that it has purged hundreds of accounts, pages and groups associated with inciting violence in Myanmar, but continues to refuse setting up an office in the country — despite groups on the ground saying would be necessary to show it’s serious about the region.
Zuckerberg said in his note that the company “didn’t focus as much on these issues as we needed to, but we’re now much more proactive.”
“That doesn’t mean we’ll catch every bad actor or piece of bad content, or that people won’t find more examples of past mistakes before we improved our systems,” he said. Some have seen that as a hint that some of the worst revelations are yet to come. Perhaps it’s just Zuckerberg hedging his bets as a way to indemnify his remarks from criticism when the next inevitable bad news break hits the wires.
In his 1,000-word post, Zuckerberg said he was “proud” three times, he talked of the company’s “focus” four times and how much “progress” was being made five times. But there wasn’t a single “sorry” to be seen. Then again, he’s spent most of his Facebook career apologizing for the company’s fails. Any more at this point would probably come across as trite.
Zuckerberg ended on as much as a cheery note as he began, looking to the new year as an opportunity for “building community and bringing people together,” adding: “Here’s to a great new year to come.”
Well, it can’t be much worse than this year. Or can it?
Source: TechCrunch
Sandra Bullock’s star power can still sell a movie, apparently. Though reviews for the Netflix horror film “Bird Box” have been lukewarm — the movie has a respectable, but not outstanding, score of 65 percent on Rotten Tomatoes — it has still managed to break records for the streaming service, Netflix said this afternoon.
The company announced in a tweet that more than 45 million Netflix accounts have now streamed “Bird Box,” which set a new record for the best-ever first week for a Netflix film.
Of course, many Twitter users then proceeded to joke that means well over 45 million have actually watched the movie because of Netflix password sharing.
That actually means 135,111,375 people have watched it
— Patty (@pmcakes22) December 28, 2018
Netflix doesn’t tend to reveal its streaming numbers for its movies or its TV shows, except in cases like this when they’re worth sharing.
But for comparison’s sake, Nielsen’s third-party measurement service estimated that Netflix’s original movie “Bright” starring Will Smith saw 11 million viewers in its first three days — less than “Stranger Things” Season 2’s first three days, which pulled in 15.8 million viewers. Meanwhile, “The Cloverfield Paradox,” which Netflix acquired first-run rights to from Paramount, saw 5 million viewers in its first week.
“Bird Box” is doing much better.
Netflix, however, has always disputed Nielsen’s figures, because they don’t count mobile devices or computers, and only measure data in the U.S. But they’re all the industry has to go on for now.
As another less direct point of comparison, Netflix said this June that its Oscar-winning film “Mudbound,” released in November 2017, had been streamed for 20 million hours. And in October, Netflix said that more than 80 million subscribers watched at least one of its summer rom-coms over the past few months, like “Kissing Booth” or “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.”
“Bird Box’s” setting of a new Netflix streaming record is likely due to a combination of factors, none of which have much to do with it being a great film, in the traditional sense.
For starters, audiences seemed to like the film more than critics did, with a 74 percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. The film is boosted by the star talent of Sandra Bullock, who can still draw a crowd. The cast includes other known names, too, like “Get Out” star Lil Rel Howery, along with “Moonlight” stars Trevante Rhodes and John Malkovich.
“Bird Box” is also riding a wave of high-concept horror movies. The film has been compared to the successful thriller “A Quiet Place,” which had monsters that hunted by sound while “Bird Box” monsters are a threat only if they’re seen — hence all the blindfolds.
The film has benefited from word-of-mouth recommendations, too, including one from Stephen King who suggested horror fans should ignore the critics‘ bad reviews. And it has been the subject of numerous memes, which made it something of a viral, cult sensation across social media. That could have prompted more people to watch just to get in on the joke.
Plus, the movie is a holiday release — it dropped on Netflix on December 21 — a time when many people are off work and have the time to stream.
Source: TechCrunch
Black Mirror makes an interactive movie before interactive movies become real-life Black Mirror episodes.
Source: CNET
It seems someone took Every Frame a Painting literally: The Very Slow Movie Player is a device that turns cinema into wallpaper, advancing the image by a single second every hour. The result is an interesting household object that makes something new of even the most familiar film.
The idea occurred to designer and engineer Bryan Boyer during one of those times we all have where we are sitting at home thinking of ways to celebrate slowness.
“Can a film be consumed at the speed of reading a book?” he asked himself, slowly. “Slowing things down to an extreme measure creates room for appreciation of the object… but the prolonged duration also starts to shift the relationship between object, viewer, and context. A film watched at 1/3,600th of the original speed is not a very slow movie, it’s a hazy timepiece. A Very Slow Movie Player (VSMP) doesn’t tell you the time; it helps you see yourself against the smear of time.”
The Very Slow Movie Player is an e-paper display attached to a Raspberry Pi board; you load a movie onto the latter, and it processes and displays a single frame at a time, updating the screen with a new one every two and a half minutes.
That adds up to 24 frames per hour, as opposed to the usual 24 frames per second — 3,600 times slower than normal viewing, and producing a (perhaps) 7-or-8,000-hour tableau you view over the course of a year or so.
“It is impossible to ‘watch’ in a traditional way because it’s too slow. In a staring contest with VSMP you will always lose,” writes Boyer in a post explaining the project. “It can be noticed, glanced at, or even inspected, but not watched.”
He compares it to the work of Bill Viola, whose super-slow-motion portraits are similarly impossible to watch from start to finish (unless you’re very, very patient) and therefore exist in a sort of limbo between motion picture and still image.
The image itself leaves something to be desired, of course: e-paper is essentially 1-bit color depth — black and white. So the subtleties of color you might see in any film, color or no, will be lost to dithering.
The way it’s done helps highlight the contrasts and zones of a scene, though if you really want to appreciate Rear Window as cinema, you can watch it any time you like. But if you want to appreciate it as a process, as a relationship with time, as an object and image that exists in the context of the rest of the world and your life… for that, you have the Very Slow Movie Player.
Source: TechCrunch
The Facebook CEO sums up the year, covering all the things his company’s done — including responding to an endless string of scandals.
Source: CNET
As Facebook struggles with intense scrutiny and drama, there’s been speculation about Zuckerberg’s role at the company.
Source: CNET
There has been plenty of speculation recently, but with the newest leak, courtesy of a Lenovo support page listing, the GeForce GTX 1160 graphics card has now been all but confirmed.
The post A new Lenovo listing all but confirms the Nvidia GTX 1160 appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
