Professional technologist (in the broadcast, communications and consumer electronics sectors) and something of a thinker.
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Color Pattern

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♫ When the spacing is tight / And the difference is slight / That's a moiré ♫
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bobdvb
2808 days ago
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7 public comments
effingunicorns
2817 days ago
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The more you know~*
jlvanderzwan
2817 days ago
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Oh goddamn it
Levitz
2815 days ago
I do appreciate a good pun!
mindspillage
2818 days ago
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see also: http://www.perspicuity.com/?lightbox=image_104h
north bay, California
Lythimus
2818 days ago
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This just made me realize WaveNet/Deep Voice could be used to match regular sentences to the cadence of a library of pop songs. This would have no practical use, but it would mean you could pick out pairs of sentences from a speech and sing them all to well known pop songs.
FlyingRat
2818 days ago
That would be fun. Certain things are well known, like the fact that you can sing almost any Emily Dickinson poem to the tune of Yellow Rose of Texas or the Gilligan's Island theme, but expanding the canon would be great.
kbenson
2816 days ago
In the future, our robot overlords will speak to us exclusively in verse set to ear-worm songs, to both torture us and prevent us from forgetting their commands.
endlessmike
2813 days ago
Do this with every Trump speech. Thanks in advance
JayM
2818 days ago
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ROFL
Atlanta, GA
jepler
2818 days ago
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hee hee
Earth, Sol system, Western spiral arm
alt_text_bot
2818 days ago
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♫ When the spacing is tight / And the difference is slight / That's a moiré ♫
emdot
2814 days ago
Lines will zig ziggy ziggy zag, ziggy ziggy zag / Don't be mad at the pattern / They can smooth do a little move, just a groove / And you'll see it unscatters

Pirate Kodi Add-Ons Gain Massive Popularity

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tvaddonsSlowly but steadily piracy has moved away from downloads to streaming. According to recent estimates, streaming services are already more popular than torrent sites, a trend that seems hard to stop.

One factor that plays a major role in this shift is ease of use. Aside from having movie and TV-shows instantly available, it’s also easier to stream content on a regular TV, through Kodi powered applications or set-top boxes for example. While Kodi itself is a neutral platform, there are lots of add-ons available that turn in into a pirate’s heaven.

TVAddons is of the largest repositories of these plugins. The site, which also distributes FreeTelly, a custom pre-loaded version of Kodi for the PC and Mac, is the go-to destination for those who want to upgrade their Kodi experience.

TorrentFreak spoke to TVAddons’ Eleazar, who informs us that the recent growth in popularity hasn’t gone unnoticed.

While the site doesn’t keep any in-depth statistics for privacy reasons, they do know how many active Kodi users access their add-ons because of the update requests they receive. These numbers show a sharp increase.

December last year, TVAddons received 2.8 million unique calls to their update server per day, and over 13 million for the entire month. Today, these numbers have doubled to a rough average of 5.6 million per day and 24.7 million a month.

This means that every 24 hours more than five million Kodi-boxes with their add-ons are online, checking for updates.

TVAddons update traffic
tvaddongraph

According to Eleazar, the convenience of Kodi is one of the main drivers for this growth. Compared to many torrent and streaming sites, the clean interface is a breath of fresh air.

“It makes the streaming process far simpler and more enjoyable than visiting sketchy ad-ridden sites, or using torrent-based services like Popcorn Time that end up resulting in hundreds of thousands of people receiving legal fines,” Eleazar says.

“Anyone who uses Kodi on a regular basis considers it a life changer, bringing more entertainment to their home than they ever thought possible,” he adds.

Of course, pirates are not the only ones who’ve been watching the rise of Kodi’s pirate add-ons. The entertainment industry and law enforcement are keeping a close eye on the situation as well.

Several sellers of pre-loaded Kodi boxes have been raided, with some risking serious prison time. And just last week the UK Intellectual Property Office described pirate boxes as a growing threat.

The makers of Kodi are not happy with these developments. They clearly want to distance themselves from anything piracy related, blaming the add-on makers and distributors. TVAddons, however, doesn’t believe that it’s breaking the law.

“Technically we’re not doing anything wrong, we don’t encourage users to distribute pirated content like torrent apps do, nor do we have anything to do with the content whatsoever.”

“We’re just providing code that ‘can’ be used to scrape websites, the content of those sites has nothing to do with us,” Eleazar adds.

Nevertheless, TVAddons has taken various preventive measures to ensure the continuation of its operation, such as regularly moving their servers. In addition, they have several policies in place to preserve the privacy of add-on developers and users.

TVAddons

also make it clear that they are strongly against the sale of preloaded hardware devices and paid services. They feel it “dumbs” down the community and causes users to feel that they owe them something, since they paid for it.Thus far TVAddons

hasn’t seen any public complaints from the industry that target their service. So, instead of focusing on the negative, they’re putting their efforts into improving what they have to offer – more convenient streaming tools and better add-ons.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

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2956 days ago
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Qualcomm Looks to Gobble Up NXP

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Remember when we talked about NXP merging with Freescale to move into the top ten semiconductor companies? Yeah, that was just eighteen months ago and just barely closed before the new year. Now it looks like Qualcomm wants to acquire NXP to the tune of $30 billion.

You’re most likely familiar with Qualcomm as a cellphone silicon company. The acquisition of NXP opens up a lot of additional markets with their portfolio of chips — automotive among them thanks to the Freescale merger. Now you should be asking yourself just how big Qualcomm is already. What’s perhaps most interesting is that, as mostly a wireless chip company, Qualcomm is ranked number three in worldwide semiconductor sales. Adding NXP — a behemoth now in the top ten — adds at least 30% to Qualcomm’s numbers.

And so here we are, one step close to a monolithic chip fab that produces all computing power for the human race. Yippie!


Filed under: news



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2985 days ago
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Arirang HD channel on Freesat

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Freesat, the subscription free satellite TV service, has announced the launch of Korean public service channel Arirang TV. Available in HD on channel 214, Arirang takes Freesat’s total HD channel offering to 14. Based in Seoul, South Korea, Arirang TV is an English language public broadcaster delivering news, cultural affairs and documentaries to international audiences. […]
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2994 days ago
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Moon Shapes

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Whenever I see a picture of the moon where the points go more than halfway around, I assume it's being eclipsed by one of those Independence Day ships and interpret the rest of the image in light of that.
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bobdvb
2994 days ago
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jessaustin
2994 days ago
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Randall should visit the Southern Hemisphere to view the crescent moon.
sulrich
2994 days ago
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i was kind of hoping for a seveneves reference.
rraszews
2995 days ago
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What, no "That's no moon" joke?
Columbia, MD
alt_text_bot
2995 days ago
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Whenever I see a picture of the moon where the points go more than halfway around, I assume it's being eclipsed by one of those Independence Day ships and interpret the rest of the image in light of that.

Datacenter Scale

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Asimov's Cosmic AC was created by linking all datacenters through hyperspace, which explains a lot. It didn't reverse entropy--it just discarded the universe when it reached end-of-life and ordered a new one.
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bobdvb
2995 days ago
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kazriko
2998 days ago
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Great reference in the hover text.
Colorado Plateau
Covarr
2998 days ago
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This makes me feel less bad about replacing my watch instead of replacing the battery.
East Helena, MT
kousha
2998 days ago
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"Google Scale"
Palo Alto, CA
JayM
2998 days ago
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Ha! Hover text is funny.
Atlanta, GA
skittone
2997 days ago
Can't hover on mobile. EDIT: Thanks!
austinstorm
2997 days ago
On mobile you can long-press the image.
alt_text_bot
2998 days ago
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Asimov's Cosmic AC was created by linking all datacenters through hyperspace, which explains a lot. It didn't reverse entropy--it just discarded the universe when it reached end-of-life and ordered a new one.
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