Counterfitbit

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Counterfitbit
Number 2665
Broadcast Date JANUARY 13, 2016
Episode Length 39:00
Hosts Tom Merritt
Guests Scott Johnson

The PC market declined by 8-10% in 2015. Can gaming revive it? Can anything? Scott Johnson and Tom Merritt discuss. Also a customs seizure shows the wearables market has made it.

Guest

Headlines

Google unveiled a new feature for Google Maps for Android called Driving Mode today. Driving Mode will guess where you’re driving to and plot out a course. Google said it can also give ETAs, nearby gas stations, and quickest routes to recent destinations to your home screen. You can find Driving Mode in the Google Maps sidebar menu or as a shortcut from the home screen. Driving Mode is coming by the end of the week to users in the US, United Arab Emirates, UK, Ireland, Malaysia, NZ and Singapore. Android Police noticed the feature yesterday and VentureBeat confirmed the launch with Google today.
Skype has added free group video calling to its mobile apps. Skype for the desktop can already do group video calls. The feature is rolling out to Android, iPhone, iPad and Windows 10 Mobile users over the coming weeks. Impatient users can pre-register on the site to get a preview.
The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg determined that Romanian Bogdan Barbulescu’s employer was within its rights to access his Yahoo Messenger account in 2007. Barbulescu’s employer had banned personal messages during work time. It accessed his work account on a work device and fired him. The judges said the employer could access the accounts on the assumption that the information related to professional activities.
According to Google’s "vehicle disengagement reports" released by the California Department of Motor Vehicles, Google’s self-driving cars required human intervention to avoid a crash 13 times between Sept 2014 to Nov 2015. Google’s test fleet drove 424,331 miles, had 272 cases where software required a driver to take over, and 69 events where the driver seized control without prompting. Computer simulations came up with estimate of 13 avoided accidents. 2 of those would have involved hitting a traffic cone. Tesla, Nissan, Mercedes-Benz, Delphi, Volkswagen, and Bosch provided similar reports with less detail and hundreds of thousands fewer miles.
The BBC Research and Development has a post detailing the results of the test of the High Efficiency Video coding standard often called H.265 or HEVC codec. It’s often used to deliver Ultra-High Def or 4K video. HEVC achieved a 59% bit rate saving over H.264/AVC in subjective tests. Bit rate savings for higher picture sizes was better than for smaller ones. This verified previous objective metrics liek the peak signal to noise ratio which had showed up to 50% bit rate savings.
Submitted by Kylde
Polygon reports that Amazon is offering Prime members a 20% discount on pre-orders of video games and continuing for the first two weeks of sales. Customers will see the discount only at checkout. Amazon is applying the discount to existing pre-orders as well.
Submitted by tglass1976
YouTube introduced localized home pages for Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal on Tuesday that deliver curated versions of YouTube. These are in YouTube’s words, “optimised for Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.” Pakistan for instance banned YouTube in September 2012 over the streaming of a movie it deemed blasphemous. Each home page will highlight local creators as well.
The Verge reports that Penn Jillette said on his podcast Penn’s Sunday School that he is working with Randy Pitchford of Gearbox software to create a virtual reality version of the game Desert Bus. It will be a period piece set in 1992 and will be for charities to use to raise money. Desert Bus for Hope raised $677,188 last year for Child’s Play which donates toys and games to children’s hospitals.
Numbers out for PC shipments in Q4 show a decline of 10.6% according to IDC and 8.3% according to Gartner. Apple was the only company to show growth with 2% in both reports. Asus had a 0.8% growth show in IDC’s numbers but 3.2% drop in Gartner’s. Analysts cite the slowing Chinese market, a strong dollar, the Windows 10 free upgrade, and mobile devices as reasons for the downturn.

Discussion

Pick of the Day

I spent a few long nights buried in Terminal trying to get everything to work on my media center, and I found the perfect answer: FileBot. FileBot is a small program that uses various databases to rename, organize, and sort movies, TV shows, and music. Best yet, it has a Command Line Interface, so with a fairly simple bit of code, you can make programs automatically sort your media right after it finishes downloading. I have hundreds of ripped movies on my hard drive in years upon years of naming formats, and after a few minutes, they ask look the same!

I am a sucker for automation, and this handles more than most of it. Keep to the good work, etc, etc, etc.
Submitted by Andrew Littler

Messages

So I thought I would pass along this article (can't do reddit from work), about US Customs and Border Protection seizing counterfeits of what they describe as "Smart Wristbands" - now, if you look at the photo, it's pretty obvious who's "Smart Wristband" is being knocked off.

I just wanted to point out again, that counterfeits are real even though we don't talk about it much, they do happen quite often and that it's important to make sure that when you put your money down on something you're getting what you paid for.


Much Love <>
Sent by BigJim


After listening to all the CES news I have decided "Cars are just computers with extensive case mods".

Thanks for all the hard work to everyone that make DTNS possible.
Sent by Tony in Hamilton, AL

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Preceded by:
"La Tech du Jour"
Counterfitbit
Followed by:
"Snoop Dogg's Blunt with Microsoft"