Daily Archives: June 1, 2017

The Aussie rapper has hit out at her record company over the failure of her new music in her latest Snapchat rant. Courtesy: Iggy Azalea

Iggy Azalea's probably not very popular at her record company right now.

JUST three short years ago, Australian-born rapper Iggy Azalea was one of the hottest names in music.

She had one of the biggest hits of 2014 with the inescapable Fancy, was an in-demand guest star for the likes of Ariana Grande and Britney Spears, and had a platinum-selling debut album under her belt.

Flash forward to 2017, and Azaleas musical fortunes have waned. The three singles shes released so far this year have all failed to set the charts alight her most recent, Switch, debuting at 180 here in Australia. Her oft-delayed second album Digital Distortion was finally due for release at the end of this month, but Azalea now admits even she doesnt know when itll see the light of day.

Azalea in the video for her single Mo Bounce. It did not chart.Source:News Corp Australia

Taking to her Snapchat account, Azalea let rip with a four-minute rant directed squarely at her record company.

Just wanted to tell you a little story about my album pre-order, because I have no idea when its coming out, she told her followers, using a filter to mask her face and voice.

At first, everyone at my label was like June 2nd, June 2nd! So I told everybody that. But then theyre like, No, we changed our mind, she said.

I was like, OK, whats my album date going to be? June 30th, June 30th. So I did a bunch of interviews on TV, and it seemed like all the reporters knew the date June 30th. I was thinking, yay! They finally got their s**t together! Theyre telling everyone a real date that we can look forward to!

But then I went on Jimmy Fallon and I noticed him saying Digital Distortion, later this month. What does that mean? That cant be good. Theyve backed away from saying a real date.

I-G-G-Y. Picture: GettySource:Getty Images

Azaela says she emailed her record company asking why they were no longer providing a concrete release date for the album.

The reponse she got was, in her words, bulls**t: They said they hadnt done the paperwork so a June 30 release is not going to happen.

She sent another, more aggressive, email.

I guess everybody at that record label just decided to ignore what I had to say, so who knows when my albums coming out. It has been Memorial Day weekend, so theyll probably be partying pretty hard for middle-aged white guys...

I know you guys are sick of it; trust me, Im super sick of it. Im really over it at this point.

Azalea even threatened to provide the address of her record company to fans so they could picket the building together.

Iggy Azalea's probably not very popular at her record company right now.Source:YouTube

Ive really been trying to be sweet and super-professional the last couple of months, but ... Im at my wits end, she said.

At around the same time Azalea was uploading these videos, half-a-dozen tracks from Digital Distortion leaked online leading some fans to suggest it was Azelea herself leaking the songs.

In a new Snapchat video with her album online for all to hear, and having deleted her previous rants a giggling Azalea apologised and announced that shed been on pretty strong meds after having oral surgery.

Digital Distortion is not presently available to pre-order on Australian iTunes.

Follow this link:

Iggy Azalea slams record label in epic Snapchat rant - NEWS.com.au

01 June 2017, 11:06

In the words of Melania Trump, what is she thinking?

Justin Bieberappeared to dump a large chunk of his camera roll onto Instagram yesterday, uploading a whopping 26 snaps in just one hour. Froma selfie with his finger up a friends nose (gross, right?) to a shot of his head super imposed onto Halseys body,the YouTube star turned pop icon has been branching out from his usual formula of staged candids, tour snapsand ab shots.

But onein particular seems especially peculiar. The upload in question shows a YouTube search bar with the words MDMA used for thats ecstasy, kids typed out, and an absolutely bizarre videoplaying underneath.

The video, entitled When People Get High As F*ck, starts off with a Jerry Springer clip, which then transitions to an interview with a shirtless hippy. The interviewer asks him, What do you think the meaning of life is? To which our shirtless friend replies, To live in the mystery and to find purpose. MIND BLOWN.

He actually makes some pretty delightful videos, including this wonderfully pure dance number. Matthew, we like the cut of your jib.

We still have no idea why Justin shared the surreal clip. Is he trying to warn his young fans about the dangers of narcotics? Was he high af? Is this all a mysterious performance art? All we know is:

Save

See original here:

Justin Bieber's Been Searching For 'MDMA' On YouTube And There's Receipts To Prove It - We The Unicorns

Getty Images | Paul Taylor

The Federal Communications Commission's plan to gut net neutrality rules and deregulate the Internet service market may hinge on the definition of the word "broadband."

In February 2015, the FCC's then-Democratic leadership led by Chairman Tom Wheeler classified broadband as "telecommunications," superseding the previous treatment of broadband as a less heavily regulated "information service." This was crucial in the rulemaking process because telecommunications providers are regulated as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act, the authority used by the FCC to impose bans on blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization.

Thus, when the FCC's new Republican majority voted on May 18 to start the process of eliminating the current net neutrality rules, the commissions Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) also proposed redefining broadband as an information service once again.

To make sure the net neutrality rollback survives court challenges, newly appointed FCC Chairman Ajit Pai must justify his decision to redefine broadband less than three years after the previous change. He argues that broadband isn't telecommunications because it isn't just a simple pipe to the Internet. Broadband is an information service because ISPs give customers the ability to visit social media websites, post blogs, read newspaper websites, and use search engines to find information, the FCC's new proposal states. Even if the ISPs don't host any of those websites themselves, broadband is still an information service under Pai's definition because Internet access allows consumers to reach those websites.

Telecommunications, as defined by Congress in the Communications Act, transmits information of the user's choosing to and from endpoints specified by the user without making any changes to the user's information.

Pai's claim that broadband isn't telecommunications might not make sense to consumers, who generally use their Internet connections to access websites and online services offered by companies other than their ISPs, as a TechCrunch article recently argued. But courts have granted the FCC wide latitude on how it defines broadband over the years, essentially ruling that the FCC can classify Internet service however it wants.

Yes, there are plenty of instancesin which courts have overturned FCC decisions, including a 2014 case that vacated an earlier attempt to impose neutrality rules. But when it comes to defining broadband as either an information service or telecommunications, judges have allowed FCC decisions to stand as long as the commissiondoes a reasonably good job of justifying itself. That 2014 decision didn't dispute the FCC's authority to impose net neutrality rules or reclassify ISPsrather, judges said the FCC could impose strict versions of net neutrality rules as long as it changed itsclassification of broadband.

Wheeler relied on the court system's deference to FCC decisions on this matter when he successfully fought off a lawsuit filed by ISPs, and Pai is hoping that judges will grant the same courtesy after the FCC changes its mind.

The Communications Act specifically defines telecommunications as the transmission, between or among points specified by the user, of information of the users choosing, without change in the form or content of the information as sent and received. A telecommunications service is the offering of telecommunications for a fee directly to the public.

The 2015 FCC order that turnedISPs into common carriers and imposed net neutrality rules said that the statutory definition of telecommunications applies to broadband, as evidenced by how ISPs market their services to consumers, consumers' expectations from broadband providers, and the way the networks operate.

Getty Images | Ethan Miller

ISPs might also offer information services such as e-mail and online storage, just like any other company that offers services over the Internet. But the FCC in 2015 said that ISPs' information services are separate offerings from broadband. As a result, the Internet plan you buy from an ISP is a regulated common carrier service even though those same providers offer some services that aren't strictly telecommunications.

Pai's argument that broadband isnt telecommunications doesn't hinge on ISPs offering their own e-mail and online storage services. Instead, he says the core broadband offering itself isn't telecommunications.

Landline and mobile voice service are both considered telecommunications by the FCC. But "Internet service providers do not appear to offer 'telecommunications,'" because broadband Internet users do not typically specify the points between and among which information is sent online, Pais NPRM argues. It continues:

Instead, routing decisions are based on the architecture of the network, not on consumers instructions, and consumers are often unaware of where online content is stored. Domain names must be translated into IP addresses (and there is no one-to-one correspondence between the two). Even IP addresses may not specify where information is transmitted to or from because caching servers store and serve popular information to reduce network loads. In short, broadband Internet users are paying for the access to information with no knowledge of the physical location of the server where that information resides. We believe that consumers want and pay for these functionalities that go beyond mere transmissionand that they have come to expect them as part and parcel of broadband Internet access service.

Under this interpretation, the fact that consumers specify which websites they want to visit isnt the same thing as specifying the "points"they want to reach. Broadband users would have to specify the IP addresses and caching servers they want to connect to in order for broadband providers to become the dumb pipe described in the definition of telecommunications.

An information service, by contrast, is defined in the Communications Act as the offering of a capability for generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information via telecommunications." Theinformation service definition "includes electronic publishing, but does not include any use of any such capability for the management, control, or operation of a telecommunications system or the management of a telecommunications service.

The capability part of the definition is key, according to the FCCs new argument, because broadband offers the capability to provide the functions described in the definition of information service. Pais NPRM thus argues that todays broadband services meet the statutes definition of an information service:

We believe that Internet service providers offer the capability for generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information via telecommunications. Whether posting on social media or drafting a blog, a broadband Internet user is able to generate and make available information online. Whether reading a newspapers website or browsing the results from a search engine, a broadband Internet user is able to acquire and retrieve information online. Whether its an address book or a grocery list, a broadband Internet user is able to store and utilize information online. Whether uploading filtered photographs or translating text into a foreign language, a broadband Internet user is able to transform and process information online. In short, broadband Internet access service appears to offer its users the capability to perform each and every one of the functions listed in the definitionand accordingly appears to be an information service by definition.

Go here to see the original:

To kill net neutrality rules, FCC says broadband isn't telecommunications - Ars Technica

So HP has now got as far as announcing its first prototype of `The Machine, first talked about towards the back end of last year. The beast is real and, if the numbers surrounding it are to be believed (and who am I to argue) it represents a significant step forward in resources available and performance.

For example, the prototype features 160 TBytes of memory spread across 40 separate nodes connected using photonics links. And as its architecture is designed squarely around in-memory processing models, that means it is all available, all of the time. According to the company, this allows the equivalent of allowing simultaneous work on some 160 million books, or five times the number of books in the US Library of Congress.

But this is only a prototype and these numbers are, in the great scheme of what HPE envisages for The Machine, really only chicken feed. If its dreams come true, we are now staring at an architecture that can easily scale to an Exabyte-scale, single-memory system as it stands. Out into the future the company is already talking mind-boggling numbers: how about 4,096 Yottabytes? (where a Yottabyte equals1024 bytes). That, the company reckons, is the equivalent of 250,000 times the entire digital universe that exists todayin a box.

This is a new class of memory technology based on large, persistent memory pools that can stretch right out to the edge.

That is the basic outline of it given by Andrew Wheeler, the Deputy Director of the HPE Labs team that has developed the architecture and the prototype. The interesting factor here is that HPE has set out to develop an inclusive architecture, rather than an exclusive buy-all-or-nothing approach. So when it comes to working out at the edge, the devices used can be whatever is extant and/or appropriate for the specific task in hand at that point.

The system is based on an enhanced version of Linux, so the ability to run Linux may even be the only requirement made on such devices. So, while the prototype has been built on devices developed by Cavium and based on ARM architectures, this does not mean that everything out at the end needs to be based on that same device.

The premise of our Intelligenrt Edge design is that users will want to do analytics processing as close to where the data is generated. Take an application like video processing; users wont want to be pushing all that data to some central location for processing. That is just not sustainable or cost effective. The question then is just `what is the processor relevant to getting the job done.

So the idea is to do as much processing as close to the point of generation as possible. Ask the local device if someone carrying a red backpack was spotted in a time frame, rather than send all the data to a central location and then process it. It is only the results that are actually important and need uploading. This does create another problem that Wheelers team have been doing a lot of work on. Communicating between the core and the edge does require agents capable of ensuring that instructions are interpreted correctly, that relevant standards are adhered to and returned data is in a form that can be used immediately.

The primary goal however, is to have an analytics space that is sufficiently large to hold both current and historical data at a scale that is currently not possible to achieve and to get real-time results out of it. And because it is in-memory processing, all the latency introduced by taking data from disk to memory, memory to processor, processor to cache, back to processor (and repeat several times) and finally out to memory and then to disk.

The next steps going toward a real product include building up the growing set of hardware and software technologies that can now be engineered as `products and High Performance Computing road maps.

The second step, having moved from simulations to emulators running on SuperDomes, and on to where we are now with this prototype, we now need to select the partners and customers that we want to land actual workloads on to further increase out understanding. This will help us determine what will be the first real instantiation of what we would call `The Machine. I can tell you right now we have a pretty clear line of sight on how it can address problems in High Performance Computing and analytics work.

An obvious target here is SAP and its growing range of HANA-based applications. Wheeler agreed that HP has a long history with running SAP applications, and estimated it currently runs some 70% of all HANA-based applications. He would confirm nothing, of course, but it seems unlikely that SAP, and some of its customers, will fail to make that list of test subjects.

There are still so many questions to be answered about `The Machine, some of which may yet just kill it. For example, when asked about addressing Yottabytes of memory that is simultaneously processing in real time his response is a classic of the scientific milieu.

We have found some operating system issues with this getting to the 160TByte level. But we do have a conceptual handle on what is required to get to the Yottabyte level.

The big question of course, is `when, and while Wheeler was understandably reticent to give any indication, the signs are that the short version of the answer is `not any time soon. This, in turn, raises of areas of speculation, some of quite a serious nature.

For example, while SAP has garnered some reasonable traction with its HANA in-memory processing technology, it is interesting that not too many others have really piled in behind them. This begs the question as to whether the technology is really only good for certain types of brute analytic applications.

That would explain why others, even those playing in the analytics space, are none-too-fussed about following the SAP lead.

Or is it a case that there are times when technologies and use cases coincide. It is not uncommon for early iterations of technologies to appear and then fade away, because the tech itself is not quite ready, or the functional need has not yet developed amongst users. Later, however, the time, the technology advances and the user need can be right. Example? The mobile phone: it was a housebrick you could make and receive telephone calls on. But when it gained a camera and an internet connection, and could slip into a pocket, it became an extension of the `self.

Where is `The Machine on this scale? As a prototype it is difficult to say, and it is even more difficult to suggest when might be a good time for HPE to be ready with a product. Some of the answer will not even be in HPEs hands for it will depend upon how well the legacy technologies hold out. Current commodity processors are really only pumped up versions of the Intel 4004 processor chip introduced in 1971, and the work within a basic systems architecture, first described by John Von Neumann back in 1945.

Fundamentally, current `stuff just about all of it is definably old. But it works, and generally works well. Is it time to replace it? Quite possibly, and it is possible to see much of current tech development work as just trusses, Band Aids and other surgical appliances designed to keep those aged architectures hanging together.

But it is also possible to see just what HPE has riding on the future success if this in-memory architecture. The company has divested itself of its big systems/SI capabilities, as well as much of its middleware/software activities. It seems determined to be a leading technology developer and provider, with a strong emphasis on hardware, to boot. Yet that, inevitably, puts it up against leaner, faster, lower cost competition that might not have the depth of experience and expertise, but will have more daring and greatly reduced risk aversion to HPE.

It is reasonable to suppose, therefore, that `The Machine will not appear as a product before three years have past, more likely five. A lot of tech water will have passed under the bridge in that time, and it is quite possible that one of the small, smart companies will come up with an analytical tech that sits between what is now, and what can be when HPE brings forth. If that is good enough, it might be the death of `The Machine and even HPE.

If not, maybe CIOs need to start thinking, fantasising, about what they might want to achieve if they could analyse anything against any number of other anythings, in real time. Give it five years and it might be available.

For reasons I cannot defend by any other justification than there lies the direction in which my knee doth jerk, I think `The Machine prototype marks the birth of the next big technology blockbuster. But I also think HPE now has a tiger by the tail, and with the departure of so many other businesses which were, while maybe not desperately profitable, potentially resilient alternatives for the company, that tiger may well bite. Now the company seems increasingly exposed as a mainly hardware tech business playing high roller poker with an unknown high-risk tech development as its stake.

Image credit - Images free for commercial use

See more here:

HPE and `The Machine' potentially the next big IT blockbuster, but one helluva gamble - Diginomica