stomach infrastructure: APC candidate shares rice to party officials in Ogun

   

All Progressives Congress (APC) senatorial candidate for Ogun East, Prince Dapo Abiodun has distributed several bags of rice to the party executives in all electoral units, wards and local councils in all the nine local government areas in the district.

Addressing the party executives at a meeting at Ijebu North East local council Secretariat, Atan, Abiodun said he visited the area in appreciation of the support given to him by the people during the party primaries.

Abiodun assured the people of the district that on market days in each of the wards in the nine local governments, bags of rice would henceforth be distributed to market women and men in the district.

APC announces Prof. Yemi Osibajo as Gen. Buhari's running mate

APC  has finally given us the ruining mate of GEN MUH BUHARI. they will both be representing APC in the coming election which will be coming of February 14th.will this combination work for the

m lets just cross our finger and see

BPG: A new, superior image format that really ought to kill off JPEG

For all of the massive technological advances that we’ve seen over the last few years, there are still a number of dinosaurs from a bygone era that, rather unfortunately, just won’t die. JPEG is one of the most prominent examples: It was created more than 20 years ago, and yet its antiquated, bloated, blocky algorithm still dominates the web. You would think, with the modern web being so image-oriented, that we would replace JPEG with something better — but no, it’s 2014 and JPEGs (and multi-megabyte GIFs!) still reign supreme.

It’s not like people haven’t tried to replace JPEG — but, much like MP3 or ZIP, it’s very hard to unseat an incumbent file format (or, more accurately, a compression technology). The fact is, despite any misgivings we might have about JPEGs or GIFs, almost every computer system in the world can display them — and generally, in the grand scheme of communication, it’s much more important to make sure that your message was seen at all, rather than making sure the message is as small and as optimized as possible. Yes, ExtremeTech could start using a JPEG alternative, and revel in our smaller and faster page loads — but our excitement would be rather short-lived when we discover that, for 99.9% of our readers, the site looks like ass.

JPEG (left) vs. WebP (right) image quality. As you can see, WebP is slightly better — but nothing compared to BPG (below)

One of the most famous attempts to replace JPEG was attempted by Google, with its WebP format — but four years on, and it’s still nothing more than a niche file format that hasn’t gained much widespread support outside of Google’s products and services. (The recent trend towards replacing animated GIFs with WebP is pleasing to see, however.) More recently, Mozilla started experimenting with mozjpeg, which reduces file sizes slightly (~10%) while still retaining JPEG compatibility (a big plus). And now, from the creator of FFMPEG and QEMU, Fabrice Bellard, we have BPG!

Short for Better Portable Graphics, BPG offers around the same image quality as JPEG, but at half the file size. To perform such witchcraft, BPG simply uses a newer codec — x265, the open-source implementation of HEVC/H.265. In essence, a BPG image is the same thing as taking a single frame out of an x265/H.265 video stream. We’ve talked about H.265 at length in the past, but basically it’s just a much better algorithm than JPEG — or MPEG-2 or H.264. Furthermore, BPG also has H.265’s ability to render 14 bits per color channel (JPEG is just 8), plus BPG also brings an alpha channel (transparency). Lossless compression is available (though I haven’t seen how it compares to PNG).

Image quality comparison: Mozjpeg left, BPG right. (Looking at it on ExtremeTech isn’t the best idea – use the link below to compare image quality properly).

To see how BPG compares to JPEG and WebP, head on over to the image comparison site. Move your mouse left and right and marvel at how bad JPEG is. The differences will be less pronounced if you go up to “medium” or “large” file sizes, but that’s because the window is very small — plus, with the shift towards mobile computing, it’s highly compressed images that are most important right now. BPG isn’t just for mobile users, though: 14-bit color, which allows for a much higher dynamic range than 8-bit JPEG or WebP, is perfectly suited to newer cameras and displays.

But, of course, at the end of the day, BPG is still just another file format/codec that has a grand total of no native support anywhere. For now, the only way of rendering a BPG file is with a BPG decoder written in JavaScript — about 71 kilobytes of JS, to be exact. Obviously, if you’re trying to cut down the footprint of a mobile website, downloading and executing yet more JavaScript kind of defeats the point. (On desktop PCs, though, the performance hit from using the JavaScript decoder will be minimal.) There is an open-source BPG library that browser makers and other software developers can build into their apps, but obviously mass integration will take months or years.

There is one other interesting aspect of BPG, too: Because it’s based on HEVC/H.265, any device with hardware decode support for H.265 can also decode BPGs in hardware. This is a big deal, because more advanced compression methods tend to require more computation (and thus power) to decode — which is a no-no on mobile devices. Hardware-decoded BPG would be better than JPEG in every which way — now we just have to pray for adoption by software developers.

YotaPhone 2 combines an AMOLED and an e-ink display, but at a hefty price

 

Who’s ready for another crazy Russian smartphone? The YotaPhone 2 may seem like a relatively standard smartphone running Android 4.4, but it harbors one major twist: it has a second display on the back, and it’s no ordinary screen. This oddball device effectively crams a five-inch AMOLED display and a 4.7-inch e-ink display into a single pocket-sized device. It sounds incredible at first, but the hefty asking price makes this phone a nonstarter.

So, why are there two displays? AMOLED and e-ink displays serve very different purposes. AMOLEDs offer bright and vibrant images, but the power cost is non-trivial. On the other hand, e-ink screens are comparatively limited, but use much less power when displaying static images. Shipping with both types of displays offers the user a ton of flexibility, and definitely sets the YotaPhone 2 apart from the crowd. Unfortunately, there are a few other aspects of this whacky smartphone that may keep you on the fence.

The YotaPhone 2 sports a 2.2GHz quad-coreSnapdragon 800 SoC, 2GB of RAM, and 32GB of storage. Those are competitive internals, but when you combine those with two whopping screens, it’s no surprise that the price tag is outrageous. In the UK, you’ll need to drop £550 to snag an unlocked YotaPhone 2. As of writing, that converts to roughly $863 USD — yikes. Even worse, it’s only currently available in 20 countries, and the US isn’t one of them. Supposedly, this phone will make its way to Asia, North America, and South America sometime in 2015, but will anyone even care by then?

Back in February, our very own Sebastian Anthony got his hands on a prototype YotaPhone 2. He wasn’t sold on the idea, and none of the reviews of the final productcontradict his initial skepticism. This model is much better than the original YotaPhone, but it remains little more than a novelty. You’re still better off sticking with a Nexus 6 or iPhone 6.

Truth be told, I’d be more interested in a low-cost, low-power e-ink smartphone. It obviously wouldn’t be as versatile as a standard smartphone, but the battery savings alone might be worth the compromise. It sure would be nice to go two weeks between charging my phone. As it stands, I’m currently eyeing a battery case to last more than 10 hours at a shot. If nothing else, let’s hope that this niche Russian smartphone inspires other companies to step away from the iPhone mold.

Intel announces 32-layer 3D NAND chips, plans for larger-than-10TB SSDs

      

It’s been clear for several years that three-dimensional NAND die stacking, in which chip layers are oriented vertically as opposed to horizontal planar structures was the way forward for next-generation chip designs. Until now, Samsung has been the only company to take that plunge, but that’s going to change in 2015 with the launch of Intel’s own solution in 2015.
According to Intel, its 256-gigabit MLC NAND chips will consist of 32 layers, and will also be available in a 384-gigabit TLC configuration. Intel is claiming that its own 256Gb die sets efficiency records, but as Anandtech reports, this depends on how you count — Samsung has consciously chosen to use a 32-layer 86Gbit die to minimize its die foot print, as opposed to maximizing capacity. This gives Samsung’s V-NAND the smallest die size of any product currently on the market, with size being a very important factor in many markets.

Moving back up the nanometer ladder

Intel, like Samsung, is expected to announce that it uses a much larger process node for its 3D NAND. In Samsung’s case, it uses a 40nm process for 3D NAND, despite the fact that its working on 14nm planar technology for both logic and DRAM devices. Intel and Micron have already launched 16nm 2D NAND, but the fundamental characteristics of flash mean that device reliability decreases as process nodes shrink.

A new version of Google Glass is coming in 2015, with an Intel x86 chip inside

The next version of Google Glass, which is due out sometime in 2015, will be powered by an Intel x86 chip — rather than the Texas Instruments ARM chip that helms the current Glass Explorer Edition hardware. This will mark the first major hardware revision for Glass, which was first shown off at Google I/O 2012 and went on sale in limited quantities in early 2013. Presumably this is either to boost the performance and battery life of Glass considerably — or Intel cut a very generous deal that encouraged Google to move away from ARM for its wearable computing efforts.
Currently, the Explorer Edition of Google Glass (which is available to public as of May 2014) costs around $1,500 — which is a pretty steep price to pay for a device with limited battery life and an ancient TI OMAP 4430 SoC. When the consumer version of Glass finally arrives, priced at around “the average smartphone,” it will ideally need all-day battery life — a problem, when you’re dealing with such a tiny form factor (it’s not ideal to carry a large battery over your ear). It would also be nice if future versions of Glass had built-in cellular connectivity (at the moment they need to be paired over Bluetooth with a nearby smartphone). Again, though, this would be a big drain on battery life.
According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter, Intel will supply the SoC in the next version of Google Glass. It isn’t clear if this will be the consumer version of Glass, or merely an updated version for developers/early adopters. Sadly, there’s no word on what Intel chip Google has chosen — but given how the current OMAP 4430 SoC is a power-hungry 45nm part, I would’ve thought that many of Intel’s newer 22nm and 14nm parts would potentially fit the bill.