Update Feb. 27, 2015: Well, here we are a little over a year later and "House of Cards" Season 3 is up on Netflix. We can't promise this is exactly how things went down this time around (there was that slight hiccup this year when the season accidentally got released early) but it's safe to say someone called in sick to work today to be the next super-binger.

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Original story: Feb. 14, 2014

The new world of Internet TV is really geeky.

I spent some time in the Netflix war room last night, as the company debuted the second season of its smash hit series, "House of Cards." The war room is a conference room with big table in the middle, and as we approached midnight, a bunch of engineers were crouched over their laptops.

Jeremy Edberg, Netflix’s reliability architect, was one of them.

"So when the clock hits 12, the first thing I’m going to be doing is looking at our dashboards to see if anybody is playing the show," Edberg said.

If nobody is playing "House of Cards," that means there’s a problem. Unlike traditional TV, people now use hundreds of different devices to go online. And last night, the engineers were there to make sure "House of Cards" would play on every one of them.

"We’ve probably got sitting around the room an X-Box, a Play Station, Nintendo, Apple devices, Android devices and a couple of different TVs from our partner manufacturers," Edberg said.

The engineers can tell, in real time, how many people are streaming the show on these devices, where they are and who’s binging. Edberg said the last time "House of Cards" launched, the engineers figured out the entire season was about 13 hours.

"We looked to [see]  if anybody was finishing in that amount of time," Edberg said. "And there was one person who finished with just three minutes longer than there is content. So basically, three total minutes of break in roughly 13 hours."

That’s right, of its 40 million subscribers around the world, Netflix was able the find the one super binger. Netflix spokesman Joris Evers said Netflix knows everything about your viewing habits.

"'House of Cards' was obviously a big bet for Netflix," Joris said. "But it was a calculated bet because we knew Netflix members like political dramas, that they like serialized dramas. That they are fans of Kevin Spacey, that they like David Fincher."

Evers said Netflix uses this data when it decides on which original program to buy.

"We monitor what you watch, how often you watch things," Evers said. "Does a movie have a happy ending, what’s the level of romance, what's the level of violence, is it a cerebral kind of movie or is it light and funny?"

Netflix’s move into original programming is all about taking viewers from other media companies, especially HBO, said Brad Adgate, an analyst at Horizon Media.

He says Netflix has more subscribers than HBO, but when it comes to making money, Netflix is David to HBO’s Goliath. But Adgate says, Netflix does have its slingshot.

"I think right now Netflix does have a competitive advantage over HBO because of the analytics," Adgate said.

Networks like HBO still rely, on large part, on Nielsen data. But the information Netflix gets is much more textured, granular — and valuable.

"And I think that’s where television and streaming video is headed — but I think right now streaming video is in the lead," Adgate said. That said, he added, it’s just a matter of time before HBO and other premium channels catch up.

Tô aqui imaginando… na copa.

 

O post Mentirinhas #581 apareceu primeiro em Mentirinhas.

Jamie Anderson, the 23-year-old American snowboarder, tells US Weekly that she and her fellow female athletes spend their down time in Sochi on one app in particular:

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E não é que a maior (e mais estranha) revelação da música pop dos últimos tempos volta a aparecer por aqui? Se você não sabe de quem tô falando, trata-se da cantora Lorde, ganhadora de dois Grammy neste ano e protagonista de uma das mais bizarras performances que a premiação já viu.

Mas ela não tá lançando música nova, nem fez show muito bizarro, não é isso!! Ela volta a aparecer aqui com uma versão completamente brasileira do sucesso “Royals“. Pois é… a internet mais uma vez se supera e algum desocupado conseguiu fazer isso… uma versão FORRÓ da música da Lorde! 

Não sou fã de forró, nem da Lorde, mas não é que o remix forrozão ficou legal?? Não sei o que ela ia achar disso, mas com certeza responderia com alguma careta (já que é isso que ela faz o tempo todo).

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theladyisagent:

GPOY

Happy Valentine’s Day!

More love and zombies.

submitted by FinallyAFreeMind to television [link] [96 comments]

O presidente dos Estados Unidos Barack Obama pediu que as pessoas não façam spoilers da nova temporada de "House of Cards", que estreia hoje no serviço de vídeos por demanda Netflix. O primeiro episódio da segunda temporada do drama político, estrelado por Kevin Space e Robin Wright, foi a primeira série on-line de grande sucesso e era esperada por fãs até no alto escalão.

	Nathaniel E. Bell/Associated Press
	Os atores Kevin Spacey, como Francis Underwood (à esq.), e Molly Parker, que vive Jackie Sharp

Leia mais (02/14/2014 - 10h44)

20thcenturypix:

Francis Speight, Late Afternoon, 1931

1931

by necessaryaegis

stevelieber:

Awesome to contemplate.

Stacy Farina had the best graph at BAHFest 2013!



Don't forget to watch the question session afterward!

In Japan, there's a dish called "omurice" (オムライス). It's a type of omelette that is filled with rice. Kids, in particular, love it. There's a way to make this tasty meal cuter: add animal characters.

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Capitalism is weird

Whee!

Star Sand

If you made a beach using grains the proportionate size of the stars in the Milky Way, what would that beach look like?

Jeff Wartes

Sand is interesting.^{[Citation needed]}

"Are there more grains of sand than stars in the sky?" is a popular question which has been tackled by many people. The upshot is that there are probably more stars in the visible universe than grains of sand on all of Earth's beaches.

When people do those calculations, they often dig up some good data on the number of stars, then do some hand-waving about sand grain size to come up with a number for the sand grains on Earth.[1]From a practical point of view, geology and soil science are more complicated than astrophysics. We're not going to tackle that issue today, but to answer Jeff's question, we do need to figure out what the deal with sand is.[2]"i like sand because i don't really know what it is and there's so many of it"

—@darth__mouth Specifically, we need to have some idea of what grain sizes correspond to clay, silt, fine sand, coarse sand, and gravel, so we can understand how our galaxy would look and feel if it were a beach.[3]Instead of just containing a bunch of them.

Fortunately, there's a wonderful chart by the US Geologic Survey that answers all these questions and more. For some reason, I find this chart very satisfying—it's like the erosion geology edition of the electromagnetic spectrum chart.

According to surveys of sand,[4]There are apparently lots of them. the grains found on beaches tend to run from 0.2mm to 0.5mm (with the finest layers on top). This corresponds to medium-to-coarse sand in the chart. The individual grains are about this big:

If we assume the Sun corresponds to a typical sand grain, then multiply by the number of stars in the galaxy, we come up with a large sandbox worth of sand.[5]I mean, you come up with a bunch of numbers, but imagination turns them into a sandbox.

However, this is wrong. The reason: Stars aren't all the same size.

There are a number of widely-circulated YouTube videos comparing star sizes. They do a good job of getting across just how staggeringly large some stars are. Although it's easy to get lost in the videos and lose track of scale, it's clear that some of the grains in our sandbox universe would be more like boulders.

Here's how the main-sequence[6]The stars in the main part of their fuel-burning lifecycle. star-sand grains look:

They mostly fall into the "sand" category, though the larger Daft Punk stars cross the line into "granules" or "small pebbles".

However, that's just the main sequence stars. Dying stars get much, much bigger.

When a star runs out of fuel, it expands into a red giant. Even ordinary stars can produce huge red giants, but when a star that's already massive enters this phase, it can become a true monster. These red supergiants are the largest stars in the universe.

These beachball-sized sand stars would be rare, but the grape-sized and baseball-sized red giants are relatively common. While they're not nearly as abundant as Sun-like stars or red dwarfs, their huge volume means that they'd constitute the bulk of our sand. We would have a large sandbox worth of grains ... along with a field of gravel that went on for miles.

The little sand patch would contain 99% of the pile's individual grains, but less than 1% of its total volume. Our Sun isn't a grain of sand on a soft galactic beach; instead, the Milky Way is a field of boulders with some sand in between.

But, as with the real Earth seashore, it's the rare little stretches of sand between the rocks where all the fun seems to happen.

Do The Awkward Yeti

dorkly:

150cc of AWESOME.

(via Twitter / sc_mo: Calling all dragon-slayers …)

Johnny Depp will show his villainous side in his next film project. The movie star has signed on to play James 'Whitey' Bulger in the biopic “Black Mass,” according to Deadline. The movie will tell the true story of Bulger, an infamous Boston kingpin who worked as an FBI informant. When the partnership soured, Bulger became one of the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted fugitives, and was arrested in 2011 after 16 years on the run.