Originally shared by ****

Forests cover 30% of the planet land, or almost four billion ha. Seven million ha are in Romania, which represents 29% of the national territory; 60% of our forests are located in the Carpathian Mountains. According to World Wide Fund for Nature, out of the 320,000 ha of virgin forests still existing in Europe, 250,000 ha are located in Romania.

As a child, I learnt from my grandparents who lived in a small village in the Carpathian Mountains that “the forest is Romanian’s brother”. This metaphor comes from the remote Middle Age and encapsulates perfectly the essence of our history. As inhabitants of a country whose social, cultural and economic fabric was closely linked to forests, and whose defense when outnumbered by foreign invaders consisted in retreats into the huge wild Carpathian forests, followed by deadly counter-attacks against the enemy – a strategy that kept my ancestors always free – Romanians are genetically connected to mountains and forests.

The Turks beat the crap out of us on several occasions though. The Germans as well. So , ya know , hide better ! )))

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/dr-ion-jinga/wild-carpathia_b_17232378.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/dr-ion-jinga/wild-carpathia_b_17232378.html

Cloud Wars

Now, Walmart is telling some partners and suppliers that their software services should not run on Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The report quoted Bob Muglia, CEO of Snowflake Computing, saying that a Walmart (WMT, +0.93%) partner wanted to use his company’s data warehouse service, but was told it had to run on Microsoft (MSFT, +0.51%) Azure cloud instead of AWS.

Originally shared by mathew murphy

http://fortune.com/2017/06/21/walmart-amazon-whole-foods/

Lyft invents a bus without poor people on it. https://www.lyft.com/shuttle

Originally shared by Wayne Radinsky

“The good news for those betting on AI is that graphics chips have so far managed to defy gravity. At the recent conference of leading graphics chipmaker Nvidia, CEO Jensen Huang displayed a chart showing how his chips’ performance has continued to accelerate exponentially while growth in the performance of general purpose processors, or CPUs, has slowed.”

“Doug Burger, a distinguished engineer at Microsoft’s NExT division that works on commercializing new technology, says a similar gap is opening between conventional and machine-learning software. ‘You’re starting to see a [performance] plateau for general software — it has stopped improving at historical rates — but this AI stuff is still increasing rapidly,’ he says.”

“In the longer term, more radical changes in how computer chips work will be required to keep AI getting more powerful.”

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607917/how-ai-can-keep-accelerating-after-moores-law/