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Chris Chandler
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More Bad News For the F-35
Celebrating Dungeons & Dragons' 40th Anniversary
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Up To a Quarter of California Smog Comes From China
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Lenovo To Buy IBM's Server Business For $2.3 Billion
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Some designers are grieving over Squarespace's logo design tool
On Twitter, some designers are going through the five stages of grief over Squarespace's logo designer tool.
Denial: "This is garbage."
Anger: "This is infuriating. I thought better of Squarespace."
Bargaining: "As a professional Designer, I am thinking about discontinuing my web service with them."
Depression: "This Squarespace Logo maker is gonna put a lot of people out of work."
Acceptance: "The people making a logo in Squarespace weren't going to hire you anyway. At least now they have a simple tool to use."
For sale: water-tank castle
Chris Chandler$500?! Do what now!?
If you're in New Zealand and want to have the coolest playhouse/LARP-prop south of the equator, this Trademe ad is offering a concrete water-tank converted to a castle for a surprisingly reasonable $500 (you have to pay to move it, though).
Castle Playhouse (Thanks, Edwin!)
This one off creation from an old concrete water tank makes a unique playhouse.Downstairs dungeon with gate.
Ladder leads to timber & ply 1st. floor.
Painted roof to form turrets.
Perspex windows.
Pictures do not do it justice.
C3PO and Stormtrooper onesies
The C3PO onesie isn't quite a kigurumi, but it sure does look cozy. $70, sizes S to XXX-L. Pair it with a Storm Trooper armor onesie and order now to get it in time for a Valentine's Day game of "Naughty droid and stern Imperial foot-slogger."
[Insert "droid you're looking for" joke here.]
Star Wars C-3PO Costume Hooded Union Suit (via Geeks Are Sexy)
IBM says goodbye to x86 forever, sells server lines to Lenovo
After reports earlier this week that IBM was again shopping its x86 server unit around—including talks with Dell—Lenovo executives announced that they had reached an agreement with IBM to buy the business for a price of $2.3 billion.
IBM will stay in the high-end server and mainframe business, focusing on its System Z and Power lines as well as its storage systems and specialized server appliances. Big Blue will hand over its System x, BladeCenter, and other x86-based server lines to Lenovo. Once the transaction is finalized, Lenovo will instantly become at least as large a server company as Dell, if not as large as HP.
The deal with Lenovo may have been reached after IBM failed to find a better one. Last year's negotiations between the companies reportedly broke down after Lenovo offered under $2.5 billion for the unit, prompting IBM to walk away. While the exact offer Lenovo made in 2013 isn't known, today's deal certainly isn't for more than that. But on the upside for IBM, the transaction will mostly be in actual dollars: Lenovo will pay approximately $2 billion in cash, and the rest of the transaction will be paid for in Lenovo stock. Lenovo and IBM will also enter into a strategic partnership that will allow Lenovo to resell IBM’s storage and cloud computing systems as well as some of its software. And about 7,500 current IBM employees are expected to be hired by Lenovo worldwide.
Microsoft Quietly Fixes Windows XP Resource Hog Problem
Chris ChandlerSuch a timely update.
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Donut-sized rock suddenly appears in front of Mars rover
As we’ve learned from our recent explorations of Mars, there’s really not a whole lot going on there. Yes, there are geological processes at work, but most of them move at a nearly imperceptible pace. So that's why after nearly ten years of Martian rover exploration, NASA scientists were surprised to see a rock suddenly “appear” in front of the Mars Rover last week.
You can see the rock in the images above. The image on the left shows the area in front of Opportunity on Sol 3528. The image to the right was taken 12 Martian days later and is almost identical—except for a rock the size of a donut that had unexpectedly shown up
NASA announced the discovery of the rock at an event at Caltech in Pasadena this past Thursday night, dubbing the rock “Pinnacle Island.” “It’s about the size of a jelly doughnut,” NASA Mars Exploration Rover lead scientist Steve Squyres told Discovery News. “It was a total surprise, we were like ‘wait a second, that wasn’t there before, it can’t be right. Oh my god! It wasn’t there before!’ We were absolutely startled.”
How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing
As the big dog of desktop publishing in the '80s and '90s, QuarkXPress was synonymous with professional publishing. In fact, it was publishing. But its hurried and steady decline is one of the greatest business failures in modern tech.
Quark's demise is truly the stuff of legend. In fact, the story reads like the fall of any empire: failed battles, growing discontent among the overtaxed masses, hungry and energized foes, hubris, greed, and... uh, CMYK PDFs. What did QuarkXPress do—or fail to do—that saw its complete dominance of desktop publishing wither in less than a decade? In short, it didn’t listen.
The rise
I went to a high school for the arts—yes, it was just like Fame, so stop asking—and only got seriously into computers, Photoshop, and design in the early nineties. Back then, when asked “what program do you learn for jobs in page layout and design," there was only one answer: QuarkXPress. Sure, you might have heard the name Pagemaker by Aldus—later purchased by Adobe—but even with my little awareness of the publishing world outside our school walls, it was obvious that no one used it. When I eventually got summer jobs in DTP service bureaus and magazines, the dominance of QuarkXPress 3 was total. The widely reported statistics were that XPress enjoyed 95 percent dominance of the publishing market at that time. But when I left Vice in ’99, the privately held Quark Inc.’s best days were behind them. That was the year that Adobe’s InDesign 1.0 hit the market.
DIY tablet computer made from Raspberry Pi
I love that individuals now have the tools and technology to affordably make their own consumer electronics. Michael Caster built a tablet with a Raspberry Pi (a credit card sized Linux computer) that he calls the PiPad. It has a wood and carbon fiber case and looks great!
How I built a Raspberry Pi Tablet
Charter tries to buy Time Warner, create cable giant to challenge Comcast
Charter Communications has offered to buy Time Warner Cable (TWC) for $61.3 billion, taking its case directly to shareholders because TWC management turned down its previous overtures.
“We haven’t received a serious response,” Charter CEO Tom Rutledge told Bloomberg today. Rutledge complained that TWC rejected its $61 billion bid and made an unrealistically high counter-offer.
Charter released an announcement saying, "Time Warner Cable's response led Charter to determine there is no genuine intent from Time Warner Cable's management and Board of Directors to engage in a merger agreement, and that it is prudent to bring the matter to shareholders directly."
Intel Puts a PC Into an SD Card-Sized Casing
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World's Oldest Decimal Multiplication Table Discovered
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strip for December / 18 / 2013 - Prayer for a new space race
Prayer for a new space race
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Gaiman's "Ocean at the End of the Lane" wins UK book of the year prize
Congratulations to Neil Gaiman, whose modern fairytale The Ocean at the End of the Lane was named "book of the year" by popular vote in the UK Specsavers National Book Awards.
He said: "I've never written a book before that was so close to my own heart: a story about memory and magic and the fear and danger of being a child. I wasn't sure that anyone else would like it.
"I'm amazed and thrilled that so many other people have read it, loved it, and made their friends read it too.
"Winning a National Book Award was thrilling; discovering that the public have made The Ocean At The End Of The Lane their Book of the Year is somewhere out beyond wonderful. Thank you to everyone who voted."
Neil Gaiman novel wins Book of the Year [The Guardian]
Microsoft's Ticking Time Bomb Is Windows XP
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Huge Pool of Ice-Free Water Discovered Under Greenland Ice
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Mikhail Kalashnikov: Inventor of AK-47 Dies At 94
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A Reburial fit for a King
An Oxford University academic has put together an authentic order of service for the planned reburial of Richard III.
The post A Reburial fit for a King appeared first on Medievalists.net.
Target says sorry again, offers 10% off and free credit monitoring
In light of the recent, massive breach that saw the store lose data for 40 million customer credit cards, Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel took to the Web yesterday to offer updates, apologies, and special discounts.
Steinhafel said "the issue has been identified and eliminated" and that shoppers’ PINs, birth dates, and Social Security numbers were not stolen. Still, he empathized with customers for the stress and confusion caused by this situation. He said Target will be in touch with all impacted customers, but that the store has heard “very few reports of actual fraud.” Even so, Steinhafel made a point to note any customers who were affected “will not be held financially responsible for any credit card or debit card fraud.”
As for the difficulty some customers have experienced when trying to contact Target through both the Web and its call center, the CEO chalked up wait times and unresponsive pages to “unprecedented call volume.” Steinhafel said Target is “working continuously to build capacity” for these resources.
Thorium put to use, kills a few more versions of Supersymmetry
Are there any particles beyond the Higgs lurking where the LHC might discover them? A team of researchers that calls itself the ACME project has now produced a measurement that says the answer is "probably not." ACME looked for any imperfections in the shape of an electron's electric field and placed a limit on the measurements that is 12 times smaller than anyone had previously achieved. As far as they could tell, the electron has no imperfections, which rules out the possibility of finding many of the new particles predicted to be within the mass range that will be explored by the LHC.
The research relied on thorium atoms, which are mostly discussed as a potential nuclear fuel. But in this case, the authors were after the electrons. Thorium's high atomic number means that its innermost electrons orbit within an intense electric field that's internal to the atom, and they travel at relativistic speeds. These properties will serve to exaggerate even a minuscule imperfection in the electric field of the electron itself.
The imperfection the ACME team was after is called the electric dipole moment, and it's measured relative to the electron's spin. If the electron has an electric dipole moment, then its charge will be unevenly distributed along its spin. Nothing in the Standard Model can create an electron dipole moment, but most extensions to the Model, including Super Symmetry, posit heavier particles, the mere existence of which should alter the dipole moment.
Scientific Data Disappears At Alarming Rate, 80% Lost In Two Decades
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IDC: 40 Percent of Developers Are 'Hobbyists'
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'Walter White,' meth dealer, gets 12 years in prison
Walter White, meth dealer.
A Montana man who "dealt methamphetamine out of his home and got shot in his driveway in a gunfight with his son over a drug debt will spend more than 12 years in federal prison. On Monday, Walter Jack White, 53, was sentenced to nine years on a meth possession charge and to a consecutive 3.5 years for a firearms conviction. (ht: @ditzkoff)
2013: a year of very bad cops (and some good ones)
Vice's Year in Bad Cops rounds up the worst American police stories of the years: cops who executed peaceful housepets in front of children, cops who forgot about jailed innocents and left them to drink their own urine, cops whose dogs only attack brown people, cops who only stop-and-frisk brown people, and, of course, Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
But the article also singles out Chris Burbank, the Chief of the Salt Lake City Police who sounds like an awesome guy. He arranged for a peaceful, respectful eviction of SLC Occupy, refuses to have his officers enforce immigration laws, and won't turn his cops into militarized SWAT goons. His motto: "[The cops] aren't an occupying force. We are a part of the community."
Most Cowardly Pet Killing, Dog Category: Antoine Jones of Georgia
On October 7, Antoine Jones, a six-foot, 300-pound probation officer, went to the Albany, Georgia, home of Cherrie Shelton, as he had multiple times in the past in order to check up on her son. As Jones walked to the door, Shelton’s 12-pound Jack Russell terrier Patches ran outside barking at him. Shelton told the local news she tried to explain that Patches didn’t bite, but before she could finish, Jones shot her dog, who died half an hour later. The officer said in a report he was threatened by the tiny dog, but though the Georgia Department of Corrections initially supported him, an internal investigation of the incident was reportedly opened at the end of October.Most Cowardly Pet killing, Non-Dog Category: Unnamed NYPD Officers
According to a lawsuit filed by Evelyn Lugo, during a legally dubious raid on her home in September 2012 a New York cop stomped the family’s pet parakeet to death while yelling, “Fuck the bird!” The injuries to several family members are documented in photographs, so it’s quite possible the bird-murder portion of the complaint is accurate as well. RIP Tito the bird.Most Cowardly Pet Killing, in Front of Children Category: Barry Accorti of Ohio
On June 10, a North Ridgeville, Ohio, police officer responded to a call to remove five feral kittens from a yard. According to the homeowner, officer Barry Accorti told her that the cats were going to “kitty heaven,” as the shelters were full, then shot them all 15 feet from her door. Her children saw the whole thing and were naturally hysterical, and the woman was baffled that Accorti would murder cats so casually within their earshot. Though the North Ridgeville Police Department’s Facebook page was swamped by threats and complaints when the story came out, chief Mike Freeman said his officer’s “actions were appropriate.”
This Year in Bad Cops [Lucy Steigerwald/Vice]
(Image: SWAT team members prepare for a training exercise/Oregon Department of Transportation)
Updated: Federal judge finds NSA spying unconstitutional
In a stunning decision, a DC-based federal judge has ruled that the National Security Agency spying revealed this summer violates the constitution.
The opinion (PDF) published today by US District Judge Richard Leon is in response to a lawsuit filed by Larry Klayman, a longtime conservative activist. Klayman was fast on the draw, filing his lawsuit on June 6, one day after widespread NSA surveillance was revealed in June.
Leon's order grants an injunction that will shut down the NSA's Bulk Telephony Metadata Program, and it requires the government to destroy the metadata collected on the plaintiffs' accounts. The shutdown will only happen if an appeals court agrees with Leon, who has stayed the injunction pending appeal, "in light of the significant national security issues at stake in this case and the novelty of the constitutional issues."
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