Andrew

20 years ago today, the internet changed forever. Mosaic Communications Corporation was founded, the company that would later change its name to Netscape. Founders Jim Clark and Marc Andreesen heralded the dot-com boom as we know it, creating the first popular web browsers, Mosaic and later Netscape Navigator, and helping build new standards like SSL and JavaScript that still define the web today. The Internet History Podcast's Brian McCullough interviewed the founding engineers who made Netscape possible in honor of the company's twentieth anniversary. "Though not technically the first internet startup per-se, Netscape was the first internet startup that mattered," he writes.

While Netscape now only exists as a tiny subsidiary of...

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Bacon is delicious, and keeping it from shrinking when cooking is a popular topic . Instructables user craftclarity wanted a more scientific, rigorous approach to keeping bacon from shrinking, so he put a number of popular tricks to the test. Which was the best? The good old oven.

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Less than two weeks after he was appointed Mozilla CEO, Brendan Eich resigned today amid a controversy stemming from his $1,000 donation to an anti-gay marriage ballot proposition in California. "Mozilla prides itself on being held to a different standard and, this past week, we didn't live up to it. We know why people are hurt and angry, and they are right: it's because we haven't stayed true to ourselves," the company said in a blog post. "We didn't act like you'd expect Mozilla to act. We didn't move fast enough to engage with people once the controversy started. We're sorry. We must do better."

Eich, who co-founded Mozilla and previously invented the JavaScript programming language, has also stepped down from the Mozilla...

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jones_supa (887896) writes "Wanting to focus their efforts on their most important strategic initiatives and ensuring that the company is not spread too thin, Canonical is shutting down Ubuntu One file services. With other services now regularly offering from 25 GB to 50 GB of free storage, the personal cloud storage space wasn't a sustainable place for Canonical. As of today, it will no longer be possible to purchase storage or music from the Ubuntu One store. The Ubuntu One software will not be included in the upcoming Ubuntu 14.04 LTS release, and the Ubuntu One apps in older versions of Ubuntu and in the Ubuntu, Google, and Apple stores will be updated appropriately. The current services will be unavailable from 1 June 2014; user content will remain available for download until 31 July, at which time it will be deleted. For a spark of solace, the company promises to open source the backend code."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It may have been overshadowed by pricier acquisition deals in subsequent years, but HP's 2010 takeover of Palm remains a milestone event. It was a seemingly perfect combination of a highly competitive mobile operating system with a deep-pocketed hardware juggernaut. HP promised it would fund the future development of webOS and support it with a broad ecosystem of devices. Only a year later, however, the company reversed course and abandoned its touted plans, to the chagrin of hard-hit shareholders.

A class action lawsuit filed in the wake of that decision in 2011 has now been settled by HP at the cost of $57 million. The plaintiffs are primarily pension funds and other institutional investors, whose anger stems from the dissonance...

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Am I taking crazy pills, or did the internet just give me two hilarious pie-in-the-sky Apple acquisition articles in the span of three days? On March 26th, The Street posted an argument for why Apple should throw down the cash to buy Netflix. Not to...

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There's been a few leaked images over the past months that were quickly pulled down by Paramount, but the studio is now ready to give everyone a look at the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. This trailer debuted to exhibitors in Las Vegas Monday night as part of the CinemaCon convention, delivering the first real footage from the Michael Bay-produced reboot of the iconic comic book and TV franchise (many would argue that the previous film incarnations are better left forgotten). Directed by Jonathan Liebesman (Battle: Los Angeles), the new film features Megan Fox as reporter April O'Neil and character actor William Fichtner as the villainous Shredder. As for Raphael, Donatello, Michelangelo, and Leonardo... well, take a look for...

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Selfies are typically a point of ridicule for us, something to poke fun at or, on occasion, use as a force for good. But for 19-year-old Danny Bowman, the quest for the perfect selfie turned into an obsession that supposedly culminated in a suicide attempt.

According to a report in The Daily Mirror, what began as a typical teenage desire to gain acceptance from his Facebook friends through self-portraits turned into a full-fledged, dangerous addiction.

He dropped out of school, lost 28lbs off of his already thin frame, became aggressive with his parents and would spend as much as 10 hours per day taking photos of himself with his smartphone.

When the addiction reached a fever pitch, he tried to commit suicide by overdosing on pills. Fortunately, his mother found him quickly enough to get him to the hospital and save his life

Here’s Bowman talking about the experience:

The idea that selfies, SELFIES might lead to a suicide attempt probably seems ridiculous to most people, but Bowman and the professionals he’s working with are calling it a genuine mental illness.

“It sounds trivial and ­harmless but that’s the very thing that makes it so dangerous,” he told the Mirror. “It almost took my life, but I survived and I am determined never to get into that position again.”

To read the full story and find out how your standard teenaged desire to look good turned into a 200-selfies-per-day addiction and a suicide attempt, head over to the Daily Mirror by following the link below.

Selfie addict took TWO HUNDRED a day – and tried to kill himself when he couldn’t take perfect photo [Daily Mirror via TIME]

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AT&T pulled in a staggering $128.8 billion in revenue in 2013. The company's operating income for the full year totaled more than $30 billion. According to the company's mobile boss, however, the extra capacity needed to deliver popular services over the Internet to its customers is an expense AT&T should not have to bear.

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Here's a fresh idea: Let's allow ISPs to do whatever they want and see what magical things they decide to do for consumers! At least, that's the idea that AT&T pitched to the Federal Communications Commission last week in a filing for the FCC's upcoming "Protecting and Promoting the Open Internet" proceeding. Ars Technica reports that AT&T said in its filing that net neutrality restrictions are pointless because it wouldn't make economic sense for ISPs to degrade traffic for popular video streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu. Why? Because doing so would supposedly cause a major backlash and would push customers en masse into the arms of competitors. You know, because America has such a robustly competitive market for home broadband services.

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While the iPhone 5s and the iPhone 5c saw many part leaks ahead of their September 2013 release, we have seen no solid hints on what Apple's larger iPhone 6 might look like, leaving it up to designers to imagine how Apple will redesign its flagship product.

Concept artist Martin Hajek has teamed up with iCulture to create a mockup of the iPhone 6 based on some recent rumors, which suggested the iPhone 6 might take some design cues from the iPhone 5c and the seventh-generation iPod nano. While the report indicated the phone could adopt the colored anodized aluminum backing of the nano, Hajek has taken the nano-inspiration even further, with a flat, rectangular design and a 4.7-inch screen.


Apple's iPhone 6 is expected to be larger than the existing 4-inch iPhone 5s, with a screen size ranging from 4.7 inches to 5.7 inches. Some rumors have indicated the company has plans to release two separate phones in that size range, but it remains unclear if the company will proceed with that plan.


Along with a larger screen size, the iPhone 6 may incorporate a durable sapphire crystal display and will undoubtedly feature processor and camera upgrades. Apple is expected to introduce the iPhone 6 in the fall alongside iOS 8.

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The thing about nature is that, if you look close enough at just about anything, you’re bound to find a beauty and symmetry that defies description. In the case of Linden Gledhill‘s microscope photos of butterfly wings, he simply discovered another level of beauty in something that already captures many of our imaginations.

A rainbow of colors and myriad textures greet you in Gledhill’s Butterfly wings Flickr set — each photograph more ethereal and alien than the last.

But don’t take our word for it, take a look for yourself:

Speaking to the Huffington Post, Gledhill explained that he first began taking macro photos of butterfly wings using a standard camera “fitted with old microscope lenses on extension tubes,” but as the series has expanded so has his gear selection.

Now he uses an Olympus BH-2 microscope fitted with LED lighting, a high speed flash and a StackShot drive that makes taking the focus stacked images much easier.

“A microscope lens has a very shallow depth of field so this is where the Stackshot drive helps to automate the whole image taking process as it has the ability to step sequentially through very tiny steps, say two micrometers, in between each picture,” he explained to HuffPo. “It often needs 80 or so individual pictures to make up one final image using a process called focus stacking.”

To see many more of these beautiful images or follow along as he captures and uploads even more, be sure to head over to Gledhill’s Flickr stream by clicking here.

(via Huffington Post)

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Image credits: Photographs by Linden Gledhill and used with permission.

A new video celebrating the composition style of director Wes Anderson is currently making the rounds on the Internet: a beautiful ode to the power of symmetry and Anderson’s ability to use it better than just about anybody in cinema.

The video was put together by a filmmaker who goes by the name Kogonada as a side project. According to Co.Create, he was working on a Criterion featurette that explored the visual similarities between Fantastic Mr. Fox and Anderson’s other films when the idea for “Centered” struck him.

The symmetry in each shot is illustrated quite simply by placing a dotted line down the middle of the frame. Be it a person or a tent flap, as the line splits it into perfect halves, the symmetry of the images really leaps out at you.

Check out the video at the top to see it for yourself, but don’t blame us if you suddenly find you’re centering all of your photography and hosting Wes Anderson movie marathons after this.

(via Laughing Squid)

Using an industrial–strength robotic arm, custom software, a Canon EOS Mark ll and a 180mm macro lens converted into a telecentrical lens, Swiss photographer Daniel Boschung has created an automated portrait machine. Made to map out “Face Cartography“, the machine and resulting images capture incredibly detailed and hyperrealistic photographs of subjects.

Every resulting gigapixel portrait consists of around 600 shots, resulting in a mind-blowing 900-megapixel image. At this level of detail, each portrait seems to bring to life every topographical detail of the human face. Pores turn into sinkholes, 5 o’clock shadow turns into a forest of saplings and wrinkles rise and fall like canyons and mountains.

With it being an automated process, the session isn’t a short or easy one and leads to some interesting results as Boschung himself notes:

Emotions are completely missing. Emotions show up only briefly while Macro photography takes half an hour. The person has to stay motionless while being photographed by the robot

The gallery on his site links out to a version of the photograph that allows you to zoom in on every detail if you’d like to take a look for yourself. Each portrait offers a unique journey as you travel across the various facial landscapes of individuals ranging in age from teens to senior citizens.

Between the lack of emotion, the detail in the images, and the overall result of the photos, it certainly flips the definition of “portrait” as we know it on its head. Curious to hear your thoughts on the project and resulting photos. Let us know below!

(via ISO 1200)

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Image credits: Photographs by Daniel Boschung

Neil Young's pet project to revolutionize how everyone listens to music -- called Pono -- launched its Kickstarter campaign a couple of days ago and quickly passed its goal by a wide margin. With nearly $2.5 million pledged as of this writing, it's...

Kind of like Lyft, but for your packages, Barnacle hooks you up with people who drive long routes and will accept a little extra cash to deliver your packages on their way. Alternatively, you can deliver packages for others and make some money yourself.

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Nearly one-third of households in the United States have either no choice for home broadband Internet service, or no options at all. The frightening statistic comes from a presentation given to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce this week by SoftBank CEO Mayoshi Son, and it cited data provided by the Federal Communications Commission this past December.

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Asus' dual-boot Transformer Book Duet is dead. At CES this year, one of the big stories was dual-OS devices. Spurred on by encouragement from chipmaker Intel, Asus announced the Transformer Book Duet, a hybrid laptop and tablet that switches between Microsoft Windows and Google's Android on the fly. The device was an intriguing highlight at a trade show that was generally devoid of interesting laptops and tablets, and was scheduled for release in the US this month. Unfortunately, the device has likely been cancelled due to strong opposition from Microsoft and Google, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

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And for those of you who are into memes, here’s the part where we make fun of ourselves for today’s comic.

jones_supa writes "A bit surprisingly, Valve Software has uploaded their Direct3D to OpenGL translation layer onto GitHub as open source. It is provided as-is and with no support, under the MIT license allowing you to do pretty much anything with it. Taken directly from the DOTA2 source tree, the translation layer supports limited subset of D3D 9.0c, bytecode-level HLSL to GLSL translator, and some SM3 support. It will require some tinkering to get it to compile, and there is some hardcoded Source-specific stuff included. The project might bring some value to developers who are planning to port their product from Windows to Linux."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Japanese tech titan SoftBank bought Sprint last year and now it really wants to buy T-Mobile. So much so, in fact, that SoftBank's President is making an unusual vow: "It’s a three-heavyweight fight. If I can have a real fight, I go in more massive price war, a technology war."

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Apple has credited the evad3rs jailbreak team with discovering several security issues, according to a new Knowledge Base article that details security issues fixed in iOS 7.1 today. The company also credits a number of individual researchers -- including one named Roboboi99 -- as well as corporate security specialists from Google and FireEye, among other companies.


As is common at many tech companies, Apple credits security researchers who discover vulnerabilities in its products after it fixes them, though the company does not offer a bounty program to financially reward researchers like many other companies do.

In iOS 7.1, Apple fixed security issues with Backup, the Certificate Trust Policy, Configuration Profiles, CoreCapture, Crash Reporting, dyld, FaceTime, ImageIO, IOKit HID Event, iTunes Store, Kernel, Office Viewer, Photos Backend, Profiles, Safari, Settings, SpringBoard, SpringBoard Lock Screen, the TelephonyUI Framework, USB Host, Video Driver, and WebKit.

Of course, with Apple fixing the security issues that the jailbreak team discovered, it has also closed the loopholes that allowed a jailbreak in the first place. For now, the last version of iOS that can be jailbroken is iOS 7.0.6.

The upcoming new YotaPhone, pictured above, shows us just how gorgeous a smartphone with an E Ink display can be. The device combines a full color display with an E Ink screen, allowing owners to extend the phone's battery life and utilize the power-sipping E Ink panel for basic functions. But what if the handset did away with the color display entirely? This is the vision of European eReader maker Onyx, which on Monday showed off its MIDIA InkPhone smartphone, a handset that promises a remarkable two weeks of battery life per charge.

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What happens when you combine an RC car, some “stick bombs” and more camera gear than you can shake…er…blow up a stick at? You get this insane creation by Subaru.

This Subaru “WRX STI vs StickBomb” video was done using a one-off 3D printed RC model of a Subaru WRX STI (unfortunate acronym, wouldn’t you say?) racing alongside a wave of 30,000 stick bombs set on a miniature track.

Documenting it is a collection of high-end cameras joined by 25 GoPros, which were used to create cool “bullet time” sequence in the middle.

It took a total of three days with almost no sleep to produce in a Japanese studio, but it’s safe to say the results were worth the effort. At the top we’ve included the behind the scenes video, and directly above you’ll find the final video in all of its glory for you to watch.

Check them out and let us know what you think in the comments!

(via DIY Photography)

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