Last month, Mayor De Blasio announced a push to fund green spaces in New York’s poor neighborhoods. This probably isn’t exactly what he meant: Very wealthy power couple Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg have announced plans to fund a giant park in the Hudson River. Read more…
Continue reading here:
Some Billionaires Want To Give NYC a $170 Million Floating Park
iOS 8.1.1 is here, and while it’s a pretty minor update, Apple says it should increase performance for the iPad 2 and the iPhone 4S, two of the oldest devices that make the leap to iOS 8. Go grab it now, especially if you have some more elderly devices. Read more…
Read this article:
iOS 8.1.1 is here, and while it’s a pretty minor update, Apple says it should increase performance f
Ann Lingard visited the Robin Rigg offshore wind farm in Scottland, and took a photo of a cross section sample of the undersea power cable the wind farm uses. According to Clifford Pickover , the cable costs $400 per foot. Cheap, by audiophile standards!
Read the original post:
Magnificent cross-section of an undersea cable. $400/foot
Fancy creating a little more distance between your social and professional facades on Facebook? Well, the Financial Times is reporting that Zuckerberg & Co. are working on a new site, called “Facebook at Work, ” that will do just that. Read more…
Original post:
Report: Facebook’s Working on a New "Facebook at Work" Site
Two foods are left out on the counter – fresh tomatoes and a bowl of sugar. Within a week or so, one will develop black spots and the other remains pristine, albeit perhaps a little clumpy depending on the humidity of the air. But why? Read more…
Continue Reading:
Why Sugar Doesn’t Spoil
New Yorkers passing through Times Square will see (whether they want to or not) the biggest, most expensive digital billboard (at least in the US) when it turns on this Tuesday night. The screen is big enough to run a whole block, from 45th to 46th Street along Broadway, and is made up of 24 million pixels. (To contrast, 4K TVs weigh in with around 8 million pixel, although the scale here is massively different.) Oh yeah, it’s also eight stories high. According to the New York Times , the cost of this prime advertising real estate comes in at over $2.5 million for four weeks. Google, a company that has the means , will take over the big screen as the debut advertiser until 2015. But we can go bigger: LG’s already using the world’s biggest billboard in Saudi Arabia, which is 820 feet long. [Image credit: Richard Perry/The New York Times] Filed under: Displays Comments Source: NYT
Continue reading here:
Times Square’s new digital billboard is almost the length of a football field
The US government is no stranger to dealing with cyberattacks , but it just took a rare and relatively extreme step to keep itself safe. The State Department shut down its entire unclassified email system this weekend to bolster its defenses after spotting “activity of concern” (read: potential data breaches) that happened at the same time as an earlier hack that targeted the White House. Officials aren’t naming culprits at this stage — they’ve pinned some previous attacks on China and Russia, but it’s not clear that there was digital warfare involved this time around. More details are expected to come once the security upgrades are in place, so you may get a better sense of what happened in the near future. [Image credit: AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite] Filed under: Internet Comments Source: AP (SFGate)
Continue reading here:
State Department shuts down unclassified email to cope with hack
Albert Michelson’s harmonic analyzer — a 19th century mechanical calculator that can do Fourier analysis with just gears, springs and levers — was found at the University of Illinois, and then lovingly restored by a trio of makers who lavishly documented it in a book ( free PDF / paperback / hardcover ) and a mesmerizing video series . Read the rest
More:
Mesmerizing rebuild of a mechanical Fourier calculator
If you’re miffed that Bitcasa not only dropped its unlimited cloud storage option but made you migrate to a costlier limited tier just to keep your files, you’ll be glad to hear that you’re getting a reprieve. Angry customers have filed a tentative class action lawsuit against Bitcasa for allegedly breaching its contract through the sudden switch. In tandem with the suit, the court handling the case has granted a restraining order that forces Bitcasa to save those files until at least November 20th. That’s not exactly a long interval, but there’s a hearing on the 19th that could extend the grace period further. The complaint isn’t meant to make Bitcasa change its mind and bring back its Infinite service. At the moment, attorneys are focused on compensation and giving subscribers enough time to get all their files. As you might imagine, that could take a while when people paid for unrestricted online space. There’s no certainty that the lawsuit will succeed, but it might serve as a warning to other internet storage outlets that are thinking of scaling back their features. [Thanks, Jay] Filed under: Storage , Internet Comments Source: Bitcasa Community Forums , LCHB
More:
Court order stops Bitcasa from deleting your cloud data, for now
MojoKid (1002251) writes One of the disadvantages to buying an Apple system is that it generally means less upgrade flexibility than a system from a traditional PC OEM. Over the last few years, Apple has introduced features and adopted standards that made using third-party hardware progressively more difficult. Now, with OS X 10.10 Yosemite, the company has taken another step down the path towards total vendor lock-in and effectively disabled support for third-party SSDs. We say “effectively” because while third-party SSDs will still work, they’ll no longer perform the TRIM garbage collection command. Being able to perform TRIM and clean the SSD when its sitting idle is vital to keeping the drive at maximum performance. Without it, an SSD’s real world performance will steadily degrade over time. What Apple did with OS X 10.10 is introduce KEXT (Kernel EXTension) driver signing. KEXT signing means that at boot, the OS checks to ensure that all drivers are approved and enabled by Apple. It’s conceptually similar to the device driver checks that Windows performs at boot. However, with OS X, if a third-party SSD is detected, the OS will detect that a non-approved SSD is in use, and Yosemite will refuse to load the appropriate TRIM-enabled driver. Read more of this story at Slashdot.