In Switzerland, it’s apparently common for people to leave out bags of stuff they don’t want for others to take, instead of throwing it all in the trash. And when a writer over on Brick Fanatics found a sack of miscellaneous Lego, when he got home he was surprised to find it actually included classic sets, manuals, and catalogs dating back to the 1970s. Read more…
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Lucky guy finds a treasure trove of classic ’70s Lego in a discarded bag
The past few years have seen a shift from owning music to accessing as much as you want on various streaming services. Why pay $9.99 for a new album each month when you can get a firehose of content for the same price? Now Apple looks to get in on the action with its newest offering, Apple Music . They made a big splash with the introduction of the iTunes store in 2003 but here in 2015 there’s a lot more competition for your listening attention. Does Apple Music have what it takes to stand out from its more established rivals? We’ve stacked up some of the bigger names to see which one can give you the most for your money. Apple Music Spotify Rdio Google Play Music Monthly fee Individual: $9.99 Family: $14.99 Premium: $9.99 Select: $3.99 Unlimited: $9.99 Unlimited: $9.99 Number of songs “Tens of millions” Over 30 million Over 32 million Over 30 million Audio quality NA 320kbps 320kbps Up to 320kbps Radio Yes (human-driven) Yes (automated) Yes (automated) Yes (automated) Video content Yes Yes No Yes Exclusive content Yes Yes Yes Yes Curated playlists Yes Yes Yes Yes Offline listening Yes Yes Yes Yes Online media storage Yes No No Yes Social features NA Yes Yes Yes Desktop apps Windows, Mac Windows, Mac Windows, Mac Web only Mobile apps iOS, Android (coming fall 2015) iOS, Android, Windows Phone iOS, Android, Windows Phone iOS, Android Filed under: Apple Comments
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Apple Music vs the competition: A streaming music cheat sheet
Film producer and real estate developer Nile Niami is building a massive Bel Air, California residence, containing a 74, 000 square-foot main house and three smaller homes, that he will try to sell for $500 million. Here’s what that pocket change gets you: Read the rest
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For sale: the largest, most expensive home in US history
HughPickens.com writes: BBC reports that Germany has abandoned tuition fees altogether for German and international students alike and more than 4, 600 US students are fully enrolled at Germany universities, an increase of 20% over three years. “When I found out that just like Germans I’m studying for free, it was sort of mind blowing, ” says Katherine Burlingame who decided to get her Master’s degree at a university in the East German town of Cottbus. “I realized how easy the admission process was and how there was no tuition fee. This was a wow moment for me.” When Katherine came to Germany in 2012 she spoke two words of German: ‘hallo’ and ‘danke’. She arrived in an East German town which had, since the 1950s, taught the majority of its residents Russian rather than English. “At first I was just doing hand gestures and a lot of people had compassion because they saw that I was trying and that I cared.” She did not need German, however, in her Master’s program, which was filled with students from 50 different countries but taught entirely in English. In fact, German universities have drastically increased all-English classes to more than 1, 150 programs across many fields. So how can Germany afford to educate foreign students for free? Think about it this way: it’s a global game of collecting talent. All of these students are the trading cards, and the collectors are countries. If a country collects more talent, they’ll have an influx of new ideas, new businesses and a better economy. For a society with a demographic problem — a growing retired population and fewer young people entering college and the workforce — qualified immigration is seen as a resolution to the problem as research shows that 50% of foreign students stay in Germany. “Keeping international students who have studied in the country is the ideal way of immigration, ” says Sebastian Fohrbeck.”They have the needed certificates, they don’t have a language problem at the end of their stay and they know the culture.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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How American Students Can Get a University Degree For Free In Germany
Early today, the official website of the US Army (www.army.mil) was defaced by attackers claiming to be with the Syrian Electronic Army. In addition to a message on the page claiming attribution, the attackers also included a pop-up message to anyone visiting: “Your commanders admit they are training the people they have sent you to die fighting.” One of several messages popped up by the defaced Army.mil sites. At the time of publication, the Army main homepage is down, although other Army websites have not been affected. However, the website of the US Strategic Command —the joint Department of Defense command overseeing space and nuclear forces—is also down, as is the official page for US Cyber Command hosted on its domain. Screenshots of the attack were posted this afternoon on a Syrian Electronic Army Twitter account, one which has in the past posted links to “leaked” files about connections between the US, Turkish, and Saudi Arabian governments and Syrian rebels. This account has also previously shared information about defacements of other websites (including that of the International Business Times and the Telegraph last year) and the hijacking of Twitter accounts belonging to a number of western media outlets. The SEA claims to have created its own distribution of Linux based on Ubuntu for use by its supporters. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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US Army website defaced by Syrian Electronic Army
Airbus, the European aerospace giant, has unveiled Adeline: its answer to SpaceX’s reusable space launch ambitions. Adeline, which stands for Advanced Expendable Launcher with Innovative engine Economy, uses a rather novel solution to get the first stage engines back in one piece: it has wings and propellers that allow the engines to follow a ballistic trajectory, and then fly like an airplane back to a runway. All current space launch systems—SpaceX’s Falcon 9, Airbus’ Ariane 5, Russia’s Soyuz, etc.—are expendable. During every single rocket launch, the rocket engines and fuel tanks fall back to Earth, usually into the ocean, never to be used again. Rocket engines are not cheap: Orbital Sciences paid around $1 billion (£600 million) to Roscosmos for 20 RD-180 rocket engines. This is why companies like SpaceX, and now Airbus, are developing technologies that can bring the rocket engines back to the launchpad, so that they can be reused. SpaceX, which is currently leading the charge in this area, says that it wants to reuse rocket engines and fuel tanks within “single-digit hours” of their return. Depending on who you talk to, and the configuration of the rocket, current space launch prices are somewhere around $250-500 million; with reusable components, SpaceX wants to get that price down below $100 million . Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Airbus unveils Adeline, its clever answer to SpaceX’s reusable rockets
Last week’s big announcement of the long-anticipated Fallout 4 included confirmation of Xbox One, PS4, and PC versions of the game. But there was no official word on any versions for the tens of millions of gamers who still use an Xbox 360 or PS3. Now, Bethesda has confirmed that those gamers will need to upgrade their hardware if they want to revisit the wasteland. “[ Fallout 4 ] is not coming to 360 and PS3,” community manager Matt Grandstaff said in a NeoGAF thread about the game. “The stuff we’re doing will never work there.” That’s good news from a technical standpoint—the development team won’t have to hold back the game’s design to make it run on aging hardware—but bad news for those who have yet to buy a new console. Fallout 4 is part of a small wave of major franchises ignoring older consoles in upcoming releases. Activision’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 will be on “Xbox One, PS4 and PC. That’s it,” Treyarch studio head Mark Lamia told Eurogamer . Street Fighter V will be coming to PlayStation 4 and PC but not the aging PS3. And then there are first-party titles like Halo 5 , Forza Motorosport 6 , Uncharted 4 , and Ratchet & Clank that will be eschewing older consoles this time around. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Fallout 4 won’t be coming to Xbox 360 or PS3
SAN FRANCISCO—As usual, another opening-day WWDC keynote has brought with it another new version of OS X. The new version, El Capitan, introduces a handful of new features to the platform but is otherwise focused on refinement, both in the overall stability of the OS and in its visual identity (El Capitan switches the system font from Helvetica Neue to the Apple Watch’s San Francisco typeface , which changes the look of the OS in subtle but significant ways). Spotlight becomes “more expressive,” according to Apple VP Craig Federighi. There are also improvements to window management and the built-in apps. On stage, Federighi showed off an improvement to the UI where a shake of the mouse causes the cursor to temporarily grow huge—for finding the cursor when first sitting down. The updated version of Safari shipping with El Capitan introduces the concept of pinned sites, which will load instantly on starting up Safari and which will remain in persistent tabs in the Safari UI. The browser also now allows users to see which tabs are playing music (similar to Chrome), and to mute noisy tabs with a single gesture. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Apple unveils the next version of OS X, “El Capitan”
SAN FRANCISCO—As expected, Apple used its WWDC keynote today to take the wraps off iOS 9, the newest version of its operating system for iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches. While iOS 7 and iOS 8 ushered in big changes, iOS 9 will instead focus on speed and stability. In other words, iOS 9 will be to iOS 8 as OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was to OS X 10.5 . That said, Apple isn’t promoting iOS 9 using Snow Leopard’s “no new features” label. The new operating system harvests some of iOS 8’s lowest-hanging fruit and continues the work of opening the platform up to developers. It also tweaks the aesthetic introduced back in iOS 7. You fancy, WatchOS-like UI. 3 more images in gallery Among the highlighted updates for iOS 9, Apple VP Craig Federighi started by detailing an improved Siri. The assistant now has an updated UI to match WatchOS, but more importantly Siri has evolved into a more proactive assistant. For examples of this functionality, Federighi mentioned Siri can automatically play music you like from the lockscreen while on a run. iOS 9 Siri can add things to the calendar alongside a “time to leave” reminder that keeps traffic data in mind. And when unknown phone numbers reach out, the newly proactive Siri will scan your e-mail to try to identify who is getting in touch. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Newly unveiled iOS 9 focuses on more proactive Siri, better multitasking
WheezyJoe writes: The NY Times brings us a story on the Disney Corporation laying off U.S. tech workers and replacing them with immigrants visiting the country under H1-B visas. The twist is that the immigrant workers are not your nice local visiting foreign guy from the university who wants to stick around ’cause he likes the people here… they are employees of foreign-based consulting companies in the business of collecting H1-B visas and “import[ing] workers for large contracts to take over entire in-house technology units.” The other twist? The U.S. tech workers are required to train their replacements before vacating their jobs, or risk losing severance benefits (excerpts of the Disney’s layoff notice are included in the article). Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Disney Making Laid-Off US Tech Workers Train Foreign H1-B Replacements