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…
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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
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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)
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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
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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
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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.
The Markagrunt gravity slide in Utah includes most of the area between Beaver, Cedar City, and Panguitch. Google Earth Some things can be too big to notice, as our flat-Earth-believing ancestors can attest, having failed to work out that the surface of the Earth curves around a sphere. Or, as the saying goes, you can focus on the details of some fascinating trees and miss interesting facts about the forest as a whole. In southwest Utah, geologists had noticed some pretty cool “trees.” The area had been volcanically active between 21 and 31 million years ago, building up a host of steep, volcanic peaks. A number of huge blocks of rock from these peaks, up to 2.5 square kilometers in area and 200 meters thick, are obviously out of place—they’ve been interpreted by geologists as the result of many landslides around the volcanoes. In a recent paper in Geology , David Hacker , Robert Biek , and Peter Rowley show that rather than being the result of many individual landslides, these are actually all part of one jaw-droppingly large event. The deposit, called the Markagunt gravity slide, covers an area about 90 kilometers long and 40 kilometers wide and is hundreds of meters thick. During the event, all of this slid 30 kilometers or more. The scale puts run-of-the-mill landslides—as terrifying and deadly as they can be—to shame. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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One of world’s largest landslide deposits discovered in Utah
Facebook is thankfully taking more steps to show fewer spammy posts on your News Feed — and we’re not talking about traditional web ads. We’re talking about overly promotional status updates posted by Page accounts, like the ones you can see after the break. The social network promised to bury “like-bait” posts (of the “1 Like = 1 Prayer” type) underneath more relevant content earlier this year, and now it’s doing the same thing to Page statuses that fall under any of these criteria: Posts that solely push people to buy a product or install an app Posts that push people to enter promotions and sweepstakes with no real context Posts that reuse the exact same content from ads Facebook’s devs have decided push through with this change, after a survey asking users how the News Feed can be improved revealed that people (as you’d expect) want to see more of their friends’ status updates. Non-spammy businesses and individual Pages don’t have anything to worry about, though — they will not be affected when the refreshed News Feed algorithm takes effect in January 2015. [Image credit: Shutterstock] Filed under: Misc , Facebook Comments Source: Facebook
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Facebook will filter out excessively promotional Page posts in 2015
Add / Remove The makers movement has come to prominence in the past few years as new technologies such as 3D printing and DIY computers have given consumers better tools to create and produce their own designs and gadgets. Even the fashion industry has received a boost from such innovation, and we’ve already seen sneakers made with a 3D printer . Now the OpenKnit project has created a device that’s able to automatically create custom clothes from a digital file. The machine looks much like a traditional loom, except that it’s hooked up to a robot and computer. Users can either download or create their own design files for printing a garment. After uploading the file to the machine and loading the thread, a carriage moves from side to side to weave the item together using similar technology to a sewing machine. A sensor on the top keeps track of the needles and the position of the carriage to ensure the threads don’t get tangled. Using the system, a sweatshirt can be produced on the fly in roughly 1 hour. The OpenKnit machine is an open source design, and it costs under EUR 550 to build. Watch the following video to see OpenKnit in action: Since personalization is a key facet of fashion design, it’s easy to see how the possibility of consumers printing their own styles is an enticing one. Are there other machines that could bring complex manufacturing capabilities into the home? Website: www.openknit.org Contact: www.openknit.org/newsletter
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Machine lets anyone print their own clothes at home
We’ve been promising airless, puncture-proof tires for – bloody-ever by this point. But pump-haters, your time is arriving: starting next week, a factory in Piedmont, SC is going to start pumping them out. Read more…
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Michelin’s Airless Tire Might Actually Start Existing