If you combined the SkyMall catalog with the Christmas list of some spoiled rich kid you’d end up with Hammacher Schlemmer: an impossible menagerie of everything from shoe polishers, to talking scales, to this amazing set of underwater thrusters that you wear like a pair of Iron Man’s pants. If there’s a better way to spend $31, 000 we haven’t seen it. Read more…
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You Can’t Buy These Underwater Iron Man Thrusters Without Gov’t Approval
There’s just enough time to pop off for a far-flung holiday before summer ends, and Sprint’s trying to make calling home from Guangzhou a little easier. The canary-hued carrier announced the other day that it’s launching free international WiFi calling for a handful of compatible Android smartphones. For better or worse, some older hardware is getting the nod first: Samsung’s Spark-friendly Galaxy S 4 will get the update before the ten other devices capable of making WiFi calls. Curiously enough, the name Sprint chose is actually sort of a misnomer. Yes, you can gab with your folks back home over WiFi, but you can fire off messages free of charge too. Just remember that it’s only WiFi calls to the US from abroad that don’t cost anything — WiFi calling Bangkok from the States will hit your wallet, as will international Wi-Fi calls to non-US numbers. Got it? Good. Comments Source: Sprint
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Sprint offers free international WiFi calls for your next overseas jaunt
Amazon has built its brand around consistency—it rarely follows popular user interface trends, and its design mission has always been ruthless pragmatism. But now, for the first time in many, many years, it’s given its login page an overhaul. It’s the end of an era, and it could signal broader, site-wide changes. Read more…
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Amazon Redesigns Its Login Page For the First Time In Decades
Alienware is famous for two things. One: selling ever more powerful gaming computers. Two: making them look like they were designed by aliens. But its latest full-size desktop gaming PC isn’t just another box sculpted to look like it’s out of this world. In fact, the new Alienware Area-51 is trying to challenge the assumption that PC gamers need a “box” at all. Read more…
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The New Alienware Area-51 Is the Weirdest Gaming PC I’ve Ever Seen
Most of Intel’s announcements lately have focused on low-power chips, but every now and again it throws a bone to its high-end desktop users. Today we’re getting our first look at Haswell-E and a new Core i7 Extreme Edition CPU, a moniker reserved for the biggest and fastest of Intel’s consumer and workstation CPUs (if you want something faster than that, you’ll need to start looking at Xeons). We already got a little bit of information on these chips back in March , when Intel made announcements related to refreshed Haswell chips (“Devil’s Canyon”) and a handful of other desktop processors. Though much of today’s information has already leaked, we’ll run down the most important stuff for those of you who don’t follow every leaked slide that makes its way to the public. The CPUs Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Haswell-E arrives, bringing a $999 8-core desktop CPU with it
The Bad Astronomer writes: Astronomers have found a 5.4 Earth-mass planet orbiting the star Gliese 15A, a red dwarf in a binary system just 11.7 light years away (PDF). Other exoplanets candidates have been found that are closer, but they are as yet unconfirmed. This is more evidence that alien planets are common in the galaxy. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Astronomers Find What May Be the Closest Exoplanet So Far
The largest companies consume a shockingly huge amount of the world’s natural resources. Ikea, for instance, uses 17.8 million cubic yards of wood a year. When it comes to cotton, there’s VF Corp., a relatively unknown corporation that owns some of the best-known clothing brands in the world. Read more…
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A single clothing company consumes 1% of the world’s cotton
It’s not just you. Instagram is down, with users reporting 503 errors. Don’t worry, they’re on it , but th ey better hurry, or I’ll have to show these photos of my lunch to the mailman. Update : It’s back. Whew. Read more…
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It’s not just you.
Starbucks is rolling out pumpkin spice lattes, starting with an early access option that starts today. This means it’s the time of year for everyone’s favorite overpriced seasonal beverage. This doesn’t mean we’ll be adding extra pumpkin to our diet, because Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Lattes™, despite the name, contain no pumpkin. Read more…
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Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Lattes™ have no pumpkin in them
An anonymous reader writes “The PHP team has announced the release of PHP 5.6.0. New features include constant scalar expressions, exponentiation using the ** operator, function and constant importing with the use keyword, support for file uploads larger than 2 GB, and phpdbg as an interactive integrated debugger SAPI. The team also notes important changes affecting compatibility. For example: “Array keys won’t be overwritten when defining an array as a property of a class via an array literal, ” json_decode() is now more strict at parsing JSON syntax, and GMP resources are now objects. Here is the migration guide, the full change log, and the downloads page.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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PHP 5.6.0 Released