The inedible green leaves left behind during pineapple harvesting contain fibers that can be transformed into goods traditionally made from leather, including shoes, bags, and other leather accessories. Pinatex has details. (more…)
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These shoes are made of pineapple leaves
Enlarge / Dangling bits of old poles hanging off new poles, from a union complaint against Verizon in October 2015. (credit: CWA ) Verizon and a union representing its workers have reached a settlement requiring the company to fix thousands of problems in areas of Pennsylvania where it hasn’t upgraded its copper network to fiber. The settlement of the union’s complaint “will require the company to repair and replace bad cable, defective equipment, faulty back-up batteries, and to take down 15,000 double telephone poles,” the Communications Workers of America (CWA) said Friday . Double poles occur when “Verizon has failed to move its equipment from an old pole that was replaced with a new one by another utility (e.g., the electric company),” the CWA said. “In many cases, these are dangerous conditions—poles are falling, leaning, rotting, partially cut off, etc.” Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Verizon is forced to fix 15,000 “double poles” and other network problems
Microsoft has been steadily working on bringing the full Windows experience to devices of all types over the past few years, including PCs, phones and even the Xbox One. But there are still a few differences with how Windows runs across them. That’s why the company is developing CShell, a new version of the Windows Shell that can adapt to screen sizes of all types, as well as unify the overall experience. It’ll likely play a large role in Microsoft’s Fluent design strategy , which is broadly focused on scaling Windows to more devices. Now, we’ve got our first look at what CShell actually looks like on a Windows Phone, Windows Central reports . At first glance, CShell looks exactly like the current Windows shell on mobile. But dig a bit deeper, and you’ll notice some important changes. It gives you more size options for Live Tiles on the Start screen, for one. It also brings over the Action Center from Windows 10, and adds a landscape option for displaying the Start screen. CShell also gives Windows Continuum the ability to run several apps at once in windowed mode, instead of forcing them to be full screen. Given that that was one of our biggest gripes with Continuum , it’s a particularly useful upgrade. Source: Windows Central
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Here’s our first look at Windows’ new adaptive interface
The cost of imprisoning each of California’s 130, 000 inmates is expected to reach a record $75, 560 in the next year, the AP reported. From the article: That’s enough to cover the annual cost of attending Harvard University and still have plenty left over for pizza and beer Gov. Jerry Brown’s spending plan for the fiscal year that starts July 1 includes a record $11.4 billion for the corrections department while also predicting that there will be 11, 500 fewer inmates in four years (alternative source) because voters in November approved earlier releases for many inmates. The price for each inmate has doubled since 2005, even as court orders related to overcrowding have reduced the population by about one-quarter. Salaries and benefits for prison guards and medical providers drove much of the increase. The result is a per-inmate cost that is the nation’s highest — and $2, 000 above tuition, fees, room and board, and other expenses to attend Harvard. Since 2015, California’s per-inmate costs have surged nearly $10, 000, or about 13%. New York is a distant second in overall costs at about $69, 000. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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At $75,560, Housing a Prisoner in California Now Costs More Than a Year at Harvard
An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via Motherboard: Mobile phone forensic extraction devices have been a law enforcement tool for years now, and the number of agencies using them is only rising. As part of an ongoing investigation, we have finally been able to turn up some usage logs of this equipment, from Tulsa Police Department, and Tucson Police Department. While the logs do not list the cause of the crime or any other notes about why the phone was being searched, it does list the make of the phone, the date, and the type of extraction. First, let’s go over what extraction devices are being used here. Tucson PD opted for the brand that is arguably the worldwide leader in mobile device forensics, the Israeli company Cellebrite. Tulsa Police Department however opted for a few different models — they purchased two different password breakers from Teel Technologies in 2015, and in March 2016 gave about $1, 500 to Susteen for their SecureView extraction device (SecureView was the product Susteen created when the FBI requested they create a more advanced extraction device for them). It does its work instantly, and has an incredible reach into a phone’s data. They renewed this contract in 2017. In August 2016 they also purchased the Detective extraction device from Oxygen Forensics. Oxygen is much less common than Cellebrite, from what we have found. The kicker really is how often these are being used — it is simply really hard to believe that out of the 783 times Tulsa Police used their extraction devices, all were for crimes in which it was necessary to look at all of the phone’s data. Even for the 316 times Tucson PD used theirs in the last year, it is still a real stretch to think that some low-level non-violent offenders weren’t on the receiving end. There are some days where the devices were used multiple times — Tulsa used theirs eight times on February 28th of this year, eight again on April 3rd, and a whopping 14 times on May 10th 2016. That is a whole lot of data that Tulsa was able to tap into, and we aren’t even able to understand the why. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Police In Oklahoma Have Cracked Hundreds of People’s Cell Phones
Quake was a groundbreaking game in a number of ways, and that included its soundtrack — id Software scored a coup when it got Nine Inch Nails (technically, Trent Reznor ) to score the grim first-person shooter. Until now, though, listening to that soundtrack has usually meant digging up your circa-1996 game CD or (let’s be honest) finding a YouTube rip. Thankfully, you’ll soon have an alternative if you own a turntable. As part of a larger wave of back catalog releases, Reznor is making the Quake soundtrack available on vinyl — you too can listen to that memorable theme in your living room. There’s no date or price for pre-orders, but NIN’s current pricing for single-record LPs suggests you’ll be paying around $20. You might not have to wait long to get your copy after it ships, at least. NIN recently ran into serious delivery problems for other albums, but a recent change in fulfillment partners should have sorted that out. If you haven’t listened to the Quake soundtrack before, it’s important to note that most of it is eerie ambient fare. You’re not getting B-sides to The Downward Spiral , folks. It added to the game’s sinister atmosphere, however, and the star power behind the soundtrack stood out at a time when many developers were just happy to have more than generic-sounding MIDI tunes. This work also led to Reznor being tapped to compose the score for Doom 3 , though he ultimately left the project. Whatever you feel about Quake , consider this: while vinyl game soundtrack releases are relatively common nowadays, this is likely the only one you’ll ever get from an Oscar-winning artist who works in the tech industry . Source: Nine Inch Nails
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Trent Reznor blows dust off the ‘Quake’ score for vinyl reissue
Atlas Obscura discloses a secret library, The Conjuring Arts Research Center , established to preserve the secrets of magic! The not-for-profit organization was established in 2003, “dedicated to the preservation and interpretation of magic and its allied arts.” It was started by William Kalush, who developed a love of magic from the card tricks shown to him by his father, a Marine wounded in World War II. This love of card magic turned to a love of collecting magic books, which now form a wondrous collection of over 15,000 books—some dating to over 600 years old—housed in this hidden location. “I like early books that no one else has ever seen”, Kalush says, sitting in a high-backed, ornately carved wooden chair that wouldn’t look out of place with a wizard sitting on it. “Books of performances pieces, card secrets, many that are unique.” Browsing through the shelves stacked with all things conjuring, you will find obscure books on sleight-of-hand techniques, mentalism, deceptive gambling, the history of magic, and the mysterious secrets of card tricks. One book is the seminal The Expert At the Card Table, which appeared in 1902, written by an S. W. Erdnase. It’s one of the most detailed collections of sleight-of-hand techniques and card sharping, a book so iconic and well-studied within magic circles it is known as “the Bible.” Appropriately enough, S. W. Erdnase was a pseudonym. The real identity of the writer has remained a century-old mystery.
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The Conjuring Arts Research Center: Manhattan’s hidden library of magic
In a post to the venerable NANOG list (mirrored since to Dave Farber’s Interesting People list), anti-spam researcher Ronald F. Guilmette posts the results of his investigation into the IP addresses claimed by a mysterious company called host-offshore.com — IP addresses assigned to “various parties within the nation of Columbia (including the National University thereof)” but, strangely, routed through Bulgaria. (more…)
In an interview with Time earlier this week, Sony Head of Global Marketing and Sales Jim Ryan said that “when we’ve dabbled with backwards compatibility, I can say it is one of those features that is much requested, but not actually used much.” An in-depth Ars Technica analysis of Xbox Live user data shows that sentiment is definitely true, at least when it comes to Microsoft’s competing consoles. Our analysis used a third-party API to randomly sample usage data from nearly one million active Xbox One Gamertags over a period of nearly five months starting last September ( read the introductory piece for much more about the data and methodology). In the end, only about 1.5 percent of the more than 1.65 billion minutes of Xbox One usage time we tracked was spent on the 300+ backward-compatible Xbox 360 games, in aggregate. That translates to an average of just 23.9 minutes per sampled active Xbox One user spent on Xbox 360 games out of 1,526 average minutes of Xbox One usage during the sampling period. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Xbox one users largely ignore backward-compatible Xbox 360 games
Upon close inspection of the Windows 10 build that Microsoft accidentally pushed to insiders last week, several users are reporting discovering the reference of a new Windows 10 SKU. From a report: In a leaked slide, Microsoft describes the edition as “Windows 10 Pro for Workstation” with four main capabilities: 1. Workstation mode: Microsoft plans to optimize the OS by identifying “typical compute and graphics intensive workloads” to provide peak performance and reliability when Workstation mode is enabled. 2. Resilient file system: Microsoft’s file system successor to NTFS, dubbed ReFS, is enabled in this new version, with support for fault-tolerance, optimized for large data volumes, and auto-correcting. 3. Faster file handling: As workstation machines are typically used for large data volumes across networks, Microsoft is including the SMBDirect protocol for file sharing and high throughput, low latency, and low CPU utilization when accessing network shares. 4. Expanded hardware support: Microsoft is also planning to allow Windows 10 Pro for Workstation on machines with up to 4 CPUs and a memory limit of 6TB. Windows 10 Pro currently only supports 2 CPUs. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Microsoft Leak Reveals New Windows 10 Workstation Edition For Power Users