Back in 2011, a group of alcoholics masquerading as scientists managed to somehow persuade their bosses that sending (very small) vials of whiskey to space was a viable ‘experiment’. Four years on, the whiskey has eluded the clutches of the ISS astronauts, as has landed safely back on Earth . Read more…
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Space Whiskey Safely Returned To Earth
Chinese site cnBeta has got its hands on some alleged screenshots of an upcoming refresh of Microsoft Office for Mac. Fans of improved productivity and enhanced workflow, your hour is nigh. Read more…
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This Is What The Next MS Office For Mac Might Look Like
How often do you find yourself interested in playing table tennis only to discover that small plastic ball either missing, crushed, or too sticky from a round of Beer Pong to bounce? The Sharper Image has the solution in the form of this $60 Virtual Pong game that projects a ball of light on the walls and ceiling, saving you from having to spend countless pennies replacing that white plastic IRL one. Read more…
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Virtual Table Tennis Finally Gets Rid Of That Expensive Plastic Ball
An anonymous reader writes Microsoft today announced it is backing the Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) technology and will be supporting the ORTC API in Internet Explorer. Put another way, the company is finally throwing its weight behind the broader industry trend of bringing voice and video calling to the browser without the need for plugins. Both Google and Mozilla are way ahead of Microsoft in this area, both in terms of adding WebRTC features to their respective browsers and in terms of building plugin-free calling services that rely on the technology. In short, Skype is under threat, and Microsoft has finally decided to opt for an “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” strategy. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Microsoft Is Bringing WebRTC To Explorer, Eyes Plugin-Free Skype Calls
An anonymous reader writes Officials say molten lava from a Hawaii volcano has been flowing steadily in an area where residents have been warned they might have to evacuate their homes. Dozens of residents in the flow path have been told to complete all necessary preparations by Tuesday for a possible evacuation. From the article: “Janet Babb, a geologist and spokeswoman for the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, said methane explosions also have been going off. She said decomposing vegetation produces methane gas that can travel subsurface beyond the lava front in different directions, accumulating in pockets that can ignite. She said it was a bit unnerving to hear all the blasts on Saturday.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Lava Flow In Hawaii Gains Speed, Triggers Methane Explosions
Google Drive is down, and it’s taken all of your docs with it. Users have been reporting outages since 11:20 , which is very annoying if you use Google Docs for work—like all my coworkers and I do. Fingers crossed they fix it soon! Read more…
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Google Drive is down, and it’s taken all of your docs with it.
In mid-July, Microsoft announced that’d it be rolling at a 1 TB storage increase for all its Office 365 Home, Personal, and University subscribers. But the team decided continue its push for cloud supremacy by upping its storage capacity into infinity. Office 365 users now have access to unlimited storage via OneDrive for free. Read more…
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Office 365 Subscribers Now Get Unlimited OneDrive Storage
An anonymous reader writes: 390, 127 Brits declared their religion as Jediism in their last census — many as a joke, but some are quite serious, the BBC reports. Cambridge University Divinity Faculty researcher Beth Singler estimates at least 2, 000 of them are “genuine, ” around the same number as the Church of Scientology. The U.K. Church of Jediism has 200, 000 members worldwide. Their belief system has expanded well beyond the Star Wars universe to include tenets from Taoism, Buddhism, Catholicism and Samurai. Former priest, psychotherapist and writer Mark Vernon finds real power in the Jedi story: “The reason it’s so powerful and universal is that we have to find ourselves. It’s by losing ourselves and identifying with something greater like the Jedi myth that we find a fuller life.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Jedi-ism Becomes a Serious Religion
MojoKid writes When Apple debuted its A8 SoC, it proved to be a modest tweak of the original A7. Despite packing double the transistors and an improved GPU, the heart of the A8 SoC is the same dual-core Apple “Cyclone” processor tweaked to run at higher clock speeds and with stronger total GPU performance. Given this, many expected that the Apple A8X would be cut from similar cloth — a higher clock speed, perhaps, and a larger GPU, but not much more than that. It appears those projections were wrong. The Apple A8X chip is a triple-core variant of the A8, with a higher clock speed (1.5GHz vs. 1.4GHz), a larger L2 cache (2MB, up from 1MB) and 2GB of external DDR3. It also uses an internal metal heatspreader, which the Apple A8 eschews. All of this points to slightly higher power consumption for the core, but also to dramatically increased performance. The new A8X is a significant power house in multiple types of workloads; in fact, its the top-performing mobile device on Geekbench by a wide margin. Gaming benchmarks are equally impressive. The iPad Air 2 nudges out Nvidia’s Shield in GFXBench’s Manhattan offscreen test, at 32.4fps to 31 fps. Onscreen favors the NV solution thanks to its lower-resolution screen, but the Nvidia device does take 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited by a wide margin, clocking in at 30, 970 compared to 21, 659. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Apple A8X IPad Air 2 Processor Packs Triple-Core CPU, Hefty Graphics Punch
sabri writes: Following the initial suspension of a California Highway Patrol officer earlier this week, news has come out that the CHP has an entire ring of officers who steal and subsequently share nude pictures. The nudes are stolen from women who are arrested or stopped. Officer Sean Harrington of Martinez reportedly confessed to stealing explicit photos from the suspect’s phone, and said he forwarded those images to at least two other CHP officers. Where is the ACLU when you need them the most? Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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CHP Officers Steal, Forward Nude Pictures From Arrestee Smartphones