The Roku 4 and its remote. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) Movie buffs looking for titles to watch now have a new option on Roku devices. Roku announced that its new channel (aptly dubbed The Roku Channel) is now available for all US users that have a Roku device made after June 2011. This channel has a bunch of movies from studios including Lionsgate, MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Warner Brothers that are available to watch for free with advertisements. Roku revealed plans for this channel about a month ago, but now it has rolled out to all customers with compatible devices. Roku has curated content collections in the past, like its Roku Recommends and 4K Spotlight sections. But now the company is actively seeking licensing agreements with studios to offer movies and TV shows on The Roku Channel. In addition to big studios, the channel also has content from smaller companies including Popcornflix and American Classics. After adding the channel to your Roku homepage (it’s under the “Featured,” “New and Notable,” and “Movies and TV” sections in the Streaming Channels setting), you can watch any of the available titles for free. There will be ads throughout the movie, so it’ll be more similar to watching a movie on a broadcast network than streaming one on Netflix. And don’t expect to see the newest movies or the latest seasons of your favorite TV shows on The Roku Channel: since viewing is free, most of the content available is older. Roku cites Mission: Impossible 3, Beauty Shop, Philadelphia, and Zookeeper as just a few of the options available. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Roku’s new ad-supported channel lets you watch a bunch of movies for free
Reader John Tromp points to an explanation posted at GitHub of a computational challenge Tromp coordinated that makes a nice companion to the recent discovery of a 22 million-digit Mersenne prime. A distributed effort using pooled computers from two centers at Princeton, and more contributed from the HP Helion cloud, after “many hiccups and a few catastrophes” calculated the number of legal positions in a 19×19 game of Go. Simple as Go board layout is, the permutations allowed by the rules are anything but simple to calculate: “For running an L19 job, a beefy server with 15TB of fast scratch diskspace, 8 to 16 cores, and 192GB of RAM, is recommended. Expect a few months of running time.” More: Large numbers have a way of popping up in the game of Go. Few people believe that a tiny 2×2 Go board allows for more than a few hundred games. Yet 2×2 games number not in the hundreds, nor in the thousands, nor even in the millions. They number in the hundreds of billions! 386356909593 to be precise. Things only get crazier as you go up in boardsize. A lower bound of 10^10^48 on the number of 19×19 games, as proved in our paper, was recently improved to a googolplex. (For anyone who wants to double check his work, Tromp has posted as open source the software used.) Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
A NAS, or network-attached storage device, is great for storing files you can reach from any computer in the house. But when you upgrade to a new one, you’re stuck copying everything over by hand, swapping drives, and risking data loss. Here’s a much more reliable method. Read more… 
Watching the world go by from the window of a plane at Mach 0.8 is hard to beat, but when it comes to an expanded world view, nobody gets a better picture than the residents of the International Space Station. Check out this time-lapse compilation by Germany’s Alexander Gerst. Read more…