According to several reports , the ‘largest-ever technology merger’ is set to be announced later today — and it’s between Dell and storage technology firm EMC, in a deal said to be worth over $50 billion. Read more…
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Dell Reported to Announce $50 Billion ‘Biggest Deal in Tech’ Later Today
While Airbus is figuring out how to stack folks double-height in Business Class, Boeing has been looking into ultralight metallic structures. HRL Laboratories , a research institute that does R&D for Boeing, has developed what they’re calling “the world’s lightest material.” And despite it being 100 times lighter than Styrofoam, it’s actually made out of metal . The researchers achieved this by creating “a lattice of interconnected hollow tubes with a wall thickness of 100 nanometers, 1, 000 times thinner than a human hair, ” resulting in a piece of metal (nickel, at least in the prototypes) that is 99.99% air. Take a look: Direct applications have not yet been settled on, but might include structural reinforcement, shock absorption or heat transfer. Also not clear is whether we’ll see these “microlattices” pop up first in airplanes—or cars. HRL Laboratories also does R&D for General Motors.
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Microlattice: Metal That’s 100 Times Lighter than Styrofoam
An anonymous reader writes: Data center provider Switch is planning to build a huge facility in Reno, Nevada, which it claims will be the largest data center campus in the world once completed. Switch has said that the SuperNap Reno campus will cost $3bn when fully built. The project will include seven data center buildings of the same size, totaling 6.49mn sq. ft. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Switch To Build Largest Data Center In the World In Reno
NASA says these streaks are proof that water flows on Mars. NASA Well, this is big. NASA today revealed that new findings from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) provide “the strongest evidence yet that liquid water flows intermittently on present-day Mars.” Here’s the announcement: Using an imaging spectrometer on MRO, researchers detected signatures of hydrated minerals on slopes where mysterious streaks are seen on the Red Planet. These darkish streaks appear to ebb and flow over time. They darken and appear to flow down steep slopes during warm seasons, and then fade in cooler seasons. They appear in several locations on Mars when temperatures are above minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 23 Celsius), and disappear at colder times. “Our quest on Mars has been to ‘follow the water,’ in our search for life in the universe, and now we have convincing science that validates what we’ve long suspected,” said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “This is a significant development, as it appears to confirm that water — albeit briny — is flowing today on the surface of Mars.” These downhill flows, known as recurring slope lineae (RSL), often have been described as possibly related to liquid water. The new findings of hydrated salts on the slopes point to what that relationship may be to these dark features. The hydrated salts would lower the freezing point of a liquid brine, just as salt on roads here on Earth causes ice and snow to melt more rapidly. Scientists say it’s likely a shallow subsurface flow, with enough water wicking to the surface to explain the darkening. “We found the hydrated salts only when the seasonal features were widest, which suggests that either the dark streaks themselves or a process that forms them is the source of the hydration. In either case, the detection of hydrated salts on these slopes means that water plays a vital role in the formation of these streaks,” said Lujendra Ojha of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in Atlanta, lead author of a report on these findings published Sept. 28 by Nature Geoscience. Ojha first noticed these puzzling features as a University of Arizona undergraduate student in 2010, using images from the MRO’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE). HiRISE observations now have documented RSL at dozens of sites on Mars. The new study pairs HiRISE observations with mineral mapping by MRO’s Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM). The spectrometer observations show signatures of hydrated salts at multiple RSL locations, but only when the dark features were relatively wide. When the researchers looked at the same locations and RSL weren’t as extensive, they detected no hydrated salt. Ojha and his co-authors interpret the spectral signatures as caused by hydrated minerals called perchlorates. The hydrated salts most consistent with the chemical signatures are likely a mixture of magnesium perchlorate, magnesium chlorate and sodium perchlorate. Some perchlorates have been shown to keep liquids from freezing even when conditions are as cold as minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 70 Celsius). On Earth, naturally produced perchlorates are concentrated in deserts, and some types of perchlorates can be used as rocket propellant. Perchlorates have previously been seen on Mars. NASA’s Phoenix lander and Curiosity rover both found them in the planet’s soil, and some scientists believe that the Viking missions in the 1970s measured signatures of these salts. However, this study of RSL detected perchlorates, now in hydrated form, in different areas than those explored by the landers. This also is the first time perchlorates have been identified from orbit. MRO has been examining Mars since 2006 with its six science instruments. “The ability of MRO to observe for multiple Mars years with a payload able to see the fine detail of these features has enabled findings such as these: first identifying the puzzling seasonal streaks and now making a big step towards explaining what they are,” said Rich Zurek, MRO project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. For Ojha, the new findings are more proof that the mysterious lines he first saw darkening Martian slopes five years ago are, indeed, present-day water. “When most people talk about water on Mars, they’re usually talking about ancient water or frozen water,” he said. “Now we know there’s more to the story. This is the first spectral detection that unambiguously supports our liquid water-formation hypotheses for RSL.” The discovery is the latest of many breakthroughs by NASA’s Mars missions. “It took multiple spacecraft over several years to solve this mystery, and now we know there is liquid water on the surface of this cold, desert planet,” said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. “It seems that the more we study Mars, the more we learn how life could be supported and where there are resources to support life in the future.” There are eight co-authors of the Nature Geoscience paper, including Mary Beth Wilhelm at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California and Georgia Tech; CRISM Principal Investigator Scott Murchie of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland; and HiRISE Principal Investigator Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in Tucson, Arizona. Others are at Georgia Tech, the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and Laboratoire de Planétologie et Géodynamique in Nantes, France. The agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, a division of the California Institute of Technology, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin built the orbiter and collaborates with JPL to operate it. More information about NASA’s journey to Mars is available online at nasa.gov/topics/journeytomars .
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Water on Mars, NASA reveals
Office 2016 is out of preview today , and in a sentence, it represents Microsoft’s most obvious effort yet to catch up with Google Drive. Though the new release looks generally the same as the last version, it’s designed for sharing and collaboration in a way that Office 2013 really wasn’t. In particular, Office 2016 introduces real-time co-authoring (a feature already available in the web version of Office), along with the ability to attach OneDrive files to emails in Outlook. In addition to Google, though, the new software takes aim at various other tools businesses might be using, including Slack (for chatting) and Trello (for to-do lists and task management). You might even be able to avoid the browser sometimes, thanks to built-in Bing search results. Microsoft’s goal with Office 2016, then, wasn’t just to match what Google Docs can do, but to ensure business users in particular barely need to leave the app.Slideshow-321997 It’s all about collaboration That flat Ribbon, that launch screen full of thumbnails — you’ve seen it all before. With a few exceptions, Office 2016 looks identical to the version that came before it, although each app now has a colorful header instead of a white one (think: blue for Word and green for Excel). Microsoft actually already does that with the Office for iPad app, so you could say even this tweak isn’t really new; the company’s just doing some tune-up to make sure its apps look consistent across different platforms. That dash of color aside, all the visual changes here were meant to make room for new features and functionality. Take a look at the upper-right corner in Word, Excel or PowerPoint, for instance, and you’ll see a new Share button. Click that, and you’ll open a panel from which you can share documents by entering an email address. (By default, you can share with whomever you want, although IT departments will have the ability to make it so that you can only share with people inside your organization.) From this pane, you can also see a list of each person who has access to the document, with notes like “editing” or “can edit” to help clarify who’s currently in the doc. Speaking of the sort, Office 2016 adds real-time co-authoring, a feature that’s been offered in the browser version for almost two years now. The way it’s implemented, you can see where your colleagues are in the document and see their edits as they make them, similar to how Google Drive works. This is a big improvement over Office 2013, whose few collaboration features were clearly an afterthought — at best, it would lock up whole paragraphs while someone else was editing. Needless to say, it’s about time. In addition to making it easier for folks to edit a document at the same time, Microsoft made another obvious, overdue move: It built in Skype so that you can send IMs and place calls from within Office apps. Notably, too, you don’t need a Skype for Business account to use this feature; even an individual consumer account will do. That said, for business users (the people this is really aimed at, anyway), having in-line Skype conversations could in theory eliminate the need for other chat apps, like Slack. Ya know, because having one fewer open window is always a good thing. Then again, this Skype integration probably makes the most sense for businesses that were already using Skype . I’m sure there are plenty of them, too, but that’s still a big “if.” At Engadget’s parent company, for instance, the entire organization uses Slack, which means it doesn’t come out of Engadget’s budget, specifically. That alone would make paying for Skype for Business a tough sell for us, however cool we find the Office 2016 integration. Basically, then, this new feature is a nice time- and space-saver for companies that already subscribe to Skype, but it won’t necessarily be reason enough to get new ones on board. Cortana, search and a replacement for Clippy If collaboration is the biggest theme in Office 2016, then “improved search” is surely the runner-up. As the first version of Office built for Windows 10, Office 2016 was designed to work closely with Cortana, Microsoft’s ubiquitous personal assistant. That means you can say to her things like, “Show me my schedule for the day, ” and she’ll read you a list of your meetings, pulled directly from your Outlook calendar. Meanwhile, the various Office apps themselves bring improved built-in search, including a feature called Smart Lookup that allows you to perform web searches from inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, without having to launch your browser. Well, if you don’t need more than a quick reference, anyway. While playing around in Word, for instance, I did a search for carbon nanotubes, which brought up a mix of webpage previews from sites like Wikipedia, as well as thumbnails from Bing image search. If all I needed was a quick word definition or a little extra context on a topic with which I was unfamiliar, this inline search would have sufficed. As soon as you click on anything, though, whether it be an article link or an image from Bing, you’ll be taken straight to a new browser tab. In general, the new Office keeps you from having to use some other tools, but I suspect the browser will still be in heavy rotation in most people’s workflows. Even navigating the Office apps themselves is now easier. Thanks to a new feature called Tell Me, you can use a search bar in Word, Excel and PowerPoint to — wait for it — tell the app what it is you want to do. (You can also use the Alt-Q command if you’re into keyboard shortcuts.) So, when I type in “Sunburst” (the name of a new chart type in Excel), the app will give me the option of selecting from the two most relevant hierarchy charts, with Sunburst being one of them (“Treemap” is the other). I can not only add a chart from the Tell Me box, but also move my cursor over the different chart options listed and see my data transform in real time. All told, then, I was able to bypass the help tool, as well as save time digging through menus in the Ribbon. In that sense, Tell Me feels like the closest thing we have to a replacement for good ol’ Clippy — just less annoying. Outlook Outlook has perhaps received more improvements in 2016 than any of the other Office apps. First off, continuing with the whole collaboration theme, Office 365 Groups are now built into Outlook, so you can see your shared inbox, calendar, notebook and OneDrive inline. Additionally, the live search feature is now faster, allowing you to whittle down your inbox. You can also attach recently used documents to emails, and that includes both locally stored items and files that live in the cloud. If you attach something from OneDrive, Outlook will attach a browser link and automatically grant permissions to that person. Basically, it works the same way as Gmail, when you want to share Google Drive files. Moving on, Microsoft also added a feature called Clutter that, over time, learns your habits, observes which mail you read and which you ignore and eventually starts putting your low-priority mail in a separate folder. The one thing you need to watch out for here is that Clutter doesn’t draw attention to itself in any way, meaning it’s not going to give you an occasional pop-up saying “you have 20 emails in Clutter waiting to be read.” You’ll have to remember to check it, as you would a spam folder. Also, Clutter is enabled by default, although you can turn it off if you like. For both these reasons, then, I think I prefer the “Sweep” feature in Hotmail, where you can set up rules for what gets shoved aside, and what happens to it. That approach is more passive, but also grants me more control. Excel Excel also received a few minor updates. And I do mean minor. All we really have here are six new chart types, including “Waterfall” (financial); “Pareto” (statistical); “Treemap” (hierarchical); Histogram; “Box and Whisker” (data distribution with range, quartiles and outliers); and “Sunburst” (hierarchical, shown above). The Tell Me feature works here too, so that you can enter the name of a chart and see the data instantly reshape itself onscreen to fit whatever new chart type you selected. Planner and Delve While Office 2016 largely brings updates to existing apps like Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook, it also ushers in some new tools that simply didn’t exist in the last release. That would include Office 365 Planner , a browser-based tool that attempts to do basically the same thing as Trello or Asana: namely, task- and milestone-based management to make sure projects get done on time. In the dashboard, pictured above, you can view “buckets” (tasks) or instead search by a particular person on your team, to get an overview of everything you’re working on. From there, you can see how many days are left before a deadline, with a color-coded breakdown of what’s completed, late, in progress or not started yet. It’s that last part that’s particularly compelling to me. Something like Trello already lets you filter cards so that you can see what just one person is working on. But what if it’s a collaborative effort, with multiple people depending on each other to get stuff done on time? In situations like that, Planner would seem to have a leg up; it’s easier to understand at a glance where the bottleneck is. Also new in Office 2016 is Delve , which sounds a little like Planner in that it, too, shows a glimpse of what different people in an organization are working on. That said, the app’s Pinterest-style design makes it better-suited for less urgent things like brainstorming, or just generally being aware of what your colleagues are working on. Over time, too, the app will start surfacing articles and other things that might be of interest to you — yep, also kinda like Pinterest. Interestingly, though, Delve doesn’t currently share data from the Edge browser to learn about what you’re interested in. Not that you’d necessarily want that, but I suspect your browser knows more about what you like and don’t like than just about any other app you may have installed. Sway You may have already read about Sway , a newish Microsoft app that allows you to create presentations designed to look good in the browser and across different devices, with support for touch, embedded video, et cetera. In a way, if you look at the finished product, it’s kind of like creating a responsive webpage, except that you don’t get to customize the URL (the best you can do is upload it to Docs — kind of a YouTube for documents — and that can have a custom address). In any case, Sway is already out of preview and hasn’t seen any changes in the final Office 2016 release. Still, it’s worth recapping what it does, and mentioning that it is part of the Office family. In closing The new software is available now to Office 365 subscribers, which continues to start at $70 a year or $7 a month for the Personal edition (access on one computer, tablet and phone; with Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, Publisher and Access included). There’s also a Student package that costs $80 for four years. While people with basic needs are still better off using either Google Drive or the web version of Office for free, business users in particular will appreciate the much-improved sharing features that finally allow them to use Office not just to get their own work done, but also to collaborate with coworkers. If Microsoft’s mission really is to ” reinvent productivity , ” and if businesses are the likeliest to bother paying subscription fees, then it was essential that Office cater not just to individual worker bees, but to whole teams. Microsoft clearly had to play catch-up, and took some cues from big-name competitors like Google and Trello in the process. The company is indeed late, but hopefully, it would seem, not too late. [Image credits: All screenshots courtesy of Microsoft; lead and closing images: Dana Wollman/Engadget.]
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Office 2016 arrives with features meant to take on Google (and everyone else)
Dropbox for Business is an increasingly important part of the company’s revenue stream — there are more than 130, 000 businesses using the service — but there are many more people out there using the company’s more consumer-focused free service and its $9.99 monthly subscription plan. Millions of those users are in fact using their personal Dropbox accounts to get work done, as well — so now Dropbox is going to offer a set of tools to make it a lot easier for individuals and smaller businesses to use Dropbox with a team of co-workers. In fact, that’s the name of the new service that launches tomorrow: Dropbox Teams. Anyone using Dropbox will now have the opportunity to create a team. When you start the process, Dropbox will even suggest users it thinks you should invite based on what documents you share with what people or whether you’re all using the same email address domain. Once your team is set up, everyone will have access to the same shared folder, which Dropbox expects teams will use to share documents that the whole group will need access to. Fortunately, you can also set up sub-groups (like a marketing team, or the specific people involved with a specific project) — that’ll keep everyone on the team from having files they don’t need taking up space in their Dropbox. Dropbox Teams will also give administrators granular control over what different users will have access to — you can limit what files and folders they can see, and you can also decide whether files can be shared or not. Another sharing option is the ability to determine whether folders and files can be shared with people who aren’t on your team. If files are confidential, you can keep them only within your team, but other files will be able to be freely shared with anyone using Dropbox. (Of course, that won’t stop anyone from downloading the file and sharing it via email, but there’s only so much you can expect from a free offering.) The last major feature here is pulled directly from Dropbox for Business. If you happen to have created Dropbox accounts for separate work and personal accounts, Dropbox will let you link them together so you can see them both while logged in, rather than have to log in and out to jump between them. All in all, it’s a pretty generous set of free features: it lets the many people out there already using the popular Dropbox Basic and Pro services for work have more control over how they do that. And it just might help the company sell more Dropbox for Business subscriptions as those small companies start growing up. Source: Dropbox
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Dropbox Teams will offer a host of business features to free users
Slate dissects the strange circumstances that led the price of electricity in Texas to briefly dip not just to zero, but into negative territory, reaching at one point negative $8.52 per megawatt hour. Why? A combination of being an “electricity island” with only weak ties to the surrounding state’s grids; strong wind in a state that’s sprouted thousands of windmills; and infrastructure design that means the only real buyer for most electricity producers’ output is ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. (One of the comments attached to the story notes that Texas is not completely isolated from the national grid, but it’s still markedly isolated.) A slice: Demand fell—at 4 a.m., the amount of electricity needed in the state was about 45 percent lower than the evening peak. The wind was blowing consistently—much later in the day Texas would establish a new instantaneous wind generation record. At 3 a.m., wind was supplying about 30 percent of the state’s electricity, as this daily wind integration report shows. And because the state is an electricity island, all the power produced by the state’s wind farms could only be sold to ERCOT, not grids elsewhere in the country. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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How Wind and Politics Pushed the Price of Texas Electricity Below Zero
An anonymous reader writes: Hewlett-Packard says its upcoming spinoff of its technology divisions focused on software, consulting and data analysis will eliminate up to 30, 000 jobs. The cuts announced Tuesday will be within the newly formed Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which is splitting from the Palo Alto, California company’s personal computer and printing operation. “The new reductions amount to about 10 percent of the new company’s workforce, and will save about $2.7 billion in annual operating costs.” The split is scheduled to be completed by the end of next month. “The head of the group, Mike Nefkens, outlined a plan under which it is cutting jobs in what he called ‘high-cost countries’ and moving them to low-cost countries. He said that by the end of HP Enterprise’s fiscal year 2018, only 40 percent of the group’s work force will be located in high-cost countries.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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HP To Jettison Up To 30,000 Jobs As Part of Spinoff
Joining the likes of Google Play Movies and iTunes, streaming content provider EPIX announced on Tuesday that it will allow subscribers to download movies onto their mobile devices for later playback, whether or not there’s an available internet connection. The feature will reportedly be available on iOS and Android devices as well as Amazon’s Kindle, beginning this month. Available titles will include The Hunger Games , James Bond and Star Trek . There’s no word on limits to how many titles subscribers will be able to concurrently download or how long they’ll be able to keep each one. Filed under: Internet Comments Source: Business Wire Tags: Amazon, Comparison of Android devices, downloads, hungergames, iOS, iTunes, jamesbond, Kindle, Star Trek, streaming
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EPIX enables mobile downloads for offline movie watching
Nevada’s Transportation Authority has granted both Uber and Lyft permits to operate in the state, a few days after approving new rules for ride-hailing services. Those include having to pay administrative fees and to stick decals onto cars that are part of the companies’ fleets. That doesn’t mean you can hail a ride from either app right now, though: neither company has a firm launch date yet. They still have to deal with Clark County officials who refuse to let the companies run their business until they have the proper license. Problem is, the county doesn’t even have a licensing category for ride-sharing/hailing services yet. Clark County plans to start working on a legal framework today, but it could take several weeks to complete the process. That said, both companies hope to begin offering rides in Nevada soon — a Lyft spokesperson even told Tri-City Herald that they are legally required to deploy cars in the state by October 15th. Uber was already available in Nevada last year, but it got suspended after being slapped with a preliminary injunction due to security and insurance concerns. In order to get approval from authorities to operate an unlimited fleet for $500, 000, it had to promise to address four minor issues. Lyft was allowed to deploy 2, 500 cars for $150, 000 if it fixes the Department of Insurance’s concerns about its insurance policy and alter the language for part of its terms of service. [Image credit: Shutterstock] Filed under: Transportation Comments Source: Tri-City Herald , Las Vegas Sun , Reno Gazette-Journal Tags: lasvegas, lyft, nevada, permit, uber
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Uber and Lyft officially allowed to operate in Nevada