These are the contents of a mysterious white bag found hidden in Neil Armstrong’s closet: Weird looking lamps, wrenches, utility brackets, sights, and a film camera that later was identified as the one that captured the famous Apollo 11’s descent on the Moon’s surface. Nobody knew about it, including his widow. Read more…
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Secret stash of Moon artifacts found hidden in Neil Armstrong’s closet
Rambo Tribble writes: Many of the 300+ theaters showing The Interview on Christmas were rewarded with sell-out crowds. While reviews of the comedy have been mixed, many movie-goers expressed solidarity with the sentiment of professor Carlos Royal: “I wanted to support the U.S.” Despite sellout crowds, the movie’s limited release meant it only brought in about $1 million on opening day (compared to $10M+ for the highest-grossing films). Curiosity about the film seems high, since hundreds of thousands rushed to torrent the film, and others figured out an extremely easy way to bypass Sony’s DRM. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Crowds (and Pirates) Flock To ‘The Interview’
An anonymous reader writes: Starting about a week ago, The Great Firewall of China began blocking the Edgecast CDN. This was spurred by Great Fire’s Collateral Freedom project, which used CDNs to get around censorship of individual domains. It left China with either letting go of censorship, or breaking significant chunks of the Internet for their population. China chose to do the latter, and now many websites are no longer functional for Chinese users. I just helped a friend diagnose this problem with his company’s site, so it’s likely many people are still just starting to discover what’s happened and the economic impact is yet to be fully realized. Hopefully pressure on China will reverse the decision. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Great Firewall of China Blocks Edgecast CDN, Thousands of Websites Affected
Vigile (99919) writes “Since the introduction of Intel’s Ivy Bridge processors there was a subset of users that complained about the company’s change of thermal interface material between the die and the heat spreader. With the release of the Core i7-4790K, Intel is moving to a polymer thermal interface material that claims to improve cooling on the Haswell architecture, along with the help of some added capacitors on the back of the CPU. Code named Devil’s Canyon, this processor boosts stock clocks by 500 MHz over the i7-4770K all for the same price ($339) and lowers load temperatures as well. Unfortunately, in this first review at PC Perspective, overclocking doesn’t appear to be improved much.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Intel Core i7-4790K Devil’s Canyon Increases Clocks By 500 MHz, Lowers Temps
itwbennett (1594911) writes “ActiveLink, which is 80% owned by Panasonic, is building heavy-duty strength-boosting suits that the company says can help workers shoulder the burden of heavy gear and protective clothing and could be useful at nuclear plants. ‘Our powered suits could be used to assist and support remote-controlled robots in emergencies, ‘ ActiveLink President Hiromichi Fujimoto said in an interview. ‘Workers could wear the suits to carry PackBots to their deployment point and to work in low-radiation areas.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Robotic Exoskeletons Could Help Nuclear Plant Workers
DroidJason1 (3589319) writes “Microsoft recently announced plans to reintroduce the Start Menu to Windows in an upcoming version of the operating system. While the plan was to roll out an update to Windows 8.1 and offer the Start menu later this year, it seems like this is no longer the case. Now Microsoft is reportedly looking to release the Start Menu with Windows 9, which is expected in April of 2015. Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 have faced a boat load of criticism and hatred, partly due to the removal of the Start button and Start menu. The restoration of a visible Start button on the taskbar was one of the key features of the Windows 8.1 update, released back in October of 2013.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Microsoft Won’t Bring Back the Start Menu Until 2015
necro81 writes: “The FDA today approved the Luke prosthetic arm for sale. The Luke Arm, created by Dean Kamen’s DEKA R&D Corp., was a project initiated by DARPA to develop a prosthetic arm for wounded warriors more advanced than those previously available. The Arm can be configured for below-the-elbow, above-the-elbow, and shoulder-level amputees. The full arm has 10 powered degrees of freedom and has the look and weight of the arm it replaces. Through trials by DEKA and the Dept. of Veterans Affairs, the Arm has been used by dozens of amputees for a total of many thousands of hours. Commercialization is still pending.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Luke Prosthetic Arm Approved By FDA
zarmanto writes: “The numbers have been telling us for a while now that (formerly expensive) feature phones have been slowly displaced by more feature-rich, high-end smartphones. Thus, it should come as no surprise that the other end of the market is also receiving active encroachment by low-end smartphones. Now, ARM is suggesting that it’s actually quite conceivable for OEMs to produce a ‘smartphone’ for as little as $20 — as long as you compromise a bit on those things which actually make it a smartphone in the first place. So, is this just more graying of the line between smartphones and feature phones? Or is this an indication that the feature phone (as we used to know it) is finally well-and-truly dead?” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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The Feature Phone Is Dead: Long Live the ‘Basic Smartphone’
An anonymous reader writes with a snippet from ExtremeTech: “After being continuously inhabited for more than 13 years, it is finally possible to log into Ustream and watch the Earth spinning on its axis in glorious HD. This video feed [embedded at ExtremeTech] comes from from four high-definition cameras, delivered by last month’s SpaceX CRS-3 resupply mission, that are attached to the outside of the International Space Station. You can open up the Ustream page at any time, and as long as it isn’t night time aboard the ISS, you’ll be treated to a beautiful view of the Earth from around 250 miles (400 km) up.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Finally, Hi-Def Streaming Video of the ISS’s View of Earth
An anonymous reader writes “In an unprecedented total disruption of a fully operational GNSS constellation, all satellites in the Russian GLONASS broadcast corrupt information for 11 hours, from just past midnight until noon Russian time (UTC+4), on April 2 (or 5 p.m. on April 1 to 4 a.m. April 2, U.S. Eastern time). This rendered the system completely unusable to all worldwide GLONASS receivers.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Russian GLONASS Down For 12 Hours