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For the most part, change in habits comes to sports in waves of inconvenience. You can usually convince players to buy into some radical new tactic if it yields results, but changes that risk sacrificing performance in the name of self-preservation are shut right out. And so it is that baseball players are rejecting a…
“Xbox” is a pretty good name for a console, right? Yeah, of course it is. You know what isn’t? Literally everything else Microsoft considered before landing on “Xbox”. In an interview with Edge, Xbox godfather Seamus Blackley explained that “xbox” (shortened from DirectX Box) was not legally sound as a product name, so they went…
This is a story about government incompetence on the grossest, most unforgivable scale. Here’s how the Economic Development Administration unnecessarily spent $2.75 million to fight a common case of malware. Warning: much innocent hardware was lost. Yes, even the mice. In December 2011 the Economic Development Administration (an agency under the US Department of Commerce)…
The 54-caliber, 5-inch naval artillery shells fired by Arleigh Burke-class destroyers are brutally efficient at destroying surface ships, aircraft, and land targets. But they’re little more than pea shooters compared to the 6.1-inch rocket-propelled, GPS-guided shells shot by the new Zumwalt-class’ Advanced Guns System. The Advanced Gun System is the next generation of naval artillery…
Today you can get yourself an awesome blu-ray collection in one click. Amazon is offering the Best of Warner Bros. 50 Film Collection for $185, which is over $400 off the original retail price, and quite the bargain for 50 amazing films. Even if you managed to get all of these separately for $10/pop, that…
Here in the 21st century, soldiers can be sitting in a room in New Mexico while piloting an unmanned aerial vehicle halfway around the world in Afghanistan. Back in the early 1980s this kind of reach was still largely the stuff of science fiction. But the incredibly rapid development of computing power and satellite communications…
iOS7 beta release 3 is out today and it fixes some of those pesky beta 2 bugs. It’s not perfect yet, but go and check it out if you’re into tinkering.
This is Matthew Zeno, the 30-year-old man who allegedly died today in New York City’s subway after peeing on the electrified third rail. He was instantly electrocuted. Update: police has confirmedthe man died electrocuted after he fell on the third rail. His Facebook friends have started to post farewell messages on his wall. According to…
So what’s the most annoying thing about using Twitter across multiple devices? I don’t know, maybe it’s the fact that direct messages don’t sync. Well, Twitter is finally addressing that annoyance today by adding in DM sync. Finally! The update is being pushed out to seven different platforms: Android, iPad, Mac, twitter.com, mobile.twitter.com, TweetDeck and…
On the off chance you missed it, you might be interested to know that there’s anunprecedented sale going on right now in the App Store. Apps that yesterday were 10 or 20 dollars are free today. Your first reaction is great. Your second, if you’re anything like me, is but I just bought these. And…
Nokia phones are pretty sturdy. Sturdier than most, actually. And while all phones go through similar stress tests, we’ve got a look into Nokia’s specifically. It’s petty impressive! Tumbling in boxes of dust, dropped on steel floors hundreds of times, splashed with rain and baked in tropical conditions. And the phones mostly come out just…
A lot of your more flashy chemistry experiments are explosion-centric, but there are a few quieter ones that are just as mesmerizing. A mixture of copper sulfate and ammonia, for instance, looks like the surface of an alien gas giant. And when it’s in slow motion, it’s positively hypnotic. When you pour ammonia into a…
There are two paths to gaining super powers that don’t involve mutations, radiation, or intergalactic origins. You can go the RoboCop route, where your body—or what’s left of it—is permanently melded to a robotic frame. Or the Iron Man route, where you temporarily don a robotic supersuit and kick ass. The latter approach is, of…
Nuclear-powered submarines, aircraft carriers, and even icebreakers have been in operation for over 50 years now with a remarkable success rate. So Russia is planning to further commercialize that technology by building a fleet of floating nuclear power plants that will provide electricity to remote areas where building a permanent reactor is either too expensive,…
A pair of photos posted to the Flickr account of Microsoft’s Windows Phone manager Joe Belfiore appear to be the first real-world samples taken with the Nokia Lumia 1020. Rumor has it the photography-oriented phone will be announced at an event in New York on Thursday. From what we can see in these images, the…
It’s a warm summer night in the city, but instead of sleeping with the windows open to let a breeze in, you’ve got them all closed to keep your bedroom quiet. It’s a ‘lesser of two evils’ decision that people living in crowded urban centers might soon not have to make. Researchers in South Korea…
You’d think the IRS would be the one organization it might be safe to trust with your precious Social Security Number. Think again. Thanks to a cock-up, the agency just put tens of thousands of the numbers out on the Internet for anyone and everyone to see. Fantastic. It seems that when the IRS went…
Today is the 66th anniversary of Roswell, whatever Roswell really was. But according to a festive Google Doodle, it was definitely an alien crash-landing. And also a point-and-click adventure. If you can spare a few minutes—you can spare a few minutes—it’s worth investigating, with or without a crew of federal agents. [Google]
Windows 8.1 will be finalized by August, according to the Windows Team blog. That doesn’t mean all your computers will work perfectly with it by then (OEMs need to to fix their drivers, etc.), but we should see a final release with a month or two. Windows 8 took just over two months to release…
When most of us think of heads-up displays, our brains almost immediately wander into science fiction fantasies. And lord knows I’ve been fantasizing about a relatively inexpensive unit that will put turn-by-turn navigation on my windshield. Goodbye, awkward smartphone mount, hello,Garmin HUD. The new Garmin HUD sits on your dashboard, projecting navigation information at eye-level…
