Apple is actively advertising for help with the design and construction of its "next generation" data centers, as it begins work on a new computing facility in Prineville, Oregon and expands its iCloud data center in Maiden, North Carolina.
The hatch is on! The first Eagle Cam chick has begun breaking through its shell, a process that can take between 12 hours and two days. Watch the livestream now.
Nokia is betting it all on Microsoft's Windows Phone OS. The company has a shot at outpacing BlackBerry as the third leading smartphone OS. So now, all eyes are on Nokia as it begins its stateside device roll-out. And the company is dropping its flagship device with a bang.
Facebook demanded a federal judge Monday dismiss an ?extortionate? lawsuit brought by Paul Ceglia, an entrepreneur with a shady past who is claiming half ownership of the social-networking service.
In the early 1990s, Mark Leyner became one of the most promising young writers of American fiction. His cult-classic novels, with titles like , tapped into the collective mind of a pop-culture-obsessed, Ritalin-prescribed generation. Now Leyner returns with a new novel that's funnier and more feverishly imagined than ever.
Researchers created an interference pattern for molecules made of 100 atoms -- the largest objects ever shown to reveal the weird quantum effect of particle-wave duality.
History is the roadmap for our future. We learn from it to avoid making the same mistakes. But that roadmap gets all blurry when we compromise our teaching of history. It's been said before -- a mind is a terrible thing to waste -- but in a global tech economy, the price gets higher every day.
I just made a long bet with a friend. The friend: Kevin Kelly, a co-founder of and adherent of the ?Long Bet,? whereby people on opposite sides of a prediction put money down to back up their hunches. The bet: If within 10 years, more than half of all video watched is live, I win. I'm not worried.
A move by Illinois and two regional governments in the Chicago area to a public data "convergence cloud" is being championed by officials as a way to be more transparent and user-friendly. But it could also be a way for municipalities -- like companies -- to cut IT costs. Could this seeming next big thing actually make the government smaller?
An electric skateboard that skateboarders will actually ride.
Fisker has announced plans to replace the battery packs on over 600 Karma plug-in hybrids after a fault was found in the cells.
A new analysis of lunar minerals shows the moon is more similar to the Earth than thought, challenging the prevailing view of our nearest celestial neighbor formed.
On this week's Gadget Lab Podcast, the gang shows off Apple's newest iPad and takes a look at some seriously hardcore gadgets as part of our Month of Badass Gadgets.
The new iPad does get warm when playing graphic-intensive games. But, so do other tablets on the market.
Websites don't need to look or behave the same in every web browser, says a former Yahoo developer. What websites do need to do is offer the best possible experience on every device.
The dramatic destruction of the Navy landing ship Schenectady on Nov. 23, 2004 marked a turning point in the Pentagon's approach to aerial warfare, and led directly to one of the flying branch's riskiest-ever investments: a $55 billion effort to build a better bomber.
Morphlabs today launched the first all solid-state drive (SSD) private cloud platform, offering performance gains that it said are "pretty massive" while matching the cost of Amazon.
For 14 years, the website Optics Picture of the Day has collected and featured stunning examples of optical effects. We look at some of our favorites and the physics underlying them.
The Kalish is a world-class, week-long (June 11-15) visual editing workshop housed at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. It's intended for anybody working in new media who wants to find the best way to sort through the junk and get back to storytelling.
Software entrepreneur Reid Hoffman talks about his plan at 12 to change the world, , and "the most expensive decision" of his life.
U.S. troops may be leaving Afghanistan, but the world's most infamous security company isn't. Academi, the company formerly known as Blackwater, keeps a 10-acre compound in the heart of Kabul. And it ain't leaving any time soon.
Edward Bellamy is born. He's the American socialist and visionary author best known for penning the forward-looking utopian novel, .
President Obama has started his re-election campaign, hoping to remind voters that in spite of four years of broken promises and disappointing compromises, he's still dedicated to what got him elected in the first place: making really good campaign speeches. One phrase you're going to be hearing a lot is "all-of-the-above" energy policy. This little catchphrase refers to his stance that, unlike his opponents who want to ransack the environment in search of cheap oil, he wants to ransack the environment in search of cheap oil .
With the Envy 14 Spectre, HP takes an already out-there idea to its barely sane terminus by making a little more than half of this 14-inch laptop out of glass.
Now that Square is gaining traction with small businesses, the company wants to better target customers on the other side of the counter. That?s the strategy behind Square?s latest attempt at capturing shoppers? minds (and wallets). On Sunday evening, Square launched a completely revamped smartphone application, rebranding its ?Card Case? mobile payment app as ?Pay With Square,? featuring a redesign that aims to improve local business discovery for prospective buyers.
Google's daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.
Over the past few months we?ve been inviting Wired-minded people to post their thoughts on technology and society and the trends and ideas that will matter most. Today, we?re making things official with Wired Opinion ? a new section offering daily insight, argument and provocation from some of the world?s most innovative thinkers and doers.
Google's daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.
An internal NASA document from 1977 outlined the first 23 space shuttle missions, but not a single one came off as planned. Space historian and Beyond Apollo blogger David S. F. Portree examines a spaceflight program that never was.
Microsoft and West Coast Customs team up to create the ultimate connected car, complete with customizable displays, XBox Kinetic integration and 400 horsepower.
MojoKid writes "Last week marked the launch of Wing Commander Saga: Darkest Dawn, a fan-built companion to Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger that's been in the making for the past ten years. It's a real labor of love. Now that the game is available, the question is, how good is it? "The game dropped on Thursday, I started playing Friday, and as of this writing (Sunday afternoon), my weekend chore list is gathering dust on the fridge. I've been too busy cursing my decision to chuck my Microsoft Sidewinder Precision 2 to notice. 'If I'd kept it just one more year I wouldn't have this problem,' I mutter, fingers splayed over the keyboard in a vain attempt to convince my Hellcat to bank like something other than a Centaurian Mud Pig. Wing Commander Saga is a fan-made game that's good enough to be worth paying for. Not only is it better than a lot of schlock companies expect you to pay for, it pays homage to its source material while improving on Wing Commander's classic gameplay and graphics."
stoolpigeon writes "HTML5 is the latest version of HTML. In fact, it is still under development — but HTML5 brings so many highly-desired capabilities that browsers have begun to implement it and many projects already take advantage of it. Often an HTML5 project employs more technology than just HTML, and the label has come to include the use of CSS3 and JavaScript as well. There are a number of resources out there to help one use HTML5 and recently I've been using the HTML5 Developer's Cookbook by Chuck Hudson and Tom Leadbetter." Read on for the rest of stoolpigeon's review.
Fluffeh writes "This story has gone from funny to sad. Following copyright-troll Righthaven's recent whipping by a judge, it now appears the company has just given up altogether. CEO Steve Gibson is working at another job (while being investigated by the Nevada Bar) and main lawyer Shawn Mangano apparently has completely stopped responding to all attempts to contact him, even by the court. All this has resulted in the key appeals in its cases to be dismissed 'for lack of prosecution.' Last Thursday it also had a key case closed, with prejudice, driving another nail in its already buried coffin."
An anonymous reader writes with news that a Tokyo District Court has granted its approval to a petition seeking to force Google to turn off the auto-complete feature for its search engine. "The petition against Google was filed by a Japanese man who claims the feature breached his privacy and eventually led to the loss of his job. According to the man, whose name has been withheld, when his name is typed into the Google search engine auto-complete suggests words associated with criminal behavior. And when those suggested searches are clicked, over 10,000 results are shown that disparage or defame him. According to the plaintiff, this negative Google footprint has prevented him from finding employment since his initial firing several years ago." Unfortunately for him, "Google has rejected the order, saying that its U.S. headquarters will not be regulated by Japanese law, and that the case, according its in-house privacy policy, does not warrant deleting autocomplete-suggested terms related to the petition, lawyer Hiroyuki Tomita said Sunday."
sciencehabit writes "A new analysis of isotopes found in lunar minerals challenges the prevailing view of how Earth's nearest neighbor formed. Geochemists looked at titanium isotopes in 24 separate samples of lunar rock and soil, and found that the moon's proportion was effectively the same as Earth's and different from elsewhere in the solar system. This contradicts the so-called Giant Impact Hypothesis, which posits that Earth collided with a hypothetical, Mars-sized planet called Theia early in its existence, and the resulting smash-up produced a disc of magma orbiting our planet that later coalesced to form the moon."
An anonymous reader writes "CNET just published an article about a new challenge to photograph 5 target individuals in 5 different cities on March 31st. The TAG challenge will pay the winner $5k. Target mobility means this will be much harder than the DARPA Red Balloon Challenge which was won by MIT. From the article: 'On March 31, mug shots of five "suspects" will be published, and it'll be game on in a global hunt for "jewel thieves" in Bratislava, Slovakia; Stockholm; London; Washington, D.C.; and New York City, each of whom will spend 12 hours that day in public areas. The first team to upload photographs of each of the five by noon eastern time on April 1 will win the competition--and with it, a ton of international glory.'"
judgecorp writes "MIT professor Hugh Herr describes how technology can end disability in 50 years — with a big incentive from the need to support injured war veterans. A champion climber, Herr lost both legs below the knee, returned to climbing and designed improved climbing prostheses. From the article: 'Herr believes the work he is doing won’t just have humanitarian benefits. There’s money to be made too. And if there’s a market here, it means more people will receive help. Despite all the horrors and injustices the Iraq and Afghanistan wars spawned, they have helped make the biomechatronics industry a lot more viable. Back in 2007, Herr gave Garth Stewart, a 24-year-old Army veteran who lost his left leg below the knee during the conflict in Iraq, a bionic ankle. It used tendon-like springs and an electric motor to provide support for Stewart.'"
Hugh Pickens writes "At low elevations, the 10,000 or so taste buds in the human mouth work pretty much as nature intended. But step aboard a modern airliner, and the sense of taste loses its bearings. Even before a plane takes off, the atmosphere inside the cabin dries out the nose. As the plane ascends, the change in air pressure numbs about a third of the taste buds, and at 35,000 feet with cabin humidity levels kept low by design to reduce the risk of fuselage corrosion, xerostomia or cotton mouth sets in. This explain why airlines tend to salt and spice food heavily. Without all that extra kick, food tastes bland. 'Ice cream is about the only thing I can think of that tastes good on a plane,' says Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. 'Airlines have a problem with food on board. The packaging, freezing, drying and storage are hard on flavor at any altitude, let alone 30,000 feet.' Challenges abound. Food safety standards require all meals to be cooked first on the ground. After that, they are blast-chilled and refrigerated until they can be stacked on carts and loaded on planes. For safety, open-flame grills and ovens aren't allowed on commercial aircraft, so attendants must contend with convection ovens that blow hot, dry air over the food. 'Getting any food to taste good on a plane is an elusive goal,' says Steve Gundrum, who runs a company that develops new products for the food industry."
thomst writes "Cnet's Michelle Meyers reports that democratic senators Richard Blumenthal and Charles Schumer have asked the Justice Department to investigate what they call a 'new disturbing trend' of prospective employers demanding job applicants to turn over user names and passwords for their social networks. 'Employers have no right to ask job applicants for their house keys or to read their diaries — why should they be able to ask them for their Facebook passwords and gain unwarranted access to a trove of private information about what we like, what messages we send to people, or who we are friends with?' asked Schumer. Last Friday, in response to complaints from employees, Facebook published a post expressing its opposition to the practice, which it said undermines both the security and the privacy of the user and the user's friends. Erin Egan, the company's chief privacy officer for policy, offered that employers who demand password information for prospective employees might just end up getting sued."
wiredmikey writes "Microsoft, in what it called its 'most complex effort to disrupt botnets to date,' and in collaboration with partners from the financial services industry, has successfully taken down operations that fuel a number of botnets that make up the notorious Zeus family of malware. In what Microsoft is calling 'Operation b71,' Microsoft and its co-plaintiffs, escorted by U.S. Marshals, seized command and control (C&C) servers in two hosting locations on March 23 in Scranton, Pennsylvania and Lombard, Illinois. The move was to seize and preserve data and evidence from the botnets for the case. In addition to seizing the C&C servers, the group took down two IP addresses behind the Zeus command and control structure, and secured 800 domains that Microsoft is now monitoring and using to help identify computers infected by Zeus."
Alfred Poor's website is called HDTV Almanac. That's where he talks about the latest HDTV industry news and changes. He also writes about HDTVs and monitors for a variety of industry publications and does some marketing consulting for manufacturers in the field. In this 17 minute video, Alfred tells us what features we should look for in our next TV buy and which ones aren't worth spending extra money on. He also says that for a variety of non-technical reasons, you might want to consider buying your next TV between now and June -- and says you should think about getting a 3D TV even if there aren't many 3D TV shows you want to watch right now.