Terrance on Tech
Sears! Once the catalog king, then an eminent brick-and-mortar retailer, and now, perhaps, a real-estate holding company that leases out space for computers that power the cloud. Data Center Knowledge reported today that Sears had created a new unit — Ubiquity Critical Environments — to look into repurposing its shuttered stores as datacenters, starting with [...]
Click here to avoid getting devoured by this guy. (Shutterstock/counterspell) So here you are, once again, on the Internet. (Hello, there. Welcome back, friend.) Here you are, another Norm within the Cheers that is the World Wide Web, hanging out in the place where everybody (or, more likely, nobody) knows your name. But why are [...]
Marc Whitten stands in front of an army of servers (Microsoft). Watching the reveal of the Xbox One this week, one particular claim about Microsoft’s new console caught my ear. Marc Whitten, the executive in charge of Xbox Live, the company’s online gaming network, charted its historical progression. “When we launched Xbox Live in 2002, [...]
In an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine today, two doctors from the University of Michigan described how they saved an infant with a life-threatening respiratory disorder using a custom-designed 3D-printed device. Printed with bio-absorbable plastic, the device is holding the child’s airway open and allowing him to breathe normally. The child, [...]
Microsoft has finally won a long-running battle at the International Trade Commission, one of the most popular venues for the corporate patent wars that have broken out in the last few years. After Microsoft launched its patents against Motorola, the Illinois company—now under Google’s control—launched a variety of counterattacks in both federal courts and the [...]
Kyle Orland UPDATE: The original version of this story misstated the 300,000-server capacity for Xbox One’s cloud computing architecture as 30,000 servers. Ars regrets the error. While Tuesday’s Xbox One presentation answered some questions about Microsoft’s upcoming system, it left just as many or more unsettled. Luckily, Ars got a chance to sit down with [...]
1) Amtrak suddenly has much better Wi-Fi service on some routes — starting with the Acela I am taking right now from DC to NY. Of course I admit that griping about the speed and reliability of a (free) Wi-Fi service, on a moving train, epitomizes having too few real problems to gripe about. But until [...]
A Ghost Army halftrack with a speaker mounted on the back for “sonic deception” (National Archives) Bill Blass was one of them. So was Ellsworth Kelly. And Arthur Singer. And Art Kane. Before these men embarked on the artistic careers they would become known for, they served together during World War II. But they were [...]
In late 1999, Microsoft created an ad for its upcoming ‘Microsoft Reader’ software. The headline blared, “This is a story about the future of reading,” and underneath the story about the company’s actual product, the marketers inserted a timeline based on “the best estimates of Microsoft researchers and developers” of what was going to happen [...]
Michał Kasprzak / flickr One of the most damning accusations against copyright-trolling operation Prenda Law is that the attorneys who manage it engaged in identity theft. Corporate papers on Prenda shell companies were signed by Alan Cooper, the former housekeeper of John Steele. Cooper has said someone else signed his name; Prenda-linked lawyers have said [...]
