I have a number of Plex servers. Plex also allows me to publish images, music and video online, albeit to a select group of people. Were I seeking a wider audience, I'd have the options of Vimeo or Xtube or Soundcloud or Bandcamp or Flickr to put my content online.

I also have a bunch of web servers. What's stopping me from using the dozens of web content galleries, if I'm going to be using my own disk space and bandwidth instead of Google's or Yahoo's?

Seriously, what is this doing that those things aren't?

I paid for the ModernUI version of Plex. It was $2 or something and it's pretty much a showpiece for the touchscreen experience on Windows.
However, I own both a Surface and a Surface Pro, so I actually use it. I also own Plex on iOS, GoogleTV, the Play Store and Amazon's app store. Getting it for Windows 8 was really more about completing the collection.

The parachute that brought the latest rover to Mars also disintegrated during testing. However NASA proceeded with the design knowing that the atmosphere on Mars is not nearly as dense as it is on Earth.

They got it working in testing after that initial failure - and even that failure provided extremely useful high-speed video of its deployment.

Note the colossal wind tunnel. This latest, flying saucer tested parachute is way larger than that Curiosity parachute - so they've figured out a whole new testing regime. One that helpfully more closely matches conditions in the Martian atmosphere, too.

But we are at Dice, sir:

[Querying whois.publicinterestregistry.net]
[whois.publicinterestregistry.net]
Domain Name:SLASHDOT.ORG
Domain ID: D2289308-LROR
Creation Date: 1997-10-05T04:00:00Z
Updated Date: 2014-03-14T22:12:11Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2015-10-04T04:00:00Z
Sponsoring Registrar:Tucows Inc. (R11-LROR)
Sponsoring Registrar IANA ID: 69
WHOIS Server:

Referral URL:
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited
Domain Status: clientUpdateProhibited
Registrant ID:tuE8gFbzWFO9qSj2
Registrant Name:Host Master
Registrant Organization:Dice Holdings, Inc.
Registrant Street: 1040 Avenue of the Americas
Registrant City:New York
Registrant State/Province:NY
Registrant Postal Code:10018
Registrant Country:US
Registrant Phone:+1.8557527436
Registrant Phone Ext:
Registrant Fax:
Registrant Fax Ext:
Registrant Email:hostmaster@slashdotmedia.com

Pros: Today's article has more content than the usual Dice front page linkage. Great article if you're not a programmer but feel stymied by the wide assortment of languages out there. Although instead of hemming and hawing before making your first project you're better off listening to Winston Churchill and sticking your feet in the mud: "The maxim 'Nothing avails but perfection' may be spelt shorter -- 'Paralysis."

Cons: It barely scratches the surface of an incredibly deep topic with unlimited facets. And when one is considering investing potential technical debt into a technology, this probably wouldn't even suffice as an introduction let alone table of contents. Words spent on anecdotes ("In 2004, a coworker of mine referred to it as a 'toy language.'" like, lol no way bro!) could have been better spent on things like Lambdas in Java 8. Most interesting on the list is Erlang? Seems to be more of a random addition that could just as easily been Scala, Ruby, Groovy, Clojure, Dart -- whatever the cool hip thing it is we're playing with today but doesn't seem to quite pan out on a massive scale ...

The people who run OKC were a bunch of statistics nerds. It runs (ran, anyway) on a custom web server that performs a lot of real time analysis. Their blog is chock full of incredibly detailed information about their users. This shouldn't be news to anyone who has even the slightest clue as to how OKCupid actually works.

The special magic thing is to hit the Windows key + X. That brings up a menu that has pretty much everything you'd want to do from a start menu. Win + X also works on desktop Windows 8.x.

The hilarious thing to me is that the Windows 8/Server 2012 line is ironically the most keyboard centric version of Windows I've used, but all people want to do is bitch about the Modern (Tile) interface that you can completely, totally ignore if you're on something that has a real keyboard and mouse.

Also, Windows RT? It's not awful. Printing and scanning work great and they have real USB and storage support. Surfaces ship with Office pre-installed. RT is missing a lot of media consumption tools that are present on other mobile OSes, but as a device for doing work they're credible. I'd rather have an RT-based Surface than anything that runs iOS, though I'd prefer a good quality Android device to either.

A microphone has already been landed on Mars - unfortunately there was a risk of data corruption if the camera hardware it was attached to was turned on, so the microphone itself never got switched on...

I travelled with a large external hard disk as well, once - which also got taken to one side and swabbed for stuff. Internal monologue: OH NO MY PRECIOUS DATA ... Oh, it's just the possibility of it being a bomb they're worried about.

On another occasion, I had fun with my home-made, Arduino-powered dSLR timelapse gadget - it got thoroughly inspected by the TSA. I'd already opted out of the backscatter X-ray whatsit, only for a swab-for-explosives test to give a (false-)positive. Eek. Cue being taken to one side, where they looked in my bag and found the timelapse-o-tron...

To give the screeners their due, they let me go after a few minutes - after I'd heard their complaints about the potential radiation doses they and the passengers were receiving from the backscatter X-ray thingers, and after I'd provided advice on what sort of camera to look into buying for a budding photographer.

Security fun elsewhere: carrying a plastic bag of loose change through the Eurostar security in Brussels (it basically looked like an amorphous, completely opaque lump on the X-ray) - and a random customs check at a UK airport giving a (false-)positive swab for some sort of illicit drugs. Eek.

So a whois.net domain name lookup on their site yielded nothing. And there are suspiciously no patents mentioning "wetag" or "ifind" and the names they listed (Dr. Paul McArthur) are in patents but for cold fusion BS in California.

Surely, though, they must have registered the "iFind" trademark? And if you search on TESS we find:

With an attorney listed as "Richard G. Eldredge" which corresponds to a local attorney. Before you deploy the door kickers to lynch somebody, that address is just somebody's $200,000 house and could possibly be a random address used by a jerk. Remember that it's entirely possible that this is all a front by some other actor and someone was paid western union/bitcoin to register this trademark through this attorney without realizing they were just being used by literally anyone in the world ... of course, kickstarter should have even better transaction details (hopefully).

+1, Interesting.

(Thanks!)

I guess "fully steerable" means "within ~20 of zenith" to you. But that's not what the rest of the world considers "fully steerable".

Oops. That was in reference to his Green Bank Telescope link - Arecibo being only partially steerable...

The Extremely Large Telescope is a compromise - what they really wanted was the 100m-diameter Overwhelmingly Large Telescope.

Their naming committees are either entirely humourless or gloriously taking the piss.

The worlds largest single dish telescope is still the Green Bank Telescope (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Bank_Telescope), which at 100m is ~6x the size.

World's largest fully-steerable single-dish telescope - the Arecibo Observatory is larger still at a diameter of 300m! (Impressive Arecibo exploration video here. The thing's sodding enormous.)

I went looking for the largest diameter multi-dish radio telescope. It looks like the biggest terrestrial 'telescope' is the Global VLBI system created by combining the European VLBI Network with the US Very Long Baseline Array - it's like some massive team of superheroes combining to save the Earth from some terrible secret of space. Or whatever. Apparently they can also add space-based telescopes when that just isn't enough. Which, quite frankly, is showing off...

My thoughts when seeing one of the beautiful, 10m diameter Keck optical telescopes up close a few years ago? I've had full control of a telescope bigger than that.

Radio Astronomers: Compensating For Something.