157177567
submission
jimminy_cricket writes:
These were some of the first growing pains of early word processing. Devoid of the seamless trackpad and mouse control we take for granted today, wordsmiths of the era were instead forced to hack through a digital jungle of their own creation. Unbeknownst to them, engineers were already developing a seemingly innocuous feature that would quietly change computing forever: the blinking cursor.
Patented in 1967 by Charles Kiesling, the blinking cursor "is simply a way to catch the coders' attention and stand apart from a sea of text." According to Kiesling's son, his father said, "there was nothing on the screen to let you know where the cursor was in the first place. So he wrote up the code for it so he would know where he was ready to type on the Cathode Ray Tube."
120466244
submission
jimminy_cricket writes:
On the 25th anniversary of the original Sony PlayStation The Verge shares the story of the PlayStation supercomputers:
Dozens of PlayStation 3s sit in a refrigerated shipping container on the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth's campus, sucking up energy and investigating astrophysics. It's a popular stop for tours trying to sell the school to prospective first-year students and their parents, and it's one of the few living legacies of a weird science chapter in PlayStation's history.
Those squat boxes, hulking on entertainment systems or dust-covered in the back of a closet, were once coveted by researchers who used the consoles to build supercomputers. With the racks of machines, the scientists were suddenly capable of contemplating the physics of black holes, processing drone footage, or winning cryptography contests. It only lasted a few years before tech moved on, becoming smaller and more efficient. But for that short moment, some of the most powerful computers in the world could be hacked together with code, wire, and gaming consoles.
118959292
submission
jimminy_cricket writes:
Quarts reports:
Few have driven a Tesla to the point at which the vehicle really starts to show its age. But Tesloop, a shuttle service in Southern California composed of Teslas, was ticking the odometers of its cars well past 300,000 miles with no signs of slowing.
These long days have pushed Tesla's engineering to the limit, making Tesloop an extreme testbed for the durability of Elon Musk's cars. Tesloop provided Quartz with five years of maintenance logs, where its vehicles racked up over more than 2.5 million miles, to understand how the electric vehicles (EV) are living up to the promising of cheaper vehicles with unprecedented durability compared to their conventional combustion-engine counterparts.
118282940
submission
jimminy_cricket writes:
It was supposed to be the safest building in the world. Then it cracked.
Structural steel is exceptionally strong, but given certain conditionsâ"low temperatures, defects incurred during fabrication, heavy-load stressâ"it remains vulnerable to cracking. Two types of cracks occur in steel: ductile fractures, which occur after the steel has yielded and deformed, and brittle fractures, which generally happen before the steel yields. Ductile fractures develop over time, as the steel stretches during use, explains Michael Engelhardt, Ph.D., a professor of civil engineering at the University of Texas at Austin and chair of the peer-âreview committee overseeing the STC's response to the cracked-beam crisis.
"Engineers can predict ductile fracture and make adjustments during design, such as redistributing the load among various parts of the structure," Engelhardt says. "Brittle fractures, by contrast, happen suddenly and release a great deal of energy. They're concerning. They arenâ(TM)t supposed to happen."
116988506
submission
jimminy_cricket writes:
Due to the ban placed on a Hearthstone player for supporting Hong Kong protestors, Blizzard is now receiving criticism from US senators. Quoting The Verge:
"‘Blizzard shows it is willing to humiliate itself to please the Chinese Communist Party,’ Sen. Ron Wyden said."
116546524
submission
jimminy_cricket writes:
Quoting the BBC:
The Amery Ice Shelf in Antarctica has just produced its biggest iceberg in more than 50 years. The calved block covers 1,636 sq km in area — a little smaller than Scotland's Isle of Skye — and is called D28. The scale of the berg means it will have to be monitored and tracked because it could in future pose a hazard to shipping. Not since the early 1960s has Amery calved a bigger iceberg. That was a whopping 9,000 sq km in area.
109338690
submission
jimminy_cricket writes:
Recently at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics in Brighton, New York, one of the worldâ(TM)s most powerful lasers blasted a droplet of water, creating a shock wave that raised the waterâ(TM)s pressure to millions of atmospheres and its temperature to thousands of degrees. X-rays that beamed through the droplet in the same fraction of a second offered humanityâ(TM)s first glimpse of water under those extreme conditions.
The x-rays revealed that the water inside the shock wave didnâ(TM)t become a superheated liquid or gas. Paradoxicallyâ"but just as physicists squinting at screens in an adjacent room had expectedâ"the atoms froze solid, forming crystalline ice.
