Month: January 2013

Culture

Wired’s Weekly Picks of Stunning Architecture

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As reported on Wired. BY NATHAN HURST Each week, Wired Design brings you a photo of one of our favorite buildings, showcasing boundary-pushing architecture and design involved in the unique structures that make the world’s cityscapes interesting. Check back Fridays for the continuing series, and feel free to make recommendations in the comments, by Twitter, or by e-mail.  The Shard, London Pritzker prize-winning architect Renzo Piano designed The Shard as an irregular pyramid with a glass exterior, evoking a…

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Culture

Stunning Whale Shark Photos Aim to Help At-Risk Species

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As reported on Wired. BY JAKOB SCHILLER   At first glance, Kristian Schmidt and Shawn Heinrichs’ photos of models swimming with whale sharks off the coast of the Philippines appear heavily Photoshopped. But while the levels and colors have been manipulated and the backgrounds tweaked, the most striking part – the models’ proximity to sharks – is real. While a bit whimsical, the photos have recently gone viral and lead to a new awareness of the whale shark,…

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Apple Retail Sales

Good Deal: $200 off all MacBook Air models at Best Buy

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As reported on The Verge. By Nathan Ingraham Apple’s MacBook Air remains one of the finest laptops we’ve reviewed here, though they do come at a cost. If you’re interested in Apple’s most portable portable, Best Buy has a good deal going on today and tomorrow — all four standard MacBook Air models are $200 off and come with free shipping.That means the entry-level 11-inch model costs $799 right now, which gets you an 11.6-inch screen, 64GB of…

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Business Microsoft

Microsoft posts $21.46 billion revenue for Q2 2013, Windows division up despite PC decline

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As reported on The Verge. By Tom Warren Microsoft’s Q2 2013 earnings report is in, and the company is announcing revenue of $21.46 billion — just a 2.7 percent increase from the same period last year. Earnings per share for the quarter were $0.76 and Microsoft recorded $6.38 billion net income. While PC sales are slowing down, Microsoft’s Windows division posted revenue of $5.88 billion, a 24 percent increase from the prior year thanks to the…

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Art

Mind-bending GIFs push the limits of art and processors

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As reported on The Verge. By Amar Toor Nowadays, the word “GIF” has become all but synonymous with the frivolous and whimsical, but Croatian Paolo Čerić is proving that there’s more to the medium than just cats and LOLs. Čerić, 22, is currently studying at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing in Zagreb, where he experiments with new ways to create art from code. His animations, published to his Patakk Tumblr, are equal parts mesmerizing and…

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Article Google

Redesigning Google: how Larry Page engineered a beautiful revolution

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As reported on The Verge. By Verge Staff The new Google way is weird, but it’s working By Dieter Bohn and Ellis Hamburger Something strange and remarkable started happening at Google immediately after Larry Page took full control as CEO in 2011: it started designing good-looking apps. Great design is not something anybody has traditionally expected from Google. Infamously, the company used to focus on A/B testing tiny, incremental changes like 41 different shades of blue for links instead of trusting…

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Microsoft Mobile Verizon

Verizon Said To Be Getting A Flagship Nokia Windows Phone (Codenamed “Laser”) Of Its Own

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As reported on TechCrunch. by CHRIS VELAZCO Don’t get me wrong, HTC’s Windows Phone 8X is great and all, but the rest of Verizon Wireless’ Windows Phone lineup (think the Nokia Lumia 822 and Samsung’s ATIV Odyssey) is a bit lacking in the oomph department. If a new report from The Verge’s Tom Warrenholds true though, that may not be the case for too much longer. According to sources within Verizon, the carrier is gearing up to…

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Business

Another Potential Suitor For RIM As Lenovo Ponders An Acquisition

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As reported on TechCrunch. by CATHERINE SHU Research In Motion is once again the target of a rumored acquisition. Lenovo’s CFO Wang Wai Ming said in an interview with Bloomberg at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos that the Beijing company is eying the BlackBerry maker as a potential acquisition target or strategic alliance partner. The news comes less than a week after RIM CEO Thorsten Heins told German newspaper Die Welt that RIM is still undergoing a strategic…

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Business Games

“League Of Legends,” The Most-Played PC Game In The World, Runs On The Same Open Hardware As Facebook

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As reported on TechCrunch. by ALEX WILLIAMS League of Legends is the most-played, multi-player PC game in the world, with gamers logging nearly 1.3 billion hours of play time. The Riot Games title has more hours logged than World of Warcraft and Minecraft. With that kind of scale, Riot Games faced some challenges that any company experiences when they have that kind of load in its data center. Electricity costs, server capacity and a host of other issues emerged. Riot Games saw in…

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Article Random

University of Michigan makes silicon from liquid metal, aims for low-cost chips Alt

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As reported on Engadget. by Jon Fingas Forming silicon normally requires extreme temperatures of more than 2,000F, with the expensive energy to match. The University of Michigan has developed a technique involving liquid metal that could shed most of the heat — and cost. By coating a liquid gallium electrode with silicon tetrachloride, researchers can generate pure silicon crystals through the gallium’s electrons at a comparatively cool 180F. While the crystals are currently small, bigger examples are at least…

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