Latest News - Page 2992

It's no secret - I am a huge astronomy buff. So much so that I even endeavor into the complex realm that is astrophotography. I say "complex" because taking a clear, crisp and vibrant image of the cosmos is quite challenging, and requites many hours to produce a single 2D image.

Finnish astrophotographer J-P Mestävainio has taken these complexities and mastered them, but he did not stop there. Mestävainio wondered what the Nebula he was photographing looked like in the third dimension and set out to create what can only be described as breathtaking. Seen below is IC 1396 or the Elephants Trunk Nebula.

These animated GIF images are in all actuality an artist interpretation of how he thinks the nebula would appear if passing by. The GIFs are created by adding interpretations and educated guesses based on the formation of the nebula and a rule-of-thumb that brighter stars are closer than darker ones to known data about the nebula, like distance and the location of certain stars around it to create a 3D model of the nebula.

You may not have heard about Windows Blue, neither had I until this morning. It appears to be the next generation Windows operating system from Microsoft. Unlike the 10+ year reign of Windows XP or the three years Windows 7 saw, Blue will begin a new era for the OS giant.

If what we are seeing is true, Windows Blue will follow an annual update model, which would actually bring development cost down for Microsoft. Blue will roll out across both Windows Phones and PC's sometime in mid-2013, a mere 6-7 months after the release of Windows 8. Blue was confirmed in a series of job postings which were uncovered by The Verge, who managed to get a snippet of one of the listings.

German security firm, Hensel European Security Services (HESS), has lost its Amazon.com contract amidst accusations of Neo-Nazi ties and mistreating foreign workers.

The whistle was blown last week when German TV channel ARD broadcast a documentary about the firm's bad behavior. The documentary used hidden cameras to showcase how the firm harassed and intimidated foreign workers. It also blew the cover off some of its "military style" employees who seemed to have ties with Neo-Nazi organizations.

HESS firmly denies the allegations, noting that it employees a number of foreign workers and immigrants. The documentary caught Amazon's eye, which lead to the decision to sever all ties between Amazon and HESS. I have included the video below, but you will need to understand German to get the full details.

Facebook have made $1.1 billion in profits since they've gone public, but they won't be paying any federal or state taxes on these profits. Better yet, the largest social network in the world will enjoy a very nice federal tax refund of around $429 million.

Before Facebook went public last year, Citizens for Tax Justice, a research group, said that this would happen, and have just released a breakdown of what the social network's crafty accounting skills have amounted to in their 2012 annual report. It all comes down to the tax deductibility on executive stock options, which Facebook gave plenty out of last year, with the deductible ended up actually being more than Facebook owed in taxes to the state, and federal governments.

This means that instead of Facebook having to pay anything to the government, the roles are reversed and the government will hand money over to Facebook - a refund nearing half a billion dollars. This refund comes from the taxes Facebook paid in 2010 and 2011. The good news doesn't stop for Facebook there, as they'll be carrying "forward another $2.17 billion in additional tax-option tax breaks for use in future years." This means that Facebook will, for as long as they can, continue to do this.

We all love our consumer technology, but scientific breakthroughs like this are just extraordinary. Later this year, we'll see the first bionic hand that will give an amputee the ability to feel their hand again.

This will be quite the moment for artificial limbs with sensory perception, where the first man to get the new touch-sensitive bionic hand will be a man in his 20s living in Rome, who lost the lower part of his arm in an accident. The wiring of this bionic hand will be connected to his nervous system, where they hope he'll be able to control the movements of the hand as well as receive touch signals from the bionic hand's skin sensors.

This is coming from Silvestro Micera of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland, where he's also added that the hand will be attached directly to the patient's nervous system through electrodes clipped onto two of the arm's main nerves - the median and ulnar nerves.

After multiple space agencies have been tracking the asteroid that fled just past Earth waving hello and goodbye, Russia was attacked by space rocks late last week. The meteroid broke up in our atmosphere, but still crashed into Earth injuring over 1200 people and causing millions of dollars of damage.

Because of this, the Science, Space, and Technology Committee in Washington are planning to hold a hearing soon "to examine ways to better identify and address asteroids that pose a potential threat to Earth."

NASA have said that the rock that smashed into the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, which is around 950 miles east of Moscow, was around 15 meters in diameter, and it was moving at an astonishing 18 kilometres per second. It lasted around 30 seconds in our atmosphere before it broke apart, and wasn't detected by any Earth-based telescopes. NASA scientists have said that it is virtually impossible for telescopes to see a meteorite that size in the daytime sky.

From the makers of Halo, we have a new game unveiled by Bungie - Destiny. Destiny is an always-on, persistent-world adventure game which the developers have signed up with Activision on a 10-year publishing deal.

The video above shows off a few quick glimpses at the otherwise bland first-person shooter bits (which I'm sure it's not a full-fledged FPS just yet), but it also unveils some of the more social integration Destiny will have, where you can create and customize your identities and gear to venture across an alternate universe to our own.

The big difference between Bungie's last massive game, Halo, and Destiny, is that it's not a lone soldier who saves the world - but a community of Guardians. Destiny will be more of a multi-player game than a singleplayer game, but this doesn't mean that those looking for a single-player game will miss out. Single player gamers can finish the quests off as a Guardian, but in order to "realize the vision of the game", Destiny will require an always-on Internet connection on all platforms regardless of play style.

Crysis 3 gets released in just over 48 hours, and is looking to do some good business as usual. First up, we have some download numbers on the beta, which was downloaded over 3 million times.

Most beta players will end up buying the full game, so we should expect at least 2-3 million sales just there. Crysis 2 sold 3 million units, so we should expect more sales this time around. Pre-order numbers are looking great too, where according to EA's end of January financial report, pre-orders for the third Crysis game are sitting at 40% higher than its predecessor.

Crysis 3 gets released on the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC on February 19 in the US, and two days later in Australia and Europe. Japan will have to wait until March 7 to get their nanosuit soldier gaming on.

Mega man himself Kim Dotcom has announced that Mega now has Bitcoin support, and has also unleashed some future nuggets that Mega will support in the near future. Dotcom reiterated his company's position to privacy, while also saying that his cloud storage is uniquely positioned in New Zealand to keep users' data more safe.

Dotcom also stated that Mega will eventually expand itself into email, chat, voice, video and mobile services "in the coming years". For details on Bitcoin-enabled Mega goodness, you can check out bitvoucher.co, where there's no less than six different ways to buy mega services with Bitcoin. Three monthly options are given, as well as three yearly options - all options cannot be refunded or exchanged. The options include:

Now we'll tackle the extra services that Mega will introduce over the next few years, first up we have chat, voice and video services. Dotcom isn't happy with the current services from Google, Microsoft and Apple, which are Gmail, Skype and iCloud, respectively. Dotcom states that these services don't offer enough privacy because they're based in the US, where the US government can demand access to users' data under specific circumstances.

Last week we reported that Google were dishing out users' data to developers when they download apps from the Play store, but now it's being reported that Facebook takes data from users even when they're logged out of the social network.

Facebook have confirmed this, but have insisted that the information collected is only for security purposes or to aggregate statistics. Facebook's data collection is from the cookies on your computer when you visit the social network, with the cookies shifting the information over to Facebook from any site that you visit that contains a link to Facebook - such as the "like button".

With this information in-hand, Facebook can map out your web usage. Director of Engineering for Facebook, Arturo Bejar, has said that the data is used to combat spam and phishing attacks by detecting suspicious logins. Not only that, but cookies can use the data to keep users from having to complete extra authentication steps each time they log-in. Because, you know, everyone logs out of Facebook when they're finished with it.

Are you getting excited? I'm a huge fan of PCs, but next-gen consoles are always exciting and they should push the bar of games up much higher since games are developed on consoles and ported on PCs.

What should we expect from the next-gen console from Sony? Sony are holding an event this week where they've said we'll "see the future" - most people, myself included, are expecting an announcement of the PlayStation 4. If this is true, here's some things you should expect from the PS4.

5.) Price. This is one of the most important parts of the PS4. The original PlayStation 3 launched for $600, where we saw 60GB included. The PS4 should hopefully hit the $300-$400 price, and include 500GB of storage. We should hopefully see a decently fast HDD inside, or some form of flash storage - maybe 64-128GB of SSD to help the OS feel snappy.

It looks as though we may soon be able to go to our local Google store to check out the company's latest technology offerings. While it will likely be structured a bit like the Microsoft stores in that they feature other companies' hardware, the stores will allow Google the chance to offer hands-on experiences of their own devices, such as the Nexus 4.

The report comes from 9to5Google who cites "an extremely reliable source." They say that Google is planning to have the first of its retail stores open by year's end in major metropolitan areas. These stores will be a bit different than the current Chrome store-within-a-store that Google currently has in Best Buys.

The idea for Google retail stores is said to have come out of plans to take Project Glass to the public. Google felt it would be hard to sell a device that will retail for $500-$1000 without offering a try-before-you-buy opportunity. The retail stores will also give Google a chance to demonstrate other products, such as Chromebooks and driverless cars.

Posterous, a popular blogging platform that was acquired by Twitter last year, has announced that it will be shutting down as of April 30. The site says that they are shutting down in order to focus on Twitter and there will be no more viewing or editing content past the shutdown date.

Because of this, Posterous is offering users the ability to download their data. WordPress and Squarespace are alternatives and both feature importers for Posterous data. A "backup" option is also provided and it will provide you with a zip file containing your data. You can request a backup by heading to the Posterous site.

"We'd like to thank the millions of Posterous users who have supported us on our incredible journey. We hope to provide you with as easy a transition as possible, and look forward to seeing you on Twitter."

For the interested software developer, or for those who want to experience a bit of nostalgia, Adobe has released a free and legal copy of the source code of Photoshop version 1.0. The code has been released in conjunction with the Computer History Museum who has detailed the software on their website.

The source code consists of about 128,000 lines and is mostly undocumented. Version 1.0 of the software was created by one sole engineer, Thomas Knoll. Version 2 had just two engineers. Around 75 percent of the code is written in Pascal and about 15 percent is in 68000 assembler language.

The code is free for non-commercial use and can be downloaded from the Computer History Museum. Nearly everything is included, save for the MacApp applications library that was licensed from Apple.

Social media giant Facebook has said that they were hacked via a Java zero-day exploit after employees visited an infected mobile developer website back in January. Facebook has said that it does not appear that any user data was compromised and that they are working on moving away from Java.

"They gained limited visibility into our systems," Fred Wolens, a spokesperson for Facebook told VentureBeat. "We've accelerated our program to disable Java in our environment."

A patch for the bug used to compromise the fully patched laptops was issued by Oracle on February 1 after Facebook alerted them to the bug that allowed the hackers to bypass the sandbox protections. This is the latest in a string of high-profile hackings and exploits found in Java.

Apple has several problems on-hand with the latest iOS 6.1 operating system. At least one of the most pressing issues was fixed with an iOS 6.1.1 update that was pushed out to iPhone 4S devices earlier this week. However, more problems remain and some new ones have popped up, some more pressing than others.

The major issue that has been discovered is the ability to bypass the lock screen's passcode easily and without any special tools. A bug like this could prove problematic for a company who usually prides itself on security. Security issues also result in enterprise customers being more wary of a product.

German blog iFun, who accurately predicted the release of iOS 6.1.1, is predicting that iOS 6.1.2 will be pushed out "early next week." This means users should only have to wait a few more days before security is returned to the device. The update will also hopefully bring with it a fix to the Exchange problems that are present in iOS 6.1.

We have been hearing rumors of Microsoft's plans to transition users of its MSN / Live Messenger service over to Skype for a while now, and today it appears that we have an official date. The transition will begin taking place on April 8th of this year.

The upgrade will target English users first and then trickle down to the rest of the world, over the rest of the month. This news comes shortly after a confusing email which alluded to all Live Messenger services shutting down on April 15th, which is not true.

"The upgrade process itself has been going really well, we've had millions of customers move over", said Skype's Parri Munsell. The transition process begins when existing Live Messenger users are greeted with an upgrade notification. The upgrade will prevent users from signing in to the messaging service using the existing Live Messenger application. Microsoft is pre-caching existing machines with the Skype installer so that the upgrade will appear seamless.

If you thought Corning's Gorilla Glass was strong, it can still lead to cracked displays, which means there's always room for someone to make improvements here and there. This is exactly what two students from Cambridge University have done.

The students' product supposedly boosts the impact resistance of Gorilla Glass by up to five times, their product is called Rhino Shield, and is a new screen protector you install on top of your smartphone's display. Rhino Shield features a specific blend of patent-pending polymer, which gives your device more protection from shock, scratches and fingerprints.

There are countless other screen protectors on the market, but the developers assert that Rhino Shield is unique thanks to its impart dispersion and dampening layers that help diffuse blows against the device.

I don't know why someone would be running Windows 7 without Service Pack 1, but if you're one of those users, you might want to upgrade soon. Why? Because the end-of-support date for Windows 7 without Service Pack 1 installed is getting close.

On April 9, Windows 7 RTM (release to manufacturing), without Service Pack 1 installed, will no longer be supported. The news is coming from a post on the Microsoft Springboard Series blog. Support for specific Windows releases ends 24 months after the release of a Service Pack - and you guessed it - Windows 7 SP1 was released in February 2011, two years ago now.

Windows 7 SP1 mainstream (free) support continues until January 13, 2015 and extended (paid) support continues all the way up until January 14, 2020 for Windows 7 SP1. The Springboard blog includes the above chart which explains the differences between Mainstream and Extended support.

New York Times reviewer John Broder is in some serious hot water after his review of Tesla'a latest electric car review, the Model S, has been found with a bunch of holes. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has come out, saying that Broder was prejudiced against electric cars right form the start, and did everything in his power to make the Model S electric car look bad for the road.

The onboard logs showing what charge the Model S had during the reviewers journey, as well as his recharge habits, point toward Broder taking the car off the power connection earlier than he stated in his review. Musk says: