Category: Technology (Page 6 of 16)

Vox: Why every website you used to love is getting worse
Facebook is the poster child for enshittification. At first, it was a big improvement over MySpace. Everyone signed up for, it was great for a while, then Facebook made changes to make more money, until is sucked. Everyone was on Facebook, so nobody wanted to leave.

Nasa plans first crewed Moon mission in 50 years for February 2026
Maybe there is too much going on or it’s the fracturing of news media, but there are big things happening that people aren’t talking about.
In four months, humans are going back to the Moon. The Artemis 2 mission is to perform a lunar orbit, no landing, similar to Apollo 9 in 1968. Apollo 9 is the mission that yielded the moving “Earth Rise” photograph.

Texas woman surprised as lost hunk of NASA equipment lands on her farm: ‘It’s kind of surreal’
She seems like a good sport. Did she change outfits or do girl farmers usually dress cute?
When Ann Walter looked outside her rural West Texas home, she didn’t know what to make of the bulky object slowly drifting across the sky.
She was even more surprised to see what actually landed in her neighbor’s wheat field: a boxy piece of scientific equipment about the size of a sport-utility vehicle, attached to a massive parachute, adorned with NASA stickers.

Here’s what was in the NYT, on October 7, 1925.
“They tell me a paper has quoted me as saying the first commercial airplane reliability tour proves the airplane to be reliable,” said Mr. Ford. “Maybe I said that, but I doubt that the tour alone could prove such a thing. I’m a greenhorn at this aviation business, but I can see that it is going to be a great industry.”

Home automation is addicting. Once the window shades in the solarium were automated, I looked for anything else to add to the system. Some people go nuts. If you have looked at a new furnace, refrigerator, thermostat or hot water heater, you see that they can all be web-enabled. I don’t want to go crazy.

Flying used to be fun. People dressed up, the stewardesses were posh, and everyone was a little excited.

My good friend and colleague, Chris Boch, recently posted on his blog about the naive views of the US Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright. I know something about that.
Early in my teaching career, I attended a summer workshop at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab. The physicist in charge, Andrew Zwicker, is the guy on the left wearing sandals.

Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is the second-fastest single-GPU graphics card you can buy, and only because there’s a $1200 Titan Xp offering questionable value out there, too.
That was from an article written in 2017.
When I wanted to try out virtual reality, I bought a gaming computer with that graphics card. At that time, it was almost impossible to buy a graphics card because crypto-currency miners were buying all available graphics cards.
World’s first 1-step method by US-China team turns plastic into fuel at 95% efficiency
That’s promising. The trick is always collecting the waste without doing more harm than good.
At the end of the process, the products include the main components of petrol (gasoline), chemical raw materials, and hydrochloric acid
