“THAT’S NOT AN 🍎,” U.S. Customs and Border Protection tweeted on Sunday night. The federal agency was crowing about its latest bust and claiming it had “seized 2,000 counterfeit Apple AirPods from Hong Kong,” estimated to have carried a retail value of $398,000. The only problem is that the CBP shared photos of…
A Cuisinart electric knife, Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro RAM, cheap Borderlands and XCOM 2 bundles for Switch, a FoodSaver vacuum sealer, and a Vava 7-in-1 USB-C hub lead Monday’s best deals.
Microsoft has concluded a years-long experiment involving use of a shipping container-sized underwater data center, placed on the sea floor off the cost of Scotland’s Orkney Islands. The company pulled its ‘Project Natick’ underwater data warehouse up out of the water earlier this year at the beginning of the summer, and spent that last few months studying the datacenter, and the air it contained, to determine the model’s viability.
The results not only showed that using these offshore submerged data centers seems to work well in terms of performance, but also revealed that the servers contained within the data center proved to be up to eight times more reliable than their dry land counterparts. Researchers will be looking into exactly what was responsible for this greater reliability rate, in the hopes of also translating those advantages to land-based server farms for increase performance and efficiency across the board.
Other advantages included being able to operate with greater power efficiency, especially in regions where the grid on land is not considered reliable enough for sustained operation. That’s due in part to the decreased need for artificial cooling for the servers located within the data farm, because of the conditions at the sea floor. The Orkney Island area is covered by a 100% renewable grid supplied by both wind and solar, and while variances in the availability of both power sources would’ve proven a challenge for the infrastructure power requirements of a traditional, overland data center in the same region, the grid was more than sufficient for the same size operation underwater.
Microsoft’s Natick experiment was meant to show that portable, flexible data center deployments in coastal areas around the world could prove a modular way to scale up data center needs while keeping energy and operation costs low, all while providing smaller data centers closer to where customers need them, instead of routing everything to centralized hubs. So far, the project seems to have done specularly well at showing that. Next, the company will look into seeing how it can scale up the size and performance of these data centers by linking more than one together to combine their capabiilities.
It seems that Facebook is starting the work week off with an unexpected bang. Earlier today, the company published a couple of videos about the Oculus Quest 2, revealing a decent amount of information about the upcoming VR headset. This definitely isn’t the official reveal Facebook is likely planning, and indeed, there are a few key details about the Oculus … Continue reading
LG has, throughout its long history, jumped onto some very unusual bandwagons. In 2011, it tried to cash in on an extremely short-lived 3D smartphone craze with the Optimus 3D/Thrill 4G. Perhaps inspired by Google’s ultimately doomed Project Ara, it…
The pandemic and need for social distancing have pushed esports into the mainstream, and the world of car racing has taken note. First, NASCAR replaced its canceled races with pro-driven esports races, which broke viewing records. Now, not to be left…
Walmart has had drone delivery ambitions for years now, and today they’ve announced a partnership with Zipline for on-demand delivery of “health and wellness” products. Zipline drones aren’t the quadcopters that most think of for these types of deliv…
TikTok, the social video platform that has dominated American politics for far too long will team up with Oracle in the hope of avoiding a US ban. In a statement, the cloud services giant says that it is part of a proposal that TikTok owner ByteDance…
YouTube is launching a new short-form video format that seems an awful lot like TikTok. YouTube “Shorts” are 15-second videos shot on mobile phones. You’ll be able to string multiple video clips together, record with music and adjust the video speed….
Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve had a tendency to play with my food. I remember cobbling together all kinds of gross concoctions at the table whenever we went out to eat, and occasionally stacking food items like Lincoln Logs to create edible towers. Yet, despite all of my efforts, I never achieved the greatness of The Cheetosphere.
Artist Sam Keller figured out that if you have the properly curved Cheetos, you can assemble them into a nearly perfect orb. It looks like each orange snack covers a 120-degree arc, so gluing three of them together forms a circle. Then by arranging and attaching the Cheeto circles together with other individual Cheetos, you can make a sphere. I’m guessing that a balloon might have been involved here in order to provide an inner form for the structure.
However Sam made it, the Cheetosphere is a true work of art, and belongs in a modern art museum alongside the works of Jeff Koons and other contemporary masters. Heck, he could turn it into a performance art piece, where someone walks into the room and nibbles on the sphere until it’s all gone, while Sam cranks out another masterpiece for the next show.
Sam also made a smaller and simpler Cheetosphere, which I came across thanks to Pee-Wee Herman:
This isn’t the only time Sam created a snack food sculpture. At the same time, he made the Doritosphere…
[via Pee-Wee Herman]
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
