Twitter turns 5 years old today! What an adorable and accomplished and incredibly rich little tot. Twitter’s become internet-ubiquitous in those five years. It’s also become the most singularly idiotic and wonderful thing in internet history. More »
Most sane folks will have greeted the arrival of Internet Explorer 9 with a curious click on a download button or a simple update of the browser they were already using, but that’s not enough for everyone. One chap with a taste for the eccentrically geeky decided to take this opportunity to go through a retrospective of every version of IE, going all the way back to Windows 95’s first iteration, and to run the Acid compatibility tests to see how they stand up to modern standards. IE1, the ancient, CSS-deprived beast that it is, choked immediately and failed to even display its homepage without an error, but things improved steadily from there until the triumph of iteration 9. See all that glorious progress happening in the space of just a few minutes in the video after the break.
Continue reading Internet Explorer versions 1 through 9 compared, signs of progress found (video)
Internet Explorer versions 1 through 9 compared, signs of progress found (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 Mar 2011 12:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sun Microsystems, one of the original gangsters responsible for supplying all the electronics and infrastructure we now know as the internet, ceased to be Sun Microsystems in January of last year. Assimilated into the Oracle juggernaut, its operations no longer carry that familiar logo and soon they’ll no longer even be referenced in the same spot on the internet. Yes, after 25 years of answering the call of sun.com, the company that no longer is will be letting go of its former domain name as well. The site has already been redirecting users to Oracle for quite a while, but come June 1st, it’ll be like the Sun we knew had never even risen.
[Thanks, Jeroen]
Sun.com, the twelfth oldest domain on the internet, will be decommissioned on June 1st originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 16 Mar 2011 13:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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For a man that spent the best part of his acting career representing a savvy dude from the future, William Shatner looks pretty well at home in the past as well. This video, dusted off from AT&T’s Tech Channel archives, shows Shatner dressed in a casual tan ensemble and dropping some knowledge on the subject of microprocessors. Aside from the retro visuals and presentation, what’s great about the vid is that the seemingly lavish claims about where computers could take us — and their own move toward increasing importance, utility and ubiquity — actually seem pretty tame in light of what we know today. Beam yourself past the break to see this golden nugget from the Bell Labs archives.
[Thanks, Dan]
Continue reading William Shatner explains what microprocessors are and do… from way back in 1976
William Shatner explains what microprocessors are and do… from way back in 1976 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Mar 2011 07:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
We had to do a double take when we read this headline from Reuters, but sure enough, it’s not April1st yet and its writers don’t seem to be joking: the location of the lost city of Atlantis has finally been discovered. Such is the bold claim from an international team of researchers, dreamers and intrepid adventurers. With the use of ground-penetrating radar and electrical resistivity tomography, they’ve unearthed evidence to suggest that a spot on the southern coast of Spain, just north of Cadiz, played host to what may have been human society’s first metropolis. One of the reasons why it’s taken archaeologists so long to pinpoint its whereabouts may be the fact that it lies 60 miles inland, where you wouldn’t really expect it to be susceptible to the effects of tidal waves (which is what Plato’s account of the ancient city identified as its demise). A National Geographic documentary on the subject will be broadcast this evening where we may learn more about what was discovered, the methods for doing so, and the gorgeous tans those scientists built up in sunny Spain.
Researchers claim discovery of lost city of Atlantis, conveniently located in southern Spain originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 13 Mar 2011 07:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Fourteen years ago today, someone murdered Biggie Smalls. It’s a sad anniversary, but it’s a terrific occasion to look back on the incredible, incredible talent he was. And as we were sifting through our favorite MP3s, it hit us—the man was surrounded by electronics. Below, our favorite of Biggie’s tech lyrics: More »
Twenty years ago today, Rodney King was savagely beaten by a team of LAPD officers during a DUI arrest. The act itself was horrific—but affected only one man. What thundered across the country was, rather, amateur video footage of the act. In 1991, the act was an unspeakable sight. In 2011, it’s unthinkable that we wouldn’t see it. More »
[image via Wikimedia Commons]
Have a few million dollars and a penchant for collecting space-age gadgets? Better head to Sotheby’s in New York City on April 12th. The auction house is selling a 50-year-old Russian space capsule that blasted off just three weeks before the first human did. The Vostok 3KA-2 on the auction block is exactly identical to the Vostok 3KA-3 that carried the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, into Earth’s orbit. In fact, this capsule provided the final test-flight before Gagarin made it into the history books, according to this Reuters article on the sale.
The interior has a not-so-spacious 8 foot diameter constructed out of aluminum alloy, making it a cozy little place to play cosmonaut.
It’s not quite in mint condition, however. The capsule sports burn marks from the hot reentry into Earth’s atmosphere and the equipment in the interior has been removed for what the Russian news service RIA Novosti calls “security reasons”. Still, this Soviet space-race relic is expected to sell anywhere between $2 million and $10 million, not a bad chunk of cash for its anonymous owner.
Even though the spacecraft didn’t carry a person into free-fall around Earth, that doesn’t mean it was entirely without passengers. When it first launched the Vostok 3KA-2 held a mannequin and a dog by the name of Zvezdochka. Both made it safely back to Earth, unharmed by the single orbit the capsule took before landing.
Nobody tell Roger Ebert, but the Smithsonian Museum has announced plans for a new exhibition, called The Art of Video Games, which will run between March and September next year. Charting the 40-year (now there’s a number that will make you feel old in a hurry) evolution of gaming from paddle-based pixel exchanges to sophisticated online multiplayer extravaganzas, this collection of memoirs will focus on the most visually striking and technologically innovative titles. Perhaps knowing how heated debates about video games can get, the Museum has sagely decided to co-opt its audience into the curatorial process — the second source link below will take you to a voting page where you can select your top 80 games from a shortlist of 240… and of course express your rage at the omission of some obscure title you totally loved late one night in 1995.
Smithsonian Museum will have a video game gallery next year, wants you to vote on what’s in it originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Feb 2011 11:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Where can you find Orson Welles, Marconi’s daughter, Alexander Graham Bell’s grandaughter, and inventors of the transistor and television? You might try To Communicate is the Beginning, a 1976 educational publication tracing the history of electronic communication, which AT&T recently decided to exhume from its archives of Bell Labs material. The 30-minute video’s just the first in a series, too, as AT&T’s website is already playing host to films about the origins of the laser and integrated circuit too, with more on the way. Find them all at our source link — you do want to know how your favorite technologies evolved, right?
AT&T opens up video archives, shares the history inside originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 19 Feb 2011 20:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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