With the government shutdown over, the FAA has lifted its daytime launch curfew. Welcome to Edition 8.20 of the Rocket Report! For the second week in a row, Blue Origin dominated the headlines with news about its New Glenn rocket. After a stunning success November 13 with the launch…
HEVC licensing gets more expensive in January. Some Dell and HP laptop owners have been befuddled by their machines’ inability to play HEVC/H.265 content in web browsers, despite their machines’ processors having integrated decoding support. Laptops with sixth-generation Intel Core and later processors have built-in hardware support for HEVC…
Microsoft’s Open Source Programs Office worked with Jason Scott to do it. Zork, the classic text-based adventure game of incalculable influence, has been made available under the MIT License, along with the sequels Zork II and Zork III. The move to take these Zork games open source comes as…
Eclipse tables in the Dresden Codex were based on lunar tables and adjusted for slippage over time. Astronomical events such as eclipses were central to Maya culture, reflected in the care the Maya took to keep accurate calendars to aid in celestial predictions. Among the few surviving Maya texts…
Google’s Pixel 10 works with AirDrop, and other phones should follow later. Last year, Apple finally added support for Rich Communications Services (RCS) texting to its platforms, improving consistency, reliability, and security when exchanging green-bubble texts between the competing iPhone and Android ecosystems. Today, Google is announcing another small…
GeForce Now Fast Pass is a new service tier exclusively for Chromebooks. Earlier this year, Google announced the end of its efforts to get Steam running on Chromebooks, but it’s not done trying to make these low-power laptops into gaming machines. Google has teamed up with Nvidia to offer…
Aerial drones are giving scientists a new view of life at sea. In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, causing one of the largest marine oil spills ever. In the aftermath of the disaster, whale scientist Iain Kerr traveled to the area to…
Conversational AI from your phone cast to your car should be about to get better. Google’s platform for casting audio and navigation apps from a smartphone to a car’s infotainment system beat Apple’s to market by a good while, but that head start has not always kept Android Auto…
Google’s new image-generator model is available to try globally today. Google’s meme-friendly Nano Banana image-generation model is getting an upgrade. The new Nano Banana Pro is rolling out with improved reasoning and instruction following, giving users the ability to create more accurate images with legible text and make precise…
A simple proposal on a 1982 electronic bulletin board helped sarcasm flourish online. On September 19, 1982, Carnegie Mellon University computer science research assistant professor Scott Fahlman posted a message to the university’s bulletin board software that would later come to shape how people communicate online. His proposal: use…
