Month: December 2015

Scott Kelly took a photo of the International Space Station's new harvest of veggies. (credit: Scott Kelly/NASA)

Scott Kelly is no Mark Watney, the potato-growing botanist in The Martian. On Sunday, the NASA astronaut, who is spending a year on the International Space Station, tweeted a photo of the latest crop of plants from the station's space garden, saying, "Our plants aren't looking too good. Would be a problem on Mars. I'm going to have to channel my inner Mark Watney."

The plants are part of a NASA experiment designated Veg-01, an effort by NASA to make its astronauts more independent of Earth by developing the technology that will eventually allow them to grow food in space. The plants are being grown in a special "veggie facility" with a calcined clay media. The initial test crops were primarily species of lettuce.

Astronauts had their first harvest of lettuce in August from romaine seeds that had been on the station for 15 months before being planted. After cleaning their crop with sanitizing wipes, astronauts Scott Kelly and Kjell Lindgren dressed them with balsamic vinegar and extra virgin olive oil before sampling the lettuce. The space farmers declared their crop to be "awesome" and tasting "kind of like arugula."

The HoloLens headset. (credit: Microsoft)

Windows 10 was Microsoft's most important product launch of the year. It shored up the desktop platform, it introduced a new approach to delivering and updating the operating system, and it created the opportunity for Windows to be everywhere.

But as important as it was, Windows 10 was not Microsoft's most interesting 2015 product. The most interesting products were the HoloLens augmented reality headset and the Surface Book hybrid laptop. OK, HoloLens isn't out quite yet—$3,000 developer units will be available in the first quarter of 2016—but it was first demonstrated back in January, upstaging Windows 10's consumer preview, which was shown off at the same time.

What was striking about both of these is that their reception was less about what they were and more about what they represented. HoloLens is obviously the grander ambition—a new kind of human-computer interaction depending on the melding of virtual 3D objects with the real world, driven by voice and gestures as well as the more conventional mouse and keyboard.

(credit: eirunning85 / imgur)

Although the official Apple Store is yet to come to the capital of the Czech Republic, it has recently seen the launch of the Apple Museum, which claims to host the largest private exhibition of its kind.

Housed in three buildings in Prague's old town, the museum has an extensive list of 472 exhibits on display—from nearly every Apple product ever built to Steve Jobs' business cards from his times at NeXT and Pixar.

Local Reddit user eirunning85 has put together a gallery of what you can see at the new Apple Museum. Here are our favourite picks:

(credit: Yandex)

An employee of Russia's Internet giant Yandex, Dmitry Korobov, stole the source code of its search engine and tried to sell it on the black market to fund his own startup, according to a report by the Russian newspaper Kommersant. A Russian court has found Korobov guilty and handed down a suspended sentence of two years in jail.

The Kommersant investigation revealed that Korobov downloaded a piece of software codenamed Arcadia from Yandex's servers, which contained the source code and algorithms of the company's search engine. Later on, he tried to sell it to an electronics retailer called NIX, where a friend of his allegedly worked. Korobov also trawled the darknet in search of potential buyers.

Korobov put a surprisingly low price on the code and algorithms, asking for just $25,000 and 250,000 Russian rubles, or about £27,000 in total. There's no information on Korobov's position within the company, but it appears that he wasn't aware that the data he had in his possession could be worth much more.

(credit: Getty Images)

It's the apps. The iPhone and Android conquered the world because of the apps. More specifically, what keeps Android and iOS dominant is the utter lack of those apps on competing platforms. But today, the mobile landscape is significantly different than it was a year or two ago (let alone five). Today, apps aren't really necessary. In fact, it's easy to envision an excellent, software-rich mobile device that uses the Web instead of apps.

There's currently a litany of problems with apps. There is the platform lock-in and the space the apps take up on the device. Updating apps is a pain that users often ignore, leaving broken or vulnerable versions in use long after they've been allegedly patched. Apps are also a lot of work for developers— it's not easy to write native apps to run on both Android and iOS, nevermind considering Windows Phone and BlackBerry.

What's the alternative?Well, perhaps the best answer is to go back to the future and do what we do on desktop computers: use the Web and the Web browser. Updates to HTML apps happen entirely on the server, so users get them immediately. There's no window of vulnerability between the release of a security fix and the user applying the update. So with a capable, HTML-based platform and a well-designed program that makes good use of CSS, one site could support phones, tablets, PCs, and any just about anything else with one site.