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Aug 9, 2012 11:40 AM   New Mexico's Apache Point Observatory has used its giant telescope to create the biggest 3D tour of the universe ever, starring 400,000 galaxies. Ohhhh, ahhhh! The amazing map was put together using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an ambitious project that's been working for the past 12 years to chart 7 billion years' worth of planetary activity. Take a minute because that might make your brain explode. The video is made from two years of SDSS info, but wait—there's more. It still has more than a million galaxies to go before it maps the whole thing. The universe is a huuuuge place. And we are tiny. [The Atlantic] View the original article here This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Aug 1, 2012 12:20 PM   The older you get, the more of your friends start crapping out kids. And of course they pretty much insta-post every picture of their spawn on Facebook. Maybe you're annoyed or maybe you just think newborns actually look more like tiny shriveled old men. Unbaby.me, a Chrome extension that removes all the babies from your newsfeed, will save you from looking at a shot of junior every time he's got a new outfit on. It automagically ditches the kid pics and puts pictures of awesome things in their place. Baby's 11-week birthday? Gone in favor of partial nudity! Baby eating solid foods for the first time? Here's a dog wearing a cop costume. A cop costume! You'll never be bored with all the minutiae of new parenthood again. Now please, make an extension that also excludes weddings and food pics. [Unbaby.me via Happy Place] View the original article here This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not...

Jul 26, 2012 5:06 PM   Twitter was really freaking broken today. Which, well, sucked. Here's what Mazen Rawashdeh, Twitter's VP of Engineering, has to say about the outage. The cause of today's outage came from within our data centers. Data centers are designed to be redundant: when one system fails (as everything does at one time or another), a parallel system takes over. What was noteworthy about today's outage was the coincidental failure of two parallel systems at nearly the same time. And that was that. Rawashdeh apologized earnestly in the blog post, noting that Twitter can't pin this to the Olympics or an external bug—just two parallel systems coincidentally going down at the same time. [Twitter] View the original article here This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Ron Johnson is best known for creating Apple's retail empire. He's now CEO of retailer JCPenney. This week, he detailed his amazing vision for turning JCPenney into a techno wonderland in Apple's image. And he's turning to Oracle for help. Apple's store design gets almost all the attention. Not as flashy but just as important is the software that does everything from tracking inventory to letting salespeople ring up purchases with iPhones. Like a lot of retailers, JCPenney has old, proprietary code. Johnson is yanking out about 500 applications, nearly all of them custom applications created over the years, and having Oracle be its one-stop shop. This is a big win for Oracle, since its archrival IBM has been entrenched with retailers for decades. (Look at this 1976 article about JCPenney installing IBM cash registers, for example.) Neither company disclosed the size of this deal for Oracle, but it's easy to see that it's big. JCPenney already used quite a b...

James Holmes allegedly opened fire on atheater full of moviegoers early Friday morning during a midnight premier of "The Dark Knight Rises." We've been bringing you a slew of updates all day. But we know things can get confusing when new details of such a horrific crime are constantly breaking, so here are the most important things you need to know: In total, 71 people were hit during the violence. Twelve are dead and 59 were were injured during the attack in Aurora, Colo. The suspect, who we later learned is named James Eagan Holmes, was arrested in the parking lot of the movie theater. He is the only suspect and reportedly did not fight the arrest. Holmes let slip to police that both his car and apartment had explosives inside. That statement spurred police to evacuate at least five buildings near Holmes' apartment. During their search of the apartment, police found that Holmes' apartment was indeed booby-trapped with various incendiary and chemical trip wire...