Cassiopeia
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Scientists made a virtual supernova you can walk around
At 11,000 light-years away, it's safe to say you won't be able to visit Cassiopeia A even if private space corporations start selling seats to amateur spacefarers. Thanks to a team of scientists, though, you might be able to see the 300-year-old supernova remnant up close -- or even walk inside it. The team used data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Spitzer Space Telescope and ground-based facilities to create a 3D model of Cassiopeia A with VR and AR elements. You'll be able to walk into the model, engage with parts of the remnant and conjure up short captions on what you're seeing and "touching."
The Summoner's Guidebook: Dominion isn't ready for ranked
I'm a huge fan of League of Legends' Dominion gametype. One of the complaints I hear regularly is that Dominion doesn't have a ranked mode. Right now, Dominion's highly skilled summoners must choose between "curbstomping pubbies" in blind pick mode or waiting for a year in queue for draft pick mode. A ranked mode would solve these issues, as players would be encouraged to play more and would be able to see improvements in their gameplay. A lot of people don't think that Dominion is ready for ranked. Most of the arguments along these lines have something to do with poor champion balance. What do they mean by "bad balance?" I have a suspicion that many of the complaints stem from a lack of counter-knowledge more than any fault of the developers.
Tabula Rasa server merge to affect US servers only
We've mentioned in the past that NCsoft plans to merge all four Tabula Rasa servers into one, before the final shutdown on February 28th. Their plan has changed somewhat, as only the three U.S. servers (Pegasus; Orion; Cassiopeia) will be merged into a consolidated server called Hydra. NCsoft will perform a data capture on Monday, and it may take up to 48 hours beyond that before Hydra is active. NCsoft says, "This means that characters will appear to 'time warp' back to Monday at 12:01 AM on the new server. We do not recommend doing anything irreversible to your character after Monday's data capture, as we are not absolutely confirming the server merge at this time. We will release more details, as well as a final conformation of the server merge, early next week." Tabula Rasa's European server, Centarus, is not being included in the server merge, and as such will have a separate 'sunset' event for European time zones.
Casio's latest portable projector, the XJ-S35
Until now you might have thought the Cassiopeia name was relegated merely to Casio's lineup of handheld devices, but their Cassiopeia Pro brand actually extends into portable digital projectors; their latest is new XJ-S35/30, an XGA DLP projector with a 2,000 lumen picture and an 1,800:1 contrast ratio. It's also got a USB 1.1 port for playing back images or MPEG-4 and motion JPEG video, or for connecting an 802.11b adapter as well. And the best part is this scant little device is only 270 x 199 x 43mm (10.6 x 7.83 x 1.70inches) and 1.8kg (about 4 pounds), quite small enough to lug around with you from one meeting with the salarymen to the next. Yes, we said salarymen -- this thing's a Japan release, sorry?
