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US Navy decommissions the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier
It's the end of an era for the US sea power, in more ways than one: the Navy has decommissioned the USS Enterprise (CVN-65), the world's first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. The vessel launched in 1961 and is mainly known for playing a pivotal role in several major incidents and conflicts, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War and the 2003 Iraq War. However, it also served as the quintessential showcase for what nuclear ships could do. Its eight reactors let it run for years at a time, all the while making more room for the aircraft and their fuel.
Modern Warfare 3's final two DLC packs fully reconnoitered
The year of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 post-launch content is coming to a close, but it's going out with a bang (gun pun fully intended). The Chaos Pack – previously half-detailed – brings three Face Off maps and four Spec-Ops missions, as well as a new mode, dubbed "Special Ops Chaos Mode." It's a wave-based survival mode, albeit with a Spec-Ops twist. The whole shebang launches for Xbox 360 on August 9, with PS3 and PC versions launching later on.In September, MW3 players on 360 get the "Final Assault" pack, which adds five multiplayer maps ("Gulch," "Offshore," "Boardwalk," "Decommission," and "Parish"), two of which are already available on 360. Again, this content arrives on PS3 and PC at a later (unknown) date. As Activision community blog One of Swords points out, Call of Duty's Elite season ends with more content than it originally promised, which seems pretty boss if you ask us. But don't go getting your precedents miscalibrated, as this may not be the case in future years.
Modern Warfare 3's July content for Elite PS3 and Xbox 360 subscribers
Call of Duty Elite members on Xbox 360 will get a new content drop in Modern Warfare 3 on Tuesday, July 17: three new multiplayer maps and a Spec Ops mission.The multiplayer maps include a graveyard of derelict ocean liners called Decommission, an oil rig built for sniping called Offshore, and the remake of Modern Warfare 2's Terminal map, available to Elite members on Tuesday and free for the rest of Modern Warfare 3's Xbox 360 players the following day. In the Spec Ops mission, Vertigo, players must take down enemy troops and helicopters while perched atop the Oasis hotel.On Thursday, July 19, Call of Duty Elite subscribers on PS3 get to tussle with three new Face-Off maps and a Spec Ops mission, content released on Xbox 360 back in June. Multiplayer maps include a tornado-rocked town called Vortex, a dilapidated middle-eastern highway in U-Turn, an urban NYC-based map called Intersection, and the Spec Ops mission, Arctic Recon, which tasks players with assaulting a Russian warship.%Gallery-160351%
Sprint shows you where and when it's disabling Nextel's iDEN legacy network
Clue's in the title, really. If you head on over to Sprint's website, you'll find a page explaining the forthcoming changes to the service for legacy iDEN customers. Nextel users can enter in their zip code to find out which cellphone towers will be decommissioned and the due dates for each one. The program's beginning in New Orleans this month as the towers are thinned out to a reasonable number. Whilst it isn't (yet) the death-knell for the standard, given the network's push-to-talk service now works over CDMA and, you know, LTE, we'd start looking at replacement phones pretty soon.
Sun.com, the twelfth oldest domain on the internet, will be decommissioned on June 1st
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]
Analog cellular networks, R.I.P.: 1983 - 2008
Marking the end of a remarkable era in cellular technology, the FCC is officially letting American carriers decommission their legacy analog networks as of today, February 18, 2008. Few of us still own a phone based on AMPS -- Advanced Mobile Phone System, ironically, despite the fact that there's been nothing "advanced" about it for many years -- but we owe the very existence of the world's modern wireless infrastructure to the introduction and overwhelming success of the Bell Labs-developed technology. So successful was AMPS, in fact, that it eventually covered virtually 100 percent of the continental United States, a statistic CDMA and GSM have only recently begun to approach.
