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Why Garfield phones have littered French beaches for 35 years
There's no better symbol of plastic ocean pollution and '80s consumerism gone wild than the Garfield phones of Brittany. The handsets, in the form of the aggressively unfunny cat, have been washing up on French beaches for decades. However, the novelty has long since worn off for residents who have been picking them up since the '80s. Now, a local anti-litter group called Ar Vilantsou has finally found the source: a lost shipping container.
Red Hat buys the creator of a Chrome-based OS for servers
The underpinnings of Chrome OS have found their way into the server room in a very roundabout way. Red Hat has acquired CoreOS, the creators of an operating system for containerized apps (Container Linux) that shares roots with both Google's Chromium OS project and Gentoo Linux. The $250 million deal promises to help Red Hat fulfill its dreams of helping people use open code to deploy apps in any environment they like, whether it's on a local network or multiple cloud services.
Samsung unveils Knox 2.0, lets users run Google Play apps even more securely
Exactly a year to the day after it first announced its Knox security solution, Samsung's returned to Mobile World Congress with news that it's making it even easier to secure and manage Galaxy devices. With the launch of Knox 2.0 today, Samsung's changed the way the platform handles Google Play apps, digitally securing their data without the need to run them in a dedicated Knox workspace. Before, personal- and work-related apps were separated, but Samsung says "most" Google Play apps can now live in Samsung's secure world. It's certainly serious about its new features, as CEO JK Shin popped up at the event to drive home Samsung's desire to nail the enterprise market. Samsung wants more secure apps across the board, so it's also launching Knox Marketplace, a dedicated cloud-based app store that lets tech managers grab apps and install them on all employee phones with a few clicks of a button. Box and GoToMeeting are already on board, and there are plenty of enterprise companies already working to make their apps available. Samsung tells us that the new features will begin rolling out in the second quarter, and it'll come pre-installed on the newly unveiled Galaxy S5. First-generation Knox users will get an upgrade to the new version as soon as their devices get an upgrade to Android 4.4 KitKat -- whenever that may be. Steve Dent contributed to this report.
WoW Rookie: Bag it
New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the basics of a good start in the World of Warcraft. Send us a note to suggest a WoW Rookie topic, and be sure to visit WoW.com's WoW Rookie Guide for links to all our tips, tricks and how-to's.With the excitement his week focused on the all-new, 22-slot Onyxia Hide Backpack, it seems anticlimactic to think that many players are struggling simply to maintain enough space in their bags for quest items and a decent amount of loot. It's easy to throw down big money for big bags when you're max level and rolling in gold from dailies – but new players must walk the line between overspending for convenience's sake and having enough bag space to get the job done.Let's make one thing perfectly clear: bigger bags are a savvy investment. There's definitely a point of diminishing returns, though, which will be obvious to even the most naive of WoW rookies searching through the Containers section in the Auction House. (Really. You'll know when it's time to stop upgrading. We promise.) Getting wise to what's available and where to find it will help you squeeze out those last few precious bag slots without going broke in the process.
Retail usage of clamshell packaging may be shucked
We've all suffered an injury or two at the hands of a hermetically-sealed package containing a shiny new controller or other accessory, but did you know that 6,500 people visited the emergency room with a plastic packaging-related injury in 2004? That's not all -- these "clamshell" packages are often made of environmentally-unsound non-recycled plastics (which are increasingly expensive to produce due to rising petroleum costs), and are the largest contributer to various worldwide terrorist organizations?Okay, that last part was a lie, but there are plenty of reasons to dislike this hand-lacerating form of consumer packaging -- luckily, a recent CNET article revealed that some experts in the packaging industry think that clamshell usage may be on its way out, for the reasons listed above. Retailers still prefer the shoplifter-deterring containers, but consumer frustration and cheaper alternatives may signal the end of the mollusk-inspired packages in the coming years. Our gnarled, decrepit hands are very relieved. [Via Kotaku]
Sun's Project Blackbox -- datacenter in a container
We're typically not of the ilk to bust out a post on a Sun datacenter solution or yet another clustered supercomputer, but technically Sun's Project Blackbox is portable -- if you consider a shipping container portable. We wouldn't believe it if it were anyone else, but the gimmick here is Project Blackbox is a shock mounted transportable datacenter capable of accommodating up to 250 Sun Fire T1000s or x64 servers, with up to 7 terabytes of memory and as many as 1.5 petabytes of disk or 2 petabytes of tape storage -- just supply water and power, and the thing will run on its own. (Whether or not you actually plug it into your network is another matter entirely.) Their big sales pitch here is that the cash-flush "Web 2.0" company which wants to go green probably needs a simple way of shipping around or deploying an entirely pre-constructed IT infrastructure; see, apparently Project Blackbox is recyclable and is designed to run independently on wind or even Martian solar power (we kid you not, pictures after the break), though our favorite deployment scenario is definitely the datacenter in the parking garage. We never thought getting your megacorp's server farm jacked by a valet was going to redefine corporate data security, but hey, this industry changes daily, and when you're Sun and your competition's ten thousand gutted Linux desktops at a fraction of the price, the publicity stunts you've got to pull start taking bizarre new shapes. That said, we're planning on deploying at least one or two to the next Jobsnote so the F5-trigger happy in the house don't spoil all the fun.[Thanks, Reese]
