Skywall is an anti-drone net-launcher – wonder if they plan to sell these privately...
Drones have caused change and upheaval, altering the way that we are able to film events and places. And also allowing people to intrude remotely into locations they have no business being. Of course someone’s going to come up with countermeasures and the Skywall100 is perhaps the slickest implementation we’ve seen. It looks like the kind of rocket launcher you’d use to remove entire communications facilities with but instead it fires an oversized Mario Bros. bullet which conceals a net. Said net entangles intruding drones before a parachute is deployed, bringing the flying offender to the ground. Wonder if they’d lend us a few so we can go hunting, catch-and-release style…
Source: OpenWorks
You’ll be a fool if you don’t own The Force Awakens on 1 April
The Disney marketing machine is a formidable one. One that will eventually be mandatory to participate in. In the meantime they’re using more conventional methods of convincing you to buy stuff, like trailers. For Star Wars: The Force Awakens, for instance, which will be hopping onto disc (DVD and Blu-ray) from 1 April this year. We’re not entirely sure that this is an international launch date but if you’re a rabid-enough Star Wars fan you’ll be okay with travelling to a participating country to get your disc before anyone else. That’s a course of action sure to please your eventual Disney overlords. Passages like this, however, will get you shot. Sorry Mickey, we’ll try and do better.
Source: Star Wars (YouTube)
No Man’s Sky is going to make you learn alien languages
Open-universe game No Man’s Sky is on track to be the largest space-title ever (to date), with “18,446,744,073,709,551,616” unique planets to explore. The number is in quotation marks because we’re going to take developer Hello Games’ word for it. But the massive size isn’t all – they’re also introducing several alien languages to this random universe. Unlike most games, you’re not going to understand them from the outset. Hello’s Sean Murray said “With NPCs in No Man’s Sky, you actually have to learn their language; they speak to you in their native tongue. The more you travel around the universe, the more you learn their language, and the more you can communicate with them.” There are perks to knowing the lingo, as you might find your travels enhanced by interaction with aliens. Or not. But you’ll have to get to know them first.
Source: PlayStation Blog
Samsung is now shipping a monster 15TB solid-state drive
Damn, it would be nice if we could hide headlines. In the absence of that, this is how you make a hard drive attractive. By making it bigger. And solid. It’s like the bodybuilder of hard-drives. What you’re looking at here is Samsung’s 15TB solid-state drive. Yes, that’s correct and no, we didn’t stick a decimal point in the wrong place or something. Samsung are now shipping the PM1633a SSD, which has a 15.36TB capacity. And it fits into a 2.5″ form factor. Somehow. What can you expect to pay for the largest hard drive on the market (never mind that it’s a solid-state unit)? Samsung isn’t saying but around R125,000 seems like a fair enough estimate. Right? Yeah, we can’t afford it either. Good thing it’s intended for enterprise.
Source: via Ars Technica