Sony spent years turning over-ear canceling into something people actually wear all day, and the WH-1000XM5, priced at $199.99 (was $400), remains the pair that made that habit stick. Eight microphones and a pair of processors hush cabin rumble, subway grind, and open-office chatter so thoroughly that music and calls sit on a darker background than most rivals managed when these launched a few years ago.
Sunday morning over Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center looked almost too calm for a rocket that would soon make more than five million pounds of thrust. At 7:26 a.m. EDT on August 30, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy lit all 27 Merlin engines and carried NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope off the pad through blue Florida sky and a thin scatter of cloud. Weather had sat at 50 percent “go” overnight on cumulus and surface-electric-field rules, then improved to 70 percent in the last hour. Launch manager Denton Gibson polled the room and sent it.
Techmoan already owned an 18-inch Hughes Wave Motion Machine that set him back about $500. He wanted something longer, so he paid $300 for the biggest model waveshop listed, a 25-inch unit shipped from India.
Chairs stay chairs. Tables stay tables. Anything that needs to become both usually grows hinges, motors, and a tangle of wires that quit the first time you twist the thing the wrong way. Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab spent years looking for a quieter option, and they landed on Bifur-circuits: a kit of 3D-printed blocks that snap together, fold into new stable poses, and keep an electrical map of whatever form they just became.
Late in 2008, NComputing boxed a full-height PCI card, five palm-sized terminals, and a disc of vSpace software and sold the kit as the X550 for $449. One kit added five extra seats to a single desktop. Seat six stayed on the host itself, so six people could work at once, each with a private monitor, keyboard, mouse, and speakers. A second kit in a second PCI slot pushed the same tower to eleven sessions.