Coca-Cola Begins Testing a Paper Bottle

“Coca-Cola is to test a paper bottle as part of a longer-term bid to eliminate plastic from its packaging entirely,” reports the BBC: The prototype is made by a Danish company from an extra-strong paper shell that still contains a thin plastic liner. But the goal is to create a 100% recyclable, plastic-free bottle capable of preventing gas escaping from carbonated…

Honor Launches First Post-Huawei Phone

Honor, the Chinese smartphone brand formerly owned by Huawei, launched the V40, its first device since being sold off. CNBC reports: Huawei sold Honor, its budget smartphone brand, in November to a consortium of buyers in China, as a way to help the unit survive in the face of U.S. sanctions. In 2019, Huawei was put on a U.S. export blacklist…

Q3 2020 Coursera for Business Quarterly Product Release

By Shwetabh Mittal, Senior Director, Product Management The great lockdown caused by COVID-19 has accelerated the need for digital skills. Companies are reallocating their digital talent to stay competitive and dedicating more time and resources to helping their employees learn about digital technologies. The pandemic has had an even bigger impact on higher education: around 1.6 […]
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Spaces or Tabs? Microsoft Developers Reveal Their Preferences

In a new video, Microsoft’s principal cloud advocate and DevOps lead weighed in on that crucial and perennial developer question: which is better, indenting your code with spaces or with tabs? “This is kind of a loaded question… However, I am very opinionated on this. I happen to be a huge fan of tabs, for a couple of reasons. Number one,…

Djokovic Wants Line Judges Replaced by Technology

Novak Djokovic’s relationship with line officials has been difficult of late and the Serbian risked their wrath again late last week when he suggested they were unnecessary. From a report: The 33-year-old world number one was dramatically defaulted in the U.S. Open fourth round after inadvertently hitting a female line judge in the throat with a loose ball. Now he believes…

Microsoft Office 365 Experienced Two Major Outages Within 3 Days

On Monday long-time Slashdot reader TorinEdge wrote that Microsoft “appears to have botched an internal Office365 cloud services rollout today, with outages confirmed up and down the West Coast of North America. Confirmed roll backs were good early omens, but in the end did not appear to be successful… Symptoms may include: All 365-related services flaking out, borking, alternately approving logins…

For the First Time Ever, Scientists Caught Time Crystals Interacting

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Mechanics: For the first time, scientists have observed an interaction of a rare and baffling form of matter called time crystals. The crystals look at a glance like “regular” crystals, but they have a relationship to time that both intrigues and puzzles scientists because of its unpredictability. Now, experts say they could have…

The Pringles Tube Is Being Redesigned Because It’s a ‘Recycling Nightmare’

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The distinctive Pringles tube is being re-designed after criticism that it’s almost impossible to recycle. The current container for the potato-based snack was condemned as a recycler’s nightmare. It’s a complex construction with a metal base, plastic cap, metal tear-off lid, and foil-lined cardboard sleeve. The Recycling Association dubbed it the number…

Coursera doubles down on Latin America with new university partners in Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina

Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, and Unversidad de Palermo join our partner community to reach Spanish-speaking learners all over the world  By Betty Vandenbosch, Chief Content Officer, Coursera  Read this post in Spanish. Coursera is growing rapidly in Latin America. In the past year alone, we’ve added more than 5 million new learners […]
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Amazon Deletes 20,000 Reviews After Evidence of Profits for Posts

Amazon has deleted approximately 20,000 product reviews, written by seven of its top 10 UK reviewers, following a Financial Times investigation (Editor’s note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source) into suspicious activity. From a report: The FT found evidence the users were profiting from posting thousands of five-star ratings. Those who had their reviews deleted included Justin Fryer, the number…