sunman42

According to Wikipedia:

"Laika died within hours from overheating, possibly caused by a failure of the central R-7 sustainer to separate from the payload. The true cause and time of her death were not made public until 2002; instead, it was widely reported that she died when her oxygen ran out on day six or, as the Soviet government initially claimed, she was euthanised prior to oxygen depletion."

Department of niggling and redundant trivia department: Kendall Square, like the MIT campus, is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, across the Charles River from Boston. But it's all part of the greater Boston area, a.k.a. the Hub of the Universe.

ascii said:

Isn't aluminum the most common metal in the Earth's crust? So common we make cooking foil and drink cans out of it? 

So not exactly the most urgent thing to recycle, but a step forward nonetheless and better than wasting it.

Almost all aluminum in the earth's crust is found in bauxite, and removing the metal from it used to be so energy intensive that aluminum was worth more per unit weight than gold. The Bayer process (1888) made extraction less expensive, but still energy-intensive. It still takes somewhere between 63 and 95 KWh to produce 1 kilogram of aluminum, however. Probably much cheaper to make the shells for MacBook Airs and Mac minis out of old iPhones and Macs.

regurgitatedcoprolite said:

Vadim, it's better to say, "the number of cores" not "the amount of cores". 

Ditto for the number of ports.

Sorry to be all didactic, but amount refers to something that's either continuous (say, a liquid or a dollop of mashed potatoes), and number refers to something that's discrete and countable.

The discussion I've seen indicates Apple is focusing on enterprise-scale management, and eliminating support for services that (1) as indicated in the article, most sys admins replace with hand-configured, more up-to-date versions, and (2) can be implemented on the cloud (Office 365, &c.) to focus instead on enterprise device management, which supposedly is what its big corporate customers have asked for. All second- and third-hand, though, except for (1), which has been our situation for several years.