Opera News

The big news from the past week here at Opera HQ was the release of Opera 11.61. As you might imagine, this announcement prompted a frenzy of downloading, as users around the world rushed to claim the latest stability improvements and Speed Dial updates for their own. The activity on our servers reached such a peak that our head engineers had to throw the switch that brought the backup servers online from their secret location.

Well, make that formerly secret location.

(It was the buzzing from all that data compression that finally gave it away.)

Meanwhile, out on the gadget side of things, record quarterly earnings were reported by Apple and Samsung. In both cases, the companies earned their billions largely on the sale of smartphones and tablets, shifting something on the order of 20-30 million units each. In three months!

As if that weren't mind-blowing enough, 3D printing moved closer to becoming a truly mainstream technology as The Pirate Bay began offering digital files for download that can then be turned into actual objects. Emails with attachments are about to take on a whole new meaning...

Last but not least, there has been a lot of unusual activity out in space lately... If you were planning to fly over the North Pole in the past few days and had to be re-routed, for example, you probably already heard about the massive solar eruptions that are creating a "minor to moderate" radiation storm around Earth right now, in the words of one laudably calm scientist. OK. You've got your tin-foil hat and raincoat all set for that. But did you know that one of our friendly neighborhood asteroids - in this case, the very friendly-sounding Eros - will pass very close to our planet on January 31st? To some folks watching the night skies it will appear brighter than Neptune. (Not quite sure what that means, but it sounds like something worthy of going outside and staring up at the sky for.

Have a great weekend, everyone!