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Michael Jackson Themed MMO In the Works Screenshot-sm 180

Posted by samzenpus from the who's-bad? dept.
norton123 writes "SEE has announced plans to published a Michael Jackson themed MMO. From the article: 'Planet Michael is described by SEE as "a massive social gaming experience" with "collaborative in-game activities," set in "an immersive virtual space themed after iconic visuals drawn from Michael's music, his life and the global issues that concerned him."'"
Privacy

Big Brother In the School Cafeteria? 425

Posted by samzenpus from the getting-an-A-in-cafeteria dept.
AustinSlacker writes "An Iowa school district's lunch program asks children as young as 5 years old to memorize a four-digit PIN code so it can monitor what they eat in the school cafeteria - prompting some parents to claim it's an unhealthy case of 'Big Brother.' An over reaction by parents or an unnecessary invasion of privacy?"
Music

Radiohead Helps Fans Make Crowd-Sourced Live Show DVD 103

Posted by Soulskill from the welcome-to-the-riaa's-hitlist dept.
Kilrah_il writes "After having a go with a Name-Your-Price album and an open-source video, Radiohead is again breaking new ground, this time with a fan-based initiative. A group of fans went to one of the band's shows in Prague, each shooting the show from a different angle. By editing it all together and adding audio from the original masters provided by the band, they have created a video of the show that is 'Strictly not for sale — By the fans for the fans,' adding, 'Please share and enjoy.' Can this be the future of live show videos?"
Businesses

Why Microsoft Is Being Nicer To Open Source 231

Posted by timothy from the in-some-markets-at-least dept.
itwbennett writes "Is open source's growth in emerging markets what is driving Microsoft to say 'we love open source' with an attempt at a straight face? 'The emerging markets (like the BRIC nations) are a huge potential market for Microsoft,' says Brian Proffitt. 'And I believe Redmond is wisely not taking the FUD route on open source software in those markets. Why? Because open source already has some strong roots in the BRIC nations (heck, in Brazil, open source is the whole darn tree), and any attack on open source would be seen as a foreign company attacking local software projects. If Microsoft attacked open source publicly in this environment, a lot of potential customers and developers in those countries could react in a protectionist manner and start giving Microsoft the stink-eye.'"
Medicine

Sit Longer, Die Sooner 341

Posted by timothy from the hence-supine-on-couch dept.
mcgrew writes "Bad news for most of us here — The Chicago Tribune is reporting that even if you get plenty of exercize, sitting down all day reduces your lifespan. From the article: 'Even after adjusting for body mass index (BMI) and smoking, the researchers found that women who sit more than 6 hours a day were 37 percent more likely to die than those who sit less than 3 hours; for men, long-sitters were 17 percent more likely to die. People who exercise regularly had a lower risk, but still significant, risk of dying. Those who sat a lot and moved less than three and a half hours per day are the most likely to die early: researchers found a 94 percent increased risk for women and 48 percent increase for men, they announced recently in the American Journal of Epidemiology.'"
Cellphones

Apple Patents Remotely Disabling Jailbroken Phones 381

Posted by Soulskill from the trying-to-put-the-break-in-jailbreak dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Apple yesterday applied for a patent to allow remotely disabling electronic devices when 'unauthorized usage' is detected. The patent application covers using the camera to take pictures of the unauthorized user and using GPS to determine location, and it involves ascertaining whether the phone has been hacked or jailbroken, using those as criteria for detecting 'suspicious behavior.' The patent would allow the carrier or any other 'authorized' party to disable or restrict the functionality of the device. Is this Apple's latest tool to thwart jailbreaking?"
Social Networks

Sifting Authorities From Celebrities On Twitter 86

Posted by Soulskill from the signal-to-noise dept.
holy_calamity writes "Celebrities like Britney Spears may be the 'most followed' on Twitter, but new service PeerIndex mines the content of tweets and tracks the spread of links and phrases to reveal the hidden experts in specific areas, from cloud computing to venture capital. The authorities the site finds for a given subject often have only a few hundred followers, but the content of their tweets is known to spread widely. Could data mining tools like this be the future for people or businesses looking for new collaborators, advisers and influencers?"
Earth

IEEE Looks At Kevin Costner's Oil Cleanup Machines 289

Posted by timothy from the bright-guy-just-picks-bad-scripts dept.
richardkelleher writes "IEEE Spectrum takes a look at the machines developed by a company funded by Kevin Costner that are supposed to extract the oil from the Gulf waters. Is it possible that in the years since the Exxon Valdez, that Kevin Costner is the only one who has invested money into the technology of oil spill cleanup?"
Google

Google Acquires Metaweb 63

Posted by Soulskill from the nothing-to-do-with-neal-stephenson dept.
eldavojohn writes "A startup called Metaweb (looks like an ontological, entity-based approach to Web 2.0 tagging) has been acquired by Google. You can find out what they're about from a super marketing fluff video they put together. The neat thing about Metaweb is that the database of entities it has is free. Will Google be able to make Metaweb work on their omniscient scale, or was this just Google making sure a startup doesn't become yet another player in search?"

Comment Re:Does anyone.... (Score 2, Interesting) 156

by Saint Aardvark (#32918590) Attached to: OpenSUSE 11.3 Is Here

Yep; where I work (small university dep't) one of the faculty members has it on all his desktops.

My main grumble about OpenSuSE is that, at least until 11.2 -- I'm still fuzzy on the details -- you couldn't actually do an upgrade from SuSE itself using zypper; you had to boot from the DVD and upgrade. I'm used to CentOS and Debian where this sort of thing isn't a mix of hope and prayer or a feature request.
Businesses

NetApp Threatens Sellers of Appliances Running ZFS 231

Posted by Soulskill from the they-also-invented-the-box-and-the-bucket dept.
eldavojohn writes "ZFS is licensed under the CDDL and is considered to be open source, but NetApp is sending threatening legal letters to startups who look to offer ZFS on NAS appliances. This assault on Coraid has a few people worried about the future of ZFS as NetApp rears its ugly head yet again. The CEO of Coraid replied to NetApp's demands, saying, 'We made the decision to suspend shipment after receiving a legal threat letter from NetApp Inc., suggesting that the open-source ZFS file system planned for inclusion with our EtherDrive Z-Series infringes NetApp patents.' Will NetApp effectively destroy any future ZFS might have enjoyed?"

Comment Saw a presentation on this last year... (Score 4, Informative) 89

by Saint Aardvark (#32802328) Attached to: IBM Supercomputer Cooled With Hot Water

I was at LISA '09, and Dr. Bruno Michel (works for IBM, mentioned in the article) made a presentation on this work (or at least very, very similar work). You can see the presentation, or download the MP3, here:

http://www.usenix.org/event/lisa09/tech/tech.html#michel

Interesting talk, and well worth your time.
Firefox

The 'Back' Button the Most Clicked Firefox Icon 267

Posted by timothy from the whatchu-clickin'-about-willis? dept.
darthcamaro writes "How many times did you click the 'Back' button in your browser last week? According to a new study from Mozilla, it's likely that you clicked 'Back' a whole lot. 'Across Windows, Mac and Linux 93.1 percent of users clicked the button at least once over the course of a five-day period. In total the study reported that users clicked on the back button 66 times over the course of five days. The next most used button is the 'Reload' button with 73.2 percent usage and 22 clicks on average per user over five days. Other areas of the main window that were heavily used include the Search Bar where users input search queries. The study found that 67.9 percent of users used the Search Bar for an average of nearly 16 clicks per user over the course of five days.'"

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