Comment well done (Score 5, Insightful) 1695
awesome, it's nice to see a company with a bit of a spine, freedom of speech is one thing, but no-one has to provide a stage.
Comment Re:Not so perfect iPhone? (Score 1) 534
I bet the engineers at Toyota are PISSED, the best they could come up with for their flaky systems was blaming it on random cosmic radiation. If only they'd had Steve Jobs to spin things they might have been able to eliminate the brake pedals completely and shift the blame to the roads for any problems with speeding or slowing.
Comment Re:Bad, Bad Idea (Score 1) 495
Gotta agree with this.
Any time the business is cutting jobs around you while expanding, management's already gone horribly wrong.
Just try for a better job title and get your responsibilities (job description sorted out).
If you're useful, hardworking, and not a total douche, you'll always be able to find another job.
Comment Re:The Pentagon Papers / Absense of Malice (Score 1) 1204
If this was legitimate reporting it'd be one thing, but dealing in stolen goods and revealing trade secrets obtained from those stolen goods, that's hardly Journalism.
This is more akin to breaking and entering a celebrities home and taking a picture of them in the shower, then going on to selling it to the People magazine or such. Returning the negatives after the pictures are on the web, hardly makes you look like a 'good' guy.
California Lake's Arsenic Hints At a Shadow Biosphere 155
MichaelSmith writes "Scientists think that there might be arsenic-based life in Mono Lake, California. If it's shown to exist, such life could have evolved independently from our own, or it could have forked from ours at a very early stage."
California To Create Public Animal Abuser Registry 404
An anonymous reader writes "California legislators are moving forward with plans to create a public, online, animal abuser registry identical in function to the public sex offender registry. Is this the slippery slope to further government mandated lists and registries?"
Brain Surgery Linked To Sensation of Spirituality 380
the3stars writes "'Removing part of the brain can induce inner peace, according to researchers from Italy. Their study provides the strongest evidence to date that spiritual thinking arises in, or is limited by, specific brain areas. This raises a number of interesting issues about spirituality, among them whether or not people can be born with a strong propensity towards spirituality and also whether it can be acquired through head trauma."
One critic's quoted response: "It's important to recognize that the whole study is based on changes in one self-report measure, which is a coarse measure that includes some strange items."
An Inside Look At Warhammer Online's Server Setup 71
An article at Gamasutra provides some details on the hardware Mythic uses to power Warhammer Online, courtesy of Chief Technical Officer Matt Shaw and Online Technical Director Andrew Mann. Quoting:
"At any given time, approximately 2,000 servers are in operation, supporting the gameplay in WAR. Matt Shaw commented, 'What we call a server to the user, that main server is actually a cluster of a number of machines. Our Server Farm in Virginia, for example,' Mann said, 'has about 60 Dell Blade chassis running Warhammer Online — each hosting up to 16 servers. All in all, we have about 700 servers in operation at this location.' ... 'We use blade architecture heavily for Warhammer Online,' Mann noted. 'Almost every server that we deploy is a blade system. We don't use virtualization; our software is somewhat virtualized itself. We've always had the technology to run our game world across several pieces of hardware. It's application-layer clustering at a process level. Virtualization wouldn't gain us much because we already run very close to peak CPU usage on these systems.' ... The normalized server configuration — in use across all of the Mythic-managed facilities — features dual Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors running at 3 GHz with 8 GB of RAM."
The Best Robots of 2009 51
kkleiner writes "Singularity Hub has just unveiled its second annual roundup of the best robots of the year. In 2009 robots continued their advance towards world domination with several impressive breakouts in areas such as walking, automation, and agility, while still lacking in adaptability and reasoning ability. It will be several years until robots can gain the artificial intelligence that will truly make them remarkable, but in the meantime they are still pretty awesome."
Comment Re:mp3.com? (Score 1) 458
the original mp3.com, it was way ahead of its time.
rewind to a decade ago, before RIAA had everyone running scared, filesharing was evolving as a social network, like facebook or myspace, but primarily centered around musical tastes (not enough bandwidth for movies & tv yet). The lawsuits from the big record companies killed the 'sharing' and turned it into anonymous 'pirating'.
While RIAA's lawsuits haven't protected their music from being stolen, they have helped protect it from drowning amongst the indie's.
Comment mp3.com and Napster worked, p2p is a protocol (Score 5, Insightful) 458
When music was first (largely) being distributed via offerings like mp3.com and Napster, there was the ability to browse by genre and mine down to find various other bands you might like. There was lots of indie bands making their way to the surface, similar to Apples "genius" feature in itunes.
p2p is only a file sharing protocol, you still need to know what you're looking for before you can download anything, thus people are only going to download stuff they already know about.
If you want to unearth cool indie bands, you'll need a more traditional site with intuitive groupings to showcase them.
Comment Re:users being hit hard (Score 1) 604
non-stop @ our call center ..
"ya, you have the blaster virus -mute- fsck doesn't anyone use windows update -unmute- norton.com, we don't support virus removal -mute- have fun downloading the patch in under 60 seconds retard -unmute- thanks for calling ..."
"ya, you have the blaster virus -mute- fsck doesn't anyone use windows update -unmute- norton.com, we don't support virus removal -mute- have fun downloading the patch in under 60 seconds retard -unmute- thanks for calling
