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Movies

Submission + - Joss Whedon to Direct the Avengers (mtv.com)

Submitted by olyar
olyar writes: Great news for Joss fans and comic fans alike. Looks like Joss is going to direct the Avengers movie. Best commentary I saw came via @DRUNKHULK on Twitter: "JOSS WHEDON TO DIRECT AVENGERS MOVIE! OUT OF TRADITION FOX HOPE FIND WAY TO TAKE MOVIE AWAY FROM HIM!"
The Internet

Submission + - Twitter Grows Up, Adds 'Promoted Tweets' (computerworld.com) 1

Submitted by CWmike
CWmike writes: Twitter is finally taking off the training wheels and moving into the world where real businesses tread with the launch on Tuesday of its first advertising model, dubbed 'Promoted Tweets.' The microblogging phenom has long avoided coming up with a business plan or even talking about one. Just last October, Twitter CEO Evan Williams told an audience at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco that the company wanted to focus on developing the site, instead of on a business model. But the time has come for Twitter to figure out how to make money over the long haul. It's a decision that makes the company look less like a grand hobby and more like an actual business, said analyst Rob Enderle. 'Twitter is growing up,' Enderle said. 'It helps take them from a dot-com-like questionable start-up to a real business.' However, analyst Dan Old isn't so sure that Twitter users will welcome the change. 'There will be a vocal minority of users who will hate any advertising at all,' Olds said. '[Many] users understand that it's necessary and will accept it as long as it doesn't interfere with their usage. But if the ads look like regular tweets, that could cause some serious outrage from users who feel that Twitter is attempting to deceive them.'

Comment Risks and Benefits of OSS (Score 5, Insightful) 128

by olyar (#31544726) Attached to: Oracle Shuttering OpenSSO

As much as this is a bummer, it's actually a great example of the OSS model at work.

If this was a closed source solution, where the company got acquired and the product wasn't strategic, the solution would just be gone.

With OSS though, another company - for whom the solution is strategic - can step in and pick up the project.

Canada

Dead Pigs Used To Investigate Ocean's "Dead Zones" 106

Posted by samzenpus from the big-ocean-long-pig dept.
timothy writes "As places to study what happens to corpses, the Atlantic Ocean is both much larger and much more specialized than the famous 'body farm' in Knoxville, TN. But for all kinds of good reasons, sending human bodies into Davy Jones' locker just to see where they float and how they bloat is unpopular. Pigs don't pay taxes, and more importantly, they don't vote. So Canadian scientists have taken to using them as human-body proxies, to study what happens when creatures of similar size and hairlessness (aka, us) end up 86ed and in the drink."
Medicine

Brain Surgery Linked To Sensation of Spirituality 380

Posted by timothy from the applied-psychology dept.
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."
Censorship

Submission + - Bill to give Obama emergency Control of Internet 5

Submitted by neonprimetime
neonprimetime writes: Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.
Google

Submission + - Google to Launch OS (wsj.com)

Submitted by
olyar
olyar writes: "The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google has announced their intent to launch their own operating system.

Initially they'll target low end netbooks."
Businesses

Submission + - How do I put unused servers to work? 1

Submitted by
olyar
olyar writes: "I worked for an internet start-up last year and during the "we have plenty of money" phase, a lot of server hardware was purchased. Eight months later, there is very little money, but we're still plugging along — using only a fraction of the hardware. We just cleared out a co-lo and I now have a stack of 17, 1U servers in my garage. Each of those has 2 servers, each of which is a 2-processor, dual-core box with 8 GB of RAM. Add that up and I have 136 processors and 272 GB of RAM with nothing to do.

The IT guy in me thinks that's a waste of FLOPS. The wanna-be businessman in me thinks its probably a waste of money as well.

So I've been brainstorming ways to put all of that power to good use. Any ideas?"
Software

Anyone Besides Zune Owners With New Year's Crashes? 480

Posted by timothy from the coincidences-abound dept.
aputerguy writes "My Fedora 8 Linux server crashed sometime between 18:59:40 EST (GMT -5:00) and 19:00:00 EST (GMT -5:00) on Dec 31, 2008 which remarkably corresponds to within at most 20 seconds of the New Year in GMT. I have been running this same hardware non-stop for more than six years and other than the occasional reboot for kernel (or distro) upgrades, it has not crashed more than 1 or 2 times in 2237 days of cumulative uptime. Nothing other than background processes were running at the time of the crash. Could this be a coincidence or was there some 2008/2009 rollover issue going on here? Has anyone (other than Zune 30GB owners) noticed similar year-end issues with their computers or electronic devices?"
Security

Google Releases Web Security Book 49

Posted by CmdrTaco from the posted-from-my-own-chair dept.
northern squirrel writes "As reported by Security Focus, Google had publicly released their 50-page Browser Security Handbook (under a CC BY license, too). To quote, the document is 'meant to provide developers, browser engineers, and information security researchers with a one-stop reference to key security properties of contemporary web browsers,' and features a comparison of security features in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and — you guessed it — Chrome. Is it a belated Christmas gift to web developers, or just a reaction to recent bad publicity?"

Comment Hardware doesn't just configure itself (Score 2, Insightful) 465

by olyar (#26184111) Attached to: Hardware Is Cheap, Programmers Are Expensive

One thing not in the equation here: Hardware is cheap, but having that hardware managed isn't so cheap. When you scale from a couple of servers to a big bank of server, you have to pick up system admins to manage all of those boxen.

Less expensive than a programmer (some times) but certainly not free.

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