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Businesses

Circuit City Files For Bankruptcy 574

WillDraven is just one of many who writes to tell us that Circuit City, the United States' 2nd largest consumer electronics retailer, has filed for bankruptcy under chapter 11. This news comes as no surprise as the company has been in financial trouble, recently announcing that it will be closing over one fifth of its stores and laying off 17% of its US employees in the process. "Larger rival Best Buy, which is based in Minneapolis, has said it might take over stores that distressed rivals close. Yet a flood of discounted merchandise from liquidating Circuit City stores could hurt Best Buy during this holiday shopping season, said Jefferies & Co analyst Dan Binder."
Space

Submission + - Astronauts to Get First Fridge Ever, Home Remake (gizmodo.com)

An anonymous reader writes: They may be rocket scientists and spend years training for things going awry in the void of space, but NASA has revealed that astronauts in the International Space Station will face the biggest, most dangerous challenge humans have ever encountered through thousand of years of history: Home remodeling. Next weekend, the ISS will get the necessary materials to do an extreme makeover in the living area of the ISS, adding new quarters, urine recycling systems, a "state of the art" space gym, and the first kitchen fridge ever.
Government

Submission + - Obama Expected To Appoint A Technology Czar (npr.org)

cbrandtbuffalo writes: NPR had a short story this morning describing the federal government's challenges with technology and Obama's intention to create a new head technology position. You can bet the leading companies will be jockeying to influence this new czar. How do we make sure open source has a seat at the table? How could federal adoption of open source help some projects?
Spam

Submission + - Researchers spam 469m to gauge response rate (bbc.co.uk) 1

An anonymous reader writes: Researchers at Berkeley and UC, San Diego have undertaken a project to measure the response rate for spam, thereby also the income spammers might receive. They first sent 350 million messages through a hijacked part of the Storm net with an advert carefully crafted to imitate that of authentic spammers. Only 28 people bought their penis enlargement pills, for a response rate of 0.00001%. In total 469m spam emails were sent. Does this rhyme with the luxury houses and cars of those convicted for spam?

Is Windows 7 Faster Or Just Smarter? 619

Barence writes "The Windows 7 unveiling garnered largely positive coverage, with many hands-on testers praising it for being faster than Vista. But is it actually? To find out, this blogger ran a suite of benchmarks to see just how much quicker Windows 7 really is — and the results weren't quite what he expected. 'The actual performance gap between Vista and Windows 7 is ... nada. Absolutely nothing. Our Office benchmarks and video encoding tests complete in precisely the same time regardless of which OS is installed. [...] It's tempting to see this as a bit of a con. They've sped up the front end so it feels like you're getting more done, but in terms of real productivity it's no better than Vista."
Cellphones

Submission + - Where have all the pagers gone? 1

oddRaisin writes: After recently sleeping through a page for work, I decided to change my paging device from my blackberry (which is quiet, and has a pathetic vibrate mode) to an actual pager. After looking at the websites of Cingular, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint, I'm left scratching my head and wondering where all the pagers went. I can't find them or any mention of them. Pagers of yore offered some great features that reflected the serious nature of being paged. They were loud. They had good vibrate modes. They continued to alert after a page until you acknowledged them. I didn't have to differentiate between a text from a friend and a page from work. Now that pagers seem to have become passe, what are other people doing to fill this niche? Are some phones better pagers than others? Are there still paging service providers out there?
Security

Submission + - Obama Team Targeted by Chinese, Russian Hackers 1

nandemoari writes: The news appears much more serious than it sounds. These aren't your average basement-dwelling nogoodniks, but instead are reportedly sophisticated hackers that may even represent government elements in both China and Russia. The news stunned the Obama campaign. According to reports, the FBI and Secret Service recently visited the Democrats to tell them that their system was under attack. An FBI agent was quoted by American Newsweek as saying, "You have been compromised, and a serious amount of files have been loaded off your system."

Comment Less to criticise (Score 2, Insightful) 1601

Of course there was a more favorable approach towards Obama, for all the reasons stated in the summary. I'd like to see a like-for-like comparison of Obama and McCain stories before the Republican sideshows of Sarah Palin and "Joe the Plumber" were introduced, because I did feel a lot more hate once they were on-board

The press over here in England still seem to be focused on the historic occasion of an African-American in power. It is a good thing and it has been noted, but I wish they would get back to focusing on how the right man won, regardless of race and what he is planning to do come January.

Comment Type of ads (Score 1) 116

If it's video ads make sure they are before the film (Or, I have seen on some other video sites, after the video, which is bizzare) and not during, then I'm great with this.

I don't even watch movies on free TV over here as I cannot have my film interrupted by the film being presented by some company followed by 5 mins of other ads. It's a real deal-breaker for me.

I've also seen those little banner ads come at the bootom of a streaming video which you can then click the 'x' to get rid of, that would be acceptable to me considering I'm watching the film for free.

Comment Re:I think my girlfriend's Civ 4 experience... (Score 1) 329

Totally the opposite to my ex. She played it on easy and loved getting cultural or technilogical wins but it was really too easy and was so annoyed when you threw the skill level up, wars were more frequent. She played it a lot more online with some close friends with the same ideology without going to war. I lent her Civ Revolution for the 360 and she actually broke a joypad in frustration, as all the other civs seem to want to do is fight in that game.....

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