Agreed, it probably should have been included. I sorta rushed to post with the information I knew off-hand. Though, the links to the DOTA wiki entry and ATRS entry both include HoN.

DOTA = "Defense of the Ancients".

The basics of the game are that you control a single unit (a hero), and you work with a team of people (normally 5 other players). So it becomes a 6 vs 6 battle where you are trying to destroy the other teams base. This game style has been dubbed ARTS (action real time strategy).

  It originally started as a Warcraft 3 mod. Since then, numerous companies have copied the style.

1) You have Blizzard creating a DOTA mod for Starcraft 2.
2) You have Valve creating DOTA 2. (note that Valve and Blizzard are having a trademark war right now over DOTA). Dota 2 is a stand-alone game.
3) LoL (League of Legends) is a DOTA style came released back in 2009. It's a stand-alone game with persistant characters.

For the lazy, the wikipedia entry on the virus. While it can spread easily, it sounds like the virus has a short life span and there is a vacine already developed for it.

Though, it can have some nasty effects on pregnant farm animals, it seems unclear (at least to me), if animals that were effected in the past then get pregnant afterwards still have birthing issues.

Nope, not in Eastern District of Texas. According to this article:

Java's server-side is still very strong and won't be going anywhere anytime soon.

Java as a language for UIs, not so much. The built in UI widgets and windowing (Swing) is weak at best. While it has many of the basic widget types, it hasn't really evolved much as time has moved forward. Plus it always felt just enough different from native applications to stop developers from using it.

Java applets, I feel, have been dead for a long time. Applet initialization time was just too long or would break during loading to discourage people from using it. Though, I've seen Java Web Start work pretty well for deploying Java applications.

I completely believe the data that these scientists have collected. I also believe that they have done their work right. I believe in their findings and their predictions about how the climate will be changing in the coming years.

What I don't believe is why they thing this change his happening. The climate of our planet is pretty complicated, and I know I don't understand or all the variables involved. I'm sure the guys that worked on this study have a good understanding of it, but we only have data for maybe a few hundred years if we're lucky? The earth has been around a long time and I'd expected it would go through changes as it goes through its very long life.

My other issue with climate study is that it's used as a political weapon. Politicians wield the results to push their own agendas. With this, it seems like results from studies could be skewed.

point taken. :-D But last year at a minimum, everyone got a Galaxy Tab 10.1 and a Chromebook. If I would have ebay both of them, I would have made around $1200 (and tickets were $500 last year for full-price).

But I guess I could argue the $300 is covering food and drinks. They feed you breakfast and lunch for the 3 days of the conference. As well there is 1 night of partying (with free alcohol, and live music (last year it was Jane's Addiction)).

I ended up getting a ticket, though I'm giving it to a co-worker (who work is paying to send).

From what I saw, it wasn't actually a first-come first-serve setup. One of my co-workers who got in "queue" before me didn't get a ticket. I started about 5 minutes after they were posted and I got a ticket. So it seems that once you were in their queue, it may have been random who they gave the tickets to.

I can't speak for others, but I attended Google I/O for their GWT (Google Web Toolkit) and related talks. The GWT sessions were actually rather popular, even though Android is the hip tech that everyone is interested in. I'm guessing people also wanted to attend the Android talks in hopes of getting free phones (some of the talks last year gave phones to people who went to that specific session).

If I was a student in the Bay area, I would definitely fork over the money (only $300 for students) to get the free swag. But for a regular priced ticket ($900), plus hotel and travel, I figured it would have cost me around $2600. I couldn't justify that cost, especially since all the talks are posted to Youtube within a few days of the conference.

App developers for iPhones and Android devices want to be paid for the work they do. Some of those developers release 2 versions of their apps: ones with ads for free, and another that costs money with no ads. Most people tend to vote for the "ads" version because it seems free to them.

If this article is right, it may be work paying for those $0.99 apps as it will save you money in electricity and time/announces.

I with I had mod points for you Mr. AC.

If you look at their website, you'll see they use likenesses of the characters from the movies in their advertising. If the pub was just using fan artwork or coming up with their own graphical material (while using the names), they may have been left alone. But they are using the faces from the movie in their own advertising and promotional material (posters, loyalty card). That's just asking for trouble.

The people complaining about services being shutdown are users/consumers of Google. The people complaining about Google wasting money are investors. While there will be overlap between the 2 group, this complaining is solely from the viewpoint of an investor.

Apple is based in North Austin (see satellite map of the campus). It's currently 4 buildings and they have room to add more building right in that area. They currently employ around 3500 people in their Austin corporate office (at least from the press releases I saw). If you poke around Apple's jobs website you'll find around 64 open positions in the Austin office, mainly around support and sales. Their only engineering type roles have to do working with their suppliers in Austin (Samsung, Intel, AMD, FreeScale, and IBM all have offices down here).

I'm little sad they have no real engineering/development in Austin, but they seem to like keeping all of their people working on the same product in the same offices. Spreading an engineering force globally can cause communication issues, so they seem to avoid it.

Development only system. I used to have a bunch of systems in the lab that most of my co-workers were too lazy to manage, so I put ESXi on all of them to handle remote management of the OSes.

I've used various naming schemes for systems I've setup (normally based on whatever video game I'm playing at the time). But the biggest change I've done is naming of virtual machines when I was administrating multiple servers, each running multiple VMs.

As I can have a lot of VMs on a single server, remembering what VM maps to what server can be a pain. I normally just do something simple like having the base server called "blue", then the VMs will be called "blue-1", "blue-2", etc. This helped me track down the host server quickly when I needed to fix something.