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Journal Journal: It is lonely being a Libertarian. But Dave Barry is! 8

Journal by robi2106

I guess you could say that I recently came out of the closet. I had been a party line Republican because the alternative, killing babies and taking all my money, is not attractive. But Republicans and still taking all my money and then wasting it still so over the past 3-5 years, I have trended more towards independence from the two party system.

Making Time With the Watchmakers 257

Posted by Zonk from the temple-fugate-would-be-proud dept.
PreacherTom writes "In the age of watches that have more computational power than Apollo 11's computer, one would think that the watchmaker has gone the way of the cobbler, the blacksmith and the Dodo. Quite the contrary. With the rise in interest for mechanical watches (especially luxury models), Rolex has sponsored a new school to train horologists in the arcane art. From the article: 'We were facing a situation today where we needed to foster a new generation of watchmakers,' says Charles Berthiaume, the senior vice-president for technical operations at Rolex and the Technicum's president 'Thirty to 40 years ago, there was a watchmaker at every jewelry store. That's not the case today,' he notes. Included are some remarkable examples of their training, dedication, and intricate patience as they take technology in an entirely different direction."
Privacy

Submission + - Computer seized for evidence

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "I used to work at an electronics recycling warehouse somewhere in the United States. My responsibility was initially to evaluate everything that came in on a pallet or in a gaylord box and take all of the "goodies" upstairs for testing and resale. This eventually expanded to include maintaining and installing the company servers, but in any case, I must have wiped hundreds of terabytes of 10/20/40GB HDDs while I was there.

Anyway, towards the end of my employment, I happened upon a few pallets of old computers from various departments of XYZ County. Items of note included a pair of Gateway servers (the first I'd ever seen in person, I almost didn't believe Gateway made them!) from the ABC wastewater treatment plant and a black ATX full tower case with no sides and evidence tape all over it. I pulled it upstairs because it had some very very nice components in it, top of the line in late 2002 (a typical computer to get on a pallet is a beige box from 1996, PC or Mac). Supplied with monitor, mouse, keyboard, and power, it booted into Windows 2000, automatically logged in, and in general seemed to be in very good working order. I used Google to search the rather unique surname that was markered on the 'seized as evidence' label and found some correlations with business documents on the PC itself. The contents of the computer were the usual mix of pornography, cracked video games, and IT deployment and migration plans that you'd expect from a feisty little dotcom specialising in media streaming technologies. I had initially assumed that the computer was seized as evidence of naughtiness by the company itself, but it turned out after contacting the original owner of the PC that it was evidence in a case against his father and they promised him that they'd return the PC eventually. Well as it turned out, there was no evidence on the computer's hard drive anyways, as his father had never used it, and they never returned the guy his PC and dumped it at our recycling plant, consigning his hardware and data to the trash heap. I did not think that was a very good ending to the situation, so I bought the drive from my company and mailed it to the original owner (I believe his dad was convicted of whatever and went to jail).

What is ethical in this situation? Obviously I violated the expectation of XYZ County that my company would wipe all of the data, but was it really theirs? Aren't they supposed to return evidence that wasn't even used, and obtained from people who weren't even defendants? I understand the owner was insistent for quite a while that his system be returned and promises were made but nothing came of it. I also feel bad about having snooped on the guy's computer, but he was quite understanding and pretty relieved in the e-mails I received from him."
AMD/OSTG

Journal Journal: Shuttle launches XPC 1337 Series SXDi

Journal by OSTG Marketing
Forget selling your first born for a PlayStation 3, and get in line for the SDXi gaming rig from Shuttle's XPC 1337 range. You'll get a double performance boost from the two ATI Radeon X1950 XTX video cards that are running in AMD's ATI CrossFire technology, and will have the fastest machine on the block.
AMD/OSTG

Journal Journal: AMD opens next-gen chip tech think-tank

Journal by OSTG Marketing
Software giant AMD has opened a next-gen chip tech think-tank in Redmond, Washington. The Advanced Architecture and Technology Lab (AATL)'s mission is to determine which technologies will drive AMD's products "beyond the five-year time horizon", part of the company's plan to build it's operation into one to match arch-rival Intel's. "The AATL will be run by AMD's chief architectural officer, Rich Witek, who's
Sony

Submission + - PS3 hits one million units shipped worldwide

Submitted by
Wowzer
Wowzer writes: "Sony's latest PlayStation 3 shipment numbers show Japan has received 390,000 PS3 units. The Americas have received 620,000 PS3 units. Which would put PS3 at 1.01 million units worldwide. From the article: "However, these are shipped numbers, which the latest Media Create sales numbers from Japan confirm. Last week in Japan, 70,942 PS3's were sold, bringing the total in customers' hands there to 308,949 units. Compared to 390,000 units shipped now, that's a difference of 81,051, which probably sold out this week." U.S. retailers reported in November that Madden NFL 07 and Resistance: Fall of Man were the best-selling titles."
Emulation (Games)

Submission + - ZSNES 1.50 released

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "After two years, the popular open source emulator ZSNES has finally been updated to 1.50. There are tons of fixes and new features including emulation of Top Gear 3000, updated movie support, and removal of old hacks. A full list of changes can be found here."
Red Hat Software

Red Hat Sales Surge 109

Posted by Zonk from the stylish-chapeus dept.
head_dunce writes "Red Hat has reported earnings from its third quarter, and it did quite a bit better than expected. Even with the movement within the business by Oracle and SuSE/Microsoft, Red Hat came out quite a bit ahead. TheStreet.com reports on the company's $29.6 Million dollars windfall, and some of the tough times the company has had in the past year. From the article: 'CFO Charlie Peters said on a conference call with analysts that the company is "cautiously optimistic that competitive efforts by some of the largest technology companies in the world are actually expanding our opportunity."'"
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Patenting RSS?

Submitted by
VE3OGG
VE3OGG writes: "Back in July 2005, Microsoft had announced its plans to integrate RSS tightly within its new browser and operating system. It was also believed that Microsoft was intending to redistribute any changes or modifications to the RSS-standard through the Creative Commons license. This appears to no longer be the case. Now Microsoft appears to be trying to patent RSS through two specific patent applications it filed more than a year ago. "This should be denounced by everyone who has contributed anything to the success of RSS," Dave Winer, one of the self-professed creators of the format, said."

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