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Communications

Swearing at Work is Bleeping Good For You 421

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-shut-the-bleep-up-you-bleeping-bleep dept.
coondoggie writes "This is the kind of news that your HR folks don't want to hear, but researchers today said letting workers swear at will in the workplace can benefit employees and employers. The study found regular use of profanity to express and reinforce solidarity among staff, enabling them to express their feelings, such as frustration, and develop social relationships, according to researchers at the University of East Anglia (UES). Researchers said their aim was to challenge leadership styles and suggest ideas for best practice. "Employees use swearing on a continuous basis, but not necessarily in a negative, abusive manner. Swearing was as a social phenomenon to reflect solidarity and enhance group cohesiveness, or as a psychological phenomenon to release stress, " the study stated." I'm sure the discussion and tags on this story will be completely G Rated ;)
Operating Systems

Intel Chief Evangelist Comments on Linux Scheduler 178

Posted by Zonk from the little-penguins-everywhere dept.
ByeByeWintel writes "James Reinders is Intel's Chief Evangelist for Intel's Software Development Products. In a recent interview on Devx.com he stated: 'If I could get ONE wish fulfilled would be for OS scheduling to focus on processes, and not threads, for scheduling. And demand that processes manage their scheduling of threads ... There is a lot of opportunity for operating systems to offer these types of control in the 'running of applications' interfaces. I'd like an OS to let me specify the 'world' my application runs in (which processors, how many, etc.) These interfaces are available in Windows at run time (the task manager will let you adjust where a running task can go).'"
Microsoft

de lcaza calls OOXML a "Superb Standard" 615

Posted by kdawson from the say-it-ain't-so-miguel dept.
you-bet-it's-not-out-of-context writes "A blogger on KDE Developer's Journal has found an interesting post by Miguel de Icaza, the founder of GNOME and Mono, in a Google group dedicated to the discussion of his blog entries. Six days ago Miguel stated that 'OOXML is a superb standard and yet, it has been FUDed so badly by its competitors that serious people believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with it.' In the same post he says that to avoid patent problems over Silverlight, when using or developing Mono's implementation (known as Moonlight), i's best to 'get/download Moonlight from Novell which will include patent coverage.'"
Communications

Skype Blames Microsoft Patch Tuesday for Outage 286

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the ddos-ing-yourself dept.
brajesh writes to tell us that Skype has blamed its outage over the last week on Microsoft's Patch Tuesday. Apparently the huge numbers of computers rebooting (and the resulting flood of login requests) revealed a problem with the network allocation algorithm resulting in a couple days of downtime. Skype further stressed that there was no malicious activity and user security was never in any danger.
It's funny. Laugh.

NYT Exposes the Identity of Fake Steve Jobs 166

Posted by Zonk from the hard-to-be-anonymous-if-someone-is-determined dept.
mattatwork writes "NY Times writer Brad Stone figured out the real identity of Fake Steve Jobs. With classic nick names like 'freetards' and 'beastmaster' Fake Steve captured an audience of 700,000 visitors to the site and around 50 emails a day. According to Daniel Lyons, the senior editor at Forbes magazine who maintained the blog, there is no definite plan for the future of the site. 'Mr. Lyons said he invented the Fake Steve character last year, when a small group of chief executives turned bloggers attracted some media attention. He noticed that they rarely spoke candidly. "I thought, wouldn't it be funny if a C.E.O. kept a blog that really told you what he thought? That was the gist of it." Mr. Lyons says he recalled trying out the voices of several chief executives before settling on the colorful Apple co-founder. He twice tried to relinquish the blog, but started again after being deluged by fans e-mailing to ask why Fake Steve had disappeared.'"
Graphics

The History of Photoshop 298

Posted by CowboyNeal from the cutting-and-pasting dept.
Gammu writes "For the past fifteen plus years, Photoshop has turned into the killer app for graphics designers on the Mac. It was originally written as a support app for a grad student's thesis and struggled to find wide commercial release. Eventually, Adobe licensed the app and has sold millions of copies." Achewood's Chris Onstad also offers a different take of how it all went down.
Censorship

Censoring a Number 1046

Posted by kdawson from the you-can't-copyright-that dept.
Rudd-O writes "Months after successful discovery of the HD-DVD processing key, an unprecedented campaign of censorship, in the form of DMCA takedown notices by the MPAA, has hit the Net. For example Spooky Action at a Distance was killed. More disturbingly, my story got Dugg twice, with the second wave hitting 15,500 votes, and today I found out it had simply disappeared from Digg. How long until the long arm of the MPAA gets to my own site (run in Ecuador) and the rest of them holding the processing key? How long will we let rampant censorship go on, in the name of economic interest?" How long before the magic 16-hex-pairs number shows up in a comment here?
The Internet

The Virtual Teacher 94

Posted by samzenpus from the aibo-ate-my-homework dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers from Illinois and Florida are developing a networking system which will create virtual representations of real people to improve our knowledge. They will use artificial intelligence and natural language processing software to enable us to interact with these avatars. The goal of the project, sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), is to give us the possibility to interact with these virtual representations as if they were the actual person, complete with the ability to understand and answer questions. We should see the results at the beginning of 2008 — if the researchers succeed."
Graphics

Submission + - PR - The3dStudio.com offers over 50,000 resources

Submitted by
Matcoland
Matcoland writes: "December 19, 2006 — The3dStudio.com web site, one of the oldest and largest 3D resource sites on the Internet, today reached over 50,000 downloadable resources on its web site. With over 50,000 resources available for immediate download, customers from all over the world can easily get the resources they need right away.

Since its re-design in late 2004, The3dStudio.com has been offering authors and artists of 2D and 3D resources a way to easily sell their products while still retaining a high royalty rate. At the same time The3dStudio.com was able to offer its customers a fast and easy way to find and download the resources they needed. In just over two years The3dStudio.com has gone from 0 to 50,000 downloadable resources with more products being added every day.

"Getting 50,000 resources on The3dStudio.com is another huge milestone for us." said Matt Anderson, President of The3dStudio.com, Inc. "We have been looking forward to reaching this goal since we hit 25,000 resources last November, we just didn't realize how fast it would happen. With so many veteran resource authors and so many new authors that are joining The3dStudio.com every day, we have had an explosion of excellent resources being added around the clock. Since we have authors from all over the world, it's very exciting to come in every day and see all of the great new products that were added overnight."

http://www.the3dstudio.com/

About The3dStudio.com
Being one of the oldest and largest 3D resource sites on the Internet really sets The3dStudio.com apart from the rest. The3dStudio.com started out as a free resource site back in 1996 and has undergone many changes to keep up with the times. Today, The3dStudio.com offers tens of thousands of free and priced 3D models, textures, tutorials, plugins, gallery art, and much more. The3dStudio.com gives resource authors a place to give their work away free or sell it for a price with no monthly hosting or subscription fees and some of the best royalty rates anywhere. The3dStudio.com continues to lead the pack as it evolves to exceed customer expectations. Media information available at: http://www.the3dstudio.com/about.aspx"
Wii

Submission + - Flash-based Web game heading to your game console

Submitted by
VeryVito
VeryVito writes: "Apparently, I wasn't the only one who spent way too much time playing this little Flash game last fall. According to Gamasutra, Line Rider is heading to both the Nintendo Wii console and the DS next year. According to the article:

"Line Rider began its life as a project I did for illustration class," commented Bostjan Cadez, who created Line Rider in his native Slovenia. "As much as people see it as a game I think of it as a toy because there is no score and no one wins or loses while playing Line Rider. I'm looking forward to working with inXile entertainment on the new Nintendo DS and Nintendo Wii versions as they will bring added gameplay and features."
I suspect we'll see hordes of Flash game developers looking for venture capital in 2007!"
Music

Submission + - Sony, BMG offer refund for infected CDs

Submitted by
prostoalex
prostoalex writes: "If you're a proud owner of 'Never Gone' by The Backstreet Boys, 'On Ne Change Pas' by Celine Dion, or a few dozen other CDs infected by MediaMax or XCP rootkits, SonyBMGCDTechSettlement.com is now allowing the consumers to file a refund claim. The deadline is December 31st of this year. Sony and BMG will also pay California and Texas a $750,000 fine."

China Malware War Gets Personal 35

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the fight-to-the-death dept.
bcaulfield writes to tell us Zhou Hongyi has filed a 3.6 million yuan ($450,000) defamation suit against Yahoo China. Hongyi, the former president of Yahoo China, filed his suit in response to comments made in a recent Yahoo press conference accusing him of unethical business practices. From the article: "A rift between Mr. Zhou and Yahoo China has been developing since before his departure from Yahoo last year, just prior to Alibaba's takeover of Yahoo's China operations. Mr. Zhou doled out generous bonuses to Yahoo employees in a ploy his detractors derided as a naked purchase of loyalties. Mr. Zhou defended the disbursements. 'Many of these people were longtime Yahoo employees, and they were under no obligation to follow me,' he said. 'It was my money to do with as I wanted.'" Update 08/20/2006 15:01 GMT by SM: Corrected the currency for the suit.

Two Jobs and Retire Early? 205

Posted by Cliff from the more-work-now-for-less-work-later dept.
70_hours_week wonders: "A Survey of teachers in a Nevada school district indicate that 40% have a second job. Do you have a second job? Assume you are 30 and since you like to save your money you could semi-retire by age 50. Now, what if you could nearly double your salary working a second job and that meant you could semi-retire at age 40. Would you do it?"

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