1330479
submission
Venotar writes:
Thought the old "Wassup" Budweiser commercials were long dead? Someone's reunited the original cast for a hilarious (and surprisingly touching) political parody based on the old idea. This is why I love the intertubes.
1181949
submission
Venotar writes:
Max Barry — the wry, geek-chic wit of Syrup, Jennifer Government, and Company fame (one of the few mainstream authors you'll find who's written his own sim-game), in noting an anecdotal increase in atheism online suggests an interesting parallel between The Internet and The Tower of Babel. So slashdot, will the big bad ass in the sky take issue with our hubris? Can we expect divine wrath anytime now? What form might it take? Will all of our machines randomly switch endianess? Will some of our transistors suddenly operate in base 3?
On a more serious note, is the internet really responsible for a growth of rational- er, I mean atheism? Or is it just acting as a great equalizer that amplifies everyone's voice so we can all more easily identify likeminded types and isolate ourselves into our own little ideological ghettos without the inconvenience of having to deal with contrary opinions? Or is there an alternative explanation?
516142
submission
Venotar writes:
According to the AP, RIM is in the midst of a continent-wide outtage of as-yet-undisclosed causes. I wonder if anyone's yet noticed blackberry addicts drooling and twitching, now that their connection to the hive mind is severed? Will this brief moment of freedom destroy the collective?
424866
submission
Venotar writes:
There's been much talk of IM interoperability over the years. The IM Federation's long been a self-proclaimed promoter of XMPP, many prognosticators have promised that google's jabber service would spell the end of non-interoperability, Yahoo IM's long had an interoperability deal with Microsoft that's actually no longer vaporware, and now Google's announced that their long discussed deal with AOL has (finally) bridged the gap between AIM and GTalk (without the use of cheesy client side plugins or buggy third party XMPP agents). Now that Google can Talk to Oscar, is ICQ far behind? And does it really matter: is this really a sign that the walls are breaking down between IM services, or is this just one more front in the not-so-cold war between Google and Microsoft?
145003
submission
Venotar writes:
While perusing the MySQL conference website, I noticed that Mark Atwood will be discussing a plugin storage engine for Amazon's S3 with MySQL. Further googling only turned up Pete Freitag's interesting observation that combining such a plug-in with Amazon's EC2 could be very useful. Does anyone know where a copy of this plug-in could be found, or if it's just vaporware? It seems like the sort of tool that could shift the economics behind quite a few ways businesses use their technology, so I was curious to hear what sort of ideas the slashdot crowd would come up with.
118
submission
Venotar writes:
It looks like Rackspace Managed Hosting is having further cozy dealings with the FBI. You'll undoubtedly recall the fiasco between Indy Media, Rackspace, and the FBI. Now it looks like Rackspace is in the news again. This time, a now former employee has been sentenced for politically motivated plans to deface websites hosted on Rackspace's network. Interestingly enough, the hosting company apparently became aware of the plans before they were acted on and informed the FBI.
