prostoalex writes "Google's acquisition of online video sharing site YouTube.com resulted in massive traffic headed to uTube.com, "the number one supplier of used Tube & Pipe equipment in the world!", according to the site. CNN Money reports: "The company, which sells used machinery for making tubes to clients worldwide, has seen its site utube.com knocked off line by millions of online searchers looking for video site. "It's killing us," said Ralph Girkins, president and owner of the 22-year-old business. "All my worldwide reps use our Web site. Customers all over the world use it to bring up photos of the machinery, descriptions and specifications there."""

raist_online asks: "After long years of X11 (and recently Mac OS X) I'm now in a job that mandates Windows and uses some Windows-only tools, providing us with XP Pro installs. Using VMWare with dual heads means I can still mostly live in X11-based goodness but I'm really missing a virtual desktop when I have to use Windows. The MS Powertoy doesn't really cut it for me and I've been trying out Cooldesk (some task-bar integration but not behaving well) and altdesk (which is OK but doesn't integrate into the task-bar). I'm really looking for something as simple as the standard X11 pager. Please note that I HAVE to use native Windows for some things so suggestions for Wine / VMWare inside Linux are missing the point. Slashdot, what are your suggestions?"

sand writes "Sapphire has just released their liquid-cooled Radeon X1950 XTX card, the Toxic X1950 XTX. Located on top of the GPU is a water block from Thermaltake that is connected to an separate cooling unit which houses a 12V pump, radiator, and fan. The card is also overclocked to 695MHz for added performance. Firingsquad has a complete review of the board, including benchmarks against NVIDIA's GeForce 7950 GX2 Quad SLI card."

You may have heard about Barcelona at the Microprocessor Forum. Barcelona is the codename for AMD's new quad-core processor , with all four cores integrated onto a single die and sharing a 2MB on-die L3. In addition to such things as floating-point and SIMD improvements, you'll find the following bells and whistles with Barcelona: improved branch prediction unit, dedicated stack engine, and memory disambiguation.

[TheBORG] writes "The U.S. military has been testing software on laptops that translate English to Arabic and Arabic to English to have conversations with Iraqis without the need to have a Arabic linguist on hand. 'This year the military's Joint Forces Command has been testing laptops with such software in Iraq. When someone speaks into a microphone attached to the computer, the machine translates it into Arabic and reads that translation aloud over the PC's speakers. The software then translates the Arabic speaker's response and utters it in English.'" (See this related story from last year about this daunting machine-translation task.)

ttul writes "Stas Bekman (formerly the maintainer of mod_perl) has been quietly building an asynchronous programming framework to build high performance network applications in Perl. His recent Perl.com article describes how he has used the Event::Lib module (that lives on top of the popular libevent library) to write a traffic-shaping email proxy to get rid of spam. Asynchronous programming is challenging at the best of times. Read on to find out how to do it the easy way in Perl."

Raindance writes "I've posted an in-depth look at Citizendium, Larry Sanger's new project and Wikipedia's new competitor. In a nutshell, Citizendium isn't just about building a better encyclopedia (though that is their goal) — it's also a pilot project for a new model of expert-guided radical collaboration with implications for things from open peer review to genome wikis. If you'd like to help out, they need both volunteers and donations."

Slashback tonight brings some clarifications and updates to previous Slashdot stories, including: Spamhaus case tests ICANN; Getting your own OLPC (CM1) computer; Followup Agile commentary from Steve Yegge; Yahoo's time capsule permit revoked by Mexico; and Microsoft denies BayStar connection. Read on for details.

An anonymous reader asks: "My company, a fairly large telco, still uses social security numbers for non-financial purposes; mostly for our IT ticketing system. I find it amazing that in these times, with how easy it is to use an SSN to obtain credit, that any company still does this. I've heard talk for almost eight years that the practice is going to be stopped but little progress has been made. How many companies out there still use SSNs so openly? Since it seems that nobody is in a hurry to solve this issue, what can be done to speed the process up?"

SimHacker writes "Sun and Laszlo Systems have announced project "Orbit": OpenLaszlo for J2ME. OpenLaszlo is an open source platform for creating zero-install 'AJAX' web applications with the user interface capabilities of desktop client software. The OpenLaszlo 'Legals' project supports multiple deployment runtimes, including Flash and DHTML, and soon J2ME! The FAQ says a proof-of-concept demo will be available later this year."

NiK0laI writes "TechWeb has posted an article regarding Vista's new license and how it allows you to only move it to another device once. How will this work for people who build their PCs? I have no intention of purchasing a new license every time I swap out motherboards. 'The first user of the software may reassign the license to another device one time. If you reassign the license, that other device becomes the "licensed device," reads the license for Windows Vista Home Basic, Home Premium, Ultimate, and Business. In other words, once a retail copy of Vista is installed on a PC, it can be moved to another system only once. ... Elsewhere in the license, Microsoft forbids users from installing Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium in a virtual machine. "You may not use the software installed on the licensed device within a virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system," the legal language reads. Vista Ultimate and Vista Business, however, can be installed within a VM.'" Overly Critical Guy points out more information about changes to Vista's EULA and the new usage restrictions. "For instance, Home Basic users can't copy ISOs to their hard drives, can't run in a virtualized environment, and can only share files and printers to a maximum of 5 network devices."

bigsmoke writes "My buddy Halfgaar finally got sick of all the helpful users on forums and mailing lists who keep suggesting backup methods and strategies to others which simply don't, won't and can't work. According to him, this indicates that most of the backups made by *nix users simply won't help you recover, while you'd think that disaster recovery is the whole point of doing backups. So, now he explains to the world once and for all what's involved in backing up *nix systems."

Jndrline writes "An Associated Press article on CNN.com reports 'Using DNA testing, scientists have discovered what is believed to be the first [new species of] terrestrial mammal found in Europe in decades: a mouse with a big head, ears, eyes and teeth that lives in a mountainous area of Cyprus.'"

An anonymous reader writes, "We are seeing more and more about high dynamic range (HDR) images, where the photographer brackets the exposures and then combines the images to increase the dynamic range of the photo. The next step is going to be monitors that can display the wider dynamic range these images offer, as well as being more true-to-life, as they come closer to matching the capabilities of the ol' Mark I eyeball. The guys who seem to be furthest along with this are a company called Brightside Technologies. Here is a detailed review of the Brightside tech." With a price tag of $49K for a 37" monitor (with a contrast ratio of 200K to 1), HDR isn't exactly ready for the living room yet.

Will Rodger writes, "Citizens Against Government Waste has said some highly critical things about open source software in the past. They've also pounced on supporters of the OpenDocument Format along the way. Alas, it seems their close ties to Jack Abramoff have drawn the (unfavorable) attention of Senate staff."