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Submission + - Hulu talks of going behind a paywall in 2010 (tvweek.com)

Submitted by Killer Orca
Killer Orca writes: Chase Carey, the deputy chairman of News. Corp has stated that Hulu will soon be charging for broadcast content. Not all content will be paid but there is no mention of whether premium channels like HBO will eventually be added or whether the advertisements will go away for paid content. Either way this represents a significant turning point for Hulu.
Data Storage

Submission + - Engineers make Fingernail-size chip that holds 1TB (computerworld.com)

Submitted by CWmike
CWmike writes: Engineers from North Carolina State University have created a new fingernail-size chip that can hold 1 trillion bytes (a terabyte) of data. They said their nanostructured Ni-MgO system can store up to 20 high-definition DVDs or 250 million pages of text, "far exceeding the storage capacities of today's computer memory systems." Using the process of selective doping, in which an impurity is added to a material whose properties consequently change, the engineers worked at nanoscale and added metal nickel to magnesium oxide, a ceramic. The resulting material contained clusters of nickel atoms no bigger than 10 square nanometers — a pinhead has a diameter of 1 million nanometers. The discovery represents a 90% size reduction compared with today's techniques, and an advancement that could boost computer storage capacity."Instead of making a chip that stores 20 gigabytes, you have one that can handle one terabyte, or 50 times more data," said the team's leader, Jagdish "Jay" Narayan, director of the National Science Foundation Center for Advanced Materials and Smart Structures at the university.The process also shows promise for boosting vehicles' fuel economy and reducing heat produced by semiconductors, a potentially important development for more efficient energy production.
Biotech

Submission + - Evolution May Lead to Shorter, Heavier Women 2

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Yale University researchers report that while survival to reproductive age is no longer such a hurdle for humans, other evolutionary pressures – including sexual selection and reproductive fitness – are still working away in full force and if the trends detected in their study are representative and continue for another 10 generations, the average woman in 2409 AD will be 2 cm shorter, 1 kg heavier, will bear her first child five months earlier, and enter the menopause 10 months later. "There is this idea that because medicine has been so good at reducing mortality rates, that means that natural selection is no longer operating in humans," said Stephen Stearns of Yale University. "That's just plain false." Stearns and his team studied the medical histories of 14,000 residents of the Massachusetts town of Framingham, using medical data from a study going back to 1948 spanning three generations and found that shorter, heavier women had more children than lighter, taller ones. Women with lower blood pressure and cholesterol were also more likely to have large families as were women who gave birth early or had a late menopause. More importantly these traits are then passed on to their daughters, who also, on average, had more children. The study has not determined why these factors are linked to reproductive success, but it is likely that they indicate genetic, rather than environmental, effects. "The evolution that's going on in the Framingham women is like average rates of evolution measured in other plants and animals," said Stearns. ""These results place humans in the medium-to-slow end of the range of rates observed for other living things.""
Digital

Submission + - Digital Art of the 50 hottest video game girls (cre8ivecommando.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: This post showcases Digital Art and illustrations of the 50 hottest video game girls. There are over 150 pieces of digital art and illustrations in this post and all art works link back to the digital artist that created them. The video game girls are listed in alphabetical order for convenience. They are not ranked in any way, shape or form. They are simply here for us to admire. Do you have a favourite?

Submission + - Virgin America offers free onboard Wi-Fi (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: For the next three months, citizens will be able to access Google services services from above Earth. Holiday travelers flying with Virgin America from Nov. 10 through Jan. 15 will get free in-flight Wi-Fi, thanks to a promotional deal with Google. Virgin's entire fleet of planes has Wi-Fi, supplied by Gogo, a company that also provides wireless Internet access to airlines including American, Delta, United, Air Canada and AirTran.
Games

Submission + - Petition and Uproar Over No MW2 Dedicated Servers (tomshardware.com)

Submitted by squizzi
squizzi writes: PC gamers recently renamed Saturday, October 17th, black Saturday from the chaos that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 developer Infinity Ward created when Robert Bowling, the developers community relations manager divulged in a recent Bash and Slash interview that Infinity Ward would switch to a propeitary server technology called IW.net, and due to this change would no longer include the files neccessary for gamers to create their own dedicated servers. The announcement launched the fear that the mod tools and development kits for creating custom content would also vanish with the creation and implementation of Infinity Ward's new service. Quickly, against the change, PC gamers rioted against the company's decision and created an ever growing petition to ask for a reinstatement of the feature. The petition has already reached 80,000 signitures in just under 2 days.
Microsoft

Submission + - SPAM: Ballmer: Sidekick outage 'not good'

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer characterized the recent Sidekick data loss episode as “not good,” and said he believes all the data will be recovered, but added that Microsoft will have to be more forthcoming in explaining to enterprise customers why a similar situation won’t occur with Microsoft’s online services.
[spam URL stripped]
Link to Original Source

Submission + - CIA Buys Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets (wired.com) 2

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon.

In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available...

Visible Technologies crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.

“That’s kind of the basic step — get in and monitor,” says company senior vice president Blake Cahill.

Then Visible “scores” each post, labeling it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how influential a conversation or an author is. (”Trying to determine who really matters,” as Cahill puts it.) Finally, Visible gives users a chance to tag posts, forward them to colleagues and allow them to response through a web interface.

Submission + - How do you manage dev/test/production environments

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I am a n00b system administrator for a small web development company that builds and hosts OSS CMS's on a few LAMP servers (mostly Drupal). I've written a few scripts that checkout dev/test/production environments from our repository so web developers can access the site they're working on from a URL (ex: site1.developer.example.com). Developers also get FTP access and MySQL access (through phpMyAdmin). Additional scripts checkin files to the repository and move files/db's through the different environments. I'm finding as our company grows (we currently host 50+ sites) it is cumbersome to manage all sites hacking away at the command prompt. I would like to find a solution with a relatively easy-to-use user interface that provisions dev/test/live environments. The Aegir project is a close fit but is only for Drupal sites and still under heavy development. Another option is to completely rewrite the scripts (or hire someone to do it for me), but I would much rather use something OSS so I can give back to the community. How have fellow slashdotters managed this process, what systems/scripts have you used, and what advice do you have?

Submission + - Are Software Developers Naturally Weird?

Submitted by jammag
jammag writes: Well, c'mon, yes — let's admit it. As a veteran coder discusses as he looks at his career, software development is swelled with the offbeat, the quirky and the downright odd. As he remembers, there was the 'Software Lyrics' guy and the 'Inappropriate Phone Call' programmer, among others. Are unique types drawn to the profession or, are we 'transformed over time by our darkened working environments and exposure to computer screen radiation.'?
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - Sony To Launch PlayStation With Bigger Hard Drive (komonews.com)

Submitted by
The Installer
The Installer writes: "In anticipation of the impending holiday season, PlayStation is launching it's new 250Gig unit for $300.

"To give more room for game, movie and music downloads, Sony is launching a PlayStation 3 with a larger hard drive on Nov. 3.

The $350 gaming console will have a 250 gigabyte hard drive, more than twice as big as the recently launched slimmer, lighter PlayStation 3.

That one costs $300 and has a 120 gigabyte hard drive. Other than the hard drive size, the new PS3 will look and work the same as the 120 gigabyte system.

Sony's move comes as game companies gear up for the holiday season, when they reap most of their profit for the year. ""
Media

Submission + - Artist Admits Using AP Photo for Obama Poster

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "The NY Times reports that Shepard Fairey, the artist whose “Hope” poster of Barack Obama became an iconic emblem of the presidential campaign, has admitted that he lied about which photograph from the Associated Press he used as his source, and that he then covered up evidence to substantiate his lie. AP claimed in January that Fairey owed it credit and compensation for using the photograph but in February Fairey sued AP, seeking a declaratory judgment that the poster did not infringe on the agency’s copyrights and that he was entitled to the image under the “fair use” exception of the copyright law. Now Fairey has admitted that in the initial months after the suit and countersuit, he destroyed evidence and created false documents to cover up the real source. Complicating the legal battle, the freelance photographer who took the photographs, Mannie Garcia, filed court papers in July saying he was the one who owned the copyright of the 2006 photograph. Anthony Falzone, Fairey’s lawyer and the executive director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford University, has withdraw as Fairey's counsel and called the disclosure “a very unfortunate situation.” Falzone added that regardless of which photograph Fairey used, the copyright issues remain unchanged. “We still believe, as strongly as ever, in the underlying fair use and expression issues of this case." Larry Lessig, who said that he has been advising Fairey but is not representing him, added that the significant issue in fair use cases is whether the image has been transformed from the original. If it has been “fundamentally transformed,” he said, then it can be used under copyright law."

Submission + - Jessica Watson sets sail (jessicawatson.com.au)

Submitted by DarkOx
DarkOx writes: Jessica Watson has begun her round the world voyage, if successful she will be the youngest person, age 16, to circumnavigate the globe by sail unassisted and non-stop.

She will 23,000 nautical miles (about 38,000 kilometres), departing and returning to Sydney as required to set the record. This will be a journey lasting around 240 days, during which she may not acquire any outside supplies or receive any assistance with repairs.

She will have internet access, e-mail, and her position will be continuously tracked and monitored. This is a pretty high tech undertaking both in the electronics sense and as in sailing kit. Her yacht is a S&S (Sparkman and Stephens) 34 a boat that has successfully been used in other solo circumnavigation bids.

Much more information can be found at her website: http://www.jessicawatson.com.au/

Submission + - Best Christmas Tech Gifts For All The Family?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Christmas is creeping up on me and I want to start buying people presents but not sure where to start. Most of the family are into tech and age-wise range from small kids to grandparents. I'm thinking about getting them all something, but I can't afford to get them all iPhones, so don't suggest that! Any suggestions welcome, keep them interesting as certain members of the family already own the usual gadgets.

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