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Microsoft

Submission + - Pranksters Post Giant Windows Logo on Apple Store 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Working calmly in broad daylight and filming their efforts for YouTube posterity, a fake construction crew attached a large Microsoft Windows logo to the black facade of a soon-to-open Hamburg Apple Store. Neat hack in the MIT vein, but next time the crew might want to take along a pic of the Windows logo — with the adrenaline flowing, some of the colors got rearranged and were hung upside down.
Google

Submission + - Google Translate API rescued - but at a price! (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: article thumbnail

Google has responded to the cries of anguish from developers unhappy at the termination of the Google Translate API with a surprisingly foresighted and generous offer — you can have the Translate API but you will have to pay for it!

Submission + - US agents illegally operating in Sweden (thelocal.se)

Submitted by metacell
metacell writes: Sweden's intelligence service Säpo discovered in 2009 that two Americans were conducting illegal, under-cover investigations in Sweden., the Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) daily reported.

The two men were discovered when Säpo noticed them tracking people who it was also investigating for suspected ties to terrorist groups, the paper said, quoting several unnamed sources close to Säpo.

Washington had not informed Swedish authorities of the agents' activities in the country, and soon after their activities were discovered, the two US citizens left the country, the paper added.
News

Submission + - NVIDIA CEO: WHY ANDROID TABLETS AREN'T SELLING (blogspot.com) 1

Submitted by
martty
martty writes: "Nvidia's CEO is not pleased with the cool reception Android tablets have gotten so far. And he expressed frustration over marketing gaffes in an interview with CNET earlier this week. Sales of the first Android Honeycomb tablet, the Motorola Xoom, have not been impressive when compared with those of the iPad. Though Motorola claimed in late April that Xoom shipments hit 250,000, that number is far lower than the total being enjoyed by market leader Apple, which sold about 1 million iPad 2 tablets in the first weekend of sales alone.During an earnings conference call, Sanjay Jha, CEO of Motorola Mobility, articulated part of the problem, saying, "Consumers want more apps for Android tablets."
Facebook

Submission + - Facebook PR Firm Edited Its Own Wikipedia Page (shitplanet.org)

Submitted by metasonix
metasonix writes: In the midst of all this week's flap about Facebook hiring notorious PR firm Burson-Marsteller to defame Google, I discovered something else: a Burson-Marsteller employee completely rewrote the firm's Wikipedia article to remove all the negative information. He did it openly, he violated a number of Wikipedia internal policies, another Wikipedia editor helped him, and no one was the wiser.
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - Amazon Servers Used in Sony Playstation Hack (yahoo.com)

Submitted by
the simurgh
the simurgh writes: "Amazon servers may have been used to carry out the massive Playstation hack that compromised the personal information of more than 100 million Playstation Network users. According to a report from Bloomberg, sources close to the ongoing investigation say the attack was mounted from Amazon Web Service's cloud computing platform."
Games

Submission + - Eden Games Go On Strike Against Atari (rockpapershotgun.com)

Submitted by juicegg
juicegg writes: Eden Games – they behind Test Drive Unlimited 2 and the V-Rally series – and have had enough of their treatment from Atari, and in the face of enormous redundancies at the company and have gone on strike today. GI.biz report that in the face of sackings, the French studio has said enough, and are refusing to work. And they’ve a few choice words to explain why.
Earth

Submission + - Geologists Say California May Be Next

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Newsweek reports that first there was a violent magnitude-8.8 event in Chile in 2010, then a horrifically destructive Pacific earthquake in New Zealand on February 22, and now the recent earthquake in Japan. All three phenomena involved more or less the same family of circum-Pacific fault lines and plate boundaries—and though there is still no hard scientific evidence to explain why, there is little doubt now that earthquakes do tend to occur in clusters: a significant event on one side of a major tectonic plate is often—not invariably, but often enough to be noticeable—followed some weeks or months later by another on the plate’s far side. "It is as though the earth becomes like a great brass bell, which when struck by an enormous hammer blow on one side sets to vibrating and ringing from all over. Now there have been catastrophic events at three corners of the Pacific Plate—one in the northwest, on Friday; one in the southwest, last month; one in the southeast, last year." That leaves just one corner unaffected—the northeast. And the fault line in the northeast of the Pacific Plate is the San Andreas Fault, underpinning the city of San Francisco. All know that the San Andreas Fault is due to rupture one day—it last did so in 1906, and strains have built beneath it to a barely tolerable level. Although geologists believe a 9.0 quake is virtually impossible along the San Andreas, a network of "strike-slip" faults smaller and more fragmented than the great chasm that exists where two continent-sized plates of the Earth's crust meet along the Japanese islands, USGS studies put the probability of California being hit by a quake measuring 7.5 or more in the next 30 years at 46 percent, and the likelihood of a 6.7 quake, comparable in size to the temblors that rocked San Francisco in 1989 and Los Angeles in 1994, at 99 percent statewide."
Advertising

Submission + - Valve finds ad agencies ‘worthless’ (operationreality.org)

Submitted by Samfer
Samfer writes: With what seems to becoming the routine, Valve recently decided to take matters into their own hands yet again with regards to the marketing of their upcoming title Portal 2. As they did in the past with the Left 4 Dead series, Valve has cast aside the mainstream creative ad agencies labeling them as “pretty close to worthless” and offering “copycat treatments”.
Facebook

Submission + - Facebook Wedding Photos Result In Polygamy Arrest (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Police in Michigan have arrested 34-year-old Richard Leon Barton Jr. on charges of polygamy, thanks to incriminating wedding photos on Facebook. The man unfriended his first wife on the social network before marrying his second wife, but unsurprisingly that wasn’t enough.
Earth

Submission + - Japan Quake Raises Texas Aquifer 1 ft. (statesman.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Energy released from last week's massive earthquake in Japan affected the walls of the Edwards Aquifer, the sprawling underground rock formation that supplies drinking water for much of Central Texas, raising its water level by about one foot. The oscillations during high-energy earthquakes are common in artesian aquifers. "We saw Haiti, we saw Sumatra, Japan, a couple in Mexico and Alaska."

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