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Businesses

Submission + - Interesting Computer Science Jobs? 1

Submitted by mattskent
mattskent writes: I'm currently a junior in college working towards my Bachelor's degree in Computer Science. As such, I'm starting to look pretty seriously at jobs in the IT/Computer Science field. I've spent plenty of time working entry-level IT jobs doing various kinds of help desk type work, and so most of the exposure I've had to the field is related to support of other people's computers. I enjoy helping other people out, but I'd rather not be plugging things in and restarting computers the rest of my life. Although the possibility is growing on me, I don't think I would particularly love to write code all day for a living either. What are some interesting jobs that you've had or heard of that I could look into fresh out of college with a Computer Science degree?
Google

Submission + - Google Wants You to be its Unpaid Muse

Submitted by
theodp
theodp writes: "So where do you turn to for great ideas when tough times force you to abort your engineers' brainchildren? If you're Google, reports Nicholas Carlson, you simply outsource brainstorming to your users. Google's launched a new Google Product Ideas blog as well as a Product Ideas for Google Mobile site where users can submit feature and product ideas and vote on others. So what's in it for you if you come up with Google's next billion-dollar-idea? 'If you post an idea or suggestion and we put it into action, we may give you a shout out on our Product Ideas blog,' explains Google, 'but we won't be compensating users for their ideas.' Lucky thing don't-be-evil Googlers don't have to live up to the IEEE Code of Ethics, or they might have to credit properly the contributions of others."
Medicine

Submission + - Is there a God gene? Or why we think like we do... (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by
jake-in-a-box
jake-in-a-box writes: "Why do religious people live longer, healthier lives, achieve more and in general have better quality of life? This study suggests that the meme for religion has a fitness factor because it results in better self-control, fostering goal-oriented behavior and all that comes from it. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081231005355.htm. It also has implications for understanding extremist behavior. Perhaps getting people blow themselves up is the wetware equivalent of planting a logic bomb."
Nintendo

Submission + - Man locked in room for 100 Days - Nintendo has key (netflowdevelopments.com)

Submitted by
unc0nn3ct3d
unc0nn3ct3d writes: "One of the most tenacious indie developers I have seen for a while has barricaded himself in his development cave(from the outside) and has no internet, or much of anything besides his development equipment for the next 100 days. The key to his salvation: A simple answer from Nintendo regarding permission for him to Purchase(with his own money) the SDK required to take his 15,000 man hour project to the final stage of development. He is asking everyone to simply go here and ask Nintendo where this guys' answer is after 18 weeks. For full breakdown of his game head here or here"
Data Storage

Submission + - Mirroring is Not a Backup Solution

Submitted by
Craig
Craig writes: "Journalspace.com have fallen, never to return. The post on their site describes how their entire database was overwritten either through some inconceivable OS or application bug, or more likely a malicious act. Regardless of how the data was lost, their undoing appears to have been that they treated the drive mirroring as a backup and have now paid the ultimate price for not having point in time backups of the data that was their business."
Microsoft

Submission + - 30GB Zunes Failing Everywhere, All At Once (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by
Badly Drawn Monkey
Badly Drawn Monkey writes: "Apparently at midnight, December 31 2008 a mystery illness blighted almost every Microsoft Zune 30GB, causing them to auto-euthenize. There are only a handful of news reports on this subject at the moment, but surely this can't be due to some Y2K9 bug?! With President Elect Obama as a customer, I'm sure Microsoft will want to fix this asap, although there has been no comment from the company as yet... BTW, yeah — mine died as soon as I turned it on too... I wonder what this will do for their much speculated UK launch in 2009?"
Microsoft

Submission + - 30GB Zunes Failing Everywhere, All At Once

Submitted by
Web design em Portugal
Web design em Portugal writes: "According to Gizmodo, the 30GB model of the Microsoft music player Zune "began freezing at about midnight last night, becoming totally unresponsive and practically useless. (...) The evidence seems to point to a software glitch, but simple resets aren't providing any relief."

"Zune frozen", "reset zune" and "zune troubleshooting" are the top 3 Google Trends right now, what lends credibility that this is a widespread phenomenon."
Television

Submission + - Time Warner to lose MTV, Comedy Central, and More (google.com) 1

Submitted by
Selikoff
Selikoff writes: "Viacom has started flooding airwaves (in the form of a scrolling banner on certain channels) announcing Time Warner customers will lose a number of channels at midnight tonight including: Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, Noggin, Nicktoons, Spike, VH1, TV Land, and more. The banner encourages customers to call Time Warner to complain and even provides a support number. Apparently, the issue stems from Viacom raising rates as much as 22 and 36 percent per channel. Funny, they didn't post a customer support number to call Viacom in the scrolling banner, but according to their website its (212) 258-6000. Read more about it at: here and here."
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - Banned Words List Carries Its First Emoticon (yahoo.com)

Submitted by
DynaSoar
DynaSoar writes: "Lake Superior State College in Michigan's Upper Peninsula ("The land of four seasons: June, July, August and Winter") has just published its 34th annual List of Words to Be Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness. Besides such unsurprising inclusions such as "green" corporations being "game changing" due to concern with their "carbon foot print", this year's list contains an emoticon for the first time — not a smiley face or variant, but the 'heart' symbol made from the characters 'less than' and 'three'. It's perhaps a sign of the evolution of language, or at least of this volunteer linguistic watchdog group, that a symbol compounded of two characters, neither of them a letter, is considered not only a word, but a particularly egregious one."
Television

Submission + - Time Warner recommends Internet for some shows (nytimes.com)

Submitted by EdIII
EdIII writes: The dispute between Time Warner and Viacom over fees seems to be without any resolution this year. Time Warner faces the possibility of being without content for almost 20 channels. Alexander Dudley, a spokesperson for Time Warner, is fighting back:

We will be telling our customers exactly where they can go to see these programs online," Mr. Dudley said. "We'll also be telling them how they can hook up their PCs to a television set.

Why pay for digital cable when many content providers and now providing it on demand via the Internet? Not to mention the widespread availability of tv shows in both standard and high definition on public and private torrent tracker sites. It is entirely possible to watch television with no commercials or advertising with only an Internet connection. So getting your content via the Internet is not exactly free, but it certainly isn't contributing to Time Warner or any other cable providers revenue stream. The real question is why Time Warner would fight back by so clearly showing how increasingly obsolete they are becoming and that cable providers are losing their monopolistic grip on media delivery.
Security

Submission + - Long Beach Police Say Photography is Illegal (thomashawk.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Photographer Thomas Hawk was detained in Long Beach last week and told that he was not allowed to shoot an industrial oil plant from a public sidewalk and was forced to leave the area by the Long Beach Harbor Patrol. Hawk was told that he had to have a "permit" in order to legally shoot from the sidewalk despite there being no such law requiring a permit. The Port of Long Beach has responded with an apology email but insisted that the Officer who detained Hawk and his friend in the area thought that they were going to enter a private area. Since when do police have the right to detain photographers who they say they think might be thinking about doing something illegal? http://thomashawk.com/2008/12/long-beach-harbor-patrol-says.html

Comment Re:Kill!!! (Score 2, Interesting) 855

by MBCook (#26270921) Attached to: Tales From the Support Crypt

Users really don't 'get' the internet.

Every once in a while get panicked calls from people in other departments saying "really important web-based product is DOWN! FIX IT NOW! We're losing money".

It has taken us quite a bit of time to train the users to first check if another site is reachable (usually Google.com, since it's so reliable). Our internet connection (the actual link, the router, or some other part) goes down at least 6x as often as the system. It's a rare occurrence now. Our system is highly redundant, our office connection isn't (or at least wasn't, it's much better now than it used to be).

I have, in one place, been emailed that the internet was down. Our mail server was external. What happened is the cheap little WiFi access point died, and they couldn't access the 'net on their laptop. It worked fine on the wired desktop, which they sent the email from. And were surfing on.
Printer

Submission + - HP accused of illegal exportation to Iran (boston.com)

Submitted by AdamWeeden
AdamWeeden writes: According to research done by the Boston Globe, HP has been secretly using a third-party company to sell printers to Iran. This is illegal under a ban instituted in 1995 by then U.S. President Bill Clinton. The third-party company, Redington Gulf, operates out of Dubai and previously stated on their web site that the company began in 1997 with "a team of five people and the HP supplies as our first product, we started operations as the distributor for Iran." though now the site has been changed to remove the mention of Iran. Has HP unknowingly been supplying Iran with technology or have they been trying to secretly get by the U.S. governement's export restrictions?

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