MattSparkes writes "Cuil may only have launched this week, but it seems that they're already enjoying late-'90s boom-style comforts. 'Lunch is ordered in every single day. Huge fridges burst with snacks and drinks. Bowls of strawberries and muffins lie around the rest area. The company pays for a personal trainer and gym membership for everyone. A doctor calls round each Friday, after the weekly barbeque, to see if everyone's in good health. Employees drift in an out at times that suit themselves.' Seems like an awesome place to work, but how long will their $25 million VC funding last at this rate?"

Ololiuhqui writes "During the writer's strike, Joss Whedon came up with a musical idea. Now his diabolical plan is about to be unleashed in the form of a streaming-only release, with a DVD shortly to follow. The three-part Doctor Horrible series stars Neil Patrick Harris as the eponymous doctor, Felicia Day as the woman of his dreams, and Nathan Fillion as the doctor's nemesis, Captain Hammer. Reportedly made for 'less than six figures,' the series has already received rave reviews and will no doubt showcase Whedon's musical facility, as well as his proven ability to squeeze the most out of a budget."

psyopper writes "Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users' names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday. Although Google argued that turning over the data would invade its users' privacy, the judge's ruling (.pdf) described that argument as 'speculative' and ordered Google to turn over the logs on a set of four terabyte hard drives." Update: 07/03 18:05 GMT by T : Brian Aker, now of MySQL but long ago Slashdot's "database thug," writes a journal entry on how companies could intelligently treat such potentially sensitive user data.

JohnnyNapalm writes "In some shocking news out of Texas, PC repair will now require a PI License. Surely this stands to have a substantial impact on small repair shops around the state if upheld. Never fear, however, as the first counter-suit has already been filed."

pacroon writes "StatoilHydro is building the world's first full-scale floating wind turbine, Hywind, and testing it over a two-year period offshore of Karmøy, Norway. The company is investing approximately $80 million. Planned startup is in the fall of 2009. The project combines existing technology in innovative ways. A 2.3-MW wind turbine is attached to the top of a so-called Spar-buoy, a solution familiar from production platforms and offshore loading buoys. A model 3 meters tall has already been tested successfully in a wave simulator. The goal of the pilot is to qualify the technology and reduce costs to a level that will mean that floating wind turbines can compete with other energy sources."

An anonymous reader writes "Steve Ballmer is in no way disappointed with Windows Vista. It is selling 'incredibly well,' he told a press conference in Herzeliya, Israel today. 'Vista sells on almost 100 per cent of all the new consumer PCs around the world,' the Microsoft CEO proclaimed. He added that the operating system was also selling on '45 percent of all of new business PCs.' Which is enlightening, since business users are about the only buyers of new PCs that get a choice." Anyone know anybody who bought Vista except as bundled with hardware?

Pickens writes "Dr. Dobbs has an interesting interview with Paul Jansen, the managing director of TIOBE Software, about the Programming Community Index, which measures the popularity of programming languages by monitoring their web presence. Since the TIOBE index has been published now for more than 6 years, it gives an interesting picture about trends in the usage of programming languages. Jansen says not much has affected the top ten programming languages in the last five years, with only Python entering the top 10 (replacing COBOL), but C and C++ are definitely losing ground. 'Languages without automated garbage collection are getting out of fashion,' says Jansen. 'The chance of running into all kinds of memory problems is gradually outweighing the performance penalty you have to pay for garbage collection.'"

Last summer we discussed twin announcements from Intel and IBM/AMD about a new chip manufacturing technology dubbed high-k/metal gate. Intel is using the tech to improve speed and power consumption in its 45-nm chips. IBM, along with its manufacturing partners, just demonstrated chips it says show that high-k/metal gate technology at 32 nm can result in performance gains up to 30% and power savings up to 50%, compared to 45-nm process. IBM plans to be manufacturing 32 nm parts by the end of 2009. (AMD is not using high-k/metal gate yet, but it has access to the technology by virtue of its agreements with IBM.)

An anonymous reader writes "A team of researchers have found that Comcast has quietly rolled out a new traffic-shaping method, which is interfering with web browsers in addition to p2p traffic. The smoking gun that documents this behavior are network traces collected from Comcast subscribers Internet connections. This evidence shows Comcast is forging packets and blocking connection attempts from web browsers. One has to hope this isn't the congestion management system they are touting as no longer targeting BitTorrent, which they are deploying in reaction to the recent FCC investigations."

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Unsurprisingly, all of SCO's creditors have objected to the plan to reimburse York for the failed 'emergency' deal. Novell's tiny seven page objection (PDF) is hilarious and very readable. They don't hold back at all, saying that 'all that happened is that the Debtors spent money needlessly on a proceeding that was, to all intents and purposes, stillborn had it not been for the stubbornness of the Debtors' management and the avarice of York,' and that it was 'another really bad deal they have chased in ceaseless pursuit of their dreams of a litigation bonanza.' They top it off by concluding with the line, 'for the reasons explained above, the Court should deny the Motion as the Debtors' worst and least supported idea yet in these cases.' One can only wonder how SCO will respond to this."

jfruhlinger writes "Think today's world, where Apple is the innovative underdog, Google is the company that does no evil, and Microsoft sits atop its throne as ruler of an evil empire. Will this state of affairs last forever? You must not remember the days when everybody loved that scrappy upstart Bill Gates. Don Reisinger muses on the fickleness of consumer loves and hates. 'It's that same [level of] success and its own questionable privacy practices that will lead to Google's PR downfall and propel it into a position of disdain going forward. Trust me, the future of Apple and Google may look bright from an economic standpoint, but these companies will be hated one day too. Sad, but true.'"

tero writes "Even though Seagate has announced it will be offering SSD disks of its own in 2008, their CEO Bill Watkins seems to be sending out mixed signals in a recent Fortune interview 'He's convinced, he confides, that SSD makers like Samsung and Intel (INTC) are violating Seagate's patents. (An Intel spokeswoman says the company doesn't comment on speculation.) Seagate and Western Digital (WDC), two of the major hard drive makers, have patents that deal with many of the ways a storage device communicates with a computer, Watkins says. It stands to reason that sooner or later, Seagate will sue — particularly if it looks like SSDs could become a real threat.'"

Vlad Dolezal writes "We tell people we use Linux because it's secure. Or because it's free, because it's customizable, because it has excellent community support... But all of that is just marketing BS. We tell that to non-Linux users because they wouldn't understand the REAL reason." The answer to his question probably won't surprise you.

bored-at-IETF-ntp-session writes "In an article at eWeek Larry Seltzer examines the supposed hacking war between the US and China. He surmises 'Even if you can't prove that the government was involved ... it still bears some responsibility'. He quotes Gadi Evron who advised the Estonians during the Russian attacks. 'I can confirm targeted attacks with sophisticated technologies have been launched against obvious enemies of China ... Who is behind these attacks can't be easily said, but it can be an American cyber-criminal, a Nigerian spammer or the Chinese themselves.' Seltzer concluded 'It's just another espionage tool, and no more or less moral than others we've used in the past.'" This a subject we've also previously discussed.