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BFG Tech Sending Out RMA Denial Letters, 'Winding Down Business' 327

Posted by timothy from the at-least-that's-a-good-excuse dept.
SKYMTL writes "Once one of NVIDIA's primary board partners, BFG Tech has now officially started denying RMA requests for their supposedly 'lifetime warranty' graphics cards. According to a letter from BFG, they are '...winding down business' and are 'unable to replace' any non-working product. A sad turn of events for the thousands who bought BFG's graphics cards and power supplies."
Google

Google Mystery Domain Reroutes 3% of Net Surfers 140

Posted by CmdrTaco from the 3%-of-a-lot-is-still-a-lot dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A new Google domain — 1e100.net, a nod to the company's famously misspelled name — is now the net's 44th most visited site. Google says the domain is used to 'identify servers' on its internal network, hinting that reverse DNS plays a role. The domain was registered in September and launched in October, about the same time Google unveiled Spanner, a new addition to its backend infrastructure designed to shift loads automatically among its data centers."

Submission + - Helpdesk Monkey tries the RIAA Business Model (ajc.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: You've Got Blackmail: The Atlanta fishwrap is reporting that an University of Georgia "IT security support" employee was accusing students of copyright violations, then demanding money to clear their names. Sounds like he's "Been caught stealin' the RIAA business model" (http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/02/02/1810214/UMG-v-Lindor-Ends-No-Fees-No-Sanctions)?
The Internet

Submission + - Internet use linked to depression 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: People who spend a lot of time surfing the internet are more likely to show signs of depression, British scientists said on Wednesday. These "internet addicts" spent proportionately more time browsing sexually gratifying websites, online gaming sites and online communities, Morrison said. They also had a higher incidence of moderate to severe depression than normal users.
Apple

iPad Is a "Huge Step Backward" 1634

Posted by CmdrTaco from the who-needs-rights-anyway dept.
An anonymous reader writes "FSF's John Sullivan launches the Defective by Design campaign and petition to rain on Steve's parade, barely minutes out of the starting gate. 'This is a huge step backward in the history of computing,' said FSF's Holmes Wilson, 'If the first personal computers required permission from the manufacturer for each new program or new feature, the history of computing would be as dismally totalitarian as the milieu in Apple's famous Super Bowl ad.' The iPad has DRM writ large: you can only install what Apple says you may, and 'computing' goes consumer mainstream — no more twiddling, just sit back, spend your money, and watch the show — while we allow you to." What is clear is that the rise of the App Store removes control of the computer from the user. It makes me wonder what the next generation of OS X will look like.
Earth

Greenpeace Decries Lack of Environmental Progress From Console Makers 143

Posted by Soulskill from the it's-not-easy-being-green dept.
SwiftyNifty writes with an update to Greenpeace's 2007 criticism of game console manufacturers over environmental concerns. Their claim was that some of the chemicals used to make the consoles were toxic, and that the manufacturers' recycling practices were not up to snuff. Two years have passed, and Greenpeace now says that progress is either slow or non-existent. "... Nintendo has little plan to remove PVC and almost no plans to remove [brominated flame retardants]. Slightly further up the scale, Microsoft was again awarded a poor ranking due to the use of toxic waste materials. And Sony, who rank rather well in their mobile phone partnership with Ericsson (scoring 6.5 out of 10 for improved toxic waste and efficient energy usage) didn't perform as well in the console category, failing to eliminate PVC or BFRs from their gaming products."
Privacy

SpinVox "Recognition" Is Often Expensive Human Transcription 226

Posted by timothy from the comes-with-free-offsite-backups dept.
An anonymous reader writes "SpinVox offers to convert voice messages to text using a system called D2 or 'the Brain.' According to BBC News, said 'Brain' is often of the old-fashioned kind: SpinVox is sending private voice messages to South Africa, the Philippines, and maybe Egypt to be typed by people in a call centre, despite being registered as keeping all private data inside Europe and claiming that the text is somehow anonymised. Insiders say they transcribed 'love messages, secret messages' and everything else from beginning to end, and the company is being bled dry by the cost: SpinVox has been locked out of one of their data centers over a payment dispute. SpinVox refuses to comment further on details — but according to their web page, they're 'enabling the Speech 3.0, Voice 3.0, and Business 3.0 markets,' whatever that means."
Earth

Earth Could Collide With Other Planets 255

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-like-my-crust-liquified dept.
Everybody put on your helmet; Smivs writes "Astronomers calculate there is a tiny chance that Mars or Venus could collide with Earth — though it would not happen for at least a billion years. The finding comes from simulations to show how orbits of planets might evolve billions of years into the future. But the calculated chances of such events occurring are tiny. Writing in the journal Nature, a team led by Jacques Laskar shows there is also a chance Mercury could strike Venus and merge into a larger planet. Professor Laskar of the Paris Observatory and his colleagues also report that Mars might experience a close encounter with Jupiter — whose massive gravity could hurl the Red Planet out of our Solar System."
Earth

Submission + - Periodic table gets a new, unnamed element (bbc.co.uk) 2

Submitted by koavf
koavf writes: More than a decade after experiments first produced a single atom of "super-heavy" element 112, a team of German scientists has been credited with its discovery, but it has yet to be named. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry has temporarily named the element ununbium, as "ununbi" means "one one two" in Latin; but the team now has the task of proposing its official name.

Comment A view from a different type of system (Score 1) 418

by iandykes (#21347575) Attached to: How Fast is Your Turnaround Time?

I'd just like to put the timescales mentioned here into perspective from a different type of software system. My experience of development has been providing online services in the form of web applications, so that means our customers don't need to install anything. That means our release process is different from the one mentioned in the question: it sounds a lot easier and quicker.

But any errors we introduce can impact the business severely, and in these cases 48 hours is just too long to fix a critical error. In such cases we need to take a view on how much the error is affecting our customers. If a high percentage of customers are affected then it needs to be fixed ASAP, but if only a small percentage is affected then a longer time can be taken to fix the error.

In our case it comes down to how much business we'll lose by not fixing the error.

http://devproj20.blogspot.com/2007/11/how-fast-is-your-turnaround-time.html

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