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A Mother’s Journey Through the Unnerving Universe of ‘Unboxing’ Videos
Intel closes AppUp, its PC app store (Intel had a PC app store?)
Intel's AppUp store for Windows apps has been around since January of 2010, though you could be forgiven for forgetting about it. Intel apparently wants to forget, too: the company announced today that the AppUp store will be closing its doors on March 11, 2014, "after which no new content or apps will be available for download."
An extensive FAQ about the closing covers most of the important facts. E-mail support for AppUp apps will be available until June 15, 2014. The AppUp client application and some apps will continue to function after the store closes, but many applications "require communication with the AppUp client and may not work after May 15, 2014." Apps purchased through AppUp will no longer receive updates once the store closes, nor will Intel be able to send product keys for keyed apps after March 11. If you want to download the AppUp client and install it now, you'll either need to find it from another download source or contact Intel customer service.
Intel is offering refunds for some paid apps here, but that page isn't yet functional, and it's not clear what criteria a purchase will need to meet to be eligible for a refund. Refunds will only be available between now and December 19, 2014.
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Episode #133 - Bullet to the Head
Danielnu hört euch den podcast doch endlich mal an, sont reposte ich die noch ewig ... EinsElf
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"Eugh yugunna get a bullet toya heuad..." |
'StarCraft' Gameplay Boosts Mental Flexibility, Says Study
Danielwusste man aber auch schon vorher
The Worst Programming Environment in the World?
Daniellook at the source code
Episode #132 - Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters
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Because "Witchbusters" infringed on any number of copyrights. |
In a $380,000 publicity stunt, synthetic hamburger cooked in London
In late 2011, a Dutch scientist made headlines by announcing that he was ready to grow meat—or at least muscle tissue—in a cell culture dish. Now, thanks to a healthy infusion of cash from Google founder Sergey Brin, the team has put together enough muscle cells to offer the first synthetic hamburger to a couple of food critics. But the event was little more than a publicity stunt; the burger was estimated to have cost $380,000, and the problems that kept it from being cheaper are nowhere close to being solved.
Brin says he was motivated by concerns for animal welfare based on what he knows about factory farming. Although those concerns are probably quite reasonable, the project he's backing as an alternative currently suffers from many of the same ones. As we pointed out when the idea first surfaced, the muscle cells used to make the burger were grown in media that contains a large dose of antibiotics and a key component (serum from calfs) that comes from the slaughter of actual cows. And there's currently no indication that the requirement for these materials is going to go away anytime soon. In other words, it's hard to see this as a technology "on the cusp of viability," as Brin described it. Instead, the burger was little more than an extraordinarily expensive proof of principle.
As we also noted in our original coverage, burgers are much more than a collection of processed muscle fibers. And the lucky foodies that got to taste it noted one of the things that was missing: fat, which is a key component of a normal burger's taste and texture.
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Queen's WWIII Speech Revealed
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A Crony Joke
Steve set aside his Turkish pizza and borek and answered the phone. He was taking lunch around the corner from the office.
“The server is down!” his boss grumbled into the phone. “Where are you? Can you come back in? This is production! Production is down!”
Steve boxed his lunch up and wiped the grease from his fingers, then slogged back to the office. The server was not, in fact, down, but their core application process was. The management panic was inaccurate, but justified. Steve restarted the service before investigating.
It came up, and it stayed up.
Between piping-hot bites of borek, Steve dug through the system. He looked for logs, core dumps, or any other traces of what might have caused the application to crash. Nothing of the kind existed. Since the process stayed up, Steve wrote the issue off as a combination of cosmic rays and butterfly farts in Taiwan. He logged the issue and finished his lunch.
The next day, nothing interesting happened. Nor the day after that. Weeks passed. Then months .
The process went down during lunch again. This time, Steve was already at his desk, enjoying a much healthier lunch, packed up from home. When his boss came in, panicking about production being down, Steve ignored his sandwich and restarted the service.
It came up, and it stayed up. Once again, there were no traces of any error or crash.
The days, weeks and months shambled along. At seemingly random intervals, Steve or one of his co-workers would get a frantic message from their boss: “The server is down!” Sometimes the process died on a weekend. Sometimes they went months without issue, other times the process auto-destructed twice in the same week. Every time, someone was fixing the server while cramming their lunch into their food-hole.
Steve got to thinking. It happened seemingly randomly, but only ever during lunch. As if it were on a schedule…
Steve checked the crontab
file on the production server. Like many production systems, the file was large and stuffed with a huge pile of jobs that were needed to keep everything running like it was supposed to. Steve grepped for jobs scheduled to run sometime during the 12PM hour, and found this one:
12 22 * * * kill 21342
Every day, at 12:22PM, the system killed whichever process had the ID 21342. Most days, that was probably no process. Some days, maybe a user’s shell got the PID. But every once in a while, the great roulette wheel of process scheduling came up “00”, and their main production application got assigned that ID.
Epic Online Space Battle
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Australian Parliament urges citizens to bypass geo-locks on software
An Australian parliamentary committee released a report today encouraging Australian consumers to find lawful ways to bypass "geo-locks" on popular software from Apple, Adobe, Microsoft, and others. According to ABC Australia, the report is the result of testimony given to the committee by representatives from Microsoft, Adobe, and Apple, companies that do business globally and charge Australian consumers and businesses considerably more for the privilege of purchasing their products and services. On average, Aussies pay 42 percent more for the same stuff as Americans.
The three companies grilled by the Standing Committee on Infrastructure and Communications each gave differing answers on why their wares cost more in Australia. "Adobe said it offered a specialized 'bespoke' experience for Australian customers," wrote science and technology reporter Jake Sturmer. "Apple blamed local copyright holders for higher prices on its local iTunes store. Microsoft said its prices were set and customers could vote with their wallets. Except customers couldn't exactly do that because of geo-blocking."
The terms "geo-locking" or "geo-blocking" refer in aggregate to the broad set of techniques companies put in place to segregate the world into different regions or markets. Most companies that do business internationally have different pricing models for different regions of the world; Microsoft, for example, might charge customers in "emerging markets" less for products than it would charge customers in the US or UK. But software pricing in Australia tends to be skewed far to the expensive side of things—indeed, Penny Arcade Report Editor and Ars alum Ben Kuchera recently wrote about the cost of being a gamer in Australia, noting that new game releases will often cost more than A$100 (about US$92).
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Moscow Metro says new tracking system is to find stolen phones; no one believes them
On Monday, a major Russian newspaper reported that Moscow’s metro system is planning what appears to be a mobile phone tracking device in its metro stations—ostensibly to search for stolen phones.
According to Izvestia (Google Translate), Andrey Mokhov, the operations chief of the Moscow Metro system’s police department, said that the system will have a range of five meters (16 feet). “If the [SIM] card is wanted, the system automatically creates a route of its movement and passes that information to the station attendant,” Mokhov said.
Many outside experts, both in and outside Russia, though, believe that what local authorities are actually deploying is a “stingray,” or “IMSI catcher”—a device that can fool a phone and SIM into reading from a fake mobile phone tower. (IMSI, or an International Mobile Subscriber Identity number, is a 15-digit unique number that sits on every SIM card.) Such devices can be used as a simple way to see what phone numbers are being used in a given area or even to intercept the audio of voice calls.
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Signs Point To XKCD's Time Ending
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Robot Produces Paintings With That 'Imperfect' Human Look
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Well Played, Hoomin
True facts about owls
Several readers reported that zefrank1 has posted another great animal video, this one a bit lighter on the weirdness but heavy on great clips and True Facts. Actually, we (Kelly Williams and I) were asked to provide a photo for this video—the one showing the owl’s eyes visualized through its ear holes—but we were too late to get our picture in.
Regardless, enjoy this 4:21 tour through Owl World.