Intros dead man switch in case of site megafails

Amazon has encroached further onto the turf of traditional web-hosters with a DNS Failover upgrade to its Route 53 DNS service.…

Visiting an Apple retail store is 'like Prozac'

Apple CEO Tim Cook has a low opinion of a lawsuit filed by Greenlight Capital hedge-fund honcho David Einhorn that seeks to prevent Apple from amending its charter to allow the issuance of preferred stock without the approval of its shareholders.…

pigrabbitbear writes "Complex, socially-tiered societies require complex communication. So perhaps it's unsurprising that eusocial animals like ants are also incredibly communicative — more so than we previously understood, according to a new study in Current Biology. Many ants begin communicating acoustically from a very young age, in fact, in such a way that scientists suggest may be very important to their survival. As explained in an article by Carrie Arnold at ScienceNow, scientists believed until only recently that ants communicated only through pheromones, leaving, for example, scent trails behind them for other ants to follow — hence the phenomenon of single-file marching ants. (They can also, newer research suggests, use magnetic and vibrational landmarks to guide themselves around.)"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

LONDON (Reuters) - Barclays' new chief executive pledged a fresh course for the British lender on Tuesday, axing at least 3,700 jobs and pruning its investment bank as he seeks to rebuild its reputation and boost profitability after a series of scandals.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The budget posted a surprise surplus in January for the first time in five years, as the Treasury likely benefited from a windfall when payroll tax cuts expired.

An anonymous reader writes "Last August, BitTorrent tracker Demonoid was taken down by law enforcement in the Ukraine. This followed raids in Mexico to arrest the people who ran the site. Panama is somehow involved, too. However, a recent review filed by the U.S. Trade Representative reveals that the criminal case against the main (alleged) operator of Demonoid has stalled, and the person has been released from imprisonment. 'For how long the alleged Demonoid operator was imprisoned is not mentioned. However, the criminal case is ongoing according to the copyright holders, who further mention that it's now proceeding in Ukraine. Demonoid, meanwhile, has moved to Hong Kong where it found a new hosting company and a new .HK domain name. Whether the BitTorrent tracker will ever return to its full glory has yet to be seen.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jikes RVM (Research Virtual Machine) provides a flexible open testbed to prototype virtual machine technologies and experiment with a large variety of design alternatives. Jikes RVM runs on many platforms and advances the state-of-the-art of virtual machine technologies for dynamic compilation, adaptive optimization, garbage collection, thread scheduling, and synchronization. It is self-hosted, i.e. its Java code runs on itself without requiring a second virtual machine. Most other virtual machines for the Java platform are written in native code (typically C or C++). A Java implementation provides ease of portability and a seamless integration of virtual machine and application resources such as objects, threads, and operating-system interfaces.

Release Notes: This release includes a number of enhancements and bugfixes. Highlights include a new framework for unit testing, fixes for building Jikes RVM using recent Java 6 and Java 7 host JVMs, source code cleanup, and a number of bugfixes.

Tags: Software Development, Compilers, Virtual Machine, research

Licenses: Eclipse Public License 1.0

liliputing: The Vivaldi tablet that's currently in the works has a higher-resolution screen and faster processor than the model the team had planned to release in 2012.

This is an amazing story. I urge you to read the whole thing, but here's the basics: A November car chase ended in a "full blown-out" firefight, with glass and bullets flying, according to Cleveland police officers who described for investigators the chaotic scene at the end of the deadly 25-minute pursuit. But when the smoky haze -- caused by...

earlzdotnet writes "I've been programming for a few years now, and I have a full time job. I'm one of those lucky souls that actually enjoy programming, so I commonly work on my own open source projects on weekends. However, I wouldn't mind working on a short-term projects (i.e. not more than ~2 months) every once in a while on weekends. I've looked at freelancing before, and I could probably make more money by working at McDonald's on weekends than that. I've also looked into making web sites for small businesses, but it requires a bit too much commitment and support for me, especially since I'm terrible at graphics design. I've tried my hand at writing reusable components to sell to other programmers, but that was pretty pointless (I made one $20 sale). I've seen teaching suggested, but I'm self-taught and probably not experienced enough to responsibly teach people. Are there any other options to make a bit of cash as a programmer? Is programming just one of those things that requires complete dedication, or what?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

W3Perl is a Web logfile analyzer. But it can also read FTP/Squid or mail logfiles. It allows most statistical data to be ouput with graphical and textual information. An administration interface is available to manage the package.

Release Notes: Error, agent, and referrer reports use now jqplot plots rather than Fly. Plot series can be selected/unselected, and zooming is available. The histogram display 95% values to improve readability. A few bugs have been fixed.

Release Tags: Maintenance

Tags: Internet, Log Analysis, Web

Licenses: GPL

It's just a load of wind doing its abrasive duty

On Friday the internet was all a-flutter over a mysterious metallic-looking object that the Mars rover Curiosity snapped last month, but an analysis by NASA claims to have identified how it came to be.…

An anonymous reader writes "A group of researchers including Dr. H. Shaw Warren of Mass. General Hospital and Stanford genomics researcher Ronald W. Davis have published a paper challenging the effectiveness of the 'mouse model' as a basis for medical research, based on a decade-long study involving 39 doctors and scientists across the country. In clinical studies of sepsis (a severe inflammatory disorder caused by the immune system's abnormal response to a pathogen), trauma, and burns, the researchers found that certain drugs triggered completely different genetic responses in mice compared with humans. The Warren-Davis paper was rejected by both Science and Nature before its acceptance by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, perhaps suggesting the degree to which the 'mouse model' has become entrenched within the medical research community. Ninety five percent of the laboratory animals used in research are mice or rats. Mice in particular are ideal subjects for research: they are cheap to obtain and house, easy to handle, and share at least 80 percent of their genes with humans (by some reckoning, closer to 99 percent). Over the past twenty five years, powerful methods of genetically engineering mice by 'knocking out' individual genes have become widely adopted, so that use of mice for drug testing prior to human clinical trials has become standard procedure."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It may not come as a surprise to anyone who regularly reads my column that I tried to be first in line to order the Raspberry Pi. I mean, what's not to like in a $35, 700MHz, 256MB of RAM computer with HDMI out that runs Linux? In the end, I didn't make the first batch of 10,000, but I wasn't too far behind either. more>>

TC: Another victory for hackers and a blow for the security of open source systems.

rbowen of SourceForge writes with an interesting way to look at the value of certain free software options: "Apache OpenOffice 3.4.1 has averaged 138,928 downloads per day. That is an average value to the public of $21 million per day, as calculated by savings over buying the competing product. Or $7.61 billion (7.61 thousand million) per year." (That works out to about $150 per copy of MS Office. There are some holes in the argument, but it holds true for everyone who but for a free office suite would have paid that much for Microsoft's. The numbers are even bigger if you toss in LibreOffice, too.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ops management and VM archiving at a discount for SMBs

Sometimes, it takes a bundle to make a bundle.…

judgecorp writes "Vertu, the luxury phone maker formerly owned by Nokia, has chosen Android over Windows Phone for its new £6700 Vertu Ti device. The bling brand is no longer part of Nokia, so is free to shun Windows Phone — apparently because there are not enough apps there for Vertu's rich customers." Previous Vertu handsets used Symbian. Note: £6700 is just over 10,000 USD.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CorneliOS is an easy-to-use and cross-browser "Web Desktop Environment", "Web Operating System", or "Web Office" that comes with a set of cool applications. It includes a Content Management System (CMS) so that you can easily set up and manage your own website as well as a Database Management System that allows you to rapidly build any kind of database application.

Release Notes: This release offers a new CorneliOS info image API, new CIOS debugging features, updated CIOS community rules, various CorneliOS and CIOS GUI enhancements, a new CIOS Edu API text comment feature, improved CIOS Edu API text statistics, new CorneliOS GUI elements, and updated system images, language kits, and style sheets.

Tags: Internet, Information Management

Licenses: GPL

Horde Groupware Webmail Edition is an enterprise ready browser-based communication suite. Users can read, send, and organize email messages and manage and share calendars, contacts, tasks, and notes with the standards compliant components from the Horde Project. It bundles the separately available applications IMP, Ingo, Kronolith, Turba, Nag, and Mnemo. It can be extended with any of the released Horde applications or the Horde modules that are still in development, like a file manager, a bookmark manager, a forum, or a wiki.

Release Notes: This release fixes LDAP preferences storage, improves compatibility with Internet Explorer 8, improves compatibility with broken messages generated by Outlook, hides the attachment upload UI in the dynamic view if file uploads are disabled, fixes adding holiday calendars if not using the English locale, improves event importation and exportation, fixes importing of LDIF contact data, updates the French translation, and adds small bugfixes and improvements.

Release Tags: Minor feature enhancements, Minor bugfixes

Tags: Office/Business, groupware, Scheduling, Communications, Email, Address Book, Email Clients (MUA), Filters, Software Development, Libraries, php classes