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Businesses

Your 60-Hour Work Week Is Not a Badge of Honor 717

Posted by Soulskill from the unless-you're-part-of-a-really-terrible-branch-of-the-boy-scouts dept.
An anonymous reader writes "We've all had to deal with long, tough work weeks, whether it's coming in on the weekend to meet a project deadline, pulling all-nighters to resolve a crisis, or the steady accretion of overtime in a death march. It's fairly common in the tech sector for employees to hold these tough weeks up as points of pride; something good they achieved or survived. But Jeff Archibald writes that this is the wrong way to think of it. 'If you're working 60 hours a week, something has broken down organizationally. You are doing two people's jobs. You aren't telling your boss you're overworked (or maybe he/she doesn't care). You are probably a pinch point, a bottleneck. You are far less productive. You are frantically swimming against the current, just trying to keep your head above water. ... We need to stop being proud of overworking ourselves.'"
United States

The Death Cap Mushroom Is Spreading Across the US 274

Posted by Soulskill from the i-blame-the-schools dept.
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Discovery News reports that the death cap mushroom is now an invasive species on every continent except Antarctica. It is spreading along the East and West Coasts of the U.S. and appears to be moving south into Mexico. 'When someone eats Amanita phalloides, she typically won't experience symptoms for at least six and sometimes as many as 24 hours,' says Cat Adams. 'Eventually she'll suffer from abdominal cramps, vomiting, and severely dehydrating diarrhea. This delay means her symptoms might not be associated with mushrooms, and she may be diagnosed with a more benign illness like stomach flu. To make matters worse, if the patient is somewhat hydrated, her symptoms may lessen and she will enter the so-called honeymoon phase.' Without proper, prompt treatment, the victim can experience rapid organ failure, coma, and death. But good news is on the way. S. Todd Mitchell of Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz, California has treated more than 60 patients with a drug derived from milk thistle. The patients who have started the drug on time (within 96 hours of ingesting the mushroom) and who have still had kidney function intact have all survived. 'When administered intravenously, the compound sits on and blocks the receptors that bring amatoxin into the liver, thus corralling the amatoxins into the blood stream so the kidneys can expel them faster,' says Adams. Still, Mitchell cautions against the 'regular look"'of deadly mushrooms. 'They smell very good and when they're cooked, many patients have described them as the most delicious mushrooms they've ever eaten.'"
United States

Thousands of Gas Leaks Discovered Under Streets of Washington DC 292

Posted by samzenpus from the do-you-smell-something? dept.
First time accepted submitter gallifreyan99 writes "Researchers from Duke revealed today that they had discovered nearly 5,900 gas leaks under the streets of Washington DC, including 12 that posed a serious risk of explosion. And it's not just Washington: a gas industry whistleblower who is part of the team showed this was happening in cities all over America."
Businesses

Curt Schilling's 38 Studios Struggling Financially 158

Posted by Soulskill from the welcome-to-the-big-leagues dept.
medv4380 writes "38 Studios, run by Curt Schilling, is having a hard time paying its bills and employees. The gaming community hasn't been happy with the company since the issue with an Online Pass for Single Player Content, which we discussed previously. Now, 38 Studios has bounced a check intended as a payment on its $75 million loan from the state of Rhode Island. If the company defaults, Rhode Island taxpayers will have to cover the loan and interest, which could total nearly $100 million."
Advertising

General Motors: "Facebook Ads Aren't Worth It" 400

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the could-be-no-one-wants-your-cars dept.
Fluffeh writes "General Motors spends around $40 million per year on maintaining a Facebook profile and around a quarter of that goes into paid advertising. However, in a statement, they just announced that 'it's simply not working.' That's a bit of bad news just prior to the Facebook IPO — and while Daniel Knapp tries to sweeten the news, he probably makes it even more bitter by commenting 'Advertising on Facebook has long been funded by marketing budgets reserved for trying new things. But as online advertising investments in general are surging and starting to cannibalize spend on legacy media, advertisers are rightfully asking whether the money spend is justified because it has reached significant sums now.'"
Biotech

Scientists Clone Sheep With 'Good' Fat 233

Posted by Soulskill from the pulling-the-wool-over-your-stomach's-eyes dept.
redletterdave writes "Chinese scientists have cloned a genetically modified sheep containing a 'good' type of fat found naturally in nuts, seeds, fish and leafy greens that helps reduce the risk of heart attacks and cardiovascular disease. The gene, which is linked to the production of polyunsaturated fatty acids, was inserted into a donor cell taken from the ear of a Chinese Merino sheep. The cell was then inserted into an unfertilized egg and implanted into the womb of a surrogate sheep. With any luck, this process could be replicated in the future to clone more animals for safe and healthy consumption."
The Military

Sixty Years On, B-52s Are Still Going Strong 403

Posted by samzenpus from the staying-power dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Those who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s knew the B-52 Stratofortress as a central figure in the anxiety that flowed from the protracted staring match between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Now CNET reports that it was 60 years ago, on April 15, 1952, that a B-52 prototype built by Boeing took off on its maiden flight and although the 1950s-vintage B-52s are no longer in the US Air Force inventory, the 90 or so H models delivered between May 1961 and October 1962 still remain on active duty. 'The B-52 has been a wonderful flying box,' says retired Brig. Gen. Peyton Cole. 'It's persevered all these years because it's been able to adapt and still continues to fly. It started out as a high-level flying platform during the Cold War. Then as air defenses got better it became a low-level penetrator, and more than that was the first aircraft to fly low-level at night through FLIR (forward looking infrared) and night-vision TV.' The B-52's feat of longevity reflects both regular maintenance and timely upgrades — in the late 1980s, for instance, GPS capabilities were incorporated into the navigation system but it also speaks to the astronomical costs of the next-generation bombers that have followed the B-52 into service (a total of 744 were built, counting all models) with the Air Force. B-52s cost about $70 million apiece (in today's dollars), while the later, stealth-shaped B-2 Spirit bombers carried an 'eye-watering $3-billion-a-pop unit price.' The Air Force's 30-year forecast, published in March, envisions an enduring role for the B-52 and engineering studies, the Air Force says, suggest that the life span of the B-52 could extend beyond the year 2040. 'At that point, why not aim for the centennial mark?'"
Cloud

Microsoft's Azure Cloud Suffers Major Downtime 210

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the higher-availability-through-cloud-computing dept.
New submitter dcraid writes with a quote from El Reg: "Microsoft's cloudy platform, Windows Azure, is experiencing a major outage: at the time of writing, its service management system had been down for about seven hours worldwide. A customer described the problem to The Register as an 'admin nightmare' and said they couldn't understand how such an important system could go down. 'This should never happen,' said our source. 'The system should be redundant and outages should be confined to some data centres only.'" The Azure service dashboard has regular updates on the situation. According to their update feed the situation should have been resolved a few hours ago but has instead gotten worse: "We continue to work through the issues that are blocking the restoration of service management for some customers in North Central US, South Central US and North Europe sub-regions. Further updates will be published to keep you apprised of the situation. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes our customers." To be fair, other cloud providers have had similar issues before.

Comment Hah. (Score 2) 226

by cswiii (#38147772) Attached to: HP's Strange Obsession With WebOS For Printers

Especially funny considering my Touchpad could not natively (i.e., at all) be configured to print to the network-enabled printer on my home network. I suppose it's possible that a third-party driver would be needed, but one would think that a) they would try and package all possible driver downloads or b) would allow you to search the internet for them or c) allow user to upload driver manually, but none of those is apparently possible.

Ah well, I haven't booted into WebOS in weeks, anyway, and the new Cyanogen Alpha 3 is terrific.

Comment Important note about nvidia/rpmfusion and F16 (Score 1) 125

by cswiii (#37989862) Attached to: Fedora 16 Released

If you use nvidia drivers with Fedora -- or at very least, do so with the aid of rpmfusion -- you may want to hold off on upgrading to F16.

To see if you should wait, run the following command:

nvidia-settings -q AccelerateTrapezoids

If you get nothing returned (or more accurately, two CRLFs), you will probably want to hold off on upgrading F15 -> F16. Looks like there is a bug in the nvidia drivers which can cause some pretty severe performance degradation.

Specifically, any card that can't handle trapezoid acceleration will suffer due to this regression. And to put it in perspective, my GT240, which is not ancient doesn't support this. So it's pretty bad.

More details: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=166698

It /is/ apparently fixed in the 290.06 driver - but that's not in rpmfusion yet.

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